disintegrates under its tire as it stops in the driveway next door. A husky cop—Wally Hawkin, the cop at school who always jokingly steals Michael’s Tater Tots—gets out, running for the MacKenzies’ front door, leaping a tricycle as he pulls out his pistol—and Michael has the odd feeling, not for the first time or the last, that he has somehow stepped into a night of make-believe. Wally looks like Leon in Resident Evil 6.
“Michael?”
Mom stands in their front doorway. She clutches her sky-blue robe closed at the neck with one hand.
“It’s happening here, too,” says Ron behind her.
“What?” says Mom.
“The TV stuff, the stuff from earlier toni—”
Screams.
The door of the house across the road has been kicked open by Wally, and Michael’s skinny, sweet-faced neighbor, Harry MacKenzie, materializes on the threshold. His shirt says: WORK IS FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN’T DRINK.
Harry moans and throws himself at the cop.
Michael does not understand, but instinctively says, “Ten points for closing your eyes,” so that Patrick will not be able to see whatever is about to happen.
Wally puts a bullet, heart-center into Harry. Harry keeps moving. Ron goes, “Oh shit!” and Mom gasps, and Patrick tightens on his neck and he says, “What’s happenin’?” Harry curls his hands around the policeman’s throat, and Michael thinks, I have to go, but he is frozen by the impossible sight of blood erupting from Wally’s mouth, which will never taste a Tater Tot again.
“Get yourselves in here,” says Ron. His voice is oddly flat. “I don’t mean yesterday. I ain’t playin’.”
Mom dashes barefoot for them. “Michael,” she hisses, “what are you doing out here?”
And stops, seeing the backpack, seeing the keys in Michael’s hand.
Many times, Michael has seen Mom look hurt. He has seen her angry. Those are not things he sees now.
Honest revelation is what is on Mom’s face.
You were going to leave me.
For that moment, this is the world:
He and Mom.
Silence on the moonlit dew-cold grass.
He and Mom on their front lawn.
Which is just sixty feet square, pebbled and rooty, and its grass wilts brown every July. But as they stand together in this shocked quiet, their yard seems to hum like ordinary earth transformed by a magic circle. He remembers the day he and Mom moved in, the downpour that day, Mom so eager for their own home that she carried boxes through the rain. He remembers the birthday when he awoke to a Slip ’N Slide set up right here, where they now stand. He remembers Mom taking his photo on the first day of school, every year, with a disposable camera, while he held up fingers to show what grade he was in.
These memories twist through him in seconds.
Then a pistol shouts somewhere, as if signaling the start of a competition.
“I’m sorry,” Mom says. She comes closer. “I’m sorry, so sorry, about everything. I know it’s been . . . wrong. I know that; I do. But Michael. Michael David.” Tears in her voice. “You cannot do this.”
He remembers the first night Ron came home drunk, his pickup leaving tire marks on the yard.
Suddenly, Ron is at her side, his bald spot gleaming sickly in the houselight.
“I’m not stayin’ here while these happy assholes are shooting,” says Ron. “Get in the car.”
He is already wearing his jacket, the letterman with COACH stitched on the breast. He’s ready to go. And just like that, Ron has ruined everything.
Except Ron reaches into his pocket and finds it empty. No keys. And Mom meets Michael’s eyes with gathering fear.
“Where in the blue Hell’s my goddamn keys?”
“I left them inside,” Michael says. “The Snoopy tray. I went to Dairy Queen.”
“Why you little sack of . . .” But another gunshot snaps Ron out of it, and he goes for the house.
Mom does not go for the house.
She doesn’t move.
“Michael. Give your mother the keys. Before he gets back, baby.”
She is using her Mom Voice.
“I’ll lie for you. You’ll be safe.”
But that mask does not fit her anymore.
He does not think of Patrick.
He does not think of Mom.
He thinks of himself.
It’s not like an adventure. Adventures, you control. Mom, you lied to me.
A cloak of smooth, cold fury unfurls from his heart. Go, the Game Master says. And Michael drifts away from Mom, to the car, loading his brother into the backseat as Patrick struggles with everything he’s got to maintain his smile.
Mom stutters, paralyzed by shock. And the moment she hesitates is the moment Michael locks the doors.