Part 2

Nico is named after his uncle, and he has his uncle’s nose—a clipped, abrupt thing that just stops without any of the normal slopes or angles. He’s quiet on the whole ride home, not surly but shy—or at least, that’s the hope. I help him wheel in his suitcases and show him to his room, an airy bedroom on the corner of the first floor that opens on the house’s second veranda. The instant he walks into the room, with his shaggy dark hair and his wrinkled hoodie, I realize that I’ve made a mistake. He looks completely out of place in the room, which is bridal white. Fourteen year olds don’t really need verandas, they don’t belong on verandas. I wondered if he even knew the difference between a veranda and a patio, not snobbishly but from compassion—it would be so embarrassing for him to go about calling it a patio or a balcony when it was so clearly a veranda, what with its rails and crossbeams and pillars. He looks like a stain on the whiteness of the room, on its carpeting and its walls and its bedspread and frame.

"It’s nice," he says. He probably means it, because he’s a smart kid and objectively, yes, it is a nice room, if you’re an adult. Maybe he is an adult. Maybe when my sister named him Nico, he inherited the forty-odd years that his uncle had lived. Other than the nose, they didn’t really look too similar.

"It’s too white, isn’t it?"

"I don’t mind. I like the patio," he says.

I bite my tongue.

"There are other bedrooms," I say. "It’s a pretty big house."

"Lots of people used to live here."

"Yeah, I say, a whole lot. Too many people, really."

I hold up both hands and make a show of counting them off, finger by finger: "Me, your mom, Uncle Nico, your grandparents, your great-grandfather, your cousin Cassie and Miss Agnes. I haven’t touched most of the other bedrooms, so you can go exploring if you want. They might need a little dusting, I say, but really, they’re probably uninhabitable," maybe even mildewing (which I don’t say, but I think it hard enough that he probably hears me anyway).

"This room’s fine, thanks."

"Okay, champ. I used to call you that, you know. Do you mind?"

"No," he says. The way he says it though, cutting the O as short as it can go and still be a vowel, makes me decide to call him something else.

"You gonna be okay?"

I don’t ask him that. It seems too demeaning, here in this room, stiff with newness. Somewhere in the periphery of my senses, I do a quick check to make sure that my sister never used this room and confirm it, nodding as I close the door behind me. Espie’s room is the only one I leave locked.

*

A few days later, I look out on the living room, cleaned and tidied specifically for him, but he’s nowhere in sight. I won’t lie to myself, I’m a little disappointed. Somehow, I expected to actually see him when he came to live here.
I find him out on his patio-veranda in a rocking chair, not rocking. He’s right against the rails, leaning forward with his arms draped over the side and his eyes on the road, following cars up and down. He stares into each house one by one and concentrates.

"What’re you up to, Nico?"

He likes his own name better than champ, I can tell, but Nico means someone completely different to me.

"Pheromones," he says.

I don’t understand.

"Lots of animals communicate with pheromones. Like bees. I wanted to see if there were any other kids my age here."

"Any other teenagers," I say thoughtfully.

"Teenagers isn’t the right word, he says. You only get to be a teenager when you have a car and can be played by a thirty-year old on television. Freshmen aren’t teenagers."

"I don’t think there is anyone your age here," I say. I try to turn the rocking chair around because I know that there is a teenager three houses down and across the street, a girl with a ridiculous chest and her own corner window. Pheromones sound too much like hormones to begin with, and I was pretty sure that one led to another, and Nico was so scrawny that I could imagine him suffocating under the weight of that girl’s absurd overdevelopment.

"There’s nothing really to do here at all, is there?"

I frown at an angle, one of those little thoughtful side-frowns that are so hard to accomplish, but I practiced at them for years and finally perfected their workings. I had hoped for a creative and self-reliant nephew, something like the one I remembered in dim memories. I hadn’t even told Espie about the hallway, or the older Nico for that matter. When I inherited the house, it became mine regardless of any shared history and so its secrets were mine.

"There is something to do," I say. I ask him if he wanted to know what forever looks like.

He does.