The Poor and the Haunted Page 15

  “My man,” he said. “Go.”

  Jimmy turned and went, first through the security checkpoint where he took off his shoes and walked through a metal detector. Jimmy picked up his bag after it passed inspection. Inside was a suit and a nice pair of shoes, packed by Claudia with Carlisle’s permission. The clothes were men’s clothes, but not because she bought them first for Carlisle in the men’s section of a Dillard’s in Oklahoma City. They were men’s clothes because they first belonged to a man who looked for the best in people and took chances on them when he saw it, a man who made only promises he knew he could keep, a man who tried to choose right and owned the moments when he chose wrong, a man who never rewrote the ending to fit the choices he made in the middle.

  Though it didn’t fit right away, Jimmy grew into Carlisle’s suit faster than he expected.

  When he and Jill were just starting out, Jimmy wore that suit to every job interview he was invited to. He wore it the first time he ever made money trading a milk future, which was also the thousandth and best time he telepathically told the old owners of a long-abandoned Oklahoma dairy to fuck off. Two children, one wife, and two presidents later, the suit still hung in his closet. It was one of the few exceptions to Jimmy’s rule and had never been banished to the storage unit. It was still, and always would be, a good fit.

  Though the suit was old, it was well cared for, and such a part of Jimmy’s wardrobe that it became part of him. He usually forgot where he got it—which, had he known, is exactly what Carlisle would have wanted.

  After he picked up his bag, Jimmy turned and headed down the terminal. He did as Carlisle asked and didn’t look back. Not even once.

  It would be almost twenty years before the two men saw each other again.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  2019

  Jill watched her husband from the doorway, his head bent over the bathroom sink. A few minutes earlier he walked upstairs, telling his family goodnight. Though he hadn’t injured his legs during his afternoon run to Walmart, Jimmy limped ever since he returned home from the hospital three days ago. Jill couldn’t say why, but she was pretty sure his limp would remain.

  She knew what running meant to him but thought change would be a good thing. The kids were getting bigger. She would start her job as a CFO in a week. Jimmy, never one for change, could take baby steps. Instead of running, maybe he could take up weightlifting. Or CrossFit. Change didn’t have to a be a disaster, especially if the alternative was running until you dropped dead.

  “Hey babe,” Jill said, embracing Jimmy from behind as he wiped the remaining toothpaste from his chin.

  He put his arms over hers, keeping her just where she was for a few moments. She pressed her cheek into his back, then broke their embrace. Jimmy had been married a long time and knew being called “babe” was often the beginning of a long and important conversation.

  Jimmy moved toward the toilet, setting the lid down and taking a seat. Jill turned around, her back to the mirror, and lifted herself onto the sink, where she faced Jimmy. They looked at each for a while, two people who knew each other far better than they knew themselves.

  “So, are we going to talk about it?” Jill asked.

  “Talk about what?”

  “Jimmy. Are you serious?”

  He took a breath and slowly exhaled. He knew this conversation was coming as soon as Jill felt he was healthy enough to have it.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “About what happened.”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “What? Why would I not believe you?”

  Because you are a sensible person, Jimmy wanted to say. You have a degree in accounting and are going to be a CFO and good CFOs don’t believe in ghosts or demons.

  “Jimmy, I mean tell me about when you were a kid. I want to know more. About you. About my husband. I will believe you. Whatever you tell me. Plus, we’re mortgage-official, so I legally have to believe you.”

  He looked up at her, confused.

  “Mortgage official?” he asked.

  “Yeah, it’s like Facebook-official, but if you leave me I can take half your crap, Mr. Hotshot-Trader Man.”

  He laughed, and she winked, and he knew he would tell her what she deserved to hear.

  “My childhood is just sad. Really sad.”

  “Then let me share it with you. Don’t carry it alone.”

  For the next hour Jimmy gave her the details she always lacked. How his parents went from cocaine in the ’80s to meth in the ’90s. How he and Kelly never lived at the same address for more than a year until his father died. How he never, ever had a single friend over for a sleepover. How their kitchen counter was a kaleidoscope of cigarette burns, and so on some days were his forearms.

  The burns were a secret he kept even from Carlisle, knowing it could set in motion a series of events that would place him and Kelly in separate homes.

  A thousand maybes and a thousand more maybes branching off each of those, and in half of them Kelly might still be alive.

  Though it pained him to see the expression on his wife’s face as she heard what her husband and his little sister lived through, he knew this was the easy part of this conversation. After he told her all he could think to tell, he waited for the follow-up question.

  “And what about now?” she asked, tossing a wet Kleenex toward the wastebasket.

  It was a difficult shot from her angle, and when she banked it off the wall and into the wastebasket, Jimmy said, “So that’s where he gets it from.”

  “Where who gets what from?”

  “Jonathan. He must get his basketball skills from you.”

  “Not everything is passed from parent to child, Jimmy. Don’t avoid my question, either. What’s happening now, in our house?”

  “Now?”

  “Jimmy, you almost died.”

  Jimmy stared down at his bare feet, stalling for time, but he knew Jill would sit on the sink all night if she needed to. There was no other way out. He had to say it.

  “I thought I was possessed by a demon.”

  Jill didn’t laugh, didn’t snicker, didn’t tell her husband he was crazy. She just extended her right leg until her foot touched Jimmy’s knee.

  “When did you start to think this?” she asked.

  “Well, when I was younger…when I was younger I started to think …I thought for a while our parents were possessed by demons. Or something. Jill, I know—I know how this sounds.”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy, Jimmy.” She pushed her foot harder against his knee. “Why did you stop thinking that? Was it what Kelly said about your parents being too big of losers for the devil to want them?”

  “I grew up. I took Psych 101 and Abnormal Psychology as electives my junior year. I realized I was trying to rationalize the fact that my parents were terrible at being parents. I was okay with that explanation for years. And then it started.”

  “What started?”

  Jimmy sighed.

  “Remember my trip to Cedar Rapids?”

  “Yeah. You texted me ‘I’m safe.’ It was weird. I just thought you were tired.”

  “That night I thought I saw someone in my room. There was a window that looked out on the hot tub. I thought I saw someone looking down on me. From the window. Well, security checked and there was no one. But there was a handprint on the window inside the room.”

  The hair on Jill’s forearms prickled up.

  “A handprint? Are you sure it wasn’t there before?”

  “I—” The thought never occurred to Jimmy. Was the handprint
there before? Doesn’t the cleaning crew wipe down the windows? He didn’t know.

  “What else?”

  “I thought I felt something in the bathroom during Jessica’s party. Pushing against me.”

  “What else?”

  “In the storage unit I felt…I felt like I floated away. Far away.”

  Jill looked her husband in the eye, holding his gaze as she used a small rubber band to pull her hair into a nighttime ponytail. Jill was, in every way, the opposite of his mother. Educated and intelligent, her beauty came without sharp edges. More than anything, though, to Jimmy she embodied the most underrated sexy quality a human can possess: reliability.

  “I don’t know what to say, Jimmy. I mean—if anything in our lives is haunted, it might be the box in that storage unit. You should bring Kelly home, and get rid of the rest.”

  Jimmy said he would like that, though he would bring his old white Nikes home, too. He told her about the morning of the footprints and about being scared of getting taken back to Oklahoma, and how he couldn’t bear the thought of returning to that place, even if it was just in his mind.

  “But tell me, why did you jump out the window? Why did you run to Walmart?” Jill asked.

  “Um—you’re going to laugh.”

  “Laugh? None of this is funny, Jimmy.”

  “I ran to get a Ouija board. They only had one, and this cashier did a price check in front of the whole store.”

  The sound of Jill’s laugh relaxed Jimmy.

  Jimmy confessed everything except the dry run with the screwdriver. In a marriage, honesty is almost always the best policy. Jimmy knew that. But there had to be exceptions, he thought, and one of those exceptions was sharing too many details about the sharp end of a screwdriver in a family with a history of suicide.

  “Do you still think there’s something here?” Jill asked.

  Jimmy looked around the room, glancing at the mirror.

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because after that day, I haven’t felt it. It’s gone.” He looked back at the mirror before locking eyes with Jill. “Or I imagined it. I was having a breakdown. I think I knew, in the back of my mind, that Jessica turning twelve would be hard. It was bad before Ronnie died. But it was worse after that. Diane, our mother, I mean, she turned the hate in both of our parents’ hearts on us. And then…”

  And then she killed Kelly, he wanted to say. After I left her behind.

  The simple math of that—Jimmy left, and Kelly died, and she wouldn’t have been in the car if he stayed in Oklahoma—was unavoidable and irrefutable. Jimmy would not let anyone tell him otherwise, believing if the truth can eat you alive, you deserve to get eaten. It was a far more brutal version of Carlisle’s approach to Kelly’s death.

  Jill stood from the sink and said, “Wait here just a minute. I have something I want to show you.” She left the bathroom, leaving Jimmy alone. He thought about standing up to see if there were any smudges in the mirror, but decided he was better off where he sat.

  Jill re-entered the bathroom, holding a plastic grocery bag.

  “Open it,” she said, placing the bag and its contents at Jimmy’s feet. Inside were a pair of filthy Kyrie Irving shoes caked in dry mud.

  “What?” He asked, lifting one shoe out and inspecting it. One of the remaining pieces of dirt fell to the bathroom floor.

  “It was Jonathan. He told me while you were in the hospital. The footprints were his fault. He was trying to clean up his mess when you got back.”

  “Why would he—”

  “Lie to you, Jimmy? He wasn’t lying. He just didn’t want to let you down. No one wants to let you down.”

  “Is he afraid of me?”

  Jill looked at him with the same stern look she used on their children.

  “Jimmy, you are not your father. Or your mother. Do you hear me? No one is afraid of you. He just didn’t want to disappoint you.”

  Jimmy looked at the filthy pair of one-hundred-dollar shoes sitting on his clean bathroom floor.

  Jill kneeled down, her eyes locked on his.

  “I want to say something, and you need to hear me.”

  “I—”

  “Stop. Just listen,” she said, waving a hand with a ring finger that sparkled with the world’s least pawnable piece of jewelry.

  “Okay.”

  “Jimmy, you are not possessed. It wasn’t the devil. Or a ghost. The first twenty years of your life were awful because you and Kelly had awful parents. I don’t—awful isn’t even the right word. Listen to me: You didn’t deserve what happened to you. Either of you.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t know. If you knew I wouldn’t be learning brand new information after being married to you for this long. If you knew, you wouldn’t have almost died.”

  She moved her hands to his cheeks, her wedding ring making a slight scratching sound as it brushed his stubble.

  “You are not possessed. You are not a haunted man. You are not bad. You didn’t deserve this. Neither did she. And Jimmy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look at your life,” Jill said, motioning at the bathroom walls with her hands. “People are jealous of what you—of what we have. Have you ever been anything but successful in your career?”

  “Jill—”

  “Answer my question.”

  “No. I mean, yes. I’ve always been successful.”

  “And you have a beautiful family and a beautiful home with a wife and children who adore you. You spend so much time avoiding your past you sometimes forget to see what’s in front of you.”

  “I’ll be better.”

  Jill sighed. She didn’t want Jimmy to promise to do better, like he wasn’t keeping up on his portion of the housework.

  “This isn’t dirty dishes left in the sink. I’m not asking you to fix something for me. I’m telling you the universe or God or whatever is usually fair. Maybe, as awful as it was, that house and those burns were the price you paid for the life you live now.”

  Though Jill was trying to comfort him, her observation on the universe’s inherent fairness broke Jimmy. When the tears came, they came with gasps and choking sounds and what Jessica would call a good hard ugly cry.

  Through the tears Jimmy managed to ask Jill a question.

  “What about Kelly? What does she get for the price she paid?”

  It was a question deserving an answer, though it wasn’t an answer Jill could give. She could tell him our reward for suffering so much might come in the next life, but she knew saying something like that wouldn’t do any good. The next life is a long way away when you have to spend so many years in this life apart from someone you love.

  Jill sensed a presence in the doorway.

  Jonathan and Jessica were standing there, their images reflected in the bathroom mirror. She turned and waved her children in.

  An observer who witnessed this scene might describe it as a moment of tremendous sorrow, a man weeping for his long-dead sister after having almost killed himself, surrounded by people gravely concerned about his well-being.

  But family?

  Anyone who belonged to a family like the one gathered around Jimmy Lansford would know differently. Family would know how important this hug was, that being touched in times of heartbreak was often what keeps a person from just floating away, from becoming a black balloon waiting for the day it can pop.

  Jimmy constructed his entire life so he would never feel lost, never float away, never make his children feel as though they were being raised
by an unstable parent. Their dad crying, giving in to the strength of his wife, was a new sight for Jonathan and Jessica.

  It was so new and unexpected they all missed the way the digital clock on the bathroom kept glowing brighter and brighter as the Lansford family sequel squeezed each other tighter and tighter.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  August 2001

  The backseat of the Camry was piled high with garbage bags full of clothes and a white pair of Nikes Jimmy had long since outgrown. If he left Garrity by noon, and drove all night, he would be back in Arizona by early the next afternoon.

  First though, he had to fulfill two promises, both food-related. The first was his promise to have pancakes with Carlisle and his fiancée at their home. There was no limit to the number of pancakes Claudia could make, which was good, because there was no limit to the number of pancakes Jimmy could eat. After two hours of breakfast and talking about Jimmy’s upcoming cross-country season, Carlisle gave Jimmy a hard handshake and said, “My man. You coming back for Thanksgiving?”

  “You know I don’t—”

  Carlisle waved his hand, dismissing Jimmy’s objection. In a month or two he would call Jimmy and tell him some old teammate worked at an airline, and he had called in a favor to get Jimmy on a flight to Oklahoma City. Jimmy shook Carlisle’s hand, and then got back in the car, needing to get to his next and most important goodbye before he left town.

  Jimmy waved goodbye to Claudia and Carlisle and headed for Derry’s.

  Kelly was waiting for him at one of the tables out front. She wore one of Jimmy’s old cross-country shirts from high school, her hair in a ponytail. He parked in a space near her table and got out of the Camry. It was still early—not even noon—and the line to the Derry’s window was short. Jimmy ordered two vanilla cones and brought them back, sitting next to Kelly on the same side of the bench. Across the street stood a liquor store, a convenience store, another liquor store, and three payday lenders. Every summer that was Jimmy’s view as he worked and saved nearly every penny he earned.