The Siren House

by Andrew Post

  Dad wore a look of surprise as if he didn’t even know Darya and I were sitting in the very next row of cots. “It’s very nice that you care about other people. Maybe once we get there and settled in, we can start to think about them. But we have to look out for ourselves first.”

  He looked at Darya, then at me, double-checking we’d gotten the message, then returned to talking to Mom.

  Darya and I could argue with Mom. Sway her on some things. Bring out the puppy dogs and occasionally she’d cave. With Dad? Not so much. He was immune. There may as well have been someone sitting there beside him with hammer and chisel, putting everything he said into stone.

  Except when it came to Mom. Sometimes she could derail Dad with just one word. But this time I could tell Dad was winning. He was talking a lot more than she was, and she was actually nodding once in a while.

  I noticed Darya’s gaze had moved. Following it, I saw a fort made of old wrestling mats propped up with field hockey sticks. Darya sighed. As if her hope of ever having a normal life were being suffocated with a pillow.

  Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I was pretty with it at eleven. I asked Darya if she wanted to talk. She nodded. We told our folks we were going outside for a minute.

  Dad’s response was always the same since we’d moved in there: “Stay close.” There’d been stories . . .

  Darya helped me get my crutches under my arms and walked beside me as I clack-thumped through the aisles of cots and tents and went outside.

  My legs don’t work; I should probably tell you that. When I was five and started falling down a lot, the doctor told my parents—with me sitting there, speaking about me in the third person like doctors do with kids—that I have this real asshole of a neurological disorder. They were going to poke me with pins as a test. I cried because I was little and afraid of pain. I cried even more when they said the test was over and I’d felt nothing. My legs and feet will feel somewhat, they said, and I’d be able to move them a tiny bit, but without solid ankles and with knees that refused to lock, I’d never actually walk properly. By the time I was eight, from midthigh down, 98 percent numb. Hating how I was treated in a wheelchair, like I was made of glass or something, I learned to develop a pretty good sense of balance. I can stand, just as long as I keep my legs strapped together; otherwise it’s like trying to standing on boiled spaghetti. To move, though, I need crutches.

  Okay, so once we got outside, we looked over our little town. As usual, not a single light on in Sugarburg.

  We moved on toward the back of the school, Darya being a good big sister and walking slowly so I could keep up. She dragged the tip of the light-pen, leaving a ribbon of purple in the air. I brushed my fingers through and wrecked it; the stream collapsed like blood being stirred in water.

  I’d brought along my plush Squishy the Squidmouse. You know, from that show Dr. Werewolf & Squishy. His Velcro-padded hands clasped my shoulders. He was a dedicated companion for those tough times, let me tell you. Better than a security blanket, he had a face. Good listener too.

  When Darya and I took a seat on a picnic table etched with a bunch of Whoever plus Whoever Forevers behind the school, I brought Squishy onto my lap and looked at his beady eyes and stitched-on worrywart smirk. I brushed his mass of tentacles, which, like a lion’s mane, framed his semistained yellow pug face.

  Darya pulled her arms inside the too-big green hoodie she’d borrowed from Dad. “I don’t want to live on an oil rig. I think I’ll get cabin fever.”

  Dad let me see The Shining once when Mom went out of town for work. “Yeah, I don’t think I want you to get cabin fever either.”

  “This sucks, because right before all of this . . . crap happened, I was writing him this note. I had been working on it all week so when I saw him at Ernest’s birthday party, I’d be able to give it to him. I had a few days to get it just right, and before I could come up with a good way to end it, here comes all of this . . . stuff.”

  I looked around. “It’s just you and me. You can swear for real if you want. I won’t tell.”

  Darya pulled her chin out of the sweatshirt, looked at the sky, and whisper-shouted all the swear words.

  All.

  “Better?”

  She tucked her chin back in. “No.”

  I pulled one of my crutches onto my lap. I had been using the same set to get around since I was five, extended about a notch a year to accommodate growth spurts. The handles had never been replaced, and the foam was old and starting to crumble. My hands left perfect indentations, hills and valleys of where my fingers always fell, the big dip in the middle where my palm rested. I picked a piece of foam off and flicked it into the wind, but it whipped back around and went right into Darya’s mouth. I apologized, while laughing, as she spat and tried to pinch it off her tongue.

  I thought she’d give me a dead arm for that, but she didn’t. She just turtled back into her sweatshirt. Her screamingly red hair—the same as mine and Mom’s—fell around her face. “I just wish all this hadn’t happened.” She uncapped and recapped her GlowSquiggle, click, snap, click.

  Our little town, Sugarburg, which was technically a village because it was so small, was a once-bright spot in a valley—nice people, no locked doors, carnivals and ice cream socials and movies in the park in the summer, sledding and snowmen in every front yard in the winter. Now it looked more like a sunken crater, an abscess.

  “Me too,” I finally said. “I’m sorry Alan probably won’t end up being your boyfriend.”

  Alan. The boy who lived in the wrestling mat cottage across the half-court line dividing the gym.

  She sighed. “I don’t mean it like that, like, ‘Oh, boohoo for me. Why did the world have to end right when I was about to tell him I like him?’ I just think this all really blows. I wish I could snap and change things, make it different, better . . . or, you know, at least less like this.” She cut at the air with her light-pen, drawing an angry squiggle. Then she erased it with a flap of her sleeve.

  When she looked at the stars, I did too. Thankfully, those hadn’t given up on us.

  I was about to say something to cheer her up when brilliant colors flashed in the sky—rainbow poppers. Flash. Flash-flash. Think Lisa Frank on LSD. We’d seen them before, but they still had the power to pause any conversation.

  Some people speculated it was radiation igniting in the atmosphere over the Dakotas. Others said it might be the ozone cracking open. A prepubescent Bible-thumper a few rows over from us claimed it was Jesus and Satan doing pro wrestling moves. Me, I always teased Darya that it was unicorns having midair collisions with each other. Oh, how she’d shriek and give me a dead arm. She’d never admit it, because she was too old for them, but she really liked unicorns.

  But I remember that night I pictured both. Jesus and Satan wrestling, executing full nelsons and body slams on each other, bouncing off the ropes, while above them, unicorns shot overhead in formation. Two packs squared up and charged toward each other, streaking the starry sky with glowing multicolor tracers. Nearing, they lowered their horns and crashed, exploding immediately upon impact, like helicopters do in movies, the unicorn kamikazes causing a nightmare to unfurl with every Easter egg dye ever. Scary. Beautiful.

  Man, I needed to lay off the pixie sticks.

  Coming out of my sugar-fueled delirium, and despite the threat of dead arms, I suggested the bit about crashing unicorns again.

  But Darya just said, “No, they’re not,” voice bland as oatmeal.

  Apparently I’d jabbed at this sensitive spot on her too often and she’d grown a thicker skin there. Shame.

  We waited for more poppers. But apparently that was it for the night.

  Darya turtled again when the last salvo’s smudges faded into regular black sky. She continued like we hadn’t seen anything at all. “I wish me and Alan had been born back when there was castles and knights and all that, before there was nuclear stuff for stupid people to blow up, before disease and earthquakes .
. .”

  “Wait,” I said. “I’m three grades behind you, and even I know there was disease back then. They had the . . . what’s it? The boobie plague.”

  “It was the bubonic plague, stupid. And you know what I mean. Before things were so shitty. Like right now, say I wanted to meet somebody and have it be like in the movies, it couldn’t be. For the rest of my life it’ll probably be like this.” She waved a baggy sleeve over the dead landscape ahead of us. “And if I do meet someone, Dad will probably have to trade me for some goats or something.”

  I laughed, really rolled, and through tears asked, “How many goats, do you think? What if it took only one to trade for you? And what if it was the really ugly one?”

  Again, nothing. She was serious.

  “I know I shouldn’t be like Raquel and Daphne and Kylie,” Darya said, naming her BFFs, “and think I’m nothing if I don’t have a boyfriend, but I should have somebody who likes me, besides you and Mom and Dad.”

  I nodded, understanding for the most part.

  She pulled out the note, intricately folded and bedecked in gel pen curlicues. She swept some hair back, not looking at me but at the note. “I want to have it just happen to me, like it did to Mom when she met Dad. Just . . . boom, romance.”

  I smiled. I had to say it, just to try it out. “Boom, romance.”

  The day my parents met was also the day I was named, even though they wouldn’t have me for another six years. They’d get married, have Darya first, then me, have a normal life for eleven years, and then suffer the A.

  But back then, when things were normal, Mom was going to the U of M and she was a trendoid—someone who considered everything from before they were born to be far cooler than anything in her time. She was a collector of yesteryear music on obsolete formats, namely cassette and compact disc.

  Mom tried to resist the urge to use the emergency credit card her parents gave her, but her fixation on 1990s music was no match for her sensible side. With fingers crossed that she wouldn’t have an actual emergency, she cashed out two hundred dollars and went online looking for local vintage music sellers or flea markets. She found a guy named Ken from Dinkytown, a section of the Twin Cities, who claimed to have close to ten thousand CDs and even more cassette tapes.

  They messaged a bit just so she could feel him out, and when no weirdo alarms went off, they arranged a meeting. She went to Dinkytown and was surprised to find Ken wasn’t an old man but her age. At the same time, he appeared to be a few millennia old—like a thawed-out missing link. Long hair, unruly beard, bad posture, and seemingly incapable of even forcing a smile.

  “Hi there. Are you Ken? From Craigslist?”

  “Yup.” He dropped his cigarette into the planter already crowded with butts, nodded to the garage door next to it, waved her in.

  He walked ahead of her through the columns of boxes in the garage lit by a single naked bulb. Mom says she couldn’t help but check him out. He was big and built like he’d been chopping wood every day since he’d learned to walk.

  He yanked a moth-eaten bedspread from over a table made hilly by what waited underneath. Blinking away the dust, Mom went googly-eyed. So many cassettes she didn’t have, so many CDs she’d been looking for. She says it was like finding piles of gold in a cave where the swashbucklers dumped it. The sensation was cemented by the garage’s moldy dankness and Dad’s piratey appearance.

  She didn’t ask if touching was allowed. She just plunged right in, hardly believing this kind of collection had been waiting all this time in Dinkytown, of all places, practically the backyard to the university. She must’ve walked past this house a dozen times coming and going from the bar with friends.

  “You should really open a store,” she said, setting aside the first pile of things she intended to buy. “You’d be off to a great start; you’ve got some amazing stuff here.”

  As Dad tells it, she was beautiful in her enthusiasm. That focus, that quick-finger click-click-click as she sped through the jewel case spines. He said he never saw anyone so happy about anything, not until Darya and I came along.

  She worked her way through the L section. Throwing Copper by Live. There it was.

  It wasn’t rare by any means, but for whatever reason, she’d had trouble finding it. “Is it Live, as in ‘I am alive,’ or Live as in ‘I live in a blue house’?”

  He shrugged. “Live, I guess.” The latter.

  She continued digging. “I always wonder if people ever said, ‘I saw Live live.’ Heh. Know what I mean?”

  Again, he shrugged.

  Mom says he was being kind of a jerk, but as Dad tells it, he wasn’t meaning to be. When he gets shy and quiet, it sometimes seems like he’s being rude but, he was just really scared he’d come off as creepy. She was so pretty, and he was so nervous. He talks about her carmine hair, pin curled and bouncy, and that one strip that fell against the curve of her cheek . . . Okay, Dad, we get the idea.

  Mom’s fingers navigated—click-click—into the Ms, then Ns. “So let’s say you did open a store. What would you name it?”

  “Cassettes Etcetera,” was what he’d wanted to say. But he could barely think straight. “Cassetera.”

  She looked up from the tape in her hand and said, as nicely as possible, “Huh?”

  “No, not Cassetera.” He chuckled. “I meant . . . Cassetera. Shit. Cass—You know what I’m trying to say, right?”

  Mom put down the cassette. “No.” She snickered. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t.” She thought Dad was trying to say “casserole,” which I don’t need to tell you would be a really stupid name for a music store. Or maybe not. There was a music store in the Twin Cities called Electric Fetus, after all.

  She bought the tapes. They went out for coffee. They were married a year later. Darya was born a year after that. They claimed she was the namesake of Dad’s great-aunt, but I always speculated she was named after a teenage curmudgeon from a trendoid show. Mom and Dad would never admit it.

  Three years on, I came along and the name Cassetera got put to use—I think because the idea of opening a store tipped the scales from someday to fantasy. I don’t mind being named after what could’ve been. Every time Mom tells this story, her face shifts from a sappy smile to absolute love when she looks at me. “Our little typo,” she’ll say.

  Then Dad’ll muss my hair and chime, “Cassetera,” like he’s saying the name of a place where nothing bad ever happened. “The best thing that ever came from a nervous man tripping on his own tongue.”

  So there you have it. Boom, romance.

  Darya released her pinched hold on the corners of the note. Maybe she’d retraced Mom and Dad’s story too, because she didn’t turn the pages into confetti. Back into her pocket it went, undelivered. Maybe she had hope she’d meet him again.

  When we got back to our corner of the gym, Mom and Dad looked like they were waiting for us.

  They weren’t talking anymore. It’d been settled.

  Darya, figuring this out too, immediately freaked out. Dad held her while I sat in Mom’s lap. Dad looked over Darya’s head at me, saying things would be okay again, maybe we’d come back, fix the house, carry on like before. But with one look in his eyes, I knew he didn’t really think that was going to happen.

  It was a Dad lie. You know what I mean.

  As delicately as possible, he whispered to us, “Start packing your things.”

  At that, Darya bawled into his chest, punching him weakly, spluttering that she didn’t want to go.

  I kind of thought it was embarrassing. Here I was the younger sister, and did you see me losing my shit? But sometimes it was contagious: if one of us got all emotional, the other one would start up too. Mom, always good at picking up on things like that, patted my shoulder and kissed my cheek, whispering that it would be okay.

  I brushed her off, grumped, “I’m fine,” sniffed, and repeated, “I’m fine.”

  Stupid Darya.

  Over their daughters’ heads, my pa
rents whispered, and I could feel Mom’s chest vibrate. “Are we going to tell any other families?”

  Dad shook his head.

  “When do you want to go?”

  “I’ve got to get our stuff in the van, but after that we can go anytime. It’d be best to get moving before the sun comes up.”

  “Why?”

  “Just feels safer.”

  “All right, so how long from now is that?”

  Dad freed one arm from around Darya to look at his watch. “Couple hours.” Then he glared at the watch like it’d just called him a name. He glanced at the big windows lining the gym. It was almost light out already. The sky was shifting into a warm gray. “I guess sooner.” He chuckled. “Batteries must finally be giving up the ghost.”

  Spoiler, but there was nothing wrong with his watch batteries. Time was starting to get screwy, even back then.

  “Should we get started now instead?” Mom said.

  “Yeah.”

  And that’s when Darya really lost it.

  I reached out from where I was hugged against Mom and put a hand on her back.

  She uncoiled from Dad and threw her arms around me. Her tears were warm on my neck.

  As our van pulled away, I saw Darya looking out the back window. I looked back that way too.

  Alan was standing just outside the gym doors, hands in pockets. Darya pointed at something to his left, and he looked. Fading in the searing yellow morning light, Look under your pillow was written in iridescent purple letters, tall as he was. Then and only then did he wave at us, a slow gesture issued low, down at his side, that didn’t say good-bye forever but good-bye for now.

  If only we knew what was ahead of us, what would happen at the oil rig, Darya and I probably would’ve waved back meaning it to be good-bye forever.

  Track 3

  STRANGE CURRENCIES