Pretty much from there down it was a sea of black.
Right up until the last line: “You just can’t unsee a thing like that.”
My stomach tingled and buzzed, thinking about what might be under those black bars. I tried and tried to piece the narrative together in my brain, but there was just too much missing. The army hadn’t left me enough puzzle pieces.
Meanwhile my parents were still fighting downstairs, and it was taking a toll on my mental state. A sudden crash made me jump. Somebody had thrown something breakable. A plate or a vase. Probably my mom. My dad didn’t have to throw things. He had the weight advantage. He was stronger.
I stared more intensely at the letter. As though that had been the problem all along: I just wasn’t looking hard enough. But there was nothing left to piece together.
It reminded me—kind of suddenly, the way a disjointed thought will hit you out of nowhere—of our late family dog, Weasel. He’d had this cancerous growth on his back leg. The vet had operated twice, but he couldn’t get it all. Finally he said he couldn’t do a third operation because there wouldn’t be enough left to stitch together. Amazingly, Weasel’s story had a happy ending. His body got the best of the cancer, and we don’t know how. He just flipped and pinned the damn tumor with his immune system, and lived to pass away peacefully of old age.
I wasn’t sure enough that my brother Roy would have a happy ending. Not with all those bullets flying around. A couple of months earlier he’d told me one had whizzed by so close to his ear that the air of its passing left a tickle he couldn’t seem to shake.
I dropped the letter suddenly, having reached a breaking point with the noise of the fight. It had been there all along. I had pushed it away. It had pushed back in. Over and over. At that moment I lost it. Lost my temper, my cool. All sense of reason. I decided it was the noise that was keeping me from being able to comprehend what Roy was trying to tell me.
It wasn’t, of course. But it was damned irritating. It was also the soundtrack to my young life.
I stomped out of my room and over to the railing, where I stood on the landing and shouted down at them with all the voice I could muster.
“Hey!”
Silence.
My mom’s face appeared, staring up at me.
“What?” she asked. Irritated. “Your father and I are trying to work something out.”
Ha! I thought—and wanted to say. You never work things out. If screaming ever worked anything out, the two of you would understand each other perfectly by now.
“I can’t . . . ,” I began. But the thought stalled along the track to wherever it was going. “I’m trying to . . .”
But in that moment my anger abandoned me. Just all at once like that. I felt deflated. Because it struck me that I could have all the silence in the world and still not know what Roy wanted so badly to share with me.
“What?” she barked, tired of waiting.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m going over to Connor’s.”
Connor’s mother answered the door.
Mrs. Barnes was a woman who had been completely abandoned by color. My own mom wore bright red skirts or neon yellow blouses, as if she wanted to shock herself—and maybe everybody else—into remembering she was alive. Connor’s mom must’ve wanted us to forget. Her clothes were some kind of grayish tan, not all that different from her skin tone, which was not all that different from her long hair worn pulled back into a wide ponytail. It reminded me of the old photographs passed down from my great-grandmother, taken in the days of sepia tone. Except I honestly think the sepia was a stronger color.
She never smiled. I don’t mean not ever in her life, because how could I know that? But in front of me, never. And she never looked up or met my eyes. She seemed to be speaking to the doormat as she greeted me.
“Lucas.”
I honestly wondered how she knew without looking.
She said my name as though it was a good thing that I’d come. But if she was happy to see me, her face didn’t know about it.
“Come in,” she said. “I’ll tell Connor you’re here.”
I followed her down the front hallway toward the stairs.
A long table lined the hall on my right side, decorated with bowls of pine cones and green fir tree boughs. Just for a second I reached out to run my finger along it, the way I did at home.
Then I remembered there was no dust.
In my house there was always a layer of dust on the furniture, and I was obsessed with leaving my mark in it. Maybe partly as a way of proving I had been there. Maybe as a message to my mom that it wouldn’t kill her to pick up a rag or a feather duster now and then. But the Barneses’ house was relentlessly clean.
My mind filled with a sudden image. There was something heaped on all those surfaces, but it wasn’t dust. It was invisible. And it made dust look good in comparison. It was . . . I couldn’t quite get a bead on it at the time, and I’m still not sure I’ll choose the right word. Anxiety? Desperation?
I pictured myself picking up some kind of spreading tool, like one of those wide putty knives, and smoothing off the top of the ugly heaps. Or making them thicker in one place or thinner in another. It was just a weird fictional image in my head, but I also think it was some kind of red flag for how real that negative energy felt to me.
I shivered once and shrugged the thoughts away.
Just as we
