dazed first thought was that his mother had come for one of her rare visits, her headlights leaping against the back wall of their father’s den, and he felt alone and spiteful. He would not go with her, he decided. He would punish her. Every other Saturday, Hollis and his brother, Blake, would call their mother in Corpus Christi on the free long-distance line in his father’s downtown feed and grain brokerage firm, their father sitting in his swivel desk chair near the window, looking out at the tops of buildings along Congress Avenue, his face plowing a dark field. Blake, who would always talk first, told their mother how he’d gone over his handlebars on a bike ramp and knocked out a front tooth, and that Peter Parker knew he wasn’t a clone because he still loved Gwen Stacy even though she was dead and clones could never feel that kind of love, now, could they? Blake’s face shone with a need that made Hollis want to punch him. Their father handed Hollis the phone, and Hollis let the receiver drop and dangle by its cord at his feet. His father’s face crumbled like a dirt clod. He could hear their mother’s tinny voice down there calling his name. When he finally lifted the receiver to his ear, their mother asked if he’d forgotten about her visit. She exhaled and smoke rose into the ocean-blue sky of an open window somewhere. In his imaginings their mother looked like Gwen Stacy and he dressed her in Gwen Stacy’s black hair band, dark top, and purple skirt. The sun was unbearably bright against her bare legs. She pinned the phone between her chin and shoulder and painted her toenails pink, like seashells. Gwen Stacy had their mother’s crooked pinkie toes. Her body glistened and made him wince. On the phone, his mother told Hollis she was taking them to Six Flags on Saturday. His mother said, “You remember that crooked house?” She waited for Hollis to remember. “Casa Magnetica,” he said, grudgingly. A whole house tilted crazily so that water flowed backwards and oranges rolled uphill. She mentioned a few other exhibits and rides and got the names wrong and he corrected her. She said, “You were always better than me with names.” He was quiet. “We’ll have ourselves a time,” she said. Then that Saturday, their mother, who was so, so very late, stood in the driveway eclipsed in the Monte Carlo’s headlights, afraid to turn off the engine because it had died on her so many times on the way. Smoke rose above her head and at first Hollis thought her hair was on fire but then he could smell burnt oil and plastic and their father said, Carole, we better have a look at that, but when he opened the hood, fire rose up and burned the hair off his father’s forearm. His mother made a low, animal sound deep in her throat and held Hollis and his brother against her, and Hollis wanted to pull away because she smelled different and her breasts were larger and she had colored her hair ( frosted, she’d said) and he hated his brother, who touched strands of it with a kind of reverence. And the fire melted all the engine wires and blackened the hood, and their mother had to stay two extra days at a motel, where he and Blake swam in the pool and got sunburned and Hollis prayed for the Monte Carlo never to be fixed.
There was a banging on the driver’s window. “Mr. Finger?” a man’s voice said. Hollis didn’t say anything, lying very still under a blanket in the backseat, his body intensely aware of the coarseness of the weave, hoping the voice would just go away. He thought of the boy who’d busted his lip and committed the egregious theft of the conch. And he thought of Truck pulling his brother Trailer alongside Barton Springs Road, and the ways people were linked to one another in time and space by something just outside it, hidden from them always but intuited like the stars in the daytime. Or made into a likeness so that you saw differently. How could he string the everyday beads of his life from this? He didn’t know. But the voice outside wanted him to. “I don’t have anything you want!” he screamed, and realized it was true but also that he’d never be able to convince them of it. And a terrible light shone down and revealed his nakedness and shame.
A YEAR AFTER THE murders, Kate puts the house up for sale. Friends nod sympathetically, say they understand, all those memories. The girls. The marriage to Ray. A few mention different neighborhoods she might consider, a deal on a condo downtown. A new beginning, they say. But, of course, they don’t understand. How do you start over with the future gouged out? Margo Farbrother, her friend from the book group, had come by with food all that first week. Margo, with her dark skin like polished wood, high cheekbones. Unlike the others, she didn’t veer away from mentioning the girls, asking what the police knew, what they didn’t. One night, on the couch, Margo held Kate’s head in her lap and stroked her hair with her long fingers. Margo had her own problems. Her stepson, Michael, was in trouble. He’d dropped out of school, gotten arrested for several DWIs, was fucked up on drugs half the time. He and his father, Darnell, fighting constantly. On top of it all, Margo, with endometriosis, suddenly inexplicably pregnant for the first time. She will lose the baby within a month, though nobody knows that now.
On the couch, Kate shook as if she had a fever. Her teeth chattered. Margo seemed to know there was nothing to say. She bent over Kate like a bough, her cheek pressed to Kate’s ear. Kate could feel the rise of Margo’s belly against her back.
Some mornings Kate stands in front of the bathroom mirror and takes a measure of her body as if for the first time. Her areolas have grown darker with age and remind her of when she was pregnant with the girls. Faint stretch marks still pearl her hips and breasts. The pale fault line of a C-section scar just above her pubic bone, which divides her into before and after.
The Realtor, a squatty salt-and-pepper-haired woman from the suburbs — Kate’s consciously avoided the city ones friends recommend; she can’t stand the sympathetic stares — comes by the house and, among other things, wants Kate to remove the growing collage of framed photos of the girls from the living room wall. “Everyone wants to imagine their own brood up there,” the Realtor says, smiling in a disapproving, hands-on-hips way that reminds Kate of her mother. Kate still expects the Realtor to know their story — as if life didn’t go on elsewhere, as if people didn’t continue to show up for work, squabble with teenage children, slog through mediocre marriages. For a few seconds they stand in silence in front of the photos. Zadie and Elizabeth in their bikinis at the beach on Galveston Island; Zadie with her first boyfriend, Marcus, at the prom. An empty space next to it where a photo once hung of the girls and Ray, looking sheepish and gangly in his shorts, waving from the deck of his houseboat. Kate removed the photo after she’d found out the detectives had questioned him. He’d grown paler and paler in her mind until he’d become a space on the wall.
“A couple of head-turners,” the Realtor says, looking at the photos of the girls. “Who’d want to compete with that?” The Realtor smiles, fiddles with a wall dimmer switch. The Realtor looks out at the living room, says that Kate might want to remove the bead board paneling, go with a neutral color on the walls instead of the sea green, mentions a range of hours they might have showings, dates to host an open house. The ceiling fan makes a ticka ticka ticka sound.
Kate readjusts one of the larger studio portraits of the girls from the year before. Cheesy, they’d called it. Staged. Both their heads tilted awkwardly to one side as if listening to an invisible radio.
The detectives surprised Ray on his houseboat. This was three weeks after the murders, two weeks after Kate had told him to leave. Ray didn’t have a phone.
This is how Kate imagines it: Ray, shirtless and barefoot, hobbles to the cabin door on his bad ankles, both of which he shattered falling off the ice cream shop roof while repairing the rain gutters three years before. They ache in the mornings and he has to do exercises to keep them from stiffening up. Because of his ankles, Ray has had to give up his one-weekend-a-month Army Reserve stints in San Antonio. He has a ragged look. Needs a haircut, his beard trimmed, which Kate has done for him for years. Before he opens the door, the urge to talk to Kate seizes him. He wants her there to explain, in her controlled, adult way, to the detectives — one of whom clearly thinks Ray’s hiding something by the way he says “discrepancies” — that Ray loved the girls as his own, that he couldn’t have ever harmed them, that he wants to kill the men who did, even though he isn’t capable of violence, except for the one instance after
