white noise, and they looked like . . . whatever the visual equivalent of white noise would be.
“I’d stay, though. Because I knew you’d come. You’d be in color. You would talk about—I don’t know. Nothing special. But you made everything around you be in color, too. You’d light up the most ordinary things and make me see the shape of them. Most times it’s all white noise, except the numbers. It’s like in my head, numbers are green, say. A green I’ve never seen in real life. I see that color when I talk to other math people like Kaitlyn. Yes, I’ve noticed from time to time that she’s pretty. I’ve got a pulse, Laurel. But when we talk, she could be anyone. I see green. I don’t see her. Not like I see you.”
She was already moving toward him, fast, glass crunching under the runner as she ran. She broke the tape as if it weren’t there and hurled herself into his arms. He caught her.
“What—” he said, but she wound her arms around his neck and whispered in his ear, “I’m answering you.”
She pressed into him, pulled his mouth down onto hers, responding to him in a language he was fluent in. His mouth was still, almost inanimate, but Laurel was electric. She shocked his body into movement, filled him with current. His hands came to her hips, pulling her to him, and the new pajama top crackled between them.
“Where can we go?” he said.
Upstairs, Shelby slept, Bet Clemmens drifted, and Thalia, thank God, was packing.
“Down,” Laurel said, kissing him and kissing him, and they moved in tandem to the basement door.
David fumbled it open and pulled her through, slamming it and shooting the deadbolt lock. Then his hands were back on her body, his mouth on hers, and they slid lower, stair by stair, tumbling and thumping down into the darkness of the basement. They left pieces of their clothing as they went. By the time they hit bottom, they were together, fast and savage, like a series of jolts. At the end, she said his name so many times it lost its meaning and stopped being a word. It became a sound, the syllables of how they were together. His face was buried in her hair, he breathed her in and said “Laurel” once, as if he were naming her.
Then they lay beside the futon, legs intertwined, in David’s plain white space. It was cool in the basement, and David pulled the Sunbonnet Sue quilt down around them, her bonnet hiding her face. Laurel suspected that Sue might be blushing. Laurel was, her cheeks pink and overheated even in the chilly basement. David pulled a throw pillow down as well and propped his head on it. Laurel rolled in to him, putting one arm on his chest and bracing herself above him so he could see her face in the dim light from his monitor.
“Thalia’s going home today,” she said.
“Awesome,” he answered, heartfelt. His eyes were sleepy.
“Don’t sack out,” she said. She lay her head down on his chest, pressing her cheek against him to hear the good thump of his heart. “I’m not done answering you.”
She felt his chuckle like a rumbling against her ear. “I’m thirty-four, Laurel,” he said. “I need a minute before you answer me some more.”
She smiled into his ribs, giving his side a good whack with the flat of her hand. “I’m serious,” she said. She turned over, and he put an arm around her so she was lying with her head propped up on his chest, both of them facing his desk. On the monitor, bright fish swam back and forth in an endlessly repeating pattern. “Thalia couldn’t have gotten in between us if there hadn’t been a crack already. A big one. I think I put it there.”
“Okay,” David said.
There was no easy way to break thirteen years of silence, so finally, she said, “Our backyard is full of ghosts.”
He said “Okay” again, this time drawing the word out slow, and she realized that she couldn’t start there. It wasn’t Molly or even Uncle Marty. It was DeLop. She should have taken him to see DeLop years ago, one Christmas, Mother’s wishes be damned, to see the place where all the hidden pockets in her quilts came from. The place of her first ghost.
“Tell me,” he said, and she was glad the lights were out. The time for lights was over.
“My mother grew up in DeLop, Alabama,”