“She seems to be cleaning house and taking stock, and it scares me.”
“Better than kicking butt and taking names,” he says. “No, actually the way you say it is worse.” He pats my knee and sighs. “She’ll come back. If I came back, she’ll come back. This is home. Like it or not.”
I suppose so.
“What about you?” he says. “I’ve been pretty self-absorbed lately. How’s your world?”
“Falling apart,” I say, but offering no details. “And it’s just human nature—being self-absorbed. Don’t sweat it.”
We sit and stare into the darkness of our childhood street. A ghost, a princess, and a Batman run by, and I think of the three of us in easier times when we could throw on a costume and satiate ourselves with sugar and chocolate and make the world a better place. Funny, I think we still do that—albeit the costumes and consumables have changed over the years.
“What fell apart?” Ray asks, not letting me off the hook.
“My illusions,” I say, realizing the truth. “That life would be easy. That marriage would an unbreakable bond. That I’d have tons of kids and none of them would ever want to leave me.”
“Where did you get that illusion?” He smiles understandably at me. “She’ll come back.”
I think he’s talking about Lola, but he corrects me.
“Cassie,” he says. “She’s just lashing out. She thinks she’s making you pay for some injustice. She doesn’t know that life has no rules and reason is mostly unsound. The punishment almost never fits the crime—thank heavens for that.”
“How do you know that’s what Cassie is doing?”
“I did the same thing. Spent way too much time trying to exact revenge—mostly on myself. She’ll figure it out. Especially once she has kids of her own.”
I roll my eyes. “Do I have to wait until then?”
“What else?” Ray asks, sensing that isn’t everything.
“I started dating a priest,” I say, leaving out the “almost” part because I know it will amuse Ray. “It didn’t work out.”
This brings a huge smile to Ray’s face and he laughs. It sounds good—not the raspy, jagged knife sound that he made just months ago.
“I don’t know if you’re joking or not,” he says, “but I think that means you’re not ready to give up on your marriage. People get back together sometimes, you know.”
He reaches his hand out across the small space between us, and I take hold of it. “Life is weird,” he says. “Most of the time I feel like I’m playing one game while everybody at the table is playing something else.”
“What did Dad say to you that night?” I ask, feeling both brave and desperate.
Ray looks at me, and I know he knows which night I’m talking about.
“Did he blame you?” I ask.
The darkness makes a safety net around us.
“He knew it was my fault,” Ray says, nodding. “That was easy enough to figure. Hiding from the world when I messed up didn’t start with that night, you know. I’ve always been good at that.”
“It was an accident, Ray,” I say. “You know that, right?”
“It was still my fault.”
“Is that what he said?” It seems a logical thing to assume. “That he knew it was you?”
“When Dad found me that night,” Ray says, squeezing my hand against the memory, “I knew Lola was hurt. I was afraid of hearing ‘Your sister is dead, and it’s all your fault’ or some version of that. It would have left me to rot in that alley forever. I guess I rotted there anyway, even though that’s not what Dad said.”
“You looked like he’d said the most unimaginable thing to you. What did he say?”
“I knew Lola was hurt bad,” Ray says again. “I knew all our lives had just been yanked out from under us. I knew it was my fault. There was no way to know that Lola was going to make it. Dad knew I was already spinning out of control.”
I squeeze Ray’s hand; I can’t stand it.
“He said, ‘I love you, no matter what.’ Simple as that. I was floored. That he took the time to find me. That he didn’t go off with the ambulance and just leave me. There’s no way someone can love you like that, is there? How did he know me so well? I barely even knew myself. I spent every day after that trying my hardest to prove there was something I could do to make him not love me. I became the most unlovable version of myself that I could. I had to prove to him that I was the bad guy, because that’s how I felt.”
“That’s a risky test to conduct.”
“I ticked him off from time to time,” Ray says. “I got that part right. Man, he could get mad at me. He told me all the time that I wasn’t measuring up to what I could be, that I was making one bad decision on top of the next. Which was true.”
I rest my head on Ray’s shoulder. The fire-breathing devil just under the surface of his sleeve breathes out a puff of smoke.
“Dad sure didn’t mind telling you when you’d made a bad decision,” I say. “But he always loved us.”
“I couldn’t do it.” Ray sighs. “I couldn’t make him stop loving me. I wanted him to. I wanted Lola to. I wanted all of you to.”
“Sometimes we don’t get what we want.”
“I know,” Ray says. “Thankfully.”
We sit for a good while. Trick-or-treaters are long home and high on sugar. A couple of neighborhood teenagers slip around the side of the house across the street. I imagine in the morning it will be wrapped in white paper and the magic of tonight’s mischief will be someone else’s mess to clean up.
I imagine a lot of things will be different in the morning.
“I never said it back to him,” Ray says, barely getting the words out. “I never said it back.”
“Say it now,” I
