34. Jonny
Chapter thirty-four
Jonny
I’ve been avoiding it since I got back. But now I have to see Denning Court for myself. Not in a picture or a news item. In the actual street, feeling the same wind that blew through the place where I grew up.
Or maybe I just can’t sit still with what’s in my head.
Because somewhere between the police station and my aunt’s driveway, I did the thing I’d been putting off, and I typed his name into my phone.
Rex Harlow. Married thirty-one years. One wife, the same one, smiling beside him in gala photos going back decades.
Which means that for the three years between my birth and Elliott’s—longer, probably—my mother was his mistress.
And I can’t stop turning the questions over, each one uglier than the last. Was it steady, or did he blow through every few months when he felt like it?
Did he love her, or was she just convenient?
When Elliott came and the diapers and the formula ate every cent, did he set aside even a single penny, or was the twenty grand via Albatross a one-and-done event?
I want to ask him. I want to stand in front of him and make him answer for every unpaid year.
But how do you get anything true out of a man you despise this completely? And worse—how do you get it out of a man who might have killed to keep it buried?
So no. I can’t sit still. Rex, Lance, Fairhaven itself—all of it can go straight to hell. I just want to stand on the one piece of ground that never lied to me about what it was.
I let myself drive on autopilot, down roads I remember, not really caring about the route. The driving itself is calming. I pass the junction with Morris Mountain Road and instinctively avert my eyes from the spot where my family’s car was found. I quickly drive on.
And then I’m slowing down at the curve. Old Oak Court, a short cul-de-sac right before mine. And now, Denning. I put my right-turn blinker on.
The houses are all different, but their locations are the same.
As if someone had taken a blue house and put it where a brown one should go, and set a house with red shutters where there were once gray ones.
There is a two-story where the ranch on the corner had been.
I still expect to see it marked with the tire tracks from Lance’s truck.
And the third one on the right, where I used to live, is now painted sunshine yellow. It has used the footprint from the old foundations, but that’s about it. The front yard is manicured with rose bushes in pebbled plantings. The lawn has been mown into neat plaid patterns.
I stop the car and stare at it. I knew when I sold the land that someone else would build on it. But until this moment, a part of me was expecting to see the bones of the blue-painted front porch where I used to do my homework to get away from the house when I didn’t have to babysit.
It’s all gone. My childhood has been erased. Painted over in sunshine yellow by a family who will never know whose floor they’re walking on.
I drive to the end of the cul-de-sac and turn back.
The Cadwalader house has a big FOR SALE sign in the yard.
I pull up and sit with the engine running, staring at the sign.
Alice lived here. Alice, who walked to that boathouse to tell me who my father was.
Alice, who died because I left her alone for thirty seconds.
I take a breath, get out of the car, and knock on the door.
A woman about my age, dark-haired, opens it and looks at me with the brisk efficiency of somebody who assumes I have come about the house. “Can I help you? Are you interested in the property?”
“I’m sorry. I used to live on this road. Before the fire.”
She studies my face. “Oh my God. It’s you. The Bishop boy from down the street. I’m Rita. Alice’s girl.”
“Rita. Of course. My condolences on your loss.” I have only a dim memory of her—a girl a few years older than me.
There is an awkward silence as we both register our connection. Her mother died coming to meet me.
“How can I help you?” she asks. She’s not friendly, but at least she hasn’t slammed the door in my face.
“Your mom had a video that she took the day of the fire. She also had information about who my father was, but I figured that out myself. I don’t really care about that. I just want to see my brother’s face again.”
She softens slightly and looks inside the house. The living room is half in boxes. They are stacked against the walls. “She was proud of that video. She said that people should see what they lost.” She steps aside. “Come in. Let’s see if we can find it.”
There are photographs still on the walls—Alice and Rita on a beach somewhere, Alice much younger with a baby on her hip—and a bookcase mostly emptied out.
“It’s on her iPad, I think,” Rita says. “Give me a minute.”
While she’s gone I look at the boxes, because there is nothing else to look at. The nearest one is full of greeting cards. Not a few. Hundreds, in bundles with elastic bands round them, and there are more still standing along the shelf above it.
“Thank you cards,” Rita says, coming back in with the iPad.
“From the women at the university. Mom fought for maternity leave, and she was ferocious about it—she’d fight the department heads for every single week they were entitled to and then some.
” She looks at the box with an expression I recognize as pride.
“That was the part of the job she loved. There are boxes and boxes of them going back years. She was always fighting for what was right, and always thinking about others. She was right, you know.”
“About?”
“She said, when she took the videos, that the insurance would stiff us if we didn’t have video. Well, she was right. And because she had the foresight to take those videos, the Dares were able to get a full settlement. Such a shame about him. He was a nice guy.”
“What happened to him?”
“Booze, mostly.” She taps something. “He was never the same after the fire. Mixed some booze and some sleeping pills and by the time anybody found him it was too late to bring him back. It was probably accidental. That’s the shame of it.
” She sighs. “Look, it’s here. It’s just enormous and this wifi has been possessed since August.” She looks up.
“Give me your email and I’ll send you a link tonight when it’s behaving.
I promise. I’ll do it before I go to bed. ”
I hand her one of my business cards and underline the email on it, and then go to my car, turn on the engine, and stare up at what Denning Court has turned itself into in its absence.
It is a completely ordinary street. Somebody has put a basketball hoop up over a garage. There is a wheelie bin out at the end of a driveway and a hosepipe coiled on a lawn and a bird doing something in a gutter.
The houses are in the wrong places and the wrong colors.
The trees all look young. Even the road surface is new—they must have relaid the whole cul-de-sac after the fire, because it is black and smooth and unmarked and I remember it gray and cracked with a crooked seam running past our mailbox that I used to ride my bike over on purpose.
There is nothing left here. Not one single thing. The only place Denning Court still exists is inside my own head, and I cannot check my own head against anything, because everybody who could tell me whether I’m remembering it right is dead.
Except one.
I sit up.
One person alive sat at our dining table.
One person met my grandmother, and my mother, and heard Elliott scream.
There is exactly one living witness to the first seventeen years of my life and I threw him away on Saturday night with a key wedged under a doorframe.
Not because he was violent. Because he was right.
Jonny Bishop was never in that house. Jonny Bishop came from nowhere.
I built him so that nothing could reach me, and it worked.
The price is that he has no right to any of it—no right to grieve them, no right to be angry at her, no right to miss a fourteen-year-old boy. Jonny Bishop never even met them.
But Parker Bishop did. And I have spent ten years telling everybody that Parker doesn’t exist anymore, and Lance stood in a classroom and said I miss him and I told him it was just a name.
It was never just a name. It was the only part of me that was ever actually here.
I put the car into gear and drive back down Hemingway for the last time, and when I pull into my aunt’s assigned parking, I don’t go home. I go onto the campus.
The Whitfield building is quiet at lunchtime. I go up to the second floor and through the glass doors into the Comptroller’s Office, and Joe, the terrifying receptionist, looks up from behind the reception desk with the expression of a man who has just found something on his shoe.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
“I’m here to see Lance Broussard. Is he in his office?”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Does that affect whether or not he’s in his office?”
“That’s a no, then. Please make an appointment.”
“When is he available?”
Joe doesn’t look at his screen. “He has had a cancellation next Thursday at eight.”
“You’re making that up. Why don’t you call him and tell him I’m here?”
“Why don’t you?” he shoots back. “If you’re that close.”
“Because I need to see him in person.”
“And you are who, again?”
“Jonny Bishop. We’ve met.”
“Have we?”
“Yes. You know what? I know where his office is. I’ll just knock on his door.”
“He’s at lunch,” he says.
“Fine. I’ll wait.”
I sit down in one of the two chairs against the wall.
Joe looks at me. I look straight ahead. Somewhere behind him a printer starts up and finishes and the office goes quiet again, and I can feel him not typing.
It takes about four minutes.
“You can’t sit there,” he says.
“Is it reserved?”
“It’s a reception area.” He takes his glasses off. “And you’re doing a thing in it.”
“What thing?”
“Breathing.”
“Does it inconvenience you, my queen?”
“He’s been in here three days looking like something the cat brought in and thought better of. That your doing?”
“Yes.” There’s no point lying. This man would smell it. He folds his arms and waits.
“I did something stupid,” I say. “All right—we both did. But I’d like to tell him I’m sorry, and I’d rather not do it in a stairwell in three days when he’s had a chance to decide what he thinks of me. There. Is that enough tea spilled for you?”
He folds his arms over his chest. “It’ll do.” He goes to the printer and pulls out a sheaf of papers, taps them square, and holds them out across the counter.
“Tell King Rex these need signing by both parties before the courier comes at two,” he says. “That will get you past the gate and into the dining room at the country club.”
I take them.
“Wait. Were you just going to let these slide if your boss hadn’t come into the office before two?”
“He takes long lunches.” Joe shrugs one shoulder. “That’s not on me.”
The phone goes. He picks it up without hurrying.
“Comptroller’s Office, please hold.” He presses a button, sets the receiver down, and takes a sip of his coffee. Then he looks at me. “Off you go.”
“Thank you,” I say, already moving. “And—you’re terrifying.”
A flicker of something at the corner of his mouth. He picks the phone back up. “I try. And Mr. Bishop?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t like people very much.”
“Noted.”
“I like Lance.”
“Okay?”
“Do this to him again and you will not find an ally in me.”
“Noted. Thank you.” I back away toward the door, because now I’m really nervous about turning my back on him. He watches me and only when I’ve put my hand on the knob does he pick up the phone again. “Thank you for holding. How can I help you?”