Dead Ringers

by Christopher Golden

  There had been some discussion of moving to the suburbs, raising Maddie in a town where she could have a house all her own and wouldn’t have to live with the sound of neighbors walking over their heads. They would all have moved, Nick getting an apartment nearby so Maddie could still feel that he was close. But over the years they had become city people, and the suburbs seemed too much like a foreign country. Living on the first floor of the Victorian, Maddie had a backyard and access to Cambridge public schools, which were excellent, and her father was just a short drive away in Somerville.

  “You like living here?” Lili asked as the two women approached the house by foot.

  Tess took in the street ahead. There were trees growing from squares cut out of the sidewalk and streetlights made to resemble some nineteenth-century gaslight district. At the end of the block she could see the Victorian, its red paint almost black now that night had fallen.

  “It’s not the life I imagined for us,” she said, shifting the brown paper bag in her arms, “but we’re okay.”

  “Well, it’s mostly the life you imagined,” Lili chided her. “You have Maddie and a job that’s ideal for you, living in a nice house in Cambridge with pretty much anything you could ask for either a short walk or a few subway stops away. It’s a good life.”

  Tess smiled. Lili had conveniently left out her divorce and her chronic pain and the fact that this life was supposed to be the one she and Maddie shared with Nick. But she couldn’t argue.

  “Tell that to Maddie,” she said.

  Lili moved the plastic bag she carried from one hand to the other. “What’s wrong with Maddie?”

  “She’s very unhappy with me right now,” Tess said gravely. “She wants to live in the turret room. Reminds her of Rapunzel in Tangled, I think.”

  Lili laughed. “Hell, I’d like to live in the turret room.”

  “Shame we live on the first floor instead of the third.”

  “Maybe the third-floor tenant would let her move in.”

  Tess rolled her eyes. “There are days I might let her, but I don’t think Mr. Mariano would go for it.”

  They stepped around the empty garbage barrels one of the neighbors hadn’t taken in after trash pickup that morning and then started up the Victorian’s front stairs. Tess inhaled the delicious, spicy aromas rising from the bag in her arms and then set it down to dig out her keys. As she unlocked the door and pushed it open, picking up the bag, she heard voices coming from inside.

  “Hello?” the babysitter called.

  Maddie piped up with an echo. “Hello?”

  “It’s Mom!” Tess called. “And I have two surprises!”

  “Surprises!”

  A thump came from the living room, followed by the sound of running feet. Maddie came bombing down the corridor dressed in flowery pajamas and a pair of dirty socks.

  “Mommy!” she said happily. Then she turned her run into a slide, gliding along the hardwood floor in her dirty socks like she was on a surfboard, arms out to steady herself.

  Tess caught her in a one-armed hug, joyful in a way that could always make her feel better. If her spine and shoulder cried out in protest, she pretended she couldn’t hear them.

  “Is Aunt Lili one of the surprises?” Maddie asked, still hugging Tess.

  “I am,” Lili admitted.

  “The other is Chinese food!” Maddie said, poking the bag. “I can smell it.”

  The babysitter, Erika, appeared in the hallway. “Did you think I wouldn’t feed her?”

  “I knew you would,” Tess said, mussing Maddie’s hair. “But no matter how full my girl is, I knew that if I brought home Chinese food and didn’t get her some fried dumplings, she’d be heartbroken.”

  “True! Very true!” Maddie said, trying to tug the bag from her mother’s arms.

  “You’re home early,” Erika said.

  “Change of plans,” Tess replied. “If you want to take off, you can. I’ll still pay you for the night.”

  Erika shook her head. “I wouldn’t take it, but I can’t leave yet.”

  Before Tess could ask why, dramatic Maddie let go of the Chinese food bag to hold up both hands as if to block Erika’s potential departure.

  “You bet you can’t, young lady!” Maddie piped. “We had a deal. I watched your movie, and now you’ve gotta watch Frozen with me again.”

  Erika crossed her arms. “I wouldn’t miss it, madwoman. But you can’t complain if I sing along.”

  “Fine,” Maddie said, then turned and tried to pull the bag from her mother’s arms again.

  “I’ve got it,” Tess said, thinking about the various sauces in the bag.

  “Mom, I can do it,” her daughter insisted with a darkly serious look. “I’m not little. I’m in the first grade.”

  Tess relented, letting her take the bag. “Straight to the kitchen table. We need plates.”

  “I know. I’m not messy, either.”

  Lili and Erika laughed. Sensing that she’d trumped her mother, Maddie marched victoriously down the hall past her babysitter with the Chinese food in her arms.

  “Wait till she’s twelve,” Erika said, reaching up to pull her thick red hair into a ponytail. “My mom says that’s when the sassiness hits critical mass.”

  “I can’t wait,” Tess replied, but the truth was that she loved her daughter’s confidence and wanted to encourage it whenever possible. If that meant indulging a little sass, she thought they would both survive.

  Erika greeted Lili, who saluted with her plastic bag.

  “What’ve you got there?” the babysitter asked.

  Lili grinned. “If I recall correctly, your favorite Ben and Jerry’s flavor is still cheesecake brownie.”

  “Oh, my God!” Erika squeaked. “You didn’t!”

  “I did.”

  Seventeen-year-old Erika threw her arms around Lili almost as enthusiastically as Maddie had hugged her mother, snatched the bag away, and dashed down the hallway toward the kitchen making happy humming noises. Her skintight yoga pants and stylish green knit sweater might have made her look mature, but it seemed there was plenty of little girl left in her.

  Tess smiled. “I guess we’re all little girls at heart.”

  She and Lili were left alone in the foyer. They could hear the clatter from the kitchen as Erika and Maddie got out plates and utensils.

  “You guys coming?” Maddie called.

  Tess took a deep breath.

  “Ice cream’s gonna melt,” Lili said.

  “We need to talk about this,” Tess replied.

  Lili moved in front of her, close enough that Tess could feel the warmth of her friend’s breath. Lili searched her eyes.

  “We’re going into the kitchen and we’re gonna eat our dinner while it’s hot,” Lili said. “Then we’re going to watch Frozen and sing along.”

  “We can’t just pretend—”

  Lili raised her eyebrows. “We can chill out with Maddie until she goes to bed and Erika goes home. It’ll give us both time to breathe and sift through all this crap. And then you’re gonna call Nick and I’m going to call Aaron Blaustein—”

  “It’ll be ten o’clock by then. If you’re gonna call him, don’t you think you should do it now?” Tess asked.

  Maddie called from the kitchen again.

  Lili smiled. “No. I do not. Aaron, if you recall, is a prick. I’m not worried about getting on his nerves. I didn’t see what you did in the hotel, but with the psychomanteum there, and having seen the things I have seen … we have to tell them.”

  Tess exhaled, trying to rekindle the joy she had felt upon walking through the door. The rest—the impossible stuff—would keep for a couple of hours. It would have to.

  “You know there’s someone else we need to call,” Tess said. “Unless we’re both completely insane, there’s something … unnatural … going on here. Which means we need to get in touch with—”

  “Audrey Pang,” Lili interrupted.

  The name echoed off the wa
lls and ceiling, and for a few seconds the women said nothing further. Then Maddie gave an exasperated, singsong shout of “Mo-om,” and they turned together and hurried to the kitchen.

  The four of them talked and laughed over Chinese food and then took their ice cream into the living room so the girls could resume their movie. Tess barely tasted any of it. Nothing seemed to have flavor. She smiled as they sang along and chuckled in all the right places during the film, but she knew she was only pretending. The shadow of the evening’s experiences loomed over her, an invisible weight that she could never forget completely, even when Maddie curled up beside her on the sofa and began to drift off to sleep.

  There were no ghosts in this house. She believed that with all her heart.

  But still, she felt haunted.

  NINE

  Nick lay in bed, head propped on his pillow as he watched old sitcoms with the volume turned low. Kyrie had one leg thrown over him, her head on his chest. The strangeness of the day had unsettled them both, anxiety rippling inside them, and though they had talked more about their plans for England and their future together, that mutual anxiety had established an awkward distance between them. Only when they had agreed to slip into bed early, ostensibly to watch TV, had the tension begun to ease like the exhalation of a long-held breath. Kyrie had stroked his arm almost absently and Nick had turned to smile at her, reaching up to push a lock of her hair away from her eyes. She had kissed him and he’d run a hand along the curve of her hip, and then desire and momentum carried them along.

  With her full cheeks and button nose, Kyrie looked lovely and peaceful in her sleep, but she also looked even younger than she was, emphasizing the age difference between them. She snored softly beside him and he stared at the TV, the volume low enough that he could barely hear the laugh track. Her naked body felt warm against his skin and he kissed her forehead, envious of her ability to sleep. The clock had not yet struck eleven and it was rare for him to drift off before midnight. Tonight he thought it would be especially difficult.

  What have I done? he thought, hating the melodrama of it. Fuck, what am I doing?

  Late-night doubts often plagued him and usually revolved around the same concerns. Tess had been the one to ask for a divorce, but Nick had not put up much of a fight. Even before her accident, before her scars, and before she’d kissed another man, she had often told him that his focus on his work would be detrimental to their relationship. Then came the crash. Tess had been out Christmas shopping, Nick home watching TV with two-year-old Maddie asleep on his chest. During a commercial break, he’d seen the brunette meteorologist in her strangely formal dress talking about the dangers of black ice and thought nothing of it. Tess had always been a careful driver.

  But she hadn’t come home.

  At 9:30 he had sent the first text. Half an hour later, he’d left the first message on her cell phone. Shortly before eleven o’clock, he’d received a call from Lawrence Memorial Hospital in Medford and answered, heart pounding. Maddie had woken up, sensing his agitation, and he’d been trying to calm her for twenty minutes when the nurse rang to tell him Tess had been in an accident. At first, the woman had tried to put off giving him any substantial report on his wife’s condition, suggesting he come down to the hospital and speak to the doctor. Nick had insisted, which was how he had discovered that she had lost control of her car on the ice, slid over an embankment and into a stand of trees, broken multiple bones and been impaled through her left shoulder by the limb of a tree.

  Before the accident, he had often been distracted in the company of his wife and daughter. Tess had told him that she and Maddie needed to know that when he was with them he was with them. Nick had mostly pretended to listen and made some halfhearted attempts to assuage her concerns, not because he didn’t love his family but because the things Tess said were true. His focus was elsewhere. When he came home late on a night they’d scheduled a dinner date, he apologized profusely and he meant every word.

  After the accident, he had spent weeks hovering by her, wanting to help but unsure how to go about it. The doctors insisted that Tess would be fine, but as she healed, she often seemed lost in her own thoughts. She would mention her pain, but never in a manner that seemed like complaining. Awkward and unable to offer her any real comfort, Nick had returned his focus to teaching, secure in the knowledge that Tess would be all right. That she didn’t need him.

  It turned out she did.

  One night, when he’d stayed particularly late at his office at the university, Nick had finally seen the anger on her face … and the hurt.

  “Where is your daughter right now?” she’d asked.

  Nick had frowned in confusion. He had worked late on plans for a symposium he wanted to pitch to the university—a project that had taken up a great deal of his time. When he had rolled in around eight-thirty, Tess had been reading a book in a chair in the living room, a basket of fresh, folded laundry beside her and an ice pack on the shoulder that still gave her trouble. The external wound had scarred over, but the internal damage was done.

  “Maddie’s sleeping,” he said. “Of course she’s sleeping.”

  “How would you know if she wasn’t? Maybe she’s at her first sleepover.”

  “She’s too young for—”

  “How would you know?” Tess had barked. He could still see the pain in her eyes, the moisture there as she fought against her tears. “You haven’t read to her at bedtime in seven months! You and I haven’t had a night out in six! And do you even remember the last time we had sex?”

  Nick hadn’t been able to remember. That was the night she had told him about letting another man kiss her. It was also the night she had asked for a divorce.

  He’d been angry about the kiss, but inside he also felt relieved it had not been more than that. In the midst of his anger, though, he realized he was not terribly surprised. Not that he expected Tess to be unfaithful, but he had always been aware of the bubble he lived in, his too often distant manner. She had always loved him in spite of the difficulties he had in understanding others and making himself understood. But the tether that connected them had frayed over time, and he knew he was far more to blame than was Tess. He and black ice. He and pain.

  “You can’t say you didn’t have fair warning,” she’d told him. “I talked to you about this over and over. I deserve to have someone in my life who wants to be with me, who can’t wait to be with me! Maddie can’t swap you for another father, but sometimes I really wish she could, because she deserves a dad who puts her first.”

  When he’d stopped fuming about that damn kiss, Nick had wanted to make it up to them. He had started to argue and faltered, shaken by the realization that everything she had said was the truth. That the door to that part of his life had closed.

  Now he had a chance to really start over, to do it right, and guilt hung over him like the sword of Damocles. He and Tess had been getting along well enough, even if only for Maddie’s sake, but the move to England would douse their détente in gasoline and set it ablaze. He knew it. She would be furious, and why not? He had promised over and over that Maddie would always be his number-one priority and now he was about to prove that to be a lie.

  It’s not a lie, he told himself. They’ll both understand. Maybe not right away, but in time. Maddie would get to see England, maybe other parts of Europe as well. Nick might not get his weekly visit with her, but when he did see her he would be able to give her his full attention. They’d be longer, concentrated visits, and it was only for two years. Afterward, he and Kyrie would come back to Boston. There’d likely be a wedding. The visits would go back to their previous pattern but with a new dynamic, a new future for all of them. By then, he thought, Tess would surely have found someone new of her own.

  All of this felt true to him. He could make it true. Yet the guilt still lingered.

  Kyrie shifted against him, soft breast pressing against him. The smell of her hair filled his nostrils and she breathed warmly against h
is chest. He slid his hand along her skin and felt himself stirring with fresh arousal.

  Nick laughed quietly at himself. “Idiot,” he whispered.

  No way he could shut his mind off just yet, not with all that was swirling around in there. Kyrie would not have protested if he woke her up for a second round, but he needed to wrestle his demons into submission, not fuck them away. Sexual oblivion worked nicely as a distraction, but he knew it would only be temporary.

  He forced himself to focus on the sitcom, turning the volume up. When the ads came on, though, his mind wandered back to the day he’d had with Kyrie, to their conversations, and to the weirdness with the real estate agent.

  Buzz.

  Surprised, Nick glanced over at his nightstand. Kyrie’s cell was in the kitchen, but his sat beside the lamp on the bedside table. Just about eleven o’clock. Before he had become a parent, late-night texts had been filled with the promise of mischief, but now they worried him.

  He picked up the phone one-handed so as not to disturb Kyrie, and tapped it to view the text message. His pulse quickened with worry when he saw it was from Tess.

  Hey. Can you meet Lili and me tomorrow? It’s important. Nothing to do with Mad. Some weird stuff going on and we need to put our heads together.

  Nick stared at the words, wondering what they meant. With Kyrie’s head nestled in the crook of his armpit, he had to hold the phone right above her head in order to text a reply. It felt wrong, somehow. Sneaky, although Nick knew the idea was absurd.

  Maddie’s okay? he asked.

  Fine. Full of late-night Chinese food. This isn’t about her.

  Nick stared at those words long enough that the cell phone screen went dim and he had to tap it to wake it up again. What did he and Tess need to talk about if not Maddie? And why was Lili involved? They were professors in the same department at Boston University, but other than that, they had very little contact. Nick had always heard that after a divorce, friends were divided up just like the rest of the marriage’s belongings, and Tess had certainly gotten Lili. That was only right, given how long they’d been friends, but …