B008J4PNHE EBOK (32 page)

Rather, Sam’s fading thoughts were occupied with Polly, who, he was bewildered to conclude, had been jealous.

 ■ ■ ■ 

His cell phone awakened him a second time. The phone was close, at the edge of the bed where he had set it down. Sam read the vibrating window:
Tess Auerbach, 3:45
A.M.

Most of his consciousness remained sunk in a dream about being packed into a large box and shipped to an unknown destination. (The Styrofoam poppers were soft, the box was roomy, and the considerate UPS person kept opening the flaps to gaze down at him and ask how he was holding up. Sam said he was okay. He liked it in there. The face of the UPS person was partially obscured by the chattering zeppelin of an Arriflex camera that he used to film Sam as he lay in the long Sam-shaped box.) A small portion of him was alert enough to be perversely warmed by the sight of her name; Tess had remembered him.

As he grinned blearily at the name in the window the call went to voice mail. When Sam tried to check the message, his hand turned the phone off instead. “Oops,” he said, and dropped back into the dream feeling blameless and happy.

 ■ ■ ■ 

There was a scream accompanied by a crash of metal poles. The door to Sam’s bedroom banged open, and Mina fell forward onto her knees. She was in her pajamas—a swishing purple running suit—and dawn had flooded the room in pale light.

“What is it?” Sam was awake and out of his bed in an instant, down on the floor beside her, his hand at the top of her spine. “What is it, honey?”

Mina rolled over and clutched her bare foot. She gasped. Sam saw a scrape on her big toe. “I—” The sentence snagged, and she gasped again. “I—”

He embraced her. In his arms, Mina felt like the pieces of something, all the lengths and sections and washers and screws, still in their plastic bag before being assembled. “Please, honey,” he said. “Stop. Tell me.”

“I stubbed my toe on the frame of that fucking hammock!” she screamed. “Who keeps a hammock in the hall of their fucking apartment?” She sobbed and slapped the floor.

Sam released her and sat back. “You’re going to be okay. It’s just a flesh wound, Mina. I swear.” He was relieved, annoyed, and—mainly—focused on convincing his pulse to slow down.

His sister closed her eyes, inhaled, and stopped crying.

At the same time, the room seemed to exhale, to unlock. The window opened onto the fire escape and a sunny day. Littered across the floor, the piles of laundry appeared soft. Black roots glistened at Mina’s hairline, as if the white dye had started to melt. It was barely morning, Sam thought. He didn’t have to get up yet.

“Tom called,” she said. “It’s Dad, Sam. There was a test—and the results—He’s dying.”

“Dad?” asked Sam.

Sam was dressed, standing in front of the logjam of crates at the entryway. Mina had shoved her sewing machine on him, and now he was holding it in front of him with both hands, like a birthday cake with lit candles. He’d been awake for ten minutes. “Let’s go!” he yelled at her.

His sister was by the beanbag chair, fighting the zipper of her duffel. “Fuck you, bag!”

Puffy-eyed, huddled on the couch beneath a calico blanket of recycled carpet fragments—
Green living is our itchy, itchy future. YEAH, I GUESS I’LL HAVE TO TAKE IT—
Wesley moaned.

Mina jumped on the duffel a couple of times, then tried the zipper again. “Come on, come on!”

“Let’s lower the volume, guys,” said Wesley. “Yelling and hurrying never helps.”

“Mina,” said Sam. “What the hell am I doing with this sewing machine?”

“I need it!” The duffel closed with a stereo-sound
zip!
“That’s right,” said Mina. She assessed the duffel a sharp kick for good measure before shouldering the rest of her luggage. In her rush, the straps of the different bags twisted together. “Oh, fuck-snot.” Mina dropped everything and started over.

“You need to calm down,” said Wesley.

“What?” She had the straps organized and the bags over her shoulders.

“Calm down.” Wesley clutched his blanket of recycled carpet fabrics to his chin. “Calm down, deep breath, gather your thoughts.”

“Calm down?” Mina asked.

“Never mind him. Let’s go,” said Sam.

“Calm down,” said Wesley. “Hurrying is counterproductive.”

Mina looked to her half brother. At the side of her head, her white hair stuck out in a smashed fan, and pebbles of mascara dotted her cheeks, as if a herd of miniature animals had recently stampeded across her face. Her eyes were very wide. Sam wasn’t sure what was going through her mind, but he guessed that it was dangerous.

“Wesley,” he said, “shut up.”

“Calm down?”

Wesley ignored them both. “Deep breaths.” To demonstrate, he closed his eyes, inhaled for a two-second count, and then exhaled. Wesley opened his eyes and nodded at her. “See? You feel better now, don’t you?”

“That’s it. I’ve had enough of your patronizing, you fat prick.” Mina ripped open the side pocket of the duffel bag, tore out a can of pepper spray, and was at the couch in two steps, smashing the fire button.

The spray caught Wesley directly in the right eye. “Ahh! Stop! Stop!” He paddled his hands through the air in front of his face and flopped over the arm of the couch and onto the floor, shrouded in the blanket of recycled carpet fragments.

Sam turned one way and then another, searching for somewhere to set down the sewing machine. There was nowhere.

While Wesley rolled around in the tangle of the blanket, Mina climbed onto the couch and leaned over the armrest, the can still raised to firing position. “Are you okay?”

“I thought we were friends.” Wesley had his palms jammed into his eye sockets, rubbing, and his voice came out muffled and teary.

She shot him with another jet. “I almost sprained my ankle on your stupid hammock.”

“Mina! Stop!” Sam had given up trying to find a place for the sewing machine. He stood in the entryway, feeling at once impotent and transfixed. “That’s enough!”

Wesley howled again, kicked against the floor with his heels, and propelled himself backward into the bottom box of a four-tall stack of boxes. The stack tumbled over onto the incapacitated man’s body with a sound like bricks hitting fresh earth. When the quake stopped, the
sight of the bare feet sticking out from under the jumble of packaging reminded Sam, inescapably, of another pair of feet, infamous in their ruby slippers, protruding from beneath a crumpled farmhouse.

Mina lowered the pepper spray and glared at her brother. “I just wish that he would clean. This is ridiculous! You know very well I would be a way better roommate.” She put the canister in her pocket and glanced back at Wesley—the only part of him that was visible, his feet. “I am your friend,” Mina said.

 ■ ■ ■ 

They had reached the front of the building before Sam managed to regain the wherewithal to ask Mina if she thought Wesley was okay. He was still toting her sewing machine.

“Depends on what was in those boxes.” She spoke over her shoulder and kicked out the door.

“Jesus Christ, Mina, why did you do that?” He followed her out into the building’s open-air courtyard, a small T-shaped area of cracked slate set back from the sidewalk and crowded by a rusted green Dumpster. It was already hot, overcast, the morning light filtered and gray.

The vagrant stepped toward them. What Sam noticed about him immediately was the brightness of his eyes; they were nested in the mass of his copper-colored beard like a pair of shiny green bird’s eggs.

“Hi?” The vagrant’s voice was throaty. In one hand, he had a long knife, blade pointed up. He blinked at them.

“Hi,” said Mina. She went at him, calmly pulling the canister out of her pocket as she moved, and when she was an arm’s length away, she blasted him in his bird’s-egg eyes.

The man yelped and stumbled backward, tripping over a loose slate. There was a thud as his head struck the paving.

Sprawled on the slates, the vagrant lifted an arm and waved the blade around as if trying to swat flies.

“Drop the knife,” said Mina.

The weapon clattered from the man’s hand, and Mina hopped aside to avoid its spinning, whisking slide. It clanged against the base of the Dumpster and lay on the slate.

On some level Sam was pondering the knife’s action—the vagrant’s intention—even as the impulse to defend his sister carried him the short distance from the door to the prone man. The same impulse lifted
Sam’s foot and dropped it on the man’s crotch. As his shoe drove downward, he felt a soft squelching beneath his heel. “That’s my sister!” Sam’s cry echoed in the morning courtyard, bouncing off the walls, the Dumpster, climbing up the wide shaft between buildings.

The vagrant momentarily sat up, spluttered, vomited orange gruel into his lap, and collapsed back onto his side. He sobbed and made hurt-animal noises.

“Sam?”

He turned to his sister. “I thought he threw it at you.”

Mina shook her head. “You’re my hero.” She dropped the pepper spray back in her pocket and bent to pick up the sword. “Let’s go.”

Sam took a blind backward step. The vagrant’s left hand popped under his sneaker sole. The man expressed a sound like a whoopee cushion.

“Sorry, sorry,” Sam said, and jumped off. He looked down at the spitting, weeping little man with grit and vomit in his beard and snot spurting from his nose, lying on the ground in a puddle of filthy overcoat. Rocking on his heels, Sam held his sister’s sewing machine and felt insane.

The vagrant’s writhing came to an abrupt crescendo: he jerked, gagged, spat, and went still. His chest rose and fell in a shallow rhythm.

Sam gathered himself with a deep breath. “Sorry,” he said again, a whisper this time—and he was, too, terribly, wretchedly sorry. But there was no time to think of strangers; his family was calling. Sam turned and chased after his sister.

Brooks Hartwig, Jr., opened his eyes. He rocked his head to look one way, then rocked it to see the other way. They were gone. Except for the crew, he was alone.

He stared into the awful sky. It still wasn’t over. It still wasn’t dead. He knew because they were filming. “Just do what you do,” said the Director. “Ignore us. We’re not even here.”

“I hate you,” Brooks tried to whisper. He wondered if maybe his hand was on fire, but he refused to look.

He was going to have to be very strong and very brave to kill it once and for all, to finally kill the beast. If he was ever going to get these fucking cameras out of his face, someone was going to have to die.

Monday’s headline was this: Booth, without consulting anyone, had offered to appear at Sam’s homeroom for that Friday’s Career Day Presentation. Mrs. Quartermain had accepted.

“That should be interesting,” Allie said.

Sam didn’t care for that—“interesting.” He was increasingly attuned to the way adults used vagaries to obscure dangerous truths. His mother, for instance, referred to her marriage to Booth as “liberated,” which Sam recognized as a sneaky way of acknowledging his father’s long absences. It was as though they were a little less married than other married parents and, by extension, that their family was somehow looser than other families, not as official. He didn’t want other people to think that they were different, although he knew they were.

“Interesting how?” asked Sam.

“I don’t know—entertaining.”

“There’s nothing interesting about being entertained.”

“Says you,” said Allie.

Mother and son were wandering the Huguenot graveyard that sat on the hill a few hundred yards from their house. It was their custom on the afternoons that his mother had off, where they went to discuss the events of the day—what had happened to Sam at school, what had happened to Allie at work, etc.

It was early spring, clear and brisk. The lichen-speckled stones lay scattered and tilted at a dozen different angles. The dead refugees they walked on top of had all ceased to breathe over two hundred years ago.

Sam let his hand trail along the arched top of a stone, scraping the spots of pale green growth with his fingers. Their steps raised milky brown puddles in the grass.

A lean, auburn-haired woman in her late thirties, Allie tended to carry herself very straight and to hold her arms crossed over the chest, like the commander of something. There was a remote quality about his mother that Sam held in great esteem. She listened. She never yelled. She didn’t tend to fool around.

Which wasn’t to say that his mother was especially severe or grindingly serious in the way that some parents could be—the fathers who barked directions from the bleachers at Little League games; the mothers who, just before the music began at an assembly, couldn’t resist running up to pat down an errant hair or smooth a tie. Rather, because of her calmness, she was the polar opposite of those types.

The café had been robbed once. Sam had been there at a café table, drawing. The bell over the door jangled, and he glanced up to see a man in a shiny teal Dolphins jacket run at the counter, snatch the tip jar, tuck it in his elbow, spin, and dash out, rejangling the bell. The thief vanished beyond the windowed doors, never to be seen again. The whole incident was over in less than twenty seconds.

Allie said, “Hey!” but didn’t make a move around the counter.

The bell was still tinkling when his mother cast a look at Sam at his table, where he was holding a magenta crayon over the paper, perplexed rather than frightened. Allie crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow. “Kiddo, I don’t suppose you’d mind drawing up a label for the new tip jar, would you?” she asked, and Sam giggled and went right to work.

A grown-up didn’t perform; a grown-up reacted. His mother was a grown-up. If Allie told him that a thing was, it was; if she told him it wasn’t, it wasn’t; if she promised that he would feel better tomorrow, he could not doubt her.

Sam had never possessed that kind of conviction in his father, and he certainly didn’t now. That winter’s episode, the trip to the museum, lingered on the boy’s mind. He replayed the events—the odd woman and her questions, how she used baby talk at first and then at the end became so serious and sad-seeming, the panties on the floor, Booth’s twisting of Sam’s words on the train—and could make no sense of the offense he had committed, and he was baffled and humiliated once more. Allie couldn’t have comprehended any of that, and even if the boy felt he could explain it to her, his father had sworn him to secrecy and gave no hint of releasing the oath.