Children spilled through the door, running straight for the camera—no, running straight for the secret compartments in the floor, all filled with toys. In that environment, the colors of the toys and the children’s clothes were shocking, delicious, welcoming, warm. Blocks, train sets, plastic animals. That was why audience had bothered her. They weren’t an audience; they were half the show, half the camera’s focus. After a chaotic moment where they sorted who got possession of what, they settled in to play.
Uncle Bob entered a few minutes later. He was younger than Stella expected, his hair dark and full, his long face unlined. He walked with a ramrod spine and a slight lean at the hips, his arms clasped behind him giving him the look of a flightless bird. He made his way to the chair, somehow avoiding the children at his feet even though he was already looking straight into the camera.
He sat. Stella had the eeriest feeling, even now, that his eyes focused on her. “How on earth did this guy get a TV show?”
“Right? That’s Denny there.” Marco paused the tape and pointed at a boy behind and to the right of the chair. Her mental image hadn’t been far off; Denny was bigger than all the other kids. He had a train car in each hand, and was holding the left one out to a little girl. The image of him playing well with others surprised Stella; she’d figured he’d always been a loner. She opened her mouth to say that, then closed it again. It was fine for Marco to say whatever he wanted about his brother, but it might not be appropriate for her to bring it up.
Marco pressed play again. The girl took the train from Denny and smiled. In the foreground, Uncle Bob started telling a story. Stella had forgotten the storytelling, too. That was the whole show: children doing their thing, and Uncle Bob telling completely unrelated stories. He paid little attention to the kids, though they sometimes stopped playing to listen to him.
The story was weird. Something about a boy buried alive in a hillside—“planted,” in his words—who took over the entire hillside, like a weed, and spread for miles around.
Stella shook her head. “That’s fucked up. If I had a kid I wouldn’t let them watch this. Nightmare city.”
Marco gave her a look. “I thought you said you had a kid?”
“I mean if I’d had a kid back when this was on.” She was usually more careful with the lying game. Why had she said she had a son, anyway? She’d be found out the second Marco ran into her parents.
It was a dumb game, really. She didn’t even remember when she’d started playing it. College, maybe. The first chance she’d had to reinvent herself, so why not do it wholesale? The rules were simple: Never lie about something anyone could verify independently; never lose track of the lies; keep them consistent and believable. That was why in college she’d claimed she’d made the varsity volleyball team in high school, but injured her knee so spectacularly in practice she’d never been able to play any sport again, and she’d once flashed an AP physics class, and she’d auditioned for the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament but been cut when she accidentally said “fuck” to Alex Trebek. Then she just had to live up to her reputation as someone who’d lived so much by eighteen that she could coast on her former cool.
Uncle Bob’s story was still going. “They dug me out of the hillside on my thirteenth birthday. It’s good to divide rhizomes to give them room to grow.”
“Did he say ‘me’?”
“A lot of his stories went like that, Stella. They started out like fairy tales, but somewhere in the middle he shifted into first person. I don’t know if he had a bad writer or what.”
“And did he say ‘rhizome’? Who says ‘rhizome’ to seven-year-olds?” Stella hit the stop button. “Okay. Back to work. I remember now. That’s plenty.”
Marco frowned. “We can keep working, but I’d like to keep this on in the background now that we’ve found it. It’s nice to see Denny. That Denny, especially.”
That Denny: Denny frozen in time, before he got weird.
Stella started on the boxes in the back, leaving the stuff near the television to Marco. Snippets of story drifted her way, about the boy’s family, but much, much older than when they’d buried him. His brothers were fathers now, their children the nieces and nephews of the teenager they’d dug from the hillside. Then the oddly upbeat theme song twice in a row—that episode’s end and another’s beginning.
“Marco?” she asked. “How long did this run?”
“I dunno. A few years, at least.”
“Did you ever go on it? Like Denny?”
“No. I… hmm. I guess by the time I’d have been old enough, Denny had started acting strange, and my parents liked putting us into activities we could both do at the same time.”
They kept working. The next Uncle Bob story that drifted her way centered on a child who got lost. Stella kept waiting for it to turn into a familiar children’s story, but it didn’t. Just a kid who got lost and when she found her way home she realized she’d arrived back without her body, and her parents didn’t even notice the difference.
“Enough,” Stella said from across the room. “That was enough to give me nightmares, and I’m an adult. Fuck. Watch more after I leave if you want.”
“Okay. Time to call it quits, anyway. You’ve been here like nine hours.”
She didn’t argue. She waited until they got out the front door to peel off the mask and gloves.
“It was good to hang out with you,” she said.
“You, too. Look me up if you ever get to Boston.”
She couldn’t tell him to do the same with Chicago, so she said, “Will do.” She realized she’d never asked what he did for a living, but it seemed like an awkward time. It wasn’t until after she’d walked away that she realized he’d said goodbye as if she wasn’t returning the next day. She definitely wasn’t, especially if he kept binging that creepy show.
When she returned to her parents’ house she made a beeline for the shower. After twenty minutes’ scrubbing, she still couldn’t shake the smell. She dumped the clothes in the garbage instead of the laundry and took the bag to the outside bin, where it could stink as much as it needed to stink.
Her parents were sitting on the screened porch out front, as they often did once the evenings got warm enough, both with glasses of iced tea on the wrought iron table between them as if it were already summer. Her mother had a magazine open on her lap—she still subscribed to all her scientific journals, though she’d retired years before—and her father was solving a math puzzle on his tablet, which Stella could tell by his intense concentration.
“That bad?” Her mother lifted an eyebrow at her as she returned from the garbage.
“That bad.”
She went into the house and poured herself a glass to match her parents’. Something was roasting in the oven, and the kitchen was hot and smelled like onions and butter. She closed her eyes and pressed the glass against her forehead, letting the oven and the ice battle over her body temperature, then returned to sit on the much cooler porch, picking the empty chair with the better view of the dormant garden.
“Grab the cushion from the other chair if you’re going to sit in that one,” her father said.
She did as he suggested. “I don’t see why you don’t have cushions for both chairs. What if you have a couple over? Do they have to fight over who gets the comfortable seat versus who gets the view?”
He shrugged. “Nobody’s complained.”
They generally operated on a complaint system. Maybe that was where she’d gotten the habit of lies and exaggeration: She’d realized early that only extremes elicited a response.