“You think it would make me feel better just to have him dead?”
“Janet—”
“There’s only one thing on earth that would make me feel better, and you know it.”
“Stephanie’s dead, Janet. That was a long time ago. Ten years ago. How can you care about that now?”
“Since you can’t care about anything from one second to the next, I don’t suppose you’d understand. But if we’re looking for suitable but inadequate substitutes, Kevin’s death is not one of them.”
“Janet—”
“Get that woman out of my mother’s house. Get her out of my life, Stephen.”
“I’m trying—”
“You’re trying not to let yourself in for any kind of scene, that’s what you’re trying to do. That’s what you’re always trying to do. Well, fine. Don’t get her out of my life then. Get a few other people into my life.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Let me call the Emiliani School and have Sister Mary James bring the children out here for the fireworks tomorrow night.”
Stephen sucked air, shocked. “But Janet,” he said, “you can’t do that. Dan told you—”
“I’m not talking about Dan. I’m talking about you. Don’t hide behind Dan. Dan would love to have those children out here. He’d call the New York Times and set up a photo op.”
Stephen looked down at his hands. Janet looked with him. The hands were working, working, and working, rubbing against each other as if they wanted to rub the skin off.
“It wouldn’t work out,” Stephen said. “You know it wouldn’t. They wouldn’t understand what they were seeing. They’d—they’d be out of control, and they’d make a mess of everything, and then where would we be? They’d—”
“Never mind, Stephen.”
He looked up at her, earnest and pleading. “You shouldn’t have said that about my hiding behind Dan. That isn’t how it is, you know. It really isn’t. Dan—sometimes I think my relationship with Dan isn’t—isn’t natural.”
“Really?” Janet shook her head. This was new. But not entirely unexpected. She was sure he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, that he and Dan were involved in homosexual union . She would have felt better about them both if he had.
“It’s funny,” Stephen said, his voice distant and slightly high, like a singer warming into a different piece. “I know you don’t like Patchen, Janet, but she was the one who pointed it out to me. How strange it was, I mean, the way we were together, me and Kevin and Dan.”
“I’ve been pointing it out to you for years,” Janet said.
“You didn’t mean the same thing. You just didn’t like them, that’s all. You just thought they made me do things I shouldn’t do. It was Patchen who told me how they sucked the soul out of me.”
“What?”
“How they sucked the soul out of me,” Stephen repeated, and then turned his head to face her. There was, she saw, something wrong with his eyes. They had gotten bigger and very, very bright, as if someone had put glycerin in them. “Patchen says we were born in splinters, Kevin and Dan and I. There was supposed to be one soul in one body, but something went wrong. We ended up as one soul in three bodies, splintered. Do you see?”
“No,” Janet said lamely. “No.”
“It’s so odd now that Kevin’s dead. I feel much stronger. I know my own mind much better. I used to feel so much as if something inside me was missing.”
“Dan’s still alive, Stephen.”
“I know. But I don’t think he’ll be alive for long.”
“What?”
Stephen smiled, slowly and broadly, letting it take up his whole face. Any minute, Janet thought wildly, he would turn into a cartoon.
“It’s my soul,” he said seriously. “Mine. Not theirs.” I don’t think anybody killed Kevin. I think the splinter of my soul in him came back to me. That’s why he was so still. That’s why they couldn’t find a cause of death. There wasn’t any cause of death. He was never alive in the first place. He was just a body living on a piece of borrowed soul.”
“They’re doing tests,” Janet said tightly. “They may find a cause of death yet.”
“They won’t.”
He got out of his chair and stretched, making his shirt strain against the belt that held it to his waist. Then he pushed his chair back into place, neatly, perfectly. He had tidied up the place setting where the weight of his elbows, resting on it as he talked, had pushed it askew.