The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [30]
Jason was looking forward to printing the photographs, spreading them out on his table and selecting a few to submit to the paper. For the first time since he had returned to work, he did not know what he would find. The mystery had roused his curiosity. When he got home, though, the front window was casting a quadrangle of light across the yard. Inside he found Melissa lounging in the living room with seven or eight of her friends. He recognized a few of them from the bus shelter—the boy who had bartered with him for cigarettes, the girl with the curved incision on her waist. His house had been occupied by strangers. The air had that strangely saturated quality peculiar to places that have suddenly fallen silent, as after a dirty joke or an argument, and the tension was strong enough to stifle any irritation he might have felt. He began telling the kids about the concert and the mosh pit, the floating star map of injuries. “I’m surprised you guys weren’t there.”
A boy lying on the floor said, “Not our kind of music, man.” He had folded one of Jason’s throw pillows across the middle and was using it to prop up his head.
“What is your kind of music?”
“We’re into show tunes.”
“Shut up, Bryce.”
The boy began singing “Memory.”
“Hey, I like that song.”
“Bryce, cut it out.”
“I can smile at the old days. I was beautiful then.”
“Dude, nobody wants to hear you sing.”
Jason swung a few steps closer on his crutches. “So what were you all doing when I came in?”
That silence again—it was extraordinary. No one would meet his eye. A girl in a college T-shirt shielded her mouth behind her palm. Melissa scratched her neck, leaving a small area of coruscation that vanished like a firefly’s mating flash. He looked around for a knife, a matchbook, a pack of cigarettes. That was when he spotted Patricia’s journal, the one she had been carrying the day of the accident, the day she died, the day he did. It was jammed between two of the couch cushions. Had he neglected to return it to the exercise room? Or had they found it while he was gone? He pictured them prowling around the house looking for ways to amuse themselves. Hey, guys, you have to check this out. It’s some kind of long-ass love letter. He let his crutches topple away from him. Something happened as he sank to the floor. It was several seconds before he realized, and then only dimly, that he had scraped a layer of skin from his knuckle on the edge of the coffee table.
The journal was in his hands now. It smelled of nicotine and potato chips, and also, faintly, of the shea butter that Melissa or her friends or the woman who had taken it from the hospital must have used. Patricia’s own scent was gone, exhausted, just as it was gone from the bed, the towel rack, her favorite chair, as it would soon be gone from every corner of the house except a few well-hidden sanctuaries, some drawer or jewelry box he had never had occasion to open and that would steal the breath from him when he did.
“All of you need to leave.”
Though he felt frail, his voice had a surprising full-bloodedness to it. The kids stood up from the furniture almost as one. There was the sound of springs extending, of clothing brushing against itself. Someone tried to speak to him. “We didn’t mean anyth—”
“Leave! Right now!”
He waited for their steps to shuffle across the hardwood, then lifted his head. Melissa was standing between the living room and the front hall, her body sliced in two by the doorway.
“You, too. This isn’t your home. Out.”
She let her foot sway back and forth until the floor interrupted it with a squeak. “You know, for what it’s worth, no one was laughing at you. I thought the diary was beautiful, and so did they. That’s why I wanted to show it to them. I just thought you should know that. Have you ever seen the movie Ghost World?” she asked.
She was stalling for some reason, hoping perhaps that he would tell her he understood, that there was nothing to forgive. The corroded rubber of her shoe had left a gray mark on