The Light Pirate(11)

Another wave of pain rolls through her. She grits her teeth, still unwilling to name it. It isn’t time. We aren’t ready.





Chapter 11




The boys kick at each other even as their eyes are fastened to the television, vying for couch space without committing to battle. By the time the commercial break comes on, Lucas has corralled Flip onto the third couch cushion, his own short body splayed across the other two. This is the way of things between them: the inevitable two-to-one ratio is a foregone conclusion. Flip hugs the arm of the sofa, curling himself into the corner that’s left to him. Lucas wriggles down farther, stretching his feet to invade Flip’s territory, always striving for more. Beating him away with a pillow and a curdled whine, Flip lashes backward only to realize that Frida is standing in the doorway, holding on to the frame. He isn’t sure how long she’s been there. Her gaze seems to settle on the television screen—crudely drawn creatures dashing across a ship deck, then plunging into the sea to look for buried treasure—but Flip can tell she isn’t really watching, that none of this is registering beyond flashing colors and high-pitched sounds.

“Lucas is hogging the couch,” he says, if only to bring her back into the room, to tug her attention away from whatever dimension it has drifted into. He won’t admit it to Lucas, but he’s beginning to like Frida. She’s kind to him. He didn’t even mind the potato skins. Lucas kicks him again and he bites back a squeal.

“Narc,” Lucas whispers, not knowing exactly what this means but feeling reasonably sure it fits the occasion.

“Turn it down, please,” she says, as if she’s only just remembered why she came into the room at all. “I’m going to lie down for a bit. Just stay inside, okay, and when your father comes home, tell him I need to talk to him.”

“Are you okay?” Flip asks.

“Fine,” she says. “Just…” She struggles for an appropriate symptom, something that won’t alarm them. “Nauseous. Lucas, be nice, please.”

Lucas picks up the remote and begrudgingly turns down the volume so she can see him doing it, then throws it at Flip, who cries out at this fresh injustice and turns to protest, only to find that Frida is already gone.

The episode finishes and the programming blinks over to local storm coverage. They gag as if they’ve ingested poison and Lucas turns off the television. These are Florida boys, born and bred; the drama of anticipating extreme weather is not special. Without the glow of the screen, the room becomes dark. A sliver of dim light creeps in through a rectangular pane on the front door that Kirby didn’t bother covering, but that’s the only evidence of a day that is passing unseen. The door to Frida and Kirby’s room is closed. The boys are alone, and there is something unusual charging the dust particles that swim in that lone splash of light. A silent voice that wants their attention.

“Let’s go outside,” Lucas proposes. “We could walk to the trailer park and play horseshoes.” That summer, he made a friend who lives in the park, and although this friend has evacuated, it seems like a sensible destination to him. He swings open the front door, quietly, so as not to wake Frida. The coolness rushes out while the wet heat rushes in and that quality of strangeness thickens. There is an urgency here. There is information.

“I don’t know,” Flip says. “We’re not supposed to.” He can feel a kind of data wrapped up in the humidity, but he doesn’t know what it means. He just knows it’s there. A message he doesn’t understand.

Lucas doesn’t notice—he’s too busy being the oldest, which means knowing everything. He rolls his eyes, hard, and leans out over the sandbags, gesturing at the sky. “It’s not even raining and there’s nothing to do here. Come on. We’ll be back before what’s-her-name wakes up.”

“Don’t call her that.”

“You coming or not?”

Flip peers outside. The sky is fiercely lit from within the thunderheads, but there is no wind. There is no rain. The air is hot and eerie and still.

Flip hesitates. “Not raining yet,” he allows. “Could come on any minute.”

“We’ll be back way before it starts.” Lucas scurries over the sandbags heaped in front of the door and into the muddy driveway. Flip hangs back in the darkness of the house, still uncertain. A layer of intangible information settles on his skin, moving through his nose and mouth. But its message is quiet, and his brother is loud. “For chrissakes, Flip,” Lucas says. It’s the phrase that their father utters when his temper is about to unravel. It works exactly how Lucas wants it to. Flip climbs over the sandbags and pulls the door shut behind him, careful to latch it softly.

“Fine,” he says, “but just real quick.”

Lucas is already halfway down the driveway by the time Flip catches up. On the main road, there is no one. This is unusual, but not unheard of. The birds seem to hush as they walk. The crickets are silent. Skinny pines tower on either side of the road. When they get to the trailer park it is abandoned. The usual chatter of television sets and radios and kids is absent. No laundry hangs and no cars remain, except the broken-down ones. Lucas climbs the steps to his friend’s red double-wide and tries the door. It’s locked. He jiggles the handle anyway, just in case that’s all it takes.