Four

FOUR

A month has passed since we agreed to do this. We found a medium with a stellar reputation. He's a parapsychologist and a university professor, a scientist who started his career as a skeptic, which is exactly what we want. Dr. Cirillo lives in Chicago, but he agreed to come for half his usual fee, in return for being able to document the event—using aliases in a purely written narrative account with no video or audio recordings.

We asked Dr. Cirillo how we could provide the ideal environment, and he said it should be a quiet spot that would invoke good memories for Anton. That made the choice a simple one.

Anton and I both grew up in Alberta, but his grandmother lived here in Ontario, where she had a huge rambling house on the shores of Lake Erie. When she died, fifteen years ago, the house was sold and turned into a bed-and-breakfast. It's now a short-term vacation rental, and we'd gone there for our first couple getaway.

That makes it the perfect place for the séance. Anton had nothing but good memories of staying there as a child, and we'd built our own good memories there with three visits over the years. I worried it'd be too late to rent, but being ahead of the beach vacation season, we were able to get it on short notice.

Next we need a participant who didn't know Anton. Dr. Cirillo says it's easy for everyone to get caught up in our memories of Anton—his voice, his image, even his scent. Having an outsider there, in addition to Dr. Cirillo himself, helps eliminate a false positive. I don't even need to look for someone. When Shania catches wind of this final séance, it's obvious that she'd love to come, so I invite her.

I'm also supposed to bring items from Anton's life, and that's easily done, too, since I haven't gotten rid of anything. Shania also suggests that I tell Dr. Cirillo I have one particular thing: Anton's ashes.

Anton wanted to be cremated. He gave no instructions for spreading his ashes anywhere. That's usually illegal, and he'd never have put that pressure on me. He expected they'd go in a memorial garden, but I want to do more.

No, that's half a lie. I'm not ready to let them go, so they're in an ornate wooden box on my dresser. I'm reluctant to ask Dr. Cirillo if I should bring them—it seems a little macabre—but I finally do, and he says yes, absolutely.

Everything is settled. There's just one problem.

Keith.

I agreed he could join us, and he's done nothing but interfere. He micromanaged, as he always does, except we aren't his office interns and he's not the expert here. Every step of the way has been a battle.

A house on the lake, Nic? Are you sure? They get a lot of windstorms this time of year, and your CF equipment needs reliable electricity.

Do you really want to take that Shania girl? Isn't she the one who found that last quack?

Are you sure you want to fly someone in from the States? There must be local experts.

You're taking Anton's ashes? Is that a good idea? What if something happens to them?

A week before we leave, Libby calls.

"I've been offered a chance to attend a conference in Vancouver next week," she says.

"That's great," I say. Then I pause. "Which means you'd need Keith to look after the kids. When he's supposed to be at the séance with me."

"Right." She clears her throat. "I don't have to go to this conference. Only I was thinking… maybe you'd like me to?"

Maybe I'd like an excuse to do the séance without Keith. That's what she means.

"I'd be a coward if I said yes, wouldn't I?" I say.

She's quiet for a moment. Then she says, "I really hate getting between you and Keith. I always have. He's being a pain in the ass. It's only because he loves you, but if we're trying for the perfect setup, everything just right…"

"Having Keith there is going to mess it up. He'll interfere, and we'll fight, and Jin will get caught in the middle, and after it's done, I'll have an excuse to say that's why the séance went wrong."

"I do have a conference invitation, and it is unexpected. If Keith strongly objects, we can revisit it. But I think, while he'll fret, he trusts Jin to be there for you. You just might have to tolerate daily phone check-ins."

"Okay, give him a call. If he will stay home, I'd rather he did."

Keith is staying in Toronto with his kids. He'd done exactly as Libby expected. He grumbled, but gave in on the understanding that there would be daily phone calls and, when the séance was over, he'd bring Hayden and Lucy to join Jin and me for a weekend at the lake.

While Jin had offered to drive, I feel more comfortable with my own car. Since starting on the new meds, I haven't needed to be hospitalized for an infection, or even have a nurse come to dump antibiotics through the shunt permanently embedded in my arm. I still don't like being an hour from the nearest major hospital without feeling free to hop into my car at 2 A.M. if I need to. I also have a lot of stuff to bring—my airway-clearance vest alone comes in its own carry-on-sized wheelie bag. Yep, I don't travel light. But I do travel, and that's the important thing.

Before we leave, I do my daily half hour with the vest and my forty minutes with the nebulizer. I also do my workout in the condo gym.

When people hear I have CF, they offer me car rides for short distances or help carrying bags. I appreciate that, because I know they mean well. It's true that, with my shitty lungs, exercise-induced asthma is a concern, and I'm no longer running the half-marathons of my university days. But exercise has always been an important part of my treatment. I might even be a touch neurotic about it, and knowing I won't have a gym at the beach house, I'm getting in an hour before we leave. Once there, I'll make a point to rise early for long walks.

I'm in decent shape. Weight is often a concern in CF—our difficulty absorbing nutrients and processing food can lead to us being underweight and even malnourished. Heading into my thirties, I got a lot of "Oh, you're still so slender" and "No middle-age spread for you, huh?" Again, I understand the sentiment, and I only smile and don't explain. My focus is on keeping up a healthy weight and staying as strong as I can for as long as I can.

I pick up Shania and Jin and then start the trek to Lake Erie. Toronto is on Lake Ontario. Erie is to the west, which means an hour drive along the highway and then another hour south through farm country until we reach the shore.

There are no major cities along the Canadian shore—they're all at least a thirty-minute drive north. Halfway across Lake Erie it becomes the United States, with Buffalo at one end, Detroit at the other, and Cleveland in the middle. Where we're going is across the lake from Ohio, only visible as a glow of nuclear plants at night. Okay, that's not true. Sometimes you can also see smoke from the plants during the day.

The town nearest the lake house is big enough to have a name but too small to have much else. There's a beachside stand for fries, a couple of bait shops, a pier, and a half-dozen small RV parks, just starting to fill as we've passed the Victoria Day long weekend.

Our destination is lakefront but not beachfront. Along this shore, Lake Erie is mostly cliffside viewing, and that cliff is eroding fast. When we pull onto the road leading to the house, Shania gasps.

"Look at that view," she says. "Can we get down to the water?"

"There's a path if it's still safe," I say. "We can do that later, maybe at sunset. It looks like we'll have one today, and they're stunning."

I pull into the semicircular drive in front of the two-story red-brick house.

Jin rolls down his window to gape up. "Okay, when you said ‘lake house,' I expected a cottage. Do I even want to know how much this place cost to rent?"

"It was cheaper in the off-season, when Anton and I always came." I stop the car in front of the steps. "But the price isn't bad, mostly because it's five years overdue for a touch-up and ten years overdue for a renovation. In other words, expect dated furniture and a toilet you might need to flush twice."

"I don't care," Shania says. "It looks amazing."

The house is two stories of Georgian-style brickwork, a red rectangle of perfect symmetry, like the way a child would draw a house, the windows all just so. Ivy covers the entire front of it. It had been in Anton's family for generations, built at the turn of the twentieth century as a summer home for his great-great-grandfather, who'd made his fortune in textiles.

Eventide Manor—as it was once called—was designed in the pre-air-conditioning days when well-off families had a summer house. Dad would stay in the humid and sweltering city for business while Mom and the kids retired to the lake, with Dad joining them on weekends. Anton remembered his grandmother telling him stories of her parents doing that—her father staying in Toronto while her mother brought the kids to the lake house once school ended.

By the time Anton's grandmother inherited it, the family no longer had the money for a summer residence, so she'd retired here following the death of her husband. Even then, there hadn't been money to keep it up, and Anton remembered summers spent helping his father lay bricks and his mother clear the overgrown gardens.

These days, the house and gardens still have a slightly disheveled look, as if someone's really trying to keep them up, but never quite manages. If it reminds me a bit of my brother—solid, reliable, and a bit down-at-heel—maybe that's part of its charm.

The gardens are mostly stone and statuary, with some bushes and perennials in need of pruning. There's a wild look to them, one that reminds me of Victorian children's novels with overgrown English gardens. When Anton and I had been here last, it'd been too cold to sit outside for long, but I'd like to do that this time. Find a spot in this wild place and curl up with a book.

We walk in, and I toss my luggage down in the front hall.

"I'm taking the Monroe bedroom," I say. "You can't miss it."

"Let me guess," Jin says. "It's the one full of photos and busts of James Monroe, fifth president of the United States?"

I smile. "That would be interesting. It's Marilyn Monroe. Very sixties glam. The decor is from when the place was a bed-and-breakfast, with themed rooms. When Anton was little, it was the room he stayed in with his brother, so that's where we always stayed.…" I clear my throat. "Anyway, Dr. Cirillo said I should use that one, if it's not too hard on me."

"Speaking of Dr. Cirillo, have you heard from him?" Shania asks as she carries in her duffel.

I check my phone. "Seems he texted an hour ago. He landed in Detroit safely. It might take a while to get through the border, but he expects to be here by seven. He said he'll grab dinner on the way, so don't wait for him."

"We're getting dinner delivered, right?" Jin says. "A neighbor?"

"Yep." I run a hand through my hair, shaking it out after the drive. "Lunch and dinner will be provided by Mrs. Kilmer. She lives at the end of the road. We passed her place. She has a standing arrangement with the latest owner. Anton and I had her cook for us the last time we were here, and I was glad to hear she was still doing it."

We head back outside to grab more stuff. Besides my CF supplies, I also brought groceries, for breakfast and snacks. And cocktail hour. Dr. Cirillo asked us not to drink past dinner—so we weren't tipsy for the séances—but cocktails at five were fine.

After we take that all in, I go back out for Anton's ashes. I'd tucked the box into a nook in the trunk, so no one would pull it out accidentally. As I shut the trunk, I glance toward the house, where Jin and Shania are talking in the open doorway.

I'm not eager to brush past them with this box. It feels macabre to bring it, but it also feels… private.

I call that I'm going to check around back. Then I slip to the side, where a wrought-iron fence stretches along the front of the gardens. The fence is a bit of a conceit when there's nothing except that front section. Anton said it'd stretched around the gardens when he was young, but the sides had been in disrepair, and at some point the back toppled over the eroding cliff edge. One of the subsequent owners removed the sides and left the front section up, including the gate.

While the fence doesn't actually fence anything in, I still close the gate behind me. Cobblestones carve paths into the overgrown gardens, and I tread with care, those stones being uneven from frost upheaval. I soon find my footing and keep going until I reach the caution tape that's been strung along the cliff edge.

My gaze goes left, to a spot where the tape dips down. That's the path Anton showed me, and that dip in the tape suggests others have found it, pushing down the flimsy barrier to climb over.

I step up to the cliff and look out. Waves lap at the bottom. The water is calm, no whitecaps in sight.

I stand there, holding the box in both hands.

"No boats today," I murmur. "Sunny and gorgeous. It's going to be one hell of a sunset."

I lift the box, as if I'm showing Anton the view. I remember the first time I stood here with him, his arm around my waist, as we gazed out over the lake. We'd just gotten together as a couple, and I'd been so damned happy. Happy and in a bit of shock.

Anton and I attended the same high school, but only for a year before my family moved to Toronto. Then Anton came to Toronto for work, and we'd met through what I presumed was an accident, though at his death he'd confessed otherwise.

When he asked me to coffee, I expected it'd be an awkward reunion, both of us spitting out names as prompts to joint memories. Then we'd go our separate ways and vow to "keep in touch," which neither of us would until we bumped into each other again.

Except the reunion hadn't been awkward. And we had kept in touch.

One coffee date became two and then three and finally actual dates, which brought us to his family's old lake house, at the point in our relationship where we were both feeling like it was something.

"It was," I whisper, clutching the box. "It was a big something. I love you so damn much, Anton, and—"

A frisson tingles down my arms, almost like a shock, and I fumble the box. My heart leaps into my throat, my brain imagining the box tumbling over the cliff, me jumping after it before I realize what I've done. But I only fumble it.

I step back from the edge, holding the box in one hand as I shake the other. The memory of that electrical shock returns, and I glance down, as if half expecting to see I'd stepped on a fallen live wire.

Nothing.

I rub my arm. My brain wants to jump on that jolt as a sign that Anton is here, but that was no lover's touch. It was a shock, the unpleasantness of it lingering long after the physical sensation faded.

I lift the box. It happened while I was holding it in both hands. Did I conduct a jolt of energy? Yeah, no. My degree might be in software engineering, but I know enough about science to realize that a wooden box is not a conductor.

Whatever it was—

"Looks like a storm's coming," a voice says behind me.

I jump so fast my feet tangle. Shania lets out a squeak and lunges, as if I'm about to topple off the cliff.

Waving her off with a laugh, I gesture to the three feet between me and the edge. "Even I can't stumble that far. What's that about a storm?"

I look out, the water calm and sun-dappled, the sky bright blue and cloudless. I can't imagine anything less likely than a storm, but when she points, I notice a black cloud off to our right. It almost looks like a funnel, swirling around on itself. That makes no sense. It's a clear day—

My phone rings. I glance down and sigh.

"My brother," I say. "I've been here an entire twenty minutes and haven't called yet." I glance back at the funnel-shaped cloud. "Can you check the forecast while I answer this?"

"Sure."

We're in the house. Shania looked up the weather forecast and found no mention of a storm, much less a tornado. We must have been seeing smoke. One of the nuclear plants? We check that, but the directionality is wrong and that smoke wouldn't be black. Hopefully it's not a boat on fire. The cloud seems to be gone now, though, so I put it out of my mind and focus on settling into my room.

As I told Jin, it's the Monroe room, which is less Marilyn-specific and more sixties glam, with bright colors, curved furniture, and semi-tasteful gold leaf on the plaster ceiling.

When I step in, time ripples, and I'm with Anton again on our first visit, us approaching the bedroom door.

"And here is where Viktor and I slept when we were kids. Well, until he was sixteen and stayed back home to work for the summer, and I got the whole room to myself. Baba let us decorate it, and I'm really hoping it's changed, or I'm totally blaming the pinups on Viktor."

He throws open the door and waves me through.

I step in and sputter. "Never knew your teen crushes were quite so retro, but I'm digging it."

He walks in and his face…

I laugh until my sides hurt. "Childhood memories ruined again."

"It's very…" He looks around at the glitz. "Sparkly. And gold. Very gold. I'm guessing you'd like us to take another room?"

"Never. It's a round bed with silk sheets under a boudoir photo of Marilyn Monroe." I hop onto the bed. "You wanna play horny honeymooners?"

He grins and tosses his bag down. "Nah, I wanna play horny teen who dreamed of getting a girl in my bed here."

"Well, come on then. I'm here to make all your teenage dreams come true."

I smile and shake my head as I put down my bag. As Anton said later, there was nothing of his old room here. The furnishings are strictly thrift-shop fare, with sticking drawers, loose knobs, and water marks, but they are immaculately clean, and the bedding is brand-new.

There's an entire bookcase filled with reading material, and I glance over to see whether there's anything recent. Nope. More thrift-shop finds, with nothing published in the last twenty years. Luckily, I brought my own reading material. I set two novels on my nightstand. Then I take a third from my bag. It's a space opera with a bookmark three-quarters of the way through. The spine is bent at that same spot, from having sat open to that same page since October.

I take the novel to the right side of the bed. Anton's side. Then I remove the bookmark and lay it open, just as it had been the night he died.

Do I feel a little foolish doing that? Yes. Mostly, though, I feel relieved, as if I can sleep in here now. If it helps, then it's fine. Or so says my therapist.

The bed is circular, with white satin sheets, and I imagine pulling them back and sliding in. Just for a few minutes.

Just for a few minutes.

Which will turn into hours, lying there, paralyzed by grief, crying into the pillows.

Yep, none of that today. I pull the folded comforter tight, as if it's a shield that'll keep me out of bed until nightfall.

A knock at the door makes me jump.

"Nic?" Jin calls. "Once you're settled, it's cocktail hour."

"Be right there!" I call before fleeing the bedroom and the memories there.