“What do you want from me, Julian?” I whisper.
I can see his reflection in the window. His arms are crossed, but his gaze doesn’t lift from mine.
“Right now?” he says. “To keep you safe.”
“And after?” I ask.
Julian doesn’t move, but the air in the music room thickens, crackles.
“It’s just like you said, Sean. I’m a greedy piece of shit. I want all that you’re willing to give me, and even more after that.” Before I can ask him what he means by that, he launches himself off the doorframe and turns back into the kitchen. “I’m going to finish helping Ritika unload the car. You should pick a room.”
The bedroom I choose is on the first floor. It’s the smallest of the bedrooms but has the biggest bathroom and a sizable closet—and most importantly, a window big enough for me to climb through. Itmeans both an easy escape for me and easier entry for someone else, but I can’t imagine anything worse than negotiating a leap from the second floor, and so I take my chances. There are more paintings here, old, worn paperbacks in dusty bookshelves, but there are also signs of life: a pastel-pink corded phone next to a Tweety Bird alarm clock, bits of tape left on the walls from posters that have been torn down and not replaced. I wasn’t a teenager in the nineties, but the nostalgia still hits me like a ton of bricks, not least of all because, just like then, we have no internet.
Someone lived here, I’m sure of it. This place isn’t just one of Julian’s many safe houses. It was a home.
“So, did you kill the previous owners?” I ask after I’ve finished unpacking my meager belongings and sauntered back into the kitchen.
It’s dark out. Ritika and Julian have made quick work of the supplies, and the bags and boxes of household essentials that had piled the kitchen counters are now neatly tucked away. Ritika’s dead to the world, collapsed on the couch, and Julian sits, cross-legged, at the dining table. He’s sipping from a bright-red mug and reading an aged green book; on closer inspection, it’s an old Danielle Steel novel. At my question, he lowers it.
“You harbor a very uncharitable view of me nowadays,” he says sardonically. “No, I did not kill the previous owners. They were actually great friends. Do you want some tea? There’s hot water in the kettle on the stove.”
I’ve been so out of it that I didn’t hear it whistle. I open up cabinets, pick out a caffeine-free peppermint variety, and make myself a cup. The only source of light is a standing lamp in the living room and a flickering candle that makes the room smell like lavender, and I catch myself about to fuss at him about straining his eyes. He looks sonormalright now, in his black hoodie and sweats, his knuckleschapped from carrying boxes in and out in the cold. We’ve had nights like this before, reading in silence next to each other at dining tables or on couches or in each other’s beds. Rolling over to turn off the lights then into each other’s embrace, swapping thoughts on what we’ve just absorbed before drifting off to sleep. The contentment I’d felt in his arms, in feeling desired and understood. How sure I’d felt that this wasn’t just a honeymoon phase, emphasized more by the fact that we weren’t having the sex that I desperately wanted to have.
When I sit back down with my tea, he wordlessly pushes a book on the table in my direction. It’s a photo album, the old kind with plastic sleeves. I open it and am greeted by a two-by-two grid of photographs of a family: a middle-aged man and woman, and a little girl. All three of them are wearing Mickey Mouse ears, and the little girl is dressed as Minnie. In the first photo, they beam at the camera, the picture of a normal, happy family on a trip to Disney World. The woman is white, with a shock of strawberry-blond hair and freckles that dust her entire face and down her arms. The man is racially ambiguous, with hair that is more salt than pepper, a straight nose, skin that looks more prone to burning than tanning, and monolid eyes that hint at Asian or Native American ancestry. Between them, their adorable daughter, with her chestnut-brown hair in pigtails and a giant, dripping ice cream cone clutched in her hand.
“Are these the previous owners?” I ask, flipping through pages of backyard barbecues, pony rides, science fair volcanoes, and Christmases, watching the little girl grow across the pages from a toothy-grinned child to an elegant, if serious-looking, young adult as her parents age alongside her.
“Yes,” Julian says.
“How did you know them?”
Julian gives me a brief and disappointed glance.
“I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out yet,” he says. “You’re usually more observant than that.”
I frown, flipping through the pages as I sip my tea, scouring the photographs for the secret I am meant to unveil.
The moment I see it, I’m shocked I couldn’t before.
“Is that…” I say, stunned, “Alphonse?”
Julian nods, turning a page in his novel.
“One and the same,” he says.
The photograph I’m on now was taken at least a decade after the first. Alphonse’s hairline has receded some, and he leans into the shot from the passenger seat of a car, laughing as his daughter gives a thumbs-up from the driver’s side. He’s still very much a handsome man, but he’s got a little paunch and he’s wearing a polo shirt and is teaching his daughter how to drive, looking like the dadliest dad I’ve ever seen. I scan the table, see that Julian has laid out three more albums, and I flip through them voraciously, absorbing the life of this incomprehensible person. Pets—Alphonse and his family seem partial to cats and bunnies—come and go, as do friends and seasons. They have a family garden; there are countless pictures of their handsome yields, images of a tomato canning process that must have become tradition and a blue ribbon awarded at a county fair for the largest cabbage. At some point, a young man joins them in their photos, and a few holiday seasons later there is his daughter again, wearing a hospital gown and holding a small pink baby. By the last album, Alphonse is old, white-haired, and kyphotic, and by the last page, he is gone altogether.
When Julian told me his friend had died, I assumed he meant that he met an early and unfortunate demise. But Alphonse went the way most of us want to, at a ripe old age, surrounded by loved ones.
“Was he human?” I ask. I feel both immensely moved and intenselyunsettled, like I’m sitting among ghosts. So much of the house has remained unchanged, from the furnishings in what must have been Alphonse’s daughter’s room to the soft yellow of the walls. “Or was he…like you?”
Julian finally looks up from his book. I realize that the bleariness in his eyes isn’t fatigue, but emotion. He’d probably brought the albums out for himself, to remember his friend.
“Is it an either-or?” he asks. When I don’t answer, he closes his book. “He was like me. Only braver.”
The swirl of my thoughts begins to congeal. I point to the woman, Alphonse’s lover. In her later years, she took to dyeing her hair lavender, and her smile is shallow with the chronic sorrow of a person who must navigate the rest of her life as one half of a former whole.
“Did she know?” I ask.