Aurora(5)

At this point, some teenagers would have shouted something incoherent and slammed the door. Others might have cranked up the volume on something by Death Grips, a rap group rivaled in their abrasiveness only by the sound of someone chewing aluminum foil in your ear. But Scott Wheeler just opened his door, walked to the top of the stairs, looked down at his father, and touched his forehead with two fingers of his right hand in an insouciant goodbye salute.

“Adios, asshole.”

Rusty picked up his bag and left.

At 10:47 that morning, Aubrey had been thirty-six, childless, newly single, and ready to accept whatever exciting adventure life held in store for her.

At 10:48, she had a fourteen-year-old to raise. Somebody else’s fourteen-year-old.

Hey, life, that wasn’t what I fucking meant.



It was home to Scott that Aubrey now raced. It was just after one in the afternoon, which meant if she hurried and traffic didn’t conspire against her, she’d be at the house by two, plenty of time to toss Scott’s room before he got home from school. She’d arranged for him to stay at a friend’s for the two nights she was gone, but she’d had no illusions about his true intentions, which had almost certainly been to spend the night with Caprice in the Aubrey-less house on Cayuga Lane. Scott had turned fifteen six months ago, too young to give up one’s virginity, in Aubrey’s opinion, but that was between him and his consenting partners. It was the substances she was concerned about.

Both of Scott’s parents were drunks. Genetics were squarely lined up against the young man, and Aubrey had no intention of letting him fall down that dark hole on her watch. A week before the trip, she’d set up three Zmodo surveillance cameras throughout the house, connected by Wi-Fi to an app on her phone she could access with any decent signal. One camera had gone in the kitchen, hidden in a stack of cookbooks, one in the living room, stashed among a tower of neglected board games, and the third hidden among the dozens of unread books on Scott’s bedroom shelves.

Aubrey had quickly shut that one down, after a test run a few days before leaving nearly seared her eyeballs with the image of a perfectly normal adolescent function that she had somehow failed to consider. Look, it hadn’t occurred to her, OK? She’d never been a teenage boy. In the end, the video system had proved worthless, unless she was actually in the house and on Wi-Fi. As soon as she was in the car and on her way to the airport, the images had blanked out, one after another, and so the house had been unsupervised, in a digital sense, the whole time she was gone. She’d spoken to Scott, who’d affirmed that he was at his friend Julian’s house as they’d agreed, and she’d reminded herself to put a tracking app on his phone the next time she got a chance. So he was fine. But she just wanted to take a quick look through his room to make sure.

Her Uber passed through Stolp Island, the red-hot beating center of things in Aurora, Illinois, if you can call a couple blocks of closed-down shops, a decrepit movie house, and a second-rate casino red-hot. Aubrey had grown up in West Aurora, a mile or two away, in a comfortable two-story house with her parents and older brother. She and her brother had always loved their trips to Stolp when she was little. It was downtown, and not the scary kind of downtown full of lost people, like in Chicago, but an old-world downtown that belonged to the 1950s, the type of place where you could buy an Archie comic on the wire rack at the Ben Franklin. Aubrey had never personally encountered an Archie comic, a wire rack, or a Ben Franklin as either a child or an adult, but she’d heard of them in certain books and movies and held a perfect, romantic image of them in her mind. That, she’d hoped, was what she’d give her kids, a place like that where they could grow up and be safe. Her brother had since moved off to seek his fortune, but Aubrey remained, determined to find something that hadn’t really existed for fifty years.

Cayuga Lane fit the model of what Aubrey had been trying to build since she was little. Ten minutes from downtown, it was a short cul-de-sac with six houses, most of them old builds from the 1920s or ’30s. The house near the end of it was an 1850s Victorian, one of those two-story flat-roofed numbers that were once so popular but had failed to survive much past the quick-build era of World War II. Somehow, this one had staggered on into modern times and had been completely gutted, insulated, and remodeled. In 1958.

Since then, it had fallen into a state of benign neglect, followed by a period of malignant neglect, followed by a “perfect lot with tear-down opportunity!” phase, which was when she and Rusty had first seen it. The decrepit state of the house was the only reason it was on the market at a price they could even consider when they’d picked it up five years ago. They’d known there was a massive amount of work to be done, but Rusty was a contractor and they were young and in love and they looked forward to doing it, and all things, together.

Until they didn’t.

Now the house was five years older, and so was Aubrey, though some days it felt like fifteen, and she was in the familiar position of trying, alone, to fix something that was probably beyond repair. On the rare occasions that she and her brother still saw each other, he would mock her mercilessly for her insistence on repair and recycling, as he’d done since they were teenagers. He, who would take one sip of juice from a plastic bottle and throw it away. . . . He, who as an adult decried the use of cheap foreign labor at the same time he profited from it. . . . He, who’d send a computer and a phone jammed with rare-earth minerals off to the landfill every eighteen months, whether they still worked or not, would make fun of her for trying to fix a hole in her favorite blouse.