“Next time, give a holler,” he said to Katie. “We can snip ’em down first. That way you don’t lose the whole tree. Don’t take any houses with you either.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. She was not herself, heat glazing her, making her feel invincible. “How could you ever be sure you got them all?”
He nodded, catching one last ember with a stray sluice of water left in the hose.
“When they cool down,” Mr. Watts said, “I’ll take them off your hands.”
She looked at him quizzically.
“Fish bait,” he said, winking at her. “The cycle of life.”
Together, they watched all of them burn, like singed cotton candy.
Later, Katie would sneak back into the yard, knees to dirt, palms on ground, until she found the last bits of gummy Lycra, a few crystals seared into the flattened grass.
Chapter Fifteen
It was nearly ten o’clock, and she’d let Drew stay up so long, his eyes stung to tears from too much TV, and his words were beginning to break apart and float away.
He kept finding shows that seemed to come from some special planet of Drew, creepy reruns of In Search Of …, a documentary about hairless, blue-eyed, and hunchbacked creatures killing livestock in Texas, another about the mysterious red rain of Sri Lanka. They all interested him and made him wonder about things, his speckled face and the softness of his boy tummy as he stretched across the cushions.
She could sit there and watch him, and not think of anything else. Not think about leotards or pixie nymphets or dark-eyed men and the lies they tell you or the silver paint in the garage, which shimmered every time she shut her eyes and which meant nothing, couldn’t mean anything. Instead, listening, her entire body flooded with love for Drew, his voice creaking forth question after question, each one a balm to her.
“Mom,” he said, his Hardy Boys book open on his lap, “it says here Blackbeard used to stick matches in his beard to light up his evil eyes.”
“That sounds scary,” she said. “That sounds like a scary book.”
Eventually, he started drifting off, curled like a glowworm in his neon-green pajamas on the sofa beside her, and she half coaxed, half carried him to bed.
Looking into those nearly lidded eyes, the gleam of his pupil trying to stay awake, to not miss anything, she found herself locked in something deep with him.
Like he held something she needed.
Don’t fall asleep, Drew. Please.
She caught herself thinking it, maybe saying it out loud, her fingers to her own lips.
Embarrassed, she shook it off, rising from his bedside and nearly bounding to the bedroom door. Leaving him alone.
The eleven o’clock news was beginning, its familiar pulsing music.
Behind it, she heard the groan of the garage door. They almost always left it open, but she’d closed it so she would know when he returned. And so he would know she knew.
Then, the loud punch and scatter of glass breaking in the backyard.
Then the scrape of metal on concrete.
Hand smacking the screen door open, the thickening June air climbing into her mouth, Katie called out, “Who’s there?”
He was slouched in the most ramshackle of their aluminum chairs, a half-hollowed pint of Jack Daniel’s in his hand, a beer bottle broken at his feet, and the back of his neck ruddy from a day spent behind a car windshield, kidnapping her daughter and driving her across the state with another woman.
His face shimmered forth in the dark, tanner than the day before, the grand slope of eyes sorrowful. Handsome as ever, maybe more. So much so he took her breath away. And she felt sick from it.
“Eric.”
“I’m gone a few hours and you set the backyard on fire?” he said, not looking at her, his feet kicking at the ashes.
“Where’s Devon?” she demanded. “Where is she, Eric?”
When he turned, head bobbing slightly, she could see how drunk he was. Like she hadn’t seen him in years. Like he’d sometimes been when Devon was a baby and he was still rollicking with coworkers at the end of his long days, his after hours spent with elbows stuck to place mats at their local, a place called Huddles where the bartenders wore green vinyl aprons and drank while they poured, and Eric staying until last call, finally stumbling home at three a.m., shoes sticky and hair matted, and once, a dart caught in his finger, he’d driven home with blood soaking through the cuff of his work shirt and sorrys, sorrys, sorrys forever.
“Where’s Devon?” she repeated, standing in front him, the caramel smell of the whiskey thick upon her. “Where is she?”
“At Gwen’s.”
“Why is she still there? Goddamn it, Eric, you lied—”
“So you know,” he said. “Your message. You know everything.”
She looked at him, a breeze lifting the smell of the ash, the waving torch.
He looked at her, eyes white as an animal’s in the woods.