It was raining when I woke up. I could hear it drumming steadily against the window glass. I luxuriated in it for a moment. There was nothing more satisfying in the world than to lie in a tangle of warm blankets and hide from a wet and dreary morning. I turned over on my side, moving my hand to tuck it under the pillow, when I realized something. There was no pillow, there were no blankets, and the rain wasn’t spattering on the window of my condo. It was hitting the roof of the car, and it was hitting me.
With a groan I straightened stiffly and rubbed a hand over my wet face. Through the tops of the trees I could see a sky the cloudy white of a freshwater pearl. The sun was the same color only a shade brighter . . . milky glass held to a fire. The rain, a warm drizzle, apparently had been drifting in for some time; my shirt was nearly soaked. At least it had warmed up to a more normal temperature for southern Florida. When I turned my head to check on Michael, I saw that he’d tossed his blankets aside. He was dry as a bone, the back windows still being intact. Shuttered eyes met mine as he pillowed his head on a folded arm. “You snore,” he said in the hush. “And you like to point out the obvious. I guess that makes us even.” I ran a hand through snarled hair. The ponytail holder had disappeared sometime during the night. The first opportunity that came along I’d get it all cut off anyway. New car, new look; it was all part of the plan—the one I was making up as I went along. Disappearing wasn’t as easy a trick as my father had made it seem, not with this guy Jericho sniffing the trail. I was going to pull out all the stops. Drastically changing our appearance was the first step. Maybe I’d scrounge a dress and wig and change Michael to Michelle.
“So,” I said with a grin, “how do you feel about the color pink?”
Suspicion ripe in the narrowing of his eyes, he sat up and began to neatly fold the blankets. “In exactly the same way I think of making a bathroom of a tree.”
He was back in his “old man” phase. The child was bound to resurface at the next fast-food joint. The thought sobered me, not because I didn’t enjoy his amazement at experiencing things that I took for granted, but because it reminded me. I couldn’t begin to imagine the life that had produced such an odd dichotomy in what had once been a normal if precocious kid.
“Misha,” I started, ignoring the clammy sensation of the wet shirt sticking to my chest. “About this Jericho . . .”
“No.” The flat denial sliced knife sharp through the air as Michael doggedly doubled the second blanket.
I didn’t want to push him. I didn’t want to do anything but make things as easy as they could be for the rest of his life. Making up for the past ten years wasn’t practical or even possible, but it was an instinct difficult to fight. “Okay,” I said exhaling with wry self-deprecation, “I know I look like some kind of superhero here, but I need all the help I can get. I need to know who this Jericho is. What he’s capable of.”
He kept his eyes on the cloth in his lap, hands smoothing the material. Just as I thought he would ignore me entirely, he said without emotion, “Anything. He’s capable of anything.”
Progress, but it was a progress that made my stomach tighten into a fist. He didn’t look up as I reached over the seat and took the blanket. Shaking it back out, I used it to dry the passenger seat before inviting lightly, “Why don’t you hop on up here, kiddo? You’re giving me neck strain.”
Silently he obeyed. The rain had halted except for the occasional drop, and he was mostly dry when he sat beside me. I started the car and cranked up the fan anyway. “I’m sorry to push you on this. I wish it could come out in your own time, Michael, I do. But we’re in trouble here. I need to know anything that could help us.” Tapping a finger on the wheel, I spoke more to myself than to my brother. “Such as why didn’t they wait until we’d stopped for the night. It wouldn’t have been nearly as public as the shit they pulled yesterday.”
“They didn’t want to take a chance that someone might see what I . . . that someone might see me.” A brittle smile curved his lips. “Time is of the essence for them. Isn’t that what they say in all the movies?”
“They let you see movies?” I asked, distracted by the thought of strangely quiet children dressed in institutional white pajamas. They were lined up in chairs before a television screen with their hands clasped in their laps as they watched images of a world beyond their reach. It was a scene from a darkly sterile future, one that I hoped not to be around to see.