just the bear but the head too, and an old-timey rifle captioned underneath, so it was hard to know which was displayed as the better prize. Her parents had bought the place furnished, but after ten years, if you’re still living with a dead bear on your wall, you’re doing so for a reason. Her dad was distraught; she watched him type. Most people of his generation finger-peck and get right up to the screen, but since he only had one arm and giant googly glasses, his deportment was in a school of its own.
“His friends,” Linda said, and snorted her way to the kitchen. “He gets one night a week. Let’s go, Bill!”
His hand fell on the keyboard like Play-Doh. He looked up at Esme and the look was bleak. She touched his arm, though it did no good. You can’t solace a man whose only friends are text.
Esme said, “Come on, Dad, we’re having cake.”
He pushed back his chair but didn’t get up. His empty sleeve hung over the armrest, and the awful thing was, you barely noticed for how slack the rest of his body was. He stared at the screen like the dead stare at us.
Esme made for the fridge.
Her dad trudged to the table when it was clear Linda would not stop calling his name. Esme sat next to Ida, though she still hadn’t said a word since Don. Her mother knifed the cake, but served only herself, a quarter wedge, huge. Her dad wasn’t hungry. Ida said it tasted gross, while Linda, who had retained her good cheer throughout, opened her mouth—her mouth was full—and said, “Now, Esmeralda, daughter mine, would you like to say something about Thurlow Dan and the Helix? Because I think maybe this little lady should know more of the world than she does.”
That night, Esme fought with her parents. She promised to get it right with Ida; she bought herself more time. And then she left. And now the hospital where Chris was living called three times a day. And the morgue where her parents were called three times a day. They all wanted to know what arrangements to make. If Esme didn’t call back, they would dispose of the bodies and send her the bill. But it wasn’t as though she didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted her parents and Chris to reunite. They had died trying to make that happen; the least she could do was help. She knew she had heard this story before, about parents who died as they drove to be with an adult child who was himself dying. It turned out that when Chris spoke her name, it was the swan song he’d been trying to belt out for twenty-four years. Only in her parents’ unction for a miracle, or perhaps because one was stoned and the other disabled, they pitched off I-64 on the way to the hospital. The road was narrow and ascendant one hairpin at a time, there was no guardrail, and if you went over even halfway up, you would not survive the fall. Every time Esme thought about it, she wondered whether they had any last words, too, hurled from their lips as they said good-bye. And why not? People were crying out for each other all the time.
They were stopped at a diner off the freeway. Ida had to pee. It was two in the morning, but still, this was not the most advisable conduct. Esme’s face was mugged on every TV, on every channel. On the plus side, the coverage gave her a visual on the Helix House, and a sense of what people were saying.
On the downside, what people were saying was bad. For one, the feds had turned the site into a zoo. Tents, kitchen, helicopters, Bradley. Bradleys. Six tanks in a residential suburb. The team had to stump all the roadside trees just to accommodate their girth. She could tell they were M3s, though, because they had room only for five—driver, commander, gunner plus scouts—which meant this was the team’s concession to context or, more likely, the government’s attempt to look modulated but ready.
Ida insisted on cherry pie because she wanted an American experience, they being on the road and mingled with the people. At age nine, she was already sassy with expectation of what dreams the country would make true for her.
“Kinda late to be up!” the waitress said, and overflowed their water glasses.
“Mom,” Ida said, and she probed the cherry