“I think I might be able to—” Julian began.
“You’re not going to be able to do shit! It’s over. We’re done. A man just killed himself in our garage. We have ghosts walking down our hall. There’s nothing to do but get out.”
She hazarded a glance toward Megan and James. Neither of the kids looked surprised by news of the ghost, but they looked both frightened and worried, and that made her wonder whether they’d witnessed more than they’d told her. She faced them straight on. “Have either of you … seen anything here before?” she asked carefully.
“I want to go,” James quickly responded.
“Me, too,” Megan said emphatically.
“Yes.” Claire nodded. She stood. “Come on,” she told Julian. “Let’s go.”
She actually wasn’t sure how long she could spend at her parents’ house before their smothering drove her out, but even if she had to endure a week or two of her mother’s nagging or her father’s complaining before they found someplace else to stay, it would be worth it.
She was not going to live in a place where a man had committed suicide.
“I’ll drop you off,” Julian said. “Then I need to come back and clean up—”
“The blood?” Megan said, horrified.
“No,” he assured her. “The police’ll do that. I just need to check things out and make sure everything’s okay.”
“And then you’ll come over to Grandma and Grandpa’s.” James’s voice was at once insistent, worried and hopeful.
“We’ll see,” Julian said, but Claire could tell from the expression on his face that he had no intention of doing any such thing.
“Stay if you want,” she said, her mouth set in a hard, straight line. “But we’re leaving.”
When she arrived at her parents’ house just before dawn, after calling ahead to explain the situation and tell them that she and the kids were coming over to stay for a while, both her mom and dad thought that she and Julian were separating. Especially when Julian dropped them off and unloaded the luggage but did not remain himself. Neither of them said anything in front of Megan or James, but they both brought it up when the kids went into the guest rooms to unpack their suitcases. Her mom was worried, her dad happy, and though she told them, specifically, that there were no marital problems, she could tell they didn’t believe her.
Claire understood why. She and Julian were not a perfect couple; they fought like everyone else. And back in Los Angeles, they’d gone through some pretty rough times. But they had never slept apart, not once since getting married, and even to her this felt emotionally like a separation. Her anger toward Julian only emphasized that feeling. She was furious at him for continuing to put himself in danger, even as she was afraid for him—and worried that the decision was not completely his.
But all of this she kept hidden from her children and her parents. She had to be strong right now.
Megan and James were in the two small guest rooms at the back of the house, which meant that she would have her old bedroom back. It was her mom’s sewing room now, but there was still a twin bed against one wall, maintained for emergencies, and Claire brought her own luggage in and closed the door. She sat down hard on the bed, taking a deep breath, thankful, for the moment at least, to be alone. She had never been even remotely religious, but this entire situation had caused her to examine her core beliefs in a way that she hadn’t since …
Since Miles died.
Claire looked out the window at the gradually lightening sky. What did happen to people after they passed away? It seemed pretty obvious that lives were not merely extinguished, that some of them, at least, lived on in another form. But nothing about that implied a coordinating higher power, though she wished it did, and the idea of an anarchic afterlife filled with ghosts trying to return to the order and comfort of this world left her feeling low. She thought of Miles, wondering, for what was probably the millionth time, what had happened to him after death. She had always liked to think that he was still with them, hanging around. The idea had been consoling to her, but it was no longer, and when she considered everything going on at their house, she thought that maybe she preferred for him to have simply stopped living. The idea made her depressed, and she was grateful when Megan and James pushed open her door and came into the room.
“Are you going to work today?” Megan wanted to know.
“I have to,” Claire said.
“Can we stay here at Grandma and Grandpa’s?” James asked.
“Of course,” she told them. “You can even invite your cousins if—”
“No!” they both said in unison.
“Okay. But I don’t understand why—”
“No!” they repeated.
“Fine.”
She moved her suitcase to the floor by the foot of the bed, and together they went into the kitchen, where her mother had already started making French toast for breakfast.
Julian met her for lunch at her office, and the meeting was surprisingly awkward. It was as though they were actually separated, and though, after the fight they’d had this morning, such a feeling was understandable, it still made the encounter stilted and odd.
He brought Chinese takeout, which they ate at her desk, and of course they talked about the kids. She told him that both Megan and James were upset, but that being at their grandparents’ house rather than home seemed to make them feel more secure. He was glad of that and seemed relieved, as though it was something that had been weighing heavily on his mind, but when she broached the idea that he should sleep tonight at her parents’ house as well, he quickly changed the subject.
As it turned out, the police would not clean up the loft, but they recommended a cleaning service in town that would wash floors, scour walls and remove all traces of blood from the site of a murder, suicide or accident. Julian had contacted them earlier this morning, and they were scheduled to come by in an hour. He had no idea how long such a process would take, but he’d been assured that with the steam cleaning and chemical solvents they employed, the loft would be spotless.
“And after that, you’ll come to my parents’,” she said.
There was a long pause. “I’m going to stay.”
“Still?” The anger was audible in her voice. “Why?”
He shrugged, as though it was something he could not explain and perhaps didn’t understand himself. Claire felt chilled, and she looked into his eyes, searching for a trace of anything unfamiliar, wondering once again whether he had been contaminated or corrupted by whatever was in that house.
“Julian—” she began.
“I don’t know why.”
“Doesn’t that scare you?”
He shrugged again, and what frightened her more than anything was the realization that she knew of no way to get through to him.
Shortly after he left, she received a call from one of the school district’s attorneys, wanting to talk settlement in the Cortinez case. She switched easily to lawyer mode, grateful for the distraction. She’d done a pretty good job of laying out her case for them at the hearing, if she did say so herself. She’d kept a few big guns in reserve, just in case, but she’d always thought this could be settled without a trial, and she’d purposely spelled out her best and strongest arguments in the hopes that they would see that if they took this all the way to trial they would lose. Apparently they had seen it, and after hanging up, she called Oscar and set up a meeting with the district and its lawyers for tomorrow at ten.