“I’d appreciate it if you could be serious,” Abby said.
“Thanks, Abby,” said Ed. “I mean it, James. We live in a world now where people see things all the time, all kinds of things, and they think nothing ever leaves a mark on them, but—”
“I’m fine,” said James.
Ed looked at his son, who had fixed his eyes on the floor between his feet. “All right,” he said gently. “Just checking in.”
He looked over at Emily, whose face was sad.
“I wish we hadn’t watched it down in the darkroom,” she said. It was her special place in the world. “It will feel different for a while. But I’m all right. I’m not the one who’s hurt.”
“I’m real glad you guys all feel great,” Abby said, exasperated. “Can we talk about those poor people now?”
“We’ll rescue them, right, Abs?” said James. His recovery was progressing rapidly. “We’ll just head out to the driveway, maybe follow their scent out into the cornfields.”
“You shut up,” said his sister. “That stuff was fucked up. She hit that boy hard enough to leave a bruise on his face. You could see his cheek turning red.” Her voice caught in her throat when she described it; she hadn’t been able to look away.
Ed felt so proud of his daughter; someday she’d stop seeking the high ground all the time, and she’d be happier for it, but it would mean that the child he’d known so long ago was finally gone forever. It gave him such joy to see her putting that moment off for as long as she could.
“Easy, Ab,” he said. She nodded. “There’s nothing we can do right now. Let’s eat something, and maybe try not to think too hard about it just now, and then we’ll think a little more about it tomorrow morning.”
The children slept hard; it had been a very long day. The Pratts had some decaf in the kitchen, and then they, too, turned in for the night. Those shaky visions from the basement weren’t strong enough to crowd out the pleasure of having everybody under the same roof for the first time in well over a year. Was it two years? Retirement time was a new and disorienting rhythm.
“It’s great to see the kids, anyway,” Emily said, nuzzling Ed’s shoulder in the dark.
“I miss them,” said Ed, whispering as if to guard a secret from temperatures in which it wouldn’t survive, from the threat of all that open air.
5
James was at the tiny drop-leaf table in the kitchen the next morning—“You have a breakfast nook!” Abby’d squealed when she spotted it yesterday, her mother trying not to beam with satisfaction—scowling at his open laptop, muttering incredulously to himself as he scrutinized the upper right corner of the screen. “You have to be kidding,” he was saying just as his mother came in.
“You be nice to your parents,” she said. “There’s Internet on the computer upstairs.”
He blinked at her. “Mom, you are the last people in the country who have to plug into the wall to get online.”
“Your parents are older than you are,” she said, lifting her eyebrows pointedly. “You are the last son in the country to come to this conclusion. We’re even.”
He rose from his chair, pulled his phone from his pocket, and held it up, screen side out. “Half a bar!” he said. “I can’t do anything on half a bar! The Vatican is more wired than this place!”
She laughed. “We’ll have a wireless router installed when we can, dear,” she said. But James, pacing past the kitchen door, had seen his signal suddenly jump, and was hurriedly typing search terms into Safari. There is nothing wrong with the upstairs computer, Emily was thinking defensively as her son’s attention disappeared into the palm-sized glow. The upstairs computer was a Gateway. It had come in a big box with adorable cow spots on the sides.
“He’s twenty minutes away,” said James, quietly but excitedly, not looking up, his grip tightening around the phone in his hand. Emily leaned over her son and looked down; a blue dot throbbed atop a highway map. “He’s literally twenty minutes away.”
“Who is?” said Emily.
“Jeremy Heldt,” he said, in a low tone like a Hollywood priest lapsing into church Latin.
*