Robert didn’t know much about his mother’s single life. She’d kept the trailer in the woods back in Oklahoma, the few acres she’d owned with their father when they were kids. She could never give it up. This thing with Annie had to be temporary. Eventually Tilla Mae would have to go back to her patch of red mud and wild sumac.
Robert had never returned to Oklahoma. He couldn’t imagine Adam’s memories were any happier than his own. At least, being ten years younger, he shouldn’t remember as much. Robert hoped Adam didn’t remember too much.
“Here,” his mother said, putting a scrap of paper with a phone number in front of him as he sat at the table. “That’s his cell phone.”
Robert didn’t want to open that door again, but he knew that if something was powerful enough for him and his mother to see it, then it went beyond science or healthcare. Adam’s invisible world had crossed into theirs.
Robert grit his teeth and inhaled the greasy, black-pepper scents of his mother’s cooking.
He’d call. No, he’d text. After dinner.
3
Adam
Adam tried not to think about Bobby’s text, and he certainly wasn’t ready to call his brother, so he thought about Tanner instead, replaying their kiss over and over. He wouldn’t mind seeing Tanner again. He certainly wouldn’t mind kissing him again. Short as it had been, it had alleviated the loneliness he’d felt for so long.
Tanner had promised to ask his dad where he’d bought the cue and text Adam with the information. The loss of the money and the encounter with the Saurians had made their goodbye an awkward one.
Adam pulled into the trailer park around one in the morning. He’d chickened out, driven until it was too late to call Bobby, even if Denver was an hour behind Guthrie.
The single-wide’s porch light remained on. Aunt Sue would be up, but not for him. She kept weird hours lately, said it was a sign of getting old. Adam didn’t like to think about that.
A flock of plastic pink flamingos marked the border of Sue’s trailer lot. Adam parked the Cutlass in the space where it used to rest on cinder blocks, languishing beneath a tarp before Adam had gotten hold of the car and gotten her running again. Though he hadn’t put her through her paces on the drive back from Ardmore, damp steamed off her hood. He’d have to change the oil before a long trip, make sure she had enough coolant in the radiator.
Adam shrugged off the thought. He wasn’t going anywhere, certainly not to Denver.
Call me. Please.
Bobby. After all this time. Just thinking about his brother slid something black and red into Adam’s guts.
He stepped inside the ring of flamingos and wind chimes made from oyster shells and bits of rusty pipe, the boundaries of Sue’s wards. The night eased in, cricket song and a distant television turned up too loud. Adam exhaled and let his shoulders slump.
“Well?” Sue asked before he’d even shut the door behind him.
She sat in a faded green recliner. Duct tape patched the places where her cat Spider had marked it in his younger years. These days he mostly slept. Sue’s hair, the color of dirty snowmelt mixed with steel, had thinned, but it still curled around her face. She staved off her age with a daily routine of sunblock and powders, but Adam paused whenever he saw her after any time away.
She was his father’s aunt, so much older than his mother and yet so much more alive, so much more vibrant. Sue smiled. She laughed. Tilla Mae did not.
Sue was getting old, and thinking about it put a weight in Adam’s chest.
“So?” Sue asked, her voice croaky after a night of disuse. “How did it go?”
“I didn’t get the cue,” he said. He didn’t want to talk about the night’s other event, the text from Denver.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I know how much you want to find him.”
“It’s okay,” Adam said. “I have a lead.”
He moved down the little hall, unbuttoning the flannel. He’d put it on thinking it looked all right for a night at a bar, but now he wanted to ball it up and throw it in the trash. It looked old, used. Normally he wouldn’t care, but Tanner’s comment echoed.
You don’t seem small town.
And he felt small town. He felt small, like he could or should be something more, shouldn’t live in a trailer.
“Did you know there’s a pack of Saurians living in Lake Murray?” he called.
He didn’t worry about Sue hearing him. The trailer’s tissue thin walls let each of them hear everything the other did, even the things he wished they wouldn’t. In a proper house his little room would be a closet, but it was his, and had been since Sue had taken him in.
“I knew there was a pack in Sulphur,” she said, sounding thoughtful. The paneled walls and worn carpet did little to muffle her voice.
“I thought they were extinct,” he said, moving back up the hall to the trailer’s biggest room.
Kitchen, living, dining—it wasn’t that big.
“So who had it?” she asked.
“Some college kid. Nice guy. They let him walk.”
“How nice?” she asked. She wore a knowing little smile when he came back up the hall.
“Nice arms,” he said. “Good-looking, I guess.”
“Did you get his number?”
“Yeah,” Adam said. “Though he’s going to be short on beer money when he finds out he’s not so good at pool.”
“But you’ll see him again?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “He goes to school in Sherman. That’s a long drive to date a normal.”
Even if he was a good kisser, Adam thought. Maybe Tanner would be worth the gas. Probably not. Adam would have to explain what he was, what had really happened at the lake. There was no way Tanner wasn’t already asking questions.
“There’s nothing wrong with normal men. All four of my husbands were normal,” Sue said. “And witches don’t always get along with witches.”
He wasn’t technically a witch, not following the religion, and his meager power didn’t work like theirs. He didn’t really know what he was, one more reason why he wanted to find the warlock, find his father. He didn’t know if they were the same person, despite the warlock’s magic, despite its similarity to Adam’s, but this was the only lead he had.
Adam got a glass of water from the faucet. It tasted gritty. The trailer needed a new softener, but he didn’t mention it.
Money was tight. He needed more odd jobs. He needed a regular job, but for that he needed his GED, if not a few years at school. Screw dating. He couldn’t afford a decent haircut.