The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [75]
“Okay,” Buster said.
“Maybe,” the sheriff said, “and this is just one of many theories, but maybe they didn’t want you two back at home, felt like they’d lost their privacy, and so they ran away without telling you. Maybe they aren’t waiting seven years to be declared legally dead. Maybe they’re just waiting until you two move back to wherever you came from, and then they’ll come home. Maybe that’s what’s happened.”
Buster looked at Annie, thought she might start crying, but she showed no emotion. “Don’t cry, Annie,” Buster thought. They needed to be strong. The sheriff was wrong. Their parents were not dead. They were not trying to avoid Buster and Annie. They had devised a cunning and beautiful artistic statement about disappearing. They had done what they always did, made art out of confusion and strangeness. And then Buster realized he was crying. He touched his face and felt the tears that he was seemingly producing without effort. Goddamn, he was bawling, and both Annie and the sheriff were now staring at him.
“Buster?” Annie said, touching his shoulder, pulling him closer to her.
“Oh, Lord, son, I didn’t mean any of what I said. I’m sorry. I don’t think any of that is true. Your parents did not run away because of you. They were probably assaulted and then . . . well, son, I didn’t mean any of that. I was just thinking out loud.”
“C’mon, Buster,” Annie said, helping Buster to his feet. “Thank you, Sheriff,” Annie continued, pushing Buster out the door of the office. As Buster, still crying, not able to stop, walked past the officers and secretaries, he felt that his outburst of emotion was not strange at all, that this was probably what they had been expecting when Buster and Annie first walked into the sheriff’s office to discuss their parents’ violent disappearance. This was what grief looked like, Buster realized. So he kept crying, soft hiccups interspersed with low moans, all the way to the parking lot, in the car, all the way back home.
“Okay,” Annie said, having returned from the barber, another step in reclaiming what was theirs, “let’s brainstorm.” She held a pen in one hand, a legal pad on the kitchen table. She kept absentmindedly raising her hand to her newly cropped hair before stopping short and wincing.
Buster wanted so badly to take a nap. He felt the strain of being a capable person, even if that only meant getting a haircut and reading articles about his missing parents that had begun to pop up on the Internet, was more than he could handle. Annie, however, seemed energized, her anger at her parents bringing her a superhuman level of clarity.
“We need to make a list of suspects,” Annie said. Buster did not understand. “Someone is helping our parents disappear,” Annie said. “If they planned on disappearing for seven years without any money, then they needed help from someone. And if we can figure out who that person is, we can find Caleb and Camille.” Buster nodded and began to think of people who might be helping their parents, people who had taken over the roles Annie and Buster had once played. But even when their careers were at their highest point, their kind of art and their decision to operate here in Tennessee had always kept them on the edge of the art world. Caleb had been orphaned when he was eighteen, his parents killed by a head-on collision with a garbage truck, leaving him the only remaining Fang, and Camille’s family had disowned her when she married Caleb. During his entire childhood, he could not remember a single person coming over to the house for dinner or to play cards or to help the Fangs with their art. No one was allowed inside the house, his parents having an almost agoraphobic need to barricade themselves from the outside world. Caleb and Camille had Buster and Annie and made it clear that they needed no one else. So Buster and Annie struggled with the brainstorming, Buster wishing he had his own pen to hold just so he felt more involved in the process, and then the doorbell rang.