Chapter Twenty-nine
Lake
Saying the woman on the doorstep was shocked would be like saying Napoleon was moderately ambitious.
When she swayed, I automatically stepped forward, ready to catch her.
She steadied herself on the doorjamb, mouth moving soundlessly.
Eventually, she mustered a few words. “How… I don’t understand…
This is not possible. I can’t…” She finished by shaking her head without completing a sentence.
“Yeah…” Baxter said. “I appreciate this is a surprise. I’ll give you the short version. Dead for nineteen years. No longer dead as of a few months ago.” He gestured at the house behind her. “Can we come in?”
She staggered backward, Baxter taking it as an invitation to cross the threshold. “Living room this way, is it?”
I followed him into a room that turned out to be the right one. A man sat at the table, reading a newspaper. “Who was at the door?” he asked without looking up. “It wasn’t one of those damn charities again, was it? They’d have every penny we own out of us if they could.”
“Hi Dad,” Baxter said.
He hid his shock far better than his wife had, but it was still there if you looked closely—in the tight skin around his eyes and his sudden inability to know what to do with his hands.
He smoothed his newspaper. Put his hands in his lap.
Rubbed his chin. Then placed them flat on the table, palms down. What he didn’t do was speak.
I searched for signs of Baxter in him as we stood awkwardly in the doorway, eventually deciding that Baxter took after his mother more.
After a few seconds, Baxter breezed into the room and made himself comfortable on the sofa.
He patted the seat beside him, and I obediently sat down.
Every now and again his father glanced Baxter’s way.
It never lasted more than a second before he tore his gaze away again.
Despite what Baxter had told me about his relationship with his parents, I’d expected more happiness at seeing him again. Maybe not tearful hugs. But something.
“I’m Lake,” I said into the silence. “A friend of Baxter’s.”
Baxter’s dad looked at me, holding my gaze longer than his son’s. “Clive,” he said. He gestured toward the doorway where his wife had appeared, her hand still clutched to her chest as if she feared if she removed it, her heart might tumble out and thud on the floor at her feet. “This is Ada.”
“Pleased to meet you, Clive and Ada,” I said, because saying something felt better than saying nothing.
“Ada, like Ada Lovelace. Did you know she’s considered the world’s first computer programmer?
” Someone stop me. “Interesting facts include that she was the poet Lord Byron’s only legitimate child, and that she was the first person to recognize a computer’s potential for creating music or graphics, rather than just performing calculations. ”
I paused, hoping someone else would fill the space. They didn’t. “She suffered from poor health most of her life, including measles that caused temporary paralysis. She was only thirty-six when she died.”
“Fascinating,” Clive said, in a tone that suggested it was anything but.
Ada cleared her throat. “My mother just liked the name. She liked short names. Easy to spell, she used to say. Her name was Catherine, and people constantly misspelled it by using a K or adding a Y.”
“Catherine the Great,” I said. “Former Empress of Russia.”
Ada pointed over her shoulder and managed a weak smile. “I’ll get us something to drink.”
Her disappearance left only the three of us. “How?” Clive eventually said. “I don’t understand.”
Baxter sighed. “It’s complicated. I’d rather not go into the mechanics of it right now, if that’s alright.”
That shut the conversation down and ushered in another silence.
Clive stared at the newspaper, the blankness of his gaze suggesting very little reading was happening.
Baxter stared at the photographs on the mantelpiece, perhaps noticing, as I already had, that none of them featured him.
What kind of parents didn’t display any pictures of their dead son?
Or perhaps searching for pictures of the mysterious Owen.
If so, he wasn’t there either. And I tried very hard not to fill the quiet by talking about Catherine the Great.
A few minutes passed before Ada returned, the smell of coffee unmistakable.
I opened my mouth to comment, but a slight shake of Baxter’s head had me closing it again as she set two mugs on the coffee table.
Unable to speak up for him the way I had at the hospital earlier that day, I settled for squeezing his knee.
I immediately regretted it when two pairs of eyes followed the gesture.
Ada’s mouth thinned as she took a seat at the table opposite her husband.
They exchanged a look I couldn’t interpret, and silence fell once more.
I’d never minded silence, but in this house it was excruciating. Ada eventually broke it. “We gave you a good funeral,” she said.
Baxter nodded. “I saw the headstone. It was nice. Thank you.”
“It was expensive,” Clive said. I understood the implication—that Baxter being alive made it wasted money—and presumably Baxter did too.
“Lots of people came to pay their respects,” Ada continued. “Some of your old school friends. Including your first girlfriend. Lovely girl. What was her name?”
“I assume you mean Wendy, but she was never my girlfriend. We were just friends,” Baxter said.
He looked a little pale, which I assumed was a result of the coffee fumes in the room.
“Wendy! That’s it,” Ada said. “She cried. I spoke to her afterward, and she told me how much she was going to miss you. You should look her up.”
Baxter tapped his fingers against the arm of the sofa. “Why?”
His mother shrugged. “Just because.”
“Because death doesn’t cure homosexuality, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Baxter said. “I didn’t resurrect as straight. Sorry to disappoint you on that score.”
“I see you haven’t lost the desire to shock,” Clive said sharply. “You were always like that, even as a child. Your mother was simply sharing a couple of pleasant anecdotes about your funeral.”
I felt as if I’d wandered into The Twilight Zone.
A strange place where arguments resumed after two decades, with death treated as little more than an inconvenient pause.
No wonder Baxter hadn’t wanted to come here.
I’d intended to stay out of it and offer silent support, but I couldn’t just sit there like a useless lump whose sole contribution was unwanted facts about Ada Lovelace.
“You must be extremely happy to have him back,” I said.
“Of course,” they both replied in unison.
Baxter laughed. “You might want to tell your faces.” He reached over and deliberately placed his hand over mine. I threaded my fingers through his and smiled at him. It was pure provocation, but I couldn’t blame him.
“So Lake is…?” Ada asked, letting the rest of the question drift.
“My boyfriend,” Baxter said.
They didn’t sneer or pull a face. They simply said nothing, and somehow that was worse.
Baxter sat forward, realized it brought him closer to the untouched coffee, and leaned back again. “Anyway, I didn’t come here to introduce you to Lake. I came here to tell you I’m alive, and—”
“And what?” Clive prompted.
“Who’s Owen?” Baxter asked.