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ghost.
He went back out to the living room.
“Mom?”
She wasn’t listening. “We need air in here,” she was saying, lifting up a window near Caleb’s chair.
“I don’t feel well.” He didn’t know what he wanted, what he expected from her. I want to go home, he wished he could say, even though he didn’t completely mean it.
“Go rest on the couch for a bit,” she said without looking at him.
“Could have been the shrimp,” Fran said. “I spat mine out.”
“Maybe that was it.” He was unsure which cushion to choose—the middle one right next to Fran, or the far one, so far away it felt rude, unsibling-like. Finally he sat between the two and now they lifted like wings to either side of him and their stiff edges were not comfortable beneath him. But still he felt frozen, unable to choose a direction. Everyone else was focused on the TV. His mother had never allowed TV. Even now by Tom’s side she wasn’t watching. Her eyes were wandering off—to the lamp, to the curtains, to the little dish on a table in the corner. She wasn’t interested in the present. For all her reading, she never bought a contemporary novel. The books she read always had some gloomy old portrait on the cover. He couldn’t ever remember having a conversation about a current event with her. And here were the Belous, every one of them, even Caleb now, transfixed by this indecipherable mayhem that had not changed in the hour since they’d been home, Tom looking as if the hostages had been seized from his own house.
Time passed, Peter wasn’t sure how much. Fran scooped up Caleb, who’d fallen asleep with his head on the arm of his chair, and took him down the hallway. He could hear the water running and Caleb moaning about having to brush his teeth.
Having been interrupted the first time, Peter still had to go to the bathroom. He didn’t want to return to Mrs. Belou, didn’t want to run awkwardly into Fran back there. Did you say hello to your own siblings in the hallway as you passed them? He didn’t know the first thing about how regular families behaved. So hewent down the other hallway instead. There was only one room here, at the end, and he went in. Tom’s bedroom, he determined, from the size of the bed and his mother’s boxes in the corner. He found a bathroom off to the left, but the light was out. He shut the door anyway and pushed open the curtain of the small window to let in a wedge of streetlight. He peed, then stood at the window. There had been no street lamps on campus. He tried not to miss his house, tried not to think of Mrs. Belou either, that this was her bathroom and she’d stood right here, too, at times thinking about the past, with maybe her hand on the sill just like this. He put his hand in his pocket and looked across the street into another family’s life. They had the TV on, too, and there was lots of movement—a woman carried a bowl into the room, a child hopped on one foot, a man stood up and fiddled with the antenna, the woman ran out, perhaps to answer the telephone. Were they friends with the Belous? Had they been at the wedding? He couldn’t see them well enough to know. Maybe the phone call was someone wanting to hear all about it. What was she like? Did they seem happy? And what about the kids, those poor kids?
When Peter had learned Tom was a widower, he’d been relieved. It meant his kids lived with him full-time, and didn’t just visit every other weekend like Craig Hager’s stepsisters. It meant, ultimately, a real union, a true synthesis, without any loose ends. He’d put their mother in the same category with his own father: permanently absent, wholly and completely unpresent. How mistaken he’d been. He could feel her. It was like she was standing beside him here in the dark, saying, You’re touching my flowered curtains, you know. I know, he said back. I’m sorry.
Through the closed door, out in the bedroom, he heard footsteps on the carpet and then breathing, long,