After Avalyn left, I waited forty minutes. Then I called her from the downstairs telephone. I began by thanking her for discovering the names on the photograph’s flip side; gradually, I led into my apology for the evening’s uncomfortable culmination. “Forget about what happened just now. There’s something in this head, something they did to me. I can’t shake it.”
“I understand,” Avalyn said. In the front room, my mother lounged on the couch, the TV’s light fireflying across her face, her head cocked as if straining to hear me. “And don’t worry, you’ll get over this. It just takes time.”
After I hung up, I joined my mother. It had been years since we’d had an honest-to-goodness fight, but I could still remember the precise curl of her lip, her jawline’s rigid architecture as she had scolded and yelled. That look was identical to the shape her features took now.
She held the remote control at eye level, switched off the set, and stared me down. “You need to explain something to me,” she said. I thought of Avalyn, her top half exposed, lying across my bed, her hand inside my pants. Did my mother know? Then my mother’s voice raised into a question. She almost screamed. “Why are you shutting me out of your life?”
She was angrier than I’d anticipated. “She understands things,” I said. “You don’t.”
My mother mocked me. “‘She understands things.’ That’s just it, Brian. I want to understand things. But it’s hard. Soon you’ll be in school, you’ll be so preoccupied. I want this time to be ours. You’re shutting me out.” She was yelling, her voice a hammer, nailing me in place. The remote control leaped from her hand. I watched it bounce under the coffee table, resting at last beside the folded entertainment section of yesterday’s newspaper. ACTOR DIES AT 32, a headline read.
My mother continued. “It’s not that I don’t want to believe you. I watched that silly program with you, I bought you the notebook to record your dreams in. But you’re not foolish. I mean, think about it.” Although she wasn’t saying it directly, I knew she meant this: the idea of you, Brian Lackey, being abducted by a UFO and examined by space aliens, is completely preposterous. If she had said those words, something inside me would have ignited.
“I just want more time with you,” my mother said. “Time that isn’t spent talking about what the interior of that damned ship looked like, how you think their fingers felt when they reached out and grabbed you. Please. I know you need to sort those things out.” Her expression melted slightly. “We should have brought this up earlier. If you want to see someone for help on this, really, there’s nothing wrong with it, they even offer it free at the prison. A lot of people I know-”
In all honesty, the idea of psychiatric help for what I truly believed had happened to me didn’t make me all that angry. At the time, however, a tantrum seemed the proper response. I allowed my eyes to widen, to reach cartoon proportions. There was nothing near me to grab and throw, so I simply stomped from the room. She didn’t follow. I strode outside, toward the car, and as I walked I remembered the night my father had left-how Deborah and I had listened from the staircase as he had stormed through the house, slammed the door, and departed our lives forever.
I drove and drove. I was nothing like my father; I would eventually return. But at the time, I wanted to be alone, wanted to plan my next move. The car careened down dirt roads, tires spinning. I crossed rickety bridges; the steel ribs of cattle guards that sent wicked vibrations through my body. I drove past acres of stubbled cornstalks. My headlights revealed a shadowy scarecrow, hunched and emaciated on his cross. Ahead, Hutchinson’s feeble lights beckoned.
Open your eyes, it will feel good. I had to know what that meant.
When I got to Hutchinson, I crisscrossed random streets. The majority of the city was safe behind closed doors. I puttered here and there for nearly two hours, pausing before each individual house. I scrutinized mailboxes, searching out his name. “McCormick,” I said, hopeful. “Come on, just one McCormick.”
By three o’clock, I’d found one McLean, one McCracken, and two McAllisters, but not a single McCormick. Soon it would be morning. My mother would be worried. I looked at my glazed eyes in the mirror, made a U-turn in the center of the street, and headed home.
twelve
The morning of Neil’s scheduled move to New York began like any other. It was a day of stalled air conditioners and rapidly melting ice cubes, a day when the sky was so cloudless and gorged with sun it granted no one the privilege of shade. I had a stomachache and a fever blister the size of a dime. The latter didn’t bother me; I wasn’t expecting a good-bye kiss anyway.
I waited until noon to dial his number. Mrs. McCormick answered. “Hello, Eric,” she said. “The weather is exceptional, and I don’t have to work. The sleepyhead’s still in bed. Let’s make his final day in the breadbasket of America a memorable one.”
My grandparents had been awake for hours. They crouched in the garden, dressed in matching aprons and sun bonnets. Grandma touched her yellow rubber gloves to the vegetables she’d cook for me on the next night I was home and hungry. Grandpa fiddled with marigolds and pansies he’d planted inside tires, the worn Michelins strewn about the lawn that added to the ramshackle antiquality of the mobile home. The temperature gauge on the porch-a rusting tin hobo, pulling down his dungarees to display a thermometer-pushed its red level toward ninety degrees.
I sat beside them. Grandpa handed me a crisp twenty-dollar bill. When he asked where I was headed, I explained how my “good friend” was leaving town that night, said I’d be back before dark, and hurried to the Gremlin. Grandma warned that the day’s pollen count had surged to an uncomfortably high level. She pinched at the feverish air, and Grandpa waved. Good-bye, good-bye, see you later.
During the drive toward Monroe, I paid close attention to my surroundings. On one lawn down the block, a gathering of children played in their bathing suits, screaming and giggling through a game of sprinkler tag. Three blocks later, a man hunched in a ditch and tried to coax something from a culvert. Kids sat on car hoods, their radios blaring heavy metal. Hutchinson was no different from before. But today, Neil would leave forever. I was stuck, an off-color thread weaved into the city’s bland fabric.
Neil stood at his garage door, beside his mom. They grinned suspiciously. Mrs. McCormick wore a green dress printed with daisies. Neil wore jeans and the usual white shirt. He was the taller of the two. Her hair, a little longer than his, was the same thick and heavy black, only streaked here and there with gray.
I slammed the car door. “Not so fast,” Neil said.
“We’re in the mood for a little trip,” his mom said. She held licorice whips, curled around her fist like a red-and-black lasso, and a fold-out Kansas road map. A paper sack sat at her feet. “The Impala’s been acting up,” she continued. “I fear it’s the transmission. I’m willing to give you gas money if you’re willing to chauffeur us”-she placed her palms on the Gremlin’s scarred hood as if to spiritually heal it-“in this little gal.”
“No problem,” I said. “Where to?”
Mrs. McCormick unfolded the map and smoothed it on the hood. She traced a line from Hutchinson to Great Bend, a city nearly an hour’s distance northwest. Then her finger curled toward a pastel green square on the map. I squinted at the green and read the words, “Cheyenne Bottoms Nature Conservatory.”
“We’ll spend the day there,” she said. She picked up the paper sack, and I heard the sound of bottles clunking together. “Wine and cheese. And if it’s okay by you, when the time comes we’ll see Neil off to the airport.”
Their minds set, I couldn’t argue. Neil took the passenger seat, and his mom clambered into the back. “Cramped,” she said. Her eyes met mine in the rearview. “But I’m not complaining!”