“Have you ever known anyone with the name Banar?” I asked them.
They both shook their heads. It didn’t spark any sort of reaction other than indifference.
“Why do you ask?” Dad said.
“No reason,” I said. “I’m thinking about using it as a character name in a story, but I want to make sure it doesn’t sound too weird.”
“Honestly,” Mom said with a sigh, “that’s the least weird thing I’ve heard in ages.” Then she got up from the table and, without asking us whether we wanted to watch it or not, she turned on the TV.
THE McCLOUDS
High in the sky lived a family of clouds, and their name was McCloud. They were Scottish clouds. The father, Horace, was a wispy cloud, a cirrus cloud if you want to be technical about it. The mother, Electra, was a storm cloud. There were two daughters. The older and gentler one, Lorna, stayed close to the ground, hovering over hilltops and often masquerading as fog. The younger and more boisterous one, Stella, was thick and puffy, the type of cloud that inspired people to say, That’s a frog … or maybe duck … or a Studebaker.
For many years, they weren’t a sad family or an angry family (even though the mom was stormy). They weren’t a happy family either. They were merely a family of clouds, called the McClouds, and no one, outside of meteorologists, paid them much attention.
That is, until Lorna disappeared.
One morning, she told her parents she planned to linger over a valley and provide some shade for picnickers, which was something she often did. Good deeds made her feel, for lack of a better word, good. She practiced kindness as much as possible, but she was always home by dinnertime.
Except on this day. The next day too.
The McClouds were understandably worried. They asked friends to help them find Lorna, and a search party of clouds swept across the land. When that many clouds come together, it’s called a storm front, and this one turned out to be a doozy. It flooded the coasts of every continent, leveling towns, killing millions, and causing mayhem.
And it was all for naught. Because they didn’t find Lorna.
The other clouds gave up after a while. Then the McClouds gave up too. Lorna was gone for good, they figured. It was best to focus their energies on Stella.
Stella loved the attention. With Lorna out of the way, she was the star of the family. Her parents kept a close watch over her, but they also spoiled her. They did whatever they could to keep her close and happy. They couldn’t bear to lose another daughter.
Meanwhile, down on the ground, leaders had gathered together.
“We must put an end to this catastrophic weather!” shouted the secretary-general of the United Nations when they held an emergency meeting of the world’s top scientists. The scientists agreed. So they teamed up to create the greatest machine ever. It was basically a giant fan designed to blow all the clouds out of the sky.
The McClouds had no idea that this was happening, because they were spending all their time indulging Stella. Stella would puff into different shapes and her parents would flatter her.
“You look like a palace of pillows,” they’d say. Or, “You look like a bucket of popcorn.”
Keep in mind, compliments in the cloud world often revolved around fluffiness.
When the humans finally finished their machine, which they called the Ultra-Blow, they put it on Mount Everest and fired it up. All the other clouds in the world had already grown wise to the humans’ plan and had slipped off and hidden in caves.
Not the McClouds, though. When gusts from the Ultra-Blow reached Scotland, it was nighttime and they were asleep. The force of the wind pushed the three clouds together and they melded as one. All their thoughts and emotions became intermingled. They became a singular soul.
It’s an odd thing to share someone else’s soul and an even odder thing to share it with your family. But because of this, the mystery of Lorna was solved. Lorna had been there all along. Her sister, Stella, had absorbed her and had been hiding her deep in her billows.
Why did she do this? Simple. Stella was greedy and wanted all of her parents’ love.
Damn you, Stella! her parents were tempted to say, but saying that was essentially damning themselves. They were a single entity now, and the Ultra-Blow kept blowing them up and up and through the atmosphere and into space. And so it was that the cloud named McCloud hurtled into the void, disgusted with itself, bewildered by itself, in love with itself, like every family since the beginning of time.
Little-known fact: clouds freeze in space. And when McCloud froze, it stopped thinking and being. It ended up in suspended animation.
For eons, the frozen cloud traveled through space, until it came upon a young planet. As it was pulled in by the planet’s gravity and hit the planet’s thin atmosphere, McCloud melted and broke into thousands of little pieces, until it wasn’t a family anymore, or even individual personalities. It was aspects of personalities: anger, confusion, compassion, and so on.
Back on Earth, there was no weather, for all the other clouds were forced to stay in hiding or face the wrath of the Ultra-Blow. However, on the young planet, where the remnants of the McClouds fell from the sky, there was always weather. Except it was thoughts and emotions that rained and snowed. It was the essence of a family that once was and would never be again.
The animals on the planet weren’t much more than blobs in the sea, but they absorbed the precipitation and became intelligent and swamped by feelings both good and bad. They evolved, slimmed down, and grew arms, legs, and eyes. After a while, one feeling dominated their hearts and minds: anger.
Because in the end, that’s what dominated the cloud named McCloud. Stella was angry with Lorna for being so kind and generous, something Stella couldn’t manage herself. Lorna was angry with Stella for absorbing her. Horace and Electra were angry with the entire situation, but mostly with themselves for letting the situation come to pass.
The aliens channeled their new intelligence and anger. They built spaceships and set coordinates for Earth with one directive in mind: destroy everything. The land, the animals, the humans, the clouds. Everything.
Damn you, Stella. Damn you.
FRIDAY, 12/15/1989
AFTERNOON
I couldn’t help myself. I turned on the walkie-talkie this morning. Not to talk to Glen, but to spy on Dorian Loomis, to find out if he knew things I didn’t already know about Milo Drake. I figured the Loomis family probably had some inside information that hadn’t been shared with the public. So I sat on my bed, headphones pressed to my ears, and I fiddled with the knobs and got nothing but static. Disappointed, I trudged through two inches of fresh snow to school.
At school, everyone was talking about bones. The news hadn’t released any updates, and if my parents knew anything, they weren’t telling me.
“I heard there’s bones for at least five bodies out there, so my question is this: whose bones are the other bones?” Mandy asked with a cough as we sat on the benches in the locker room, lacing up our sneakers. She had spent the last couple of days at home with a cold, watching game shows and soap operas and every news update that interrupted them. “There are tons of other missing kid cases. Remember that boy last year on Long Island? Or that girl in California all over the news last summer? What’s-her-face?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My only question is this: if everything went down like people think it went down, then how does Milo Drake snatch up Charlie? There’s maybe fifteen minutes between when Alistair left the Dwyers’ backyard and when the ambulance showed up.”
“Plenty of time to stuff a kid in the back of a van.”
“So what? Milo’s hiding in the swamp? Or out in the street hoping to find some kid? It was pouring rain.”
“Well, if he got Fiona, then maybe she told him about Charlie too and he was hanging out near his house,” Mandy said as she hopped up and closed her locker. “Listen. I’m not a psychopath so I don’t think like a psychopath, but I do know a few th
ings about the yakuza.”
“The yakuza?”
“Come on,” Mandy said. “The yakuza? Ruthless Japanese swordsmen mafia types who you don’t mess with? Everyone knows this.”
A few other girls had been listening in on our conversation and they provided the appropriate shrugs.
“Jeez,” Mandy said. “Forgive me for being educated. What I was trying to say is that the yakuza commit their crimes when it’s raining so that all the evidence is washed away.”
“Fiona disappeared when it was snowing,” I said.
“Rain, snow, it’s all water,” Mandy said.
Phaedra Moreau was one of those girls listening in and she tapped me on the shoulder. “Aren’t you happy?” she asked.
“What? Why?”
“No one will ever think your brother did this ever again,” she said. “Not now that they’ve caught the real guy. Your brother won’t be a scary weirdo anymore. He’ll be a harmless weirdo.”
Phaedra is the type of kid who will tell you that your shoes are out of fashion and act like she’s doing you a favor by saying it.
I spun the dial on my locker to make sure the combination was scrambled up. “Why do people think they know anything?” I said. “Just because someone told a story? They’re stories. People pick the stories they want to be true and they believe them. It doesn’t make the stories true.”
Phaedra smirked and said, “Well, I’m only trying to put a positive spin on it and let you know that even if people keep saying that your brother—”
“They’re stories,” I said again. Then I stormed out of there.
EVENING
A few minutes ago, I put on the walkie-talkie. Again, I’m not sure what I was hoping to hear. Dorian Loomis relaying inside information about the case, announcing conclusively that Milo Drake is indeed the monster we all think he is, that Fiona and Charlie will never come back, and that my brother can give up his weirdo talk for good? Did I expect to hear all the answers to everything tied up in some devastating, stereophonic bow?
Again, all I got was static.
We must have been lucky that one time we caught Dorian on the CB. Knowing Mandy, I’m sure she exaggerated how many times she’s actually heard him. I tossed the headphones in the corner and went into the other room.
My parents were on the couch and they were hugging.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Animal bones,” my mom said, practically giggling. “They’re all animal bones.”
SATURDAY, 12/16/1989
AFTERNOON
Milo Drake is an insane person. It might not be a nice thing to say, but we all know this. We just don’t know what type of insane person.
This morning, the sheriff held a press conference to discuss the case. Dad taped it, because he wants to keep a record of everything. Now I’m watching it for, like, the fifth time and writing down what the sheriff said.
Milo Drake is no longer considered a suspect. We have ruled him out in both the disappearances of Fiona Loomis and Charlie Dwyer. There is indisputable evidence that he could not have been involved in either occurrence. He was nowhere near the victims at the time periods in question. In addition, the bones recovered from his yard are animals’ bones. Mostly deer and raccoons, though there are cats, foxes, and a few dogs as well. It appears that no crimes have been committed in relation to these bones, but we will continue our discussions with Mr. Drake. I will not be taking questions at this time, but should new information come to light, we will share it with the public. We encourage various news outlets to be judicious in their reporting. Thank you.
“Judicious in their reporting.” That means don’t print every insane person’s confession! That means you, Sutton Bulletin! My parents had canceled their subscription to you a while ago and only recently renewed so they could know what their neighbors were reading about the Loomises, the Dwyers, and us. I’m pretty sure they’re regretting that decision. I know I am.
Last night’s relief transformed into something new this morning. Fear. Heavy, heavy terror. I’ve been scared for weeks. For Fiona. For Charlie. For Alistair. For myself. I’ve been scared about the how and the what. How do we find them? What are we going to do to help Alistair … and me? But this morning was when I really started worrying about the why. Why so many lies? Why so many stories? I realized that I don’t understand what motivates people. Somehow, that scares me the most.
“Why would a guy confess to something he didn’t do?” I asked Mom as she drove me to the mall in Sutton to buy Christmas presents, which she had insisted on doing even though it’s something I know she hates doing.
Mom paused when I asked her. I could almost hear her saying, Isn’t this a better question for your father? But that’s not what she said. Because I think we both knew why I asked her. I didn’t want the professional answer. I wanted the mom answer.
“Well,” she said, “people feel guilty about a lot of things. Sometimes all they want is to be punished. So they confess, to almost anything.”
Is that what Milo Drake wanted? Is that what Kyle wanted? Is that what Alistair wanted?
“Why were there so many animals buried in his backyard?” I asked.
This pause was longer. She was either speculating or wondering if she should share the truth. I couldn’t tell. “He wanted to give them a proper burial.”
“Because he killed them?”
“Because he found them,” she said. “They were roadkill.”
As Mom said this, I spied a dead squirrel on the side of the road. A coincidence, sure, but only a small one. Streets around here are covered in death. From deer all the way down to baby birds.
Baby birds. Baby birds.
At the stoplight next to the memorial tree, I was still staring out of the window, trying to conjure the image of the dead hummingbird from a couple of weeks ago, trying to make it seem real again, trying to reassure myself it was real.
“Everything okay?” Mom asked.
“What are coincidences?” I replied.
“Sorry? What do you mean?”
“I mean … if there are all these coincidences piling up in your life … where do they come from? What do they mean?”
Mom turned her eyes from the road for a second, which is a big no-no when driving, but I think she wanted to say this to me face-to-face. “I haven’t the first damn clue.”
That’s not what you expect from your mom. I wanted her to tell me that coincidences were signs that good things would happen. Or a sign that bad things would happen. Anything but what she said, which was basically, Why don’t you tell me, because I’d like to know myself.
Mom turned her eyes back to the road, loosened her grip on the steering wheel, and stretched the fingers on her right hand. It almost seemed like she was preparing to make a fist so she could punch the dashboard or the windshield.
But she didn’t. She put the hand back on the wheel and she began to cry.
What do you do when your mom cries? Well, I know what you’d do, Stella. Something comforting, like hug her and tell her you’re there for her, right? Well, I’m not you, Stella. I’m me. And what I did was this: I stared out the window some more, hoping that if I kept staring then when I finally turned back, her tears would be gone.
Mom turned on the radio. A song crept into the car. The lyrics were all about how birds suddenly appear whenever the singer’s boyfriend is around. It’s a love song, but it didn’t feel like one to me. It felt icky, eerie, wrong.
Mom started humming along, which I thought meant she wasn’t crying anymore, so I turned back. She still had a few tears on her face, but she seemed almost content. I guess she likes the song. I’ve heard it before, but I never gave the lyrics much thought until that moment.
Seriously, why do birds suddenly appear?
Baby birds. Baby birds. Baby birds.
SUNDAY, 12/17/1989
MORNING
Another weekend almost over. Next week is a short week of classes and then we have
Christmas break. Then Alistair is back at school.
Yesterday, Mom and I bought him some new shirts for Christmas. We want him to look nice when he returns. Better than he did before, so people might actually think he is better than before. In the past, Alistair would have opened a present like new shirts and he would have said, Oh, these are … fine. Because, really, what kid wants new shirts for Christmas when there are video games, bikes, model rockets, and all that fun stuff?
I don’t know how he’ll react this year. It’s hard to know anything. I’ll admit that the coincidences, and all the things my mind is struggling to believe, are starting to weigh me down. I know my parents try to put on their best faces for me and my brother, but I’m beginning to see all the weight on them too.
So at breakfast, I asked Dad if maybe we should go to church today. He didn’t laugh, but I think he might have been tempted to. As I told you, we’re a science family. Religion is barely mentioned around here, though Mom and Dad did tell me once, when I was about eight or nine, that I could start going to church if it was something I wanted to do. It was my choice. Which seemed great. Freedom! Glorious freedom!
Looking back on it, I see it wasn’t really my choice at all. My parents didn’t go to church. I didn’t really know what church was like. So why would I choose to go, especially at eight or nine when I could watch cartoons instead or go mess around at Mandy’s?
“Getting in the Christmas spirit, are we?” Dad asked me this morning when I started talking like a born-again.
“I want answers,” I said.
Alistair was at breakfast too (we all were, though Mom was loading the dishwasher). I could tell he was listening, but he wasn’t offering any opinions.
“Well,” Dad said, “some people find answers there.” The but certainly not the Clearys was implied.
“I’m going,” I said, and I stood from the table.
“What? Where?” Mom asked as she finally pulled up a chair. We’re usually done with breakfast by the time she sits, though she never complains about it.
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