Model Home (44 page)

“I don't believe in God,” Warren said.

“That's okay. I work for myself.”

Warren looked at him. He seemed to be serious. Kenny knelt in front of him and laid a hand on Warren's head. His sunglasses reflected Warren's face, turning it moosey and distorted. Warren closed his eyes. He did not know how to ration his prayer. There were so many things he could ask forgiveness for: for loving Jonas least of his children; for giving up on life; for being here at all, in grease-stained khakis, at a strange woman's trailer. Once, as a boy, Warren had asked his mother if animals ever prayed to God; she'd told him that they didn't need to, that God heard them through their suffering. The
thwup
s of a hammer echoed nearby, fading into the relentless buzz of cicadas.

“Please,” he said, “bring Jonas home.”

Something touched his ear, gently, but it was only a trickle of sweat. Kenny nodded and stood up, his right knee cribbled from the gravel. There was nothing left to say. The sun shone, the bugs bugged, his son was still missing. Warren thanked the freelance
Jesus in front of him and headed back to the car. As if remembering something, Kenny popped into the trailer for a minute and then caught up with Warren, holding a sheaf of papers.

“It's a petition,” he said. “We're getting as many sponsors as we can. They want to raze this whole place and put in a gated community.”

“Here?”

“Fucking developers. Dad's lived here for thirteen years. They think because it's a trailer park, no one's going to raise a stink.”

Warren almost laughed. Using Kenny's back, he signed the petition and wrote his address in. The man in the La-Z-Boy was still fiddling with his Rubik's Cube, wearing an enormous sombrero to protect himself from the sun. Warren wanted to ask Kenny how his father had come to feel at home in such a place.

“What happened to the neighbor's pig?” he said instead. He pointed at the empty pen, raked clean as a baseball diamond.

“Bacon.”

“What?”

Kenny dragged his finger across his throat. “You can smell it in the morning.”

Lyle sat in the backseat of Taz's car with Hector, who looked as miserable as you could look while eating a bag of Funyuns. In Hector's case, this was profoundly miserable. He hadn't said a word since they'd left the house. He'd insisted on coming along and helping them look for Jonas—there was no convincing him otherwise.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Lyle asked Dustin.

“Why not?”

“I guess because you still flinch when I unwrap a hamburger.”

“No, he doesn't,” Taz said from the driver's seat. She was wearing a Dead Kennedys T-shirt, which seemed—given that she was driving a BMW—a contradiction at best. Lyle wanted to say,
He's my brother, what the fuck do you know about him?
But she didn't. For one thing, they needed Taz's car to get inside Herradura Estates. For another, she might have been right: Lyle hadn't been out to eat with him since the beginning of the summer.

“It's the only place we haven't checked,” Dustin said. “For all we know, he might be camping in the backyard.”

They were going to their old house in search of Jonas. Or rather, the place where their house used to be. The idea—Dustin's—was that Jonas might have gravitated there instinctively, like a sea turtle. It seemed like a desperate hope. Frankly, Lyle had not wanted to come at all, but her mom and dad were at the police station again and she hadn't wanted to stay home alone. The idea of waiting around helplessly for Jonas to show up made her sick with dread.

Taz put her hand on Dustin's leg, resting it there while she drove. When she'd met them at a pay phone down the road, pulling up in her car with little windshield wipers on the headlights, Dustin's face
had actually brightened. Something had happened between them, a shift. Lyle did not want to begrudge her brother his little bit of daylight—you couldn't call it happiness—but she didn't like Taz's face when they were together. There was a touch of pride in it, as if she were showing off a tattoo. She was younger than Lyle, a spoiled little girl, which made it all the more irritating. Before summer started, Lyle used to see her hanging out sometimes at school, talking to her new tenth-grade friends—girls in lip gloss and stirrup pants—but Lyle had never approached to say hi. Anyway, what would she have said?
I heard my older brother was fucking you.

At the gate, Taz stopped at the guardhouse and waved at Bud, who'd lost the “male pattern” from his baldness and was now more or less without hair. He peered into the car and seemed to recognize Hector, his face going slack with amazement. Lyle was amazed as well—less that she'd lost her virginity in this glorified closet and more by the fact that the deflowerer was sitting beside her, holding a half-eaten U of Funyun, a flying rodent asleep in his pocket. They had held each other while the trees outside swooned in the wind. The fact that you could know someone almost intimately and then a year later not know him at all seemed to be at the heart of everything sad and fucked-up in the world. Bud opened the gate and let them pass.

“They replaced the clock,” she whispered to Hector. She felt strangely desperate.

“What?”

“The clock,” she said. “The one that fell on the floor.”

Hector seemed to have no idea what she was talking about. Since Jonas had disappeared he'd been at the house every day, arriving unannounced, a look of irritating exhaustion on his face. It was as though he'd lost his own brother. Even Dustin was beginning to dislike him. The more irritated Lyle or Dustin got, ignoring his stricken-looking silence, the more Hector insisted on helping them.

They drove along John's Canyon Road, past old stables and flowering bougainvillea and trees cotton-candied by webworms, skirting the horse trail where Lyle's mother used to honk people into the bushes. Nothing had changed. The lawns were green as golf courses and smelled of rain. Wands of water moved across them in lazy arcs, silent under the
chk chk chk
of sprinklers.

“I can't believe we used to live here,” Lyle said.

“Why not?” Dustin said.

“I just mean, it smells so nice. Like spring.”

Dustin glanced at the backseat. “You used to call it Hairy Turd Estates.”

“Personally, I like it where you guys live,” Taz said. “It doesn't feel like Never Never Land.”

Lyle waited for Dustin to pounce; if Lyle had said such a ridiculous thing, there would have been little mercy. Instead he took his sunglasses off and squeezed some drops into his eye. She remembered Cats vs. Dogs, the game they used to play when they were kids, choosing one thing or another to zap into extinction. Lyle wondered who Dustin would pick now, her or Taz. They drove by the Wongs' and the Dunkirks' and the Starchilds', the houses as intimately remote to her as the faces in a dream.

“Remember at the Starchilds' barbecue, when Mr. Leonard ate their Amazon parrot? It cost Mom and Dad seven hundred dollars.”

“He wouldn't even eat his kibbles this morning,” Dustin said. “I think he's dying.”

Lyle frowned. “He's not dying. He's just arthritic.”

“He hasn't moved from his bed in two days.” Dustin put his sunglasses back on. “Ask Hector. He's the animal expert.”

Hector glanced over uncomfortably, prepared to answer, but Lyle didn't want to hear his opinion. They'd been through enough. Somehow, if Mr. Leonard was dying, it meant that Jonas might actually have disappeared. They turned onto High Street and then followed the snaking, tree-tunneled road until they reached their old driveway, where Taz parked at the curb like a chauffeur. Remarkably, their old mailbox was still there:
THE ZILLER FAMILY
, a cardinal sitting atop the words as if perched on a branch. They had not bothered—or perhaps not had the courage—to take it with them. Facing them from the other side of the driveway was a backhoe, its hood carpeted in red berries.

“Our home on High,” Lyle said.

Dustin didn't respond. She got out of the car by herself and walked up the driveway to where she could see the construction. The remains of their old house were gone, replaced by a half-built frame. A mansion, flowering into a corolla of rooms. Birds flitted in the joists, chirping like crazy. Lyle wondered where the workers were until she remembered it was Sunday. The yard itself, where they'd played torturous, Dad-driven rounds of croquet and boccie
and horseshoes—where Dustin had rolled across the grass, coiled in flames—was gone as well, turned into dirt.

When she was little, Lyle used to think that the frames of houses being built were models. You practiced with the model first and then put up the real thing. The idea that a pile of sticks could shelter anyone, could protect them from the dangers of the world, seemed preposterous.

She glanced behind her, but there was no one in sight. Lyle went back down the driveway to where the BMW was parked. Taz and Hector were standing by the open door of the passenger seat, peering inside at Dustin, who sat in the car without moving. His back was hunched like an old lady's.

“I thought we were going to look for Jonas,” Lyle said.

“He's not here,” Dustin said. “It was a stupid idea.”

“Now you tell us.”

“What do you think? He's camping in the yard and no one's seen him?”

“We came all the way out here,” Lyle said. “We should at least
look.
”

“Can't you see he's petrified?” Taz said angrily, glaring at her.

It was true. Dustin's face had gone rigid, his arms tucked in as if he were bracing against a wind. He would not move his eyes from the dashboard.

“I'll go help Lyle look,” Hector said. “We'll find Jonas if he's here.”

Dustin snapped toward him, “What the fuck's wrong with you? My little brother's disappeared, maybe dead, and you're acting like he's your own fucking relative!”

Hector took a step backward. He looked pale, as though he might throw up.

“Why don't you go
home
for once?
H-O-M-E
. We have a fucking pet already.”

“Dust,” Lyle said.

“All he does is stand around looking miserable!”

“I'm the one who did it,” Hector said quietly.

Lyle looked at him. “What are you talking about?”

“The stove. I left it on by accident. I broke into your house because I was mad at Lyle.” He caught his breath, staring at the curb. “I blew up your house.”

Lyle was suddenly scared. A peacock cried from somewhere below, the call echoing down the canyon.

“It's my fault. I was sick . . . I left some water on the stove.”

Hector started to cry. For some reason, Lyle remembered letting him eat that pistachio ice cream cone the day he'd wandered into The Perfect Scoop, the way he'd closed his eyes to swallow, hunched over to mask his suffering. Dustin got out of the car suddenly: his face was so awful, so red and still and strange, that Lyle wondered if he would strangle Hector with his bare hands. Instead he reached into Hector's shirt pocket and pulled out the sugar glider, gripping the furry creature in his glove. Hector shook his head, eyes wide with fright. Dustin turned and crossed the street toward the Constables' house, holding the tiny animal in front of him like a grenade. He strode swiftly, as if he were carrying an actual bomb. When he reached the Constables', he walked down the sidewalk to where you could see the blue glimmer of their swimming pool through the bushes. The deep end was a stone's throw from the street. He was going to heave the thing into the Constables' pool and watch it drown.

Lyle rushed across the street but he'd already cocked his arm, his bad one, letting it fly. She waited for a glimpse of fur, for the hurled creature to open in midair—a puny flying carpet—before gliding into the pool with a splash. Nothing happened. When she reached Dustin, he was standing on the sidewalk, clutching his arm. His sunglasses lay at his feet. He opened his fist and the remarkable creature was still there, panting like a heart.

“You couldn't kill it,” Lyle said.

“I would have. It stuck to my glove.”

The animal's claws were still dug into the leather, eyes big as marbles. Even scared out of its wits, it was infuriatingly cute. Taz and Hector watched from the car, frozen like statues. Zap, Lyle thought. Us vs. them. She glanced back at her brother, who was staring at the scrub oak across the street.

“Jesus,” he said.

Caught high in the branches, where the leaves were spotted from blight, was one of Lyle's old T-shirts. It was ratty and yellow, but filling in some letters she could still make out the slogan:
MURDER IS A FAUX PAS
. It must have escaped the fire only to get stuck in a tree. Once she'd walked around with jokes on her chest, believing herself to be unhappy. The shirt flapped in the breeze, like a kite she couldn't get back.

People. Jonas had never seen so many in one place before. Smoking pipes by their cars or dancing like noodles to noodley music or playing Hacky Sack as though they were learning a Russian dance. Blasts of mossy perfume made his eyes water. On the roof of a van, a woman was swaying in a circle, a hula hoop spinning around her neck. “Steal your face?” a man asked Jonas. He held up a T-shirt with a skull on it. Jonas hurried past. This was the third time someone had asked if they could have his face. He did not know what they planned on doing with it. Perhaps they were unhappy with their own faces, which were gaunt and hairy and sometimes even missing teeth.

The parking lot went on forever, bristling with cars and vans and motorcycles. Jonas entered a maze of vendors selling jewelry and skateboards and T-shirts with teddy bears on them like the ones on Griselda's bong. He stopped in the narrow shade behind a booth, wondering what to do. He did not know where Major Meltdown and Griselda were. He'd gone with Captain Lobo to sell the tickets they'd picked up from the stationery store, the ones they'd had copied onto special cardboard and cut out carefully with scissors, making sure the little skeleton doffing its hat didn't get snipped off at the top. People had bought these tickets believing they were real. Captain Lobo had not felt bad about this: he called them Trustafarians. Trustafarians were from Trustafaria, a very rich planet. They did not deserve their money, and therefore it belonged to the “mendicants of Earth.” Explaining this to Jonas, he'd smiled to show off the gunk in his teeth, as though it were proof of his impoverishment.