Forbidden Echoes

Chapter One: Empty Rooms

The house had stopped keeping time the same week his mother did.

Nine fourteen. That was where the grandfather clock in the hallway had frozen, pendulum hanging mid-swing like something caught in the act of almost continuing. Nobody had wound it since the funeral. Nobody had said out loud that they wouldn't, either—it had just happened, the way most things happened in this house now: quietly, by omission, until the omission became the shape of a rule.

Justin Harper woke at half past eleven because there was no longer anyone whose disappointment could get him up earlier.

He lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling fan turning in its slow, indifferent rotation, and catalogued the sounds of the house the way he did every morning—an old habit that had calcified into a ritual. The pipes ticking in the walls. The thirteenth stair, the one that groaned no matter how carefully you stepped, currently silent because no one was on it. The wind chime on the back porch, the one his mother had bought at a roadside stand in Vermont and hung herself, standing on a kitchen chair while he held her ankle and pretended to be annoyed about it. It still rang sometimes when the wind found the right angle. He still flinched every time it did, half a second of his chest convincing itself it might mean something.

It never meant anything. It was just wind moving through brass tubes that should have come down months ago.

He got up. The floor was cold under his feet in the specific way that meant the house had decided, sometime around the second week of October, that warming itself was no longer a priority it shared with him.

Downstairs was a museum that hadn't been told it was a museum yet. His mother's reading chair sat by the window with the blanket folded over the armrest exactly the way she'd left it, and he had developed an entire secondary route through the living room specifically so he wouldn't have to walk past it directly. The kitchen, at least, had been colonized—one bowl in the drying rack, one mug rotating through use, the refrigerator door a flat white expanse where her grocery lists used to live beneath a ceramic strawberry magnet that had since migrated to a junk drawer, because looking at her handwriting first thing in the morning had stopped being something he could budget for.

He made coffee. He did not make breakfast, on account of breakfast requiring a person who believed there was a day worth being fueled for, and most mornings he wasn't sure he qualified.

His phone sat face-up on the counter, screen lit with a notification he'd been ignoring since Tuesday: the state university's housing portal asking him to confirm a deposit for a dorm room he had stopped being sure he wanted. He didn't open it. Instead, he drank his coffee standing at the window, looking out at what used to be his mother's garden and was now just a rectangle of dirt with a few stubborn perennials refusing to acknowledge that the person who'd loved them was gone.

The roses had gone feral.

She would have hated that.

She would have had opinions, delivered while wrist-deep in soil, about exactly how much he was letting things go to seed—and the thought arrived with its usual two-stage detonation: first the warmth of her voice in his head, clear as if she were standing behind him, and then the cold drop of remembering that voice was now something he assembled from memory and would never again hear arrive unprompted.

The house was very good at silence. It had had practice.

By early afternoon, the silence always got too loud, the way it did every day around the same hour, like his grief kept office hours. And every day, around that same hour, Justin did the same thing he always did: opened his laptop on the bed, drew the blinds, and let the blue light have him for a while.

It wasn't pleasure, not really. Not anymore.

It hadn't been in months.

It was static.

A way of turning the volume down on his own head by feeding it something louder and emptier, an hour purchased against the next hour, the way you might take a pill that didn't cure anything but at least postponed the symptom.

He always closed the laptop afterward feeling worse in a specific, familiar way—a little smaller, a little more like a routine and a little less like a person—and he always did it again the next day anyway, because the alternative was sitting with the silence and the stopped clock and the chair nobody sat in, and he hadn't yet found a version of himself capable of doing that sober.

His phone buzzed against the nightstand, and he was almost grateful for the interruption.

Alex: you still alive in there or should I start writing the eulogy

Justin: working on it. don't peak too early

Alex: justin harper everyone. grief turned this man into a comedian

Alex: come out tonight. mike's having people over, nothing crazy

Justin: can't. my dad's coming back tonight

Alex: ok and? since when does that require your attendance

Justin: he's not coming back alone

There was a pause long enough that Justin could picture Alex sitting up a little straighter on the other end, phone held closer to his face—the universal posture of someone who'd just smelled a story.

Alex: ok WHAT does that mean. is your dad seeing someone

Justin: he says he's bringing someone "important." wouldn't say who. just that I "needed to be home" tonight, like I have anywhere else to be

Alex: that's ominous as hell my guy

Justin: yeah well. ominous is kind of our whole brand at this point

Alex: for real though. you good?

Justin looked at the question for a second longer than the others.

You good was doing a lot of work in three words and a question mark. Alex had been asking some version of it since March, in person and over text, with the patient persistence of someone who'd decided not to be scared off by the flat, non-answers he kept getting in return.

Justin appreciated it in the distant way he appreciated a lot of things lately, as if from underwater.

He typed three different responses and deleted two of them.

Justin: ask me again after tonight

Alex: that's not a no, which from you is basically a yes. text me if it's weird

Justin: when is it ever not weird

He set the phone down and lay back against the pillows, staring at the same ceiling fan, listening to the house settle into its slow afternoon creaking—wood contracting, pipes shifting, the small involuntary noises of a structure that, like him, was just old enough to complain about everything.

Somewhere down the hall, the wind chime stirred and went quiet again.

Important.

His father had never once in eighteen years used that word about anything that wasn't a client, a contract, or a golf handicap. The fact that he'd used it now—about a person, about someone Justin was apparently required to be present for—sat in his stomach like a swallowed stone.

He thought about asking more—a name, an explanation, literally anything—and then thought better of it, because some part of him understood, the way you understand weather before it arrives, that he wasn't ready for whatever answer was coming.

Better to let it stay an abstraction a little longer.

Abstractions, at least, you could control the shape of.

He spent the rest of the afternoon in the kind of aimless drift that had become his default state—half a video game, half a book he wasn't reading so much as holding, a long stretch of time spent simply lying on his back doing the thing he was best at these days, which was nothing in particular, very thoroughly.

At some point he found himself standing in the hallway in front of the grandfather clock, the way he sometimes did without quite deciding to, looking at the frozen hands and the dust gathering faint and silver in the carved grooves of the wood.

Nine fourteen.

He didn't know anymore if that was the time she'd died or just the time someone had stopped winding it, and it bothered him, distantly, that he'd never asked which.

The light outside had gone the particular gold-orange of early evening when he heard it: gravel crunching under tires, the low approach of an engine down the long driveway, headlights sweeping briefly across the hallway wall before cutting out.

His stomach did something complicated, dread and curiosity braided together so tightly he couldn't separate the strands.

He heard the car door.

Then a second one.

Two doors. Not one.

Justin stood very still in the hallway, in front of a clock that had refused to move in months, and listened to the sound of his father's voice carrying faintly from the driveway—easy, performative, the tone he used for people he wanted to impress—answered by another voice.

Younger.

A girl's.

Whoever she was, his father had brought her home, and the house, for the first time in a very long while, was about to have to remember how to hold more than the two of them and the silence.

The front door opened.

"Justin?" his father called, too brightly. "Come down here—there's someone I want you to meet."