Sign Here(37)

“Come on, Pey,” she whined, pulling all of the syllables long and sharp. “I don’t want to leave yet.”

“We need to get back; we have a team meeting.”

Cal kicked a rock, rousing dust from the desert’s camouflage. Anything around us could have been the body of a snake. I was about to argue my point when my tablet gave its insistent beep. Cal pulled her army helmet straps and beamed.

“Okay,” I said. “One more.”

I don’t know why the tablet picked up this one. It was in a different time and a different time zone, all the way across the world. Maybe it was a coincidence, luck of the draw. Or maybe someone was testing us, testing Cal. I accepted the request before I had time to think about it.

We came to in front of a house that wasn’t quite abandoned but was too far gone to be called something cute like “rickety.” The lawn was all rough edges and the ghostly heads of dandelions, bent and huddled as if gossiping in the late-afternoon light. Cal picked up the mailbox, which lay on its side with the red flag rusted permanently up.

“?‘The Culvers,’?” she read.

The house wasn’t a trailer, in that it had a foundation that locked into the earth. But the shape was the same: a brick home without any brick. Paneling, meant to look like wood but warped and collapsed in places real wood never would be, wasn’t organic enough to rot. A screen drooped in its window.

“What do you want?” a man said from the doorway. I took him in, unwashed, uncombed, and bloodshot. Just our kind of guy.

“Mr. Culver?”

“Who’s asking?”

“Can we come inside? We got a message from you.”

This guy would be thanking us soon enough, full-on snot-in-the-beard-crying kind of thanking us, just like the rest of them. But for now, we were the same as people selling knives or cookies or God. Useless at best.

He nodded and stood aside.

It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. It was that red kind of darkness—like when the sun is so bright you have to close your eyes, but you can still see the burn. The kind of darkness that comes not from a lack of light but rather in rebellion against it. But the light bled in anyway, rushing through the cracks between the window frames and the pieces of cardboard held there with duct tape, seeping into the piles that cluttered the tattered couch and around the circular table. It was the same light that I had relished so deeply many times before, but now it felt like a predator, claws and tongues curling under the door.

Cal elbowed me as I rubbed my eyes.

“I know I haven’t memorized the whole book,” she whispered. “But this has to be breaking some kind of rule.”

I squinted in the gloom, my hand on my tablet. That’s when I saw the piles of clutter weren’t piles at all. They were people. The tiny living room was damn near bursting with men.

“All right, boys,” Culver said. “Let’s make ourselves a deal.”





SILAS





SILAS COULDN’T REMEMBER THE last time he saw Sean read anything besides the Internet, and certainly not for pleasure. But there he sat on the porch, watching the girls as they dashed for the water, an open book on his lap. Sean had always been a quiet kid, like Philip. But unlike a lot of the quiet ones, Sean was never much of a reader. He didn’t like escaping into other people’s prefabricated worlds, preferring to build his own. As a child, he spent countless hours sprawled on the floor of his bedroom, lining plastic soldiers along his bed frame, making war sounds with his mouth. One time, Silas opened Sean’s door and was met with a downpour of green men from a pillowcase rigged above his head.

“Guerrilla warfare,” Sean had said, grinning.

This was back in the days when Silas could freely open his son’s door. Although, as Silas thought about it, he realized maybe Sean had always wanted privacy, but it was only recently that he learned the vocabulary. He seemed to walk around inside something invisible, everything just a few inches from his skin. Even his clothes were baggy enough that Silas rarely saw the shape of his son’s body. That seemed to be the point.

Silas wiped off his hands the dirt from the vegetable garden, where he grew enough for a couple of highly celebrated salads each summer; then he shaded his eyes and walked up the hill.

“What are you reading?”

Sean tensed at his father’s voice, as if he hadn’t seen him coming the whole way across the lawn.

“Just something I found on the shelf.”

“Is it good?”

Sean shrugged, his own language. Silas sat down next to his son and extended his legs, hoping if he looked comfortable, he might somehow become comfortable.

“So,” he asked, “what do you think of Ruth?”

Sean had been willingly around his sister more in the past week than Silas had seen in years, and it wasn’t about Mickey. Maybe having a crush would be a good thing for Sean, Silas thought. Get him out of his head.

“She’s fine,” Sean muttered.

“I think she seems pretty great,” Silas said, smiling sidelong. “She’s cute too.”

“Gross, Dad.”

“She is! Don’t you think?”

Sean’s face turned red, which made Silas smile more brightly. He sank back into the lounger.

“You totally think so.”