The Town

1

Adam lay on his bed, listening to tunes while he read through the new Spiderman. His parents’ friends Paul and Deanna Mathews were over tonight, and after dinner he and Teo had been sent off to their rooms so the grown-ups could talk. Sasha, as usual, was out with her friends somewhere—

I like ’em long

—and she probably wouldn’t be back until… well, whenever.

Teo had tried to hang with him, but he’d kicked her out of his room, closed and locked the door, and put on his Walkman headphones so he couldn’t hear her whining.

He wished he had a television in here. Even a black-and-white one. They’d won the lottery, they were supposed to be rich, but his parents didn’t seem to be doing anything with the money except spending it on themselves. He still didn’t have a decent stereo or a computer… or a television.

The television was a necessity. Especially for nights like this. Hell, Scott had his own TV. Even Roberto had had one. But his mom had some bee up her butt about limiting the amount of time kids watched television. She’d made him read an article about some group that was sponsoring an “Unplugged” week, a week where everyone was supposed to turn off their TVs and do something else. The woman who was president of the organization said that since giving up television viewing, she’d had more time for knitting and reading and playing Scrabble.

He’d thought that meant that their TV viewing was going to be curtailed, but luckily for him and Teo, their dad had weighed in on their side, laughing at the woman in the article and saying that she could learn a lot more watching PBS than she could sitting in a silent house and knitting.

“Her ‘reading’ must consist of romance novels,” he said.

Their parents had gotten into an argument after that, and the upshot of it was that their father had granted them unlimited viewing privileges rather than the two hours a night they’d previously been allotted.

But, meanwhile, he still didn’t have a TV in his room.

He finished Spiderman, picked up a Hulk that Scott had lent him, but then he finished that comic book and the tape in his Walkman ended.

He was thirsty and bored, and he tossed the comics aside, took off his headphones, and walked over to the door, opening it slowly. He hadn’t exactly been exiled from downstairs or banned from going out to the kitchen, but it was more exciting to think he had, and so he planned a route that would enable him to sneak out and snag a can of Coke without his parents or their friends seeing him.

Adam looked up and down the hall, made sure there was no sign of Teo, then walked to the edge of the stairs. He could hear the mumbled buzz of adult conversation but could see no sign of anyone, and he crept down the steps. They were all in the living room—he could see the side of his mom’s head at the close end of the couch—and he considered trying to sneak into the kitchen that way, but he would have to pass through a corner of the living room and then through the dining room, and detection was almost certain. Even crouching down and scuttling behind furniture, there wasn’t enough cover.

So he settled for the easy route, going into the kitchen from the hall doorway.

He could tell from their voices that the adults had had a little too much to drink, and he made it successfully across the kitchen to the other side, moving past the open entryway of the dining room without being seen. A plate of leftover tortilla chips and an empty salsa bowl were on the breakfast table, and he popped a couple of chips into his mouth, sucking on them instead of biting so that they wouldn’t crunch, not wanting to give himself away.

He opened the refrigerator, took out a can of Coke, and started back the way he’d come, grabbing a few extra chips for the return trip. He paused for a moment at the edge of the dining room, listening to the conversation, hoping to hear something about himself or his sisters.

“Well,” his father was saying, “my first wife, Andrea, absolutely loved the idea of living in a small town. She wanted to move to Oregon or Washington—”

Adam felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach.

His father’s first wife?

His parents’ friends were talking now, but Adam had no idea what they were saying. The conversation had become background noise to his thoughts, which were coming fast and furious, tumbling over each other in his head. The overwhelming feeling was one of betrayal, and the idea that kept repeating in his brain was that this man, his father, was a stranger to him, was not the person he’d thought he was, was not the person he knew.

Adam practically jumped out of his skin when his mother passed by, walking into the kitchen.

She saw him before he had fully recognized her, and she smiled at him. “Thirsty, huh?” She motioned toward the table. “Want some chips?”

He shook his head dumbly, though he still had quite a few tortilla chips in his hand.

“Well, you’d better go back to your room and get ready for bed. It’s getting late and tomorrow’s a school day.”

He nodded, walked out the way he’d come in, but instead of going back upstairs, he made his way down the short hall to Teo’s room. Her door was closed, but it wasn’t locked, and he let himself in, shutting the door behind him. Teo frowned and was about to yell at him to get out, but he put a finger over his lips, indicating that she should be quiet, and her annoyance disappeared instantly, replaced by curiosity.

He crossed the room noiselessly, sitting down on the bed next to his sister. He looked at her, came straight to the point. “Dad was married before.”

“What?”

He held up his Coke can. “I came down to get something to drink, and I heard them talking. Dad said he was married before. To someone else.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Uh-huh. Mom’s his second wife.”

There was silence as he let the revelation sink in. Teo looked like a ghost. All of the color had drained out of her face, and she blinked rapidly, her lids and lashes the only movement on her otherwise still features. She looked like she was about to cry. He felt a little like crying himself.

“He said her name was Andrea.”

“He was married to someone named Andrea before he married Mom?”

“I guess.”

Teo still looked like she was about to cry, and for the first time since she’d been a baby, Adam felt like reaching over and giving her a big hug.

“Does Sasha know?”

Adam shrugged. “Maybe. You think she’d tell us if she did?”

“But how come… ?” She looked up at him. “Does Mom know?”

“Of course. She was there too, and she wasn’t surprised about it or anything.”

“How come no one ever told us?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

He stayed in Teo’s room for over half an hour, the two of them talking, analyzing what had happened, going over and over the few sentences he’d heard, until their mother came in, intending to make sure Teo was in bed, and found him there. She was surprised to see him, but she did not overreact. She simply told him to go upstairs, it was time for both of them to go to sleep.

He half expected Teo to bring it up, to ask their mother about it, and he purposely lingered, wanting to hear what was said, but Teo kept it to herself, and he and his mother left the room at the same time.

“Now go to bed,” she told him sternly. “You have school tomorrow.”

He nodded, went upstairs.

Teo was obviously very upset. Normally, it was impossible for her to keep her mouth shut, especially when something was bothering her, and the fact that she was not willing to ask their mom about this indicated that its magnitude was off the scale.

He was pretty shaken up himself, and he wished he hadn’t been so stupid, wished he’d listened in on more of the conversation, but he told himself that they were probably talking about something else anyway and the subject of his father’s first wife had come up only in passing.

His father’s first wife.

It was an idea he still could not seem to get his mind around.

He did not even check to see if Sasha’s door was unlocked but went immediately into his own room, slamming the door behind him and plopping onto the bed. He tossed the Walkman and the comics on the floor.

His father had been married before.

It devalued everything, he thought. Mom was not his first choice for a wife. They were not his first choice for a family. They were the runners-up, the ones he’d had to settle for.

It occurred to him for the first time that Babunya knew all about this. She’d been someone else’s mother-in-law before his mom’s. She could have been someone else’s grandmother.

Was she someone else’s grandmother?

No, they would have known about that, they would have heard of it before.

But which wife did she like better? he wondered. Had she liked the first wife more? Had she wanted his dad to stay married to her?

He felt betrayed by Babunya too, although the feeling wasn’t quite as strong.

What if his mother had been married before?

He stared up at the ceiling, ashamed of his next thought: what if Sasha was her daughter from the first marriage and was not really his full sister? It wouldn’t exactly be incest, then.

He shouldn’t even be thinking about that. He’d just found out that his mother was not his father’s first wife, and he was horned out over his sister? What kind of sicko loser was he?

But what if she wasn’t his sister?

He reached under the bed and pulled out Sasha’s panties. He knew it was wrong, knew it was especially inappropriate now, but just thinking about Sasha had turned him on, and without any preamble, he did what he always did: unbuttoned, unzipped, and pulled down his pants, stretching out.

He grasped his penis firmly and began stroking it.

He closed his eyes. His door was unlocked, and in his fantasy Sasha came home early and walked in on him just as he was reaching his climax.

That moment was already getting close, and he used his left hand to pick up her panties. At the last second, he wrapped them around his erection, poking the head of his penis against the cotton panel where he knew her vagina had been.

He looked down and watched the explosion of white wetness burst against the confines of the cotton crotch as he came.

Afterward, he lay there for a few moments, breathing heavily, before tossing the panties back under the bed.

He pulled up his pants, went over and locked the door, lay back down on the bed, and began to cry.

2

There was nothing for him to do.

Gregory awoke late, the sun shining through slatted slits in the window shades, and realized that he had nowhere to go.

Oh, he could putter around the house, do yard work, fix up the storage shed, but those things weren’t necessary. And the truth was that things at the café were running themselves. He wasn’t needed. Shows were booked through the end of the month, there was no problem with any of the equipment, procedures were in place and working smoothly, and everything ran like clockwork. He didn’t have to be there.

In fact, he hadn’t been there for a while. He’d hung out, helped Paul and Odd with a few menial tasks, but he hadn’t been to a performance in over two weeks, and he hadn’t even bothered to check with the café’s other employees to find out how the shows had gone. He assumed that if there was a problem, someone would tell him. And since no one had told him, that must mean everything was fine.

Gregory sat up in bed. His work was done and he had nothing to take its place.

He didn’t know how to react, how to use this unstructured, unrestricted free time. He supposed he could try to think of other projects, but the truth was that his short burst of ambition and drive seemed to have fled, leaving in its place a disconcerting lethargy. He recalled, years ago, reading an interview with Pete Townsend, one of his idols. It had been a long interview, wide-ranging, and Pete had responded thoughtfully to all of the questions, but there was nothing he seemed excited about, nothing he seemed interested in, nothing he wanted to do. He and his wife had just had a baby, and he didn’t even seem interested in that. It was as if he’d seen everything, done everything, and there was nothing new. He was just putting in his time, waiting to die.

At the time, the interview had depressed the hell out of him, and he had not been able to understand how someone so rich, so famous, so talented, with so many things going for him, could have such an attitude. But he thought he understood now, because he felt the same way. He’d won the lottery. He no longer had to work, he could do whatever he wanted to do—and there was nothing he wanted to do.

He’d thought moving to McGuane would change his life, and it had. But not for the better. Things were not working out well here. He was not happy. He was not satisfied. He was not content. He was just… lost. And he didn’t know what to do about it.

He found himself wondering what his life would have been like had he remained with Andrea. She was completely different from Julia: flamboyant where Julia was subdued, spontaneous where Julia was thoughtful. He had loved her, he supposed—even though she was an outsider, as his mother had never ceased reminding him—and it had hurt him to break up with her, but it was the aftereffects of the breakup that had been hardest to deal with: having to explain to the family what had happened, having to adjust to seeing friends without her by his side, having to meet people by himself instead of on equal footing, as part of a couple. He was not meant to be alone, was not the kind of guy who did well by himself. He wasn’t clingy, but he needed a woman, and socially he worked better if he was part of a team.

It was why he’d gotten married again so quickly.

He had never thought of it that way before, had never even considered that the life he had now, the family he had now, had not sprung from a foundation of love and romance but had resulted from his unwillingness to be alone and his need to be married.

Did he love Julia?

He’d always thought he did, but now he wasn’t sure. They seemed to be drifting apart, and he didn’t think it was simply a temporary downturn on the graph that measured their relationship. They had moved to a small town in another state, basically cutting themselves off from their friends and their previous life. It was a sink-or-swim scenario, and they were sinking. They were not drawing closer together in this pressure-cooker situation—the test of true love in his book—but were coming apart. It pained him to think that the only reason their marriage had survived for so long on such a relatively even keel was because he had a life, she had a life, and they saw each other only on nights and weekends. Now that they were together so often, now that they had more of a life together, things were not working out.

And lately he’d been thinking about other women.

That was a shock to him. He’d never had any respect for those wealthy older men who dumped their longtime wives for some young chippie, had never had any use for married losers who looked elsewhere for sex and were unfaithful to their spouses, but now he could understand where they were coming from.

He thought of the checkout girl at the market.

Kat.

She seemed to like him. She always talked to him when he came through the line, always smiled at him when she saw him come in for groceries, and she had mentioned more than once that she was not married and had no boyfriend. She was a regular at the café as well, and Wynona had even joked that she only came to the concerts to look for him—which meant that he wasn’t the only one who had noticed her interest, that it wasn’t all in his mind.

Kat was a nice girl, and he had the feeling that she was more understanding than Julia, more open, more willing to compromise within the context of a relationship.

Not that he necessarily wanted a relationship with her.

But sex would be nice.

The last time he and Julia had had sex, it was the checkout girl he’d visualized as he pumped away between his wife’s thighs. He’d imagined a tighter vagina, slimmer hips, perkier breasts, and he had come much more quickly than usual.

He had been to the store only once since then, but in line he kept thinking of how Kat would look naked, how she would behave in bed.

She was probably wild.

She would probably let him do whatever he wanted.

“Gregory!” Julia called from downstairs. “Are you up? I’m going to do the breakfast dishes! This is your last chance!”

He groaned, rubbed his eyes.

“Gregory!”

He kicked off the covers, got out of bed. “I’m up!” he yelled as he walked into the bathroom, and there was a touch of anger in his voice. “I’m up!”

The kids were at school—a friend had picked up Sasha, Julia had driven Adam and Teo before she even tried to wake him up—and Julia was in the den, working on her children’s book. His mother, as usual, was at church or doing some other Molokan thing.

He was the only one at loose ends, and he found himself wandering around the house before finally drifting upstairs into the attic.

The attic was one of the old kind that he’d seen before in movies but never in real life. The entrance was not a small square hidden in the ceiling of the bedroom closet, as the attic in their California house had been. It was a large rectangle in the ceiling at the end of the upstairs hall, and when he unfastened the chain from its hook and pulled on it, a fold-out wooden ladder slid down. The attic itself paralleled the hall below and was slightly wider, tall enough for him to stand up in the center. They’d used it so far to store some of the boxes that had formerly been in their garage, and Julia had made him get a lock for the entrance so that the kids couldn’t play in there. He could reach the lock standing on tiptoe, but everyone else in the house needed a chair. He kept the only key on his ring.

He’d thought her precautions a little excessive at first—after all, the kids weren’t babies anymore—but now he was glad of them.

Gregory unlocked the lock, pulled on the chain, walked up the ladder.

Once inside, he pulled the ladder up and shut the trapdoor behind him. Walking to the end of the room, he reached up to a shelf above the small dormer window and took down the gun case.

He opened the case, took out his revolver.

He touched the cold metal, hefted the gun’s weight in his hand. He’d bought the revolver yesterday, and though he hadn’t told anyone about it, already he felt different, more confident. There’d been no more graffiti, no more vandalism, but he was ready if there was. He pointed the unloaded weapon at the opposite wall and pretended to fire. Any criminal who violated the sanctity of his home had better be prepared to face the consequences.

He’d wanted to tell Paul and Odd about his purchase, thought about telling them, but in the end he decided to keep it to himself. He’d been brought up in a household and a culture of pacifism, and for the most part those beliefs had taken. He felt right now like a little boy sneaking behind his parents’ backs to smoke behind the barn. He was doing something he shouldn’t, something he knew to be wrong, and on some level, he supposed, he was embarrassed about it.

But it gave him a sense of empowerment, and because of his background, because of his upbringing, he also felt like a pioneer, a rebel paving the way for others to follow.

He’d brought the gun into the house in a brown paper bag, and when Julia asked him what it was, he’d merely smiled and said nothing. The kids were still at school, and shortly afterward, she’d taken the van to drop something off at Deanna’s. His mother was asleep in her room.

So he’d taken the gun and its case out of the bag and brought it up to the attic. He’d originally planned to keep it under his bed, but he knew Julia might see it there, and so he decided on the attic instead. No one else ever went up there, and he could be assured that his purchase would remain a secret. He would not be able to get to it quickly, would not be able to stop a home-invasion robbery in progress, but that was not the kind of crime that happened too often in McGuane, and it was not the situation for which he was preparing. He was after the people who had defaced his home, the bigoted redneck assholes who blamed him and his family for the recent deaths and problems in town.

He looked down at the revolver in his hand and there was a sense of soothing satisfaction as he imagined the scenario: waking up in the middle of the night after hearing a noise, getting his weapon and going outside, surprising the intruder, the vandal dropping his spray can, going for his gun, and then clutching his chest as Gregory beat him to the draw and blew him away.

“Gregory!” Julia’s muffled voice called from downstairs.

He quickly slipped the revolver back into its case, shoved it back on the shelf, and quietly opened the trapdoor, hurrying down the ladder.

“Gregory!” Julia called.

“What?” he replied, and he smiled to himself as he closed the attic door, locked it, and headed downstairs.

3

Though it was cold, Gregory had left the van at home today, walking to work in order to burn off some of his fat. Julia drove down to the café around noon, thinking the two of them could have a pleasant little lunch together.

But the young woman grinding coffee behind the counter for an elderly man told her that she hadn’t seen Gregory all morning.

That was strange. Before leaving home, he’d specifically mentioned that he was going to the café today because the sound system needed some fiddling. Her first thought was that something might have happened to him. She hurried back to Paul’s office and found him going over invoices. Alone.

“Have you seen Gregory this morning?” she asked.

He frowned. “Gregory? He hasn’t been here all week.”

“He said he was going to work on the sound system today.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the sound system.”

She didn’t know what to say. Obviously, he had lied to her. Which meant nothing had happened to him and he was off doing something else, something secret, something he didn’t want her to know about.

She wondered if he was seeing someone else, if he was having an affair.

“Odd!” Paul called out. He smiled at Julia. “Don’t worry. We’ll track him down.”

From the alley in back of the café came a “Wait a sec!” and a moment later, Odd walked into the office, wiping greasy hands on an equally greasy rag. “Yeah?”

“Have you seen Gregory today?”

The old man nodded. “Sure. He was sitting on one of the benches in the park reading a magazine about twenty minutes ago. I think he was going to go over to the bar afterward. The Miner’s Tavern.” He looked sideways at Julia. “He don’t drink much, but he seems to have some kind of feeling for that place, although I don’t rightly know what it is.”

She smiled thinly. “Thanks.”

Odd nodded. “That all, boss?”

Paul grinned, waved him away. He turned toward Julia. “You going over there to get him?”

She shook her head. “I was going to meet him for lunch, but I guess I’ll just go home.”

“You’re welcome to join me,” Paul said. “I was getting ready to eat myself.”

She thought for a moment, then smiled. “Thanks,” she said. “I’d like that.”

“Grab yourself a table out there. I’ll just wash up and join you.”

She walked out of his office to the café proper, sitting down at a table near the window. Paul joined her a moment later. “Our lunch menu isn’t too extensive. How about a pizza bagel?”

“Sounds delicious,” she told him.

“And coffee?”

“Iced cappuccino?”

“Iced cappuccino it is.” He walked over to the counter, spoke to the girl, then returned and sat down across from her.

“I don’t mean to pry,” he said. “And I’ll understand if you don’t want to talk about it, but how are things with you and Gregory?”

She shrugged noncommittally. “Okay.”

“Lying to you? Not telling you where he’s going?” He held up a hand. “I know it’s none of my business, and you can tell me to buzz off, but that doesn’t sound ‘okay’ to me.”

“I’m sure there’s a reason for it. I’m sure there’s less here than meets the eye.”

“Maybe.” He nodded. “Maybe. But like I said, he hasn’t stopped by all week, and the last few times I’ve seen him, he’s seemed a little distracted, a little… I don’t know. Lost.”

Lost. It was a good word, and it described her take on the situation perfectly. She was tempted to talk to Paul, to tell him everything—about Gregory’s increasing coldness toward her and the kids, the trouble they were all having adjusting to McGuane, even her little adventure up in Russiantown. But Paul was Gregory’s friend, not hers, and while he seemed sympathetic, she knew where his loyalties lay.

On the other hand, she’d already opened up enough to tell him that Gregory was MIA today, and perhaps if they talked he could shed some light on what was happening, offer a different perspective. He was Gregory’s friend, and perhaps that meant he was as concerned about Gregory as she was.

She took a deep breath. Started talking.

She left out the supernatural stuff, the hints of weirdness and suspicions of hauntings—she needed all the credibility she could muster here—but she ran down everything that had happened since they’d won the lottery. They had changed, she said, drifted apart. And it wasn’t the money, she emphasized. It was… this place. Sometime in the middle of the conversation the girl arrived with their food and coffee, but Julia didn’t stop, didn’t pause, just kept going, until, finally, drained, she leaned back in her chair.

Paul was silent for a moment. “I… I don’t know what to say,” he admitted.

“That’s okay.” She smiled at him. “I think I just needed to get it off my chest. I needed a sympathetic ear more than helpful advice.” She took a bite of the now-cold pizza bagel, a huge sip of the coffee.

“I can’t help but think that if you told Gregory this, sat him down and explained it to him exactly the same way you explained it to me, he would understand. I mean, he’s not a bad guy. And he’s not a dumb guy. And I’m sure he realizes something’s wrong. I know it sounds corny and clichéd, but maybe the two of you just need to communicate. If you sit down without the kids and the grandma and just talk to each other—”

“That’s the problem. We don’t seem to be able to talk to each other lately.”

“He’s going through something, and I don’t think either of us knows what it is.” Paul finished his coffee, motioned for more. “I don’t want to sound like some pop psychologist, but I can tell you that he got a lot more secretive, a lot more withdrawn, after his dad died. There wasn’t a big personality change or anything, but he went through some kind of head trip, something that he didn’t tell any of us about, any of his friends. Maybe coming back here—and living with his mom again—brought some of that back.”

Julia nodded. “I’ve thought of that,” she agreed.

“And I’m hoping that’s all it is. I’m hoping he just needs a little space, a little time to get himself together and sort things through. And I’m trying to give that to him. But life doesn’t stop just because you have a few problems to work out. And, besides, I’m his wife. He’s supposed to be working them out with me. It’s not as if I’ve ever been uncaring or unsympathetic. I think he knows he can come to me with anything, that I’ll always be here for him. We’re partners here. Or at least we’re supposed to be.”

“Give it a little more time,” Paul suggested.

“I have no choice. What else can I do?”

They were silent for a few minutes, Julia finishing her food, Gregory getting a refill on his coffee.

“No relationship’s perfect,” Paul said finally. “There are always problems.”

Julia waved him away. “You think I don’t know that by now? As long as we’ve been married?”

Paul took a deep breath. “You know, Deanna and I are having some problems too,” he said. He held up a quick hand. “Nothing serious, nothing we haven’t been through before, but in the peaks-and-valleys scenario we’re in a valley right now.”

She smiled. “Maybe it’s catching.”

“Maybe,” he said. But he did not smile.

She leaned forward. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re Deanna’s friend. I was hoping you could tell me. I know she talks to you—”

“Yeah, but not about that. I was under the impression that everything was fine between you two.”

“Maybe it is,” he said. “Maybe I’m reading more into this than I should. I hope I am. I love Deanna more now than I ever have, but lately she’s been kind of bitchy.”

“PMS?” Julia suggested, joking.

He reddened. “No, it’s not that.”

She was immediately sorry she’d mentioned it. “I didn’t mean to make light of—”

“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “I know you’re not serious.”

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked.

He sighed. “I suppose we could spy on each others’ spouses, report back to each other.”

“Is that a joke?” she asked uncertainly.

“Yeah. That’s a joke.”

“If you’d like me to talk to her, I will.”

“No. I was just kind of curious if she’d said anything to you.”

Julia shook her head. “Like I said, I had the impression that everything was fine.”

“She hasn’t seemed bitchy to you?”

“Nope.”

“Maybe it’s all in my head. Or maybe she’s jealous because she’s been hanging around you so much lately. After all, you’re a very attractive woman.” He tried to laugh it off, but the humor fell flat and she felt slightly uncomfortable.

She pushed her chair away from the table, stood.

“Well, I’d better get going.”

He nodded, his face red.

“If you do see Gregory this afternoon, you might mention that I stopped by, looking for him.”

“I’ll do that,” Paul promised.

“Do I owe you anything for…” She gestured toward the table.

“On the house,” he said.

She smiled. “Thanks.”

He looked at her, and once again she felt uncomfortable. “You’re welcome.”

Adam and Teo confronted her that afternoon.

She picked them up from their respective schools, and they were both unusually silent on the ride back. The temperature was stuck somewhere in the mid-fifties and, though the heater was on in the van, neither of them bothered to take off their heavy jackets.

It was Teo, sitting in the back, who brought it up.

“Dad was married before, wasn’t he?”

She’d known this day would come sometime, but it still threw her for a loop. She managed to remain on an even keel, to show no surprise, and she nodded. She and Gregory had decided years ago that they would handle this matter-of-factly, and so she said, “Yes, he was.”

In her peripheral vision, she saw Adam turn in his seat and look back at his sister, giving her a meaningful glance that Julia could not see to interpret.

She stuck to the party line, the tack they’d decided to take. “Your father was very young, and he made a mistake. He realized that early, and he got a divorce, and we met after that.”

“Her name was Andrea, wasn’t it?” Adam’s voice was hostile.

“Yes, it was. But, like I said, he realized his mistake early. Which just goes to show you why you should not rush into things and why people should not get married too young.”

“How old was he?” Teo asked.

“About twenty.”

“How old were you when you and dad got married?”

She took a deep breath. “About twenty-three.”

“That’s not much difference,” Adam said.

“You and Teo are three years apart. You don’t think there’s any difference in maturity there?”

“No!” Teo announced from the back.

“I guess so,” Adam admitted grudgingly.

They were all silent. Julia knew there were more questions they wanted to ask, but she did not want to volunteer any information. She waited to see what they would come up with.

The next question, from Adam, was a surprise.

“When did Sasha find out?”

She looked back at him. “I’m not sure she knows. She’s never asked about it.”

That brought him back into her corner. The hostility was gone. He was shocked and disturbed to find out that his father had already been married and divorced before starting their family, but the fact that he knew something his older sister did not almost made up for it.

“Does Dad like you better than that other woman?” Teo asked.

That other woman. Julia liked that. She smiled. “Yes, because he divorced her and married me and we had you children and we’ve been together now for almost twenty years.”

“Did you have another husband before Dad?”

“No,” she said. “Your father is my only husband.”

That seemed to satisfy them. There were no other questions immediately forthcoming.

She pulled into the drive. “We’ll talk about it some more with your father when he gets home.”

“Do we have to?” Adam asked.

“Well, he can explain better—”

“I don’t want to!” Teo announced.

“He was the one—”

“Can’t we just pretend like we don’t know?” Teo whined.

“Yeah.” Adam looked at her. “I’m sorry I found out. I didn’t mean to.”

They were both upset, upset and a little frightened, and she thought of Gregory’s recent behavior. She pulled to a stop, turned off the van’s engine. “It’s okay,” she said softly. “You don’t have to discuss it with your father if you don’t want to.”

They needed time to adjust, she decided. They needed to think about it a little more before they felt up to talking.

She would bring it up with Gregory herself tonight, when they were alone in bed, and tell him not to let on that he knew they knew.

Adam fixed her with a look so adult and sincere that it almost broke her heart. “Thanks, Mom.”

“Yeah,” Teo echoed, “thanks, Mom.”

The phone began ringing the instant she walked through the door, and she tossed her purse and keys on the coffee table in the living room as she ran to answer it.

Adam and Teo raced each other to the kitchen to find some snacks.

She kept her eyes on the phone across the room, wondering who was calling. She was suddenly aware of how rare an occurrence this had become. Back in California, the phone had rung constantly—calls for Sasha, mostly, but also quite a few for herself. Here in McGuane, however, very few people called. The telephone was seldom used, and what had been an ordinary part of everyday life had become almost an event. It brought home to her how much her social circle had shrunk and how much she missed her old life.

She answered the phone on the third ring. “Hello?”

It was Debbie, and Julia’s heart lifted as she heard her old friend’s voice. “Greetings from sunny California. How goes it, stranger?”

Debbie had called for no specific reason, just because she was bored and wanted to shoot the breeze (and she wanted to annoy her miserly husband by calling in the daytime instead of during the cheaper evening hours), and that touched Julia more than anything else. Adam and Teo emerged from the kitchen with Cokes and cookies in their hands, and she waved them away, motioning for them to stay out of the living room so she could talk in private.

Debbie always liked to work from the generic to the specific, so they started out talking about movies, making Julia realize how long it had been since she’d had a serious movie discussion with anyone.

“I watched Singin’ in the Rain last night,” Debbie told her. “It was on AMC.”

Julia smiled. “A classic.”

“Yeah, but don’t you always wonder about the movie they’re supposed to be making? The Lockwood and Lamont costume epic that’s turned into a musical? I mean, what kind of movie could include ‘Broadway Melody’ and ‘The Dancing Cavalier’? And ‘The Dancing Cavalier’ is supposed to be part of a dream sequence, while the rest of the story is contemporary, but ‘The Dancing Cavalier’ ends the movie! Does that mean the movie ends with a dream?”

Julia laughed. “God, I miss you.”

Debbie’s voice, which had been righteously serious, softened. “I miss you too, Jules. That’s why I called. How are things going there?”

She shrugged, but the shrug could not be heard over the phone. “Okay, I guess.”

Debbie had always been able to read between the lines.

“That bad, huh? What is it? Mother-in-law troubles?”

“Not exactly.”

“Local hillbillies?”

She laughed. “No. It’s just that… it’s taking us a little longer to adjust than we thought.”

“Gregory, huh?”

“How do you do that?” Julia asked.

“Do what?”

“See through whatever I’m telling you and guess the truth.”

“It’s an acquired skill,” Debbie said. “So spell it out for me.”

This time, Julia kept nothing back. She even talked about the box of dishes and her feelings about the house and her trip to Russiantown.

“You want my advice?” Debbie said when she was finished.

“What?”

“Get the hell out of Dodge. Pack your things and go. Stick your little tails between your legs and come running back here to the real world.”

“You really believe me about our haunted house?”

“I believe that you believe, and that’s enough for me. Whether it’s ghosts and creeps or simple dysfunction, things aren’t working out the way they should, and it sounds to me like it’s time for you to bail.”

Julia smiled, already feeling better. “This is your totally objective opinion?”

“The fact that I’d like my friend back here in California in no way compromises my impartiality.”

“Well, I’m stuck here for a while. For this school year at least.”

“But you’re thinking about coming back?”

“Every damn day.”

They both laughed.

There was a long pause, and it was Debbie who spoke first. “You’re really spooked, though, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Julia admitted.

“I didn’t think you were the type to believe in ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night.”

“I didn’t either.”

“I’ve always kept an open mind, myself. I don’t believe or disbelieve. But the fact that you think you saw something scares the shit out of me. I trust you more than I trust my own eyes.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“Jules?” Debbie’s voice was serious.

“Yes?”

“Be careful.”

A shiver passed through her, but Julia managed not to let it reach her voice. “I will,” she said.

“I mean it. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“I know.”

The conversation ended on an up note, with a return to movies.

Debbie was the one to finally say good-bye, and she hung up promising to call soon. Julia put the receiver back in its cradle and stood there next to the phone until her vision started to get blurry. She wiped her eyes before the tears overflowed onto her cheeks.

Teo emerged from the hallway, walked over to her.

“What are we having for dinner?” she asked.

Julia looked at her daughter, felt her strength return.

“I don’t know,” she said. She smiled. “But let’s go into the kitchen and see what we can figure out.”

4

She had not been to the banya in a long time and it was mad at her.

Teo peeked out at the bathhouse from behind a boulder. It even looked angry. There was something cross about the defiant darkness staring out of the open doorway. The small building looked better than it ever had before—the adobe seemed new, the roof no longer appeared to be caving in on one side—but it also looked sore, although that was something she sensed as much as saw. It knew she was here, it could see her, it could sense her, but it was refusing to speak to her, and Teo could feel the rage behind its silence, the anger within its darkness.

She wanted to leave but dared not, was tempted to walk closer but was afraid to do so. She was trapped just where she was, and the thought occurred to her that that was exactly where the banya wanted her to be.

It had called to her, and though there’d been no words, no explicit commands, she recognized the summons. It was one of those feelings that didn’t need words, that her brain understood without having to translate into language. She’d ignored it at first, pretended she didn’t notice, tried not to think about it, but the calling had grown increasingly insistent until it no longer seemed to be something outside that was beckoning her but a part of herself, a need.

So she had come.

But she was not brave enough to go all the way, and indeed the need within her seemed to have lessened—which was why she was beginning to think that this was exactly where the banya wanted her.

She’d been trying to think of ways to explain why she had not been by, things she could tell the banya that would explain her absence: the weather was getting too cold; she’d gotten in trouble and was grounded; her parents had found out about her coming here and had forbidden her to come again. She liked the weather idea the best. Being grounded was only a temporary excuse, and her parents had already banned her from coming here and she’d done it anyway. But it was definitely fall, and it was a lot colder fall than she was used to, and she could always say that she’d wanted to come but it was just too darn cold out. In fact, the idea of being inside the warm house, sitting on the living room floor, doing her homework and watching TV, sounded mighty good to her right now.

But she’d been called and she’d come, and it was as though she was helpless to refuse. She was a puppet. She thought of the animal attack at school and knew with dreadful certainty that the banya had done something for her and now it expected her to do something for it.

She already had, Teo told herself. She’d brought it food.

But she knew that was not enough, and that was what scared her.

The banya was still not speaking to her, and as scary and angry as it looked, she told herself that if it did not say anything in the next five minutes, she was going to leave.

At that thought, there was movement within the darkness, the sense of something shifting inside the bathhouse. She sucked in her breath.

And a horde of mice streamed out of the banya door toward her.

It came completely out of the blue, was not something she had thought about or could ever have expected, and she remained rooted to the spot as hundreds of the tiny rodents, far more than could possibly have fit inside the bathhouse, sped in a living wave over the rocky ground, the brown bodies so close together that they looked like a carpet being unrolled.

They stopped three or four feet in front of her, instantly, at the same time, as if they’d run into an invisible wall. They were in rows, she saw, lined up perfectly, like little army men. It was the orderly unnaturalness of it that frightened her the most. She wanted to run, but something kept her from it, and she could only hope that that something came from inside herself.

There was an exhalation of warm air from the door of the banya. She could see it rustling the fur of the mice, could feel the outer edges of it touching her face. It brought with it a foul stench that reminded her of rotting cucumbers, and she wrinkled her nose, turning away, finally freed from her immobility.

The mice stood up on their hind legs and smiled at her.

It was a frightening sight. A mouse’s mouth was not meant to smile, was not built to move in those directions, and seeing hundreds of them doing it at once, all facing her, made her blood run cold.

As one, the mice screeched, and the sound coming out of their mouths was her name:

“Teo!”

She ran.

Crying, screaming at the top of her lungs, finally able to make her body obey her mind, she sped back down the path toward home as fast as her legs could carry her.

She could not be sure, but behind her she thought she heard the sound of the banya laughing.