Luster(35)

“Jesus,” she says softly. We travel for a while in silence, take the exit toward Maplewood. “That painting you had. What was that?”

“A portrait of my mother.”

We get out of the car, and she shields her face as two headlights come into view. We turn to look as the taxi stops at the curb. I think of how we look, the mud on our faces, the grass in our hair, the crowdsourced blood on our clothes. She looks at me and smiles darkly, and when he steps out of the taxi, for a moment the headlights bloom behind him, and he hangs there in the dark, a whole day early, almost unrecognizable to me, a shadow of a man.





6


Inside the house, I see the full extent of what happened to Rebecca in the mosh. There is a bruise with its own set of fingers around her neck, though in the half-light, it looks like residue from costume jewelry. We are all hungry. Eric empties his pockets, but his hands are shaking and a few soft Canadian bills fall to the floor. He stares into the fridge for a while, and then he piles some leftover steak onto a plate. Rebecca pits an avocado and motions for me to leave. On my way up the stairs, I hear Eric say, What did you do to your hair, his refusal to acknowledge me one of the many reminders that I am, in the grand scheme of things, an extremely brief addendum to their mortgage, to their marital bathrobes, to the two cars parked side by side. I sit at the top of the stairs and eavesdrop. When they begin to talk, it is in a very languid, businesslike fashion, their conversation filled with affirmations like yes, I understand you, and yes, that is valid, like they are a couple of aliens who have seen all the invasion agitprop and want to reiterate that they come in peace. This is actually much more unsettling than the alternative. Their hushed tones are polite and inorganic, Eric’s effort so much more apparent than his wife’s, and then in the middle of a digression about his experience with customs, he says, what is she doing here, what are you doing, and that tells me all I need to know, so I go to the guest room and start gathering my things. I look up the hours for my storage unit and scan the fine print for policies on habitation, but none of the language is clear. When I come out with my bag, Akila opens her door and motions for me to come inside. She takes my bag and tells me to take off my shoes.

“Your feet are horrible,” she says, not looking at me, turning on the TV. I sit down on the floor and try to keep my flat, chronically dry feet out of view. “It’s going to be all night.”

“What?”

“Their dialogue,” she says, a little annoyed, like she wishes I would keep up. “It’s this thing they learned in therapy—Radical Candor.” She makes a cross with her fingers. “It’s an axis. There’s also Ruinous Empathy, Manipulative Insincerity, and Obnoxious Aggression.”

“I didn’t know they were in therapy.”

“Yeah. Sometimes we all go together. It’s terrible.” She mutes the TV and turns to me with a solemn look on her face. “It isn’t perfect here, but it’s fine. Please don’t mess this up.”

“Listen, I’m not here to ruin your life. This all just happened,” I say, and she picks up her phone, opens Twitter, and gives a short, joyless laugh. She scrolls for a bit before turning her attention back to me.

“Because if I’m going to have to move again, I just want to know. I have an Insecure Attachment Style, and I just started calling them mom and dad. School is terrible, but I have my own room, and they let me close the door. I know you probably don’t care, but—”

“I’m not a monster,” I say, and she shrugs.

“I don’t know that,” she says. “I can’t be sure of that. But I’m sure about this—it literally takes nothing for this all to go away. My last family was really happy. I had this fish tank, and it was inside the wall. So it felt permanent, even though it was probationary. And then Carol went to this residency in the woods and when she came back she didn’t want to be married anymore. I didn’t see it coming, and I usually do.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and she pauses the stream, turns to look at me.

“That’s such a weird thing to say. That you’re sorry,” she says. “I just don’t want to have to do that again, okay?”

“Okay,” I say, and she unpauses the show. It is a subtitled anime, the animation limber and bright, all the characters living in a vaguely Eastern European village that is under siege by nude giants. Everyone is screaming. A giant bounds into the village and puts his foot through a levee. A cavalry made entirely of teenagers takes the offensive, and then a second giant appears and drops a horse down his throat, the whinnying paired with a dramatic upskirt of a female colonel who is suddenly airborne with her double-hilted claymore, the arteries in the giant’s neck spraying the upturned faces of the blacksmith and candlestick maker as I close my eyes.

Seven hours later, I wake up in a ball on Akila’s floor. Akila is asleep in bed, a video game controller still in her hand. The room is dark but for the blue light of the television, where a save screen is on a loop. I turn off the TV and put the controller on top of the console. I take my bag and my shoes and go downstairs, the light at 5:00 a.m. soft and gray, the key hooks and baby tomatoes and silent digital clocks redefined by the single muddy bootprint on the floor. Rebecca’s actual boots are not much farther off, their relationship to each other preserving the manner in which they were removed, which is without the use of the hands, one foot anchoring the other while it lifts out of the shoe. I take the tongue of the boot between my fingers, and when I pull them away they are coated in dust. I drink a few glasses of water and wander to the downstairs bathroom on the assumption that it will be empty, though when I open the door Eric is there shaving and listening to the weather report.