In the kitchen, Will Banfelder is making breakfast. He has cracked four eggs into a frying pan and the whites have joined together, creating the impression of one giant egg with four yolks. In a second pan, a dozen turkey sausages sizzle and tremble. He puts a glass lid on the pan and watches as the links of encased meat, of their own accord, start rolling around and bouncing into one another.
“Salam, jaddi.”
He turns and sees the boy. Who looks absolutely terrible, like he didn’t sleep a wink. Which would make two of them.
“Tired, huh.”
Karim cocks a shoulder and goes to the table, sitting in the same place as yesterday and the day before: They have settled naturally into this one small routine. He asks if he may drink the juice, and Will says, Of course. He drains the glass. Then refills it from the pitcher. Then returns it with exactness to the place mat.
“I had a dream,” he says.
“Tell me.”
“I was going back to the camp. You were taking me back.”
“Hey,” Will says. “Look at me. Karim, look at me. I would never do that. I told you yesterday …”
“I know.”
“Okay, then. So cut it with the dreams and make some toast.”
The boy gets up and removes two slices of bread from the bag and drops them into the slots. Their shoulders are almost touching. It would be a simple thing for Will to put his hand on that shoulder. But same as yesterday — when, after the children had gone and he was sitting beside the boy, asking him to explain and then listening to his explanation (given in Arabic and broken by the arrhythmic breathing of a child holding back tears), and their bodies were very close — same as then, Will is scared to touch him now. Too soon for that. Do it too abruptly and you will startle him. Do it too freely and you cheapen the action. For now, on the subject of breakfast, the adoptive father simply says:
“Over easy, or sunny side up?”
The plan was to spend the night on Keenan’s grandmother’s couch — but every sixty minutes, the grandfather clock played Westminster Chimes and then tolled the hour; and finally at four o’clock Dorian had enough of it and slipped out the back door and walked in the darkness up the road to his own home. The cicadas were silent, not sleeping, he imagined; waiting wide-eyed for the sunrise. The door off the den (referred to by his brother as The Door of Stealth) was the one he entered through. He hoped to see, in the bathoom mirror, that the evidence of the fight had miraculously disappeared. Overall, however, he looked worse than yesterday. Though the swelling in his lip had gone down, the right eye was no less bloated, and the bruise was bigger and darker and ringed with a sickly yellow. He padded upstairs in bare feet, past his parents’ half-open door (through which he heard one of them turning and releasing a breath), then safely into his own room, where he lay on his bed and everything went black until a rude shaking and a shining of light—
“Yo, nitwit.”
“Stop.”
“Time to face your doom,” his brother says. Then informs him that the rents are waiting in the kitchen.
“So you explained it,” Dorian says.
“I told them the party didn’t go so well.”
“That’s it?”
“I told them that, in my expert opinion, you are not to blame, and Mom said, Blame for what exactly.”
“And then what.”
“Then I came in here,” Cliff says. “And BTW. She’s got some serious post — date night stress disorder going on.”
She is waiting in the kitchen, with a terrible hangover and a cup of coffee — for what, she is not sure. For some kind of bad news. In my expert opinion, her older son had said, he isn’t to blame. Blame for what, she said; and he said, He really is the victim here; and she said, Victim of what; and he, gesturing with a forefinger, said, I’ll go get him … So Kathryn is waiting, with a feeling like her brain is trapped under rubble, for the next wave of domestic drama. While she stands by the sink, her husband sits at the table. He looks worse than she feels. He removes his eyeglasses; they dangle from one hand as he stares into the astigmatic distance. Finally saying: “They’re not coming.”
“Mm.”
“They’re tying the sheets together and escaping through the window.”
“Good luck to them.”
He puts the glasses back on and gives her a little smile: “But last night, you did have a good time, right.”
“Heck of a time.”
“It’s just we’re not thirty anymore.”
“We’re not forty either.”
“Well, we aren’t fifty,” he says.
It’s the kind of exchange that can turn, suddenly, stupidly, into an argument. She shrugs assent. Can’t say that, in the literal sense, he isn’t correct. And the truth is, she was having a good time last night. All through the first set (stretched out on the blanket, on the grassy hill above the amphitheatre), Kathryn had felt happy. Happier with every song and every drink of wine and every hit from the oldschool joints that Deven had brought: five of them expertly rolled and neatly lined up in an antique cigarette case. “Where’s it from?” she asked; and he answered, “Humboldt. But don’t worry, this farm took readings and tested the soil for years. It’s way north of the zone.” He started one and handed it to her. A while since she’d smoked anything other than a factory green: just one small hit brought everything around her into a sharper softer focus. The music started; the joint circled back. She felt like something adrift brought to shore on a breaking wave of applause. She lay back on the blanket. Saw one white star: like a faraway idea in the almost-dark sky. Not until intermission, when the music ended, did her mood begin to change … She was lying supine with her eyes closed, people conversing all around her, but their voices were a sound without signification, like wind in a forest. She was thinking of the pot farm in Humboldt — not far (a hundred-something miles north) of the old house in the river valley — and of what their friend had said about its distance from the radiation zone. Which made her think of the city. San Francisco. Most beautiful city in the New World. Place where she and Mitch had started loving each other, and where, also, she had come to know the other. (Don’t think his name; try to snuff it out as you would a flame.) Place also of unplanned pregnancy and of no baby. Whose beauty might have been for all time, but had instead been ruined in an instant, blasted and burned up and poisoned … On the hill above the amphitheatre, she was crying. Hearing the past speaking to her from a great distance. Despite the sounds all around her (the people talking to each other and the crickets calling to one another in the nearby woods), Kathryn Wakefield could hear very clearly a message of confusion, anxiety, and fear: Her own past coming to her across the reaches of space and time. And as she lay there under the stars of the future, a next wave of applause heralding the return of the musicians, she felt she was feeling an impossible sense of interconnection and dependence: as if not just her son’s fantasy of a sister, but even the death of that city where the fantasy had lost her life, had followed somehow from her.
It’s like a movie he saw once, where a prisoner was going to get shot at dawn: His brother escorting him down the carpeted hallway which, through some trick of mental editing, seems longer than it can possibly be. Up ahead, on the right, is the kitchen. Inside, Mitch and Kathryn hear them coming — and they can tell when Dorian stops just shy of the doorway. “Can we get on with it,” Mitch says. Cliff takes his brother by the elbow and steers him across the threshold. At the same moment, they see him; and though each parent is viewing the same damage, only the father makes the correct inference. The mother is thinking: Stupid choice; skateboard; on a dare, maybe.