Eden Park
by Brett Berk
First Runner-Up, 2026 Fiction Contest
Victor passed the tennis court during his final set of reverse-march runs. He was looking at his feet, which he wasn’t supposed to be doing, his spats tapping backwards along the pitted ring road as he played the harmony from “Looking for Love” on his saxophone, a song from last year, from middle school. He couldn’t get the music he needed for Carlson in the fall. He righted his head and glanced at his clamp-on lyre, and as he marched past the far neck of the complex’s dumbbell-shaped inner roadway, he caught sight of his sister, strutting the warped court practicing her kicks and stances. He tried to look away, but she caught his eye. Mindy would sometimes allow him to sit on the floor near her in the apartment in front of the old console set while she watched TV and chatted through the game shows and soaps with the Jens, so long as he didn’t talk. But if he raised his head or offered her cereal or a glass of instant iced tea, she would squint and scowl. “Don’t look at me, Vicky. I told you not to look at me.” More than once that past school year, he’d heard her tell people at Hampar that, despite their shared last name, they were not siblings, but cousins. “Once removed.”
He had managed to smuggle his new high school marching band uniform out of the house before they left, but Mindy’s cheerleading outfit hadn’t yet arrived, so she’d had to make her own. She bought the kilt and jersey at a rummage sale, at a church she’d walked to, alone. She hadn’t even told him she’d gone. The sweater and kilt were separates, and though they were close to the Kelly green of the Hampar Middle School Warriors, they were off by a shade from each other. The pom-poms were worse. Not only were they gold instead of white, they were flimsy, a cheap stringy set from a drugstore Halloween costume that had somehow migrated to Joel’s after the divorce. Their mother was holding the actual uniform hostage at the house, along with their clothes, their books, their furniture, their photographs, their music, their games, their notebooks, their jewelry, and the rest of their past and their future. Though Victor tried not to think too much about their future.
He hadn’t seen a genuine look like this from his sister the whole time they’d been at Eden Park. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it was exhaustion—it had been weeks. But she smiled. It seemed untrustworthy at first. Then, she gave a high kick, and called out his name, as if he was a star quarterback entering the field. “Go Victor! Go Grey Wolves!” she cheered, naming the mascot at Carlson.
Mindy had taught him to cheer, when she’d first started on the junior squad, back in fifth grade. They’d practiced her routines together, in private. She’d made him promise never to cheer outside. Still, he couldn’t resist. He brought his knees high like a majorette. He pumped his sax in the air. “Go Mindy!” he shrieked. “Warriors forever!”
Mindy screwed up her mouth and dropped her kick. Then she turned and walked away, toward their building.
They didn’t speak back at the apartment, not even while they watched the news break before the prime time shows. But as he microwaved a bag of popcorn, and she waited with her bag behind him, she said his name, his Hebrew summer camp name, for the first time in ages. “Avigdor…?” like she had a question.
They were both supposed to be at Camp Habonim that summer, for Victor’s final year, in the best bunk, Ha’Aretz, closest to the lake, and Mindy’s second-to-last, in the Sad’eh Tal cabins along the Capture the Flag field. Ethan was off at computer camp in Ann Arbor again, where he got to stay in an air-conditioned dorm with vending machines on every floor. But Rhonda and Chuck had sent them to Eden Park. Sad-Dad Park, they called it, a warehouse for the plague of recently divorced fathers. Ringed by the tangle of on- and off-ramps where the three main suburban freeways met, the complex had its own exits and interchanges, but no real connection to other roads. It was a convenient location to drop someone off, on the way to anywhere else. It was a dump, a dumping ground. And everyone who lived there had been disposed of, like trash.
“Avigdor,” Mindy said again. The light went off inside the microwave, and her reflection appeared in the smoked glass, against his. She looked at him, right at him, for the first time in what seemed like forever. “No one cheers cheerleaders.”
On his first visit to the house, Chuck brought a softening carton of Borden’s neapolitan ice cream and a can of Sander’s hot fudge. They were still eating the spaghetti with margarine and garlic powder Victor had cooked for dinner, but Chuck insisted they skip to dessert. “Noodles, you can nuke. Ice cream melts.”
Ethan sighed. “His logic is unassailable.”
On the next visit, Chuck handed out gifts—a makeup case for Mindy, a 1:16-scale model car for Victor, a calculator watch for Ethan.
“This is cool,” Victor said. His siblings scowled at him.
Chuck winked. His bald head wrinkled awkwardly.
“Say thank you,” their mother commanded, fluffing her hair with a red plastic pick.
He stopped bringing gifts around the same time he started spending the night. He would sometimes bring fancy takeout dinners for Rhonda, which the two of them would eat in the dining room, alone, before retreating to her room, The Cave. Then they gave up on eating in, and would just go out, coming home after in his Mercedes, talk radio blaring, and heading right for the Cave, his chunky gold bracelet clanking like a bag of screws as they walked past. “We’re so in love,” Rhonda said. “Be happy for me. For us.”
But the more Chuck came around, the less time Rhonda had for them. She stopped shopping. She stopped cleaning up. Victor tried to maintain his daily chore rotation—dishes, laundry, bathrooms, sweeping, houseplants, garbage—but Mindy and Ethan didn’t bother. The cereal boxes emptied, the milk went sour, they ran out of toilet paper. They worked their way through the cans in the back of the pantry, the meat in the freezer, the crusty leftovers from Ethan’s bar mitzvah.
“We’ve been Chucked aside,” Ethan said, eating a personal pizza he’d brought home on his bike.
“She’s on the Chuck Wagon,” Mindy said.
Victor smirked. “We’re Chuck Buried,” he said, and all of them laughed, which never happened.
“The Divorce Decree says he’s not supposed to stay here,” Ethan said. “Unless they’re married.”
“She told me that he doesn’t have his own place right now,” Victor said. “He lost it in his divorce. He’s building a big new house. It’s just not done yet.”
“Ask how many bedrooms it has,” Ethan said.
“She said he’s ordering us a new fridge, filled with groceries.”
“She says a lot of things.”
They were together at the kitchen table, and Victor could hear Chuck’s carping voice, and the sound of their mother’s giggling, above them. He cocked his ear at the ceiling. “Fake laugh.”
“Drug laugh,” Ethan said. “Don’t tattle, Tattler. It never works out for you.”
Victor didn’t want to tattle. He wanted to wait until he figured out what was going on. But that Sunday, when Grandma Nicky picked him up for their Only Child Brunch, he found himself complaining to her about Chuck. “He called Ethan a Nerdlet. He’s Jewish, but he’s in a church and he says grace at every meal. The house smells like his cologne.” Nicky had already sued Rhonda once, just after the divorce, over her legal rights to paternal grandparent visitation. She chewed a piece of sable. “That’s terrible, Vickeleh.” He could see the fish’s golden skin twirling around her tongue.
Victor was the first one to spot the ring on their mother’s finger—an emerald, her second-favorite gem after diamond, her birthstone. He was helping with her nails at the kitchen table, and he blew on her sepia polish, working up his courage. “Are you and Chuck getting married?”
Ethan glanced up from his Calculus. Mindy kept her head down, as usual.
“No.” Rhonda withdrew her hand, flicking it sharply. She studied the ring at arm’s length, right under Victor’s nose. It was a large square stone, well cut, with exceptional clarity and he could see that it caught the light. “We’re already married,” she said hurriedly. “So you can tell your grandmother to stop worrying about extra-marital cohabitation. Anyway, we’re renovating this crappy house your father made me buy, then we’re selling it, and we can finally move and start our new life.”
Victor swallowed. “I didn’t know we wanted a new life.”
Rhonda glanced past him, into the gold glittered hand mirror. She adjusted the edge of her eye liner. “I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up.”
Mindy held up the envelope Joel had left that morning. She pulled two ten-dollar bills from inside. These envelopes would appear, like everything with their father, like everything at Eden Park, irregularly—different amounts, different times of day, no note. Instead of handing Victor one of the bills, like usual, she pocketed both. “Want to go to the store?”
Victor swiveled in the stained orange armchair, the living room’s only real piece of furniture, besides a clunky wooden end table that Mindy used for the phone. “With you?”
“Obviously.”
They walked to the cinder-block party store at Eden Park’s far edge, past the dumpsters, behind a chain-link fence sieved with trash and leaves. Though he knew better than to ask, Victor wondered what had changed, and he was curious if this was a clue to some larger plan. Other families had plans. Gary Fein’s family even had a flowchart for what to do in case of a fire, or nuclear war, and they sometimes held practice drills. “Do you know where we’re going after the summer?” Victor asked. “To Chuck’s? Back to our house, once it’s renovated?”
Mindy shrugged. She stared ahead. “I don’t know,” she said. “Who would we even ask?”
They stalked the dingy aisles of the party store, pointing and laughing as they gathered their ration of boxes and cans: sugar cereal, toaster pizza, Chunky soup, chili-mac, frozen entrees they boiled in their plastic wrapping.
Mindy convinced an old white man in a hardhat to buy her cigarettes, menthols like Rhonda smoked, and a big Heineken.
Victor watched as she struck the black lighter. “Blow it on my face,” he said. “It reminds me of her.”
His sister exhaled. “Weirdo.”
As they trudged back to their building, Mindy drank from the beer like a bottle of pop. After a bit, she held it out, and let Victor take turns swigging from it. They competed for the loudest burp, a competition Ethan always won. He picked up a rusty umbrella stalk and hung his shopping bag from the end, like a hobo’s bindle. He added a rhythmic little kick to every-other step, like they’d done during the overture in marching band.
Mindy linked her free arm in his. She squinted at him like they shared a secret. Then she leapt into a strut, waving the nearly empty bottle like a showgirl’s cane. “Today we’re living in a shanty,” she sang. “Today we’re scrounging for a meal.”
Victor joined in, recognizing the Hoovertown song from “Annie.” “Today I’m stealing coal for fires.”
“Who knew I could steeeeeal?” Mindy howled. She thrust her arm high over her head, then brought it down hard. The bottle smashed on the cratered asphalt. Shards of glass flew past Victor’s face. A green mosaic chunk, held together by the label, landed at his feet, roiling in foam.
“Yeahhhh,” he sang, like a chorus, doing jazz hands.
“Yeah!” she joined in harmony.
In the apartment, Mindy cranked up the air-conditioning, and turned up the television. She pointed to the banner that crested the highway sides of the complex--A/C and Cable TV Included. “Might as well take advantage.”
They took out the garbage. They brought in the mail. They sat on their foam pads, on the floor, and watched TV. They ate lunch. They ate dinner. One evening, after they did their cheerleading and marching band practices, after showers, Mindy said, “It’s hot. We should be swimming.”
The next day, at the party store, they gathered up provisions—baby oil, Faygo, Doritos. They found one extra towel in the back of a closet, wrapped around Ethan’s old science kit test tubes. They stuffed it all in the overnight bag in which Mindy had carted her possessions to Eden Park, back when summer started. Mindy stared at the quilted pink bag as she zipped it. “Better than your garbage bags,” she said.
“You read my mind, again,” Victor said.
“We’re from Transylvania, on your Bubby’s side,” Mindy said in their mother’s rasp. “You’re a quarter vampire.” She put on a bikini and a baseball hat. She looked like a college student. He put on a t-shirt over his speedo. He looked like a lost little boy.
The pool became part of their ritual. They created aquarobic routines they performed together. They practiced flips and slams they’d seen on pro-wrestling, though Mindy never let him be the bad guy. They danced together in the shallow end to songs they sang, and if they forgot the lyrics, they just used each other’s names, over and over. Mindy held his hand.
Men tanning alone scowled, or sometimes stared. Dads tried to abandon young children in their care. Once, they recognized a kid from school, but they looked away. Victor stared the banner atop the closest building. On it, kids were horsing around in groups, running together like they were free, like they’d finally been liberated from the reins of family life. But Victor knew they weren’t free. They were quarantined.
Victor tried to teach himself to draw from life: a lacy weed, a dead squirrel. Mindy talked on the phone with the Jens, conversations that always came in pairs, the sequence dependent on the trio’s slippery alliances. Victor was expected not to listen in, yet Mindy would often ask him later to be her foil, to take her side in the braided conflicts.
They practiced their marching and cheering, sometimes twice a day. But as the summer wore on their most consistent mission became trying to call Rhonda. Mindy had started this scheme alone, without telling him. But he caught her dialing one morning, crouched over the phone in Joel’s room, and she confessed immediately. “You can help,” she said.
They called her three different lines every day, the two numbers they knew at their house and the one at Chuck’s rental. They randomized the timing, keeping track in a graph pad they’d found in the bedside table, which used to be Ethan’s bedside table. Then they tried every 474 phone number, their prefix, in sequence, hoping to happen on the private line Rhonda had had installed in The Cave. At the back of the notebook, they kept a list of things they wanted to ask her. When can I get my cheerleading outfit? When can I get my music and summer reading? Why did you leave us here? Why did you pick him over us? On the endpaper, Victor wrote an oath with Mindy’s purple calligraphy marker. We hereby pledge to always side together, against her. Forever. They each signed it with a prick of their own blood. “You should always write calligraphy.” Mindy squinted. “I can actually read this.”
In the heat of the afternoon, with the a/c blasting, they’d drag over the two least ripped vinyl dinette chairs and play round after round of car poker. “One pair,” they’d say, pointing at a set of brown cars on the highway interchange. “Three-of-a-kind. Full house.” They kept score on an accordion stack of blank computer paper Ethan had made them promise not to touch. Neither of them ever really pulled ahead. They stared at the sunlight, wishing there were curtains. They stared at the phone, willing it to ring. They stared at the cars, circling on the interchanges.
They slept in an L in the corner next to the air conditioning vent. The carpet smelled like gravy, but it was the darkest spot, the only place they could sleep past sunrise. They would talk until they fell asleep, telling stories of the days they’d just lived, or of moments they remembered from childhood, trying to find the differences in their perspectives. They talked about bad things they had done or bad things that had happened to them, which were often the same. Victor told her about Gary Fein, and what they’d done. Mindy told him about their Uncle David, and what he’d done. “It must be my fault,” Mindy said. “Mom always said, people get what they deserve.” Victor said maybe their uncle had been the one to get what he deserved, burning up in a car wreck. They talked and talked, because if they were quiet, they’d hear voices through the duct. Not words, just squabbling, other kids and dads.
They would leave the TV on all night to drown out this noise, falling asleep to the chords of late-night monster movie organ music, or the chords of late-night hippie movie organ music. “The Star Spangled Banner” would sometimes startle them awake, or a test pattern tone and blast of static. The fact that the TV was off when they woke up was the only evidence that Joel had come home, the envelopes the only evidence that he’d left again.
They started exploring Eden Park. They went in every building. They rode every elevator to every floor, walked the length of every hallway, visited every scalding roof and musty basement, tested the combination locks of every storage pen, every mailbox. Weirdly, everywhere they went in the complex, there was always some dad leaving that spot with something: a ball that had been kicked onto the roof, an inflatable floaty retrieved from deep storage, a book dropped in the hall, a sack of groceries carted in from the parking lot. “We should get a dad,” Victor joked once, as they walked back from the party store.
“We need to get out,” Mindy said, passing Victor her beer for a swig.
The surrounding highways, with their snarl of ramps and barrier walls, formed ramparts around the complex. But as they began walking further, they discovered narrow Service Roads, and freeway Extensions, and stunted sidewalks that sluiced around the edges. They followed each one as far as they could, but every route turned out to be a path to nowhere, dead-ending in an underpass, a pile of rubble, a scatter of railroad ties. Success equals effort over time, Victor had read in his high school handbook. The equation made sense, except if time was infinite.
Then, one afternoon, they pressed around the edge of a cinderblock wall, and through a hedge, and discovered a neighborhood, one street long. A foamy creek gurgled along the cratered dirt road. Tangled oaks shaded the centerline, their fallen limbs littered the ditch. The houses looked like shacks, their exterior walls covered in shaggy plywood or rinds of tarpaper, their wavy roofs tiled with mismatched shingles. Rusty cars sat on blocks in the yards. Cardboard signs hung by mailboxes, advertising food for sale, haircuts. “Is this the Inner City?” Mindy asked.
If they cut through the backyard of the last house on the left, and crawled through a loose fence board, they emerged by the dumpster behind Qwik Pik. A black iron table was chained to a No Parking sign out front. They used Victor’s backpack to sweep away cigarette butts and splayed takeout bins. They ate a snack before the walk home, sour mini-pizzas they’d packed in foil, a roll of Sprees that trailed dye down their throats. Often, Mindy would smoke afterward. “A cigarette is the best dessert,” she’d say, another of their mother’s lines, though Rhonda smoked all the time. They made tiny fires of their debris. “Burn the evidence,” Victor would say, as the Styrofoam bubbled black and gooey, like a marshmallow.
Men, always men, slunk up in ratty trucks and asked if they were okay, if they wanted a ride. Men, always men, stumbled up, and blundered into the back entrance of the store. They came out clutching the necks of paper bags, and hovered close, waiting for Victor and Mindy to leave before slumping into their seat, sometimes not waiting. Once, Mindy asked one of these men to buy her some vodka, flicking her hair and delivering a smile Victor had never seen before. The man took her money, and returned gripping a small, flat bottle, but when she reached out to take it, he wouldn’t let go. He stroked her arm, up and down, his grey eyes narrowed, like a goat. She looked frozen, as if by a ray.
After the second session of Computer Camp had started, they received a letter from Ethan. It was four pages long, dot-matrix printed. He listed his daily schedule, with the hours written in military time, 12:30-13:30: Lunch; 13:30-17:00: Advanced Programming. He included an alphabetical grid of all the kids on his hall, last names first, as well as their countries of origin. He typed up a BASIC program that, he said, “would perform an astonishing trick, if either of you were a computer.” He told them that the U of M fight song was called Hail to the Victor, “something we’ll never do—ha ha.” Then, in one run-on paragraph, he described three friends he called “The Phreaks” with whom he’d made computerized calls, using the dorm payphones, a slide whistle, and a homemade cradle modem of their design. “We called the Emperor of Japan at home, and he answered. Hiro recognized his voice from TV. We made Chuck’s home phone call Hawaii for ten hours. Won’t he be surprised when he gets the long-distance bill? Don’t tell mom,” he wrote, as if they could.
Finally, at the end, he wrote that he’d found the number for Rhonda’s secret phone line. “We accessed it in the Michigan Bell computers.” He had written the number in red pen, with a caret, hovering above the typewritten line. “Call AYOR,” he’d written. Then, in parentheses, “(At Your Own Risk.)”
The walk to the house took longer than they expected. On the atlas they’d found in Joel’s closet, it looked like a straight shot, and when they’d measured it with a thread from Mindy’s cutoffs, it seemed less than three miles. “I can march a mile in twenty minutes, in my spats,” Victor said. “It can’t take more than an hour.”
They plotted the trip carefully, waiting for the right weather, selecting the proper supplies. But more than two hours into their adventure, they hadn’t even crossed Inkster. Victor checked the scrolling timer on his digital watch. Mindy itched a welt on the back of her thigh and looked over his shoulder at the readout. “Maybe we should have marched,” she said.
They had started out in silence, following their usual trail through the Inner City. They walked behind the Pin-Am bowling alley. They walked behind the Twist King custard stand. They walked past the roll-up door behind the dry cleaner, where Victor spotted a laminated sign. “NO SMOKING. NO LAZY.”
They entered a field of cattails and scraggly birches. The path forked, then forked again to run parallel to the road. Victor knew from camp that deer could make trails, but deer trails meandered into random snarls, where the animals slept and hid. These trails were direct, the work of humans, of people who didn’t want to be seen, or who other people didn’t want to see.
To pass the time, Mindy filled Victor in on an argument she was having with the Jens, which he already knew of from overhearing her calls. The Jens both liked the same football player, Jacob Rosen, but the boy liked Mindy.
“They’re just jealous because you’re prettier and funnier,” Victor said. “No wonder the cutest boy on the team likes you.”
Mindy stared, both of them noting what he’d revealed. “This has been the worst summer ever, right?”
Victor shrugged. “…I guess.”
They finally entered a stretch of dark woods. Victor thought he recognized it, a dense piney plot that separated their old elementary schoolyard from the grounds of an orphanage. They used to have to hike here every Earth Day to spot robins and trillium. He looked around for sassafras leaves, mitten-shaped like the state of Michigan. “I think we’re in St. Joseph’s Forest.”
Mindy glanced around without moving her head.
He muddled the leaves in his palm, and inhaled their sappy reek, like spilled root-beer. “Can you tell me,” he asked, finally. “What she said to you?”
Since receiving Ethan’s letter, they’d taken turns calling Rhonda’s private line, but Mindy had dialed when they’d finally gotten through. His sister’s temper could be searing with her friends, or him. But this conversation had been eerily one-sided. Mindy asked their questions as if reading instructions from a TV dinner. When are we coming home? When are we going to see you? When can I get my cheerleading uniform? When can Victor get his music and books? He hadn’t been able to hear the replies, but he could tell from Mindy’s expression that they weren’t the answers they’d hoped for.
“I’ll tell you.” Mindy picked at the fringe on her shorts. “But then I don’t want to talk about it ever again. Promise?”
Victor reached for the gold chai he wore on a chain under his t-shirt, a bar mitzvah gift from Grandma Nicky. But it was at the house, too. He kissed his finger and pointed at the sky. “I promise.”
“She said she couldn’t see us. She said we should stay with dad. She said that it’s better for her, for her and Chuck, if things remain how they are. She said that she’s been a mother and a father to us for years, that it’s Joel’s turn. She said she’d have someone bring over our things when it’s convenient. She said that we’re old enough to take care of ourselves, that she needed to take care of herself. She said, ‘I’m done being a mom.’ Like it’s something you can decide to not be. Like, I was a ballerina for Halloween, but I’m not a ballerina in real life. I’m not wearing my ballerina costume anymore. She said, ‘Don’t call me Mom.’ She said, ‘Don’t call me.’” Mindy ignored a spider that dangled close to her cheek, then swatted it away. “She said, ‘How’d you get this number?’”
The house was locked, and the locks had been changed. Even the sliding glass doors in back were barred, clean wooden dowels wedged in their tracks. Victor peered through the open curtains at the Pit, their sunken living room. He felt a voyeuristic rush, like staring into a diorama of naked Indians at the Detroit Historical Society. When he turned back around, Mindy was no longer next to him. She had climbed on top of the air-conditioning compressor. Its grinding metal blades and hot breath had terrified him as a boy. Even motionless, it looked like the maw of a giant carnivorous robot. His sister lifted a leg. “Boost me up.”
“Onto the roof?”
“If I can sneak out, I can sneak in.”
Victor stood in the pea gravel, a moat of lava in their childhood games. He cupped his hands and lifted, like he was the thrower in a cheerleading pyramid. Mindy scrambled up the shingles. “Go, Bug. Go!” he called. It had been his nickname first, but their parents eventually used it for them both, like they were from the same hive, or infestation. Mindy didn’t look back.
Victor turned and stared at the yard. The previous summer, he’d spent hours back there alone one evening at dusk, throwing a lawn dart high into the air, then closing his eyes and twirling in circles, waiting for it to land. Its heavy metal tip had pounded into the ground again and again, sometimes far away, sometimes very close. Once its finned tail had struck his shoulder, like a slap. Once, the nib grazed his thigh. It bled lightly and gave him an erection.
“Victor!” Mindy was calling to him from the kitchen’s open slider. “Victor!! Were you in a trance?” She offered a hand. Rhonda had never had the back steps installed. “It was like the time Ethan elbowed you in the stomach and you had those convulsions.”
“I think I was praying.”
The house smelled crusty, like old leaves, and it was clammy without the air conditioning. But it wasn’t cleared out or being renovated, like their mother claimed. It was just a mess. A yellowed canister of matzo meal spilled out of the empty pantry. The kitchen table was turned on its edge like a gutted animal, two of its metal legs detached. The smoked plastic chandelier was balanced on the floor, still plugged into the wall and trailing its golden chain. It looked freakishly large, like a traffic light they’d seen on the sidewalk after a tornado.
“It’s even more depressing upstairs,” Mindy said. “But you don’t need to go up there. I found your things.” She gestured at the kitchen counter, at two padded envelopes, both torn open recklessly, revealing their grey felty lining. “I didn’t find my uniform, though. Can you help me look?”
Victor wanted to stay with his sister. But he also wanted privacy, to search his room. He removed the tiny sheet music folios from the flimsy cardboard—“Crazy Train,” “Ebony and Ivory”—as well as his copy of Lord of the Flies. A boy, a blood red watercolor splotch of a boy rocked forward on the cover, his scrawny arms curled around his head. “Maybe we should split up?”
“I’ll start in the basement.” Mindy fanned herself. “It better be cooler down there.”
He took the stairs one at a time, and splashed cold water on his face in the bathroom. His door was closed, but, inside, his room had been ransacked. Everything was gone. The chai and silver ID bracelet, the opal chip earrings he’d taken from Rhonda’s old jewelry samples, the $60 in cash hidden behind his books, saved for years toward one day buying something big, something he hadn’t even thought of yet. His school clothes lay tangled on the closet floor, some still on their hangers. His dresser drawers lolled out of their tracks like taunting tongues. And his stash of magazines—old Tiger Beats he’d taken from Mindy, Playgirls and Vivas lifted from Rhonda’s bedside table—had been removed from under his mattress, and stacked on his pillow.
Victor seared with shame, thinking that his sister must have seen all of this. Maybe she’d known about it before. He’d certainly snooped through every room in the house. He’d read her diaries, letters from her crush at summer camp, scribblings about Jacob Rosen in old notepads. He’d read his mother’s high school yearbook inscriptions, and the explicit love notes from Chuck in her nightstand. He’d even found Ethan’s rhyming poems to a girl from computer camp.
He wasn’t sure what he should do with the magazines. Should he hide them again, in a better place? Bring them back to Eden Park? Or just throw them out the window, and let all the glistening dicks litter the yard like downed branches, like flagpoles for a country without a flag? He gathered them up, planning to lay them out like tiles on his mother’s bed. But as he walked into the hall, he saw that the Cave’s door was padlocked. He threw the magazines down. Some of them landed open, and he jerked off over them, finishing quickly and spilling on the carpet. He stuffed his pillowcase with three shirts, his journal, and a pair of mix tapes he’d recorded off WLBS late at night, though he had nothing to play them on. When he glanced into his sister’s room on his way downstairs, he noticed that she had made her bed.
Mindy was sitting on the kitchen counter. A bottle of Canadian Club and a canister of powdered lemonade mix were next to her, and she was drinking from a tall glass, cloudy ice clinking. A warped cardboard box rested in her lap. Champion it said across the top. She glanced at his pillowcase. “You went upstairs?”
He shuffled the sack. “We really are hobos now.” He nodded at her box. “You found it?”
“The basement must have flooded again. It’s all mildewed,” she said. “I’ll never get the smell out.” She tapped the whisky bottle. “I should probably just douse it in this, and light a match.”
“Bananas flambé,” he said. Mindy hated bananas. It was their mother’s, and Uncle David’s, favorite dessert.
She lifted the glass again. “Jen G taught me how to make this. You can barely taste the alcohol. There’s a whole case of booze down there from Ethan’s bar mitzvah. No vodka, though. Nothing she likes.”
Victor dropped his bag and hopped onto the counter. His mother’s cloisonné lighter fell into the nest of lipsticked butts in her giant ashtray, alongside an ornate glass pipe, patched in char. A few months earlier, after an argument with Chuck about Jesus, he and Ethan had sat right here and drank microwaved mugs of Kahlua and evaporated milk, using a bottle his brother had liberated from the same basement stash. Apparently, Ethan had been sneaking drinks for a year. Victor confessed this to Mindy. “It tasted like mocha.”
“Why didn’t you invite me?”
“You weren’t really talking to me then,” he said. He took a deep sip from her glass. The drink was sour and sweet, and burned his throat. He rolled his stinging lips together. “At least we both found what we were looking for.”
Mindy nodded. “Yeah.” She finished, the splintered ice rattling like rhinestones. “I saw the family photos, Victor. Out in the garage,” she said, pressing her lips together. “Ethan’s Bar Mitzvah album, your Bar Mitzvah album. Our baby books. The Halloween photos. They’re all out there.” She slid off the counter unsteadily, forgetting about the box. Its contents spilled onto the floor. The uniform was rank, freckled with greyish mold on the arms and torso, and powdering the white satin H. But Mindy stooped over it and folded it, like a toddler’s blanket, placing it back inside and sealing the soft cardboard. “They’re in the garbage.” She was crying. “We’re in the trash.”
She remained crouched down, but held out a hand. He was unsure if she wanted to pull him down, or for him to help her up. But he was overcome by the urge to avail her.
“Come on,” he said. He grabbed the liquor bottle and the lighter, flicking its flame to the highest setting. He knelt on the floor so his face nearly touched hers, wrathful, bathed in fire. “We’ll take care of it. All of it,” he said. “Come on,” he said. “Show me.”
He had managed to smuggle his new high school marching band uniform out of the house before they left, but Mindy’s cheerleading outfit hadn’t yet arrived, so she’d had to make her own. She bought the kilt and jersey at a rummage sale, at a church she’d walked to, alone. She hadn’t even told him she’d gone. The sweater and kilt were separates, and though they were close to the Kelly green of the Hampar Middle School Warriors, they were off by a shade from each other. The pom-poms were worse. Not only were they gold instead of white, they were flimsy, a cheap stringy set from a drugstore Halloween costume that had somehow migrated to Joel’s after the divorce. Their mother was holding the actual uniform hostage at the house, along with their clothes, their books, their furniture, their photographs, their music, their games, their notebooks, their jewelry, and the rest of their past and their future. Though Victor tried not to think too much about their future.
He hadn’t seen a genuine look like this from his sister the whole time they’d been at Eden Park. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it was exhaustion—it had been weeks. But she smiled. It seemed untrustworthy at first. Then, she gave a high kick, and called out his name, as if he was a star quarterback entering the field. “Go Victor! Go Grey Wolves!” she cheered, naming the mascot at Carlson.
Mindy had taught him to cheer, when she’d first started on the junior squad, back in fifth grade. They’d practiced her routines together, in private. She’d made him promise never to cheer outside. Still, he couldn’t resist. He brought his knees high like a majorette. He pumped his sax in the air. “Go Mindy!” he shrieked. “Warriors forever!”
Mindy screwed up her mouth and dropped her kick. Then she turned and walked away, toward their building.
They didn’t speak back at the apartment, not even while they watched the news break before the prime time shows. But as he microwaved a bag of popcorn, and she waited with her bag behind him, she said his name, his Hebrew summer camp name, for the first time in ages. “Avigdor…?” like she had a question.
They were both supposed to be at Camp Habonim that summer, for Victor’s final year, in the best bunk, Ha’Aretz, closest to the lake, and Mindy’s second-to-last, in the Sad’eh Tal cabins along the Capture the Flag field. Ethan was off at computer camp in Ann Arbor again, where he got to stay in an air-conditioned dorm with vending machines on every floor. But Rhonda and Chuck had sent them to Eden Park. Sad-Dad Park, they called it, a warehouse for the plague of recently divorced fathers. Ringed by the tangle of on- and off-ramps where the three main suburban freeways met, the complex had its own exits and interchanges, but no real connection to other roads. It was a convenient location to drop someone off, on the way to anywhere else. It was a dump, a dumping ground. And everyone who lived there had been disposed of, like trash.
“Avigdor,” Mindy said again. The light went off inside the microwave, and her reflection appeared in the smoked glass, against his. She looked at him, right at him, for the first time in what seemed like forever. “No one cheers cheerleaders.”
On his first visit to the house, Chuck brought a softening carton of Borden’s neapolitan ice cream and a can of Sander’s hot fudge. They were still eating the spaghetti with margarine and garlic powder Victor had cooked for dinner, but Chuck insisted they skip to dessert. “Noodles, you can nuke. Ice cream melts.”
Ethan sighed. “His logic is unassailable.”
On the next visit, Chuck handed out gifts—a makeup case for Mindy, a 1:16-scale model car for Victor, a calculator watch for Ethan.
“This is cool,” Victor said. His siblings scowled at him.
Chuck winked. His bald head wrinkled awkwardly.
“Say thank you,” their mother commanded, fluffing her hair with a red plastic pick.
He stopped bringing gifts around the same time he started spending the night. He would sometimes bring fancy takeout dinners for Rhonda, which the two of them would eat in the dining room, alone, before retreating to her room, The Cave. Then they gave up on eating in, and would just go out, coming home after in his Mercedes, talk radio blaring, and heading right for the Cave, his chunky gold bracelet clanking like a bag of screws as they walked past. “We’re so in love,” Rhonda said. “Be happy for me. For us.”
But the more Chuck came around, the less time Rhonda had for them. She stopped shopping. She stopped cleaning up. Victor tried to maintain his daily chore rotation—dishes, laundry, bathrooms, sweeping, houseplants, garbage—but Mindy and Ethan didn’t bother. The cereal boxes emptied, the milk went sour, they ran out of toilet paper. They worked their way through the cans in the back of the pantry, the meat in the freezer, the crusty leftovers from Ethan’s bar mitzvah.
“We’ve been Chucked aside,” Ethan said, eating a personal pizza he’d brought home on his bike.
“She’s on the Chuck Wagon,” Mindy said.
Victor smirked. “We’re Chuck Buried,” he said, and all of them laughed, which never happened.
“The Divorce Decree says he’s not supposed to stay here,” Ethan said. “Unless they’re married.”
“She told me that he doesn’t have his own place right now,” Victor said. “He lost it in his divorce. He’s building a big new house. It’s just not done yet.”
“Ask how many bedrooms it has,” Ethan said.
“She said he’s ordering us a new fridge, filled with groceries.”
“She says a lot of things.”
They were together at the kitchen table, and Victor could hear Chuck’s carping voice, and the sound of their mother’s giggling, above them. He cocked his ear at the ceiling. “Fake laugh.”
“Drug laugh,” Ethan said. “Don’t tattle, Tattler. It never works out for you.”
Victor didn’t want to tattle. He wanted to wait until he figured out what was going on. But that Sunday, when Grandma Nicky picked him up for their Only Child Brunch, he found himself complaining to her about Chuck. “He called Ethan a Nerdlet. He’s Jewish, but he’s in a church and he says grace at every meal. The house smells like his cologne.” Nicky had already sued Rhonda once, just after the divorce, over her legal rights to paternal grandparent visitation. She chewed a piece of sable. “That’s terrible, Vickeleh.” He could see the fish’s golden skin twirling around her tongue.
Victor was the first one to spot the ring on their mother’s finger—an emerald, her second-favorite gem after diamond, her birthstone. He was helping with her nails at the kitchen table, and he blew on her sepia polish, working up his courage. “Are you and Chuck getting married?”
Ethan glanced up from his Calculus. Mindy kept her head down, as usual.
“No.” Rhonda withdrew her hand, flicking it sharply. She studied the ring at arm’s length, right under Victor’s nose. It was a large square stone, well cut, with exceptional clarity and he could see that it caught the light. “We’re already married,” she said hurriedly. “So you can tell your grandmother to stop worrying about extra-marital cohabitation. Anyway, we’re renovating this crappy house your father made me buy, then we’re selling it, and we can finally move and start our new life.”
Victor swallowed. “I didn’t know we wanted a new life.”
Rhonda glanced past him, into the gold glittered hand mirror. She adjusted the edge of her eye liner. “I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up.”
Mindy held up the envelope Joel had left that morning. She pulled two ten-dollar bills from inside. These envelopes would appear, like everything with their father, like everything at Eden Park, irregularly—different amounts, different times of day, no note. Instead of handing Victor one of the bills, like usual, she pocketed both. “Want to go to the store?”
Victor swiveled in the stained orange armchair, the living room’s only real piece of furniture, besides a clunky wooden end table that Mindy used for the phone. “With you?”
“Obviously.”
They walked to the cinder-block party store at Eden Park’s far edge, past the dumpsters, behind a chain-link fence sieved with trash and leaves. Though he knew better than to ask, Victor wondered what had changed, and he was curious if this was a clue to some larger plan. Other families had plans. Gary Fein’s family even had a flowchart for what to do in case of a fire, or nuclear war, and they sometimes held practice drills. “Do you know where we’re going after the summer?” Victor asked. “To Chuck’s? Back to our house, once it’s renovated?”
Mindy shrugged. She stared ahead. “I don’t know,” she said. “Who would we even ask?”
They stalked the dingy aisles of the party store, pointing and laughing as they gathered their ration of boxes and cans: sugar cereal, toaster pizza, Chunky soup, chili-mac, frozen entrees they boiled in their plastic wrapping.
Mindy convinced an old white man in a hardhat to buy her cigarettes, menthols like Rhonda smoked, and a big Heineken.
Victor watched as she struck the black lighter. “Blow it on my face,” he said. “It reminds me of her.”
His sister exhaled. “Weirdo.”
As they trudged back to their building, Mindy drank from the beer like a bottle of pop. After a bit, she held it out, and let Victor take turns swigging from it. They competed for the loudest burp, a competition Ethan always won. He picked up a rusty umbrella stalk and hung his shopping bag from the end, like a hobo’s bindle. He added a rhythmic little kick to every-other step, like they’d done during the overture in marching band.
Mindy linked her free arm in his. She squinted at him like they shared a secret. Then she leapt into a strut, waving the nearly empty bottle like a showgirl’s cane. “Today we’re living in a shanty,” she sang. “Today we’re scrounging for a meal.”
Victor joined in, recognizing the Hoovertown song from “Annie.” “Today I’m stealing coal for fires.”
“Who knew I could steeeeeal?” Mindy howled. She thrust her arm high over her head, then brought it down hard. The bottle smashed on the cratered asphalt. Shards of glass flew past Victor’s face. A green mosaic chunk, held together by the label, landed at his feet, roiling in foam.
“Yeahhhh,” he sang, like a chorus, doing jazz hands.
“Yeah!” she joined in harmony.
In the apartment, Mindy cranked up the air-conditioning, and turned up the television. She pointed to the banner that crested the highway sides of the complex--A/C and Cable TV Included. “Might as well take advantage.”
They took out the garbage. They brought in the mail. They sat on their foam pads, on the floor, and watched TV. They ate lunch. They ate dinner. One evening, after they did their cheerleading and marching band practices, after showers, Mindy said, “It’s hot. We should be swimming.”
The next day, at the party store, they gathered up provisions—baby oil, Faygo, Doritos. They found one extra towel in the back of a closet, wrapped around Ethan’s old science kit test tubes. They stuffed it all in the overnight bag in which Mindy had carted her possessions to Eden Park, back when summer started. Mindy stared at the quilted pink bag as she zipped it. “Better than your garbage bags,” she said.
“You read my mind, again,” Victor said.
“We’re from Transylvania, on your Bubby’s side,” Mindy said in their mother’s rasp. “You’re a quarter vampire.” She put on a bikini and a baseball hat. She looked like a college student. He put on a t-shirt over his speedo. He looked like a lost little boy.
The pool became part of their ritual. They created aquarobic routines they performed together. They practiced flips and slams they’d seen on pro-wrestling, though Mindy never let him be the bad guy. They danced together in the shallow end to songs they sang, and if they forgot the lyrics, they just used each other’s names, over and over. Mindy held his hand.
Men tanning alone scowled, or sometimes stared. Dads tried to abandon young children in their care. Once, they recognized a kid from school, but they looked away. Victor stared the banner atop the closest building. On it, kids were horsing around in groups, running together like they were free, like they’d finally been liberated from the reins of family life. But Victor knew they weren’t free. They were quarantined.
Victor tried to teach himself to draw from life: a lacy weed, a dead squirrel. Mindy talked on the phone with the Jens, conversations that always came in pairs, the sequence dependent on the trio’s slippery alliances. Victor was expected not to listen in, yet Mindy would often ask him later to be her foil, to take her side in the braided conflicts.
They practiced their marching and cheering, sometimes twice a day. But as the summer wore on their most consistent mission became trying to call Rhonda. Mindy had started this scheme alone, without telling him. But he caught her dialing one morning, crouched over the phone in Joel’s room, and she confessed immediately. “You can help,” she said.
They called her three different lines every day, the two numbers they knew at their house and the one at Chuck’s rental. They randomized the timing, keeping track in a graph pad they’d found in the bedside table, which used to be Ethan’s bedside table. Then they tried every 474 phone number, their prefix, in sequence, hoping to happen on the private line Rhonda had had installed in The Cave. At the back of the notebook, they kept a list of things they wanted to ask her. When can I get my cheerleading outfit? When can I get my music and summer reading? Why did you leave us here? Why did you pick him over us? On the endpaper, Victor wrote an oath with Mindy’s purple calligraphy marker. We hereby pledge to always side together, against her. Forever. They each signed it with a prick of their own blood. “You should always write calligraphy.” Mindy squinted. “I can actually read this.”
In the heat of the afternoon, with the a/c blasting, they’d drag over the two least ripped vinyl dinette chairs and play round after round of car poker. “One pair,” they’d say, pointing at a set of brown cars on the highway interchange. “Three-of-a-kind. Full house.” They kept score on an accordion stack of blank computer paper Ethan had made them promise not to touch. Neither of them ever really pulled ahead. They stared at the sunlight, wishing there were curtains. They stared at the phone, willing it to ring. They stared at the cars, circling on the interchanges.
They slept in an L in the corner next to the air conditioning vent. The carpet smelled like gravy, but it was the darkest spot, the only place they could sleep past sunrise. They would talk until they fell asleep, telling stories of the days they’d just lived, or of moments they remembered from childhood, trying to find the differences in their perspectives. They talked about bad things they had done or bad things that had happened to them, which were often the same. Victor told her about Gary Fein, and what they’d done. Mindy told him about their Uncle David, and what he’d done. “It must be my fault,” Mindy said. “Mom always said, people get what they deserve.” Victor said maybe their uncle had been the one to get what he deserved, burning up in a car wreck. They talked and talked, because if they were quiet, they’d hear voices through the duct. Not words, just squabbling, other kids and dads.
They would leave the TV on all night to drown out this noise, falling asleep to the chords of late-night monster movie organ music, or the chords of late-night hippie movie organ music. “The Star Spangled Banner” would sometimes startle them awake, or a test pattern tone and blast of static. The fact that the TV was off when they woke up was the only evidence that Joel had come home, the envelopes the only evidence that he’d left again.
They started exploring Eden Park. They went in every building. They rode every elevator to every floor, walked the length of every hallway, visited every scalding roof and musty basement, tested the combination locks of every storage pen, every mailbox. Weirdly, everywhere they went in the complex, there was always some dad leaving that spot with something: a ball that had been kicked onto the roof, an inflatable floaty retrieved from deep storage, a book dropped in the hall, a sack of groceries carted in from the parking lot. “We should get a dad,” Victor joked once, as they walked back from the party store.
“We need to get out,” Mindy said, passing Victor her beer for a swig.
The surrounding highways, with their snarl of ramps and barrier walls, formed ramparts around the complex. But as they began walking further, they discovered narrow Service Roads, and freeway Extensions, and stunted sidewalks that sluiced around the edges. They followed each one as far as they could, but every route turned out to be a path to nowhere, dead-ending in an underpass, a pile of rubble, a scatter of railroad ties. Success equals effort over time, Victor had read in his high school handbook. The equation made sense, except if time was infinite.
Then, one afternoon, they pressed around the edge of a cinderblock wall, and through a hedge, and discovered a neighborhood, one street long. A foamy creek gurgled along the cratered dirt road. Tangled oaks shaded the centerline, their fallen limbs littered the ditch. The houses looked like shacks, their exterior walls covered in shaggy plywood or rinds of tarpaper, their wavy roofs tiled with mismatched shingles. Rusty cars sat on blocks in the yards. Cardboard signs hung by mailboxes, advertising food for sale, haircuts. “Is this the Inner City?” Mindy asked.
If they cut through the backyard of the last house on the left, and crawled through a loose fence board, they emerged by the dumpster behind Qwik Pik. A black iron table was chained to a No Parking sign out front. They used Victor’s backpack to sweep away cigarette butts and splayed takeout bins. They ate a snack before the walk home, sour mini-pizzas they’d packed in foil, a roll of Sprees that trailed dye down their throats. Often, Mindy would smoke afterward. “A cigarette is the best dessert,” she’d say, another of their mother’s lines, though Rhonda smoked all the time. They made tiny fires of their debris. “Burn the evidence,” Victor would say, as the Styrofoam bubbled black and gooey, like a marshmallow.
Men, always men, slunk up in ratty trucks and asked if they were okay, if they wanted a ride. Men, always men, stumbled up, and blundered into the back entrance of the store. They came out clutching the necks of paper bags, and hovered close, waiting for Victor and Mindy to leave before slumping into their seat, sometimes not waiting. Once, Mindy asked one of these men to buy her some vodka, flicking her hair and delivering a smile Victor had never seen before. The man took her money, and returned gripping a small, flat bottle, but when she reached out to take it, he wouldn’t let go. He stroked her arm, up and down, his grey eyes narrowed, like a goat. She looked frozen, as if by a ray.
After the second session of Computer Camp had started, they received a letter from Ethan. It was four pages long, dot-matrix printed. He listed his daily schedule, with the hours written in military time, 12:30-13:30: Lunch; 13:30-17:00: Advanced Programming. He included an alphabetical grid of all the kids on his hall, last names first, as well as their countries of origin. He typed up a BASIC program that, he said, “would perform an astonishing trick, if either of you were a computer.” He told them that the U of M fight song was called Hail to the Victor, “something we’ll never do—ha ha.” Then, in one run-on paragraph, he described three friends he called “The Phreaks” with whom he’d made computerized calls, using the dorm payphones, a slide whistle, and a homemade cradle modem of their design. “We called the Emperor of Japan at home, and he answered. Hiro recognized his voice from TV. We made Chuck’s home phone call Hawaii for ten hours. Won’t he be surprised when he gets the long-distance bill? Don’t tell mom,” he wrote, as if they could.
Finally, at the end, he wrote that he’d found the number for Rhonda’s secret phone line. “We accessed it in the Michigan Bell computers.” He had written the number in red pen, with a caret, hovering above the typewritten line. “Call AYOR,” he’d written. Then, in parentheses, “(At Your Own Risk.)”
The walk to the house took longer than they expected. On the atlas they’d found in Joel’s closet, it looked like a straight shot, and when they’d measured it with a thread from Mindy’s cutoffs, it seemed less than three miles. “I can march a mile in twenty minutes, in my spats,” Victor said. “It can’t take more than an hour.”
They plotted the trip carefully, waiting for the right weather, selecting the proper supplies. But more than two hours into their adventure, they hadn’t even crossed Inkster. Victor checked the scrolling timer on his digital watch. Mindy itched a welt on the back of her thigh and looked over his shoulder at the readout. “Maybe we should have marched,” she said.
They had started out in silence, following their usual trail through the Inner City. They walked behind the Pin-Am bowling alley. They walked behind the Twist King custard stand. They walked past the roll-up door behind the dry cleaner, where Victor spotted a laminated sign. “NO SMOKING. NO LAZY.”
They entered a field of cattails and scraggly birches. The path forked, then forked again to run parallel to the road. Victor knew from camp that deer could make trails, but deer trails meandered into random snarls, where the animals slept and hid. These trails were direct, the work of humans, of people who didn’t want to be seen, or who other people didn’t want to see.
To pass the time, Mindy filled Victor in on an argument she was having with the Jens, which he already knew of from overhearing her calls. The Jens both liked the same football player, Jacob Rosen, but the boy liked Mindy.
“They’re just jealous because you’re prettier and funnier,” Victor said. “No wonder the cutest boy on the team likes you.”
Mindy stared, both of them noting what he’d revealed. “This has been the worst summer ever, right?”
Victor shrugged. “…I guess.”
They finally entered a stretch of dark woods. Victor thought he recognized it, a dense piney plot that separated their old elementary schoolyard from the grounds of an orphanage. They used to have to hike here every Earth Day to spot robins and trillium. He looked around for sassafras leaves, mitten-shaped like the state of Michigan. “I think we’re in St. Joseph’s Forest.”
Mindy glanced around without moving her head.
He muddled the leaves in his palm, and inhaled their sappy reek, like spilled root-beer. “Can you tell me,” he asked, finally. “What she said to you?”
Since receiving Ethan’s letter, they’d taken turns calling Rhonda’s private line, but Mindy had dialed when they’d finally gotten through. His sister’s temper could be searing with her friends, or him. But this conversation had been eerily one-sided. Mindy asked their questions as if reading instructions from a TV dinner. When are we coming home? When are we going to see you? When can I get my cheerleading uniform? When can Victor get his music and books? He hadn’t been able to hear the replies, but he could tell from Mindy’s expression that they weren’t the answers they’d hoped for.
“I’ll tell you.” Mindy picked at the fringe on her shorts. “But then I don’t want to talk about it ever again. Promise?”
Victor reached for the gold chai he wore on a chain under his t-shirt, a bar mitzvah gift from Grandma Nicky. But it was at the house, too. He kissed his finger and pointed at the sky. “I promise.”
“She said she couldn’t see us. She said we should stay with dad. She said that it’s better for her, for her and Chuck, if things remain how they are. She said that she’s been a mother and a father to us for years, that it’s Joel’s turn. She said she’d have someone bring over our things when it’s convenient. She said that we’re old enough to take care of ourselves, that she needed to take care of herself. She said, ‘I’m done being a mom.’ Like it’s something you can decide to not be. Like, I was a ballerina for Halloween, but I’m not a ballerina in real life. I’m not wearing my ballerina costume anymore. She said, ‘Don’t call me Mom.’ She said, ‘Don’t call me.’” Mindy ignored a spider that dangled close to her cheek, then swatted it away. “She said, ‘How’d you get this number?’”
The house was locked, and the locks had been changed. Even the sliding glass doors in back were barred, clean wooden dowels wedged in their tracks. Victor peered through the open curtains at the Pit, their sunken living room. He felt a voyeuristic rush, like staring into a diorama of naked Indians at the Detroit Historical Society. When he turned back around, Mindy was no longer next to him. She had climbed on top of the air-conditioning compressor. Its grinding metal blades and hot breath had terrified him as a boy. Even motionless, it looked like the maw of a giant carnivorous robot. His sister lifted a leg. “Boost me up.”
“Onto the roof?”
“If I can sneak out, I can sneak in.”
Victor stood in the pea gravel, a moat of lava in their childhood games. He cupped his hands and lifted, like he was the thrower in a cheerleading pyramid. Mindy scrambled up the shingles. “Go, Bug. Go!” he called. It had been his nickname first, but their parents eventually used it for them both, like they were from the same hive, or infestation. Mindy didn’t look back.
Victor turned and stared at the yard. The previous summer, he’d spent hours back there alone one evening at dusk, throwing a lawn dart high into the air, then closing his eyes and twirling in circles, waiting for it to land. Its heavy metal tip had pounded into the ground again and again, sometimes far away, sometimes very close. Once its finned tail had struck his shoulder, like a slap. Once, the nib grazed his thigh. It bled lightly and gave him an erection.
“Victor!” Mindy was calling to him from the kitchen’s open slider. “Victor!! Were you in a trance?” She offered a hand. Rhonda had never had the back steps installed. “It was like the time Ethan elbowed you in the stomach and you had those convulsions.”
“I think I was praying.”
The house smelled crusty, like old leaves, and it was clammy without the air conditioning. But it wasn’t cleared out or being renovated, like their mother claimed. It was just a mess. A yellowed canister of matzo meal spilled out of the empty pantry. The kitchen table was turned on its edge like a gutted animal, two of its metal legs detached. The smoked plastic chandelier was balanced on the floor, still plugged into the wall and trailing its golden chain. It looked freakishly large, like a traffic light they’d seen on the sidewalk after a tornado.
“It’s even more depressing upstairs,” Mindy said. “But you don’t need to go up there. I found your things.” She gestured at the kitchen counter, at two padded envelopes, both torn open recklessly, revealing their grey felty lining. “I didn’t find my uniform, though. Can you help me look?”
Victor wanted to stay with his sister. But he also wanted privacy, to search his room. He removed the tiny sheet music folios from the flimsy cardboard—“Crazy Train,” “Ebony and Ivory”—as well as his copy of Lord of the Flies. A boy, a blood red watercolor splotch of a boy rocked forward on the cover, his scrawny arms curled around his head. “Maybe we should split up?”
“I’ll start in the basement.” Mindy fanned herself. “It better be cooler down there.”
He took the stairs one at a time, and splashed cold water on his face in the bathroom. His door was closed, but, inside, his room had been ransacked. Everything was gone. The chai and silver ID bracelet, the opal chip earrings he’d taken from Rhonda’s old jewelry samples, the $60 in cash hidden behind his books, saved for years toward one day buying something big, something he hadn’t even thought of yet. His school clothes lay tangled on the closet floor, some still on their hangers. His dresser drawers lolled out of their tracks like taunting tongues. And his stash of magazines—old Tiger Beats he’d taken from Mindy, Playgirls and Vivas lifted from Rhonda’s bedside table—had been removed from under his mattress, and stacked on his pillow.
Victor seared with shame, thinking that his sister must have seen all of this. Maybe she’d known about it before. He’d certainly snooped through every room in the house. He’d read her diaries, letters from her crush at summer camp, scribblings about Jacob Rosen in old notepads. He’d read his mother’s high school yearbook inscriptions, and the explicit love notes from Chuck in her nightstand. He’d even found Ethan’s rhyming poems to a girl from computer camp.
He wasn’t sure what he should do with the magazines. Should he hide them again, in a better place? Bring them back to Eden Park? Or just throw them out the window, and let all the glistening dicks litter the yard like downed branches, like flagpoles for a country without a flag? He gathered them up, planning to lay them out like tiles on his mother’s bed. But as he walked into the hall, he saw that the Cave’s door was padlocked. He threw the magazines down. Some of them landed open, and he jerked off over them, finishing quickly and spilling on the carpet. He stuffed his pillowcase with three shirts, his journal, and a pair of mix tapes he’d recorded off WLBS late at night, though he had nothing to play them on. When he glanced into his sister’s room on his way downstairs, he noticed that she had made her bed.
Mindy was sitting on the kitchen counter. A bottle of Canadian Club and a canister of powdered lemonade mix were next to her, and she was drinking from a tall glass, cloudy ice clinking. A warped cardboard box rested in her lap. Champion it said across the top. She glanced at his pillowcase. “You went upstairs?”
He shuffled the sack. “We really are hobos now.” He nodded at her box. “You found it?”
“The basement must have flooded again. It’s all mildewed,” she said. “I’ll never get the smell out.” She tapped the whisky bottle. “I should probably just douse it in this, and light a match.”
“Bananas flambé,” he said. Mindy hated bananas. It was their mother’s, and Uncle David’s, favorite dessert.
She lifted the glass again. “Jen G taught me how to make this. You can barely taste the alcohol. There’s a whole case of booze down there from Ethan’s bar mitzvah. No vodka, though. Nothing she likes.”
Victor dropped his bag and hopped onto the counter. His mother’s cloisonné lighter fell into the nest of lipsticked butts in her giant ashtray, alongside an ornate glass pipe, patched in char. A few months earlier, after an argument with Chuck about Jesus, he and Ethan had sat right here and drank microwaved mugs of Kahlua and evaporated milk, using a bottle his brother had liberated from the same basement stash. Apparently, Ethan had been sneaking drinks for a year. Victor confessed this to Mindy. “It tasted like mocha.”
“Why didn’t you invite me?”
“You weren’t really talking to me then,” he said. He took a deep sip from her glass. The drink was sour and sweet, and burned his throat. He rolled his stinging lips together. “At least we both found what we were looking for.”
Mindy nodded. “Yeah.” She finished, the splintered ice rattling like rhinestones. “I saw the family photos, Victor. Out in the garage,” she said, pressing her lips together. “Ethan’s Bar Mitzvah album, your Bar Mitzvah album. Our baby books. The Halloween photos. They’re all out there.” She slid off the counter unsteadily, forgetting about the box. Its contents spilled onto the floor. The uniform was rank, freckled with greyish mold on the arms and torso, and powdering the white satin H. But Mindy stooped over it and folded it, like a toddler’s blanket, placing it back inside and sealing the soft cardboard. “They’re in the garbage.” She was crying. “We’re in the trash.”
She remained crouched down, but held out a hand. He was unsure if she wanted to pull him down, or for him to help her up. But he was overcome by the urge to avail her.
“Come on,” he said. He grabbed the liquor bottle and the lighter, flicking its flame to the highest setting. He knelt on the floor so his face nearly touched hers, wrathful, bathed in fire. “We’ll take care of it. All of it,” he said. “Come on,” he said. “Show me.”