Teeth(2)

WE HAVEN’T EVEN LIVED HERE TWO MONTHS, AND WE ALREADY have our routine down pat. My father stands in the gray granite kitchen, chopping potatoes and onions for omelets. Mom is on the balcony facing the ocean, my brother on her lap, hitting junk out of his lungs and letting the sea air slap them both awake. Two fish boil in the pot on the stove. Both for Dylan.

I trip over Dylan’s rainbow xylophone on my way down the stairs. It’s the only color in the whole house.

Dylan’s talking a little; I can hear a bit of his voice drifting in through the open balcony doors. He must be having a good day.

“This thing’s a biohazard,” I say, giving the xylophone a nudge.

“I think it needs blood to be a biohazard.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Trust me. I’m a doctor.”

“I can straighten up. I’m not being a good kid, don’t give me that proud face. I’m a useless shit and you know it.”

“I never forget.”

“It drives me insane. Fucking . . . stuff everywhere.” I load my arms up with toys and cardboard books and my sketch pads.

Dad says, “Someday he’ll learn to pick up his own stuff,” and he smiles a little.

His hair is still damp from his shower. It’s so humid here. We never dry. I try to shower as little as I can, because I hate being cold, and because there isn’t anyone here I need to look nice for, anyway.

There’s no one my age here, no one even close. There are two kids, around Dylan’s age, both as sick as he is, if not sicker, though they’ve all been here longer so they’re more hopped up on fish than the kid here, doing a little better. The next youngest person, after me, is thirty-two. She’s here with her mother, who has lymphoma. I feel more camaraderie with her, when I catch her eye at the marketplace, than I do with anyone else here, my family included. I can tell she’s here because she’s obligated.

I don’t think she’s ever going to leave.

In two years I’ll be in college. This will be the strange place I’ll ferry to on summer vacation.

These three will go from my whole world to a picture in my wallet. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

I can taste it, and it doesn’t taste like salt water.

Anyway, sometimes I wash my hair to look nice for my mom, which I guess is weird.

“How’d you sleep?” Dad asks.

“Recklessly,” I say, just to say something.

“That was some storm. Wind was howling like crazy.”

“Maybe a ghost,” I say, because I like the way his face contorts. The fact that my father will not even consider a ghost reminds me that not entirely everything has changed. We are not entirely crazy.

I steal a piece of potato. One piece, a rough cube, cold and grainy. It splinters against my tongue.

I tug my hood up over my head before I step out onto the balcony. The wind hits me, cold and heavy, and I taste it underneath my tongue. Below us, Mr. Towner is strolling with his bag, handing out copies of the newspaper he prints in his attic. It never says anything we didn’t already know.

Mom turns around and smiles when she hears me. Every morning she gives me this bright smile, like every morning she’s surprised I’m still here.

I kiss her cheek, then Dylan’s.

Dylan is twisting his shirt in his hands. His chest heaves up and down while he breathes. Each exhale wheezes out of his throat, like a miniature version of the screams that keep me awake. Even though his chest is tight, his breathing’s pretty clear, because Mom just finished smacking him clean. When we first moved here, there was this instant, amazing moment of “Dylan is so much better”—but since then it’s been slow. They warned us that would happen when we moved here. Get a cut on your arm and the fish will heal you right away, but my coughy little brother is still coughing.

“How’s it going, short stack?”

Mom says, “I think he sounds a little better today.”

Routine.

But he doesn’t sound very good, and I can tell by the glance she gives me that he had a rough night. He has been better since we moved here, but there are still times we really, really worry.

Back home sometimes I’d stay up listening to him cough. I can’t hear him anymore.

I give Dylan my fist to tap with his, and then he goes back to telling Mom, quietly, about the cartoon robot he saw on TV. I’ve never met a kid who cares as much about TV as Dyl.

I sit down next to Mom and zip up my hoodie. When I was a kid, I thought beaches were always warm. But it’s only September here and I already feel frozen all the time. Something about the cold makes me want to pace all the time, but it drives my whole family crazy, so I try my hardest to keep still when I’m here and go for walks whenever I can.

“I need a heavier coat,” I tell Mom.

She nods, immediately, and then more slowly as she keeps considering. “We’ll have to order one,” she says. There’s a little farm here for milk and eggs and meat, but most other stuff rolls in on the slowest boat in the world. Like we did. Twenty days puking on a rocking boat, the opposite of immigrants coming to a better land.

“Ms. Delaney invited us all over for dinner tonight,” she says.

“What about Dylan?”

Dylan looks up at me with those brown eyes. People usually estimate him as two and a half, which is almost exactly how old he was when we realized he was sick.