Forty-eight.
Forty-nine.
I cursed under my breath and pulled in a huge lungful of oxygen, releasing it while I curled my arm up again with a grunt.
Fifty.
The muscles in my arms burned as I carefully set the weight back on the large black metal rack that lined one wall of my gym. I’d pushed too hard today, I knew it when I reached my arm over my chest and pressed it there in a stretch. All week I’d been doing this, and I couldn’t figure out why there was so much pent up energy swamping my veins, making my skin buzz. Why I was spending more hours in the windowless basement of my giant house. Reading made me edgy; watching TV was a waste of time.
Some days, when I spent too much time staring at the walls around me—at the pristine hardwood floors and curved archways, built-in bookshelves and spacious rooms—I wondered what it would be like if I’d been born to a different family. If my father had been a preacher or a mechanic or a butcher, I wouldn’t be living in a large custom-built home purchased from the massive trust fund that I’d been able to access on the day I turned twenty-five.
Even though the speakers perched in the upper corners of the walls were playing music, I could hear someone walking upstairs. I braced my hands on the arms of my treadmill and counted to twenty before snatching my shirt off the hardwood floor. As I took the steps two at a time, I wiped the sweat off my forehead and chest, then pulled the white shirt over my head. Before I opened the door at the top of the stairs, I could hear my mom’s voice, and I mimicked beating my forehead against the wall.
Maybe if I hit hard enough, I could give myself a concussion and avoid the impending conversation, which would definitely be starting with, how the hell did you get another key to my house? She was looking at her phone when I closed the basement door behind me, and I mentally steeled myself for what was undoubtedly about to happen.
“Bartholomew, your air conditioning is set far too low. If you insist on walking around like such a sweaty mess, you’ll catch cold. And then what? You’ll get pneumonia.” Her voice was pinched. Her forehead would have been too if her plastic surgeon didn’t occupy the first open spot on her speed dial. So instead, her face was perfectly smooth, almost creepily ageless in how blank it made her look.
I walked past her and punched the button on my thermostat back down to sixty-six, where it had been before she came into my house. She clucked her tongue at my back, which I ignored. I pulled a water bottle out of the stainless steel fridge hidden behind custom-built doors and drank half of it in one long pull.
“You’re still here,” I said dryly when I turned around and she was giving me a narrow-eyed look of concern. “And don’t call me that, please.”
“Honestly, you haven’t been to visit all week.” She raised a dark eyebrow. Or tried, because it only moved about an eighth of an inch. “Have you eaten today? You never get enough fruit in your diet.”
I held my hand out and stared at her.
“What?”
“Key.”
She scoffed and picked at a piece of imaginary lint on her pale blue dress suit. My mom hadn’t worked in an office since before she married my dad, but she still dressed every single day as if she was running the Fortune 500 company instead of him.
“Key. Now.” I set my jaw when she didn’t make a move to give it to me. “If I have to start telling Claude to bar your entrance into the house, I will. He likes me more than he likes you.”
Mom walked past me into the kitchen and pulled open the pantry door. “Nothing fresh.” She looked over her shoulder, the perfect curve of her French twist not moving in the slightest. “How many calories have you eaten today?”
Her purse was on the center island, so I unzipped it and started dumping out the contents until I found the key on a Tiffany key ring. I gave her a long look. “Any more copies I should be aware of?”
She closed the pantry door and leaned against it. “Would I tell you if there were?”
“We have talked about this,” I said forcefully. “I’m twenty-six; you cannot show up at my house unannounced and go through my things. You know how much I hate people touching my stuff.”
As soon as her eyes, the same dark brown color of my own, turned sad and remorseful, I wish I’d just kept my damn mouth shut and let her ask her insane, intrusive questions so she could be on her way. It was about to get worse.
So, so much worse.
She sniffed.
“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath and turned to walk into the living room.
“You’re all I have,” she cried, coming after me at a clipped pace. “You’re the future of the Lockwood family, Bartholomew. The only future your father and I can count on. And since you refuse to find a nice girl to marry to give me grandchildren, you’ll remain the only hope we have. Just … just you.”
I sat on the couch and braced my head in my hands. The next ten minutes, give or take, could be recorded and put on YouTube demonstrating how to successfully guilt trip your adult son.
“When your brother died,” she said quietly, and I dug my fingers into my scalp. “You were so little. I used to go into your room and pick you up after you were sleeping, even when you were almost too big for me to pick up, I’d rock you and breathe you in and just make sure you were still alive.”
One of these days, I was going to record this bullshit and make Dr. Watkins listen to it. I’d told him, oh, I’d told him and I was pretty sure he thought I was exaggerating. That the paranoid, anxious part of me was twisting my mother’s words and giving them more weight than she intended to lay up on me.
Don’t get me wrong. It was sad. Very, very sad that my four-year-old brother died when I was eleven months old. From what I’ve been told (over and over and over), he wandered away from my parents at a birthday party of an old family friend. A valet went to bring a car around to the front, didn’t see my brother and hit him. He died at the hospital the next day.
I’d seen pictures of him, of course. Our eyes were the same color, the same shape, and his smile hooked up to the right, just like mine. His hair was lighter though, more like Dad’s before he turned gray. I didn’t have a single memory of him, which is why the absence of grief didn’t cause me guilt. How could I miss him? I didn’t know him. All I knew was that my entire life, I’d been hidden away like a prisoner, sheltered from the outside world like it would cause me pain, all so that my mother might not lose me to sickness or violence or freak tragedy.
Her nerves were constantly humming, and I could hear them like I’d been tuned to the same pitch, the same frequency. The years of my childhood were spent being warned about the dangers of the outside world, and it stuck to my brain like a thick wad of glue that I couldn’t dislodge. So even though she drove me abso-fucking-lutely crazy now that I was an adult, I couldn’t shake the lessons that she instilled.
My mom was like the reverse Oedipus complex. Her obsession with me—not sexual, thank the Lord—was exhausting. It was a lead weight over everything I did, everything new that I attempted. So when she showed up like this and put her hands on my things, hovered around me like a buzzing bee, all it did was make me want to break shit.
Thankfully, she knew better than to touch me. Once she smoothed the hair back from my forehead while I was eating dinner and I exploded, the crawling sensation under my skin breaking and cresting over me like a tidal wave.
“I’d hear your heart beat,” she continued, and I pinched my eyes shut. Maybe if I faked a seizure, she’d leave the room long enough to call 911 and I could escape out the back door. “And it would make me just cry. I’d cry all night, so happy that you were alive. My sweet little baby.”
You know that book where the mom keeps creeping into her kid’s bedroom at night? She picks him up and rocks him, even when he’s like, married and shit and says that poem every time? That would be my life if I wasn’t careful. My mother—the psycho—would scale the walls and climb into my marriage bed to be able to rock me to sleep and count the beats of my heart.
I shivered, unable to shake the image. Then I made a mental note to have Claude change the locks on all the doors. I glanced at my mom. Windows, too. Just to be safe.
“Good story, Mom.”
She wiped under her eyes, though I wasn’t sure there were any actual tears there. “No need to be sarcastic.”
I stood from the couch and stretched. “Was there any other reason to visit besides counting my calories?”
Mom mirrored my movements, standing and taking a deep breath. “Just wanted to say hello. See how you were.”
My arms spread open. “Perfectly healthy, as you can see. If I catch the plague from my air conditioning, I promise you’ll be the first person that I call.”
She did one of those slow blinks that masked an eye roll, a move that I’d yet to perfect. “Thank you.”
I followed her into the kitchen and watched her slide her purse strap up over her shoulder. “If you’re up for an outing on Sunday, Marguerite will be making that roast you like so much for dinner. Six sharp.”
Damn it. Marguerite’s roast was the best thing I’d ever tasted, and she always made extra to be able to send me home with enough leftovers to last the week. I kept my face smooth though. “I’ll let you know.”
With a sigh, and an air kiss next to my cheek, she left, and I had to fight not to crumple into the stool next to the island. My mom’s spontaneous visits always drained me. She loved me, in her own way, but it wasn’t a love that was free of expectations, free of conditions. If anything, the cloying sensation of how much she depended on me for her happiness only served to heighten my desire to stay isolated from everything. Everyone.
I grabbed another bottle of water from the fridge and walked through my house, the comforting sounds that I was accustomed to soothing the hackles that had been raised by my mom’s visit. The ticking of the clock on the dining room wall, the low murmur of the radio in my library when I passed the open door, the water heater kicking on. Consistent reminders that the life I lived in my home was just that. Mine. It was predictable, and calming. A conscious choice of solitude that revived me.
Most of the time.
I took a shower and searched for a new book to read, but when I settled into the leather club chair, I felt that edginess creep through me again. An unsettled feeling that I wasn’t accustomed to. It was like my body felt the rumblings of a storm coming, and each hair stood on edge in preparation for a lightning strike that was still miles away.
With a deep breath, I focused on the pages in front of me again. If a storm was on the horizon, I’d see it long before I felt a single drop of rain. I hoped.