921.
Shouldering her duffel, she locked up the rental and crossed the lot to the door. A big, scruffy guy with glasses came out as she approached, leading a tiny dog wearing a red snowflake-pattern sweater. He held the door for her and Miri smiled and thanked him, thinking that this was better, that seeing her mother face-to-face when she opened the apartment door would somehow be less awkward than talking to her over the intercom from the building's foyer.
She could not have imagined how wrong she'd be.
The elevator whirred up to the ninth floor and she found herself wishing for the distraction of Muzak. Alone on the elevator, it was too quiet, with too much room for ghosts.
The long, turning corridor surprised her, with its freshly scrubbed brick and exposed wooden beams left over from the original mill building. At the door to apartment 921, Miri paused and took a breath, wondering if she really wanted to do this. She could always go to the shitty little Best Western on the north side of the city. She exhaled, realizing the truth. No way would she tell her mother about seeing her father's ghost, not just yet. But if this was real, and not just some breathless, fevered wish come to frightening life, she would need to tell them all in time. Jake and Allie Schapiro, and her own mother. Although Angie and Niko were divorced, they had loved each other once. His death had scarred Angela deeply, especially coming on the same night as her best friend, Cherie Manning, had died.
The worst night, Miri thought. Ever.
Shifting her duffel to the other shoulder, she rapped on the door, then waited through twenty seconds of silence before she knocked again, louder this time. She had just started to wonder if her mother might not be home when she heard low voices behind the door.
"Who is it?"
So strange hearing her mother's voice in person after years away.
"It's me," she said. "It's Miri."
More talking inside, and Miri began to get a terrible, sinking feeling. Her stomach dropped and she swore softly, wincing with awkwardness as she heard the lock thrown back, and then her mother was opening the door.
Miri wasn't prepared for Angela's pleasant smile or the way her mother stared at her as if in discovery, looking her up and down as if it had been forever since they'd last seen each other. But she supposed that, in a way, it had.
"God, it's really you, isn't it?" Angela said, tucking her hair behind her ear.
Miri took in the unruly hair, the pink flush of her mother's cheeks, the hastily tied bathrobe, and any hope that her suspicion might not be warranted went up in smoke.
"Hi, Mom."
Several awkward seconds passed before Angela seemed to notice the duffel, and then realization lighted her face. She gave a kind of sad smile and stepped back to let her daughter in, opening the door wider, which gave Miri a glimpse of Doug Manning farther inside the apartment, hastily buttoning his shirt. Though it had been years, Miri recognized him immediately. Doug had been the husband of her mother's best friend, and he'd always been kind to young Miri, teasing her about boys and ruffling her hair. At the city's memorial for those killed in the blizzard, with Doug grieving for Cherie and Miri for her father, he had stood beside her while Charlie Newell's sister sang "Amazing Grace" and put a protective arm around her, both of them quietly weeping.
"Hey, kid," Doug said now, the way he always had, as if no time at all had passed.
As if it made all the sense in the world for her mother to be screwing the husband of her dead best friend. And probably it did-Miri was no expert-but in that moment it made her want to throw up.
"Come in, sweetie," her mother said, oh so tenderly-so carefully. "It's so great to see you."
Angela's smile seemed almost sincere, but the sweetie sickened her. In her whole life, her mother had never called her sweetie. Girl, sometimes, or babygirl, as if it were all one word. Mirjeta, her full name, if she was angry. Bitch, more than once. But never sweetie.
An image of Doug and her mother having sex swam into her mind and it was too much for her to take.
"This was a mistake," she said, shaking her head and taking a step away from the door. "I'm sorry. I should have called. I should have … "
The thought left unfinished, she turned to walk away. Her mother stepped out into the corridor and called after her, voice cracking with a plaintive sadness, a vulnerability that Miri never would have associated with Angela Ristani, and it very nearly stopped her in her tracks. But sweetie rang in her ears and the image of the pink, mid-sex flush in her mother's face made her rush down the hall to the elevator.
Only when it had arrived and she'd stepped in did she allow herself to look back down the hallway to confirm that her mother had not given chase. The combination of relief and disappointment confounded her.
The doors slid shut and the elevator hummed as it began its descent.
Shitty little Best Western it is.
Sometime after one A.M., Allie Schapiro woke from a dream in which Isaac rushed into her room and slid into bed with her, afraid of the rattling of the windows caused by the storm and the whistle of the icy wind. It was the sweetest of dreams, lying there under the covers, whispering assurances to her little boy in the dark, and when some noise or other roused her from sleep, she still felt him in her arms, felt the softness of his hair against her cheek. The dream dissipated like smoke and she tried so hard to hold it inside her heart and her memory, but like all dreams, it had never been meant to keep.
Outside her window, it had begun to snow in earnest. This was no little flurry but the beginning of the blizzard that forecasters had been warning about for days. The wind gusted and the window rattled and the frigid air howled in through the single inch that she had left it open.
Allie rose tiredly and went to shut it, closing out the wind and the chill and turning the lock to secure it.
Out on the corner, just at the edge of a pool of golden light from a streetlamp, she saw the ghost of Niko Ristani staring up at her.
With a small cry she backed away, her hand over her pounding heart. She shook her head, not understanding. Pinched her arm to make sure she was awake. Looked around the room to see if somehow she might still be dreaming.
When she returned to the window, the street below was empty.
It would have been so easy for her to tell herself that it had been a stray thread of her dreaming mind that had shown her something impossible, but Allie could not do that. She was awake, and she knew what she had seen. If she hadn't seen Niko's body herself, hollow and forlorn in the casket on the night of his wake, she would have thought that somehow he had faked his death. But she had loved him, and so she knew that her love had died.
Niko, she thought.
Ghost or not, it would have made her happy to know that somehow his soul still endured, but she had seen the tortured look in his eyes, the worry there. The fear in the eyes of a dead man.
And it terrified her.
SIXTEEN
On Wednesday morning, the banging of a loose shutter roused Jake from a deep sleep. He came awake with barely conscious irritation, his brain trying to make sense of the sound as he took a deep breath and forced himself to open his eyes. Gray light filtered through the bedroom windows and thick, wet snow pelted the glass. So much had already built up on the sill that a diagonal slash of white covered the bottom quarter of the window.
The banging drew his attention again and he frowned for a moment before putting it together. Shutter. Right. On this side of the house's exterior, the previous owner had left the original old-world shutters intact. In an era when the fear of Indian attacks was still fresh in the minds of settlers, such heavy wooden shutters were typical, useful as they were for stopping arrows. Later, they became a common architectural feature, even when the prospect of Indian attack was a distant memory. Though their hinges were rusty and they had probably not been closed in decades, the old shutters on the east-facing side of the house remained. Something else he hoped to rectify someday.
The hinges squealed as the shutter banged against the house, the blizzard gusting as if its winds were the breath of some icy billows. As the sleep-fog retreated from his mind, it occurred to him that he would have to go outside and secure it, and he swore under his breath and turned over, burrowing his head into his pillow.
Then he went rigid as true wakefulness returned.
"Isaac," he said, his voice muffled by the pillow.
Jake glanced at the clock on his bedside table to find that it was nearly eleven A.M. They had stayed up until almost three o'clock in the morning, talking and watching superhero movies. Isaac had always loved comics and Jake had remembered how they had fantasized about what it would be like if Hollywood ever managed to make a movie of The Avengers. Last night, Jake had helped make that fantasy come true for his little brother and had been content to let the movies fill the quiet that had fallen between them as the hour grew first later and then earlier. Just when he had begun to think that Isaac would never sleep, he had heard the soft snoring of the little boy and realized that-ghost or not-his physical body had passed its endurance threshold. He had slept, and Jake had done the same.
Still tired, eyes gritty with sleep, he sat up in bed. Small stacks of comics shifted on top of the bedspread as he moved beneath the covers.
"Isaac?" he called, glancing at the bedroom door, which had been tightly shut.