Chapter Text
2022
The boy walked into his office one afternoon, halfway through a September that insisted on towing along the last dregs of summer. Later, scrambling to record every detail of the first encounter, Daniel would manage to recall only the insignificant ones: he’d worn a blue linen shirt, sleeves rolled up to his thin elbows. He’d been standing stock-still.
The knocking caught Daniel off guard; he swiveled toward the door and barked “Yes?”️ with sufficient grit, he hoped, to shake whoever planned on walking through it. He was in the middle of grading the freshman papers, a task which never failed to depress him: here was the next generation of reporters and truth peddlers, seemingly unable to write a coherent sentence without the aid of ChatGPT.
The boy looked nonplussed. “Professor,” he said, “I contacted you a week ago about a meeting. I’m your four o’clock.”
“You are,” Daniel acknowledged, glancing down at his wristwatch as if it had done him a great wrong. “De Romanus, yeah? Come in.”
There was nowhere for the boy to sit, seeing as the chair opposite Daniel’s had been loaded with binders and stacks of paper old as his tenure. Students preferred emailing him anyways, or cornering him after class. Something about his manner did not inspire an urge for private heart to hearts.
Daniel stared into the boy’s face, gave a non committal smile, and realized he had no idea why the kid was here. He answered his request, therefore he must’ve read it, but the memory simply was not there. Lights on, no one home. The kind of thing that made you wonder, once you got to an age.
“So,” he began, clearing his throat in an effort to buy himself some time.
“About my change of majors,” the boy supplied.
“Right.” Daniel clung to that lifeline.
It turned out to be one of those conversations that required little participation on his end; the boy did most of the talking. In so many words: he’d taken Daniel’s class as an elective—not surprising, not the first—while completing a major in Art History and Conservation. The way he said it, sounding out those big imposing syllables, coupled with a hard to place, continental sort of accent, slowly began to etch a word in Daniel’s mind: snob️.
The conversation would’ve been careening into the insufferable, if not for little things that nipped at his attention. Hair-flicking; fluttering hands; loose rolling shoulders; unwavering eye contact. It had been a few years, but Daniel still remembered what being flirted with looked like.
It was so bold-faced and shameless, at first he double-guessed himself. Yeah, right, keep dreaming you old geezer. Then, slowly, disbelief turned to incredulity: surely not? Daniel busied himself by pulling up the boy’s record on the computer—here he leant in too close to check that he’d typed the name correctly, offering ample view down the front of his shirt—all the while thinking maybe this is a prank. A social experiment.️ What the fuck, am I being filmed?
Finally he had to admit the obvious. The boy never looked away—hardly blinked—which felt slightly eerie, a bit exhilarating, and overall a lot like an ambush. A couple times he paused, bit on his lips in a practiced, fake-pensive way.
“Your attendance is a hundred percent. You’re acing this class,” Daniel said, after long minutes of not listening to him, fingers stumbling over the keyboard to close the most recent tabs. “If you need extra time to finish your assigned work while figuring out what to do, that’s perfectly fine.”
The look on the boy’s face was serene. He was leaning his meager weight into the side of Daniel’s desk, hip cocked.
“I’ve already completed all of it,” he said breezily. “You should’ve received an email…”
Daniel sat back in his chair, eyes darting from boy to computer screen—hundreds of post-its were plastered around the monitor, many stuck on top of each other; a veritable geologic column of shit he forgot to do.
“I don’t get it,” he called it in, finally, spreading his hands.
The boy drew himself up, pulling inward: his shoulders hitched, his hands joined together and began tapping against one leg. He tilted his head. “What is there to get?” Looking for all the world as if he’d just wandered into Daniel’s office asking for directions, and had not in fact spent nearly half an hour subtly propositioning him.
“You…don’t need anything. From me.”
This was uncharted ground. Daniel weighed the possibility that the boy might file a complaint against him, just for suggesting. But fuck it: this was possibly the funniest thing to happen all month. (It had been a dreary September, weather aside.)
The boy had not lost his spirit quite yet, but was starting to look a tad deflated. He threw a small look over his shoulder to the door, which Daniel had failed to get up and shut—a fortuitous breach of etiquette.
“Who says I’m asking for anything?”
Daniel felt his eyebrows climb across his forehead.
After a moment he chuckled, swiped off his glasses. The boy laughed too - wheezing slightly, but pleasant - tucking his chin down, glancing up through a sweep of thick, dark lashes. Daniel silently conceded: cute. Really cute.
“Yeah well, I don’t think I can help you in your — research,” Daniel said finally, moving some papers across his desk, playing at ‘busy busy professor’. A ghost of a smile still tugged on his mouth while he apologized. “I’m sorry.”
The boy drew in a long breath, nodded, a little sad but not surprised. He left the office with the same polite pseudo-deference with which he’d entered. His curls, perhaps, with less bounce, altogether a bit kicked. He wound one long-fingered hand around the knob and dragged the door shut after himself, muttering a farewell.
At the time, that was it. It didn’t feel like the beginning of anything; it was an incisive, open-and-closed, a flattering parenthesis. That night Daniel would savor the victory with a - marginally - higher percentage of alcohol than his doctor would have recommended. Then he’d go back home and sleep it off for exactly nine hours, because he was three birthdays away from seventy.
And then, quietly, it started.
2025
His daughter’s voice ran up the stairway like a ship-horn, bouncing off the walls and rattling the pictures in their frames, nearly shivering the glasses off of Daniel’s face. Her frustration seeped through the small space underneath the door: “Dad! We’re gonna be late!”
“One minute,” he called back, then waited for her telltale stomping to fade away, retreating further into the house.
He straightened his glasses, coughed, and read the last line of the letter again, squinting down at the slightly crumpled paper.
I hope you understand this decision is mine alone, and accept that I will never ask for your permission. Not because I don’t love you, but because I will not put that kind of responsibility on anyone else’s shoulders.
Daniel plucked the pencil from where he’d perched it behind one ear, and tapped the graphite nib once, twice, leaving tiny marks on the page like a flock of migrating commas. How many times was it appropriate to mention love, in one letter? How many before the word lost all meaning?
The tiny editor in his head was at a loss. Each time he went over it he found something new to cross out, until you almost couldn’t read the words for all the cross-hatching.
He left the bed, approaching the desk. He had to crouch to reach the last drawer (which put an awful amount of pressure on his lower back), cleaned most of the junk from it and shoved the letter into a far corner.
Standing back up, he considered the precaution of sliding the lock closed, then quickly abandoned it. Kate had not set foot in the house since one notable Christmas three years prior, and Lenore, though she’d assumed control of the place and exercised martial law over most things within it, avoided his bedroom entirely. If she needed to bring him something while he was in there, she knocked and left it by the door, as if she were the help and he a brooding Gothic lord. Daniel thought that although she’d made the unprompted decision to become his—yuck—primary caretaker, this newfound closeness might be embarrassing her. Something he understood perfectly.
He was greeted downstairs by the steady crescendo of Lenore fretting and fussing to herself, dashing between the kitchen and the living room, stopping a moment in front of the mirror by the entrance to rearrange her hair, then bounding back towards the sofa to straighten out an invisible wrinkle and turn off the TV.
She shot him a look as he stood on the second to last step, gestured towards him with a pillow pinned against her side. “You’re wearing another sweater on top of that. It’s chilly.”
“I’m fine,” he said, clinging to the rail with his good hand.
“It’s chilly.”
She added a scarf on top of the extra jacket for good measure, an ugly polyester tartan thing Daniel didn’t remember buying. It stuck to his neck like velcro tape and gave a terrible itch. On their way to the car he understood that Lenore was talking at him, but his mind kept turning back to structure and punctuation. ‘I will not put that kind of responsibility on your shoulders’-- or leave it be, keep it more impersonal? Aseptic.
“I’m listening,” he lied, as Lenore backed her blue Buick out of the driveway.
“I think this is actually really important for her. When’s the last time she’s introduced anyone to us? You need to make an effort.”
Daniel stared consideringly at his house: low pitched roof, shingles beginning to buckle in uneven rows, the chair that Lenore had moved from the study to the porch in vain hopes of coaxing him out into the sun. An eyesore of pastels, thoroughly faded.
“I am making an effort,” Daniel said, latently offended. Lenore grimaced doubtfully at him. “I’m out of the house on a Sunday afternoon, which feels illegal. Do you know how old I am?”
“Just...be nice,” she sighed after a minute, fingers tapping a fast rhythm on the steering wheel. “Try your best. And be nice.”
Daniel scoffed. The suburb spun past his mirror, tinted with the hues of New York autumn: less pumpkin spice and cozy crackling leaves underfoot, more mottled gray gunk by the sides of the road. He refrained from comments on Lenore’s driving (much too slow, even for their sleepy neighborhood); Christ, but he missed the city.
“And don’t interrogate the guy.”
“Interrogate? When do I ever interrogate anyone?”
It was Lenore’s turn to scoff; in fact she might have guffawed. “Dad—” she began, shaking her head, “you always needle them. That’s why we never bring people around. You put them on the spot, act like you’re interviewing them.”
“Am I not allowed to ask questions anymore?” Daniel retorted, keeping his tone even. But he recognized the truth of what she said. It wasn’t about his daughter’s boyfriends specifically; not something he could jump in then out of, like tapping a switch and suddenly becoming a more pleasant person.
He just asked questions, and he just couldn’t stop. What then? And then? And then?
Talent is fine, but relentlessness you can build a solid career off of.
He could tell that afternoon Lenore was on edge, although to be fair she’d been on edge since she was twelve years old. It made her jittery and overcompensating, which meant that when they finally got to Shayna’s she was overly familiar with the staff but complained about getting them a clean table—one without grease stamps or rings of condensed milk or coffee spills.
It was a homey, sad little corner of the world. Sprung up from the ashes of a quaint mom and pop hardware store, two years after a recession and the owner's untimely burst coronary had run it into the ground. Daniel remembered visiting the shop all of three times, and the conversation by the cash register always dragging awkwardly.
Even now, sitting in the second booth down from the entrance, his eyes skimmed over checkered linoleum and conjured up rows of shelves loaded with nails, cable clips, drills. Where the counter stretched—a wooden ‘70s relic molting its ancient varnish—Daniel pictured the aisle where he’d struggled to track down which exact screws Alice had needed to mount Lenore’s cradle.
The lights flickered. Those at least were the same, he thought, staring into their beams until his vision prickled at the corners. He nudged two fingers underneath his glasses and dug into his eyes.
“Here she is,” Lenore said, vibrating in her seat. She sat up and then immediately down again, waving out the window, mouthing Kate’s name. Daniel’s eyes still blurred unhelpfully, so all he caught of his youngest daughter was a moving smudge in her signature oversized trench-coat, and a tall shape following her close behind.
“Shit,” he said, blinking harder, “goddamn it.”
“Dad they’re here,” Lenore said, and he had to bite back the rude reply that yes, he’d heard her well enough, he wasn’t senile yet. Be nice.
He took off his glasses entirely, and heard—louder for that, perhaps—the little bell ring as the door swung open. Thick-soled boots squeaked towards their table.
He heard Lenore squeezing her way out of the booth, and sounds of sisterly greetings; quick unsentimental pecks, high pitched how’s it going and how are you’s.
Someone shoved a hand in Daniel’s face. In the split second before his eyes flicked up to meet its owner, Daniel’s brain registered a few facts: it was a man’s broad palm, but soft—from the faint whiff of citrus, moisturized-soft. Slender fingers that extended a considerable length, ending in slightly too long but well manicured nails.
His mind caught up in the span of seconds it took his eyes to travel up, up. A familiar hand. The same hand that had curled around the edge of his desk, that swept down the counter at the WundaBar in broad, efficient strokes, before sliding him a martini. Then it all blurred again; an inward-blurring, static rushing between his ears.
…
Daniel blanked most of the date, woke again in the car. Soon as the locks had clicked in place, Lenore lost her reins completely. She was snickering and wide eyed like a teenage girl on her first jello-shot. She started blathering and couldn’t stop.
“I know, right,” she began, misinterpreting Daniel’s silence. A short, exasperated laugh, “She told me he was younger than her but, I wasn’t expecting…well. I guess it’s not that bad, but still. It’s weird, right? Isn’t it weird?”
The verbal barrage swept over Daniel, plummeting past him and out the passenger window, unheard. He wanted to jab his finger on the button, stick his head out, and spew his guts against the side of Lenore’s car.
But his body couldn’t be convinced to move. It was caught, under the spell of some animal conviction, that if he stood absolutely still then there would be no space left for reality to settle in. A little optimistic, seeing as he was in a moving car.
Something must’ve shown on his face. “Dad?” Lenore was shooting sidelong glances at him, now, every few seconds; one hand left the steering wheel to prod his arm, carefully, so carefully. “Dad, are you alright?”
“No,” he said honestly, before he could stop himself. He thought he might really be sick, and cringed at the thought of leaning over, crumpling in on himself, soiling both clothes and seat with vomit; maybe a few specks would fly onto Lenore’s pants, the cracked leather of her boots.
Lenore drew a sharp breath, said “Okay,” and began driving imperceptibly faster. “Want me to swing by the hospital?”
He shook his head, which felt much too light, like at the beginning of a pleasant 3-beer buzz—coupled with the nausea it all worked to disorient him.
“No, just get me home. I wanna go home,” he said. Then, with a start: “Where’s your sister staying?”
Lenore blinked, mouth opening and closing like a fish’s. “In town, I think?” The sudden switch in topics had evidently alarmed her. She was now paying more attention to him than the road, which was luckily barren of other cars.
“She’s not staying at the house?”
“No…no, I don’t think so. She would’ve told me. Dad, are you sure you’re okay?”
He allowed her to maneuver him inside the house. Every few steps, he craned his neck to scope behind them, across their quickly darkening patch of neighborhood: the lights flipping on behind windows, the overflowing garbage bins at their post, one fat cat prancing along the sidewalk.
Something about the quaint benevolence of it all disturbed him. Then clack! The door fell shut and was quickly bolted. Daniel scrambled to flick the lights on, scanning the hallway, walking into the empty kitchen, then back to the living room, just as tidy as Lenore had left it.
“Dad, you're scaring me,” she said, softly, behind him.
There was no one, of course. Rationally, no one could be there. No-one would have had to strand Kate at her highway-side little motel, rush ahead of their car—assuming No-one already knew his address, which Daniel did assume—and silently break his way in. No-one was quite capable of that.
Lenore appeared at his side, a picture of consternation.
“What’s wrong? Do you feel sick?”
Yes, Daniel thought, mouth dry as sand. “No,” he said, as his heart slowed to a steady pace. He paused for a moment at the bottom of the stair, studying the darkness above; then forced his feet to rise one step at a time. Lenore hovered close, wringing her hands.
“I’m just tired,” he said, turning towards her, all the energy he could muster going into his face to pull up a convincing smile. Something that could work to reassure her. “Ate too much. Don’t worry.”
Lenore tightened her grip around the end of the stair railing, wide eyed and fixed on him, whole body tipping forward like a pointer-dog. He guessed she was likely running through past doctor visits and consultations in her head, trying to evaluate how close he was to a stroke. Pretty damn close, by Daniel’s own estimation, but she didn’t need to know that.
He walked to the top of the stairs in total darkness, tapping the wall with increasing force until his hand accidentally slapped the light fixture. Coming into view: the empty corridor, leading down to one single bathroom, and opening onto three more rooms.
He veered into his bedroom with unsteady feet, slammed the door behind.
Daniel felt a faint whiff of guilt at making his daughter worry, although there was reasonable cause for it. But how to explain? Where to even begin telling her? She’d probably spend the rest of the evening pacing a trench through the house, falling to fitful sleep on the pull out couch. Dinner bubbled painfully up his throat, carrying that bile-burn. And she didn’t even know half of it.
First he took out all the desk drawers. Rifled through them so thoroughly that he managed to find a bunch of invitations to his first wedding, Daniel and Alice Molloy invite you— he did not pause to read through. By the time he finished with the desk, there were stacks of old notebooks piled on the floor, and his back was howling.
Next he pillaged the dresser. Rounds of ties he must’ve worn all of once and never again, mottled with dust. Layers of socks, ironed shirts, a pair of ancient leather gloves. Finally, patting down the front of a jacket, Daniel’s fingers ran over something solid, smooth, in the mess of moth-bitten fabric.
He tore the thing out of the drawer in a deathly grip, as if it were alive and would jump away to hide in some dark nook, given the chance.
There, nestled in the front pocket, just as he remembered. Pristine, from going mostly unused, ink probably dried up: polished silver, surprisingly heavy for such a relatively small object.
Daniel ran the pad of his thumb over the curved surface, feeling the delicately traced lines woven across the design. He blinked over the top of his glasses, waited a moment before raising it closer to his face.
From its sheen, a crowd of grinning skulls winked back at him, surrounded by blooming volutes and beautifully carved leaves. Daniel had to almost tap it against his nose to make out what he already knew was there.
A small placard, the size of a thumbtack, opening amid all that horror vacui, and in it etched two equally tiny initials.
D.M.