on, it certainly didn’t care. It moved forward again. I could feel it. I could almost hear it laugh and taste it. Close. Watching.
Mocking. And it was cold, so cold, as it watched my sister bleeding at the back of our house.
Inside, Rube was angry.
He said, “Now, you see? This spoils things.”
“It was always gonna happen.” As I said it, I saw Steve’s figure out on the front porch. Away from us.
“Yeah, but why today?”
“Why not?”
From the couch, I looked at an old photo of Steve, Sarah, Rube, and me as very young children, standing in staggered formation for some photographer man. Steve smiled. Sarah smiled. We all did. It was strange to see it, because it was there every day and only now was I really noticing it. Steve’s smile. It cared — for us. Sarah’s smile. It was beautiful. Rube and I looked clean. All four of us were young and undaunted and our smiles were so strong that it made me smile even then on the couch, with a kind of loss.
Where did that go? I asked inside me. I couldn’t even remember the photo being taken. Was it actually real?
At that moment, Sarah was on our back step, crying, and Rube and I were slumped on the couch, powerless to help her. Steve didn’t seem to care, for any of us.
Where did it go? I thought again. How could that picture turn into this one?
Had years defeated us?
Had they worn us down?
Had they passed like big white clouds, disintegrating very slowly so that we couldn’t notice?
In any case, this was pretty awful, and it was to worsen.
It worsened during the night when Sarah went out and didn’t come back for hours.
She left with the words “I’m goin’ out for a walk,” and a lot of time passed while she was gone. The rest of us acted indifferent to it at first, but by just after eleven, we were all worried. Even Steve seemed a bit affected.
“C’mon,” our father told us. “We’re goin’ out lookin’.”
No one argued.
Rube and I went out in the panel van with Dad while Mum and Steve stayed home in case Sarah showed up while we were gone. We checked the pubs and all her friends’ places. Even Bruce’s place. Empty. She was nowhere.
By midnight, when we got home, she still wasn’t back, and all we could do now was wait.
We each did it differently.
Mum sat, silent, not looking at anyone.
Dad made coffee after coffee and drank them down like there was no tomorrow.
Steve put a heat pack on and off his ankle and kept it elevated, determined.
Rube mumbled something very quietly, at least five hundred times: “I’m gonna kill that bastard. I’m gonna kill that bastard. I’m gonna get that Bruce Patterson. I’m gonna kill that … I’m gonna. I’m gonna …”
As for me, I ground my teeth together a bit and leaned forward with my chin resting on the table.
Only Rube went to bed. The rest of us stayed.
“No sign?” Mum asked when she woke up at one o’clock.
“No.” Dad shook his head, and quite soon, we were all falling asleep, under a white, aching kitchen light globe.
Later on, a dream was arriving.
Interruption.
“Cam?”
“Cam?”
I was shaken awake. I jumped. “Sarah?” “Nah, me.” It was Rube. “Ah, bloody you!”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “She’s still not here?” “No. Unless she walked straight past us to bed.” “Nah, she’s not in there.”
That was when we noticed something else — now Steve was gone as well. I checked the basement
“Nup.” I looked back up at Rube. So now just the two of us went out on the porch, then out on the street. Where the hell was he?
“Wait.” Rube turned around, looking down the road. “There he is.”
We saw our brother sitting, propped up against a telegraph pole. We ran down to him. We stopped. Rube asked, “What’s goin’ on?”
Steve looked up, and I had never seen him afraid like that, or as knotted up. He looked so lanky, and still like a man; he had always seemed to be a man. Always … but never like this. Not a vulnerable one.
His crutches were two dead arms, lying there, wooden, next to him.
Slowly, meltingly, our brother said, “I guess.” He stopped. Started again. “I just wanted to find her.”
We said nothing, but I think when we helped Steve up and helped him walk home, he must have seen what the lives of Rube, Sarah, and me were like. He’d seen what it was to fall down and