The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [86]
“Anyone else?” she asked Hobart. He shook his head. It was getting late, the sky slowly, as if by magic, dimming. The old man was struggling to sit upright, his shoulders slumped and hands trembling so softly it seemed like he was holding a tiny, nervous animal in each cupped hand. “No one ever got close to Caleb and Camille,” he finally said. “It was just the four of you in your own little world. No one could compete with that.” The way that Hobart said this last sentence, Annie wasn’t sure if he thought this was a good or bad thing. Did he think their parents had loved them or held them hostage? She was afraid to ask.
“We should leave you alone,” Annie said. “We’ve bothered you enough, I think.”
“Don’t leave,” Hobart said, suddenly springing up. “It’s late. You can stay here tonight. I’ll make dinner.”
Annie shook her head. Buster nudged her with his elbow but she continued to decline. “We have to get going.”
“We haven’t even had a chance to talk about my work,” Hobart said, his obvious desperation causing his body to expand, to take up enough space to make Annie and Buster feel cornered.
“We have a plane to catch,” Annie said, though they had no tickets for their return trip, no place to stay. “Thank you for your help.”
“I didn’t do a goddamn thing,” he replied, shrugging. “I just gave you some advice that I don’t think you’re going to follow.”
Hobart took Annie in his arms, kissed her, and then shook Buster’s hand.
“You two are great artists,” Hobart said as the two siblings walked back to their rental car. “You can separate reality from art. A lot of us can’t do that.”
“Good-bye, Hobart,” Annie said as she started the car.
“Come back sometime,” he told them.
Annie pressed her foot gently on the gas pedal and the car pulled slowly down the driveway. Through the rearview mirror, she watched Hobart shuffle back into the house, shut the door, and then the entire house went dark.
As they drove back to San Francisco, Buster asked what they were going to do next. Their options seemed so limited that it was impossible to ignore the feeling of failure. Where else could they go but back home? They had no leads, the few possibilities having closed shut after their talk with Hobart. Annie could not imagine how to continue searching. Buster was now asleep in the passenger seat, softly snoring. She accelerated, her headlights cutting through the darkness in front of her, and she knew there was nothing left to do. She could not shake the feeling that this was a contest, her parents competing against her and Buster. And, following this line of thinking, she could not help but acknowledge that her parents had won. Her parents were gone, for an indeterminate amount of time, possibly forever, and the only thing she could think to do was to go back to their house.
Too late to catch any flights, Annie parked the car in the long-term lot and reclined her seat. Just as she closed her eyes, Buster said, still half-asleep, “What are we doing?”
“We’ll go back to Tennessee in the morning,” she replied.
“What about Mom and Dad?” he asked.
“Maybe Hobart is right,” she said, finally giving voice to what she had been considering for the past few hours. “It might be possible that they mistakenly put this distance between us without considering that we would forget about them. Maybe we’re in the position of power now.” It was, in the game she had decided existed between her and Buster and her parents, the only way she could now imagine winning, to simply end the game on their own terms.
“Maybe,” Buster said, without conviction, and, before Annie could answer, he was asleep again. Annie closed her eyes, the car a thin shell that protected them from the rest of the world. She slept as soundly as she had in weeks, locked with her brother inside an object that had come to a complete and total stop.
Annie and Buster checked with the police almost daily for updates as to their parents’ whereabouts, but