The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [93]
Chapter Ten
Inside the house, Buster could not shake the feeling that he and his sister were being watched. By whom he could not say. Or, rather, he could say it: Caleb and Camille. One night, Buster removed each of the air vents, looked under all the lampshades, ran his fingers lightly over the fibers of the carpet in order to check for listening devices. Annie walked into his room while he was on the floor, his fingers moving deftly over the carpet as if he was reading something in Braille. “What are you doing, Buster?” she asked. He looked up, his ears rushing with blood, a humming in his head, and replied, “I lost something.” “What?” she asked, and he answered, his gaze returning to the carpet, “I don’t know.”
There was a growing certainty in Buster’s heart that he and Annie were a crucial part of the happening that their parents had devised. His parents had disappeared and now it was up to Annie and Buster to decode the series of actions that would bring their parents back from the missing world, to complete the piece. How often had their parents sent them into the wilderness of a mall or public park or private party and asked them only to be prepared, to open themselves up to the infinite possibilities that their parents, god-like, would create? And how often had Buster and Annie, their reflexes so attuned to the chaos that rumbled just beneath the surface of every living and nonliving thing, been able, once the event began, to respond in just the right way to push everything into a better—stranger—place?
His fear was that he would tell Annie all of his suspicions, that they were supposed to keep looking for their parents, and she would refuse. It was a delicate thing, wanting something that might not be the same as what his sister wanted. He was unaccustomed to the position he was in, and so he continued to press his ear against the walls of the house, listening for the sound of his parents’ voices.
“Have you tried reaching out to them spiritually?” Suzanne asked him as she sat in his car, the motor running, a copy of one of her stories in his hands. Buster had been meeting with her every couple of days since he had returned to Tennessee, waiting in the parking lot of the Sonic Drive-In, where she worked nights as a car hop. During her breaks, she would fly across the parking lot on her roller skates, slip into the car, the wheels on her skates still rolling, and they would discuss her stories and how to fix them. He ate the food that she brought him and they would sit, their shoulders nearly touching, as the windows fogged up around them.
“What did you say?” he asked, putting down the story.
“Well, if they’re dead, then you could try to communicate with them through a séance or something. Or a Ouija board. You can get one of them at Walmart.”
“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea,” he replied. “I don’t believe in that stuff, so I wouldn’t accept anything it told me, even if my parents were dead and trying to communicate with me.”
“I don’t believe in that stuff either,” she said, “but it means something, right? You put your hands on the little wooden arrow, and you make it move around the board and it tells you something, even if it’s something that you already knew. It’s you doing the talking, but maybe it’s something you wouldn’t say otherwise.”
“I don’t think so,” Buster said, eager to change the subject.
“I guess I don’t understand what’s going on,” Suzanne said quietly, suddenly shy. “You think your parents are dead?”
“Maybe.”
“But you also think they’re alive.”
“Yes, maybe so.”
“And you think that maybe they’re doing this on purpose?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t know how to find them, if they were alive?”
“Yeah, we tried, but we’re not very good at it.”
“Well,” Suzanne said. “It seems like you won’t be satisfied until you know for sure what happened to them. And you don’t have any good ideas left for finding them. So maybe you need to start doing stupid things in order to find them.”
“Go on,” Buster said, suddenly interested in her logic.
“You need