Part 29 (2/2)

”I thought you might want to see it,” I said, feeling stupider and stupider. I looked over at him as he looked at all the stuff. There was a thin streak of color across the top of his cheeks, but otherwise nothing. He looked like he was viewing a corpse. ”I really did, I thought, this is your stuff, this is your-here, I left a s.p.a.ce for you on the couch. I thought maybe you'd want to look at the pictures. There are like four boxes of pictures.” He stared at me, then walked over to the s.p.a.ce on the couch I had cleared for him. I had stacked the alb.u.ms neatly on the coffee table next to the boxes of loose photos and negatives. He stood there for a moment, considering the arrangement, then he reached down and flipped open the top alb.u.m. Still without sitting, he turned the first page, and then the second, sort of casually, like he was only half interested. He looked up, and his eyes flicked over the room again, taking in the piles of stuff, the dusty collected bits and pieces of his childhood, and then he wavered on his feet for a minute, like he was going to fall over maybe.

”Are you okay?” I asked. ”I'm sorry. I just thought you would want to see these things, I really, I ...”

”Yeah,” he said, holding up his hand to stop me from talking. ”I know. I'm just going to need a minute.” And then he turned and walked back down the hallway.

I felt like an idiot. I sat down in the middle of all the c.r.a.p and wondered what to do. I wasn't even sure he was still in the apartment; that stupid place is so big you can't tell half the time if anyone is in there with you; it's like a mausoleum, just a big empty monument to people who came and went. When he didn't come back after ten minutes, I went looking for him. And there he was, in my room that used to be his room, sitting on the little bed on the floor and looking at the sunset painted on the wall.

”I used to dream about it,” he said, not even acknowledging me, more like he was saying something out loud to himself just when I happened to show up. ”In all those upside-down ways you dream about things. It would come to life sometimes and try to drown me. She thought it was so cool when she did it. Far as I was concerned, it was like a nightmare painted on the wall.”

”Did you tell her?”

”Come on. She loved it,” he said. ”And it's really not very good, is it? I mean, really. It's just c.r.a.p.”

”I like it,” I said, stepping inside the doorway and considering the sunset. He laughed a little, like he thought I was stupid but he appreciated my attempt to say something nice about his mother's dreadful painting. ”I do,” I insisted. ”I'm not kidding, I really do.”

”Well, you're wrong. Because it's s.h.i.+t.”

”Are those real constellations?” I asked, pointing up at the star stickers on the ceiling.

”No,” he said. ”We tried. She was all, let's put up the ones no one knows, Taurus and Perseus and the Archer, only she was so bent on being original it ended up not looking like anything. It doesn't really mean anything.”

”But her stuff. I thought you might want her stuff.”

”All that s.h.i.+t in the other room?” he said. ”Really. You think I might want that.”

”Yeah, well, you know what? It's not all s.h.i.+t,” I told him. I went to the closet, picked up that crumpled brown shopping bag, pulled out the pearls, and handed them to him. He turned them over in his hand, considered the clasp, and looked back up at me, raising an eyebrow like he was waiting for me to explain this again. ”Those are real pearls, they're worth a fortune. I'm not kidding. There's a lot of stuff out there, who knows how much it's worth. There's an alligator purse, someone told me you could sell it for five thousand dollars. And some of her old dresses, they're probably worth ... Sorry. I'm sorry.”

”No, it's fine,” he said. ”People need money. I a.s.sumed you needed money.” He continued watching me with those impartial eyes. I wished he would laugh again, but I figured that would be an uncommon event.

”Look,” I said finally. ”You should go look through that stuff. Even if you don't want it because of whatever your reasons are, even if it all seems like-nothing to you-you should go through it. It's yours.”

”Our lawyers have been telling us for months that it's not ours. According to them, any way you look at it, it's all yours.” He held up the pearls to hand them back to me; they hovered there between us for a moment. He wasn't kidding. I took the pearls, and then I took a breath.

”My mother. Called my sister,” I told him. ”Before she died.”

”So?”

I sat down next to him on the bed. The pearls were lovely to hold, cool and round and heavy. They seemed somehow confident in my sweaty hands, like they knew I could get through this.

”She knew that she was, that maybe she was dying,” I said. ”Anyway, that's what I think. I don't know for sure, because I didn't talk to her. She didn't call me; I was out there in h.e.l.l at the Delaware Water Gap, no one knew how to get hold of me.”

”But she called your sister,” he asked, like a detective reminding a witness to keep the story moving forward.

”She called Alison. She said something like the will wasn't right.”

”No. It was right. He told us we weren't getting anything. The will was right.”

”Yeah, but wait. Mom told Alison that she wanted to make a new will for herself, so that you and your brother would get it. If anything happened to her. She was going to make a will.”

”Did she call a lawyer?”

”I don't know. I talked to that Mr. Long just last week. He didn't say anything.”

”He didn't say anything in his deposition either. I saw it.”

”Yeah, but she told Alison-”

”It's hearsay, Tina,” he explained. ”It won't hold up in court.”

”You don't know that. You're not a lawyer.”

”I'm a police detective; I think I know a few things about how the law works. Hearsay is inadmissible. Even if Alison would admit it.”

”She admitted it to me.”

”She won't admit it in court, and they wouldn't enter it as evidence even if she did. And then it would only complicate a legal situation that already has way too many complications. I wouldn't bring it up, if I were you. When did Alison tell you this?”

”Yesterday.”

”So she knows how to keep a secret. Good for her. Tell her to keep her mouth shut in the future about your dying mother's phone call.”

”Look,” I said. ”We have to start getting a clue. The co-op board wants both of our families out of here. They're trying to steal it out from under all of us. If we got together on this we could at least-”

”Keep it in the family?” he asked, with a sardonic roll of the eyes.

”I know you have every reason to be mad at me, but I'm honestly trying to do the right thing,” I informed him. ”Don't you want this? Don't you want the apartment?”

He looked over at the painting, and his eyes creased with the worry and sadness of the past. You could see that he didn't want to think about any of it, but that he wasn't a coward when called upon to do so.

”A lot of s.h.i.+t went down here,” he said. ”So no, I'm not sure that I do want it. And you know, I lived here for a long time, and then I didn't live here for a long time. So I'm not so sure I need it.”

”Whether you need it or not, it's worth a lot of money!” I insisted. I was tired of his version of the facts. He kept skipping the one fact that had been twisting through everything that had happened since the day my mother died: the money. ”Even if you don't want the stuff, this place is worth a total fortune. It's worth millions. You could sell it. If you didn't want it.”

”Would you sell it?”

”Me?” I said. ”It's not mine to sell.”

”So, if you could, you'd just live here forever?”

I thought about this. I had never even let myself think it, because I knew from the start it couldn't happen. But if it could? ”I like this place,” I admitted. ”It's beautiful. Things happen here. It's kind of weird, with all the hallways and rooms and hardly any furniture. I really like living here.”

”People don't live here, they die here,” he reminded me.

”People die everywhere. And this apartment is considerably better than the other places I've found.”

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