done fussing?” Craig pulled his tired eyes off of him.
Their mom unfolded her paper napkin and covered the uneaten food on her plate. On the radio a choir was singing. When the music ended, she brushed roughly at her lap as if the voices had settled there. Lyle hadn’t wanted to cause trouble, but they were so touchy about what a person could say.
Craig set their plates in the sink and found her sedatives in the cupboard, she took the pill with her milk, and he got his brother’s pills and offered him one. Lyle didn’t cup his hand to receive it, so Craig placed it on the table so that it rested in one of the birds’ heads in the glass.
“I only take one pill anymore,” Lyle said. “Took it this morning.”
“Now you’re taking two.”
“No, just one now. I didn’t say anything wrong.”
Craig showed him two fingers in the air.
“Dad never would have taken any medication,” Lyle said.
“Maybe he should have.”
“I’ll take it if I can see one of the photo albums.”
“Nope. Told you already.”
“Can I see some pictures of Dad?”
His brother didn’t speak, but Lyle figured he knew what the answer would be. Most of the photographs of his dad had Lila in them, so they were off limits too. But his brother and mom had never wanted to talk about his dad, either. Maybe anyone dead was off limits.
“I can’t see any pictures, then,” Lyle said. “Not one.”
“Quit talking, and take your pill.”
“I didn’t say her name.”
Craig’s mouth twitched. “I said I heard all the talk I want to hear. Take the pill, right now.”
Lyle tucked the pill beneath the spiny egg on his plate. His brother flipped the egg over, with the pill stuck in its yolk—a sick, downward-looking eye—removed the plate, and dropped the pill on the cloth placemat printed in tiny runaway stagecoaches.
Lyle set the pill on his tongue and sipped milk. In the living room, he fell back on the couch, spat the pill into his hand, and dropped it between two cushions. Then he worked the remote through the channels. After watching part of a show where people competed by eating bananas, he turned to a special about high school cheerleading squads. A girl fell from a pyramid of cheerleaders and two of them caught her before she hit the floor. Another falling girl was caught. It was only beautiful kids who people mourned. When one of them died the way his sister did, everyone came out with tears and good words. In fact, they kept talking for weeks and wouldn’t shut up. It was okay to talk about the pretty ones—it was even a pleasure. Everybody wanted a piece of a death like that.
The teapot made a banshee noise. Craig and his mom rattled spoons in their cups of instant coffee. They were talking low-voiced beneath the gospel music and TV. Lyle heard snatches of their conversation. He heard her say, “Pray that boy doesn’t go crazy on us next,” and, “He ain’t a bad one clear through. He has his merit points.”
His eyes pinched when she said he wasn’t bad. When she was soft, he loved her in a way he couldn’t at other times. But her softness angered him, too, because he disliked it that he cared. For a moment he wanted to tell her that he wished he could do what she wanted him to. Back when he was in youth group, in the mountains—before he “set Jesus on the shelf,” as she put it—she had been warm toward him, and he had been part of things.
That night he left the apartment after his brother and mom went to bed. His night legs were coming into him, and he had a fierce need to run. The air smelled of wet dirt, as if the ground nearby had been freshly turned. Flying rain stung his face. He loped along the tracks downtown, holding his folded, sharp-pointed umbrella in one hand. The tracks rose onto an embankment, and he walked on the ties, between window ledges close enough to leap onto. In one building, a man made rows of bread dough on a table, tattoos of red ropes looping his arms, a stiff cone of beard. The man sang with the stereo, and Lyle heard the edges of his furious song. A few minutes later, in a phone booth outside of the A&W, he searched his pockets for change, then turned over his sister’s photograph, smelled the peppermint ink from the candy cane pen, and dialed the number.
The woman who picked up wanted to know who this was and what he wanted. When he heard himself breathing into the phone, he moved the mouthpiece to his chin, wanting to explain that he was one of the good kids—from the mountains, raised Christian. A Mexican mother would like hearing that.
She asked again who he was and he told her his name.
“Liar?” she said. “This is Liar?”
He corrected her, and she pronounced his name as if the word was hard to get her mouth around: “Li-ar,” she said.
“No. Lyle. Lyle.”
Rosa got on the phone. “Can you come out?” he said.
“It’s too late,” she whispered. “Usually my parents are asleep by now, but they’re letting my little sister stay up and watch this stupid movie. Can you meet me tomorrow night? I have ballet in the afternoon, but we could meet at Levi’s at ten, if that’s not too late. Good. My parents usually go to sleep at nine thirty.”
“You’re up on Chambers? What’s your last name?”
“Larios,” she said. “What’s your number?”
He gave it to her and asked what grade she was in. “Ninth,” she said—two years younger, but she seemed his age. When he hung up he found the name in the phone book, matching the number with the address, 87 Skyline.
He walked the two miles of boulevard from downtown and tramped up Chambers. The streetlights tapered in the distance above, where the road met sky. As he crested the hill, he unbuttoned his jacket for the wind to cool him and turned onto Skyline. Houses rested on stilts. He glimpsed the city in the spaces between them.
At Rosa’s house, he stepped along a raised walkway to the back deck. The city spread shimmering below him. In the first window he saw Rosa, cross-legged on her bed in a bathrobe, reading a book in her lap. When she turned to lift a mug from the night table, her robe, tied at the waist, pulled against her body. As she read she made expressions of frustration and disgust. Stuffed animals lay at her headboard. A poster of black-haired men hung on the wall above. The Cure. He had never heard of them. She reached the book to the floor—a man on the cover fitted a ring onto a woman’s finger—and turned off the light; he ducked and leaned against the wall for a moment.
He crept along the railing and saw the family in the living room. He crouched down. City lights quaked like outlying fires in the sliding glass window. They probably couldn’t see him past their own reflections. A five-year-old girl jumped on a small trampoline. Mr. Larios lay sleeping on the couch in a tie and glasses, frowning, his arms pressed to his chest as if he were holding onto something tightly in his dream. His wife, a bulky woman with a large brown face, sat on the carpet before a stack of files. The little girl spoke words Lyle couldn’t hear. Mrs. Larios tapped a finger to her lips to shush the girl. When the girl spoke again, Mr. Larios opened his eyes. “Why can’t you shut her up!” he yelled. He sat up and bowed his head into his hands, then smoothed his hair. From the coffee
