CHAPTER FOUR

I PULLED IN to the fenced lot across the street from the apartment complex at four forty-nine, squeezing in between a sports car with a bashed fender and a dusty suburban from the nineties whose driver had clearly spent the subsequent twenty years doing anything but learning how to park. At the front of the lot was a familiar burnt-orange pickup, which meant Dad beat me home. A seventy-two Chevrolet C-10. The same model Bill Murray drove off that cliff in Groundhog Day.

“Home,” I yelled down the hall as I forced our apartment door open with my good shoulder. All the lights in the entrance hall were off, apart from a yellow glow coming from the kitchen, which meant Dad was being weird again. I locked the door behind me and rounded the edge of the hallway. As I guessed, my father was sitting on a barstool in the kitchen, wearing a headlamp and a thick set of magnifying glasses, which wouldn’t seem too out of place if my father wasn’t the most nearsighted son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever known. In his hand was a thin rusty screwdriver prodding away at something golden resting on the kitchen counter.

For as long as I’d been able to remember, my dad has tinkered. I’d call it a hobby, if he ever fixed anything. Maybe he likes taking things apart. He never really talks about it. It’s always just been a thing he’s done. Like shaving. Or changing out faulty lightbulbs. And it’s one of the things which reminded me I was home. It might seem silly, but it was probably the best thing I could have walked in on after the day I’d had.

“Hey,” I said, feeling myself smile at the sight of his shotty craftsmanship. It was a golden watch he’d been working on—or at least, it used to be. He’d decomposed the thing to a series of gears and screws scattered across the counter. At my voice, his head jumped up from the watch, and the dull beam of his secondhand headlamp caught me in the eye.

“Hey girl,” he said, smiling.

“Can you, um—” I began, raising a hand to shield my eye from the light. He stared for a brief second before realizing what I was asking.

“Oh! Sorry,” he laughed, turning the beam upward into the ceiling and leaving the rest of the kitchen in shadows as he spun around on the barstool to face me. “You can grab the light, hun.”

Without looking, I flipped the switch along the edge of the wall, lighting the semi-chandelier hanging just above the circular kitchen table. And I mean just above. The damn thing gave maybe six inches of dinner space between it and the glazed finish of my grandmother’s hand-crafted Christmas gift from the early nineties, which already felt a bit low to the ground to begin with. Sitting at our kitchen table in its current position usually brought forth a peculiar feeling of being simultaneously too large and too small to eat comfortably for anyone joining an Adams’ dinner party for the first time. But having survived the sensation for nearly a decade and a half, I happily took a seat, slumping down in my chair as I sighed.

“Didn’t expect to make it back before you,” my dad said, pulling the ridiculous glasses from his face. “You grab lunch or something?”

If by grab lunch he meant watch downtown Chicago’s cultural hodgepodge of dead souls pass into the shadows of the afterlife and great unknown, then yes I suppose I had grabbed some lunch on the way home.

“Yea,” I laughed, a bit more nervously than I had meant to.

I would have loved to tell my dad about Ethan. About Abigail and Joseph. I’d probably skip the part with the gun and the aggravated assault, but I’d tell him everything else. Sure, Ethan hadn’t mentioned keeping anything under wraps, but a small part of me knew I couldn’t tell my dad how I’d spent that afternoon. At least not yet. Beyond the tempting notion of finding out if he was crazy enough to believe the story, telling my dad that the afterlife is a dark place would be like telling a child Santa Clause isn’t real. I know where his mind would go, and in my heart of hearts, I couldn’t bear to put it there.

“And you didn’t bring anything back for your old man?” my dad joked, folding his arms across his chest.

I raised my hand and rubbed my fingers and thumb together, lifting an eyebrow. “It don’t grow on trees, dad.”

He laughed and unstrapped his headlamp, placing it on the counter next to his latest project.

“Whatcha got there?” I asked, gesturing to the cluster of mechanical bits at the edge of the sink.

He smiled, spinning back around and grabbing something off of the counter. He held it out to me, turning it a few times in his hand until I took it from him. It was a golden, circular shell with a notch at its side.

“Found her out on the sidewalk,” he said, looking extremely proud of himself. “Some kind of watch. A bit flashy, huh?”

I nodded, smiling as I ran my thumb across an engraving in the back. It was heavily cursive and a bit difficult to read through some minor scratching, but the letters E and A branded the casing, and I immediately knew why my dad had taken it home.

“It’s great Dad,” I said, handing it back to him. He placed it back in its position among the innards and turned back to me, smiling and nodding as his head fell toward the floor.

I noticed a plate on the opposite side of the sink, covered in crumbs and ketchup smears. As far as my dad knew, I had eaten a late lunch. In reality, I was fucking starving. I thought to my room, wondering if any stray potato-chip bags or oatmeal cream pies were hiding out on my dresser, or if any canned teas lay unopened beneath my bed. Ever since Dad banned sodas from the apartment, I found Brisk Raspberry to be the next best thing.

I stood from the table and grabbed Dad’s empty plate from the counter, rinsing it off in the sink and placing it carefully into our decade-old dishwasher that should have been taken out back and shot a few years back.

“Thanks, hun.”

“No problem,” I said, faking a yawn. “I think I might go nap for a bit. You gonna be alright here by yourself?”

Dad laughed, pulling his headlamp back down to his forehead again. “I’ll figure something out,” he said. He unfolded those dorky-ass glasses and slid them up his nose. I kissed him on the cheek and walked off to my room, flipping the kitchen light switch off almost instinctively and attempting to look as drowsy as possible while images of barbecued Pringles danced in my head.

I opened my door to find a black dress draped over my hauntingly tidied bed. My stomach dropped as I turned back to my dad at the other end of the apartment. He was nose-deep into the watch. I looked back to the dress and slowly crept into my room, pulling the door shut behind me and clicking on the lamp next to my bed. On the dress laid a small piece of what looked like receipt paper, fluttering against the French lacing with the air from my ceiling fan. It was a note, scribbled in thick black ink.

My end of the bargain

The letters were skewed and ran into each other a bit, but as someone with the handwriting of a caffeinated serial-killer, it might as well have been the Declaration of Independence.

I grabbed the dress and walked it to my closet, picking an unused hanger from the edge of the railing and hooking it through the neckline. I placed it in the back trenches of my closet, behind my junior prom dress and the fuzzy red Christmas sweater I had mistakenly worn to school last year, miscalculating the effect an embroidered “Ho Ho Ho” would have on my classmates.

I walked back to my bed, swiping the spare oatmeal cream pie from the edge of my night stand as I let myself fall backwards onto my pillow. I ripped the plastic wrapping from the pie and shoved the whole thing into my mouth in one go, thankful no one was around to see my lack of self-control. I stared at my ceiling as I chewed, though my ceiling had become a slideshow of moments with Abigail, Joseph, and the prick in the alley—each vanishing through the veil of blackness.

I swallowed the pie and closed my eyes, listening to the soft hum of my ceiling fan as the rest of the world slipped away.