4. The Ghosts
haunt - v.
1 tr. (of a ghost) visit (a place) regularly, reputedly giving signs of its presence
2 tr. (of a memory, person etc.) be persistently in the mind of
For the first few weeks it's like living with a phantom. Unaccustomed noises in the house, objects that vanish then reappear and knowing that she hadn't moved them - sometimes they're the only way to tell she has acquired a house-mate.
It isn't like on TV. There are no giggly chats, no shared intimacies. Despite their proximity the substances of their lives barely brush against each other. He eats and reads and sleeps and when she sees him, sometimes, as she's heading out to work, or when she gets back, or when they take a strained, uncomfortable meal together, he seems better, at least physically. Everything about him is still contained, controlled, as though the idea of coming into contact with something like living is its own peculiar agony. He shrouds himself in stillness and silence, making himself invisible to the world.
And to her.
He keeps out of her way. That doesn't mean that she is unaware of him; if anything, his attempts to erase the signs of his presence make her all the more aware of the reality of him there, in her house, behind the closed door just off the top of the stairs.
She's aware of him even when she isn't in the house.
The scissor-blades flash under the salon's neon strip lighting and she listens with half an ear to the rambling monologue about her client's visit to Nashville. The hair curled between her fingers and the snip-snip-snip, the chemical smell of bleach and dye and setting lotion. A song on the radio and she recognises it as the same one that had played when she had driven them back from Lexington.
She wonders about change, and wants to believe in it, and about redemption and hope. She wonders what would take the fire from a man's eyes and what it would take to restore it.
She finds herself worrying about him.
But it isn't only Boyd who hovers constantly, uneasily, on the edges of her mind. It had been easier when she was drinking more to blank out the things she would sooner forget, but it would still take an awful lot of liquor to get rid of so much.
As brothers they had been close, more or less, but had never really been much alike, never looked much alike. Boyd was a little taller than Bowman but far slighter, his frame lean and wiry against his brother's bulk. Bowman had been his father's son, the same broad shoulders and strangely graceful swagger. Thick muscle that had, in later years, been running inevitably to fat. Boyd had his mother's looks and Ava remembered her well: a tall, slender woman, softly spoken with humorous green eyes and steel in her spine.
Boyd isn't Bowman-
-No, he's worse-
She smiles grimly to herself. Naturally, he's worse because Boyd is a criminal but Bowman was just a wife-beater. He's killed a man, perhaps more than one, but she's also killed a man and she knows that's a big deal but she also knows it isn't the worst thing you can do. Experience makes everything relative.
As brothers they had not been much alike but sometimes there's a cadence to Boyd's voice, a gesture, a way of looking and she sees someone else.
Boyd isn't Bowman. She knows that. She has always known that.
Her hands, suddenly damp, slip around the handles and the blade slices against her skin, bright blood oozing from her thumb. It is everywhere. She stands, dumb, watching the drops fall, feeling the sting until Jodie takes her by the shoulders, leads her to the back-room, lectures her - severe and concerned - and Ava smiles, nods, tastes the salty tang of the blood. Jodie pulls at her hand, rinses it, binds her thumb and sends her back out to finish Miss Nashville's do.
When she's back home she peels off the plaster, examines the reddish-brown stain against her skin and the split running the length of the soft pad of her thumb. It throbs dully but she's known worse. She gets a glass of water, half-filling it with ice; she holds one piece against the cut, numbing it.
From upstairs faint music trickles out from behind his door and she thinks that it wouldn't be so bad if they actually talked to each other now and then.
One day.
Maybe.