“I—” I was still squinting against the brightness of morning. The rusted metal groaned on my father’s weather vane, and Mom spared an irritated glare for the rooster outline that spun atop the post of cardinal directions on our roof.
In the events of last night I’d completely forgotten about my car. I cast around for a lie, a good lie, a convincing one. “I … hit a deer, Mom.” There, that was believable. There were deer everywhere in Hollow Pines. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I knew I probably should have felt worse about that fib than I did.
Mom appeared as though she’d been put together from a collection of chicken bones this morning, and I wondered if the light was too bright for her, too. Her teeth were still stained grape juice purple from her favorite brand of Merlot. I’d tried a sip once. It’d tasted like sweet vinegar and made my breath smell like rubbing alcohol.
“I swear, for how smart you are…” She didn’t finish her sentence. Instead, she pinched her nose so that I didn’t know if she was about to sneeze or yell at me. All I knew was that on mornings after she drank, she was in a rotten mood. Lucky me. “Who’s going to pay for this, Tor? The tooth fairy?” At that, I felt a surge of righteous indignation. When it came to how parents were supposed to act, I wasn’t the resident expert, but still, wasn’t my mother supposed to thank God I was okay or something? Since my father died, she was always thanking God for everything else. “Can Bert still drive?” she asked instead.
And I thought about the two of us and how different we’d become from each other. Looking back, I found it nearly impossible to remember whether we’d started this way before my dad’s death or whether it was his passing that had turned us both into creatures with our own thirsty addictions—hers to forget, mine to know more.
Seconds felt sticky and slow as I waited for them to tick by, and I succumbed to the familiar, twitchy-fingered jitteriness of impatience I got when my mom took too long to understand something or forgot to set the oven timer. “It’s only the windshield and maybe the fender,” I said.
Goose bumps erupted on my arms as the weather vane let out another creaky howl.
“This is going to cost us your dad’s Social Security check, you know that?” Her words rubbed at my nerves. Every time she mentioned my father, it was as if she put a special tone around it just to show that she thought it was his fault for dying. She glanced up at the roof again. “And haven’t I talked to you about fixing that thing?” My arms prickled again.
I hated that. Mom didn’t get anything. She didn’t get why Dad chased storms and she didn’t get science and she didn’t get me. But that was all going to change now that my first big discovery was already here, just beneath our feet.
Eureka.
EIGHT
Conclusion: First human subject—reanimation a success! Submersion in conductor; higher voltage capacity; placement of incised wires on cranium and trunk stimulated all vital organs; possible injury to the hippocampus or reset resulting from localized charge to that area of the brain causing loss of memory; signs of electrocution present on torso.
*
I watched my mom’s beat-up station wagon trundle out of the drive, leaving muddy tracks in the bogged-down dirt, when I noticed something. Or at least I thought I had noticed something. The soles of my shoes squelched onto the unpaved road as I moved closer to study the thing that I believed I’d seen—tire marks. Three sets of fresh tire marks to be exact.
The stench of rain tilled up notes of cow manure. Brown sludge oozed up the sides of my sneakers as I stepped closer, dodging the puddles left over from the night’s storm. First, there was a set of tracks leading straight from the fence opening to where my car was now parked. I could see the small curve that my car took before stopping, and as I traced the path with my eyes, I remembered sitting behind the steering wheel with Owen beside me. Our argument. The enormity of what followed.
I bent down and studied the pattern, touching my finger to the imprints that were left over like fossils in the damp earth. Next, I sidestepped over to where Mom’s car had been parked, a stone’s throw to the right of my driver’s side door. Four craters were left where her wheels had sunk into the mud during the rains. I’d watched her leave and could now retrace the path. The tire marks bowed out from my own before converging again at the fence. I could recognize her tires by the three lines, crossed through by horizontal markings that looked like sketches of barbed wire.