The Tunkles were waiting on the front porch. Melanie Prine gave them a cheery wave as they drove up, five scarlet fingernails flashing in the sun. They were nice enough, and their house was a nice-enough house. Owen could see that it was a comfortable place, a house where people could live with each other, but it was not his house. He did not live here. He did not know anyone here.
The family had an older daughter of sixteen, a blonde girl who said hi and then vanished, and a still older son who was away at college. Melanie Prine abandoned Owen there for the afternoon, leaving the Tunkles to try to interest him in farm life. He was shown to his room, a nice-enough room to be sure, but not his. Just as the bathroom was not his bathroom, the kitchen not his kitchen, the basement not his basement, the front yard with its single stunted maple not his yard. It was as if everyone was playing a game: Let’s pretend this is normal. Let’s pretend we know each other. Let’s pretend we care.
With each minute that ticked by, Owen was exiled deeper into an inner Siberia. The worst moments were when Mr. Tunkle, a bony little man whose skin looked parched and stiff as if he’d been salted and left to dry in the sun, took him by the hand (a hand rough as a plank) to show him the pigs, the chickens, the fields, the cows. Owen had never seen anything so dreary.
Norwalk is not a big city, but it is not a small town and it is most definitely not the country. To Owen, farms were something you drove by to get somewhere interesting-a river, an aquarium, a museum, a campground, an airport. You didn’t stop at farms. The sunlight beat down on the place in a way he had never experienced in shady Norwalk. The chickens were repulsive, the cows somnolent, the pigs appalling. Owen was not afraid of manual labour; he had enjoyed helping his father fix things around the house, and he earned pocket money shovelling snow and raking leaves. But the idea that he would be expected to spend time with these creatures made his heart shrivel.
He would be required to change schools, the nearest neighbour was a mile away, and he would probably never see his friends again.
“Well, what did you think of the Tunkles?” Melanie Prine asked when they were on the way back to the receiving home. Her fingernails had dimmed to carmine in the late afternoon light.
Owen couldn’t answer.
“They’re nice, don’t you think?”
“They’re okay.”
“And isn’t that farmhouse incredible?”
“I don’t want to live there.”
“So much to do out here, don’t you think?”
“I don’t want to live there.”
“Open space everywhere. Lots of fresh air. Did you see they’ve even got a swimming hole?”
“I don’t want to live there.”
Five of the ten red fingernails lifted off from the steering wheel and travelled toward him as Miss Prine tried to comfort him with a touch on his shoulder. It was the briefest feathery touch, but it burst something inside Owen’s chest and he convulsed with tears.
“No one expects you to like it right away, Owen.”
“I don’t want to live there,” he said again, all but choking on each word.
“You’re not used to the country, I know. But a farm is an ideal place to grow up. So much to do. And it’s fun looking after the animals, don’t you think?”
“I want to live in my own home,” he said miserably. “Why can’t I just stay at home?”
“Owen, your parents aren’t there anymore. There’s no one to look after you.”
“But you said there’s money, right? Insurance money? Why can’t we pay a babysitter and I’ll just stay in my house? I don’t have to have new parents. I don’t want new parents. Would you want new parents?”
“No, Owen, I wouldn’t. Nobody wants to lose their parents. You’ve been very unlucky. But we have to find you another family to live with, and the Tunkles are good parents and they have room.”
“But I don’t want to live there.”
Owen was sent to the Tunkles the following day. He spent a painful weekend supposedly adapting to the routines of the farm, and when Monday rolled around he took the bus to his new school and sat silently throughout his classes. He made no effort to acknowledge his new classmates, and when his teacher called on him, he had nothing to say, he had heard nothing. He was focused strictly on the final bell, waiting hour after hour, minute after minute, for it to ring. When finally it did ring, he went nowhere near the bus stop. He walked into town and back to his old neighbourhood.
He had never seen his house with all the curtains closed. It sat blind and mute on the corner where it had always been. No car in the drive, of course, but then there never was when he got home from school. He still had his key, and let himself in.
It was a little stuffy, a little dusty, but it smelled the same. It smelled of his house, the way no other house would ever smell. And nothing had changed. All the furniture was there. The coats were still hanging in the vestibule-his mother’s, his father’s, his own-above a chaotic jumble of footwear. The merest objects filled him not just with pain, but with awe: his father’s enormous running shoes, the wellingtons his mother wore in the garden. He went and sat on the couch in the living room, facing the television. His reflection on the dim screen, thin and distorted, looked back at him.
He had never seen the house so dark, not during the day. He fell sideways into the cushions and cried, but it didn’t help. After a while he went to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of Snapple from the fridge. All the same food was there. Nothing had been done yet, by whoever had come in to close the curtains. The electricity was on, and the water.
The message light was blinking by the phone, but he didn’t want to see who had called.
His plan was this: He would live in this house by himself. He would continue going to school as if nothing had happened. If he could get that insurance money, he would hire someone to cook and clean and look after the house while he was at school. He pictured a fat, cheerful woman who would bake lots of pies. Miss Prine would be impressed; she would see that he could get along without a mother and father.
But for now he had to keep quiet. He couldn’t open the curtains, and he was afraid even to turn on lights. The cops would burst in, thinking there was a burglary in progress. He brought a jar of peanut butter and some crackers into the living room and ate in front of the TV. For dessert he had a granola bar.
His parents had not brought him up to be religious, but he found, looking around at the empty chairs where his parents used to sit, with their books still open beside them, that he was thinking about God. What possible reason could God have to snatch his parents from this house, this town, this planet, and leave him behind? He would have to be a mean God. How would He explain it to his parents, wherever they might be now, who surely must be missing him too?
He woke up when the lights came on sometime later. Miss Prine stood over him, along with a policeman and an older man in a sober grey suit. He had an English accent just like his parents, and he looked a lot like the pictures of his grandfather.
“Owen?” Miss Prine said softly. “I think I have some good news for you. This is your great-uncle, Uncle Max.”
This jocular, highly verbal and theatrical tonnage of humanity managed to wade his way through the swamp of child welfare regulations, and to win over the support of Miss Prine in particular. It turned out he was the brother of Owen’s paternal grandfather, whom this strange apparition referred to as “Tommy.” He had a battered satchel full of family photographs that he showed Owen and Miss Prine during their first, supervised office visit. Many of them were the same images his parents had kept in musty old albums, but there were others he had never seen before: Max and Tommy as young men in cricket whites, Max and his father as a boy on a Brighton pier, Max in the crowd at Owen’s parents’ wedding in London. He told Owen a couple of amusing stories involving his father as a boy-the time he got stuck in the mulberry tree, the time he blew up his train set using his chemistry set, the time he ran away from home and asked to live with Uncle Max.