“No. No way. What if I can’t get out again?” What if he cuts himself and bleeds to death in an empty house with a ceramic palm tree on the wall and other people’s photographs and Mom stuck outside?
“All right. No problem.” She backs down, because she can tell he’s serious. But then she slams both palms against the crenellated aluminum of the garage door, sending it shuddering like a giant metal dog shaking itself.
“Mom!”
“Sorry. How strong do you think this is?”
“I don’t know. But you scared me. Cut it out.”
“I’m going to bust through. Go stand over there.”
She jumps in the SUV, backs it up and revs the accelerator. He can’t watch. The car leaps forward and crashes into the door. There’s a huge smash and a screech of protest as the aluminum buckles over the hood like cardboard.
“Mom!” He runs over and finds her sitting in the front seat, pushing down on the fat white jellyfish airbag and laughing like a maniac.
“Fuck, yeah!” she says, tears running down her face, gulping and sobbing.
“Mom!”
“What? It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Stop worrying.” She swipes at her eyes.
“You broke a headlight.” He inspects the front of the vehicle, and okay, he’s impressed that it’s the only thing that’s broken. She seems to have judged it well, the toughness of the vehicle, the momentum, hitting the brakes at the right moment so she didn’t punch right through the back wall like Wile E. Coyote and keep going. He’ll never admit that to her, though.
They squeeze past the crumpled remains of the roll-down and through the unlocked interleading door and into the house. It feels like stepping into a first-person shooter and his fingers twitch for a gun, or, truthfully, for a controller, so he can press X to access the drop-down menu to click on random items for information, like the healing values of the tin cans scattered all over the kitchen floor. In a video game, there would be boxes of ammo, various weapons, medpacks, maybe even a llama piñata or two.
Of course, in a video game, you wouldn’t get the smell. There’s a dark, sweet reek from the broken jars spilling their black sludgy guts across the tiles among a scatter of feathers from where a bird got in. Mom is grabbing cans, checking the dates on them, piling up the ones that are still good, taking assorted knives, a can opener, a corkscrew out of drawers. She opens the refrigerator and quickly closes it again. “Well, that’s a big nope.”
“I’m going to look around.”
“Don’t go too far.”
More feathers in the living room, where the window is broken and the curtain puffs and billows. He pulls out one of the stuffed leather chairs and uses it to anchor the fabric down and try to block out the wind, which is low-key screaming around the house, rattling at the windows. He picks up the picture frame lying broken on the ground, shakes out the glass, and turns it over to look, trying to assemble clues. The photograph is of a proud gramps crouched down and holding his catch aloft, with a five-year-old kid standing next to him, in waders and a floppy hat, side-eyeing the dead fish with a look of WTF-OMG-gross-what-even-is-this.
“Welcome to vegetarian life,” he tells the kid in the photo. But he can’t tell if it’s a real photo or the stock art that comes with the frame.
He opens up all the cupboards, hauls out the half-empty bottle of whisky, because you can use spirits to clean wounds if you’re out of antiseptic. In the bathroom, a mummified spider plant crumples under his fingers. The medicine cabinet is already standing open, the contents shambled. Reaching for a Hawaiian-print toiletry bag, his fingers graze over a set of dentures, pale pink and shiny in their plastic case, and he squawks in clammy panic and flicks them away. It’s the same feeling he got from Cancer Fingers. He hasn’t thought about him in ages. Not since The Army Base and Boy Quarantine. Don’t want to now, thank you very much, dumb brain.
He scoops up the medicines without bothering to check the labels and dumps them in the toiletry bag, because that’s what you’d do in a game unless your inventory was already full. On reflection, he also grabs the roll of toilet paper, the half-squeezed activated-charcoal toothpaste.
He finds Mom about to walk into the main bedroom, dark, except for a bright crack of sun between the curtains. It brings back a sharp memory of Dad, dying, and how the air was heavy, and the smell in the bedroom. No one tells you about that.
“We don’t need to go in there,” Miles says, firm. He has visions, now, of a lump in the unmade bed, rising like dough in the oven.
“We need cash, buddy. Don’t worry. I’ll be respectful.”
The closets are already open, emptied out. Mom clicks her tongue, irritated, gets on her knees and reaches under the bed. And it’s dumb kid stuff to be afraid of things under the bed, but his stomach flips anyway. She hauls out a narrow box and opens the latch. “Huh.”
“What is it?”
“A record player. Wind-up. Want to play some music?”
“I want to go. Can we go? Now?”
“In a bit,” Mom says, shifty-calm. “It’s hot out there in the desert. We should make like the Tuareg, travel at night.”
“Are they looking for us?”
“They can try. Rule One of being on the run, do the last thing anyone expects you to. Like having a Kenny G dance party at Eagle Creek.”
“Is it Kenny G?”
“Oh god, I hope not.”
It’s worse. When she lugs it into the living room and hooks it up to the portable speakers, on their last legs of battery, pumps the handle, and then lowers the needle onto the record, it’s not smooth jazz, it’s some kind of German opera.
“Augh!” he yelps, clowning. “My ears! They’re bleeding!”
“At least it’s not Ed Sheeran. C’mon, dance with me.” When he was little, he used to waltz standing on her feet, but his hulking great boy paws are too big to do that now. So, he does a half-hearted funky chicken, and they shake it off, and he tries to show her how to floss, again, but she’s hopeless.
“You look like a drunk octopus.”
“Still better than Ed Sheeran,” she shoots back. They dance until they’re sweaty, because dancing means you don’t have to think. Mom flops down on the couch, the razor energy driving her all used up.
“Ah, man. I think I need a nap.”
“Okay,” he says. “I’m going to do a perimeter check. Keep watch.”
“You really don’t need to,” she says, but this is coming from the woman who has already lined up a golf driver and a very large kitchen knife next to the couch.”
“It makes me feel better.”
Miles picks up his own golf stick and walks through the house, opening all the cupboards, lightly tapping important objects with the head of the club.
Maybe one day people will come tour the ruin of this golf estate townhouse. And here, the guide will say, is the very house where the notorious outlaw Miles Carmichael-Brady, one of the last boys on earth, took shelter with his mom that fateful day after busting out of a luxury bunker facility for men. The tourists will take their own happy snaps, and maybe there will be a commemorative plaque.
He checks the whole townhouse three times over, then he curls up in the overstuffed chair watching Mom sleep, and despite himself, he drifts off too, the golf club across his lap.