Huddled on the last step with her angry temples between her knees and her hands full of her hair, she heard Owen cooing from her apartment’s window. Soon he was next to her, cradling her, collecting her stiff limbs in his arms. “Come inside, now.” A gray-haired woman passing on the street stopped, mulling over the possibility of alarm, and Adeleine heard him say to her, “Bad day. Happens to the best of us.”
The woman clucked her tongue and continued on her way home, satisfied with his answer.
~ ~ ~
JUST AFTER DAWN, on the walk from the pea-colored emergency room lobby to the parking lot, through the two sets of automatic doors and across the quickly warming concrete, Claudia kept her arm hooked around Paulie’s waist and refused to look back at Edward. Still dressed in the thin motel robe, the regrettably undersized cutoffs, and the orange drugstore flip-flops, Edward gave a range of sighs aimed specifically at the back of Claudia’s head.
She opened the passenger door for Paulie and kissed his forehead as he settled in.
“Hey,” Edward said, before she’d had the chance to slip around to her side. “You really think this is such a good idea, to keep going? You don’t think he’s maybe had too much excitement and change for three days?” He was careful not to gesture in Paulie’s direction, to keep his image through the windshield calm.
“He had a panic attack, Edward, not a total breakdown. His condition comes with the occasional anxiety issue. He used to cry every time the trash went out because he didn’t want us to lose anything.”
“Claude. Have you forgotten the last five hours? I had to pry his hands from the bathtub. He said his heart felt like a drum march. The doctors had to sedate him.”
“I’ve been his sister for about three decades longer than you’ve been his weird misanthropic neighbor,” she said. “Travel freaks him out, but he’s been talking about these fucking bugs longer than you or I have talked about anything.” She indicated the conversation’s conclusion by sliding into the driver’s seat and slamming the door.
Edward leaned on the hood and looked out at the lot. Three silver-red hounds left behind in the cab of a peeling green truck barked up a chorus, trying to crowd their mouths through the just-cracked window. He closed his eyes and felt the car start, all the parts beneath stirring towards purpose.
—
THE STRETCH OF THE DRIVE that followed, free of sound save the occasional zoom of a speeding car, seemed to reject any passing of time, presenting the same fast-food billboards and roadside crosses in triplicate again and again. Paulie kept his hands in his lap and sometimes pressed his mouth against the window, forming bubbles of spit that broke almost as quickly as they formed. Claudia, her posture improved but fossilized, as though her shoulder blades were sewn to the seat, sent hard looks to Edward via the rearview mirror. Made restless by the silence, Edward dug into the backpack at his feet and removed his camera, trained it on Paulie, and called to him gently.
“Oh hi Eddy,” said Paulie, with a deflated inflection.
Claudia sensed the presence of the device immediately and asked Edward to place it far within a body cavity of his choosing.
“Ass could be good, but why not try—”
“It’s okay, sweet pea,” said her brother, looking straight ahead. “Let Eddy do what he wants.”
“Hey, pal,” Edward said. “How you doing? Last night must have been rough on you.”
“To be Mr. Frank, I feel like an octopus in a… math class.”
“Yeah? Feeling weird? Like, foreign? Alien?”
“I guess so, Ed. I guess you could say alien. I guess I would say I was worried I was accidentally living on the wrong planet.”
“You know what, though. An octopus in math class could work on a number of equations at once with all those arms.”
Paulie’s face, as represented through the viewfinder to Edward, began to twitch upward in small ways. “Wow, Eddy. Wow. I bet you’re right.”
“Just a different way of working.”
Edward repositioned himself. Up on his haunches, twisted behind the driver’s seat, he filmed from a slight height. Paulie retrieved a pen and paper from the glove box and began to sketch the tentacled creature in question. “Oc-to-pi,” he said, exhaling air from his open mouth rapidly. “Oc-to-pi.”
Claudia slipped on her neon-green gas-station sunglasses and began looking for a radio station, turning the knob at the first hint of static.
~ ~ ~
I CAN WAIT for a long time,” he said, but Owen, Adeleine could tell, was made uncomfortable by silence. He jerked his thumb across the screen of his phone until the battery died, ran his index finger along the spines on the bookshelf and pulled down a 1930s Boy Scout manual. He grew briefly engrossed in a series of yellowed diagrams titled “How to Build a Snow Tent,” delicately lined images replete with pastel-cheeked boys in uniform. After he closed the brittle pages, Owen gravitated towards the records, delicately set the needle down on a Robert Johnson recording and settled on the floor. Adeleine watched as he drew his knees upward and tucked his face, like a hiding child trying to make his space in the world diminutive. He started to speak, and the spite in his voice, refracted through cloth and limbs, seemed softer, washed of grit.
“This isn’t how I imagined it happening, you know. I didn’t intend for this all to play out like a crime movie. I only came to get what’s owed me. Right, Mom?”
Owen turned his face, his coloring now blotched like a much-used eraser block, towards Edith, but she didn’t move. His speech was absent of its regular pattern of hard consonants, syllables doled out with restraint. It had adopted a reedy lilt, and Adeleine could imagine him very young, begging: for another hour outside, for dessert, for uncompromised attention.
“You have any idea what it was like growing up here, Edith? Mom? Dad throwing parties all the time while I tried to sleep? You painting all your attention on Jenny, praising her every weird ritual and sudden mood while I brought home perfect grades and made my bed? I spent all those summers helping Dad with the house, I worked to pay for school myself, I never asked for a cent — meanwhile you two blow your money on gin and private detectives: Where’s Jenny? Where could Jenny be? And I could have told you for free — getting fucked in the back of some car in California, getting high, losing what was left of her mind. I was never mistaken about what I meant to this family. I wasn’t a part of all your embarrassing excesses and I never wanted to be. I’m just here for what’s owed me.” The repetition of the phrase—what’s owed me—seemed to comfort him, break happily from his body.
As he droned on, Edith closed her eyes and began to whisper, her dehydrated lips moving against her teeth rabidly, as though physically locating the words she needed. Adeleine recognized the words as a prayer, and held her breath to listen.