Breathless Read Free Page A

them—Katie? There was also an empty bottle of crème de menthe. Anybody want to take credit for this?”
    He’ll look at my mom while she’s furiously taking notes on a legal pad. We have a whole filing cabinet filled with minutes from family meetings, dating back, like, ten years, all of them in my mother’s gorgeous cursive handwriting. While she writes, she keeps her head down, her ears trained to get all the highlights, her knuckles clenched white.
    “Sweetheart?” he asks my mom. The Ghost is at his most intimidating when he’s being sarcastic. “Were you drinking on the roof again? Because I can’t imagine it could have been our children.”
    “Unthinkable,” my mother says. She looks up for a moment, bats her eyelashes at him. “It must have been somebody else’s children,” she adds, as though she feels sorry for somebody else’s long-suffering parents. “Those bad kids.”
    Even after two children and everything she’s been through, everyone knows my mother is still a real beauty, soft and calm in contrast to the Ghost’s harshness. Somehow she always seems blurred, as though to focus on anything that exists beyond a canvas might prove too difficult for her tiny frame to handle. When I was a very little girl, whenever she made me angry, I would imagine a strong wind simply blowing her away.
    “Yes.” The Ghost nods in agreement. “That must be it. Somebody else’s children wouldn’t care if they created a fire hazard on our roof that could incinerate us all, would they?”
    My mother and father have a secret language that I have never understood. They have been married since college and are still madly in love. I can’t imagine why, since they have nothing in common besides me and Will, and all the two of us ever do is cause trouble.
    As a result of these meetings, Will and I have learned that we have to be extra careful. We usually come up to the roof when our parents aren’t home, which is often, or else late at night when they’re asleep. This place has become the only place where I feel like I can know my own brother. I have never felt afraid as we lie beside each other, murmuring so as not to make too much noise. As Will says, “We wouldn’t want to rouse the Ghost.”
    Sometimes, when we’re sure that our parents aren’t home and the neighbors aren’t paying attention, we climb around in the pine tree that bows against the house on the farthest corner, over the living room, its branches thick enough to hold us as our bare feet sting from splinters and sap.
    Even as I’m living it, something feels important about this day in particular. We’re climbing around in the tree, hopping back and forth between its thick branches and the hot roof, when it occurs to me that I never feel too close to the edge, even with my brother right behind me.
    “Willie,” I say, turning around to face him. “It’s too hot up here. Let’s go swimming again.”
    “Don’t call me that,” he says. “I’m not a kid.”
    Will, Willie, William—our father’s name. But the one thing we all know about Will, the one thing we’ve known right from the beginning, is that he will never be like our father. Not even close.
    Even for a Ghost, our father isn’t around much; he works eighteen-hour days. When he is home, he spends most of his time locked in his office. I notice him mostly late at night, when I’m not sure if I’m asleep yet, and the murmur of his voice dictating psych reports filters up through my bedroom radiator. But always he is white, white, white: he has fine, grayish white hair that puffs along a tired ashen face and deep-set white eyeballs. He is wise and disappointed and so much older than he ought to be.
    When I was a little girl, still in single digits, I’d sit on his lap in my pajamas and sip watery hot chocolate while he smoked a Marlboro; picked tobacco from his beard, which is full and also white—although he’s no Santa; and held a flabby arm across my belly. We used to