The Summer the World Ended (13 page)

Hours later, all the sensitive information was gone, leaving only a few pushpins stuck in the drywall as well as some scraps of Scotch tape. She frowned at the black marker writing on the cardboard around her: Xbox games, books, clothes, Xbox stuff, more clothes, Anime, Movies, and one box labeled in all caps, ‘Dad, do not open!’

My underwear.

It occurred to her she’d been wearing the same undies for four days. She closed her eyes and imagined the bathroom back home, the last shower she’d ever taken at the house in which she’d grown up. She sat on a box of books, rested her head on her knees, and cried. Riley hated it here. She hated the desert, the strange, angry people that stared at her, and how far away she was from everything comfortable and safe.

Why did Mom have to die?

A presence at the door signaled Dad’s approach, but he backed away without saying a word.

“What?” She sniffled.

“You okay? I was going to suggest we get your bed out of the trailer first. There’s a storage place in T or C where we can put your mother’s. Figure I’d run over there tomorrow on the way to drop the trailer off.”

It’s better than foster care.
“Yeah. Just thought of Mom again.”

“C’mere.” He held his arms out.

She walked into an embrace, sniffling. “Why’d you have to live at the ass end of nowhere?”

“You hate it here.” He patted her on the back.

“Yeah, maybe I do a little”―she closed her eyes―“but I don’t hate you.”

shower and clean clothes made Riley feel human again. Despite the clutter, Dad’s house felt newer than home, as if built within the past ten years. The bathroom was clean and far neater than she’d thought possible for a man living alone. The bathtub had sliding glass partition instead of a curtain, and one of those pulsating water jet heads with the long extension hose. Her new bedroom sat catty-corner to the shower, requiring only one step in the hallway to dart between them.

With her game posters on the walls, her bed beneath her, and the familiar glow of Xbox controllers charging up, she could almost imagine herself in her own bedroom again. It surprised her how cool it got at night. She’d expected to roast since Dad didn’t have air conditioning in the place.
Is he stingy, or are we poor?
Despite it being late June, it got rather chilly: 48-degrees according to the thermometer in the hallway. Wrapped in flannel pajamas, she snuggled under the covers and tried to believe nothing had happened. In a few hours, Mom would come wake her up for breakfast.

A loud noise broke through the veil of sleep, as if someone dragged something heavy across the roof, scraping it. She sat up, squinting at the window. Morning was well underway, judging by the amount of light. The noise grew louder, morphing into the recognizable sound of jet engines as her brain edged closer to being awake.

She crept to the window and peered up. Eight large airplanes with military silhouettes left cottony contrails through an otherwise cloudless blue sky in a straight, boring line. At a guess, they were green or black with swept wings that looked like they could swivel.

As far as she could see behind the house, the same flat open nothingness ran to the edge of the world. Off to the right a bit, a shallow ravine and some faint hills broke up the barrenness, but otherwise she might as well be the last person on Earth.

Riley crawled back onto her bed, after fishing her iPhone out of the jean shorts she handled with fingertips. “Ugh, forget washing these… I should burn them.” She clicked the power button, but the stone dead phone didn’t even display a red battery. “Dammit. Where did I put the cord?”

A short search of her room came to an unsuccessful end. She slipped on a clean pair of shorts before daring to open the door, and scurried through the hall to the bathroom. Afterwards, she wandered through the house, finding no trace of Dad. She leaned against the doorjamb of the master bedroom, peering at the darkness inside. Heavy blackout curtains covered the windows. The only light came from a weak, flickering computer monitor next to three stacked PCs, and the dial of an old radio tuned to an AM news station currently dissecting some judicial confirmation hearing. A small bookshelf had been pulled from the wall, likely when he crawled in to find the line for the TV. Riley stared at an upside down book with a picture of two ‘greys’―aliens with black, almond-shaped eyes. She twisted to get a look at the title.
The Conspiracy of Control
. A line along the bottom claimed the book proved the government created ‘UFO hysteria’ as a tool.

She whistled and edged to the computer, nudging the mouse. The screen lit up with a picture of Riley younger, grinning like an idiot in a royal blue one-piece swimsuit. She remembered the day Mom took the photo. She’d been eleven and on her way to Amber’s for a pool party. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. Seconds later, the image changed to another shot of her at nine outside in the snow. Her legs gave out and she fell into his chair. Image after image flipped by. The oldest had to have been only weeks after he left. The most recent showed her dressed up as Hermione Granger from Halloween 2015, shoulder to shoulder with Amber’s Catwoman.
Months ago.
Mom took these pictures.

After some time, the screen went black again, offering the feeble grey light of a blank screen.

“Dad?” She wandered through the kitchen to the back door. Hot, dry air blasted her when she slid the glass aside and stepped out onto dusty patio stones that cooked her bare feet. She looked left and right at lots of not-Dad. A peak in the rumble made her squint at the sky toward the still-audible sound of jets. “Dad?”

Riley made her way to the front door, finding the truck gone.
He must’ve gone to town to rent that storage space.
Why’d he leave me here alone? I’d have gone with him.
She backed inside, and caught her blurry reflection in Mom’s TV.
When did he bring that in?
It had looked a little small at
home
, but here it seemed massive. She debated bringing the Xbox out to the living room. Mom never let her hook it up because she did not want to have to argue a teenaged daughter off the TV when she wanted to watch her shows.

Not like that was a problem now.

Having it in her room also let her stay up late online with Amber without getting yelled at.

Dad probably wouldn’t care.

She paced in a circle around the sofa, arguing with herself if it would be disrespectful to Mom to defy her and use the big screen for games. Riley stopped and fell seated on the cushions. She didn’t really even feel like looking at the Xbox, much less playing it. If she hadn’t been so focused on getting online as fast as possible to hang out with Amber, maybe her Mom would’ve lived. If she had been more insistent about calling Dr. Gest… Riley slipped over on her side and curled up. If nothing else, at least she would have had a few more minutes with her before…

She hugged a small throw pillow to her chest and cried.

Dad stomping in the front door woke her up. He kicked dirt off his boots and smiled at her when she popped up to peer at him over the sofa back.

“Hey, Sweetie.”

“Hey,” she muttered. “Um, Dad?”

He paused in his beeline for the kitchen to look at her. “Yeah?”

“You left me here alone.”

He pressed fists into his hips, pondering. “Well, you are fourteen, right? I trust you for a few hours.”

“What if I don’t wanna be alone?”

“Oh.” Dad let his arms hang slack. “That didn’t even occur to me. Uh, sorry. You looked like you needed the sleep, so I didn’t want to bug you.”

Her eyebrows drifted together. “What time did you leave?”

“About zero-six-hundred,” said Dad, heading for the kitchen.

She twisted on one knee, facing him as he passed. “Is that six a.m.?”

“Yep.”

“We were up till stupid o’clock unpacking. How the hell did you wake up so damn early?”

He grabbed two cans from a cabinet in the kitchen and opened them, speaking with his back to her. “Practice. Lunch?”

“I didn’t have breakfast.”

“It’s almost noon, hon.”

She wandered to the kitchen table and sat on one of the hard wooden chairs. Elbow up, head against her bicep, she traced one finger over the possibly fake wood grain pattern in the basic Ikea table until the microwave beeped. A few seconds later, Dad set a bowl of SpaghettiOs in front of her and put another one in for himself.

Riley pushed the glop around with a spoon. “Again? We had this for dinner last night.”

Two minutes later, Dad joined her at the table and dug right in. “I know.”

“Guess you’re not much for cooking?”

He pointed at a small cabinet freezer in the back corner of the kitchen. “Got some deer, jackrabbit, and… whatever that other critter was in there. Figured you wouldn’t want it.”

Riley shivered.

“My cooking is pretty much meat, salt, heat, done.” He smiled. “Sometimes, smoke is involved.”

She ate one spoonful, thinking back to the last meal Mom had cooked for them. Salmon, asparagus, potatoes… real food. Her throat constricted and the corners of her eyes got warm. Riley held in the urge to cry as a dozen different recipes danced through her mind. Somehow, in flagrant disregard of her horrible, stressful job, Mom adored cooking. She never just ‘nuked something,’ no matter how worn out she was. Well, not since Riley hit about twelve. When she was little, the occasional micro-meal happened during bouts of the flu or extreme circumstance. Lately, Riley had taken over cooking if Mother had been too drained.