Aly was supposed to show up in September, and then in October, but Dante had managed to ward her off through several less-than-true truths. Stomach bug, his anniversary, work’s getting crazy, Aly, sorry. November rolled around, turning everything more grey than orange, and he was prepping for more weaseling when he suddenly found himself hunched over his kitchen table, phone crammed in his shoulder, hands ground up through his short hair. He knew, just sitting there, that the snare had sprung.

       “Those last buyers are taking it, the one with the kids,” Aly said through the whispering line, as if he too might be charmed to imagine kids back there. Playing in the washed-out sandpit, or else on the tire swing that Aly had goaded him and a few neighbour boys to haul up like a butchered animal. Sneaking beer on that back porch with a gaggle of other less-than-legals.

       It wasn’t his home, but he had some attachment. If not to brick and panel siding, then to Aly still. And so he managed a, “That’s nice,” for her benefit.

       “I have a week to get it all packed up, D,” she said, and he clenched his molars tight. He liked having a nickname, because only something real could be extended upon, and she knew it. Aly Fino was always good for ripping the guilt out from between your teeth, could turn her nearly-forty-year-old voice to that of the gawky-eyed child he used to tease in brother-ish fashion: “Can you please help me? I don’t want to do it alone.”

       He opened his mouth—

       “It’s been three years since I saw you last, D,” she said. He wanted to argue, but with a feeling like concrete drying in his chest, he knew she was right.

       And so, ever so: “Alright,” he said, they arranged a time, and he thunked his forehead onto the linoleum table, groaning softly.

       Aly showed up the next day, and Dante got in her tidy grey sedan. He supposed she was expecting him to speak first, but he didn’t, and so there was only crackling silence. They rode smoothly out of the city, carved off towards the dwindling suburbs with their quaint strip malls and premature Christmas decorations. Dante tried to control his breathing, or rather be sure he was breathing at all. The heating vents coughed up familiar air, and he felt as he assumed homing pigeons do when following instinct homebound. Things were familiar before he knew they were, and then they turned the corner and there was that same derelict park that infested his light-up shoes with pea gravel, the same fading sidewalk carving down the hill towards the houses, the same gum-splotched lamppost he’d once helped heckle Aly into licking, since she was the youngest kid on the block and thus the easiest to bully. And then (as the feeling of familiarity became a panicked, bruised ache) the green electric box where he could nearly see the faded marks of his name carved there.

       Aly’s older sister had done it, he remembered, and could see her scrawling it like a frenetic dream. But if he tried to look too long, she charred at the edges, and reality crept in.

       “Most of it’s already cleaned out,” Aly finally said. She was holding the wheel tightly, and there was a nervous twitch under the eye he could see on her profile of neat bangs and sharp nose. “The Maddisons’ grandsons helped. You remember Graham, right?”

       He hummed. Yes.

       She was cat-footing her way to easy conversation, trying at least, with a sticky pain like easing off scabs: “Didn’t you say he tried to kiss you once?”

       Dante breathed sharply through his nose, maybe a laugh. Grade-eight dance. Dante couldn’t remember if he’d truly liked Graham Maddison, but still the memory of him had bled over the rest of that dance, so it was the only thing Dante knew whole-heartedly: Graham, and his oversized suit, his swoopy hair. Behind that, Dante understood Molly Fino had been at the dance too, but it was an afterthought, as she tended to be. Dante took a slow breath.            “I’m guessing he’s got a wife now for those kids.”

       “Yeah,” she said. She tried to laugh, chickened out at the last moment, and it sounded more like a cough. “So now it’s just the last few things, and sweeping up. We were thinking of going out for dinner, inviting everyone...”

The trees on the medians were completely bare, more like scratchy piles of timber than anything kind, holding phone lines in their claws and standing bleak against the grey sky—Molly in the high branches, teetering at the top. He could almost see her, paused forever at the precipice. He blinked, but she was burned on the inside of his eyelids. She was stained all down this street like something dragged beneath sixteen wheels. And from behind the branches and her insistent memory, he could see the house moving closer, as if it were bearing down on them. He hoped to see the day-nurse’s car, anyone else, but the driveway was empty. Just him, and Aly, and… Ms. Fino. He would only let himself think of her as that.

       They pulled in, and Aly snuffed the engine. A distant crow gave one croaky cough, and then there was only silence. Dante could feel the chill weaseling in through the vents.

       Aly took a breath, seemed to hold it in like cigarette smoke, and then finally: “I know you don’t want to see her, and I get it,” she said, telling only half the truth. “I’m grateful, D, really.”

       He clasped his hands, digging his thumbs in hard. “Hmm.”

       Aly swayed like she’d get out, and didn’t. Dante felt one pulse of explosive anger that wanted to tell her to just get on with it, stop making the moment go on forever but it would, it would. Life was just jumping from one forever-moment into the next, winding the frames fast enough to think you were moving.

“She doesn’t really recognize you,” Aly said, lower. “I mean she does, sort of, like she talks about you but if I show her a recent photo just…” She breathed in slow. “She knows you’re important.”

       “Alzheimer’s is a bitch,” he said, cordial, and yet felt sickly glad she couldn’t recall him. It eased some of the guilt, or maybe just the fear that he’d re-run the last time he saw Ms. Fino, which had been just after Molly, if you could say ‘after Molly’, though he always did.

       “Agreed,” Aly said. He heard the click of the handle, but the door didn’t open yet. “Just remind her who you are.”

       His throat caught, nearly a scoff. And yet when he looked at Aly, preparing to be angry or scared or anything, he saw too many memories flashing across her face. She was five and revered him, she was twelve and it was fashionable to pretend she didn’t like him very much but she still filled his shadow whenever he looked back, fifteen and Dante left, Dante didn’t come back, he didn’t come back. That day in the car with a SOLD sign on the lawn, she was a few months from tottering into her 40th birthday, and yet she seemed permanently the fifteen-year-old girl who begged him to call.

       “I’ll talk to her,” he said. For Aly. For Aly. For Aly—cut the track.

       Dante got out of the car, crunching frosty pavement under his boots. Up the drive, to the porch. He had his hands in his pockets, was spinning his wedding band around and around with his thumb, hoped it would bring some calm. The front doors were like waiting jaws, and he could hear deep rumblings. Aly knocked once and walked straight in while Dante trailed stiff-jointed behind. The overcast shadows of the house consumed him whole.

       He hadn’t realized that the grey outside was in fact bright, and it took him a second to adjust to the cold dim. Before he could even see past the dull muttering in his head, he could hear that the house was reverberant and empty, all the furniture packed away. When at last his pupils did their job, the cramped entryway came into focus. He knew there should have been a shoe stand to his left, a coatrack to his right, but both were gone. Up the stairs that curved to the second level, the walls were bare, showing the sun-starved squares of removed picture frames.

       It was a gutted house, a memory too, and that was better. And yet in the cannon-blast emptiness where things had once been and no longer were, the smell was familiar. He couldn’t say what it was (cooking spices? Burnt-down candles? New shoes and old coats?), but just to say that even if all the trappings were gone, he understood.

       Aly was already toeing off her shoes, calling for her mother, but he couldn’t hear her. The dim dust drifted, and faint light came in through the skylight high above the stairs. In the slanting beams, he could remember black uniform shoes on the rack and scuff marks on the walls, school binders between the stair banisters. Aly’s slathered with Lisa Frank’s accosting, bright animals, and Molly’s of simple primary colours, boys’ names scribbled in the hidden back pages. Graham among them, and then… James, Liam, Brett, his old classmates came back to him now, and their boyish faces.

       There was a small table crammed against the stairs, and though most of the usual knickknacks had been boxed or maybe tossed, there was still a picture frame propped up. While he heard Aly greeting her mother in the kitchen, he drifted forward. It was one of those Sears family photos in front of the chalky blue background, so pleasantly staged. Aly was perched in those awkward early teen years, her mother was in a fashionable black turtleneck and looking exactly as prim-sat and sharp-nosed as she had the last time he’d seen her.

       And behind them both was Molly Fino, smiling convincingly, her hair more curled than swooped, her dress crisp and blue, a few months shy of graduation. She was pretty, beautiful even. He knew half the boys in the graduating class would have dated her if she’d let them. But she drew Dante’s name in her schoolbooks, even if he’d wanted nothing to do with her. But he didn’t hate Molly! He had to say that, remind himself. He loved her, found her pretty and kind and overall agreeable. Maybe that’s why the end hurt, because he hadn’t hated Molly Fino. He’d pitied her, and yet couldn’t mourn her, and so felt sickly delighted by her passing, sickly free.

       He could hear the house still rumbling, ticking. He took a slow breath, one that sunk low in his stomach. Molly looked back at him, and if he stared hard enough through the thin glass and dusty semi-dark, her swore there was blood between her teeth. The sincerity of her smile faded, became a slow snarl. Images flickering into motion, her face turning closer to his and her mouth smearing into accusations, the image warping, nauseating and yet sickly riveting, in the way twisting out a loose tooth can feel euphoric. There was no grave for Molly Fino. Her mouth opened—

       Dante put the photo down so Molly would stare into the table. He blinked, wiped his hands on his pants, and took up his breath like slack line.

Faint light was straining towards his feet from the kitchen, where he could hear Aly chatting amiably with her mother. Dante wet the dust from his mouth and eased into the grainy bright of the kitchen, keeping timid shelter next to the fridge.

       Aly was already at the counter, wrapping plates in the brown paper. She’d coaxed her mother to sit at the table all washed in grey glow through the sliding porch doors. For a moment, she was only an imposing silhouette, and Dante’s mind swapped her face out for every memory. She was the powerhouse woman who raised two girls and a career and still ran Girl Guides, he saw the staunch face of his third-grade teacher when he’d fallen into her class and did his best to keep up, he saw the woman who danced with him at that hokey mom-son/dad-daughter grade-eight-graduation dance when he was the only one left partnerless.

       But suddenly her face was split right down the center, and he saw the haggard shell left in the wake and reverb of her eldest daughter. The moment she clutched Molly’s baby blanket, and stared all at once through and at him while he stood in his black jeans, grim and fitting for a wake. If you could call it that. “What are we supposed to do now, Dante?” she’d spat, and his name was acid on everything, more cruel joke than comfort.

       His eyes adjusted to the November grey, and though Ms. Fino still seemed split-down-the-middle, she was quite different from when he was only twenty. She’d slipped from ‘older’ into ‘elderly’, and he hadn’t been there to notice. Still her pointed jaw, her faint freckles, her watery eyes that damned him.

       She looked up, and tilted her head at him. He waited for round two, but there was no glint of recognition. “You’re not Michael,” she said, very matter-of-fact and almost good-humoured. He was surely not Aly’s six-foot-two, well-muscled husband.

       “Mike’s watching the girls,” Aly said, fussing with the plates, her hands like scurrying spiders.

       Dante pulled a smile and stepped forward. “Hi,” he said, swallowing. He’d told Aly he’d say who he was. He’d pull the corpse into the light and let it rot between them, why not? He was a grown man. “Sorry it’s been so long…” She didn’t seem to know how long it’d been, so he didn’t bother with excuses about work or the flu or ‘life’s funny, haha’. He motioned awkwardly over his shoulder. “I offered to help pack things up.”

       She narrowed her eyes just slightly, pulling dark lines through her forehead. It was a look that seemed to remember that he occupied a vital part of her brain, and she was simply sifting through the phonebook to find him.

       “Oh, yes,” she said, and he felt his veins constrict with alarming pressure. She smiled knowingly. “Molly’s friend: your name is in all of her books, but don’t tell her I said that. She’d hate to know I was snooping.”

He felt a trapped moan try to cram through his throat. The snare was indeed sprung. He knew Aly was watching him, and he should just come out and say it: Molly’s gone, might as well be dead, carved herself from the future in the downstairs bathroom, and she did it because she was infatuated with the ghostly boy on the edge of her life, one she saw only the shadow of, and wanted him closer. Here he stood.

       He would not sing requiem twice. He wasn’t strong or brave enough. “She’s not coming,” he said, very quickly. He could feel Aly staring, but he wouldn’t deal with the fall-out. “She was busy, working,” he decided on, and was given no time to let the words lie plain.

       “Dante,” he heard Aly say, and he turned. She wasn’t quite glaring at him, not yet, but there was the warning cresting slowly across her face. She looked so much like Molly, and sometimes he hated it, and her. He wished it was all the time. “Can you help me sort out the basement?”

       “It’s mostly done,” Ms. Fino said easily. It pulsed about the empty house. “Could just use a sweep.”

       The basement.

       “Yes, Mum,” Aly said, and then she was grabbing Dante’s wrist like they were children, and tugging him towards the cavernous basement stairs. When he looked back to Ms. Fino sitting in her chair, swallowed in light, he wanted her to recognize him. He’d rather be accused than plead. Why the hell was he talked into coming back!

       Because Aly was still holding onto him, or him to her, and it was time to start breaking fingers.

       She smacked her fist into the light switch, and tugged him down into the black. The basement was half un-finished, a tidy den and then a tight corridor off to the bathroom. They hit the cement floor, and Dante was trying to get something to spark up in his stomach, something able to crunch remorse. But he felt empty, exhausted. At least let him sob, or let him be angry, let him be something other than tired of this.

       “Fuck off, Aly,” he snapped, tearing his wrist free and taking two side-long steps towards the hall, into the shadows there that coiled and tried to pull him back. The hair on his arms was scratching up against his shirt, his stomach compacting.

       The stair light shone down and touched only the edges of Aly. “What the hell, Dante,” she said, a hushed hiss that wanted to shout. It slithered about the empty basement, rattled off the plaster walls. “It’s beyond fucked up not to tell her who you are.”

       “What does it matter?” he asked. “She thinks she’s got two daughters, just how she wants it. Isn’t it like…” How could he explain it in a way that would make sense, especially when the bathroom door was wide open behind him, and if he listened into the echo, he could hear the faint crackling of plastic packaging, could hear Molly like a ghost:

       “Dante,” she croaked. “Dante Dante Dante, lasting and enduring.”

       “Isn’t it kinder to let her think Molly’s coming back and I’m some random loser?” he snapped, wiping his hands so hard against his eyes he heard a popping sound and saw spots. “She made it pretty clear she’d rather I change my mind or shut up about it.”

       Aly narrowed her eyes, her bottom lip threatened to slide out childishly. No, not childish, innocent. Forty years on this hellish rock they called Earth, and still Aly was a baby sister he wanted to protect. “What if she gets lucid again? You’re just going to confuse her more.”

       She won’t. The shadows spit and laughed, took their first steps, opened presents at Christmas, sipped beer on the back porch, sobbed in the wake of what should have been a celebration. Life for life. Past for future. “Aly—”

       “You aren’t ever here,” she said, her voice dropping lower rather than growing louder. She stepped forward, and the shadows bit off the front of her face, left only teeth and eyes. In the reverb, Dante heard the guttural squawking of scissors shredding through thick clumps of hair. “You left me here to clean it all up.”

Bring on the guilt. It was searing and yet sweetly real. “Must be so hard,” he said. “Cry more about it, Aly. Whatever happened to you or her was half the shit I felt scrambling out of here, and I’m the bad guy for it? She could have called me back—”

       “I told her to—” she tried to say and now her eyes were watering like a child’s. “She wants you back, alright? She asks about you all the—”

       He heard a creak upstairs, Ms. Fino standing, and he shied his voice quieter, felt his heart racing. “She wants Molly,” Dante said. “I’m not her. I won’t be her. I never was.”

       “D—”

       His eyes were cement-dry, and his throat scraped, and Molly Molly Molly whispered his name forever. “I won’t kill her daughter again,” he said, and that was the crux.

       Aly’s face slackened, waxy and ghoulish with one single tear carving strange shadows, as if someone had dragged a nail down her cheek. She pressed her fingers tight into the corners of her eyes; she’d always done that, since childhood.

       “You didn’t kill anyone,” she said simply.

       He’d lost whatever meager fire he’d found. He was tired. “I might as well have,” he said. “I’m not doing it again, Aly. If you want her to know I’m her son, you tell her. You said you asked her to call me all that time, so ask again.” There was a broom leaning against the wall, and he motioned towards it. He was ready to break fingers, he had to, because this couldn’t happen again. “I’ll sweep because I owe you that, but that’s it. Send me your Christmas card once a year like acquaintances and be done with it.”

       She scoffed, almost a laugh. He wondered if she was relieved too. “I’m sorry I made you come back after you ‘scrambled out of here’,” she said, and turned on her heels to head up the stairs. “Maybe I’m selfish for wanting my brother here before my mom forgets me too.”

       He felt his bones creak, and then he felt them harden back again because he wouldn’t be caught exposed. Crack, crack, crack went his fingers around his love for his little sister, and he let it slip away as she trudged upstairs. She left him there in the unfinished dark, with the cement and pale plaster, and the echo off it.

       Dante stood a few seconds longer, seeing again and again the image of her turning from him and going up the stairs. It looked more distorted each time, melting away like burnt sugar, the shame trying to curdle in his stomach but he couldn’t feel it because the track reset and again she walked away from him. Again. Again. A—

       “Dante. Dante. Dante. Dante.” He heard it over and over, and closed his eyes slowly. “Lasting and enduring,” he heard Molly whisper, and turned to look back over his shoulder. He swore he caught a glimpse of her through the sliver of mirror he could see from the hall. The corner of her sharp face, her pale eye and sick-grey skin, taller than most memory. He saw her as old as she’d get, or been allowed to get, like an animal who hit the butchering weight.

       Death to Molly Fino. Let her rot. Let him out.

       “Good riddance,” he said. And yet the image of her never waned. Blinking stained her red-and-black on his eyelids, and he snapped his eyes frantically open, and still saw a burnt-sugar picture-show of her watching from the bathroom.

       So he stepped forward. He could barely see where he was going, and he needled through the darkness like the prow of a ship through oily waters. His hand was shivering when it touched at the door jam, and he knew this house. He didn’t need to see to turn into the bathroom, and find Molly Fino standing before the sink and mirror. There was a shell of packaging on the ground, he could smell crisp new plastic and metal, hear the curious shiver of the clippers whirring in her hand and the faint friction fritz. Her shoulders jumped once, a choked sob, and her hand holding the lip of the sink was all crooked and white-knuckled, like a man bracing to jump from bridge balustrades.

       Jump, Molly, he thought, and felt a half-delirious smile creeping up. Do it, coward.

       She turned, and looked through him, but her eyebrows furrowed. Two decades ago, he knew, she was aware of him standing there, because if the past looped forward than the present looped back. He knew she’d felt him reverb to her, calling siren-sung backward with his deep-pocket jeans, his tidy beard, his short, swoopy hair.

       Molly made the cut. The shears snarled angrily. He watched in the mirror as she tore one solid stripe across the side of her skull, right down to an even 3. There was no time to marvel. She pulled off another chunk; it came away like orange peel, fell thick onto the tiles, landed with the weight of a corpse. Like the cicada splits from its skin, or like horror movie monsters shred through the chest of their hosts, he saw himself climb out the mouth of Molly Fino. One moment she was there, and then it was some uneven-haired man barely twenty, holding the shears in his hands, staring tear-smeared into the deep recesses of the mirror. Again, again, again in the black he could paste any memory over.

       “Dante, Dante,” his lips murmured. He heard Mrs. Fino and Aly laughing over something above him, and wanted to be up there, but couldn’t be. And so he eyed the broom still in the light, and wondered if it was any good to tidy the murder scene. If he owed this house anything. If he should just bundle out like the killer, go on his merry way, and leave Molly rotting for someone else to sweep away.