Things Go Flying (27 page)

“I call Tom Grossman,” she whispered, realizing she might as well be specific.

She waited and waited.

Damn.
Now that she was convinced it wasn't going to work, she was feeling much braver. “Stupid game,” she said, forgetting to keep her voice down.

It moved.

Audrey jumped, lifting her fingers off the plastic triangle as if she'd received an electric shock.

For a full minute she sat absolutely still and argued with herself.
Put your fingers back on, what do you think you're here for?

At last she put her fingers back on the plastic triangle. She whispered, “Tom?”

The triangle moved, of its own accord, to
Yes.
Audrey knew
she
hadn't pushed it there. Her heart began to pound.

“Tom Grossman?” She had to be sure.

The pointer pulled back and nudged
Yes
again.

“Are you here because of the paternity test?” she whispered.

“Why else?” he barked out loud, and laughed.

Audrey screamed.

As soon as the scream was out, Audrey clapped a hand over her mouth. She was gripped by the fight or flight response, pumping with adrenaline. After a few seconds, she got up and tiptoed over to the bottom of the stairs and peered up, listening intently, to see if they'd woken Harold or the boys. There wasn't a sound. She struggled with her decision—should she turn back and face Tom, or bolt back up the stairs and climb under the covers with Harold?

But Audrey remembered what was at stake. She turned back to the living room, hugging her housecoat around her. “Keep your voice down,” she whispered into the air.

When he didn't say anything she whispered, “Are you still here?”

“I'm still here,” Tom whispered. She knew it was him—there was no mistaking that voice, that whisper.

“We have to talk,” Audrey said—so softly that she was almost mouthing the words.

“Okay,” he whispered back. She could tell that he was humouring her.

“We have to think of Harold,” Audrey said.

“Right.”

“We made a mistake.”

“Agreed.”

Encouraged, she said, “Regardless of what the test results are, Harold can never know.”

“I'm not sure I agree with you there,” Tom said.

“Why the hell not?” Audrey said, forgetting to whisper.

“Don't you think Harold should know if Dylan isn't really his kid?”

“No, I don't,” Audrey said crossly. “You never cared about it when you were alive, why do you care now?”

“I'm thinking of Harold too.”

“No, you're not,” Audrey protested. “You never really did think about Harold—how could you when you were always thinking about yourself?” Audrey had understood, if Harold never had, Tom's essential character. “You didn't think about Harold when you were with me.”

“Neither did you.”

“That was temporary insanity!”

She could
feel
him grinning. Really, the man's ego was enormous. But that was what had attracted her to him in the first place, damn it all. “Do you have any idea how fragile Harold is right now?” she demanded.

“Harold's not as fragile as you think.”

“What do you know about it?” Audrey cried. “You haven't been around for the last fifteen years, at least!”

“And who's responsible for that, Audrey?” he shot back. When she didn't answer, he added, “
I
could have gone on as if nothing had happened.
You're
the one responsible for coming between me and Harold, and you know it.”

Although his
I could have gone on as if nothing had happened
remark stung, what really hurt was the truth of Tom's accusation that she was the one who'd come between him and Harold. Of course she'd found ways, afterward, to avoid getting together with Tom and his wife. Tom hadn't pushed, and Harold's general passivity had made it easy. She'd hardly considered that she was robbing Harold of his best friend—she was so terrified that Tom would tell him the truth. Which would have been bad enough, but there she was, pregnant, and it could have been by either one of them.

So she'd allowed Harold to believe that Tom was too busy,
too successful.
All these years.

When she thought of how sad it all was, she could cry.

• • •

H
AROLD WASN'T, IN
fact, still asleep. Audrey's scream had pierced right through the Sleep-Eze and jerked him out of rem sleep and into the reality of his bedroom—the bedside table light still on, the closet door wide open, and Audrey's place empty beside him. The strangeness of the closet door being wide open and Audrey gone was enough to nail him to his place initially, but eventually Harold got up his nerve and crept tentatively to the top of the stairs. He heard voices coming from the living room.

It was Audrey, whispering—and Tom!

Gripping the handrail, he descended partway down the stairs, even though he knew—had always known—that curiosity is a terrible thing. The things one learns when partway down a dark staircase can chill the blood.

He paused, swallowed, and listened. He unstopped his ears, heard it all. And hearing it, sagged down on a stair, and wondered how he'd ever been so blind. Wondered how he'd keep on going now, betrayed by the two he'd loved most in the world.

“Let's just see what the test says,” Tom was saying now. “Maybe I'm not the father.”

“Then will you go away?”

“I suppose.”

“And what if you
are
Dylan's father?”

There was a long pause. “I don't know.”

Harold heard all this and started to move. He was leaning heavily on the handrail with one hand, but the other was stretched out in front of him. He stumbled down the stairs and into the living room.

It was a strange tableau: in the dark, Audrey, standing alone, turned a horrified face upon him. He saw the Ouija board on the coffee table, glowing wanly in the dark, roughly the same colour as Audrey's ghastly face. “Tom?” he said. “Tom!”

But Tom didn't answer.

Instead, there was a sudden chill, as if the temperature had just dropped twenty degrees. The curtains billowed gracefully as if a gust of wind had blown through the room.

Audrey and Harold stared at each other.

Then the Lladró on the bookshelf behind the La-Z-Boy went spinning across the room and exploded against the brick fireplace.

“The Lladró!” Audrey shouted.

Next, the Ouija board was ripped in two and tossed up in the air; the plastic triangle fell to the floor with a clatter. Then it was raining debris—the magazine basket by the sofa had been flung high up into the air. Harold was knocked in the head by a descending magazine. An end table was pushed violently over; its lamp careened off and smashed to pieces on the hardwood floor. The painting centred over the fireplace hurled itself across the room and upended itself against the side of Harold's La-Z-Boy.

It was a terrifying display.

“The demons of hell!” Audrey gasped.

It was a matter of seconds, and then it was over. Audrey and Harold, stricken dumb, surveyed the wreckage in the dark. It was as if a small, localized hurricane had begun and ended in their living room.

No one could sleep through all that, and the boys came racing barefoot down the stairs. They arrived at the bottom of the stairs in their pajamas and stood there, stunned.

“What happened?” Dylan asked.

“It's nothing, honey,” Audrey said, not wanting to alarm them, scrambling for a plausible explanation. “We were just having a fight.”

There was enough palpable tension between Audrey and Harold to support her explanation. And Harold was speechless.

John looked upset, like he was fighting back tears; Dylan, who normally had something to say, for once was silent, his usually sunny face gone dark.

• • •

I
F THIS WERE
anything like a normal household, either Audrey or Harold would be sleeping on the couch, perhaps for weeks. But neither one of them, once the broken china was swept up and the ransacked room put back in order, ever wanted to be alone in the living room at night again, or the basement either. There was no guest room, so they were forced back into their bedroom

Audrey, the guilty party and a natural martyr, pulled out the extra pillows and blankets from the top of her closet and made herself up a bed on the floor. Every one of the lights in the bedroom was on. Harold took the bed, but it might as well have been a bed of nails for all the comfort he found in it.

That Dylan might not be his own son!

That Audrey, his wife, had slept with his best friend!

That Tom, his best friend, had slept with his wife!

That Audrey had kept Tom from him—all these years!

Harold, who asked for so little from life, had never expected anything like this.

He heard Audrey sobbing from the floor, even with her face buried in her pillow. Stubbornly, he ignored her. He was afraid the boys would hear her. They would take her side, he thought; they would imagine he had done something terrible.

John would never ask. But Dylan would, and Harold wouldn't be able to tell him the truth. And for sure Audrey wasn't going to tell him.

Harold wondered bleakly what the chances were that he was, in fact, Dylan's father. Dylan was nothing like him, he knew that. He might be a throwback to Harold's own father though, whom Harold remembered as confident, independent-minded, and optimistic. Or he might be Tom's.

But even if he was Tom's, Harold realized—with wonder and a tightly constricting heart— it made no difference to how he felt about his son. He loved Dylan.

It made a hell of a difference to how he felt about Audrey, though. Could he ever forgive her?

He would stay home in the morning and wait for the mail, every day, until the test results arrived. He couldn't trust
her
to tell him the truth.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A
udrey was in shock; she wasn't used to having everything out in the open like this. Well, not everything. The boys didn't know what was really going on, thank God. But Harold was so unpredictable these days—she didn't know if she could count on him to keep it to himself.

Also, he wasn't talking to her, which was making her very nervous.

Right before her eyes, her family—her life's work!—was disintegrating. She knew she had only herself to blame, which sure didn't make it any easier.

This morning, to escape the open hostility between their parents, the boys had skipped breakfast altogether and run off to school without waiting for their lunches, leaving her alone in the house with Harold.

Harold hadn't left for work, which was a little surprising at first (he couldn't want to spend the day with her) until she remembered the test results. Of course he would stay home and wait for the mail. It wasn't as if she could shred the damn results and then when he came home from work, announce, “Good news!
You're
the father!” and expect him to believe it.

Now Audrey sat alone—Harold hadn't come down—her toast untouched, and wondered if she was headed for divorce—after all these years!—her most significant legacy to her boys a broken home. She'd failed them all. All that work for nothing.

And her with no means of supporting herself.

• • •

J
OHN, MAKING HIS
way morosely to school, was troubled on many fronts.

That his parents could go from being blandly settled to throwing the furniture around was alarming. He wished Dylan had kept his mouth shut, instead of coming into his room last night while their mother wept in the bedroom down the hall. John had sat biting his nails—he couldn't stand the sound of his mother crying; it was like the house coming down around his ears.

Dylan said, “I think I know what this is all about.”

John didn't want to know, but Dylan was going to tell him anyway. He could tell when Dylan had something too good to hold back. Just
once
he'd like Dylan to not know everything.

“Are you ready for this?”

John shrugged sullenly. He wasn't, but he didn't want to admit it to his younger brother. Even if he did, Dylan would hit him with both barrels anyway.

Dylan was sitting in the chair across from the bed. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and said, “I was using the computer a while ago, and discovered something interesting.”

John waited. He had no idea what was coming.

“Someone in this house has been using the Internet to look into
paternity
tests.”

“How could you possibly know that?” John asked in disbelief.

“Easy—I know how to check the most recently accessed websites.”

John hadn't known such a thing was possible. “What do you mean, paternity tests?”

Dylan grew impatient. “I mean, you dummy, that one of us might not be Dad's kid.”