Dane had started dating Misty about a year before he’d decided to leave McFalls County and relocate to Fannin. The drive back and forth to see each other had been taxing for both of them, so after the first few times she’d brought it up, he’d finally agreed to let her move in. He wasn’t sure it was a good idea then and he still wasn’t now, but it wasn’t like she didn’t practically live here already, only now it was official. And it made her happy. Dane rarely had that effect on people, so he rolled with it. And after so many years alone with no one but ghosts in his head to talk to, it was kind of nice to have a real person around when he got home.
As he got closer to the house, he could make out one of Misty’s handmade wreaths hanging on the door and he shook his head. It was made of burlap and brown ribbon with a huge K made of green wire in the center. She loved to make those things and, honestly, Dane didn’t mind seeing them. It was something else that made her happy, and for a moment, the wreath made the details of room 1108 fade. He’d deal with those later. He would never forget what he’d seen back there, but it had no place in his home. In fact, the closer he got to the house, the warmer he felt. The night pulled its fingers off his neck. The darkness outside was apparently no match for Misty’s love of the craft store. It was things like that—the things that went unnoticed by so many—that made all the difference, and if there was one thing Dane knew to be true, it was that for all the cruelty and violence the world had to offer, none of it stood a chance against the unassuming power of a man’s porch light being left on to welcome him home. Dane managed a smile for the first time all day as he slowly made his way up the steps. He ran his fingers over the folds of wire and burlap on the wreath, right before he fished his keys out of his pocket and unlocked the bright red door.
Dane was about to drop his keys into a coaster-sized ceramic turtle bowl on the small table against the wall in the foyer but picked it up instead. It always looked to Dane more like a warped oak leaf than a turtle, but he never argued the point. Dane’s daughter, Joy, had made that turtle in kindergarten, and it had sat right inside the door of the old house they’d lived in every day since she’d brought it home. Now it was here. He ran his thumb over the jagged edges. He’d broken it several times over the years but superglued it together every time. It was more glue and cracked purple ceramic chips now than it was oak leaf or turtle, but he loved it. He loved that damn turtle. Dane thought about how upset Misty had gotten the first time she’d come over and seen it there. She said he was just torturing himself. Maybe she was right, but he put it there anyway. Some things were worth the torture. Some things he didn’t want to feel distant from. That turtle-blob-thing made this house feel more like a home—his home. The turtle stayed.
He had no sooner picked it up before he felt the vise-grip hug of a little girl with long hair, wispy and blond and in need of a good brushing, crushing his leg. He’d expected it. He also knew it wasn’t real. The little blond girl let go and vanished around the corner. Dane said nothing as he followed her into the house. He poked his head sheepishly around the corner and looked over the living room into the kitchen. He saw what he always saw.
Gwen.
He knew she would be there, too. He also knew she wasn’t real, either, but there she was—waiting on him—almost every day. She was standing in the kitchen facing away from him, her dark cocoa hair tied in a loose, shiny knot behind her neck, falling down her back. She wore a simple wrap dress painted an autumn floral and bunched up at her hips, stopping a quarter way down her thighs—her swaying thighs. Her hips moved in time to The Bangles’ “Manic Monday”—
OH-ooh-OH, Dane hummed to himself.
She acknowledged Dane’s presence with a quick glance over her shoulder that said, “You can go back to looking at my ass now,” before lip-syncing Susanna Hoffs into her wooden-spoon microphone. She stayed that way, dancing like a teenager in a movie, while she worked the pans on the range like a game of three-card monte for a crowd of invisible spectators.
Dane felt the familiar ache in his chest beginning to burn its way out like kerosene in the back of his throat. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He stayed like that for a long moment. That move had become ritual for warning off his ghosts. When he opened his eyes, he was still in the foyer holding the purple turtle and the house was silent. He set it back down on the table and emptied his pockets into it—about two bucks in loose change, a tied fly he’d begun to make at the creek, and a mushroomed .30-30 bullet he’d been carrying around for years.
He announced himself and kicked off his boots as he walked past the stairs into the living room, and this time, grounded in reality, he stared into the empty kitchen. He made his entry loud in case Misty was in the shower or busy upstairs. He wanted to surprise his girl, but not scare a woman who knew her way around the Colt 1911 Dane kept in the safe by the bed. It took him nearly a full minute to notice her nephew, Jackson, sitting on the carpet in front of a muted TV to his right in the den. He had to do a double take and he blinked a few times just to make sure this boy was real and not another apparition. But the boy was real, and Dane suddenly wasn’t surprised to see him there. Misty kept her little sister’s boy more often than his own mother did. Dane knew Misty hadn’t gotten used to being alone in the strange house for any length of time yet, so she must’ve volunteered to take Jackson for the weekend just to keep her company. Dane liked her nephew just fine, but the kid wasn’t exactly the person he had hoped to come home to. The romantic surprise idea was a bust. He’d parked by the street and walked the drive for no reason.
Jackson sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by sheets of paper he’d taken from the printer in Dane’s office. A spilled box of crayons littered the carpet in a circle around him. The boy looked up to acknowledge Dane’s presence, but that was it—just a casual glance—before going right back to work on his Crayola masterpiece.
Dane took a seat on the ottoman in front of the sofa. “Hey, buddy, I didn’t know you were staying with us.” He said it like a question but didn’t get any response, so he tried again. “Hey, bud, when did you get here?” He ran a hand through the boy’s hair, a thick tangle of brown curls that matched Misty’s and her sister’s both. Dane thought the kid needed a haircut. Jackson drew away from Dane’s hand. He didn’t like to be touched. Dane was familiar with that quirk in the kid’s personality, but it didn’t stop him from doing it anyway. He picked up one of the drawings from the floor. “Whatcha working on, buddy?”
The child said nothing as he tossed a crayon back into the pile and searched for a better shade of green.
“Jack? Bud?”
“I don’t like that,” the boy finally said, pushing his kid-sized plastic-rimmed glasses up on the bridge of his nose.
“What, the crayon or the picture?” Dane looked at the drawing of what he assumed was some kind of dragon. “I don’t know, buddy, I think that’s a pretty cool dragon.”
“It’s not a dragon. It’s a pterodactyl. It can fly. I like those.”
“Then what don’t you like?”
“He doesn’t like it when you call him buddy,” Misty said from the stairs. “Right, Jackson?”