Do you know me? the man said. If you did, would you have done what you did? Would I be able to do this?
He shot her again. The woman’s eye went a thousand directions.
This is what happens, the man said. Don’t worry waiting. This is what we’re all gonna get.
Then the screen went black, and there was nothing.
* * *
My brother wouldn’t eject the tape. He sat on his knees, frozen. The TV was black, but I still saw the tape’s images, over and over. Get it out of there, I tried to tell him, but a sob was stuck in my throat, hung there fat and dry. The tape wasn’t going anywhere. It was here forever.
Who knows how long we would have stayed there if our dad hadn’t come home. The cruiser’s headlights washed over the front-door window, thawing out my brother. Without a word he ejected the tape and sprinted upstairs, returning it and the cursed box it came in. He flew back down the stairs and into the basement, forgetting that I was frozen too, so that when my dad came in, there I was, still sitting on the floor.
“I thought we had a deal,” he said.
“I can’t sleep.”
He shook his head. “It’s the movie, isn’t it?”
My dad bent down and picked me up like I was nothing. He carried me downstairs, into the black of the basement, and tucked me in next to my brother, pretending to sleep.
“Don’t worry,” my dad said, “there’s no such thing as a Lazarus. No one dead like that is ever coming back.”
He started up the stairs and I tried to call after him.
“Dad,” I said. But nothing more.
I rolled over and inched as close as I could to my brother, listening for his heartbeat in the dark.
seven
THE NEXT MORNING our mother picked us up for church again. When our dad answered the door, the sun was behind him, and he was wearing a new polo. It fit his arms well, but was too wide around the body. From the side he looked big and fit, but from the front a bit like a kid in his older brother’s shirt.
He stepped to the side and told my mother to come in. “They’re not ready,” he said, and the entrance hall’s linoleum creaked as my mother walked in, arms crossed like she forgot her jacket. She raised her shades and her face looked tired, her makeup faded.
“What are you watching?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said as Lieutenant Lazarus mowed down a team of Soviets. My dad had put the tape in first thing this morning, and although I didn’t want to watch the rest, I also didn’t want to stare at a blank screen. Lazarus popped open a Russian’s skull like a can of cat food, started gnawing on his brain. He was a cannibal now. One of the ways his witch bride got the spell wrong.
My mom stopped the tape. “Where’s your brother?”
I told her I didn’t know that, either. I didn’t tell her that he was still in bed, that he hadn’t moved since last night. I’d wanted to stay with him, but as soon as I woke up he told me one of us needed to be upstairs.
My dad put the news on.
“Have you heard anything more about that guy?” my mother said, whispering too loudly.
“We’ve got a couple of ideas,” my dad said. “It’s not a big deal.”
“A friend at work said his family still lives around here. Is that true?”
“A friend at work,” my dad repeated. “Huh.”
I turned from the TV and looked at my mom, who was picking at her hangnails, one of her bad habits she could never break. “Yes,” she said. “Cornbread, I think it was.”
“Right,” my dad said. “Cornbread. Well, your friend is right. He still has family. Tony’s already talked to them, but the Chief wants me to head out there today.”
There was a short silence as the news went to the weather. I followed the weather report, waiting for the woman to tell me what today and tomorrow would be like.
“Anyway,” my mother said, “thanks again for the phone.”
“What phone?” I said.
“Your dad bought us a new phone. Dropped it off last night. Cordless, like something from the future.”
“You’re welcome,” my dad said, mouth full of eggs. “Sorry I interrupted.”
That’s where he went. Why he didn’t come home smelling like strawberries.
“Hey,” my mother said, and I heard my dad drop his fork on his empty plate. “Is everything OK?”
A graphic came on the TV. Five columns of clear skies, a large orange ball in front of a pool of blue.
“Of course,” my dad said. “You and your friend have nothing to worry about.”
On the way home after church, my mother kept the radio off. My brother sat up front, but still wasn’t talking. Van noises filled the void. Each sound was a symptom of the van’s larger illness, my mother said. The whining serpentine belt. The thundering muffler. All point to old age, she said. All hint that the van’s best days are behind it.
At Eisenhower and Main, the vehicle idled oddly. My mother petted the steering wheel. “I’ll tell you guys, if I found a way to escape this place, if I stumbled into some money or something, I’d pack my bags and go right back to school. You wouldn’t catch me lurking around.”
My mother let herself smile. I had never seen a college, but I pictured my mother at my school, walking around, hair bobbing, encyclopedia clutched to her chest.
“Of course, you guys would come with me. You know that, right?”
I nodded my head. She turned on the radio. Over the music, I could hear the van’s engine ticking away.
* * *
We went to the pool every day that week, but we never saw Chris. Or the smoking lady. We were careful to sneak out each morning, sneak in each afternoon. When we left the apartment, we sniffed the air for cigarettes, then poked our eyes into the hallway, slicing the pie. The smoking lady was never there, though the hall still smelled of smoke. It became clear that our mother never checked with the smoking lady, to see how we were doing, or she did and the smoking lady lied and said we were good, then went back to sleeping or watching TV or whatever it was she did when she wasn’t smoking. Either way, no one was watching my brother and me. Either way, we could do whatever we wanted.
Our dad had to work that Friday night, so instead of going to his duplex we went to work with our mother. There was something about the weekend, she said, that she didn’t want us home alone. I thought her worry might have to do with the full moon floating in the sky, beaming like a silver coin, or the distant way my brother had been behaving.
At night we weren’t allowed to explore the course like during the day. We had to stay indoors, which was incredibly boring. The cafeteria was closed, so Sandy was gone, as was Cornbread. There was just our mom, leaning against the counter in the pro shop, staring off into space, dreaming of what, I did not know.
When Rick showed, she perked up. He brought two greasy bags of food, one for him, one for her, none for us. Sorry, Rick said, I thought the mice were away. My mother took some change from the register and gave it to us for the vending machine. Make sure you each get something sweet, she said. Rick slid her a burger and pinched her by the elbow. He said, Don’t mind if I do.
The vending machine was downstairs, next to the door that led to the golf cart garage, which was locked at night. The entire way down my brother mumbled mean things about Rick. Things like God I hate that guy and Why can’t he just die? I thought it would have been a perfect time for the candy bar my brother selected to fail to fall, to hang on its hook and refuse to dive. But the bar fell no problem, and when my brother handed me the leftover change, I was a nickel short of all the things I wanted.
Neither of us wanted to go back upstairs. Neither of us wanted to see our mother with Rick, even if it was just eating fries, or straightening the shop for the five customers who came at night after hitting a bucket at the driving range. My brother tried the garage door, just to make sure there was nowhere else we could go. When it didn’t turn, he sat on the stairs and unfoiled his candy bar, eating the whole thing in three or four vicious chomps, not offering me a bite.