The Night Parade(32)

As if reading his mind, Ellie said, “Where will we go?” She was staring out the window, the cheeseburgers in her lap untouched. On one slender thigh she balanced the shoe box. Its lid was off, and she was absently petting the three speckled eggs within.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about that. Do you remember Uncle Tim?”

“Your stepbrother,” she said.

“We should get in touch with him, go to his place for a while.”

“I haven’t seen him since I was little.”

“Yeah, well, it’s been a long time for me, too,” David said.

“Mom says he’s a slouch.” Then she hung her head, as if physically pained by the sheer mention of her mother. “Where does he even live?”

“Missouri, last time we talked.”

“That’s far.”

“It isn’t so far,” he said. “We can do it.”

“In this car?” She glanced up and looked out the windshield, which appeared hazy behind a cloud of gravel dust.

“It’s the only car we have, Little Spoon.”

She looked back down at her lap and at the speckled eggs in the bird’s nest.

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” he told her.

“I know.” She turned over in the passenger seat so that he was left staring at her back.

David went back to the newspaper’s map. Yes—given their situation, Tim was the only logical choice he had left.

It wasn’t that he and Tim had left things on bad terms; despite Kathy’s disapproval of his stepbrother’s irresponsible lifestyle, David had never expressed this to Tim, nor had he let it sour anything between them. It was simply that they had gone off in different directions in life, and their infrequent conversations over the phone had eventually stopped altogether. He wondered now what kind of reception Tim might show him, receiving a phone call out of the blue. Moreover, what might he say or do if he’d already seen the news bulletin? David couldn’t imagine.

David’s mother had married Tim’s father when David and Tim were nine and eleven years old, respectively. Memories of David’s stepfather, Emmitt Brody, were of a hulking lumberjack of a man, broad-shouldered and thick-nosed, with a deeply furrowed brow and hands as abrasive as the outer shell of a pineapple. He had been a physically intimidating man, a stern man, but also a fair and kind man, and he had always treated David and his mother with respect and, to the degree he was capable, love. As he grew up, Tim Brody had adopted some of his father’s workmanlike attributes—he took to building things with his hands, for instance, to include an entire canoe that he carved from the bole of an enormous tree one summer—but he did not possess his father’s work ethic. Time spent punching a clock, which Emmitt Brody had done his entire adult life in a Pennsylvania quarry up until he was whisked away by pancreatic cancer in his early seventies, was time wasted slaving away so some corporation could get rich, according to Tim. And while David had somewhat admired Tim’s aloofness and free spirit, he couldn’t quite bring himself to follow in his stepbrother’s shoes. David had gone on to college, got his teaching certificate, fallen in love with and married Kathy, had a daughter. Tim had dropped out of high school his senior year, spent the next decade or so running around with various women—one of whom accidentally got pregnant and had a subsequent abortion, David had heard—and never worked the same job or stayed in the same place for long before his feet got itchy and, like a wonky compass needle, he switched direction. It occurred to David now that while Tim had been living in Kansas City the last time they had spoken, there was a good chance he had rolled up his carpets and headed someplace else—perhaps many other places—since then. For all David knew, Tim Brody could be anywhere in the world right now.

Or dead, he thought, the notion seizing him about the throat. Maybe it’s unlikely, but maybe it’s true, too. Just look at that map. Look at all those colored bull’s-eyes printed right there in front of you.

There was also an ever-changing number printed below the map, maintained by the Social Security Administration, known morbidly as the Death Tally. The SSA and the CDC had stopped using actual numbers and had changed to percentages sometime last year, because 0.05 percent of the country’s population dead or infected sounded a hell of a lot better than 17.5 million people. David folded the paper in half and tucked it down between his seat and the console.

He rubbed Ellie’s shoulder. “I’m gonna step outside and check my phone, see if I can get reception out here.”

Ellie didn’t respond.

“Try to eat something,” he said.

Leaning over the seat into the rear of the car, he dug around in his bag until he located his cell phone. Then he stepped outside, startled by the heat of the fading afternoon, and of the smells of gasoline and decay emanating from the deserted strip mall.

He turned on the phone. A series of chimes indicated that there were more text messages waiting for him. He ignored those. At least there weren’t any additional voice mails; if there were, he might be tempted to listen to them this time.

He scrolled quickly through his contact list, distraught when he did not find Tim’s number listed under the T’s or the B’s. It had been so long since they’d spoken that it wasn’t out of the question that he’d deleted Tim’s number or simply replaced his phone since then. Goddamn, that was foolish. He wondered if Tim had likewise deleted him at some point.