True Places

by Sonja Yoerg

  She rolled her eyes. “Even you probably noticed there are three kids in your house now.”

  “Even me?”

  Mia sped right by. “What do you think of her?”

  “Iris? She’s quiet. Sleeps a lot. Her manners are worse than mine.”

  She nodded. “She’s like an extremely fast toddler.”

  “Suzanne must’ve told you that I wasn’t crazy about the whole Iris deal.”

  She laughed a little and sipped her wine. “‘The Iris deal.’ I like that.”

  “She didn’t have to do it.”

  Her face became serious, her blue eyes shading to navy. “She absolutely did.”

  “Why?”

  “Damned if I know.” She picked up her fork and stared at her plate as if seeing it for the first time. Typical Mia, she’d eaten the shrimp off the risotto and left the rest. “I’m not sure she knows.”

  The conversation seemed like a riddle. He was becoming impatient. “I don’t get it. I don’t. Suzanne has so much going on already.”

  “Don’t we all? That’s the point, Whit.” She stabbed the air with her fork. “It’s not a whim. It’s not a fluke. I don’t know what’s up with Suzanne and Iris, but it’s something.”

  “Something?”

  “Yes, something. And God knows we all need something.”

  Whit looked across the table at Suzanne. She was listening to Robert describe a recent vacation in the Maldives. She wasn’t a fan of beaches, but you wouldn’t know that from her expression. He was struck by how skilled she was at not appearing exhausted, at not giving away that she’d thrown herself together in ten minutes and was probably bored out of her mind by this guy she had to pretend interested her. Maybe he did interest her; Robert was all right. That was the thing. It was so hard to tell with Suzanne, even if he asked. His wife accommodated everyone—the kids, him, her parents—keeping them together, keeping things running. Duty. Suzanne wore it like a cloak.

  Suzanne caught his eye and her smile sent an uneasy ripple through his stomach, the tail flip of a fish. “We all need something,” Mia had said. Whit had tried to give Suzanne everything, to prove himself, and tonight, before Mia spoke, he’d felt he had succeeded. He was worthy.

  But now, as he returned his wife’s smile, doubt settled on him like a fine mist. What if what Suzanne needed wasn’t something he could give?

  CHAPTER 20

  Reid was relieved the three of them had managed to clean the kitchen without fighting or, rather, without Brynn picking a fight. It helped that Iris loved washing dishes. “It’s the warm water,” she said.

  He had retreated to his room to finish his calculus homework, saving his reading for AP English until after he had meditated. It was only nine o’clock, so he texted Alex to see if he wanted to come over, but Alex had blown off his work for days and was in catch-up mode. Reid couldn’t understand why Alex created stress for himself, especially now, with all the teachers cutting him slack, telling him not to worry about deadlines too much. As if what had happened on New Year’s Eve had anything to do with schoolwork. Adults assumed a kid who did that was depressed, but the truth was kids—even smart kids, especially smart kids—did stupid shit all the time for no other reason than to experiment, to see how it felt, as Alex had said. For some kids it was cutting. For other kids it was bashing the shit out of someone on the field, or being an asshole on social media. It was all the same. Everyone felt too much and not enough at the same time. Reid did, too, which was why he meditated. It flattened things out, if only for a while. Getting balanced was impossible. High school was a wild ride, and sometimes the sane response was to jump off, even if it meant getting hurt.

  If only Alex would meditate. He would argue the fine points of religious theory for hours, but he wouldn’t sit still with himself. Reid didn’t press him, though. He respected Alex too much.

  Reid closed his book, left his room, and went to Iris’s door, which was partly open. She was talking softly. He couldn’t make out the words, but the rhythm of her speech sounded like a conversation. Confusing, because the phone she used to listen to music wasn’t activated for calls, messaging, or browsing. His mom didn’t want Iris exposed to too much at once. Reid felt awkward about interrupting, even though he knew she couldn’t really be talking to anyone. He had turned away to go back to his room when Iris spoke clearly.

  “Someone there?”

  He stuck his head inside. She was sitting on the floor in profile to him, her back against the bed, facing the window. She faced a window whenever possible. As she turned toward him, she pushed something under the bed, but it was hard to see what since only the bedside lamp was on. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something scuttle along the darkened baseboard. “Did you see that?”

  “A mouse.”

  “Oh.” There were mice in the basement—everyone had mice in the basement—and once in a while, one would turn up in the kitchen. “Do you have food up here? Maybe my mom didn’t tell you about not bringing food upstairs.”

  She dipped her chin. “She told me. But I . . .”

  She motioned for him to come closer and lifted the bed skirt. He bent down. It took a moment for his eyes to adapt. Boxes of crackers and cookies, a pile of energy bars, a few apples, a bag of something, nuts maybe. A lot of food.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. He noticed it was a habit she’d adopted in the last week or so, no doubt copied from Brynn—or maybe him.

  “Are you planning to run away?”

  She shrugged again.

  Reid let it drop. At least she was trusting him enough to show him the food stash. He stood up. “Well, the mouse is a problem.”

  Iris nodded. “Sit on the bed and don’t move.”

  “We can set a trap.”

  “What about Vishnu?”

  His snake would only accept live prey, but Reid had never given him anything more challenging than a wriggling pinkie. “He does need to eat, but we get baby mice for him.”

  She shook her head hard, squeezing her eyes tight. “There’s a mouse here .”

  Iris’s circumstances in this house, with his family, confounded her to the brink of madness. Her logic was inescapable, and Reid felt for her.

  He climbed on the bed and crossed his legs, curious about how she’d go about luring the mouse and catching it. He settled himself. It could be a while.

  Iris crouched low and moved noiselessly to the far wall under the window. Half the room was in total darkness, including the area near the door where he had seen the mouse. Iris was completely still and, although half in shadow, nearly invisible. Her head was cocked, and the tips of her fingers grazed the wood floor. She slid forward so slowly he was not sure she had moved at all; only the pattern of shadow on her back gave her away. She was not simply predatory. She was not of this world, at least the world he knew. The air in the room seemed to have become denser from her concentration and the disguise of it. Reid held his breath.

  A shadow flickered and snapped. Iris sprang to her feet and took a step toward the bed. Dangling between her thumb and index finger was the mouse, immobilized by the pinch at the scruff of its neck.

  Reid jumped off the bed. “Whoa! That was awesome!”

  For the first time since he’d met her, Iris grinned so wide her eyes crinkled at the corners.

  She followed Reid into his room. He lifted the lid off the cage—an extra-large terrarium with a mesh top—and Iris dropped the mouse in. It froze on the shaving-covered floor, either because it was stunned from being handled or because it had detected the snake. The snake was sprawled along one side of the cage, half-uncoiled. It lifted its head, testing the air with its tongue again and again. The mouse shook itself and circled its head, sniffing and searching, one circle, two, three. It took a few tentative steps. The snake stiffened. It had spotted the mouse. Reid was reminded of Iris only moments before; the intens
e concentration and something else as well, the cold confidence of a machine, a laser-guided missile.

  The mouse turned and scrabbled at the glass wall, rising up on its hind legs. Uncoiling completely, the snake approached, sliding silently, its head tracking the mouse’s uncertain movements until the snake’s nose was inches from the mouse, now backed into a corner.

  The snake struck and tucked the mouse into a coil, one loop, two. The mouse was locked in a noose from which it couldn’t possibly escape. It happened so fast, like a magic trick that succeeds even when you are paying close attention. When Reid fed pinkies to Vishnu, the snake didn’t give them the big squeeze. He just swallowed them.

  Iris watched without emotion. Reid figured she’d seen a lot of animals die, and had killed some of them herself. After a few moments, she went to sit in the chair by the window. “Why do you have this snake?”

  “A couple years ago I was mowing the lawn.”

  Iris shook her head in a way he’d learned meant she didn’t understand.

  “The short grass around the house? When the weather gets warmer, it has to be cut once a week.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Oh, you mean why do we bother?”

  She nodded.

  “So people can walk across it, play on it, I guess.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone do that.”

  “Maybe more when we were little.”

  She nodded, unconvinced.

  “Anyway, I was mowing the grass, with a machine. Normally we pay someone to do it, but they hadn’t come for some reason. Mom was having people over and wanted it cut, so she asked me.”

  “The people were going to play on the lawn?”

  “No. They were going to be near the lawn, so she wanted it to look nice.”

  Iris didn’t even nod. She was right. It was stupid.

  Reid sighed. “So the lawn mower, the machine, hits this snake. Just the tip of its tail got chopped off. He was only a foot long then.” He expected Iris to nod but she didn’t. “What?”

  “The snake would have healed if it was just the end of the tail.”

  “Well, I didn’t know that. I wanted to help it.”

  She smiled, just a little.

  Reid felt foolish. He gestured toward the cage. Vishnu was working on swallowing the mouse; it was halfway down, more actually, because getting past the mouse’s shoulders was the hard part. “He’s been here since. My dad was against it, didn’t want him in the house. He said a snake wasn’t worth getting upset about.”

  “Suzanne disagreed?”

  “Well, I don’t think she wanted it either, but she could see it mattered to me.”

  Reid paused, feeling he’d gotten to the important point of the story, the message he wanted to relate to Iris. His mother had backed him up. The snake was a reminder of that. His father always seemed to win. He was a winner! Brynn, too. Keeping the snake, with its strange odors, its sinister blackness, its appetite for live meals, was proof that sometimes the messy, the ugly, the imperfect could win. His father had offered to get him a snake from a pet store, one that didn’t smell and would accept dead prey, or frozen ones they could keep on hand, like those tamales from Whole Foods he loved. But Reid wouldn’t budge. He didn’t see why he should.

  Reid’s relationship with his father hadn’t deteriorated gradually. Reid could remember the exact day. He had been twelve, and his father had enrolled him in a summer tennis program at the club. Reid protested. He preferred baseball and reading. Tennis was nerve-racking. He held his breath the entire time the racket was in his hand, terrified the ball would go out or into the net, which it always did eventually. He couldn’t get over the inescapable fact that he could hit a dozen or more great shots in a single rally and still lose the point. And after that point was another. On and on and on.

  But his father was adamant. “Your forehand will be so strong from baseball. You’ll see.”

  Reid had no choice but to give in. And he did try—he wasn’t a quitter—but that didn’t add up to much. Many of the boys played year-round, and some who didn’t were more talented and motivated than he was. Reid performed well in the drills. His father was right about his forehand, and Reid had a long reach at the net. But when it came to playing for points, the weight of the matches bore down on him. He concentrated on not losing badly, which wasn’t the same as trying to win. His father monitored his performance, stopping by to chat with the coaches and showing up at random times. Reid became irritated. He felt he’d done what his father wanted. He was wasting twelve hours a week at tennis camp, but for his father, it wasn’t enough.

  Reid sat out the midsummer tournament, feigning illness, but found no way to avoid the competition at the summer’s end. It was single-elimination format. He’d won his first match, beating a kid who wanted to be there less than he did. His father was so overjoyed it made Reid want to drill a forehand into his father’s stomach. Reid’s opponent for the second match that afternoon was a boy Reid knew he could beat if he tried. But something in him turned sour. His father stayed to watch, even though it was midweek and he should have been at work. That caused the sourness inside Reid to harden into a rank mass, the way a dead animal becomes a vile piece of flattened leather. He threw the match but he did it slowly, playing well at first, then losing his edge, finally faltering completely. He ended the match on his service game with four double faults, then shook his opponent’s hand and walked off the court.

  His father practically assaulted him. “What the hell happened?”

  “I didn’t need to win.”

  “What do you mean? You had that match.”

  Reid shrugged. “What difference does it make?”

  Blood rushed to his father’s face, and it frightened Reid. His father was pretty even tempered. “What difference? You have everything. You have every privilege imaginable. You don’t have the right to throw things away, to be mediocre.”

  Reid felt his own cheeks redden. He raised his arm to wipe his forehead on the sleeve of his polo shirt.

  His father snatched his arm out of the air.

  Reid yanked his arm back. “What? It’s just tennis.” But even as he said it, he knew it was a weak defense, although he wasn’t sure why.

  “‘Just tennis.’ You won’t get anywhere with that sort of thinking.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to get anywhere.”

  His father laughed and shook his head. “You don’t know it yet, but you’ll find out. If you don’t have ambition, Reid, you’re not a man. You’re not anything.”

  Reid glared at his father. Irritation and confusion and pure emotion he didn’t know how to define roiled inside him. He walked away, dropping his tennis bag at his father’s feet. Later, in his room, he scratched through his father’s words, pulling at them like rubber bands binding him. And much later, when his anger subsided, he explored the idea that his father was wrong, that it was possible to be a man, a good man, perhaps better than his father, with no ambition at all.

  Now, in his room, Reid returned his attention to the snake, and to Iris, who was looking out the window and frowning.

  “What?” Reid said, curious as much as frustrated.

  “Why is Vishnu still here? He healed a long time ago.”

  Reid opened his mouth to explain, but what could he say? That having a snake was cool? That he got perverse enjoyment from knowing his father didn’t want it here?

  “Tell you what, Iris.” He crossed to his desk and picked up his laptop. “Let’s go downstairs where the Wi-Fi is stronger, and maybe we can look for a good place to set Vishnu free.”

  Brynn came downstairs on the hunt for ice cream. On her way through the living room, she spotted Reid’s head sticking out over the back of the couch. It had been forever since they’d hung out, just the two of them. Either she or Reid—or both—were too busy nursing a wound from a run-in or a slight, or just feeling that their mom or dad had favored the other. Maybe their parents should’ve had three kids so it’d be harder
to feel singled out, or alone.

  She decided she’d test the waters, see if Reid could manage not to be a self-righteous jerk for a change.

  “Hey, you want some ice cream?” Brynn came around the couch. Shit. The Stray was curled up in the corner of the couch. She was such a runt, Brynn hadn’t seen her. Reid was scrolling around a map on his laptop. Iris closed her eyes when the image moved. Unbelievable.

  “Sounds good.” Reid gave a guarded look and said to Iris, “Want some?”

  Iris untangled herself. She had this creepy way of tucking her arms and legs around her body, all elbows and head, like a chick stuffed inside a shell, big eyed and wet. “Okay.”

  Brynn clenched her teeth. All she’d wanted was to chill with her brother for a while, and now she was the ice cream waitress. She stomped off to the kitchen before her anger flew out of her. She didn’t like to lose control; it frightened her. But so many things pissed her off, especially since Iris had arrived. Their family was kind of messed up—whose wasn’t?—but Iris somehow made it all too obvious, at least to Brynn. She could see how her mother was hungry to pour her time and energy into another project, in this case a random kid somehow more worthwhile than her own daughter. Not exactly an ego boost. She could see how her dad, strong in every other way, didn’t have the balls to stand up to her mother and keep this misfit from ruining their lives. And right now, Brynn could see all too clearly how her brother, who once upon a time was a cute, lovable kid, had become such an absolute loser that he would actually choose an anorexic hillbilly half mute over her.

  She yanked open the freezer compartment and pulled out the ice cream containers: a new pint of Chunky Monkey (her brother’s favorite), a half-pint of Cherry Garcia (her dad’s), and a near-empty chocolate gelato. The quart of vanilla her mother always kept on hand didn’t count. It was so fucking symbolic that Brynn’s favorite dessert was the one they were out of. How hard was it to go shopping?

  Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She checked the screen: a text from Robby. They’d been exchanging texts and Snapchats practically every day since she’d found him on Tinder roulette two weeks ago, and they’d had one extremely memorable Skype session at the end of which he’d asked her to take off her shirt. She’d given him a flash—some boob—then said she had to go, which was sort of true since she could hear her parents coming upstairs. She hadn’t heard from him since.