The clock in the dining room ticks loud over the sound of our assembly in the close room, cabinets full of china likely stolen and the window curtains thrown wide to the gravel road outside that stretches it’s lazy arm over the expanse of the bayou. We settle into silence. Evelyn looks from Bonnie to Adam, guilty with a secret. Clyde eats his Skittles. Grady taps his fingers on the table. Brad and Dean text, probably one another. Bonnie watches. Nick sleeps, or pretends to. Adam bites his thumbnail, worried.
“It’s been awhile since we’ve heard,” Dean says into the discomfort. “Has...anyone...heard?”
“No,” Grady answers. “Not a word. Not for days.”
“So, she’s gone,” Bonnie says, her tone dismissive. No sense in wasting time on the dearly departed.
“I don’t know,” Evelyn says. “I mean...maybe something happened. She said…”
“She said she would come back. She don’t come back,” Grady answers, his patois sneaking out of his dark lips with his distress. Everyone knows that just before she left, Anders broke off her engagement to Grady, and has since cut off her communication with the family.
“I don’t know,” Evelyn pleads. “I mean...maybe we could…”
Her eyes are wide in apology, and refusal to accept that there is something she can’t affect, finally, where all the rest of her life, she could. Being left. The final nail in anyone’s coffin. The funeral ends, and people go home.
“Call for a hundred and tenth time?” Brad asks her, his voice dripping sarcasm from behind the screen of his phone.
“She’s gone,” Clyde says, his voice flat, and the discussion is closed. If Clyde says she’s gone, she’s gone, the painful certainty of it the price we pay for his omniscience.
“But will she ever…” Dean begins, seeing the pained expression on the faces around him. “She’s come back before. Will she ever…”
“Nope,” Clyde says, and swallows his bite of candy, hard, and wipes tears from his eyes beneath the curtain of his stringy hair.
The silence fills with some sniffs of regret or remorse. Brad’s sarcasm takes over.
“Well, wouldja listen to that fat lady?”
“Mighty fine voice,” Clyde agrees.
“Oughtta be in pictures,” Bonnie adds.
The ninth dining chair in the room is suddenly conspicuous, empty but for the ghost of a girl no one will ever see or know again.
Brad’s scoffing is angry, vehemently spit from his cherry lips. He’d wanted things from Anders she couldn’t or wouldn’t give him, and the exposure of his begging for them left him raw and feeling pathetic.
“Yeah. Well. She’s jerked me around for the last time,” he bites, as if trying to blame someone for this, her third return and departure. “I can’t do that to myself anymore. I have a family to think about, you know? Maybe it was cool once to sort of run around after her like my dick was on fire and she could put it out, but you know what man?”
No one answers him.
“That was never fucking real, no matter how much I wanted it to be, and that fuckin bitch had me by the balls hard, and she fuckin knew it, too, sayin all her shit about like… ”
“Don’t talk about her like that,” Gradient interrupts, his mouth a firm line and his voice a firmer one. “That girl was lost and confused and didn’t know who she was.”
Brad, chastised, grinds out his cigarette with a vicious stab into a brass ashtray on the table.
“Besides,” Grady softens. “We don’t speak ill of the dead, here.”
While Anders may not have been dead to the world outside our walls, she was dead to us in here, and her time with us, while over for herself, had only just begun in Gray House. Now, we would live with her ghost, until she was forgotten.
Nick replies to Grady with his eyes closed, as if he is too bored to fully engage. His tone is quiet and thoughtful.
“I’m a bit sick of it, really,” he says. “We do this every life, and many times in every life, and I have to watch this fucking meat grinder. With Anders, and with Joshua, even, and both of them have stayed before. Both of them were who’d I’d have once called family. And I don’t care to do it anymore.”
From down the table, Adam looks at his brother’s rat’s nest hair, and serenely closed eyes with his tired and reddened ones. Many have noticed Adam’s guilty expression, usually so guiltless, and his uncustomary distance from Evelyn.
“What do you mean?” he asks Nick, and Nick shrugs.
“How long have we been a family now?”
Bonnie answers for us.
“Seventeen years,” she supplies. “Longer, if you count those who were born into it.”
Nick nods, and purses his mouth.
“Mhm, and longer still if you count myself and anywhere I’ve insinuated my bones in as many years while you were all babies. And in that time, how many have come to stay with us, under the guise of being family?”
“Forty-one,” she says without expression.
“Right,” Nick almost sneers. “And how many of them turned out to stay?”
“Eleven,” she replies. “Is there a point you’re trying to make?”