I didn’t know I’d risen from my chair with enough force to tip it backward, until Daddy said, “What?”
Then I moved.
Seven hours later, with the afternoon dying, the desert far behind me, and the approach of night turning the sky a shade of indigo, I pulled the rental up to a diner marked by a twenty-foot neon cowboy whose right arm wobbled to and fro in perpetual friendly wave. I would have preferred to drive still further, putting even more distance between myself and the struggle now taking place in the swimming pool, but the hunger I’d denied all day long had just settled in for good. I had to feed it or risk going off the road.
The waitress must have gotten her hair and her lipstick out of the same bottle. “I’m sorry to ask, honey, but what happened to you?”
“My ATV broke down in the desert,” I said. “I couldn’t get a signal on my cell, so I had to walk about twenty miles for the nearest tow truck.”
She clucked. “People have died that way. You should have taken cover under the vehicle and done your walking at night.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what they told me at the Emergency Room.”
“Are you sure you’re all right to travel?”
“They said I was fine when they released me,” I said. “Won’t be winning any beauty pageants for a while, but I’ll be good as new in a week or two.”
She shook her head. “I gotta hand it to you. You’re one tough kid.”
“Believe me, not as tough as some.”
She brought me a turkey sandwich and threw in a slice of apple pie out of sympathy.
I didn’t need the charity. Between what I’d taken from Daddy’s wallet, and the cache I’d found in Mommy’s underwear drawer, I had a couple of thousand to fool around with. The burns, the buzz-cut, and my physique would help, too. They made me look older than I was, which would free me of any embarrassing questions about family.
I’d been better than them, in the end. I’d shown enough mercy to leave them the umbrella, and five one-gallon bottles of water. I’d also left them ungagged, with one free arm apiece, so they could drink as much as they wanted for as long as their supply held out. Of course, that gesture had been less about indulging their thirst than respecting their right to therapeutic communication. Now that they were speaking again for the first time in almost sixteen years, it would be a shame to deny them the time and voice they needed to catch up. There would be some awfully entertaining discussions going on between now and however long it would take for their voices to fall silent, and since I’d taken care to secure each of them well out of reach of the other, those conversations would all have a chance to play themselves out at proper length. It would have been interesting to stick around and listen, just to hear how often my own name was mentioned, and in what context, but I reasoned that they’d be more likely to release their inhibitions without me around. I was sure the privacy would lead to any number of fruitful epiphanies, some appreciated and some not.
I wished them well. At least, in the short term.
In the long term I hoped they fried.
Midway through my second cup of coffee, a family of four came in. Daddy was a scrawny thing with a prominent chin and weary blue eyes. Mommy, who was shorter, with frizzy blonde hair and a pointed nose, bore the grimace of any woman who had endured too many complaints for too many years. The boy and girl, who were six and five, didn’t want to eat anything but french fries and had to be seated on opposite sides of their booth when the boy persisted in tapping his sister on the shoulder, again and again, a crime she found unbearable and which made her screech, “Mo-OMMM! He’s touching me!” Daddy ended up slapping the boy and Mommy ended up informing both kids that were in big trouble if they dared make another noise: a disciplinary measure that lasted all of thirty seconds before wails and spilled water escalated the warfare, and the noise, to the next level.
As soon as I could I paid the bill and drove away, the lights of nearby homes blurring in the distance.
Maybe someday I’d be done with missing them.
Pieces of Ethan
Ethan’s condition swallowed him whole on the day of his sixth birthday. You could say that he was dead from that moment on, though he lingered for many years afterward, dragging all of us into the same black hole with him. Maybe we were entitled to hate him for what he became, and what that did to us: but how was he entitled to feel about us, the ones who would go on after he was gone?
It happened at the place on Sunny Creek where the river turned wide enough and calm enough and deep enough to become our natural playground on those days when the afternoons were more generous with hours than chores. This was of course still many years before that creek was dried to a fraction of its former glory by the dams greedy developers constructed upstream in order to turn our little valley from a refuge on the edge of wilderness to yet another overcrowded place for city folks to breed their litters of vacant-eyed suburban tots. We could splash around in our underwear or even outside of it without fear of offending neighborhood prudes or attracting neighborhood pederasts. Until that day Ethan changed we considered the site one of the great landmarks of our childhood, and I suppose we still did after Ethan, though what it meant to us had irrevocably changed by then.
I returned to the spot just once within the last couple of years, just to see if it had continued to get worse after Ethan died and our family moved away forever. I found rust on the rocks, stagnant water that stank of sewage, and abandoned crack pipes in the dirt. Highway traffic was audible over the trickle that remained of the waterfall. The ruination of our childhood playground made the lives we had lived before Ethan’s transformation look even more like what it was: an idyll we had known but lost.
But back then, it was still a family refuge beloved by all of us. And so Mom had felt no misgivings over asking me to take him there and keep him occupied until it was time to get him dressed for his party. He’d been driving her crazy for hours with his constant talk of the presents to come, and she needed him taken out of the house as acceptable alternative to strangling him. It was a choice between watching him or helping her clean the living room, so I agreed. She packed some sandwiches and sodas, and let me take Ethan and our middle sister Jean out to where the water was cold and white.
We enjoyed a few hours of innocent fun going over the falls and dunking each other under the water, before taking a break on the flat rocks that overlooked the pool so we could feel the droplets tingle as they turned to vapor on our skin. During those hours, the last unspoiled hours of our lives, I’d dared Ethan to jump from the highest cliff, something he hadn’t ever worked up the nerve to do before and might actually be able to steel himself to attempt some visit soon. I’d splashed Jean in the face and endured her promises to go running to Mom. I’d endured the inevitable payback in the form of the fistful of mud she’d mined from the pond bottom. We teased and played and pretended that time wasn’t passing at all as the sun rose high in the sky and started to sink again, changing only the pattern of the light that shone like diamonds on the rippled surface.
Many years later, I think about the first part of the day and reflect that if the bad thing hadn’t come along to ruin it we would now remember it as one of the perfect, transcendent moments of our lives; one of those days that we all keep as permanent snapshots in our heads, when we define what was best about our childhoods.