“So we can listen to the news in our room,” Pete explained. If we’d had cell phones like some of our friends did, it would have been easy to follow along with what was happening, but Mom and Dad said we had to wait until we were thirteen. “You’ll thank me when you get older,” Dad liked to say whenever Pete brought it up, although he never actually explained why we would thank him. I think it had something to do with having proper childhoods.
“Good idea,” I said. Pete didn’t have those often, so I liked to give him credit when he did.
Inside, Pete took the radio up to our room and then came back down and joined me on the floor in front of the TV, much like he used to on Saturday mornings when we watched cartoons, many of which I still watched by myself, while Pete had now “grown out of them,” as he liked to say. If that was true, then how come he was always asking me about what was happening with Optimus Prime or the Rebel Alliance? Why was he in such a rush to grow up if he wasn’t tired of being a kid yet?
Mom and Dad had obviously had whatever talk they’d needed to have while we were outside, although Mom didn’t really seem any more relaxed. I glanced sideways to catch Dad squeezing her shoulder in that way he did whenever she was too tense. She smiled at him in return.
“I think I’ll go dig out those candles now,” she said, more to get away from the news, I think, than out of any sense of urgency to prepare for another power outage.
“I need you two to behave tonight,” Dad said to us after she left the room. “Your mom’s under a lot of stress right now.”
“I am behaving,” said Pete, a little defensively.
“I didn’t say you weren’t,” Dad replied. “I’m just telling you, okay?”
“Okay,” we both agreed.
The big red BREAKING NEWS box still covered a third of the TV screen, but there didn’t really seem to be anything breaking right at the moment. The dark skies had come and gone all over the world, a vast wave that seemed to have left few places unaffected. Now the same question was on everyone’s mind: Just how many people had been lost? A thousand? Ten thousand? More?
The phone rang and Dad went to answer it even though Mom was yelling, “I’ll get it!” as she hurried back up the stairs from the basement.
“I think it might be like a plague,” said Pete. We were alone now in the living room. “Only instead of people getting sick, they’re turning to glass.”
“I don’t think viruses can do that, Pete.” I didn’t care to consider the consequences of a wider spread. I didn’t really want to think about any of it. I wanted to wind back the clock and have the whole day turn out differently. I’d even change the part about me landing my seedpod on the first try. It’s not like I really got to enjoy my win anyway. I didn’t even get my root beer float.
SIX
Mr. Crandall, as it turned out, wasn’t the only victim in town.
Charlie Watts had turned to glass as well, while unloading stock in the back room of the Safeway store. He was twenty years old, a former junior hockey star who had just missed going pro. The Edmonton Oilers had actually drafted him in the fifth round when he was seventeen, but then a knee injury took him out for a year, and when he returned he just didn’t have the moves that he used to. After a few unproductive months with the Oilers’ farm team, he was forced to hang up his skates for good. It was a sad story that everyone in town knew well.
“Man,” said Pete, shaking his head. “Talk about bad luck.” I could tell that he was truly upset, maybe because he could sort of relate to Charlie—Pete played hockey, too—or maybe just because Charlie was still young and in his prime (aside from his knee problem); if people like him weren’t safe, then who was?
The news quickly became a parade of arguing scientists and religious doom-and-gloom types, each with their own ideas about what was happening. They talked about random fluctuations in energy and matter and atmospheric anomalies; they threw around words like revelations and rapture and reckoning, as if anything serious that had to do with God must start with the letter R.
“That’s it,” Dad said finally, having obviously heard enough. “I’m shutting it off.” And he did, even as Pete begged him not to.
“It’s not even suppertime yet!” Pete complained. It was a rule in our house that the TV couldn’t be on during supper. Mealtime was family time.
Dad checked his watch and then glanced sideways at Mom. Truth be told, our regular suppertime had already come and gone.
Mom’s eyes went suddenly wide at this realization. “Oh my God!” she said. “I completely forgot!”
Dad smiled. “Given the circumstances,” he said, “I would have been more surprised if you’d remembered.”
“Can we have hot dogs?” Pete asked hopefully. If Pete had his way, hot dogs would be on the menu every night of the week.
“Sure,” said Dad. “Why not?”
Five minutes later Dad was standing outside in front of the barbecue with a package of all-beef franks. Lots of people in town preferred propane over briquettes, but Dad bucked the trend. The tradition of using charcoal was far more important to him than getting the meat cooked five minutes faster.
I watched as he rotated the dogs methodically, as if there were a prize for grilling them perfectly even all the way around. He was all concentration and didn’t look up or over at me once.
When he was finished, we sat at the table and ate in silence. As usual, Pete took so long getting his buns ready with mustard, ketchup, and relish that his hot dogs must have been almost cold by the time he finally bit into them. I ate mine plain, without even really tasting them. I chewed and swallowed and thought about all those glass bodies.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” Dad assured me, as if he’d been reading my mind. That happened sometimes, or at least it seemed to. It was like we were both on the same wavelength or something, whereas Pete was always just a little out of tune.
“You’ve got crumbs in your beard,” I told him. It happened every time Dad ate bread. Normally I waited for Mom to point it out to him, but this time I didn’t. Maybe I was just trying to change the subject.
Pete kept looking at the black TV screen, as if willing it to come back on.
The phone rang again just as we were finishing eating. Mom answered, and then handed the phone over to Dad. It was Uncle Dean, checking in to see how we were doing.
“I’m going to go over there and get him,” said Dad after he hung up a few minutes later. “I don’t think he should be alone tonight.”
Uncle Dean had never married. Mom said it was because Dean wasn’t attracted to the “marrying type,” whatever that meant.
“Why doesn’t he just drive over here himself?” Mom asked. “Why do you have to go?”
“He’s already had a few beers,” Dad replied. “He shouldn’t be driving.”
Mom sighed. “Fine,” she said, “but no extra stops.”
“I’ll be back in a flash,” Dad promised her.
As it happened, a flash was about fifteen minutes.
Pete and I sat waiting at the living room window, both of us spooked into silence by how quiet the neighborhood had become. Normally on a summer night like this one, there would be all sorts of noise, from lawn mowers and sprinklers to the constant shrieks and laughter of the Olson girls jumping rope or playing hopscotch down the way.
“It’s like a ghost town,” said Pete, and it really was, at least for a moment.
But then we saw movement, a pair of bikes coming down the street, each of them ridden by an identical slouching teen.
“The Messam twins,” said Pete, his voice barely more than a whisper, as if the schoolyard menaces might somehow hear him across the distance through the double-paned glass.
Instinctively, we both pulled back from the window, our fear of the mysterious glass plague momentarily replaced by a fear we’d shared since the twins first moved to Griever’s Mill almost two years before.
The worst thing about the brothers was how random they could be
in their bullying. There were times when Pete and I went weeks without either of them casting so much as a glance in our direction, but the minute we let our guards down and started feeling safe—wham—they were on us like gangbusters. It was the same for everyone they harassed. I think they fed off the kind of fear inspired by their own unpredictability. Mom said they had a sickness inside their souls.
I had no idea what the twins were doing out riding while everyone else was hunkered down with their families waiting for news, but whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.
“Probably out looking for stuff to steal,” said Pete. “While everyone is distracted.”
I nodded and thought to myself that if the sky over Griever’s Mill turned black a second time, karma should make the twins its next two victims. If only the universe worked that way.
Even after they’d ridden out of sight, we kept our distance from the window in case they circled the block and spotted us on a second pass. Eye contact alone was sometimes enough to get their evil gears turning. As it turned out, Dad and Uncle Dean got home before that could happen.
Uncle Dean came in wearing a casual smile and carrying an eighteen-pack of beer. He kicked off his boots and threw a glance at me and Pete, his gaze shifting sideways momentarily to the open curtain. “Zombie watch?” he asked.
“Something like that,” said Pete.
“Well, I wouldn’t worry if I were you,” Uncle Dean replied with a wink. “I hear they only eat brains.”
Pete scowled, but I could tell he was smiling underneath. It was exactly the sort of joke he would have made, if only he had thought of it first.
Just having Uncle Dean in the room was enough to make me feel a little bit more at ease. It wasn’t because he was always goofing around or cracking jokes (although he often was); it was more just the way he carried himself, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
He plopped himself down on the couch and uncapped a beer.
“So where are the circus clowns?” he asked, somehow managing to keep a straight face. “Your dad promised me circus clowns.”
SEVEN
The neighborhood grew rowdy just before sunset, or at least a part of it did. This was nothing new, though; it happened almost every night now.
“Right on time,” said Mom as a chorus of shrieks and jeers erupted out in our yard.
A band of blue jays had just arrived for their evening meal.
Blue jays are flashy birds—not just in the way they look, but also in the way they behave. From bullies and thieves to tricksters and helpers, there was no telling how the winged wonders might act from one day to the next. Sometimes they came to the feeders like a pack of wolves, crests raised and bristling with attitude, pretty much daring all the other birds to stand in their way, which few ever did. Other times they approached more cleverly, perfectly mimicking the call of a predator (usually a red-tailed hawk) in order to scare all the feeding birds away. The blue jays could then swoop in and eat in peace, at least for a moment or two, until the scattered birds got their confidence back. Still other times, the jays would perch in high branches above the feeders and appear to stand guard there, no longer imitating predators but actually watching for them and then sounding a genuine alarm if any appeared.
On this particular night, they were doing their wolf pack routine. I watched from the window as they came in at all angles, surrounding a particularly prized peanut canister as if it were a caribou separated from the rest of its herd, and scaring away a pair of white-breasted nuthatches in the process.
“Troublemakers,” said Mom, standing beside me. She was smiling, though, amused at the band’s antics.
That’s what a group of blue jays is called: a “band.” It makes sense, too, since jays are like rock stars out on the town, decked out in their finest blues, which, in reality, aren’t even blues at all. Blue jay feathers are a trick. The pigment is actually brown. It’s just the way that the cells in the feathers scatter light that gives them their false appearance.
I was surprised when I learned that. I guess some things you just take for granted, like what you see is what you get, even though it isn’t always.
Dad used to say that you had to be careful about who and what you believed, because unlike blue jays, who only have one disguise and who only ever seem to lie for just one purpose, humans wear lots of different masks and tell all sorts of crazy stories for all sorts of crazy reasons, some of which might not even make a lick of sense.
“Just trust your gut,” Dad would say. “It’s the best BS meter you have.”
I was reminded of all this as the sound of the jays outside converged with the sound of my dad scoffing at the TV screen.
“What a bunch of baloney,” he said.
In addition to all the accounts of dark skies and mysterious transformations—“glassification,” they were now calling it—some reporters were now talking to individuals who were claiming to have witnessed other strange phenomena as well, pretty much everything from ghosts and UFOs to spontaneous human combustion. None of it was confirmed, of course.
“They’re really coming out of the woodwork now, aren’t they?” said Uncle Dean.
“Who are?” asked Pete.
“The nutballs,” said Dad. “They want their fifteen minutes.”
“Well, let’s not give it to them,” said Mom. “Let’s turn it off and do something else.”
“Like what?” said Pete, who was still a bit sour about the loss of our computer. Uncle Dean had looked at it and declared it “pooched.” He said it was hardware, not software.
“How about we play a game?” I suggested. A board game, I meant. We usually only played them on the weekends when Dad didn’t have a bunch of paperwork to do, but since Uncle Dean was over and the whole world appeared to be going crazy, I figured that maybe we could break from routine. We could definitely all do with a break from reality.
Pete immediately nominated Risk, but since Mom was going to be playing and didn’t appreciate that game, Dad overruled him and picked Monopoly instead, which was okay by me since I sometimes actually won at that one. I went upstairs to grab the box from the closet, and a few minutes later we were on our way.
“I call top hat,” said Pete, predictably. He was the only one who ever wanted to play with that piece, but for some reason he always felt the need to claim it.
Uncle Dean grabbed the car, while Mom picked the thimble and Dad the wheelbarrow, which left only me, still hemming and hawing over what I felt like using. Sometimes I picked the dog or the boot, but I liked the iron as well, not because of what it was, but simply because it had a nice streamlined look to it. Today I took the boot.
It felt weird to be setting up for a game considering what we knew and what was happening. It almost felt wrong. But what were we supposed to do? It wasn’t as if we’d been given any instructions—like if your house is on fire and you need to get out, stay low to the floor where the smoke is thinnest, or if you’re outside and there’s lightning, don’t lean up against a tree because if it gets struck, the current could run straight through the trunk and into you.
All we could really do was just wait, and if you’re going to be waiting anyway, you might as well be rolling dice and buying up real estate.
As always, Pete ignored all the lower-priced properties and tried only for the ritzy ones like Marvin Gardens, Pennsylvania Avenue, and Boardwalk. It was a strategy that only ever worked if he got lucky on his first few trips around the board, but for some reason, he remained committed to it.
I was more of a buy-anything-and-put-up-houses-as-fast-as-you-can type player, which had its own risks but seemed more sensible overall.
On this particular occasion, I managed to scoop up all the red properties in only four circuits, this while Pete repeatedly landed on Chance or Luxury Tax, which had him shaking his head and scoffing as if the will of the universe had been bent against him.
“You could have bought railroads,” I reminded him. He’d landed on at least
two of them.
“So?” he said. “Who the heck wants railroads? You can’t even put hotels on them.”
I just shrugged. I thought the railroads were great, if only just because they provided you with safe landing areas when you owned them.
“Woo-hoo!” said Uncle Dean with exaggerated excitement as he passed Go and landed on Baltic Avenue. “A biker bar to go with my bowling alley!” He’d purchased Mediterranean Avenue just a few turns before.
“You’re on the fast track to high society,” said Dad with a laugh.
“The Hamptons, here I come!” Uncle Dean replied. Mom laughed then, too, and I had to smile, even though I didn’t really get what the joke was.
The game continued, and it wasn’t long before houses and hotels sprang up all over the place. I wasn’t doing well. My red properties were keeping me afloat, but I hadn’t managed to get a set of anything else. I was faring better than Pete, though. In a desperate bid to stay alive, he ended up trading away two yellow properties so that he had Park Place and Boardwalk both. But it was too little too late; when next he landed on Pacific, Mom cleaned him right out.
I braced myself for the usual complaints and excuses, everything from dumb rules or accounting errors to unlucky rolls of the dice. Pete was a sore loser, no matter what the game, so I knew it had to be coming. Or at least I thought it had to be coming.
As it happened, something else came first. Or, rather, something else went, namely our power. One second Pete was scowling down at the game board, deconstructing how it all went wrong, and the next he was saying “Oh crap…” into the darkness.
EIGHT
The sun had long since set, so it wasn’t just dark; it was pitch-black. It immediately came to mind that if anyone in the room turned to glass, none of us would even see it happening. I started to freak out a little at the thought. My chest felt tight and my heart began to pound. That’s when it started: a low rumbling outside. A second later there was a flash, followed by more rumbling, closer now.
The Absence of Sparrows Page 3