by Kris Ripper
“Technically.” Emery, balanced between a dresser and the sill, lifted his chin in the direction of the ceiling. “Unless you make it out of glass and live in earthquake country.”
Frankie giggled. “Alice, you did not make a baby mobile out of glass.” But sure enough, it wasn’t just glass, but broken glass. Thick shards, which Alice had painted all different colors, with swirls, and designs, then mounted on a disk of wood so they’d all hang at different heights. Was it a mobile if it didn’t move? Not that it mattered. Frankie was never having kids.
Although, considering the mobile or whatever was currently making rainbow splinters of sunlight dance across all the walls, she had to admit it was a cool idea.
“In my defense, I’ve never lived in earthquake country. Where I’m from, if you put something on the ceiling, it stays there.”
“Unless it falls,” Emery added.
Alice revved her drill at him. “Honey, when I install something, you better believe it doesn’t fall. I’ll leave you guys to clean up while I go fight crime and home improvement failures elsewhere.”
“You’re the sweetest!” he called after her, before offering a shrug to Frankie. “Sorry.”
“No worries. I mean, better to be in here than out there, anyway. Singer’s on a hair trigger. Where the hell is Jakey?”
“On his way home from work.”
“Huh. I’ll get the floor if you want to get everything else.”
“Sounds good.”
Emery was uncomfortably good-looking. From his perfectly mussed black hair to his body to his overall demeanor. He had dimples. And he never seemed fazed by anything. Not even Derries.
She steadied the dustpan to finish sweeping the bits of drywall on the ground. “Does anything ever surprise you?”
“Surprise me?”
“Yeah, you know. You hang out, but you never seem all that shocked by anything. Most people who spend time with us get a little green around the gills.”
Emery huffed a laugh. “You guys don’t scare me. And I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time I was really surprised by something.”
“What about the tattoo parlor? Don’t people shock you?”
“Never. Probably when I’m there longer and get more interesting jobs. Right now it’s mostly drunk college kids who want Chinese calligraphy they don’t understand.”
“You ever give them the wrong word as a joke?”
Another laugh. “I respect the ink more than that. But I’ve definitely been tempted.” He brushed his hands over the trash can. “What do you think? Clean enough for a kid?”
“Hey, you’re asking the wrong person. I don’t know anything about kids.”
“Alice and I used to watch my neighbor’s kids a lot, but I still get confused about which age is doing what. Singer said ten months, so I think we’re good.”
“Take your word for it.”
They carried the garbage can, broom, and dustpan out to the kitchen, where things were still chaotic but Alice appeared to be taking over. In the bustle Frankie heard her phone ding a notification.
Logan. Baby or no baby?
No baby, she sent back.
Carey looked up. “Whoever that is, tell them to pick up coffee. We were supposed to but got distracted, and all Singer has is instant.”
“Instant isn’t coffee.” Another ding.
Looking forward to being a godfather. I could be an Asian godfather to any kid, you know. The kid doesn’t have to be Asian …
She bit back a smile. You are not the kid’s godfather. Get over it.
“Who is it? Are they bringing coffee?”
Frankie focused on her cousin, feeling vaguely guilty. “No one. And no.”
His eyes sharpened. Hell.
Before he could ask, she retreated—or, no, fled. She fled to the bathroom, turned her phone to silent, and stayed there until conversations in the kitchen had time to roll in directions other than hers.
Carey knew Logan. He didn’t remember him from school, but he knew him now, as Frankie’s coworker. Everyone knew Logan. It wasn’t incriminating that Logan had texted, or that she texted back. They were friends; friends texted each other.
Damn Logan for making everything weird.
She emerged into the hallway and stood there for a minute, listening for signs it was safe to return to the kitchen. More whirling drill noises, Emery’s voice, then Singer’s. It was probably fine, but she hesitated.
Thurman House wasn’t all that sentimental. There were formal graduation pictures, one for Singer, one for Lisa, in the living room. And a family portrait taken when they were both early teens, maybe. But every other picture in the house was right here, in the hallway.
It was like a timeline of their perfect lives, tracing from Lisa’s birth on one end, through Singer’s, and then their various sports and activities, family shots at the holidays, all the way until sometime in middle high school when the Thurman elders had either stopped taking pictures or at least stopped framing and hanging them.
Singer had done plays all through high school, always starring as a quirky side character. In the sparse later-years section of the wall Frankie found only two pictures of Singer’s biggest extracurricular, one of which she remembered because it had been in the program (Our Town? Annie Get Your Gun?). The other was Singer and Lisa in the lobby of the theater, standing beside one another, he still in his costume.
Each of them was slightly turned away, like they’d been pulled together at random, not like they were brother and sister. But the smiles on their faces were identical.
Frankie shivered. The past was creepy as shit. She listened for a minute, trying to hear any proof that Lisa was alive, but if she made noise it wasn’t enough to rise above Thurman House’s current level of aural chaos.
The brightness of the kitchen was a relief. “Singer, what’s up with your sister?”
“Hmm?”
“Your sister, you know, the madwoman in the scrapbooking room?”
He shot her a look. “Do you have a point?”
“Well, yeah.” She cleared a spot of counter and hopped up, almost toppling a domino line of spray bottles with brightly colored fluids inside. “Does she ever come out of her cave?”
Singer glanced back toward the hall and shook his head. “I think she waits until Jake and I are out of the house. I haven’t really seen her that much.”
Ha. That got Carey’s attention, though Alice and Emery were still staying out of it. Like amateurs.
“She’s been back for weeks.” Care raised an eyebrow. “You haven’t seen her at all?”
“I saw her earlier today, when I told her about—about the baby. But not as a general rule, no. She stays in her room.” Singer tried to sound defiant at the end there, but Frankie wasn’t fooled. He felt guilty. She could spot that one a mile away.
Totally not her goal. She could tweak Singer’s guilt some other day. Time to slightly redirect the conversation. “I didn’t like the old version, but the new one’s kind of freaking me out.”
Carey got to his feet, brushing down the knees of his jeans. “Three years is a long time to be in one place. And then to be completely cut off from it. I’m sure there’s some kind of culture shock thing there.”
She poked him. “Is that what it felt like moving home after New York?”
“Probably more like how it felt to move to New York when I was eighteen. Everything was a little surreal, like I was living someone else’s life.” His hands spread. “Then again, Lisa came back here. That’s gotta be even more disorienting. All right, Singer. Cabinets are done. What’s next?”
Frankie paid half-hearted attention to the plans for the rest of the day, though it was hard to stop thinking of those identical perfect smiles in the pictures on the wall. Who was Lisa Thurman under all that bullshit? Did she even know?
It was so sick and wrong, feeling sorry for Lisa Thurman. Frankie resented the hell out of it.
3
Singer
3 hours until Miles
The text came while Singer was washing bottles. Dozens of bottles, it felt like. All different types.
Cathy and Joe had gone shopping. When Singer started hyperventilating, staring at everything they’d bought, Joe had gently steered him toward the kitchen.
A somewhat hysterical part of his mind had registered that this was not the first time Joe had steered a panicking member of his family toward the kitchen. Singer was going to have to draw the line if his de facto father-in-law started preheating the oven or searching for cupcake tins, but he hadn’t.
“Coffee fixes everything that parenting unravels,” he’d said, shaking coffee grounds into the filter. Then he’d glanced over, with a small smile. “And anything coffee doesn’t fix, wine does. Words to live by.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
That’s when the first load of bottles—unwrapped by the living room contingent—made its way to the kitchen. Alice offered to wash, but Singer had declined, grateful for something to do.
He still had a full sink of brightly colored kid dishes, utensils, and bottles left, but he looked at his phone when it chimed anyway.
I’m in our bedroom. DON’T TELL ANYONE. Also: hi. I’m in our bed.
Singer rinsed his hands, glanced toward the living room, decided they could all take care of themselves, and slipped through the back door to the hallway, past the bathroom, past Lisa’s room and the nursery.
The lump on the bed, fully under the covers, had to be Jake.
“Are you hiding?” Singer inquired, trying not to smile.
“How are you not hiding? Oh my god, what is happening?” A dark patch of hair emerged, followed by only the topmost quarter of Jake’s face, eyes wide. “I’m freaking out. Is that okay? Do you have time for me to lose my shit?”
“I think I can pencil you in.” Singer contemplated the bed, and the fact that they had company. A lot of company. Then he locked the door and pulled off his trousers. “You snuck in the back?”
“I parked down the street and crept through the hedges. That’s, uh, more hot than neurotic, right? Imagining me going all James Bond?”
“Definitely.” The bed was welcoming in direct proportion to how risqué it was to slide under the sheets in broad daylight with a house full of Derries. Singer shifted closer, tugging Jake against him.
Jake buried his face against Singer’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I took so long. I got caught up in trying to make sure everything was ready for me to be gone for eight weeks, and I had to sign those papers— Wait, you should have papers. Did you need us to drive into the city? We might not have time—”
“They sent me a PDF. Jake—”
“And then I realized eight weeks is a really long time, but it’s also a really short time, like it can’t possibly be long enough to bond with—with a baby—a kid—is ten months a baby or a kid? And then I started thinking about, like, spending all day with him, like what will we do?” Jake’s much-beloved face, creased in worry, turned up toward Singer’s from where he was lying on his pillow, pouring all of his fears out to the ceiling. “Do you feel ready?”
Singer leaned down for a kiss. “Your dad says coffee and wine fix everything.”
“Ha. Which one do I drink right now?”
“Neither. I have some ideas for right now.” In a move he wouldn’t have dared anywhere else in the world, Singer extended his hand to cup Jake’s cheek. “I don’t think we can be ready. I’m already overwhelmed and the baby isn’t even here yet, but I think that’s probably how all parents feel.”
“Really? I kind of can’t breathe.”
Singer smiled. “I know. I wish you’d seen your dad hauling all that junk into the house. He looked like the world’s most bashful Santa Claus.”
“God, they’re overbearing.”
“Yes. But now we have bottles, and dishes, and we’re to call the second Miles gets here because ‘there’s a range of diaper sizes for a healthy baby’ and your mom needs more information.” His imitation of Cathy’s tone got a reluctant smile out of Jake.
“I just can’t believe this is happening. Does it feel real to you?”
Singer, allowing his hand to linger on the warm skin of Jake’s cheek, shook his head. “Entirely surreal, I think. Like I’ll wake up and it will all be a dream, except I wouldn’t have imagined Alice making a crib mobile out of glass shards.”
Jake’s mouth dropped open. “She did not.”
“It’s actually beautiful.” Singer kissed his boyfriend in their bed, behind a locked door in a house full of people. “You’ll see. I don’t think it will be easy, but I think we’re up for the challenge.” Each time Jake’s confidence had faltered over the years, Singer’s had more than made up for it. They were intelligent, capable men, and even if they didn’t have a great deal of experience with babies, they should be able to manage.
“I’m glad one of us has it together.” Jake took a deep breath. “But we don’t have to go out there, right? I’m on the ‘avoid Cathy and Joe at all costs’ plan at the moment.”
“Your parents have been nothing but helpful.”
“That’s what they want you to believe! It’s not helpful, it’s codependent, Singer. Don’t let the Derries suck you in!”
The phrase hit both of them simultaneously, and they muffled laughter against their pillows.
Singer made his voice low and seductive. “There’s only one Derrie I want sucking me in, Jacob…”
“Oh my god!” Jake laughed and blushed and tumbled Singer over. “You’re not serious, though, right? Because actually I think that would be a really good idea, except for the fact that my parents and brother and Alice and Frankie are all out in the living room right now, but I’m sort of worried maybe this will be our last chance to have sex ever, so on the other hand—” He broke off when Singer kissed him again. “You’re not worried about that?”
“I’m not worried about that.”
“Okay, then. Good.” Jake leaned his forehead against Singer’s chest. “Sometimes I get so scared.”
The perfect opening to wrap arms around him, hold him close. “I have you,” Singer murmured.
“Thank god for that.”
Something crashed in another part of the house, followed almost immediately by shattering glass. Both of them winced.
Frankie could be heard distantly. “It wasn’t me! It was not, Carey, you jerk!”
Jake sighed. “God. How bad would it be if we just kept hiding?”
“No one even knows you’re here. But I should probably go out and see what broke.”
“I’m not sending you out there alone. What kind of man would I be if I did that?”
They traded smiles.
“Plus, any opportunity to fuck with Frankie should not be turned down.” A quick kiss before Jake levered himself out of bed. “Our story is that I parachuted into the backyard. Got it?”
“You’re afraid of heights.”
Jake rolled his eyes. “Yeah, because that’s the flaw in that story. If anyone asks, I took some really good antianxiety meds, and then I parachuted into the backyard.”
“Your mom will want to know which meds.” Singer ran his hands through his hair, sighting across the room to the mirror. “Carey will probably want to know if your company has skydiving as a perk, or if it’s simply another mode of transportation, like the company car.”
With a tremendous sigh, Jake paused, one hand on the doorknob. “Fine. We’ll tell them I donned an invisibility cloak and walked right through the front door.”
“That’s much more believable.”
They squared their shoulders and went to face the family.
4
/>
Singer
Miles.
Miles’s arrival was somewhat anticlimactic.
“He is so ready for his bottle.” Brandi was young and white, with an air of tarnished good intentions about her. Right now she just looked tired, shoving a bag into Singer’s hands. “Okay, who’s taking him?”
They both froze. Then Jake, without a bag, shrugged. “I guess I am.”
Miles had tears in his eyes but wasn’t actively crying. Apparently, it had been a rough drive. Jake settled him somewhat awkwardly against one shoulder, bouncing him a little.
At least one of them had, at some point, been around a baby.
“If you give him a bottle, he’ll go right to sleep. Here.” She handed over a canister of formula. “This one’s open, but there’s another in the bag. Do you have bottles?”
Thank god for Cathy. “In the kitchen,” Singer said. (All freshly sanitized and arranged in some kind of bottle organizing contraption Cathy and Joe had bought, which took up a significant chunk of counter space.)
“Good. Okay, then.” Brandi tweaked Miles’s nose, but he dodged away, leaning into Jake instead.
Jake’s eyes widened fractionally.
“Singer, you’re my victim. Here.” Brandi passed him a pen. “Let’s do paperwork.”
He thought he’d done paperwork before, and he had. Astounding amounts of paperwork. Applications, reports, questionnaires. But Brandi had brought with her a heretofore unexamined treasure trove of paperwork. An entire ream, it seemed.
“Do, uh, I have to sign all that, too?” Jake shifted on his feet, jiggling Miles in some kind of dance designed to either make both of them more comfortable or possibly just to do something that wasn’t standing there still.
“Nope. Only need one.”
Page after page, some with cute names—a health passport?—most boring. Singer’s hand wasn’t exactly cramping by the end, but his signature was less and less namelike.
“Perfect. All right, then. Any questions for me before I go?”
Any questions? Singer almost blanked out, but rallied. “We’ll need to know more about his parents, Brandi. This isn’t exactly how we pictured it.”
