PART I
ONE
“RISE AND SHINE, Wallace.”
My father woke me with that hard, open-handed push on the face he liked. I blinked awake.
He said, “We’re leaving.”
I’d been having a dream about trees that could communicate with each other by flying box kites. They discussed the wind. They waved to clouds. Then a pack of aphids, falcons, and men with knives descended on them, and they screamed.
Again.
Why couldn’t I just dream about sex?
“It’s still dark out,” I said.
Dad flicked on the lamp. “Get your stuff together. We’ve got a long drive.”
We were living in a two-bedroom rental with walls made out of stale crackers. None of the overhead lights worked. In the kitchen, duct tape held together two cabinets, three windows, and four drawers. I couldn’t tell you if the decrepit white stove was gas or electric, or if it even worked—we’d never turned it on.
“I already packed up the kitchen,” Dad said.
That meant he’d grabbed his bottle opener.
“Where we going?” I asked.
“New York.”
Shoot. That was a thousand miles away. “I’m presenting my science project third period tomorrow,” I protested. “Or today. Whenever it is. With Nicole.”
With nods and single-eyebrow raises, my father had approved of Nicole. Maybe mentioning her now would change his mind about leaving and we could stay in Kentucky a little longer. Until the weekend, say, when Nicole and I might go camping along the Cumberland River. Or if not until then, maybe we could stay just one more day, just one, because there was no question in my mind the announcement to Nicole of my sudden departure would lead to emotional last glances, a ride out on the dirt road behind Bueller’s pasture to that whispery grove, unbuttoned clothing, breathless quivers, breathful quivers, all different kinds of quivers, and—
“That’s not happening,” my father said. “The science project.”
“You can’t wait a day?”
“Let’s go.”
I sat up. “We’re going to present on local pollution. We worked hard on it all afternoon”—actually, we had mostly been fooling around in Nicole’s hand-me-down Civic—“about Jackduke and how it’s poisoning the river. Did you know not a single black-throated blue warbler has been seen in this county since the plant had that accident? The one right before we got here?”
Dad paused checking through a closet. “Black-throated blue warbler?”
“Black-throated blue warbler. It’s like a regular blue warbler but with more black. On the throat part.”
I liked Nicole. She was all-county in swimming, had chlorine-bleached hair and lats for days. Sometimes she spoke so fast she lost track of what she was saying, and kissing her felt a bit like an X-wing starfighter diving into the canal in the Death Star—her braces were that stupendous. Yes, she did get a bit weirded out whenever I shared my deep thoughts, and she made her own herbal teas that had pieces of grass floating in them and tasted like butt—but! These kinds of things can be forgiven, and we were almost past the “We shouldn’t be doing this” phase of hooking up.
And the next phase of hooking up? The “Let’s do this” phase? I’d only been there once, and that was by accident.
“I’m falling in love,” I said.
Dad snorted. “You’ve known her four weeks, Wallace. It’s not love.”
“It might be.”
“You don’t even know what love is.”
“Well, how can I when you rip it out of my hands?”
Dad was quiet at that. He was filling a trash bag with my clothes. Or perhaps trash—both tended to smell and to collect on the floor of my room. My life: a moldy pile in a Febreze commercial; a garbage bag thrown in the back of a truck; love, crushed by fate.
It was hopeless. I had one thing left to hit him with.
“This is not what Ma would want,” I said.
“You’re wrong,” he countered. “This is exactly what she’d want.”
“She’d want me to be alone?”
“She’d want me to do my job.”
That’s it? Dad hated when I brought up Ma. It was a direct circuit to the pain center of his brain. I’d say to him: “Hey, I had a dream about Ma on a midnight ferryboat,” and Dad would grab his head like spiders were laying eggs in there. Then he’d give me a twenty to disappear.
But not this time.
I felt a sudden gust of fear. What the hell was happening in New York?
“AC is cranked,” Dad said. “Beef jerky is bought—that gross honey-mustard kind you like. You can sleep in the truck.”
* * *
—
It was hard to sleep in the truck. The thumping and jostling of buckled midwestern pavement did not lend itself to sleep. The thoughts of where we were going and what I was leaving behind did not lend themselves to sleep, either. Before my iPhone died somewhere in Indiana, I tried out a few texts to Nicole, explaining my sudden departure: witness protection, a fatal illness from a secret space wormhole mission, vengeful Congolese warlords, leprosy (non-contagious, don’t worry), a retaliatory raid on the Westboro Baptist Church. But I didn’t send any of them. I’d learned from previous experiences of leaving towns abruptly (thanks, Dad) that continuing communication after a sudden departure just made things messy.
I knew that regardless of what I wrote, I would never hold Nicole again. A quiet exit was a clean exit.
Cool.
I looked out the window at the truck headlights slicing across bleached-out billboards. Our Happy Meals come with apple slices! Our lawyers sue with a smile! You’ve never seen antiques like these antiques! You will never know love, Wallace!
Cool, cool, cool.
Across the cab, my father smoked like a busted piston. As we crossed the state line into Ohio, I leaned my head against the window and watched the curtain lower forever on a short, reasonably happy, and sexually promising chapter of my life.
* * *
—
“No!”
I jerked awake to Dad talking on his phone. To the moment when everything began.
“How long ago? What was the last measurement?”
I looked over. Dad sat hunched against the driver’s-side door, phone pressed against his face.