Читать книгу The Arsonist's Song Has Nothing to Do With Fire - Allison Titus - Страница 22

On her walk back to the house, Vivian counted eight cicada shells. It was the season of nostalgia, August turning into September, almost her birthday, which was their birthday. She could almost forget she had a brother, since they hadn’t been in touch for years. He was obscured, he was part time, he was in hiding. He was a mime. He was no forwarding address/no longer at this address/undeliverable. He was a postcard back in March that said I am an exhibit at the state fair. They were twins, but that didn’t mean much that Vivian could vouch for. They weren’t psychically connected. Vivian and Seth weren’t aligned in some intrinsic, magical twin way and never had been. All they had in common was their gift for evasion. It was hereditary, in their family—the one quality you could point to that connected them. Evasive, evading, evaded. He evaded the law. He evaded the question. It was their mother’s fault—she was the queen of evasion, having grown up ringside after seasonal ringside, the perma-costumed daughter of parents who worked the small-time carnivals. The names of those setups were fixed in her memory from stories her mother told: Bayside Marvels (New Madrid, MO); Land of Wonders (Carbon, UT); Point Mercenary Daylong Enchantments (Sulphur, LA). And here it was, the end of another summer. The two-headed calf was stumbling his final parade around the ring. The fire eater’s awkward teenage assistant was dismantling the portable coaster, trying to forget the acne blushing painfully over half his face.

Vivian hardly heard the footsteps before someone rushed past her, running down the sidewalk. He would’ve run her over if she’d moved left; the person was oblivious. Startled into pausing there on the sidewalk, she watched as he dodged off. Lanky guy, dark sweatshirt; dark pants—she lost sight of him quickly.

She was almost at the house, Helen’s house, when she spotted him again up ahead, a black sweatshirt turning down a driveway, jogging up to the side door of a green foursquare. He waited there on the porch a few seconds, then disappeared inside.