Chapter 1

1

come home

i’ll be waiting

Received 8/6 3:32A.M.

The message sat unanswered. Andrew tapped from Eddie’s hanging text thread to the brief obituary that had run in the local paper: Edward Lee Fulton, recent graduate of Ohio State University, is survived by adoptive parents Lou and Jeanne Blur and sibling Andrew Blur as well as close friends and colleagues. Memorial services will be held at Streckler Funeral Parlor on Tuesday, August 10^{that 11A.M. Andrew dropped his skull against the headrest of the driver’s seat, free arm dangling out the open window. The impound office waited across a potholed blacktop parking lot, baked under dog-day sun to a shimmer. Sans air-conditioning, the interior of the Supra grew hot and hotter as he flicked through nothing on his phone. Del had left the I-65 rest stop right behind him, but she was late catching up.}

He figured that might have something to do with the bitter exchange they’d traded over the hood of her sedan, when she’d said, “Come home with me after this, there’s no reason to stay down here,” and he’d replied, “There’s no reason for me to go back up there, either.” Her face had shuttered. The problem was he meant it. He was coming back to Tennessee, but there wasn’t going to be a homecoming. He’d buried home two weeks past.

Del’s trim red Focus crunched over the stray gravel scattered across the parking lot and jerked to a stop alongside him. He got out without rolling his windows up. If someone felt the pressing need to steal his trash bags full of clothes, or ransack a footwell crammed with books, they could help themselves. The estate letters in his back pocket were crumpled from the drive. He unfolded them as she joined him, sweat ringing the collar and armpits of her loose muscle tee, her mouth a rigid, bloodless line. Her crisp silence told him as much as he needed to know about the fallout of their sniping.

“Well, here we are,” he muttered, to a hum of assent from Del.

The impound office was a glorified double-wide with a narrow service counter and dense safety glass barricading off the clerk in his reflective vest. Andrew said, “I’m here to pick up a car. It’s been in impound a couple weeks, estate shit had to get sorted out first. I’ve got the paperwork.”

“Okay, sure,” the guy said without taking his eyes off his phone.

Andrew stuffed the letters and his license under the slot and stepped to the side with Del as the clerk heaved himself up to go searching. She said, “I’m serious, Andrew. I know your mom isn’t going to say it, so I will. I don’t think Nashville is where you need to be right now. Especially not alone.”

He’d spent the past six weeks chafing to come south, waiting for the all-clear while Eddie put him off, and put him off, and put him off—May stretching to June, June to July, while he sat amongst his packed boxes wondering what the fuck, man. The excuses were bullshit, but they kept coming. First Eddie had a short research trip to finish at the close of spring term, then he needed to prepare every last perfect detail of the house for Andrew, and finally there was some old family business he said Andrew wouldn’t want to be party to (he was right about that one). By the time Eddie drummed up a summer independent study that Andrew would “distract” him from if he showed before it was finished, Andrew figured he was being teased. After that interminable wait and the devastating payoff, he’d be fine if he never laid eyes on Columbus again.

He had to be in Nashville to find out what Eddie had done to get himself put in the ground. That wasn’t a fight worth rehashing again with Del, though. She was as secure in her conclusion that he needed to cut his losses and accept Eddie’s death as all the other people orbiting his life, watching and judging from the outside.

“I won’t be alone. I’ll be with what’s-his-name, Riley, and all those folks,” he said.

“Yeah, the friends he didn’t introduce you to and that your parents didn’t invite to his funeral, that sounds great. A super supportive system,” she countered, measured but fierce.

Andrew scraped the sweat-drenched hair off his forehead, then ran his fingers through it twice to slick the whole mess out of his face. Four weeks past due for a trim. He wiped his damp hand on his jeans and wrangled the urge to say something: you invited yourself, I didn’t ask for support.

The clerk interrupted: “I’ve got your keys, man, and there’s a hold fee.” He held out the twin red-and-black key fobs on a wire loop—one for valet, one for horsepower—and a thin sheaf of papers.

“How much?” Andrew asked.

“Looks like two hundred thirty-three, for the tow and storage.”

Andrew clenched his jaw as his frustration abruptly compounded. It didn’t matter that he’d summarily inherited the entire seven-point-five million dollars Eddie’s late parents had left him a decade ago, not right then.

“You’re telling me I have to give you two hundred bucks to pick up my dead best friend’s car,” he said.

“Hey, sorry, I don’t make the rules,” the clerk responded.

“Goddamn.” Andrew slapped his card onto the counter. “Fucking charge it, then.”

“Calm down,” Del said.

“Leave it,” he said through gritted teeth. The clerk passed him his card and the charge slip, along with the release forms and the key ring. He signed each dotted line with jagged, imprecise slashes of the pen. “Where’s the car?”

“Head to row eighteen and hang a right, it should be about three-quarters toward the end of the lot. Look for the sign at sixteen, though, the numbers fell off the rows after that. Just count your way.” He took the signature sheets and stuck them into an accordion file. “Sorry ’bout your loss.”

Andrew banged out the door; Del slipped through behind him. The pavement ended at the barbed-wire gate of the impound lot proper, giving way to gravel and, a handful of steps in, the crunch of pebbled glass. One fat grackle sat sentry atop the second numbered pole. Shreds of metal and plastic littered the ground underfoot.

Almost a third of the cars were mangled: doors crushed, paint scorch-ruined, windshields spiderwebbed with cracks. Those had permanent residence on the lot—or were interred there, he thought with a morbid humor. The sepulchral vibe ached in his molars, wreckage all around resting silent and still. The sign for row seven hung upside down from a single remaining screw. To his left at the head of row eleven, someone’s sticker-splattered banana-yellow tuner—a Civic, maybe a 2010. He sidestepped to tap the hood in solidarity. Del snorted, and he flinched. Her hand caught his elbow, thumb slipping on the sweat at the crook.

“Please just explain it to me, why you’re still going forward with this after he…” she paused. The sun forced her to squint, chin tilted as he turned to stare her straight in the face. “After he did what he did.”

“You aren’t going to say it?”

“Do you want me to?” she asked.

Without answering, he shook off her grip and kept walking. The pale tops of his feet in his sneakers and the bare length of his arms had begun to sting, unsuited as he’d been since childhood to the hot hand of summer in the South. A broiling tension pushed under his skin. The image of Eddie’s corpse, emptied out and dolled up, remained stuck to the inside of his eyelids, a non-negotiable, fragmented picture. Under the sleeves of his funeral suit, fat stitches had closed Eddie’s waxy forearms from wrist to elbow, black like tarred railroad ties.

No mistaking the ruined flesh and its bleak message, unless the obvious narrative wasn’t the whole story. Maybe instead it was a palimpsest, scrawled in haste over the original draft to cover—something else. He wasn’t sure what.

“I don’t believe he killed himself. He had no reason to,” he said against his better judgment to the sound of her footsteps crunching behind him, because he didn’t have the fortitude to turn and look her in the face. “I don’t know, Del. Does that sound like Eddie to you? He ever strike you as the type?”

“No, but that doesn’t change the fact that he did it. I hate seeing you grasping for straws like this,” she said.

Her pitying tone, the same he’d heard from the cops and his parents, pushed his temper over the edge.

“I wish you’d stayed the fuck home,” he said.

The scuff of her shoes paused as he continued on. “Jesus, Andrew.”

Naked poles stuck out of the ground like dead trees. He hooked a turn into row eighteen past a grisly, caution-taped SUV that leered with a dank stench. The hair rose on the nape of his neck. A shade loitered on the wreck’s bones like a smear of night. The ghost reached toward him in the corner of his vision, but he resisted its gravitational force out of long habit, passing the wreck before the intrusive specter even had the chance to break his stride. Down the row he spotted a sleek and boxy black bumper. His heart tripped, squeezed.

“Look at me,” she said desperately from behind him. He twisted on one heel, paused halfway between Eddie’s car and Del standing with her hands at her sides, defeated already before she spoke again. “Why not defer a semester and come home, stay with me while you adjust? If you’re still interested in the program come spring, then do it after all. I’m worried about leaving you here, not knowing what happened with him.”

“Go home, Del,” he said.

“What?” She balked.

“I’ve said it enough, we’re done here. You didn’t know him how I did. I’m going to find out what happened, and I don’t give a fuck what you think about it, okay?” His shoulders heaved with the rising volume of his voice.

Deep red climbed across her olive-tan skin from collarbones to cheeks, a steel surety flashing as she spat back, “Don’t be such a dick—he was my friend too. And I care about you. I’m trying to help.”

Friendsmeant nothing in comparison to what he and Eddie were to each other.

He said, “You’re not listening to me and you’re not helping jack shit. The roommate said he’d meet me at the house at seven. I’m going to the executor’s office before then, and I don’t need an audience for any of that.”

“God, you selfish fuck. The pair of you are such a mess, I don’t even…” She trailed off as her words caught up: are, she’d said. Are. She jerked her head and pushed her hands out as if shoving the air between them apart.

The tiniest twinge of guilt flared in Andrew as tears spilled in a line across her cheek. The oozing specter from the crunched SUV lapped across her feet unbeknownst to her, clueless that she stood so close to old death. Under the high-noon sun, the alien shadow held his attention like a magnet; when her heels scuffed backward two steps, it retracted to the wreck once more, unable to reach her.

His distracted silence spoke for itself.

“All right, fine. I’ll leave,” she said.

“Delia,” he murmured, closer to a concession.

“No, you said it yourself. Apparently it’s more important for you to follow his lead even when he’s gone than it is to be with your goddamn family, or your friends.”

“I wasn’t here with him,” he said. Nashville held the last of Eddie, the unseen weeks. Andrew willed her to understand, even though she hadn’t yet, not one time.

“And that’s the reason?” She tossed her words out with a skyward gesture, frustrated.

“It’s the reason I’ve got. I wasn’t here when he needed me to be.”

She shouted, “Because he left you behind with us! He didn’t deign to allow you to be with him. He let the rest of us watch you mope around and—”

“Stop! Just, stop.” The black car loomed, spiking longing through his chest. He said, “Let me be alone, Del. I didn’t ask for help, and I didn’t even ask for company.”

Del scrunched both hands into her hair, yanking the ponytail lopsidedly loose, a strangled shrieking sound tearing from her throat. No further emotion rose in him in response. He’d loved her once, or something close to it, years ago before the three of them had settled into their off-kilter unit. Now her paroxysm of grief and anger played out in front of him like a film, or the panic of a stranger, while he drifted in the void left where Eddie wasn’t. After the outburst, she dropped her arms limp.

“Fuck you,” she breathed out as she turned her back on him.

The sun-dappled straggle of her tawny hair bounced as she strode stiffly away without a final glance. An itch tickled the root of his tongue. He swallowed against it fruitlessly. Eddie had come to Nashville alone. He’d left in a box, a handful of weeks before Andrew was due to join him, without so much as a warning—leaving him a car, and a house, and a graduate program, and a fortune, but nothing that mattered as much as himself. Without Eddie, there was no point. He palmed the key fobs. Cicadas called as he crept the last few yards along the lot. The hulk of Eddie’s car grew to meet him as he approached.

Slickly grim in the gold afternoon light, the black chrome and black detailing and cherry-red rims struck him to the core. The morning Eddie’s trust fund spilled open, the pair of them had driven two hundred miles to pick up the absurd beast. More muscle than the Aventador went Eddie’s argument; Andrew responded andso American it hurts. But the Hellcat fit him, reckless and extravagant, made to measure straight off the line. The brash white of Eddie’s toothy smile and his muscled arm hanging out the window, gunning the brutal roar of the engine at the first stoplight they’d coasted up to together, had lit him on fire.

The car could not be his. It belonged to no one but Eddie, this machine that had extended his churning life-large hunger from palm on gearshift and foot on clutch, glorious and unapologetic. The small bristling wolf decal he’d stuck in the corner of the back driver’s side window flashed its teeth. Andrew pressed UNLOCK and crossed the distance in three stilted strides, jerking open the door to stand in the wash of magnified scent: cigarettes cheap deodorant sweat-musk pot. It lanced straight through his skull.

He laid his arm across the doorframe and his clammy forehead on top of it, breathing shallow. One scraping gasp hitched for a moment before gusting out in an agitated burst. He hadn’t cried for the last two weeks since he’d gotten the call from his own mother, Eddie’s listed next of kin. When he thought too long about the fact that Eddie’s big hand was never going to clap across the nape of his neck again, or that the brief, happenstance videos left on his phone had captured the final remnants of Eddie’s human voice for endless stale replay, a nothing-numbness severed him from himself at the root. Self-preservation, maybe.

Faced with the real process of inheritance, Eddie’s car reeking of summertime indiscretions, a terrible pressure constricted the soft muscle of his throat. Andrew clung to a thread of control as he collapsed into the grasp of the Challenger’s driver’s seat and pulled the door shut with a muffled slam.

One hundred thousand hours were packed on top of each other in Eddie’s lingering scent: eleven years old and pressing cut palms with tears in their eyes, swearing brotherhood; thirteen and boxing up his bedroom for their move to Columbus, Eddie shell-shocked and silent over the loss of his mother and father and home; fifteen and smoking cigarettes under the back porch with the spiders; seventeen and drunk, Del sandwiched half-nude between them in the back seat of a borrowed sedan under cold winter stars; nineteen and messaging each other across a classroom with grins tucked out of sight; twenty-one and putting in their applications for the same graduate program in the campus café. That’s where it broke, when Eddie surprised him with an earlier admission and a request that Andrew wait him out. Their first and last extended separation. Andrew had promised to follow behind, toes at Eddie’s heels.

He had, and he hadn’t. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.

On the passenger side, Eddie had left a wadded-up tank top, a sea-green flat bill hat, and a crumpled straw wrapper. Andrew adjusted the seat out of habit to accommodate his lesser height, then pushed the clutch down and jammed the starter button. His thumb left a trace of his own sweat over the print that had been smudged there. The rumbling snarl of the engine waking shook him. The clock read 6:52. A Misfits song punched abruptly through the speakers as the media system replaced an absent Bluetooth signal with radio; the horrible jolt had him slapping his hand down on the volume knob to shut it off on instinct.

With nothing else waiting on him, he drove.

After a coasting trip around Centennial Park to the lawyer’s offices, where he had to discuss investment accounts and multiple properties and cold cash funds, then an additional circuitous drive through campus, he rolled to a stop in front of 338 Capitol Street—Eddie’s house, now somehow Andrew’s property. The place was a sedate old Craftsman six blocks from campus, shaded by a looming oak that shed branches on the rooftop and yard in twiggy tangles. The photos Eddie had sent, framed over his shoulder with a grin or the corner of a crinkled, smiling eye in view, had made it look verdant and charming, not quite so summer-withered. Lights glowed through the front windows. He pulled out his phone to swipe through saved snaps from Eddie that spanned the past six months.

He lingered on a shot of the roommate, Riley, flicking a wave with a rillo between his lips and a dimple at the corner of his smile. He was wiry, sporting an undercut colored black on top and a shade of yellow too close to orange to be natural on the scruffy stubble beneath. A scar crossed from the bridge of his nose down to the top of his cheekbone, thin and pale pink. Andrew flipped through more photos of strangers, recalling their names where possible—Ethan, West, Sam, Luca, a handful more whose faces he’d glimpsed but couldn’t place. The people who’d been around Eddie most, until the end.

Eddie’s assurance that he’d introduce him around as soon as he arrived left him stumbling now. Over the past week, he and Riley had traded a few awkward, terse DMs about what time Andrew would be arriving, but nothing more. He knew that Riley was also in their American Studies program, and that Eddie had invited him to be their roommate after knowing him for two weeks, despite having absolutely no need to share expenses on the house he’d flat-out purchased: an incursion on Andrew’s space that rankled. He pieced together the home from a series of stills: a foyer with a bike rack, leading through to the sprawl of the living room and kitchen; upstairs, three bedrooms and a bathroom off of a landing. It was close and charming. It was supposed to have been theirs.

Andrew cut the engine. The warm night outside blinked with fireflies while he sat adrift. Fatigue throbbed in the soles of his feet and in his tailbone. He would walk in and see Eddie’s things, pace over his footprints like he was waiting for him to arrive—like he’d gotten held up after class and had Andrew pick his car up from the shop. He crossed his wrists over the steering wheel and dug the fingernails of his right hand into the blotchy bracelet of inked dots around his left wrist, then bowed his head between them.

Glowing red digits ticked out time, methodical, on the dash clock. He wondered if Riley was concerned that the mysterious stranger who now owned his house might be about to kick him out. The thought of mounting those front steps, crossing the threshold, and introducing himself to his inherited roommate made his skin crawl. Instead, Andrew fumbled for the seat adjustment and tipped into a recline, flinging the seat belt aside and tucking one knee over the other. The soft nap of the red leather headrest held a faint animal scent.

Enough minutes slid past that the interior displays cut out with a click and plunged him into streetlight-banded darkness. He counted his steady breaths, continuing to squeeze his own wrist. The underside of the steering wheel dug against the outside of his leg, huddled crooked as he was in the bucket seat. Weighed down by the shittiness of the interminable drive, the conflict-riddled afternoon, and the impending rest of his life, he allowed exhaustion to drag his eyelids shut for a brief rest.

Freezing pressure crushed his lungs. He woke with a heaving spasm less than a single blink from the moment he’d drifted off, or so it felt to his disoriented brain. His bones throbbed under his muscles, wracked with another shudder that torqued him against the seat. His right hand scrabbled at the divider; superimposed over his limp left arm was a headache-inducing vision of a skeletal limb dripping brackish blood.

Mist fogged in front of his face from the wheezing gasps of his breath. His own distorted, huffed yelps brought him further out of his stupor, enough to fling himself across to the passenger seat headfirst. The gearshift slammed into his calf. His temple cracked against the window. He scrambled upright, dragging his leg to the other footwell as if escaping a monster’s claws. A hollow silhouette constructed out of negative shadow occupied the driver’s seat in his stead, claiming the seat where it had belonged in life. He wasn’t alone in the way Del imagined—far from it.

The enclosed space stank of summer-boiled earth, swamp-wet and fetid. Andrew snapped his teeth shut on a scream. The dead thing shifted through banded gold and black darkness, refracting the suggestion of a jawbone or a half-lidded eye, an elbow propped through the window without regard for the glass. It lifted a hand from the wheel to reach for him, uncanny as a marionette; searing cold fingertips tapped the tattooed bone of his wrist. The streetlight overhead popped at the instant of contact, bursting in a flare of light that left him part blinded—and when his eyes cleared, the thing was gone. Abandoned again.

It was the third time in fifteen days that the haunt had visited him.

He yanked open the glovebox and fumbled through junk for Eddie’s spare cigarette pack: four left, lighter tucked inside in case of emergency. Three tries to light it, hands and lips shaking too ferociously to line up in the necessary order. He coughed out his first burning pull and sat with the glow of the cherry balanced between his knees while he caught his breath. Fragments of the nightmare drifted with the smoke curling tongues around his face.

Andrew had thought a near decade of persistent, life-starved haunts and their shredded memories prying into his dreams would be enough to prepare him for the shade he refused to name Eddie, but three times was not the charm. His hands continued to shake. Wounds he’d never had, only seen on his best friend’s corpse and in his tortured imaginings, stung across his forearms—but on petrified second glance, he saw only unblemished lean muscle, dusted with sparse hair standing on end.

Dregs of primal fear clanged around the inside of his head with the dissolving remains of a nightmare: the specter’s punishing gift to him, disorganized visions of pain, fear, cut wrists, desperation without structure or clarity. He’d sorted through the tattered remnants left behind by purposeful suicides before. This grisly, vicious miasma didn’t remind him of those at all, though explaining that to another human being was a nonstarter. Only Eddie could’ve grasped his point, understood from experience the gulf between the two and the questions it raised.

A sour copper taste lingered on his gums. He lifted his unsteady hand to the dim moonlight and found fingerprint blisters frost-burned around the base of his wrist, crossing the uneven dots of old ink. He stubbed the cigarette, crawled into the back seat, and tucked his body into the tightest ball it could make, the collar of his shirt stuffed between his teeth to grind. His wrist stung in starbursts where the phantom had marked him.

Eddie,he thought, what happened, what the fuck happened to you?