The air was warm and dry and felt good in his lungs, each breath seeming to siphon away the tears threatening to well up in his eyes.
What had Kristen been like as an adult? he wondered.
Or had she ever been an adult? She was twenty-six years old, but years meant nothing. In his mind, he still saw her the way she was when he'd left, obsessed with cute boys and popular music and schoolgirl gossip. He remembered how she'd cried when he left and how he'd promised to come back and visit, and he remembered the way her arms had felt around him as she'd hugged him goodbye.
He began to cry.
Angrily, he wiped away the tears. He took a deep breath, shouldered his backpack, started walking. Most people, he knew, would want someone to talk to, a shoulder to cry on, but he was glad he was alone. Grief, he believed, was a private experience, not meant to be shared. He did not want to think about other people's needs at this moment, whether he was soaking their good shirt with his tears, whether he was keeping them from an appointment or making them late for a meal, whether he was being too needy or too emotional or not emotional enough. He needed at this moment to be completely alone, completely selfish, so that he could feel what he had to feel for as long as he had to feel it without the influence of another person affecting his emotions.
A pickup sped past him, and a half-full McDonald's cup splattered on the ground at his feet, coffee splashing onto the cuffs of his jeans. He heard a harsh laugh as the driver drove away.
'Asshole,' Mark mumbled.
Still, the encounter had brought him back into the real world, the practical world, and for that he was grateful.
He thought for a moment, then hurried across the highway to the opposite side. He faced the oncoming traffic, held out his thumb. He'd been heading for southern California, planning to look for construction work in Los Angeles, but now he was going to do something he should have done a long, long time ago.
He was going to go home.
The Land Rover drove down Highway 60, the driver silent, Mark still mulling over in his mind the fact that his sister was gone. He'd slept last night in the desert outside of Quartzite, and though he'd expected to spend the entire night unable to sleep, staring up at the stars, he had dozed off almost immediately after crawling into his sleeping bag and had not awakened until the sun had come up over the mountains.
The Power was fading. As long as Kristen had been alive, as long as there had been that blood connection, he had been able to tap into it, reference it, but now it was growing weaker by the hour, only a faint pulse remaining, and soon it would be gone. Already, he was having to use his own memory, to rely on his own thoughts and hunches. He was dismayed to realize how much he had relied on The Power, how much a part of him it was, and now that it was disappearing, he felt more isolated than he ever had in his life, as though one of his senses--his sight or his hearing--had been taken away.
He hadn't even been aware of how often he used it.
That was a little scary.
He probably wouldn't have gotten into this vehicle if he hadn't been able to take a reading of the driver.
It looked like his hitchhiking days were over.
Kristen was the real loss, though. Not having The Power was a mere inconvenience. Kristen's death was a tragedy.
They drove toward Phoenix, a series of dying desert towns bleeding into each other, empty cinderblock buildings in the open spaces between them making it difficult to determine where one town ended and the next began.
Through the side window, Mark saw a rock shop.
Faded pink paint on a dirty window read: sale!!
agates! jasper! geodes! Tireless cars sat on blocks next to the store, their exposed axles rusted and sagging, wrecked corners of their bodies twisted into unrecognizability.
A white cross near a burned section of desert memorialized some driver's death, and Mark wondered who was taking care of Kristen's burial arrangements. Would Billings still be there? he wondered. Would the assistant have remained even after their parents' deaths? Would Kristen have kept him on or would she have let him go?
Did Kristen have any friends? Maybe they were seeing to the arrangements.
He just hoped he didn't arrive too late. He wanted to be there for the funeral. And if there was no funeral, if the county or some social services agency simply provided her with a generic burial, he wanted to make sure that that was rectified, that she was put to rest with dignity.
Kristen deserved at least that much.
Mark closed his eyes, lulled by the heat and silence and the motion of the Land Rover. In his mind, he saw Kristen as she'd looked the last time he'd seen her:
shorts and a tank top, hair long and straight and blond, sunlight glinting off her braces, tears in her eyes, the house behind her.
The house.
He did not think of the house too often, tried not to think of it at all. He remembered as a child watching Giant on television and being freaked out by how eerily similar the gothic ranch house was to that of his own family. Like the structure in the movie, their home sat alone on a flat desert plain, an island of darkness in an endless sea of tan. Two and a half stories with a wraparound porch, the house, with its deep gray-black wood and permanently shuttered windows, its gables and wrought-iron weathervanes, gave the impression of age, permanence, and old- fashioned authoritarian power. It was an intimidating building, and it had always frightened his friends from school, had always been the recipient of wide-eyed stares and hesitant approaches, treated with trepidation and barely concealed fear--unlike the house in the movie, which, despite its appearance, had been treated as though it was not unusual, not out of the ordinary, yet another average ranch building.
The movie had disturbed him. It was not traditionally scary, was a light epic drama with comedic overtones, but the specter of the ranch house, its dark prominence, had been more than a little unsettling. Halfway through the film, the interior of the house had changed, been remodeled, and that wasn't so bad. The lighter walls and furniture looked fake, setbound , and that had enabled him to disassociate the movie home from his own.
His father, he remembered, had loved that film.
He'd known early on that there was something different about his family. They hadn't socialized with the other people in the extended series of adjoining ranches known as the town of Dry River, his parents keeping to themselves, associating only with his father's assistant Billings and with the occasional old friends or relatives who visited from back east. Even when Mark had started going to school and making friends of his own, he had the impression that his parents disapproved, that they would rather he not bring any other kids home--which seemed to be fine with his friends since they were afraid of the house anyway. He'd ended up spending most of his childhood at other people's houses, inventing a family that did not exist in the stories he told, lying and exaggerating in order to make his parents seem more normal, expanding his personal mythology to include Kristen when she'd come along.
It had been the ritualization of their lives, he supposed, that had first caused him to start thinking about moving away, the fact that his father made them eat breakfast every morning at exactly six o'clock, made them eat dinner at six each evening, made them sit in exactly the same spots each time, made them all go to bed at precisely nine o'clock, made them sit in separate rooms for an hour each night reciting their Daily Words.
Other parents didn't do that, he knew. People sometimes said prayers, ate together, but they didn't regiment their lives to the extent that his parents did.
And they did not beat their children when some slight mistake or miscalculation made them a second or two late for one of these ritualized practices.
As his parents did.
But, still, they were his family. And there was no way that he could leave Kristen. She needed him. He took the heat that would have otherwise fallen on her. And he kept her from buying into their parents' wackiness completely, kept her grounded as much as possible in the real world.
Then it had happened.
Even now, goose bumps popped up on his arms when he thought about it.
