Eric Puchner: Model Home

His wife had disappeared from the kitchen. Warren got up from his stool at the counter and went to find her. The hallway, like their room itself, was decorated with shell sculptures and turd-colored macramé things and paintings not unlike the splotch of oil staining the driveway. Camille had bought them all at a store called Creativity Unleashed, which sold art by developmentally disabled people. Mandy Rogers’s disappearance had inspired her to invest in heroically unattractive art. She’d wanted to hang it all over the house, but the kids had refused to adorn their walls with “retard paintings” and the bulk had ended up in their bedroom. When Warren objected, wondering if some types of creativity weren’t better off leashed, Camille had called him hardhearted. He couldn’t tell her it was the waste of money that frightened him.

Now he found his wife in the bathroom, tugging at her tennis skirt instead of getting dressed for work. He had to remind himself it was Saturday. Camille made educational videos for the public school system, and Warren often felt guilty for not taking it as seriously as she did. It was her goodness — her belief in higher rewards than money — that he’d always been attracted to.

“Where did Jonas get orange socks?” he asked, watching her put on some lipstick.

“He picked them out at Nordstrom’s,” Camille said.

“You bought them for him?”

“How was I supposed to know he’d dress up like that?”

Warren sat on the bed to untie his sneakers. “Given the choice between a slow kid and a genius who dresses like a carrot, I might have chosen the former.”

“Any word from the police?” she asked.

“What?”

“About the Chrysler! Did they learn anything?”

Warren shook his head. “Probably scattered all over the state by now,” he said.

Thankfully, Camille didn’t seem to question this and began dabbing her lips with a Kleenex. A little pink T, like a cat’s nose, stained the middle. She was still lovely: blond hair and the sort of wholesome, cheerleadery face, freckled and wide-eyed and slightly bucktoothed, that caused people to smile at her from their cars. She was a Midwesterner in the way Blackbeard was a pirate: iconic to the species. Even when she was angry at Warren she seemed hopelessly preppy, her face a cardigan pink. He wanted to tell her that his project in the desert — for which he’d sacrificed everything, his family’s own future — was a disaster. Everything they had was in peril. If she knew, they could face down the debt collectors — the angry phone calls and investors — together. It would be like before they were married, when Warren was in law school in Chicago and they were living in a run-down studio in Rogers Park, so poor they’d been forced to eat a moose Camille’s brother had shot in Michigan. They’d survived on ground moose meat all winter, using Hamburger Helper to mask the flavor. Moose Helper, they’d called it, laughing at the TV commercials they’d thought up as a joke.

Warren got up from the bed and kissed Camille’s neck, holding the faint bulges that had recently formed at her waist. She turned around in surprise.

“Camille…”

The surprise on her face melted to concern. “What is it?”

“There’s something…”

He couldn’t meet her eyes. Last week, making love, she’d said something to him strange and terrible, a confession of despair. I want to die. Through the bedroom window, he could see Dustin waxing his surfboard in the backyard, kneeling on the lawn while Jonas practiced his fencing moves. The sun had broken through the mist, lighting the persimmon tree near the garden into a blaze of orange fruit. Beneath it, lunging in the sunlight, his fruit-colored son looked weirdly beautiful.

“Mr. Leonard,” Warren said quietly. “Maybe it’s time we had him looked at.”

Lyle’s mother had to drive her to work, a universe of suck, because her dad’s car had been stolen from the driveway and he’d had to borrow Lyle’s Renault, which despite having the words “Le Car” stencilled on the door in bubble letters was infinitely less embarrassing than riding with her mom. They drove through the hills of Herradura Estates, slow as a hearse. An anemic-looking cyclist overtook them on John’s Canyon Road. Lyle slid down in her seat. There were several things that embarrassed her about her mother’s Volvo: (1) it had her mother in it; (2) there was a Post-it note on the steering wheel that said RECYCLE BOTTLES; (3) the stereo was typically playing something called “Come, Ye Makers of Song”; (4) they were often mistaken for people with special needs, because her mom insisted on signaling before pulling into a parking space. Worst of all were the slogans plastered all over the back bumper: NO APARTHEID, KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY BODY, GOOD PLANETS ARE HARD TO FIND, and the more bluntly confessional I BRAKE FOR SPOTTED OWLS. (Dustin wanted to replace it with I DON’T NEED TO BRAKE, BECAUSE I’M BARELY MOVING.) Last week her mom had added COMMIT RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS, which to Lyle perfectly summed up her psychotic brand of cheerfulness.

There was someone jogging on the wood-chipped trail that ran along the road. Jennifer Boone, a senior at Palos Verdes High who lived down the street. Lyle slid even lower in her seat. Her mother honked as they passed, which caused Jennifer to startle like a deer and veer dangerously toward the bushes.

“I can’t believe Dad’s car got stolen,” Lyle said sullenly, hoping her mom was unrecognizable in tennis clothes. She was wear ing a pink Izod, a skirt fringed with Lilliputian pom-poms, and a see-through visor that made her look like a bank teller from Bonanza. “Isn’t that why we live in a gated community? To prevent theft?”

“This isn’t a gated community, honey. It’s an equestrian village.”

“There are gates, right? They go up and down?”

“That’s for the horses,” her mother said. “Otherwise people would drive through all day and scare them.”

Lyle squinted at her mom, wondering if she really believed they lived on a dude ranch in the suburban hills of L.A. An intriguing theory, since it might explain the visor. Lyle would not have been surprised if the horseback riders who occasionally ambled by their house were stooges brought in by Herradura Estates. She couldn’t help being impressed by the marketing genius involved — just paint some horse crossings on the street, call yourself an “equestrian village,” and rich people came running.

“This is all Dad’s fault for moving us out here,” she said. “The car getting stolen.”

“In Nashotah, you always complained about how boring it was. I seem to remember you saying you couldn’t wait to leave.”

“Anyway, the guards don’t do jack. They’re rent-a-cops. All you have to do is give the name of a resident.”

Her mom sighed, checking the rearview mirror. “Do you really have to be so negative? As long as people believe it, what does it matter?”

It mattered deeply. Lyle’s mother, of course, was one of the deceived. She read books with “healing” or “mindfulness” in the title. She went on check-writing sprees to save various birds of prey. Once she’d bought a newborn calf for a poor farmer in Mali and was shocked to receive a picture in the mail one day, a wordless thank-you, showing the meat drying in lurid strips from the farmer’s roof. She’d rushed to the bathroom in tears. He’s starving to death! Lyle wanted to shout. Of course he’s going to eat it! Most infuriating of all was her mother’s optimism: whenever Lyle said she disliked someone, her mom looked at her with her eyebrows pinched into a V, head cocked to one side as if she were draining an ear. “You don’t really hate that person,” she’d say. “You just have different values.”