Model Home (27 page)

“Maybe you can steal enough wine to cover tuition.”

Dustin got out of the car and walked toward the house, pausing for a moment to fish cigarettes from his pocket. The sun glinted off his hair. He was such a relentless boy, so unforgiving; why did Warren insist on trying to befriend him? It was like a sickness or a curse. He wondered what it would be like to stop trying. To give up completely and let Dustin set the rules, let his son's contempt seep into the ground between them.

It might be a relief, a great one, like sinking into bed after a long day of travel.

Camille was awake now, blinking at the windshield. Warren wanted to tell her that he'd mistaken fatherhood for true love, how sorry he was that he'd been fooled, but even as he thought this he knew it was a lie. He would seek Dustin's love at all costs, a hopeless search.

Warren watched his son walk toward the house, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Dustin stopped in the middle of the lawn and pulled out a lighter. For a moment, he seemed invincible. The birds seemed to stop chirping, as though in a trance, the air still as a question.

Then something strange: a whoosh, a gasp from the trees. It happened in an instant, but Warren saw the explosion unfold in a tranquil sequence of disasters. First the sound, this earth-sized whoosh. Then the house itself, a crumpling of wood and glass, like someone sucking the air out of a bag. The sky volcanic with fire. A hooflike clatter above him, the world outside the car swirling with debris.

His first thought was:
I'm free.

Then he saw Dustin. He was writhing in the grass, trying to flap the fire from his arms. Warren grabbed a blanket from the backseat and bolted across the lawn and jumped on top of Dustin, hugging him with the blanket, his eyes shut to the smoke—to the sweet, bacony, gut-wrenching smell filling his nostrils—rolling through the grass with his burning son, clutching him with both arms, heaving him around and around until the blanket stopped feeling like a wild creature, aware of the awful smothered screaming only when it ended, his son alive and panting in his arms, quiet as a fish, and still Warren didn't move or speak or let go, ignoring
the shouts of his family, the stink of burned wool and flesh, until finally he opened his eyes and saw the trail of scorched lawn and the black angel in the grass where his son had lain flapping, so small compared to the gorgeous disaster of his house, the kitchen and bedrooms and entryway transformed into a pyramid of fire, a tremendous rustling of heat, shirts rising from the popping windows like ghosts.

PART II
 
Summer 1986

Lyle rolled down the window of the Renault, the desert air scorching her face. Her T-shirt stuck to her chest. Why the fuck hadn't she gotten the air-conditioning fixed? She'd replaced the muffler with her own money but had decided to skimp on the extras, forgetting that they lived in the Mojave desert. With coyotes and jackrabbits. Animals that dashed into the highway, hoping to be put out of their misery. Feeling faint, Lyle glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a hungry-looking vulture seesawing behind her, its red head hanging down like a trigger.

She hadn't been home in a month. It was a major topic of conversation, how little she visited. Last fall, when her parents had agreed to let her live with Bethany so she wouldn't have to commute four hours a day, they'd made it clear that they expected her to drive home every weekend. It hadn't occurred to Lyle that she wouldn't. At that point, Dustin was still wearing his pressure mask around and couldn't take a bath without someone's help. She'd actually
wanted
to come home. Bethany was her best friend, her parents very nice and generous, but she was also a person who equated combing the tangles from her hair with suffering. All she talked about was France and how much she missed the
tarte tatin.
The
tarte tatin
would make you cream your pants. If she wasn't talking about
tarte tatin,
she was cooing into the phone to her French boyfriend with the Dickensian teeth. It was a relief for Lyle to go home and face the gravity of her life, the irrefutable suffering of a crippled brother.

By spring, though, Lyle had stopped making the drive every weekend. There was the column she was writing for the newspaper—
“Severely Yours”—which took up a lot of time. There was all the work for her AP classes, and then studying for her achievement tests, and then of course finals, not to mention that she was working twenty hours a week at The Perfect Scoop. Did her parents think being manager was a walk in the park?

Now she'd quit her job and was returning home for summer vacation, the back of the Renault crammed with her things. “Vacation” implied some kind of holiday, but the thought of spending three months in the middle of the Mojave with her family alarmed Lyle deeply. As she exited the freeway, turning up the dirt road to Auburn Fields, the air began to take on the smell of rotten eggs and stewed cabbage, the putrid stench of home. It was like an enormous fart that never went away. She rolled up the window. To the left of her, dug into the earth and protected by a very tall fence, like a humongous footprint filled with rain, shone the dump. Its azure pool shimmered in the sun. A “sludge pond,” they called it; what toxic things it retained, and why it was such a gorgeous, heartbreaking blue, Lyle could only imagine.

She followed the long dusty road to the entrance of Auburn Fields, which was not only fieldless but brown as a turd. The gate was open, as always. She waved at the defunct video camera in its little steel hut, to make it feel useful. Beyond the single block of empty homes sprawled a barren tract of desert. They had no neighbors: the last holdouts—the Jimenezes—had moved out in May. Driving up the block, Lyle always felt like the survivor of a nuclear war: she imagined the interiors of the other homes, each one a tableau of bodies, families slumped around the dinner table or huddled Pompeii-like in front of the TV.

She had to park on the road because a mail truck was blocking the driveway. She got out of the car and heaved her duffel bag from the trunk. The mailman, tan and colonial-looking in a pith helmet, stopped sorting the mail in his lap and looked at her from the driver's seat of his truck.

“Hello,” Lyle said, smiling.

The mailman smiled back. Then—tenderly, as though holding out a present—he gave her the finger. Lyle thought she was seeing things, but the finger was still there after she blinked.

She schlepped her bag across the front yard—a crusty square of dirt—and plopped it inside the house. She peered into the little office where her dad liked to sit and do crosswords and saw a
futon lying in the middle of the floor, her mother's shoes lined up against the wall. Sitting on the desk was a humidifier and her mom's makeup mirror spread open like a triptych. Lyle kept going, choosing to ignore this development. Her father was sitting by himself at the kitchen table. He was dressed in a shirt and tie, attacking a penny with a pair of scissors. Moons of sweat darkened his armpits.

“The mailman just gave me the finger,” she said.

“Don't be too hard on him.” Her father gave up on the penny and peered into the open case bristling with knives beside him. “We're twenty miles off his route.”

“He's never flipped me off before.”

“Twenty minutes each way. The stress of commuting. It accumulates.”

Lyle waited for her dad to hug her or at least welcome her home. He returned his attention to the penny, squeezing the scissors with two hands and gritting his teeth.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

His face was red. “Trying to cut through this goddamned penny.”

“Why?”

“For my pitch. It's supposed to, um, impress people.” He gave up again on the penny, which seemed to have melded permanently to the hinge of the scissors. “The guy who does our training, Ted, cut one into a corkscrew. It was extremely righteous.”

Lyle squeezed to the sink to get a glass of water, almost tripping over a hump of linoleum that had blistered from the floor. Ever since becoming a knife salesman, her dad had starting using words like “righteous” and “awesome.” Lyle guessed they were sarcastic but wasn't a hundred percent sure. The kitchen sink was so full of dishes, some with whole servings of food on them, that she couldn't fit a glass under the faucet. She tried to use the water dispenser built into the fridge, but the lever had broken and the water dribbled out like a leak. While she was waiting to collect enough to drink, Jonas came through the sliding glass door that opened to the yardless desert, letting in a stink bomb of air. He was carrying a turtle. The turtle's head and legs were shrunk into its shell, which was divided into little trapezoidal sections. Jonas himself was tanned a reptilian brown. He'd been roaming happily around the desert even though this whole disaster was his fault. If
he hadn't left the stove on for two days, if he hadn't been roasting marshmallows inside to begin with, the pilot wouldn't have blown out and choked the house with gas, and Dustin would be fine.

“Another turtle,” her father said.

“It's not a turtle. It's a desert tortoise.”

Lyle's mother came in from the hall, aghast. “Those are endangered!”

“Actually, they're only threatened,” Jonas said.

“Please take it outside,” she said quietly. She looked like she might cry.

“They'd be endangered, except they're good at relocating.”

“Relocating! How would you feel if someone drove you from your bed?”

“Your mother would know,” Lyle's dad said, grinning at her mom. It was not a pleasant grin but something you might give a little girl who's trounced you at chess. Her mother scowled, refusing to meet his eyes. It occurred to Lyle that they could barely stand to be in the same room. Mr. Leonard hobbled in from the living room and peered at the tortoise shell with a look of undisguised longing. He was still alive, miraculously, which gave him a biblical sort of aura. Mr. Leonard began to sing to the shell, a lovelorn croon. The shell started to hiss.

“A duet,” Lyle's father said.

“Jonas, take that outside this instant,” her mother said. “I mean it. You didn't go near the dump, did you?”

Jonas shrugged. “What difference does it make? We're all going to die of leukemia, anyway.”

“By the way,” Lyle said, “I just drove an hour and a half with no air-conditioning.”

“Welcome home,” her mother said, hugging her.

“Where's Dustin?”

Her parents glanced at each other for the first time. “In his room, probably,” her mom said. “Watching a movie.”

Lyle walked back into the depressing living room, past the depressingly fake chandelier hanging in the foyer, and down the depressing hallway toward Dustin's room. It wasn't just the chintziness of the house that depressed her, but the fact that her father insisted on pretending it was as nice as their old one. Even the motel they'd stayed in those first couple months, when Dustin was in the hospital, was better than this: at least Lyle had had
a bathroom in her room, with a shower that didn't have furry brown scorpions hiding in the drain, waiting to sting her feet. When she complained to her dad about the furry scorpions, or the rotten fart smell in her hair that she was afraid to wash out, he looked at her as though she were talking about a different house. It was the same one, ironically, that he'd tried to sell to Hector's mother. Lyle knew this because Hector had written her a letter a few months after the accident. Many letters, in fact. He had the address from the day they'd come to look at the house. Though she'd been too upset about Dustin to write back, Lyle had opened the letters immediately, hoping they'd live up to the buzzy, sexual thrill of seeing them in the mailbox. Instead, they were tame and disappointing, filled with a remorsefulness Lyle didn't understand. The hours she'd spent in the hospital, seeing her brother demented with pain, watching him weep and curse and howl without even knowing she was there, had shown her that she didn't really love Hector. Love was something that required you to be invisible. What she'd loved was Hector's attention: it had made her feel desired, which wasn't the same thing.

Lyle knocked on Dustin's door, wondering if he could hear anything over the sounds of mayhem rumbling from inside. Adding to the general tide of depressingness was the fact that he watched TV in his bedroom. It was one of the things on Lyle's list of
THINGS YOU SHOULD AVOID DOING BEFORE YOU'RE FIFTY
, right after
Go speed-walking with little arm weights.
Whenever she thought of her brother like this, holed up in his room all day watching movies, she felt forlorn and useless. She hesitated before turning the doorknob, dismayed to see that her hand was trembling.

“It's the best part,” Dustin said, pointing at the screen. He was lying in bed, focused on Sylvester Stallone's shirtless body slumped in a helicopter. He liked movies with explosions in them: it wasn't ironic so much as a fuck-you to fate. “When Rambo hides the bazooka under his seat.”