“Oh, fuck off, Micah. I just spent the last five years thinking you were dead. And here you are, playing king in a tree house. You don’t get to relax.”
Her brother looked skyward, as if a response might be written in the tree branches above. “You make a valid point,” he said, and handed her one of the cups.
She took the cup, but she didn’t drink. Just one sip wouldn’t hurt the baby, would it?
“A bouquet of lighter fluid and piss,” Micah said, and downed his.
She put the cup to her nose. Being drunk actually sounded wonderful, and the sharpness of the liquor was as pleasing as it was revolting. The burn traveled through her nostrils and into her throat.
But she couldn’t.
“I’d rather not,” she said.
“Seriously?” he asked. “You? Turn down a drink?” But he was already putting down his empty cup and taking hers. Between his fingers, the edge of cup folded into a triangle, threatening to spill its contents. Micah brought it quickly to his lips.
“I have so many questions,” she said.
“Ask them, then,” he said. “But up here, there’s no need to be a mouthpiece.”
“‘A mouthpiece’? You mean Cal’s?” She leaned back. “Don’t be typical, Micah.”
The phrase was out before she could even think about it. Hilda used to say it to him when he’d refused to eat dinner with them or put on shoes to go to the market. Or when he’d say something witty and cruel, his mouth curved mean and smug.
“I want to know just as much as my husband does,” Frida continued. “Why wouldn’t I? It’s only natural.”
“I can’t believe you just said ‘Don’t be typical’ to me.”
“Now you know how it feels to see a ghost.” She smiled. “Brings you back, doesn’t it?”
He looked bashful for the first time since she’d arrived.
She picked up his empty cup and swiped at its bottom with her index finger, then brought her finger to her mouth. The liquor tasted sour as vomit.
“Ugh,” she said. “You must be really desperate to drink this.”
“Maybe,” he replied. “You know how it is, not having all the things we used to have.”
“Tell me about it!”
Cal never wanted to gripe about what they were missing from the old life. He said talking only made the loss more palpable, the absence more glaring. He said it was a form of self-punishment.
Micah seemed to agree with Cal, because he didn’t go on. Instead, he took off his hat and ran his hands through his scraggly hair. Frida was glad she couldn’t see the top of his head, that bare spot. Micah looked more like her with his hair long, and she realized she was proud of this. It would help with the Vote.
“I want to know why you did it,” Frida said.
Micah raised an eyebrow.
“Stop with that phony face,” she said. “Tell me.”
He sighed. “Look at it this way: no one’s looking for me, are they? The police, Homeland Security, they were idiots. Or, I don’t know, maybe they were just underfunded. They got a piece of me, tested my blood. They had a piece of clothing my poor family could identify. They had enough to close the case, and they did.”
“‘My poor family.’ Listen to you. There have to be easier ways to disappear.”
“I was the head of the Group by then. One of them, anyway. You had to have known.”
Did she? She supposed she should have. “So what?” she said.
“What I did, or what I pretended to do, proved we were serious. Not only to you and everyone outside, but to our own members, the little shits who’d started skulking around only because they’d heard we might feed them.” He shook his head and put his hat back on. “My stunt proved we were in control. For the first time, people were scared of us, really scared of us. Until that day, no one important cared about what happened outside the Communities.”
“I hate to say it,” Frida said, “but they still don’t care. But maybe you knew that all along, and that’s why you didn’t actually commit suicide. Maybe you were too chickenshit to do it for real.”
He smiled. “That’s beside the point, don’t you see? My stunt, whether real or not, freaked out the Communities, and it got us new members. Good ones. People saw we could be powerful.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“Within a month we’d expanded our encampment by a mile.”
“But what about the guy who really did blow himself up? He died anonymously for your…cause? Just like that?”
“Better that than to die pathetically, ignobly.” He looked at her. “Isn’t that how Hilda put it? I read the websites. I read what she thought of me and what I’d done.”
Frida felt the old anger feathering in her chest. “You know she came to terms with it. They both did. They had to.”
“I suppose,” Micah said.
They were silent. Micah’s words filled Frida’s head—my poor family. That was all they were to him. Three people he could dupe.
“Frida?”
“How are they? Do you hear from them?”
“Ah,” he said, grinning. “See? That’s what you really want to know.”