Day Twenty-Four
A shadowy figure stood outside his front door as Jesse pulled his Jeep up the drive and, with no delivery truck in sight, it sent a chill down his spine.
Part of him had been expecting an unwanted visitor for weeks, but when none materialized his nerves slowly calmed, like he’d taken half a lorazepam, just enough to take the edge off, like someone starting to believe he might have gotten away with a crime.
As expected, he’d heard an earful from Randall Moss, the man who lived in the Airstream trailer on the vast property across the street.
The morning after Norman’s disappearance, he pounded on the door sharply at six, an hour when Jesse would not usually be awake, but he had been up all night when Norman had…
left, and so coffee was on—a second pot.
“Randall,” Jesse said wearily when he answered the door.
“Coffee?” He thrust a mug into his neighbor’s hand to play nice.
Randall was older, in his late sixties, and just about the opposite shape of Jesse, a hair over five feet and rather rotund.
It was almost hard to imagine them as the same species.
“You two and your renovation,” Randall groused. “I thought the worst was behind you. But floodlights at two a.m.?”
Jesse was surprised it was the blinding lights more than the wind that rattled his neighbor, since Randall lived in what seemed to Jesse like a glorified tin can.
But he had anticipated this encounter and had an answer at the ready.
“Sorry, Randall. We’re doing a bit of nightscaping.
” His heart raced at the lie. He went on to explain that nightscaping was simply landscaping done under the cover of night, and that the guy they’d hired was a real artist, except he pronounced it ar-TEEST, as he knew that would play to Randall’s disdain for elites.
“He might also be a wind shaman, if there is such a thing?”
Randall, to his credit, wasn’t buying any of it. “Then what was with the klieg lights?”
This is what shock had done to Jesse, he already forgot this complaint was about lights. “Oh, he brought a few lights to make his way around, but I think mostly that was the moon.”
Randall shook his head—that was no moon—and Jesse thought it best to change the subject.
The more he lied in the days that followed Norman’s disappearance, the more he came to feel like he was overreacting.
It was a cover-up so good he began to doubt the crime.
Maybe he hadn’t seen what he thought he had?
Maybe it was as simple as Norman needing some space—not going to space—and that he was merely away on a build or overseas visiting his parents.
But then night would come, and the loneliness would strike, and Jesse would remember anew that he’d been abandoned.
But even with the most perfect crime, there were always loose ends.
Which is why Jesse both expected the shadowy figure at his door and why it was so unsettling.
He slowed the Jeep to a crawl to get a better look at the front of his house, but his visitor was obscured in part by a ficus.
He put the car in park and killed the engine and when he opened the door he was flustered, even though he told himself over and over again to remain calm as he approached his own house carrying a canvas bag of groceries like a shield.
And then recognition set in.
“Lally?” Jesse asked, nearly dropping his tote and pulling her into a tight hug, the ferocity of which surprised even him.
“How long have you been standing here?” Norman’s sister, Lally Alfano, was the thing he’d forgotten—lately, it was easy for Jesse to imagine himself the extent of his husband’s relations.
Norman’s parents had retired back to Italy to renovate one of those grand proprietà the government was giving away for pennies on the dollar to those willing to restore them to glory.
He had a brother, Robbie, who’d died when Norman was a teen, more than a decade before Norman and Jesse had met.
And Lally, a flight attendant, flitted in and out of their lives as her busy flying schedule allowed.
In fact, Jesse wasn’t even certain he had her current phone number.
“Are you going to invite me in?” she asked, pushing her brother-in-law off her after a quick squeeze.
Until she asked, Jesse wasn’t certain he was. But she furrowed her brows, thick like Norman’s but more feminine, and pushed back the single gray streak in her dark hair to insinuate that no was not an answer she’d accept.
“Of course. It’s just…”
She was still wearing her uniform, the clothes scratchy and vaguely outdated. He reached for her roller bag, which was surprisingly light; he exhaled in relief, she wasn’t planning on staying.
“It’s just what?” Lally challenged.
Jesse tried to remember what was behind the closed door as he fumbled for his keys.
A can of frosting left open on the kitchen counter into which he dipped a spoon when the mood struck.
(No cake, mind you. Baking required too much effort.) Drawn shades, leaving the house not dark exactly, but certainly not bright, either.
Bags of burnt popcorn, because even though every microwave had a popcorn setting, every bag of popcorn apparently came with a dire warning not to use it.
But this was Norman’s sister; refusing her entry would ring more alarm bells than swallowing his shame and allowing her inside.
Jesse mumbled something untrue about their nonexistent housekeeper recently quitting as he unlocked the door.
Lally didn’t seem all that surprised, as if it was common knowledge that Jesse and Norman were a nightmare to work for.
“Is that Norman’s shirt?”
Jesse glanced down at what he was wearing.
It was a T-shirt with a xenomorph from the movie Alien colored in red, white, and green that said It-alien.
“This?” Lately he had taken to wearing Norman’s clothes, thinking if he could get inside his husband he could just understand.
Some of his shirts even still smelled like him.
But they were clearly different sizes, and this particular shirt barely covered Jesse’s midriff.
“I can’t believe you go out in public like that.”
Jesse tugged at the hem like a teenage girl going through an awkward growth spurt; until a few weeks ago, he wouldn’t have believed it, either. He opened the door fully and stepped aside to, against his better judgment, allow company in.
“I texted Norman to tell him I was coming.”
Jesse braced himself. “Did you get a response?”
Lally felt along the wall for a light switch until she found one. “Typical Norman, he did not text me back. So I took a Lyft from the airport.”
Jesse hoped she wouldn’t see her brother’s phone abandoned on his nightstand, the battery now long dead. He would have to keep her clear of their bedroom.
Lally’s eyes scanned her surroundings with both awe and disgust. “I can never tell if this cold, industrial thing is a look you two are going for, or if two men are naturally bad at keeping house.”
“Oh, don’t kid yourself. We work hard at it.” Jesse turned a dying houseplant, so that its last few healthy leaves hid the worst of its rot.
“I can’t believe you left the ocean for this. Are those windmills?” she asked, staring out the back of the house—the tips of the blades peered over the tamarisk trees. It was true it wasn’t the ocean, but it was not without a view.
“Would you like to freshen up, Lally?” He pointed to the guest bath down the hall.
Lally was one of those names that rich people swear is short for something perfectly benign, Elizabeth, perhaps, when the rest of the world would go with Liz or Betty.
In this case it was a name their late brother Robbie called her when she was young, some butchering of little sister and her given name, Lauretta.
The name used to strike Jesse as odd, but years on it rolled off the tongue.
“Do I need to freshen up?”
Jesse didn’t see an upside in his answering that question honestly.
“Of course not. I love that uniform. It really brings out the gray in your skin.” Lally made a sour face; the playful rapport they used to have when they were young and saw much more of one another now bordered on rude.
Still, she took his point without protest and hauled her roller bag down the hall, Jesse worrying about their concrete floors on Norman’s behalf.
Once alone, he scrambled to close the cabinet doors beneath the island, while pushing a mostly empty pizza box into the trash, followed by a few dry bones of crust that sat by the sink.
He looked at his house through a stranger’s eyes.
The décor was minimal, which made the mess maximal.
But it wasn’t the mess that Lally had scrutinized; if anything it made the home seem more lived in and therefore less unwelcoming.
It was the aesthetic and architecture. The polished concrete floor, which ran seamlessly throughout, notwithstanding the few cracks that had appeared the night of Norman’s disappearance; it felt lucky the house hadn’t lifted cleanly from its slab foundation.
The wood beams and the glass that made the place feel so open.
The very modern chandeliers and the midcentury concrete-block walls, walls that made it very difficult to place art, save for the few pieces on top of the low bookcases that were propped up without wires or nails.
A complicated macramé wall hanging of knotted rope did brighten one corner, but it looked as much like a net to ensnare prey as it did something crafty that might soften a home.