Falling Together by Marisa De Los Santos

Author:Marisa De Los Santos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins US

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

PEN HAD SPENT TWO YEARS WAITING TO BE HAUNTED, AND IT hadn’t happened. True, her father was always there, inside Pen’s mind, sometimes standing squarely in its center, everything else sidestepping or flowing around him, other times as a reassuring but nearly anonymous presence, like the lit windows of the apartment building across from Jamie’s that Pen would look at, parting the curtains of the window next to her bed for a quick glimpse, when she couldn’t sleep. Anything—a windbreaker, a bicycle helmet, a man with his hair parted a certain way, the joke the weatherman on Channel 10 made about fog—could send him flaring like a torch into a three-dimensional, walking, talking memory. But if these moments were vivid and if they bruised and embraced Pen at the same time, they were memories all the same, she knew, incorporeal, evanescent. Actually seeing her father or hearing his voice or feeling his hand on her shoulder, even sensing his physical nearness had never happened, no matter how patient she had tried to be, no matter how much she had longed for him to come back to her, even for a second.

The day she and Jamie brought their mother home, entered, for the first time in months, the house they had grown up in, was no different, though the house even looked sort of haunted, with every shade and curtain drawn and pale sheets over the furniture making a moonscape of the living room. Pen knew that the Wexlers next door had been coming over now and then to check on things and to adjust the thermostat so that the pipes wouldn’t freeze in the winter, and that they had been sending their teenaged son, Alec, to weed Pen’s mother’s flowerbeds and mow the lawn, but the house had the hollow, echo-filled atmosphere of a long untouched place. Standing in the dim entryway, Pen imagined cobwebs into the corners, even though she knew there wouldn’t be any because she knew that, just as Margaret Calloway would never have asked her friend Astrid Wexler to do a little tidying up from time to time, Astrid Wexler would never have not, from time to time, tidied up her friend Margaret Calloway’s house.

As she and her mother went room to room, dusting and vacuuming, raising blinds, lifting or cranking open windows so that light cut pathways across the floors and new air drifted in (with Pen dogged, the whole time, by the idea that doing so should have felt a lot more metaphorical than it did), Pen kept a part of her psyche (small, upright, and hyperalert as a meerkat) attuned to the possibility of her father’s presence. She had to admit that it made her feel foolish. She had never believed in ghosts, not even as a kid. It was only in bursts that Pen believed in an afterlife at all.

The thing was, though, that if the dead could come back to visit the people they loved, her father was exactly the kind of person who would do it.

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