Model Home (48 page)

“Look,” she said, handing Dustin the homemade book in her hand. “I dug this up when we moved.”

“What is it?”

“The Land of Underwater Birds.”

It was in surprisingly good shape, staples lining one side like a column of ants. Dustin stared at the cover. Painstakingly drawn in colored pencil was an underwater vista of strange-looking birds, strings of bubbles rising from their beaks. They swam on outstretched wings, gliding like manta rays, floating peacefully or bringing worms to nests sitting in the seaweed. You could tell which ones were Dustin's because of the blobs of bird shit sinking from their tails. Lyle's birds tended to have lipstick and long eyelashes. In the sky, more indifferently drawn, were fish: a shark with saw-blade teeth, an octopus lounging on a cloud. The octopus had on a name tag that said
CLAUDE
.

“This made it through the fire?” Dustin said, amazed. At the bottom of the page, in different-colored letters, were their names:
DUSTIN AND DELILAH ZILLER
.

“It was in the garage, I guess. With the other junk that survived. I didn't even know till I found it in storage.”

Dustin flipped through the pages, sending up an acrid must of smoke. It amazed Lyle how much they'd written. How they'd
looked forward to it, rushing upstairs after day camp or swim lessons to sit in the closet and dream up more details.
It snows when it's hot outside. Caterpillars are more beautiful than butterflies. Also, movie stars have terrible faces.
When Dustin reached the drawing for this—an acne-riddled man with a long, bulbous nose, bumpy as a pickle—he stopped smiling, staring at the man's face.

“Did I draw that?” he said.

Lyle nodded. The cars on the freeway had begun to move in starts, bunching and unbunching like a snake. Dustin closed the book and handed it back to her.

“Mom sent me a copy of your college essay,” he said finally.

Her heart sank. “She
did
?”

“At first I was pissed. ‘My Brother's Life Is Fucked, I'm Not Going to Fuck Over Mine.'”

“It was about all of us.”

“I know. You told the truth.” He looked off at the refinery. Lyle wondered which part of the essay he was talking about: the bit about seeing him in the burn unit for the first time, how some teensy part of her had been happy he wasn't more beautiful than her anymore? “Will you write me from Columbia?” he asked.

She had to clear her throat to speak. “Yes. Every week.”

“You'll forget to. But that's okay. It's enough that, you know, you think you're going to right now.”

Lyle wanted to assure him she wouldn't forget, that she would write him every day if that's what he needed, but somewhere inside the unkempt crannies of her mind she knew he was right. She would get pulled into a new life, frantic with friends and classes. It occurred to her that her brother would never apply to college; he was too frightened to leave his hideout in the desert. He'd end up working somewhere like Mojave Video for the rest of his life, the strangeness in his face seeming less and less like an accident. At some point he'd become one of those men who look older than their bodies, trolling the supermarket with a cart full of frozen steaks.
In the land of underwater birds, they say good-bye for hello.
Lyle's stomach growled so fiercely that Dustin heard it over the traffic, looking at her in surprise.

“I forgot to have breakfast,” she said. Maybe she was wrong; maybe Dustin would do something great with his life, as unexpected in its way as what had already happened to him. She tried her best to convince herself of this.

“We should eat,” he said, frowning. “Taz can fucking celebrate with her friends.”

In the bathroom, Camille washed her hands, fighting the urge to smoke the cigarette hidden in her pocket. She'd had to escape the awkwardness of the living room. In the mirror, the face peering back at her seemed pale and tired, tiny wrinkles creping the skin above her lip. The lines around her neck seemed deeper than usual. She reached into her pocket and touched the Camel Light. It was the only one she had; she didn't dare smoke it yet, so early in the evening, no matter how much she wanted to.

She began to organize Lyle's and Jonas's things, putting the cap back on some deodorant and collecting a stray Q-tip that had dropped on the floor. She'd done what she had to do; she'd left Warren in the desert to nurse his failure, to watch over their poor, bitter, sick-hearted son. So why did she feel so wretched? Perhaps it was having Warren in the apartment with his wedding ring. Her own was in a drawer, tucked inside an old prescription bottle. Running the sink to seem busy, she wondered if she'd made a mistake in leaving him. At the time it had been a matter of survival. She could forgive him for moving them out to California, perhaps, for bankrupting them in pursuit of some fantasy of wealth, for falling victim to a malady of shame he could never pay off—she could forgive Warren these things, but this was different from getting over them. In the end it was her disappointment in him that had proved toxic. He'd squandered the life they might have had together, the one he'd promised her those moose-eating days in Chicago before they were married. After Dustin's accident, he'd given up completely, in love with his own misery. Or so she'd thought. Now that she'd left, she could see him more clearly: a broken man, well-meaning but not as brave as life required, who'd become something he'd never imagined.

But perhaps you could never imagine it. She'd wanted to be someone else, a glamorous woman in black. But she wasn't. She was a woman who assembled newsletters, who looked better in pastels, who'd found a small, fragile, unexpected peace with her daughter.

Camille turned off the sink and stepped out of the bathroom, where Warren was standing in the hall. She wondered if he'd been waiting for her. In his hand was a present, a Bullock's box
wrapped up in a bow. Camille felt suddenly ashamed; she hadn't thought to buy Taz anything for her birthday.

“That's thoughtful,” she said. “I should have gotten something, too.”

Warren held the present out to her. “It's for you.”

“What?”

“I wrapped it myself,” he joked. His hand—the whole present—was trembling. He could barely look at her. Camille took the present from him, as much to relieve her own discomfort as his.

“Warren,” she said helplessly.

“An early Christmas present.” He laughed. “Anyway, I'm not used to having an income. I don't know what to do with my money.”

Camille looked at the ribboned box in her hand. She knew he couldn't afford his own health insurance, let alone a gratuitous gift from Bullock's. Still, she had no choice but to open it. Folded ineptly inside some tissue was a black stole with a viney pattern woven around the edge. Possibly it was cashmere. For a second something caught in her chest. She pictured Warren taking the stole out of the box at home, making sure there was nothing wrong with it before folding it up again as best he could.

“It sort of reminded me of that shawl you used to have. The Western one? But, you know, without the fringes.”

“It's beautiful. Warren, it is. But I'm not moving back to Antelope Valley.”

“It's only a present,” he said.

“I just got Jonas enrolled back in school here. And what about Lyle?”

He frowned, gazing at the ribbon she'd handed him. “I'm not saying right now. Maybe when the school year's over.” He gestured vaguely at the hallway. “You can't stay in this tiny place forever. You don't even have room for a Christmas tree.”

“I haven't had time to pick one up.”

Warren avoided her eyes. “Anyway, I found a big one. A tree. You can spend the night at the house.”

“Maybe the kids,” she said, shaking her head.

Looking at her husband's face, its chronic, communicable unhappiness, Camille knew she hadn't made a mistake. She'd escaped for a reason. When she'd first moved out and found the apartment, Warren had seemed to think it was worse than their
place in Auburn Fields: “dark as a forest,” he'd called it. He seemed to hold himself responsible for its gloominess. Of course, it would never occur to him that she loved it. The tiny kitchen whose windows fogged up when she cooked. The shag carpet that harbored old coins, causing a racket when she vacuumed. The wallpaper in the living room that Lyle called “inkblot beige” because of its tacky Rorschach blobs. Even the sound of the freeway at night, steady as a waterfall, a mindless roar that helped Camille sleep. It might seem cramped to anyone else, even cavelike, but mostly what she felt was
space:
the freedom to be happy if she wanted to.

She walked back into the living room, where Jonas was playing his video game. There was a stillness in his face that frightened her. She saw it at times like this, when he didn't know she was watching: something like sorrow, a mortal wound. Camille watched him from the doorway. For so long, well before Dustin's accident, she'd been dissatisfied with who she was. She'd wanted to surprise people, to be the person who wasn't afraid of doing the wrong thing. A different kind of mother. Well, just look at how she'd succeeded.

She bent down and kissed Jonas's head, hoping he'd look up from his game. She knew he wouldn't, but her heart waited nonetheless. Dustin called from the kitchen that lunch was ready. She told Jonas to switch off his game and he did, jumping up like any other kid, shocking her with his gawky height. He's going to be fine, Camille thought—and then said it again to herself before leaving the room.

After lunch, they all drove out to Herradura Estates to see the new house that had been built where their old one had been. Jonas thought it was strange that this would interest his family, since the place was no longer theirs, though in his experience grown-ups were often interested in things that no longer existed. Not just coins: old things that had happened to them. It was like a disease. He hoped there was a way to avoid getting it, but figured it must be something inevitable like hemorrhoids.

It had been Dustin's idea to go look at the house, but now it looked like maybe he was having second thoughts, his leg jerking up and down as they drove up Crenshaw toward the gate. Jonas wondered if they'd still be making the trip if he'd actually blown up the house. He doubted it. Since they'd found out it was Hec
tor's fault, his family had been doing a constant sort of egg-and-spoon walk in which he was the egg. They were always hugging him out of the blue or offering to fix him his favorite dinner or buying him something no one else at school had. His mom, especially. It was like living with Santa Claus. If he told her that he wanted a torpedo, right that second, she'd probably stop the car and drive them all to Submarines-R-Us.

Still, there was something missing. Would they be buying him all this stuff, showering him with hugs, even if he
had
blown up the house? That was the question that nagged him while he brushed his teeth or waited for a Pop-Tart to pop. Would they have loved him anyway? Probably it was one of those things you could never know.

They had no trouble getting past the gate, Jonas's mom being old pals with Herman the guard, who put a finger to his lips before waving them through. The new house looked nothing like their old one. It was much bigger, for starters. Plus it had two stories and a little castle wall like the teeth of a jack-o'-lantern sticking over the top and a giant arch where the front door was supposed to be. Heaped in the muddy yard was a pile of scrap, materials enough for another house. Jonas's mom parked at the curb since the driveway was mud. They stayed there in the car looking at the house. A girl on a horse stared at them as she rode by, stiff as a pole, her head turning slowly as if she were one of those mechanical dolls at Disneyland.

“Our mailbox is gone,” Lyle said.

“Maybe they've moved in,” Jonas's mom said.

“Unlikely,” his father said. “There aren't any windows.” He turned to the backseat. “Well? Should we head back?”

“No,” Dustin said. “I want to check it out.”

He climbed out of the Volvo and tromped up the muddy slope toward the house, leaning into each step, as if he were walking into a wind. Jonas's parents waited until he'd gone into the house and then got out of the car and then Jonas and Lyle did, too, following Dustin through the giant archway into the doorless vestibule curtained with plastic. Inside there were no walls, only wood studs like bones marking where they'd go. Pipes snaked up to the ceiling or jutted toward invisible sinks. The skeleton of a staircase, tall and banisterless, rose up to a hole in the second floor.

Jonas followed his family through the half-built house, watch
ing for nails and leaving scattered footprints in the sawdust. Dustin was nowhere to be found. They wandered from room to room, stepping through the walls like ghosts.

“This must have been where the sports closet was,” Jonas's dad said. He was standing in the middle of a large room, next to a tall pile of Sheetrock.

“How do you know?” his mom asked.

He shrugged. “It's in my head. Like a map.”

“Where am I?” Lyle asked.

“In the laundry room. In front of the dryer.”

They called Dustin's name, but no one answered. In the corner of the next room, beside a wall stuffed with pink insulation, Jonas found a party-sized bag of M&M's sitting in a hardhat. He and Lyle sat down on the unfinished floor, feasting on M&M's. The orange ones embarrassed Jonas and he didn't eat them.

“Was this the kitchen?”

Jonas's dad nodded. He sat down with them, slow as an old man, and then his mom did, too, the four of them passing the hat around. The room smelled like pee.

“I hope Dustin's all right,” Lyle said.

“Probably he just wants to be by himself,” Jonas's mother said.