The Night Listener : A Novel

Charleston cocktail party, and it was hard to believe that Pap could no longer be found at the center of that cacophony. I stayed long enough to catch up with my brother and help Darlie evict the last mourners, then retreated to my room to check the airline schedules. As I’d expected, there were no available flights to San Francisco until Christmas Day.
    I actually didn’t mind travelling then. Had I stayed on either coast that day someone would have tried to make it merry for me, and the effort would have been more painful than no Christmas at all. I did wonder what sort of reception awaited me, what I’d be asked about Pete. After all, I’d told Anna emphatically that Pete was dead, while Jess had apparently talked to him the following day, when Pete called the house looking for me.
    I found signs of Jess’s brief reoccupation when I arrived home: a bag of potato chips in the cupboard, a new box of treats for Hugo, a general tidying-up of the items on the bulletin board. It felt sweetly reassuring to see his imprint on the house again, though that feeling was promptly trampled by errant thoughts of the men who might have been there with him.
    Hugo didn’t greet me at the door, so I assumed he was out walking with Jess. But when I climbed to my writing room under the eaves, I found the dog curled in a ball on the sofa. Finally sensing my presence, he rose on wobbly legs and tried to wag his tailless rump, but this only sent him toppling to the floor with a whimper. I scooped him up in my arms and restored him to his spot on the sofa, where I stroked him carefully and nuzzled his graying face. “I know what you mean,” I said.
    I heard the front door open and close. Jess, upon spotting my luggage, hollered up the stairwell at me.
    “Where are you?”
    “All the way up.”
    He appeared in my aerie sporting a new accessory: a gleaming gold nose ring. And not one of those prissy little wires either; this was a meanest-bull-in-the-pasture number that pierced the middle of his nose and dangled like a door knocker out of both nostrils.
    “Wow,” I said with less enthusiasm than the word usually demands.
    “That’s new.”
    Jess, of course, could tell what I was thinking, so he shrugged off the matter as unworthy of discussion. “Yeah. Fairly.” Then he stepped forward and embraced me, kissing me lightly on the lips.
    “You okay?”
    “Yeah. I’m fine.”
    “I’m sorry about Pap.”
    I’d never heard him call the old man that, and I was moved by the sound of it, the suggestion that he’d just lost an in-law.
    “I guess it was time,” I said.
    “I spoke to Josie this morning. She said you got to talk to him.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, that’s good.”
    He gazed out the window toward the tree line of Sutro Forest, where a pair of turkey vultures was making drunken figure eights above the valley. “She also said you were depressed about some kid who died.”
    I nodded.
    “She couldn’t have meant Pete,” he added.
    I sighed in concession and headed for the stairs. “Let’s make coffee first.”
    He let me tell the story without interruption, nodding me along while I shaped its themes and refined its details. The star in the east.
    The sightless Madonna. The empty manager. That miraculous resur-rection.
    “Father, son, and holy ghost,” said Jess.
    I didn’t get it.
    “Pap and you and Pete.”
    “That’s good,” I said absently. “Clever.”
    “Use it, then. You’re the writer.”
    “Is that what you think?”
    “That you’re a writer?”
    “No. That he’s a ghost. That’s he’s imaginary.”
    He shrugged. “That’s the fun of it, isn’t it?” I said it wasn’t fun anymore.
    “Oh, I think it must be, or you would’ve tried to meet Marsha. Or gone to that hospital and asked if he was ever a patient there.”
    “I had to go see my father, for God’s sake. And I don’t even know which hospital Pete was in.”
    “And you never once asked him, did you? Or her.” I shook my head.
    “See? You never wanted to know. You require mystery, babe. It’s like oxygen to you.”
    “Forget about me,” I said irritably. “Tell me what you think.”
    “Well…that it was probably a hoax of some sort, and once she knew you’d gotten wind of it, she killed him off.”
    “But he called back.”
    And he cried and said he missed me .
    “So,” said Jess. “She’s not an evil person, and you’re not an easy person to hurt. She probably felt bad, and this was her way of making it