Chapter 2 #3
His mother had died the spring he was seventeen — fast, a thing in her blood nobody caught in time — and what Theo remembered wasn't, mostly, the dying.
It was the after. The casseroles. The whole town coming at him with its soft sorry faces and its hands on his shoulders and its if there's anything, anything at all, until he was drowning in the kindness of two hundred people who'd known him since before he could walk and who now, every one of them, looked at him and saw a motherless boy and could not, would not, ever see anything else.
He'd been Carol's boy. Then he'd been Carol's poor boy.
And he'd understood, with the awful clarity of seventeen, that if he stayed he'd be Carol's poor boy at forty, at sixty — that the town would keep him seventeen and bleeding forever because a town needs something to be tender about — and that the only way to ever be anything else was to go somewhere nobody kept a reservoir of pity with his name on the valve, and become a person so shiny and easy and obviously fine that not one living soul would ever look at him with that face again.
It had worked, too. For years it had worked beautifully.
And now here he was, back inside the exact photograph, in the town that built the trapdoor, with Dee's oh, you've got her chin still going off in him like a slow leak.
The terrible thing — the thing he would not be examining tonight, or ideally ever — was that some seventeen-year-old still living in the basement of him had felt the pity land this afternoon and hadn't, entirely, hated it.
Had almost wanted to sit down in it. Let somebody's sorry hand stay on his shoulder for once instead of shrugging it off with a joke.
He'd move the photograph tomorrow. Face-down in a drawer, where it couldn't reach him.
He knew he wouldn't.
Through the floor he could feel the building tick and settle. Cold coming up off the harbor. Somewhere down the hall, behind the one bedroom door, the man who hated him was presumably asleep, or lying awake hating him more efficiently.
Theo took out his phone.
He looked at Julian's text — you okay? — for a while, and didn't answer it, and instead did the thing he'd driven four hundred miles telling himself he wasn't going to do until he'd at least tried the other way. He opened a new message to the number on the heavy navy card. His thumbs hovered.
You could just not, said the younger voice.
He thought about the tired man from collections.
Disappearing is never a plan. He thought about the mug in the drying rack.
He thought about Dee's hands on his collar, you go easy, and he thought, with the particular self-loathing he'd gotten very good at dressing up as pragmatism, that going easy was a luxury for people who could afford to lose a hundred and forty thousand dollars, which was not, and had never been, and was the whole tragedy of him, a club he belonged to.
Mr. Colson, he typed. Theo Vann — we met at the Coastal Hospitality summit a couple years back. I've come into a piece of property in Merritt Harbor you may have an interest in. Situation's complicated and I need some time to work it, but I wanted to open the door. Give me a few weeks.
He read it three times. He took out the door.
He put it back. He hated that he was good at this, at the warm frictionless sentence that made a betrayal sound like an opportunity, because being good at it was the only thing that had ever reliably worked and it had still, in the end, cost him everything.
He sent it.
The little sound the phone made was very loud in Eddie's quiet apartment.
Theo put the phone face-down on his chest and closed his eyes and waited to feel like a man who'd just solved his problems, and instead felt the trapdoor hanging open under him the way it had since Dee said Carol's chin, and he lay in the dark of the room he'd sworn he'd never sleep in and understood that the couch really was bad, structurally, as a couch, and that he was going to be awake for a while.
He was still awake at four.
That was when the sound started underneath him.
Not loud. The opposite of loud — careful, rhythmic, a man moving around a kitchen who knew exactly where everything was and didn't need a light to find it.
The soft ring of a pot set on a burner. The knock of a knife finding its board.
Water. The particular music of someone starting bread in the dark, hours before anyone would eat it, because that was when it had to start.
Theo lay very still and listened to Rory Nash grieve the only way he apparently knew how — by feeding a town that was still asleep — and he thought, unwillingly, in a voice that wasn't the performing voice or the pragmatic voice but some third one he'd forgotten he had: I know that.
I know exactly what that is. That's a person who can't sleep either.
He did not want to know that about Rory Nash.
Downstairs, the knife kept its steady time against the board, and Theo did not go down, and did not sleep, and lay there in his dead great-uncle's apartment with a developer's answer pending in his pocket, listening through the floor to the only other person in Merritt Harbor who was awake — and hating, more than the couch, more than the town, more than himself, how much the sound felt like company.