“What?” Dad asked him.
“Dinner and a movie, once all this craziness is over.”
“Oh, Dean,” said Mom. Dad just laughed and shook his head.
Pete was still looking out the window at the panel in the truck box. “Do you even know how to hook it up?” he asked.
Uncle Dean shrugged. “Well, I unhooked it. It’s a beast, though. I’ll definitely need a hand getting it up to the roof.”
“I’ll help!” offered Pete.
“You can help from the ground,” Mom quickly replied.
Pete grumbled and rolled his eyes.
“I think the two of us can manage it,” said Dad.
They did, too, although not until after Uncle Dean had eaten a sandwich, during which time Dad recounted pretty much everything that Constable Sheery had told him, including the part about the Messam twins chasing off a would-be burglar in a mask sometime after midnight.
Uncle Dean narrowed his eyes and then looked right at me, my heart suddenly doing double-time in my chest. The fact that I’d been outside with a ninja mask at the exact same time of the night Lester had gotten hurt obviously wasn’t lost on him. The only question now was, would he tell Dad?
I sat there in agony as he slowly chewed and swallowed his last bite of peanut butter and jelly and washed it down with a big gulp of iced tea.
Here it comes, I thought. I’m totally busted. Pete would be, too. It didn’t matter that Uncle Dean had actually only seen me outside. Dad would never believe that I had gone to the Messams’ house all on my own. I wasn’t the scaredy-cat that Pete liked to make me out to be, but I wasn’t exactly SEAL Team Six material either. No, we were definitely both up the creek without a paddle.
Uncle Dean opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Dad started talking.
“I think I’ve still got those straps that we used when we hauled that big old deep freeze to the dump,” he said. “I should go dig them out. No sense in us wrecking our backs if we don’t have to.”
Uncle Dean considered this for a second, then replied, “Good idea. And while you’re doing that, I’ll get the boys to help me carry the bank of batteries.” He looked our way. “Go on and get your shoes on, guys.”
I could tell from the look in his eyes that it wasn’t batteries he was thinking about. He just wanted to get us outside, where he could question us without Mom overhearing. As it happened, though, she followed us out. I guess she wanted to make sure that we didn’t electrocute ourselves on the terminals.
There were only four batteries in total, so we each took one and carried it around the house to the backyard. I grabbed mine last, and Uncle Dean hung back for a second to say something to me.
“I don’t know what you and your brother got up to last night,” he said quietly, “but I know that you lied to me, and I expect a full explanation as soon as we’re through installing this panel. It’s either that, or I go to your dad. Your call.”
I swallowed hard. “I’ll tell you,” I promised.
“Good,” he said. “Now, get moving, and watch where you’re holding that thing or you’ll end up with grease all over your hands.”
TWENTY-ONE
Slowly but surely, Dad and Uncle Dean managed to muscle the panel up the ladder and onto the roof, where it was apparently a whole lot hotter than down on the ground. Dad swore after kneeling down for just a second, the sun-roasted shingles singeing his bare knees.
“That’s what you get for wearing cargo shorts,” Uncle Dean told him.
I’d never seen Uncle Dean in anything other than blue jeans. I guess we were kind of alike in that way. I didn’t ever wear shorts either, unless I was swimming.
Pete and I watched from the lawn in the front yard, far enough away that if anything fell, it wouldn’t land on us. Mom stood beside us.
A few of our neighbors came by for a minute or two, all of them wanting to know where the panel came from and whether there were any more of them available. Mr. Olson offered to lend a hand, but Dad politely declined, saying, “I think we’ve got a pretty good handle on things here, Steve. Thanks, though.”
One of Mr. Olson’s two young daughters, who couldn’t have been older than four, looked up at her father and said, “Daddy, how come they’re putting a giant mirror up on the roof?”
“It’s a magic mirror,” he told her. “It makes electricity.”
“Oooohhhhh!” she said, to which her older sister replied, “You don’t even know what electricity is.”
“Do, too,” the little girl insisted.
“C’mon, you two,” Mr. Olson told them. “Let’s go.”
They continued arguing as they headed back down the sidewalk, numerous sections of which were decorated with the colored chalk that the girls often used to draw out squares for hopscotch. Mom smiled at them as they went, and I wondered if she ever felt sad that she only had sons.
“That takes care of the rails,” Uncle Dean said from the roof. “Should be smooth sailing from here.” He put down his drill and then stood the panel up on its side to reposition it, only to pause as Dad tapped him on the shoulder and directed his attention to the north. They both stood there staring in that direction for a moment, and then slowly turned their heads and their bodies all the way around, taking in the whole horizon.
“What is it?” Mom asked them. “What are you seeing?” She turned in a circle herself and stood on her tiptoes to no avail. Above us was only blue.
Dad and Uncle Dean just kept on staring.
“It can’t possibly be moving that fast,” said Dad. “Can it?”
Uncle Dean glanced quickly over his left shoulder, and then back again over his right, as if he were trapped in a room and the walls were closing in on him. He didn’t need to answer Dad’s question; the truth was written all over his face.
I still couldn’t see any darkness from where I was standing, but I could feel it now, like a tightening noose encircling our town.
Mom put one hand on my shoulder and one on Pete’s and told us to get inside.
“Finish it later!” she yelled up at Dad and Uncle Dean.
Pete and I only went as far as the front step, where we stopped to wait for everyone else.
“Look!” said Pete, pointing across the street, where a billowing blackness was already starting to encroach on the sky.
Mom yelled again, to which Dad replied, “We just need to secure it! It’s a handful of screws. Won’t take but a minute.”
It was a minute they wouldn’t get, though. There was a sudden thump from up on the roof, followed by the harsh skkssshhhhh sound of something sliding along rough shingles, and Dad saying, “No! No! No!” And then the solar panel came over the eaves, its wire harness trailing behind like a comet’s tail. It hit the ground with the crash and crunch of broken glass and dented metal—details that I registered only vaguely, as my attention had shifted from one falling thing to another, the second being dark and human shaped, arms raised in a final pose that would last only seconds.
He landed fingers first on the sidewalk, so that his hands and his arms shattered a fraction of a second before his head and body, the fragments exploding out in every direction, peppering the nearest feeders like so much shrapnel, while his clothes came to rest in a strangely neat little pile, baseball cap first and running shoes last, both of them landing soles down and toes pointed in the same direction.
I might have flinched at the moment of impact, but other than that I don’t think I moved. It had all just happened so fast, like some sleight-of-hand trick my brain couldn’t keep up with.
I saw the pieces and heard Mom scream; I even felt a slight tingle on my left cheek where one of the fragments had grazed me in passing, but it wasn’t until Dad stepped right to the edge of the roof and stood there looking down that I finally made the connection between the carnage and my uncle Dean. A sudden heaviness pulled at my insides. Tears welled up in my eyes.
“Dean?” said Dad, my heart breaking at his confusion, at the
disbelief on his face. His younger brother had vanished instantly, like flash powder fed to a fire.
Mom begged Dad to get off the roof before the same thing happened to him. She was yelling at us as well, her fear as deep as the sky was black above us.
I felt a surge of fear then, too, not only for Dad but also for myself. The possibility of turning to glass was scary enough, but now I had to consider the timing of it. Like what if it happened to me while I was running or climbing a tree, or even just coming down the stairs in the morning for breakfast? The thought of it made me want to move in slow motion. I looked up at the sky again, and watched how it roiled and swirled, how it seemed to possess its own currents, a million shades of gray swimming this way and that. It would have been beautiful had it not been so terrifying, and as I stood there, marveling at it, I somehow knew that this time was different, that Griever’s Mill was about to join the countless other places that had already experienced the full wrath of whatever force this was.
The ladder clattered as Dad climbed down the rungs. He paused at the bottom, his eyes wide with shock and grief as he surveyed the damage. There were bits of Uncle Dean everywhere, some of them having flown as far away as the driveway. Dad would collect them, I knew, every single one he could find, although what he would do with them after, I had no idea. I had a brief vision of him sitting on a stool in the garage, hunched over like some sort of tinker with a tube of model glue, valiantly trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
He finally turned to look at Pete and me. “Are you two deaf?” he asked us, more firm than angry. “Your mother told you to get inside.”
Pete grabbed my shoulder and said, “C’mon.”
I kept thinking about the lie I’d told Uncle Dean the night before, and how I would never get the chance to explain myself now. I felt gutted that he’d left this world believing that I was dishonest. I hated lying, and I especially hated lying for Pete, which I felt like I had to do a little too often. But it was my fault for not saying no, for not standing up to him when I knew that I should.
I kept my distance from him once inside—partly out of anger, but mostly just because I felt like I needed some space, some room of my own to breathe. That’s the thing about being a little brother; you sometimes feel like you spend your whole life just orbiting around your older sibling, as if you’re a satellite instead of a planet in your own right.
Had Uncle Dean ever felt that way about Dad? If so, it never showed. They’d always seemed to me the best of friends, but I guess things might have been different when they were younger. I stood at the window and tried to imagine them at Pete’s and my ages, Dad the serious one and Uncle Dean the prankster, with maybe the kid brother getting the older one in trouble instead of the other way around. I’d never thought of them in that way before, and it just made it all hurt that much more.
A strange sense of hollowness began to creep into me, which perhaps was just my mind’s way of trying to insulate me from myself, from the grief and anxiety that might have otherwise overwhelmed me, the way they appeared to be overwhelming Mom. She’d barely moved since coming inside, and every time that Pete tried to talk to her, she just shushed him and held her head, as if the noise was too much to bear.
The darkness ended up staying for more than an hour, and the power stayed off for another two hours on top of that.
Dad carried Uncle Dean’s remains down into the basement, the fragments all gathered up into three different garbage bags. When he came back up a few minutes later, he was crying—not full-on sobbing or anything, but his eyes were noticeably wet and he was sniffling.
Mom seemed to snap out of it a little. She and Dad hugged for a minute before telling me and Pete to come over, too. We hugged as a family then, and I could feel Mom shaking. I wondered if she was going to be okay, if any of us were.
TWENTY-TWO
It’s hard, trying to get back to normal after losing someone you love. You sort of just drift, from one room into another, and from one moment into the next, until eventually you focus your energy on something random, because you need to, because it hurts too much to be idle and just keep thinking about it.
It took some convincing, but I finally managed to get Pete to put down his radio and play a card game with me. I suggested UNO, but it was War that sealed the deal, most likely because Pete had a habit of ending up with most of the face cards and aces, although not this time, or at least not after the first game.
Pete took me down in a close one to start off with, but then I thoroughly trounced him in the second game, forcing a rubber match, which we were halfway through when Dad got a call from Constable Sheery that he had to respond to. Dad didn’t say what it was about (he never did), but it was clear from the look on his face as he rushed out the door that it must be serious.
“Let’s finish this later,” said Pete. “I wanna see if something’s happening.”
“Nothing’s happening,” I told him. “Let’s just play.”
We had just finished a double showdown in which I’d managed to steal two jacks and an ace from Pete’s pile. I had a sneaking suspicion that if we didn’t finish the game now, we’d never get back to it. Most likely our cards would end up getting mysteriously mixed up while I wasn’t looking.
Pete huffed and flipped over a nine to my queen.
“I hate this game,” he said. “I don’t even know why I play it.”
He kept looking over at the stairs, as if the radio weren’t just on his mind now but actually exerting a pull on his body, like some sort of mind-control tractor beam. He was scared that he might be missing something important. That’s why he hadn’t wanted to play cards in the first place.
“So what if you miss something?” I’d asked him. “What’s the big deal?”
“I just hate not knowing,” he’d said.
We flipped again, Pete’s one and only ace taking my four of diamonds.
“What a waste,” he said, disgusted.
It went on for a while, as war often does, but eventually I triumphed, taking Pete’s last cards in an epic triple showdown.
“Finally,” said Pete, as if I’d been dragging the game out on purpose or something.
Dad arrived home right after we finished but didn’t immediately come inside. Instead he sat in his truck for a few minutes, the way he used to when he still smoked cigarettes. Had he started again?
“I’ll kill him,” said Mom, whose thoughts were obviously running parallel to my own. She opened the front door and stood there with her arms crossed, waiting. I figured she’d start giving him the third degree as soon as he walked in the door, but she didn’t, and as soon as I saw the look on Dad’s face, I understood why. Something was wrong.
“What is it?” Mom asked him. “What happened?”
“It’s George Crandall,” said Dad.
“He shattered, didn’t he?” said Pete.
Dad shook his head, real slow-like.
“What, then?” Mom asked him.
“He came back,” said Dad. “He came back to his body.”
“What?!” said Pete.
“Came back?” said Mom. She looked confused, like she couldn’t square Dad’s graveness with what should have been good news. I was confused, too. Didn’t we want people to come back? Wasn’t that what we were waiting for? But then I realized that old man Crandall must be different somehow. He must have changed, and not in a good way.
“I couldn’t get him to talk,” said Dad. “I tried, but I’m not even sure he can talk. He was just sitting there in the dark, staring at nothing. I snapped my fingers right in front of him and he didn’t even look at me. Marge says he’s been like that since this morning, when she found him. The only way she can get him to react at all is by turning the lights on.”
“What’s he do then?” I asked.
“He screams,” said Dad. “Covers his eyes up and screams like a bloody banshee.”
Mom gasped. “Why on earth would he do that?”
Dad sh
ook his head. “It’s just the light. Apparently he’s scared of it.”
Nobody said anything for a moment. But then I had to ask, “Why would he be scared of light?” If he was returning from a place of darkness, wouldn’t light be something to welcome?
“I have no idea,” said Dad.
“Maybe he’ll get better,” said Mom. “Maybe he just needs some time to settle back in.”
“Maybe,” said Dad. “For Marge’s sake, I hope you’re right.”
I hoped so, too, and not just for Mrs. Crandall’s sake either, because if Mr. Crandall had come back, it meant that others could come back, too, possibly in the same condition. There was a chance it had already happened and we just hadn’t heard about it yet.
We turned on the TV to find out, and the headline immediately confirmed it: HUNDREDS RETURN WORLDWIDE.
“I knew it!” said Pete. “I knew something was happening!”
The ones who’d come back were all like old man Crandall, just shells of their former selves, empty eyed and helpless. None of them were talking, and they all shared a fear of the light.
“Where have they been all this time?” reporters were asking. “What happened to them, and why are they back now? Are they dangerous?”
“Dangerous?” said Mom. “Why are they asking that?” She turned to Dad. “Did George look dangerous to you?”
Dad shook his head. “I don’t think he’s coherent enough to be dangerous.”
“Did he look different at all?” Pete asked him. “I read a story once about someone who saw the devil and it turned all his hair white.”
“His hair was already white,” I reminded him.
“I know,” said Pete. “But it could’ve fallen out or something.”
“He looked the same,” said Dad. “Just… empty.”
“Please stay with us,” a reporter went on. “We’ve just received word that a New York hypnotist is attempting to regress one of the returned, and we’re expecting a statement shortly.”
“What does regress mean?” I asked.
“It means they’re trying to make the person remember,” said Dad. “And if they remember, then maybe they’ll talk.”
The Absence of Sparrows Page 9