Читать книгу Touch and Go - Thad Nodine - Страница 7

The next morning I stood in the doorway in my new shorts and sandals, chilled by the dawn air and irritated at myself. Our bags were already packed in Betsy’s hold, and the casket was lying atop the old wagon at a tilt, gift-wrapped inside a big tarp with plenty of duct tape. Half an hour earlier, the boys and I had helped Patrick cover the bulky box as it lay on the driveway. I didn’t like the idea of transporting the thing, but I did my part, holding a corner of the tarp against the side of the box and feeling the contours of the relief carvings. Suddenly Patrick tugged the tarp out of my hands and pushed it aside, the stiff material crinkling—a sound I always found satisfying, like popping a sheet of bubble wrap underfoot. But the abrupt noise spooked me now.

He clicked open the lid and whispered to us not to tell Isa.

Devon laughed. “I forgot about the lights.”

I couldn’t help reaching inside, where my hands found the string of small pin lights, growing warm, tucked into the crease of soft fabric around the base of the casket. I pulled my hands away. Jesus, I thought. Lights in a casket! And the casket for an old man not yet gone.

I’m not one for empty decorum, but there are limits that shouldn’t be pushed.

“Never mind the lights,” Patrick said brusquely. He brought to my hand a large canvas sack. Within it, I realized as Patrick pulled it open and I reached inside, were several zip-lock plastic bags. He opened one, and we all passed around a small, prickly bone about the length of my fingers. He’s selling bones again, I thought, shaking my head. And this time from a coffin.

“Coon bone,” he said, though he wouldn’t tell Devon, when Devon asked, what a coon bone was, or what was in the other bags. I pretended I didn’t care, but Devon took the bait, asking him who would lay down for some janky bones.

“Gamblers,” Patrick said, his voice tinged with enthusiasm.

“Where we going to see gamblers?” Devon said.

“You’d be surprised.”

“What do they want them for?”

“Luck.”

Devon pressed him, but that was all Patrick would say.

Gamblers, I thought, trying to take it in stride. I’d never been to any of those Indian casinos.

We used half a roll of duct tape to make the tarp cling to the casket. Next we hoisted it onto Betsy’s roof, careful not to bump anything. There was only one crossbar in the roof rack, the back one, so the coffin tilted forward. Patrick lashed the casket to the crossbar and sent a second rope in through the front of the back doors and around the top. He rolled towels around the two ropes to protect the wood. He tried to show Devon how to tie a trucker’s hitch on the back rope and a carrick bend on the front, but Devon wasn’t interested. It made me think of Dad, who’d tried to teach my brother, Larry, how to tie knots but had never bothered with me.

“That’s a good tilt,” Patrick said proudly. “More aerodynamic.”

“Looks like shit,” Devon said. “We look like hillbillies.”

As we waited for Isa, I stood in the doorway, stewing about Patrick’s stupid plans: Lugging a casket cross-country. With impertinent lights inside. And bones—Jesus, the bones!

But I was also annoyed with myself for being ensnared by this trip. And for breaking my cell phone the day before; now I’d have to travel without it. Deep down I must have known why I was going, yet still I clung to my delusion about writing some articles. I even made a vow, as Isa rustled in the kitchen behind me and Patrick shuffled around Betsy before me: I resolved to keep my distance from them both. I would be a reporter, a witness. I’d have to comfort Isa and suffer Patrick from time to time. But I would not get pulled into their vortex.

It’s startling to me now, how good I was at self-deception.

Devon’s flip-flops slapped the driveway as he approached. “Lighten up,” he said, jiggling my arm. “Why you always playing the worried white boss?”

I shook my head and couldn’t help but smile. “You’re the one worried about how Betsy looks,” I said.

“That’s more like it,” he said, slapping his flip-flops down the driveway. “You got to let things go.”

Betsy’s motor rumbled, stopped. Caught and revved. “Get in!” Patrick yelled.

Nobody got in, so far as I could tell. The pitter-patter of feet came up the driveway, and Ray leaned against my side, sleepy, so I put my arm around him, trying to feel better about going. It was about the kids, I told myself. I’d hang out with the kids.

“What’s the racket!” Mr. Grenadier yelled from next door. “Turn off the damn motor!”

“Isa!” Patrick yelled. “You’re waking the neighbors!”

“Let’s go!” Isa declared, pushing Ray and me out of the front doorway. We hurried into the backseat as Isa locked the house and jumped into the front, filling the car with her woody perfume. Patrick gunned it, throwing my head back and spinning Betsy’s tires. Isa shrieked and laughed as her door slammed shut. The old station wagon bounced into and out of the gutter and swerved to the right into the street, pushing Devon on the backseat into me and me into Ray, who was pinned against the door, all of us laughing, even Patrick, with his rapid-fire chortles sounding like a machine gun. A horn blared on our left: Caution! Welcome! How dare you!

Betsy bounced, but the casket seemed to hold.

“We’re tipsy,” Patrick said.

“Seatbelts on!” Isa sang. She turned and reached between the front seats to slap our knees and scratch her fingernails like rain under the hems of our shorts and along the insides of our thighs, making us squirm. I felt my penis quiver.

Patrick accelerated up the ramp to the 5.

“Ray,” he said, “don’t hang on the rope.”

I reached forward and up toward the ceiling. The taut rope that came through the car and ran around the casket sagged with Ray’s movements, then twanged as he released. The kids leaned out, the wind whistling a long ssshhhh around heads or arms. The tarp fluttered above.

“Seatbelts on!” Isa bellowed this time. They dropped back into their seats, and we tugged at the belts, poking each other with elbows.

We had to be back in two weeks for the kids’ school and Isa’s job. Patrick and Isa had about fifteen hundred dollars, they’d told me, enough to visit Isa’s dad and see some sights on the return. But it wasn’t enough for motels—about a hundred dollars a day—and it’s not like we had a tent, not that you’d need more than boxers and a mosquito net along Interstate 10 in August. As part of our living arrangement, Isa was supposed to cover monthly room and board for me, but I told her I’d get my own food on the trip. After all, they’d bought my new clothes—or so I thought. I started with seven twenty-dollar bills in my wallet and ten fifty-dollar bills clipped in the zippered pocket inside my suitcase, money I’d saved from my job. I didn’t have a credit card. I fold fives in half across the width; tens in half along the length; twenties in half first along the length, then across the width; and fifties in half first across the width, then along the length. It’s easy to remember because five and fifties are similar, as are tens and twenties. Ones aren’t folded at all.

When the sun moved to the windshield, warming my face, I knew we were heading east on the Ventura Freeway. “What a beautiful dawn,” I said, though I knew the sun was higher than that in the sky.

“You can’t see it,” Ray said.

“What can you see, Kevin?” Isa teased. “What can you see?” I hadn’t heard that phrase in a long time—not since we’d lived alone together.

“I see a road that goes to Florida,” I said, smiling. “I see an old man who’s happy to see us.”

“You do not,” Ray said.

“Sure I do. I even see his dreams. Last night he dreamed he was dying. But today he wants to go swim in the Gulf.”

“For reals,” Ray said.

Sometimes I joked too much for Ray, so the two of us had a deal: whenever he said “for reals,” I had to tell the truth. “You already know what I see,” I said, laughing.

Ray loved to imagine nothingness.

Devon groaned. “Not again.”

I spoke slowly: “I see absolutely nothing. Or nothing absolutely. I see neither darkness nor light.”

After a moment, Ray said, “I always see black and bits of color.”

I knew he was closing his eyes.

“You have to imagine,” I said. “Back before there was light, there was no darkness either. There was just the heavens and the earth.” I’d never liked that first paragraph of Genesis, which says there was darkness before God summoned light. That’s how I knew, even as a kid, that the Bible wasn’t written by God. It was written by people with sight.

I was born with vision but lost it in an accident when I was five. After I was blinded, I still had visual memory as a child growing up, but by the time I arrived in Burbank, I could remember only a few broad sweeps: The flatness of a prairie. The expanse of a mountain dwarfed by sky. I could remember Grandpa’s barn looming above me, the huge span of the open barn door, which I always associated with the rich smell of manure. Picture what you can remember from age five without the benefit of someone having snapped a photo; the few wisps I can generate are hazed in the fog of a dream, in murky shades—no colors or stark whites.

I can’t remember faces, including my own. I can recognize with my fingers Mom’s high forehead and quick dimples, but my mind won’t connect the dots to construct a likeness. To this day, I can maneuver each turn from our street in Greeley to our front door, but I can’t picture the entryway. I can identify instantly the pattern of wood grain on my chair at Mom and Dad’s kitchen table, but I don’t try to sketch it in my mind. For me, chairness is nonvisual; it’s the feel of a seat connected to four legs and a backrest.

Many children who lose their eyesight have its memory fade in adulthood, as the brain no longer receives light sensation and begins to dedicate its functions to other senses. At least one fleeting image, how-ever, has come back to me since I got clean and sober, so maybe part of my loss came from the drugs. As I was getting out of bed one morning in Burbank, I recalled an indistinct image of Mom turning and pausing in her bedroom, looking away from me. I sat on my bed and thought about Mom a while, but my other memories were sightless: her heels tapping across the hard porch, her fingers gripping my hand, and the smell of peach cobbler in her apron.

When I was a teenager, I still had visual dreams, but not anymore. Now my dreams are multisensory except for sight: Voices call out, but I can’t scream. Or I’m naked in the commotion of a trolley that smells of Dad’s hair gel. Sometimes I recognize footsteps or the clutch of a hand on my shoulder. I caress a woman’s thigh as she laughs. I taste oysters. A man hits me as I reach. How do I know it’s a man? He smells rough. Or maybe I recognize a place—a fluency with the coarse fabric of a cushion beneath my fingers, the smell of leather, or the sound of my boots on Mexican pavers—but I don’t quite know where I am.

After we merged onto I-10, I reached over the backseat and felt for my backpack, pulling out my note-taker. The night before, when Devon had helped me test it, I’d talked to him about describing things on the trip for me: the visuals I thought I’d need. But after I told him I wasn’t bringing my laptop along, he got pissed at me and refused to help with anything. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m not describing a thing for you.” He loved roaming the Internet and posting comments about how fucked up the world was. And he blamed me for keeping him out of touch on the trip.

“Show us your new toy,” Isa said, twisting in the front seat.

After I showed them the keys for typing and the strip along the bottom for the Braille display, Ray and Devon ran their fingers along the display line.

“I haven’t typed anything yet,” I said.

“Ah,” Devon said. “No wonder I couldn’t read it.”

“You can’t read Braille,” Ray blurted.

“It has a voice reader too,” I said. “Let’s try one. Tell me what the dawn looked like.”

“That’s over,” Ray said. “It’s day already.”

“I know. Tell me what it did look like.”

“It was orange and yellow like cotton candy.”

“That’s good,” I said. “I like that.” I pressed the keys, and Ray and Devon felt the dots pop up along the display line:

“It tickles my fingers,” Ray said.

“Here,” I said, “push this button. You’ll hear what I typed.”

“Wait,” Devon said in a deep, authoritative tone. “I think I’ve got it.” He was still feeling the Braille display, trying to convince Ray he could read it. “Something about orange and yellow and cotton candy.”

Ray ignored him. He pushed the button, and the mechanical voice rushed through its monotone. “That was too fast,” Ray said. “What did it say?”

I slowed the speed; he pushed the button again, and the voice intoned, “The pre-donn smog glowed like cot-ton can-dee at the fayr.”

“That’s not what I said,” Ray complained.

“That’s what writers do,” Devon said. “He’s conning you into describing stuff for that article about us.”

“What article?” Patrick boomed. “What the hell are you writing in that thing?”

We sat silent for a moment, startled. I knew these clashes would come, but already? An hour from Burbank?

“It’s not anything real,” Isa said. “He’s just writing stories about himself. Aren’t you, Kevin?”

“Like those articles he got Devon to write?” Patrick sputtered. “About the teachers?”

For an assignment at school, Devon had wanted to write about teacher-student relations, so I’d let him borrow my digital recorder to record what teachers said in class. He got outrageous quotes: put-downs and name-callings to get kids to behave. Instead of just handing in a paper, he turned it into a newsletter for everybody to read. It caused an uproar and almost got him suspended. The teachers denied what they’d said, but then he produced the recordings. It made his newsletter a huge hit and made him want to be a reporter.

“If you put me in that thing,” Patrick said, “I’ll throw it in a river. I’m not kidding.”

I remembered my vow to myself not to get sucked into his squalls. I took a deep breath and spoke evenly, like none of it mattered to me. “It’s a journal,” I lied. “I’m just writing about myself.”

“That cost over four thousand dollars,” Isa said. “You better not throw it in a river. He’ll walk out. His parents will sue us.”

“Look how you got him in trouble,” Devon whispered across me to Ray.

“I did not,” Ray said. “You did.”

“Maybe he should walk out. He can take care of himself.”

“Of course he can,” Isa said. “But this setup is good for everybody.”

I felt like a kid, the way they were talking as if I weren’t there.

“Listen to me, Kevin,” Patrick said loudly and slowly. I figured he was looking at me, glancing over his shoulder or in the rearview mirror; I was sitting in the middle of the backseat. I took off my dark glasses and faced straight ahead so he could see where the sweeper wire had etched an S across my crumpled eyebrow, down through my eyelid, and into my cheek. I’d never excelled at pressing myself on others, but over the past year, as Patrick had become more controlling, I’d found an approach that allowed me to hold my own: I would remind him one way or another that I’d already been cut to the core and survived.

“Parents or no parents,” he said, “money or no money. If I find you’re writing about me, that thing’s going out the window. Or you’re going out the window, and I’ll sell it.”

“It’s not about you,” Devon said.

Patrick swerved onto the shoulder, throwing us all to the left and then forward into our seatbelts as he braked and Betsy kicked rocks and dust into the dry heat of California’s summer. The car slid to a stop and everybody was breathing hard and a cloud of dust enveloped us and whirled in through the windows, smelling like tires and sweat and asphalt, making me sneeze once, then again, into my hand to keep the mucus off my four-thousand-dollar chronicler. Patrick twisted in his seat—the vinyl creaking—and spoke across me into Devon’s face, cars whizzing past us on the freeway: “How the hell would you know?” He waited a full half minute to let that sink in, Devon fidgeting beside me, knowing better than to mutter a word, the dust settling as an acrid taste in my mouth. Ray sat as still as stone on my left. “You think I’m an idiot doesn’t know you and him sat up all last night figuring out how to download between that thing and his laptop? Blind man can’t write on his own.”

My jaw clenched. My breathing stopped. “Fuck you!” I wanted to say. I wanted to reach over the seat and grip him by the throat. But I suppressed all that. I kept my vow; I remained quiet. I would not let him get to me. Not already.

“You listen good, Devon,” Patrick said. “Not everything’s on the up-and-up. Somebody with your record ought to know not to write stuff down. Don’t give them anything to pin on you. Don’t show your tracks. Tell it by word of mouth. With your history and the color of your skin, you better learn that and learn it well. You’ll know soon enough how fast you can lose what you’ve got.”

What a paranoid son of a bitch, I thought. I forced myself to breathe.

“And you listen, Kevin.” He spoke so close I could smell his sour face and the dank coffee from his gums. “You’ll have to get your own ride in the middle of the damn desert if I find you’ve got a hand in writing about me.” He turned away, sitting squarely in his seat. “And put your glasses on. It’s not right to have to look at a man without an eyeball.”

I faced straight ahead at the rearview mirror, defying him to look. And I thought, I’m going to focus the damn articles on him. Just to spite him.

Isa got us back on the highway with her effervescent and disabling goodwill. She reached back between the seats, tapping on the note-taker with her finger: my cue to slip it into my backpack.

Looking back, I don’t mind so much that Patrick insulted me. But I’m still pissed at myself—my blood boils—for not standing up for Devon right there. Maybe I could have brought things to a head a lot earlier.

All across the desert, Betsy’s air conditioning kept shutting off, roasting us, and then coming back on, only to bake us again later. The radio had been torn out by a thief the year before, leaving a hole in the dash. Without music, there was no escape. Searing winds blew the car around and shifted the casket on top. Twice, one of the towels above flapped and fluttered; Patrick cursed, pulled off the freeway into the shade of a gas station, and fiddled with the ropes, which were stretching in the heat. Each time we stopped, we would pile out and dawdle at the back of the minimart in the coolness of open refrigerators until the clerk told us to buy a soda or close the damn doors. I loved my huaraches and shorts and couldn’t imagine wearing jeans and boots.

When I was six years old, after I got out of the hospital and my body started to heal, I wore Western boots and a hat because I loved being a cowboy, not to protect my toes and head. I had visual memory then, of course, and I was intrepid in our neighborhood. I used a hockey stick to get around, dragging it against fences and along the ground like any kid would. I didn’t care if I banged my shins. The houses were packed pretty tightly. It was second nature for me to learn the dips and ledges in sidewalks, the location of a tree trunk or a bush near a friend’s yard, the contours and length of his driveway, and whether it was two or three steps up to the door. I knew all that before I knew anything about sweeping with a cane. “Hey, cowboy!” Dad would call out. The cowboy with the hockey stick, that was me.

When I started school, a year late because of the accident, Dad wanted me to go to Cameron Elementary like other kids; he didn’t want me surrounded by blind children in a special school. That summer before my first school year, Mom and Dad would argue after I was supposed to be asleep, but sometimes I would lurk in the hallway, listening.

“He gets around fine!” I remember Dad saying. “He might as well get his licks now.”

“You don’t see him all day, by himself.”

“You watch,” Dad said. “He’ll come back helpless and feeling like a misfit.”

A few days after my seventh birthday, Mom drove me three hours south to a school for the deaf and blind, and I hated it before I got there.

For a bunkmate, I was paired with Matthew, an eight-year-old who could see billowing clouds of color in a world that moved: to him, our bunk bed keeled like a boat, parked cars loomed from fog, people floated like ghosts. I got the top bunk because he was afraid to go up there. On the first night, he cried, missing his mother, so I climbed down and got into bed with him, comforting him, allowing us both to sleep. The next morning, he pushed me aside in the bathroom. “You can’t see as well as I can,” he said.

I convinced myself that I hated blind people. In the second week, my dessert started to disappear off my tray as I was eating. After a few days, I learned to put my cookie or brownie in my pocket as soon as I got it. And by the end of the third week, I learned the shuffle of his step and would slap his hand as soon as he came around. “You’re getting smarter,” he said. “My name’s Charlie. When I was new, a kid did that to me. Taught me how to listen.”

Charlie was a couple years older than I was. He could see splinters and shards of objects in the corners of his eyes, and he helped teach me the real way to cane, sweeping back and forth: don’t tap, touch. It was easy for me to coordinate my feet with the sweeping. I already knew how to listen for the echoes of my own footsteps on walls and overhanging roofs; that was another benefit to cowboy boots, the hard heels and soles. One day, as we were walking along the periphery of the school grounds, he offered to take me around the block.

I paused, of course—going across the street was against the rules.

“Get out of Braille Jail as often as you can,” he said. “Otherwise you’ll always be blind.” He pushed the button at the traffic signal, and when the tune came on, we walked slowly across, our canes outstretched. My heart was in my throat, but I learned to relax. He explained how he created a tactile map inside his head every time he went anywhere. “Only it’s not a map,” he said. “It’s life size. And you fill it in with sounds and touches as you go, so you can always get home. Feel this: that street curb. That’s when you turn right. Feel the wind? It’s coming from behind. Hear that car going by? That means we’re heading along the sidewalk fine.” We turned at another street. “Now the sun’s on your face.”

We were almost back to the crosswalk when bicycles clattered from behind and skidded in front, stopping us. Maybe two or three bikes.

“Look,” a kid said, “it’s the freak show.”

Charlie grabbed my elbow, and we caned around them quickly. They zoomed by us laughing, slapping me hard on the shoulder.

“Hey!” a kid said, his voice rough.

“What a wimp you are!” another one said, his pitch higher. “You gonna let him do that?”

“I’m gonna beat his ass,” the first kid said.

“I got him with my stick,” Charlie whispered to me. He was the first person I knew who called it a stick.

The bikes skidded out ahead and started rattling back toward us.

“Here’s the crosswalk,” Charlie said. I heard him hit the button. Then he pushed me behind the pole and I prayed for the sound of that song as we huddled together, waiting for the bikes. I didn’t hear any cars. I decided we should run for it: dash across the street to the safety of the school. But I was afraid of moving and of standing still. I didn’t know what to do. As I faltered, the first bike was upon us. I tensed and prepared to jump into the street. I felt my friend lunge away from the road just as the bike approached. The bicycle crashed: bam! A kid yelled.

“Charlie!” I said, panicking.

The other bike crashed. The song came on at the crosswalk. A hand was suddenly at my elbow, pulling me across. Then he swiped my cane from my hand. “Hold on to me,” Charlie said. “We gotta go faster.”

“Are you okay?” I said.

The kids behind us were moaning.

“I poked my stick in his spokes,” he said.

By the end of the day, they traced the broken cane to Charlie. “I’m getting out of here,” he whispered to me in the bathroom that night. “No more Braille Jail. They’re looking for you, but I didn’t tell them who.”

I was terrified they would find me. Charlie was gone the next morning; I didn’t get to tell him good-bye.

By the time I came home for Thanksgiving two weeks later, I’d convinced myself I couldn’t bear the school. I told my parents I was bolder than the other children there. I could do things they wouldn’t do. And I said the teachers kept us inside to protect us. I knew that would get to Dad, the idea that I was being coddled. But the truth was, I was homesick. I missed my pal Charlie. And I was terrified of the kids on bikes; I dreaded going out anywhere, certain they’d track me down. On the Sunday my parents were supposed to drive me back, Mom and Dad sat me at the kitchen table and gave me the choice. I never went back. I named my stick, and every one since, after Charlie.

My parents got me a tutor, Mary Robinson, who helped me with schoolwork every weekday afternoon from first through ninth grade. She taught me Braille. For several years after my blinding, I was bold, even reckless, around my neighborhood, with plenty of bruises and scrapes to show for it. I didn’t use my cane much except at school. I rode my brother’s skateboard while poking my hockey stick out front. Sometimes I rode his bike and crashed into bushes, fences, and walls. I bounced on my pogo stick for hours in place.

By the fifth grade, however, I had gotten left behind so many times by neighborhood kids that I began to turn inward. I also became cautious and quiet as I grew more accustomed to accessing the world through my ears. Listening is not passive; I had to focus and concentrate and invent the world from what I could hear. That was when Mom started getting books on tape from the library, and I started listening to stories whenever I could. I loved books not because they let me escape but because they showed me the world. The Jupiter Jones series got me started; Jupe was a fat kid, an outcast who didn’t have money but was smart as hell. He could fool adults and solve mysteries they couldn’t solve because he thought about things differently.

In middle school, as kids started picking on me more, I kept to myself until shyness became routine. I started wearing dark glasses to cover my scar, and I ditched my cane whenever I could. I avoided going out on my own. Dad pressed me to do things outside, but he was gone all day. It was Mom who helped me in stores, showed me how to open plastic wrappers when I got frustrated, or took me to doctors and specialists. At night, Dad would drill into me how difficult the world was for a boy like me—that was his phrase: “a boy like you.” My parents never used the word “blind.” I couldn’t just be mediocre, he said. I had to excel at whatever I chose. That was the only way I would ever support myself. Even then, I sensed that that was how I could gain his respect, by not being a drain on society.

One afternoon, I overheard Dad demanding that my tutor stop pushing me to use my cane.

“It’s about being independent,” Mrs. Robinson said, “getting around on his own.”

“They make fun of him,” Dad said. “He gets around Greeley fine.”

“He gets around the neighborhood,” she said. “He doesn’t strike out into new places anymore.”

“This is about your movement, isn’t it?” Dad said. “You want to show the world how many people there are without sight.”

“It’s not about a movement,” Mrs. Robinson said. “It’s about Kevin accepting who he is.”

Dad just about lost it then. And my tutor almost lost her job.

Later in Burbank, as I was getting to know Ray, I wondered sometimes, when he grew quiet or distant after he’d been running around only moments before: Had Ray come to us at the same stage I’d been in—those middle school years—when I’d stopped being intrepid? Maybe it was a projection on my part, that parallel between him and me. But the thought always made my heart sink because I didn’t want him to hide inside himself, as I had. And I didn’t know how to help him.

After lunch, the temperature was 104, and Betsy got a quart of oil and a gallon of water. “You think the heat’ll warp the wood?” Patrick said, coming inside the store where we were loitering.

“What is that thing?” a man said, his voice rattling like pebbles. “Looks like a coffin.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. Maybe we shouldn’t have wrapped it so tightly, I thought.

Then Patrick tried to sell him one: “It’s a handmade, one-of-a-kind casket. Everybody’s buying ’em. You can’t get ’em in a funeral parlor.”

Before I got into Betsy, I made the mistake of laying a hand on the coffin’s tarp. I jerked my hand away; the thing almost burned my skin.

“I hate that ugly box,” Isa said. “I can’t even look at it.”

When we were back on the road and the desert furnace came through the windows, my sweat evaporated at the same rate as I perspired. As far as we knew, we were driving until Patrick couldn’t drive anymore, which depressed us all, I think: the hot road ahead. My skin felt tacky and smelled salty. Devon pushed away my leg whenever it touched his, but Ray couldn’t stop moving. He kept bumping up against me with elbows and knees. He had grown some during his months with us, I realized.

Late in the afternoon, just before Phoenix, Isa said she hoped we could stop at her brother’s place in Tucson for a night—which was such good news it even got Devon asking questions. She hadn’t seen Robert in four years, she answered, since before she was clean and sober. No, she didn’t have any other brothers or sisters. Yes, he had a family: June, his wife, and Alexis, his teenaged daughter. Yes, he knew about us; she’d talked to him on the phone a couple of times over the past year. No, he didn’t know we were coming. Then she started mumbling to herself in her thin, anxious voice, asking Jesus something or other—I couldn’t quite hear.

“Enough questions!” Patrick declared.

I was glad to hear Patrick come to her aid.

We were quiet after that. I remembered that Robert was the younger brother who’d badgered her and spied on her as a kid. I knew he was a successful contractor and that she felt inept in comparison with him and his family. But I’d forgotten he lived in Tucson.

We pulled up at Robert’s place after six, but it still felt like 100 degrees as Betsy tick, tick, ticked in the heat. The AC hadn’t kicked on since Phoenix. We hadn’t eaten since Quartzsite, just this side of California. Now that we’d gotten it into our heads to spend the night, the thought of being turned away and driving on toward Florida was out of the question.

I don’t remember stepping out of the car, just holding Devon’s strong, bony elbow along a curving walkway as his body loped forward and his flip-flops slapped the pavement. We followed the gentle thuds of Isa’s wedge sandals. Ray’s steps chattered far ahead, even in the heat. Behind us, Patrick’s rubber soles came in even paces, always so damn certain. Charlie, folded into sections, protruded in a lump from my pocket and pressed into my leg as I walked. Devon hardly broke stride in rambling up a set of oddly deep stairs, where I had to quicken my pace, stuttering a step and a half for each stair. We shuffled across a large expanse of stone or ceramic pavers until we stood in a cluster before what I assumed was a front door, the five of us standing there as if the door would open of itself. None of us wanted to press Isa to act; we knew she felt unsound. In the silence of that scorching portico, how was it that I felt responsible, as if this were my younger brother and I had gotten us into this bind?

After a flurry of short breaths, Isa stepped quickly forward and told us to “smile natural,” as if there were such a smile. I thought of what Patrick had told me on the roadside outside Burbank: blind man can’t write on his own. I pressed my lips together and dipped my head to the right. I let go of Devon’s elbow, nudging my glasses up my nose and lowering my brim to hide my scar, berating myself for hanging on to this family, for not staying home. Inside the house, chimes set off the yapping of a little dog, mocking us from the other side of the door.

“He must be one rich motha’, your brotha’,” Devon said, but he offered a quick, good-natured laugh.

“Stop it,” Isa said, edgy. “Don’t talk like that here.”

Ray fidgeted like a terrier, moving about the porch and brushing against my arm. Heat radiated from some wall to our left, sucking moisture; even in the shade, I withered. As the door chimes trembled to a stop, the high-pitched yaps fell away. I made myself breathe.

“That’s one big-ass door,” Devon said.

“I said don’t talk like that,” Isa said, her voice cracking.

“Like what?” Devon said.

“Ruff!” Ray snarled, which got the yaps started again inside.

“Stand still, Ray!” Patrick said. “You’re making me hot.”

Leave him alone, I wanted to shout. Let him be himself, you son of a bitch! But I caught myself, closed my mouth. I shook my head and breathed. I was beyond this, I decided, outside it all.

That’s how selfish I was.

Still the dog yapped, with pauses between fits and bursts.

“Should I ring again?” Isa said in a high, nervous pitch as she shifted from one foot to the other.

“I’m starving,” Devon said.

“Why would anyone live in Tucson?” Patrick said, disgusted.

The heat didn’t so much oppress as drain me; I could feel my lips parching. Again I made myself inhale.

Just then the door scraped fast across its threshold, and the yaps circled in a frenzy.

Isa gasped. “Oh my gosh!” she said. “Robert! You scared me.”

Her brother. Was he holding something? Doing something? What had startled her?

From the doorway, Robert exhaled a miserable groan that blended into “Isa.”

A cool slant of air drifted across my ankles. I’ve waited on plenty of thresholds hoping for the kindness of others. Standing on Robert’s pavers in the bald heat of Tucson’s summer, I didn’t know what he looked like, how he stood. But I imagined how we appeared to him, his degenerate sister’s ragtag troupe: a Mexican kid, a black teen, a sightless ex-addict looking who knows where, and two born-again sinners posing as parents. He knew the baggage we bore.

“Don’t bother with introductions,” Patrick said. “We’re brothers!” He let the brother bit burrow beneath Robert’s skin.

Somehow the dog stopped barking, making silence deeper.

With a forced giggle, Isa clapped her hands and seized the moment. “Robert!” she said. “Praise Jesus you’re here! We’re on our way home to Daddy and just stopped by for a night. You look great.” She swished up to hug him or peck him on the cheek; I’m not sure. But as quickly as she’d thrust herself on him, she took a step back. From her pace, I could tell she was in self-protect mode, staving off insecurity by ramping toward one of her highs. “You’ve never met Patrick,” she blurted. “This is our little Ray. Look, your dog likes him! And this is our teenager, Devon.” Isa has always been generous that way, claiming us, trying to make us family though only she and Patrick shared a name.

“Come on, Kevin,” she said, grasping the back of my left arm, her palm tacky against my skin. She didn’t mean to, but she pulled me off balance. I stumbled, mouth open, pitching to my left and forward but catching myself before I fell. Charlie sprang from my pocket, releasing and clattering on the tiles. As my hand flew out, it pressed into softness between her thighs. Isa giggled as I pulled my hand from her leg.

The dog started yapping again.

Patrick chortled. I should have laughed too, but I was too self-conscious. I straightened, embarrassed. Isa clung to my arm, her hand trembling as if she might collapse without contact. I stood tall and dropped my shoulders to show strength of mind. I tried not to think about my scar.

“This is Kevin,” Isa said. I reached out to shake Robert’s hand.

“Who is it, Robert?” a woman’s voice called from inside.

Patrick’s footsteps—the rubber soles—flashed into the house, vanishing, leaving the rest of us to swelter in the heat, suspended.

Ray was squatting next to me, fiddling with the dog. “Are we staying?” he said.

“Shut up!” Devon said. “You’re going to blow it.”

My right hand still hung in the air, so I moved it down to Ray’s shoulder. Isa handed Charlie back to me, opened fully, so I held him upright like a staff, his tip on the ground, his grip in the air. I relaxed my jaw when I realized it was clenched.

Isa offered a nervous laugh. “I’m sorry we didn’t call first,” she said. “How are June and Alexis?”

Still Robert didn’t answer. Devon shifted his feet. The dog panted.

Across the street a car door slammed, and a man’s rough voice called out, “Robert! Sorry to hear!”

From inside the doorway, a trace of garlic cooled to my nostrils. Still nothing came from Robert; I was certain we wouldn’t stay.

“This isn’t a good time,” Robert said finally, his voice dead serious. “You can’t visit right now. You can’t be here. I’m sorry.”

I thought of walking back into the sun, stooping into the backseat, and spending the night at a rest stop: the sweltering seats, the suffocating air. Even my eye sockets felt dry.

Off to our right, a camera clicked rapid-fire.

“Hey!” Robert said.

The clicks fluttered on.

“Get off my property!” Robert yelled. Then he stepped among us and herded us toward the door, his hand on my back. Ray scampered ahead as the dog yapped. I swept Charlie back and forth, feeling the threshold through Charlie’s touch and stepping over it into coolness. The door slammed behind, footsteps dispersing helter-skelter on hard stone: marble? As I pulled the artificial moisture deep into my lungs, I felt blood pulsing in my temples.

We were in.