3. Everett
3
Everett
A pparently, I was losing my shit.
Seeing ghosts of the past standing around the yard seemed especially healthy. When the kid turned and ran, I tried to shake it off. It hadn’t been him. It couldn’t have been him. The kid had been...well, a kid, and Peter was my age. He’d be pushing thirty by now.
It wasn’t the world’s biggest surprise that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, really. I’d put myself in a truly terrible situation. Yeah, fine, my boss had put me in a terrible situation, and I’d made it worse by not going along quietly and agreeing to work eighty-hour weeks in exchange for no extra compensation.
When I got back to the office, I was either going to be fired or told that I was required to work even more hours to make up for my vacation, and there was no longer any chance I was going places in the company.
But . . . had there ever been a chance?
I’d been there for years, and watched the revolving door of young artists and writers coming in, working their asses off, getting disillusioned, and leaving. I’d just lasted longer than most of them, convinced that if only I proved myself, my loyalty, to the company, I’d be the next Tom. I’d someday be the venerable artist who had made it and was a mainstay at the company.
I’d be the one telling people they just had to work harder, and they too could earn five-figure bonuses.
Except I was starting to think that Tom was a carrot on a stick, and no one under the age of fifty was ever going to earn more than the smallest amount James Warren could get by with paying them.
So there was a good chance that in three weeks I was going to be looking for a job.
Maybe it was a good idea to start during my vacation, in fact. I had my computer with me, so it wasn’t an unreasonable thought.
The moment I stepped into the driveway of my grandmother’s fabulous old house, though, all thoughts of cleaning up my CV and looking for a new job fled my mind.
The house was falling the fuck apart.
When grandma’s lawyer had told me about the inheritance, he’d said the taxes on the property were low because “its value had been impacted by some necessary repairs,” but I’d clearly had no idea what he’d meant. The charming old place where I’d spent years of my childhood now looked like a house from a horror movie, where the main characters had been dared to spend a night, and if they succeeded, they’d be given a million dollars.
Of course, no one ever succeeded. They were always brutally murdered by ghosts or Oscar Mayers or something. What could I say? I didn’t really watch horror movies. The real world sucked too much; I preferred my fictional worlds to be happy ones. Or at least fun. Not murderous. Cartoon mouse universe for the fucking win.
Too late to think about staying home instead, though, so I trooped up to the front door, let myself in with the key I’d been given, and stepped inside my grandmother’s house for the first time since I was eighteen.
A breeze blew through the foyer, hitting me as I stepped inside. There must be an open window somewhere in the house. Or just as likely, a broken one. Either way, that probably wasn’t good, since the place had been empty since my grandmother’s death some five years earlier.
I’d wanted to come back every summer of my teen years—no, the truth was that I’d never wanted to leave. We’d lived with my grandmother for four years in my childhood, starting when I was ten. And then my dad had gotten a new job in the city, and that had been the end of that. It didn’t matter that all my friends were in Cider Landing, or that I’d have been perfectly happy to stay with my grandmother forever—I’d always gotten along with her better than my corporate shark lawyer father and MLM-loving, PTA-attending mother. It didn’t matter that my grandmother had agreed, and said she’d be happy to have me stay. My parents had decided to go, so I’d been required to go too.
I’d begged and wheedled, shouted and cried, and it hadn’t mattered. I had been a kid, and I didn’t get a say in my life.
At first, they’d promised to let me come back in the summer. Then summer had come, and when my father had found me in my room packing a bag the day school ended, he’d laughed and said he’d just agreed so I’d stop being so melodramatic, and he’d expected me to be over it by now.
No, of course I wasn’t allowed to go spend the summer with my grandmother, now go play outside.
Wandering through the halls, looking for the source of the breeze, I was almost inundated with memories of the place. We’d lived with grandma for four beautiful years. The best years of my life. We’d eaten holiday meals in the old formal dining room. She’d taught me to cook in the homey gold kitchen—something I still absolutely loved to do, and didn’t get to do enough of, because I was too busy working. I ran my hand along the wide banister as I went upstairs—at age ten, I used to hop up onto the sturdy wood and slide down.
After we left when I was fourteen, I hadn’t been able to step foot back in the house again until after my eighteenth birthday, when my parents no longer held sway over me. I’d rushed out there, bag packed, and gone in immediate search of...of Peter.
My first friend.
My best friend.
The first boy I’d ever kissed.
My first love.
I’d asked my grandmother about him, and she’d given me a funny look and said she didn’t really know all the kids in town, but he didn’t sound familiar.
Didn’t sound familiar.
I’d spent four years wandering the woods around the house with Peter, bringing him home for movie night, refusing to spend time with anyone but him at my birthday parties, and...well, he’d been more important to me than my mostly absent parents, who’d wanted me to be more self-sustaining, so they could have social lives. He’d been more important than anyone.
How could she not remember him?
And I’d spent the entirety of my eighteenth summer wandering Cider Landing, asking after him. No one remembered a Peter my age. Maybe his family had moved away, they had suggested. He didn’t sound familiar at all. Maybe I’d known him somewhere else—like I didn’t remember sitting on my grandmother’s back porch eating snow cones in the summer and trying to make her porch swing into a blanket fort in the fall.
But no.
There hadn’t been a sign of him.
And that had been when I’d truly realized that my childhood was lost. I didn’t know Peter’s last name. Hadn’t ever met his family, except once, there had been an angelic little blonde girl he’d called Aurora, who I thought was maybe his sister. She’d given me a sad smile and said if I was taking Peter away, she hoped we were happy.
I wished I had taken him away with me.
He’d never taken me home with him, or even told me where he lived.
In short, Peter of no last name and no home...had never existed.
I’d spent the following year, my first year of college, in twice weekly therapy, half convinced I was schizophrenic and had made him up. My therapist had assured me that it wasn’t all that strange for children to fail to exchange last names, but I knew better. I knew better than anyone, Peter had been the most important person in my life for four years, and there was something wrong with me not knowing more about him.
I’d recalled odd conversations with him about where he lived—conversations where he’d sort of awkwardly changed the subject. My therapist thought maybe he was poor and ashamed of his home. It wasn’t that unusual, she said, over and over. Wasn’t unusual for me to not know his name, or where he lived, or what his dad’s name was.
We’d been children, after all. It hadn’t been serious.
Nothing a fourteen-year-old ever did had the ability to be serious, it seemed.
The upstairs of the house was in even worse shape than the downstairs. I could smell mildew, and finally found the open window—not broken, thank goodness—in the previous main bedroom where my grandmother had lived and died. The window next to the bed was sitting open, and the rain must have been getting in for five years. I sighed and went over to close it, but the damage was done. The carpet and mattress and everything would have to go. Not that I’d expected anyone to ever again sleep in the bed my grandmother had died in.
I’d never been able to make my therapist understand that Peter had been the most real, most serious person in my life. Closer to me than my parents, more important than any other friend or boyfriend or family I’d ever had.
That couldn’t possibly be true. Family was always the most important, I was assured again and again, by everyone. An absent, manipulative father and a mother more interested in wine night with her PTA friends than me—they were who I should care most about. That was “normal.”
And somehow, I had a hard time remembering what color my father’s eyes were. Everyone told me he and I looked exactly alike, so blue, I supposed. They would know better than me.
Peter’s clear, hazel eyes that had seemed to become more green or brown with his moods? Those, I could never forget. Especially filled with tears as he told me that if I really loved him, I would stay. I’d stay forever, and never leave.
They’d been so green that day; almost as green as a stormy, wind-swept sea.
I found myself in my own childhood room. The purple room, my grandmother had called it, and she’d argued with my father constantly about whether it was appropriate for a young man to sleep in a room decorated in purple. The purple had been why I’d loved it, even though sadly, most of it was so pale that it looked white now, bleached by the sun after so many years. Even when I was younger, it had been a pastel purple, which was never my favorite shade.
I ran my fingers over the windowsill, having to swallow down the emotion that welled up at the sight. It was still nailed shut. My father had done that when he’d caught me with a duffel bag of clothes, trying to squeeze myself out the window and down the tree outside it, to run away. To stay with Peter forever, even though I still had no idea where he had lived.
Even more strangely, there I was, more than a decade later, with a college degree and a career, and still wishing I’d managed it. That I’d been able to sneak into the woods and stay there. At the time, I’d have lived in a freaking tree to stay with Peter.
I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t have been a better life, even now.
It wasn’t like working for James Warren was a prize of a life. No doubt my father would say something about how he warned me that being an artist wasn’t a real job, even if I dressed it up in marketing to make it look respectable.
I scanned the backyard as I stood there, but there was no sign of the young man from before. I’d been imagining it. He hadn’t looked like Peter at all. I’d just made a mistake in the dark.
Peter was gone, and maybe...maybe he’d never existed at all. Maybe coming back to Cider Landing had been a mistake, even for just three weeks. Already, it was making me long for things I could never have back.