on, saying, “No, Mom, jeez, no. Dodger’s not my type. I mean, she’s a girl, and she’s smart, and she has boobs, so I guess technically she is my type, but she’s not, because I think she’s my sister. I mean, functionally, I know she’s my sister, but I’m talking about biologically. When you adopted me, did the agency say anything about a second child? Was I a twin?”
“Go to your room,” says his father, in a soft voice.
“What?” Roger turns to look at him quizzically. “Dad, I don’t—”
“Go to your room,” his father repeats, and this time, the stresses on his words are impossible to ignore. Colin Middleton is terrified. More than that: there’s a layer of resignation to his terror, like this is the moment he’s been waiting for since the day they brought Roger home. This was, somehow, the inevitable outcome.
Roger rises slowly, waiting for his mother to say something, waiting for one of them to start making sense. Neither of them moves. He pushes back his chair, steps away from the table, and climbs the stairs, all while waiting for them to say something.
Neither of them speaks.
The stairs haven’t seemed this long since he was a child, being sent to his room for one infraction of the rules or another. This time, he knows, there won’t be a book conveniently hidden under his pillow; his mother won’t be coming by with cocoa or chocolate milk to tell him that all boys are rambunctious sometimes, they understand, they always understand, but if he could just try to be a little quieter, they would appreciate it so, so much. A little neater. A little tidier. Read your book, Roger; finish your homework.
This is the first time it’s occurred to him that perhaps their reactions to his childhood misbehavior were unusual. Did other kids get antique dictionaries and glossaries of dead languages from their fathers when they were bad? Did they find themselves rewarded with the thing they loved most when they broke a plate or said a swear word? He always assumed they did, and so he never talked to anyone else about it. Maybe he should have.
Something is very wrong. Something that started with the silence his parents made between them when he mentioned his adoption.
Roger closes his bedroom door, walks to the bed, and sits. He’ll explore the treasure trove in his closet later; right now, he needs reassurance that he didn’t somehow violate some essential agreement between adopted child and adoptive parents. Closing his eyes, he reaches into the dark behind them, and says, almost meekly, “Dodge? You there?”
“Roger!” There’s a blink, and the world is cast in startling color. Dodger’s in the backyard of her parents’ house in Palo Alto, sitting near the high, whitewashed fence between grass and gully. They must have rebuilt the fence after her . . . accident, making it higher, closing the gap she used to wiggle through. He recognizes the birdbath, and the climbing roses Heather Cheswich used to spend so much time tending. He always liked it when Dodger sat on the porch and looked at her mother’s roses, which had so many more colors than the ones in Boston.
(He didn’t know much about colorblindness back then, or that he couldn’t see the delicacies of shade in the roses in his own neighborhood; he just knew California was supersaturated, more brightly colored than any real place could possibly be, colored like a fairy tale, colored like the Up-and-Under.)
“Shouldn’t you be downstairs eating pie?” Dodger is stretched out on a plastic beach chair, dragged to the side of the backyard where her father—and the barbecue—aren’t. He can’t feel through her skin, but he knows the sun will be warm, and the air will be gentle, and he’s never missed California like he does right now. He never knew Cambridge could be so cold.
“Shit’s weird here,” he says—understatement of the night—and forces himself to smile, so she’ll hear it in his voice. He doesn’t want her to worry. “How’s your Thanksgiving going?”
“Oh, gangbusters. Mom made cranberry pie, which set itself on fire somehow, and Erin made roast root vegetables with garlic and rosemary, which didn’t set itself on fire, and Dad set the turkey on fire twice. He’s about to start barbecuing the corn, and . . . Roger? What’s wrong?”
Sometimes he forgets how sensitive their connection is to sound. He hadn’t even considered that his sharply indrawn breath might transmit, or that she might be able to tell