“Uh, north of Immaculate Heart,” Charlie answers, “if you turn right on—”
The numbing heat is trickling through his hands and up his arms, from his burnt tongue outward to his lips. He brings a hand to his face and smears his fingertips across the line of his mouth. He feels nothing.
The car is idling at a railway crossing, waiting out the clang of the bell. The boys watch him with unblinking eyes. Julian is still smiling; Paul looks as if he never has.
They’re both wearing gloves. They’ve shed their coats in the stifling warmth, but they’re still wearing their gloves.
“My name.” His tongue is so thick he could choke. “I never told you my name.”
In the moment before he manages to smother it, Julian dissolves into sharp, jittery laughter. But Paul doesn’t flinch. His eyes are bright and pitiless. His every word is tight and mannered, as if he’s practiced in front of the mirror.
“Do you think the neighbors will notice that you’re gone, Mr. Stepanek?”
Charlie tries to will his unfeeling hands to the door latch. His arm lands hard against the door, and his body slumps uselessly in the corner of his seat.
“You don’t want to do that,” says Julian. It isn’t a threat. He speaks as if he’s trying to coax a reluctant child. “Could I see your wrists, Charlie? Behind your back, if you don’t mind, it’ll only take a few seconds.”
He tries again to wrest his body back under control, but he lurches forward and falls against the dashboard. After that his limbs will no longer obey him. He can’t even hold still.
What’s going to happen to Lucy? It’s his only intelligible thought.
At Julian’s request, Charlie’s arms move as automatically as if he still controls them. He can just barely feel the loops of rope around his wrists and the tug of a tightening knot—a nagging, distant feeling, like someone gently pulling on his clothes. The car trembles from the passing weight of the train.
“Thank you,” Julian says. “See, that wasn’t so bad. You like following orders, don’t you? No matter what they tell you to do.”
“We’ve read all about you.” Paul’s voice is soft. “We know exactly what you are.”
But Charlie doesn’t know what he is, not anymore. Maybe he never has. Fear makes you forget everything—turns you into something that only knows it can die.
He’s felt it before, and seen other people feeling it. He knows what it looks like from the outside, and from the boys’ faces he knows they see it too. In this cloying heat, smothering as the Vietnamese sun, he remembers the relief of deciding not to see.
When the train is gone, it leaves a ringing emptiness in its wake. Julian coaxes Charlie to sit upright and refastens his seat belt for him. Paul watches, stone-faced, then draws a deep breath and shifts the car into drive.
The numbness bleeds into Charlie’s vision. He sees everything through the veil of a dream. The widening black between the streetlights; the silent strangers alongside him looking out into the dark. They’re kids—just kids. He doesn’t understand, and he never will.
The boys still won’t meet each other’s eyes. They’re afraid, both of them, of what they might see.
Part I
1.
The pills let his mother sleep, but they didn’t help her do it well. They left her lower eyelids dark and thick, as if she hadn’t slept at all. Paul could tell when she was taking them because she became sluggish instead of jittery. Most sounds still startled her, but they reached her at a delay, enough that she could brace herself first. She moved languidly, low-shouldered, as if through water.
It wasn’t much of an improvement, at least not for the rest of them, but Paul wasn’t the only one who had given up on that.
She was sitting by the living-room window, where she had always claimed the light was best. The winter light cast her face in the same creamy gray as her dressing gown. Paul watched her sweep her fingertips under her eyes; the shadows vanished beneath a film of concealer.
“There’s nothing wrong with your present,” his mother was saying. Her eyes were turned toward the compact mirror but not really watching it, as if she had surrendered her movements to muscle memory. “It’s beautiful. Bubbe Sonia’s always loved your artwork.”
Paul was already dressed for the party, in the brown corduroy suit and knit blue tie he wore to every party. The blazer had grown too tight across his shoulders, little folds of fabric biting into the flesh whenever he lifted his arms. The sleeves were too short by an inch. Paul hated the look of his own bare wrists, with their shining blue veins and the skin stretched too thin to hold them in place. They reminded him that his body was a thing that could be taken apart.
“She won’t love this,” he said. “If I were her I’d hate it. It’s a slap in the face.”
“Who puts these awful ideas in your head?” His mother had the doleful dark gaze of a calf. When he forced himself to keep looking at her he felt a dull, insistent ache. “You’re forever assuming the worst. I don’t know how I feel about those books they’re making you read.”
“No one puts ideas in my head,” said Paul. His voice was sharp, but it took a moment for her to wince. “It’s an objective assessment. She’ll despise it, and she’ll be right to do it.”
His mother slowly clicked her compact shut. She smiled at him, but with a weary finality designed to end the conversation.
It was snowing, large wet flakes that were stained gray before they even hit the ground. Outside the window, the family Buick hydroplaned in the slush before pulling to a stop. Audrey ducked out of the driver’s side, shaking her long strawberry-blond hair out of her face, and sauntered up the walk with a paper bag swinging from one hand.
“Well, it’s the fanciest I could find for the money,” Audrey said by way of a greeting. She shook the wine bottle free of its bag and inspected it. “Whether it’s fancy enough for Mount Lebanon people is a whole other matter—Ma, Jesus, are you ever planning to actually get dressed for this thing?”
It had once been the job of Paul’s mother to play the sheepdog, to chase everyone into place and keep an eye on the clock. Now it had fallen to Audrey, who up till a year ago had always been the one stumbling from the basement in half-tied shoes while their mother fretted at the head of the stairs. Audrey was ready in time today, bootlaces pulled tight, but she was still so skeptical of the idea of punctuality that she struggled to convince anyone else of its necessity. By the time she’d coaxed their mother upstairs to get dressed it was clear that they were going to be late.
The three of them waited in the front hallway in their party clothes and winter coats. Paul stood very still, elbows tucked in, trying not to fidget with his cuffs. Audrey kept lifting her sleeve to look at her watch; Laurie, ignoring them both, leaned against the railing and listened to her transistor radio.
“I’m going to go see if I can give her a nudge,” said Audrey after a while. “Paul, what’s that face? You look like you’re going to cry.”
Paul glared at her back as she made her way up the stairs. Laurie took out one of her earphones and heaved a sigh. She was doll-like and scrubbed pink, wearing T-strap shoes and a flowered pinafore dress their grandmother had sewn for her. She looked much younger than her twelve years, but she had already adopted an air of adolescent lofty irritation.