think he loves her. I guess love can make a dude do crazy things.”
“Have you ever had a girlfriend, Clem?”
“Nope. You?”
“Not exactly,” said Cole. He was thinking of Jade Korsky. But though it was he who’d steered them in this direction, he had no real desire to go there. “Where do you think they are now? Do you think they’ll ever come back?”
“I don’t know. But maybe if they do come back, there’ll be three of them.”
This outrageous thought had not yet occurred to Cole. He stood up and began clearing his dishes, making a lot of noise, as if the outrageous thought were a living creature that could be scared off this way.
Clem got up from the table, too. “Hey, I got an idea,” he said. “Why don’t I cook up some more French toast? Then we can keep it warm for when Tracy and PW get up.”
He was already at the counter, cracking an egg into the bowl.
Cole was too agitated to sit down again. He opened the dishwasher and began unloading the clean dishes from the day before. The sun was slanting through the kitchen window now and birds were singing in loud, ecstatic bursts. Cole had heard it was supposed to turn hot again.
Cole didn’t want to be angry with Clem. He wished that he could make him understand. He looked at Clem’s tall pear-shaped back and found himself wondering what his mother would have thought of him. Lately this had been happening a lot: he’d be thinking about one thing or another and suddenly he’d start wondering what his mother or father would’ve thought about it. It was part of the spell that had begun to lift with Addy’s arrival. He could remember his parents without horror, without feeling the need—the pain being too much for him—to shut them out. Now there were times when he wanted nothing more than to recall his old life. He would stare into the past and try to reconstruct things: The rooms of all the houses he had lived in. The last time he had seen his grandparents. The names and faces of every teacher and classmate he’d had since kindergarten.
It was like a game—it could be fun—but it felt like something more than just a game as well.
He even tried to recall bad things, like his parents fighting. Some T-shirt his dad had worn and that his mom said was juvenile . . . a slogan that rhymed . . .
Often as not he’d have to give up, frustrated. But there were times when he wanted to shout hurray.
Human Race, Get Out of My Face.
Of course! How could he have forgotten!
His mother would have liked Clem, he decided. Except for his religion, she probably would have liked him a lot.
“Clem,” he said, laying the last spoon away in the drawer. “Are you saying it’s not evil for Mason to run off and leave his mother all alone like that? I mean, she’s so sick she can hardly get out of bed.”
Clem raised his voice above the sizzling frying pan. “He probably told himself she’d be okay. He probably figured he could count on us. Nobody’s ever on their own in Salvation City. Like, you weren’t here, so you wouldn’t know, but during the flu it wasn’t like other places. There wasn’t any fighting over food or medicine, or stealing from sick or dead people—none of that stuff. And Mason knows—Hey, sounds like we woke someone up.”
Either it was all the noise they’d carelessly started making or the smell of the French toast, which Clem was now transferring from frying pan to platter. Someone could be heard on the stairs. Someone was descending with thumping, exaggerated slowness, like an actor playing a zombie. Cole remembered that Tracy had sprained her ankle yesterday. They waited, watching the doorway, and when she finally appeared each of them involuntarily took a step back.
Maybe she was sleepwalking. She certainly didn’t look fully awake. Clearly, she had just rolled out of bed. Her face was puffy and creased. Her wavy brown hair stuck out all over her head like a fright wig. Yesterday, PW had cleaned the cut on her eyebrow and put a Band-Aid on it. The Band-Aid was now stained with blood, and there were smears of dried blood on her forehead and cheek. The skin around the cut had turned purplish, and her mouth—hanging open in a dumb-struck expression—looked bruised and puffy, too.
She paused in the doorway, holding on to the