Eric Puchner - Model Home

“We’re still a family,” she said. “Even if we don’t act like it.”

He didn’t dare move, in case she’d startle to her senses. I’m going on trial for burglary, he wanted to say, but was too grateful to speak. The fog where the peacock had been seemed to move in the headlights, as if haunted by its presence.

“The other day I forgot to pick Jonas up from fencing. He had to walk home in his uniform.”

She looked at him, a hank of hair dangling over one eye. There was a sadness in her face that had nothing to do with him. He touched her knee. Relaxing under his touch, her body seemed to fill with light, a miraculous brightening; only when high beams flooded the car did Warren realize there was someone behind them.

Camille pressed the gas, and they moved forward through the fog. At the house, she pulled up the driveway and stepped out of the car, standing there for a minute in the pale glow from the windows. She did not seem to want to go inside. A coin of pink turtleneck showed through her poncho on one side.

“There’s a hole in your poncho,” Warren said, joining her by the lawn.

“I know.”

“Sorry,” he said, catching himself. “Shawl.”

Camille lifted her arms, spreading her tasseled sleeves as if to show off their poncho-ness. She shot an imaginary gun in the air. A joke, Warren realized in amazement, though she seemed as serious as can be.

Jonas stood in front of the bathroom mirror. He raised his jacket in the air behind him and stretched it out like a cape, trying his hardest not to look like a four-legged prey animal. If you looked like a four-legged prey animal, you were doomed. Mountain lions were ravenous and not very good at counting legs.

“What the hell are you doing?” Dustin said. He was standing in the door to the bathroom, wearing flip-flops and a plain brown T-shirt. He might as well slather himself in blood and limp around like a wounded deer.

“Practicing for mountain lions.”

“We’re going to Joshua Tree,” his brother said. “To roast marshmallows.”

Jonas pointed at Dustin’s flip-flops. “If you fall down, a mountain lion will ambush you from behind and sever your spinal cord.”

“Don’t get my hopes up.”

This was typical of his brother’s attitude lately. His entire family seemed to be having some sort of meltdown. Despite the fact that Dustin hoped to get eaten by a mountain lion, despite the fact that his dad had been arrested for a mysterious reason no one would talk about, despite the fact that his sister was still covered in blisters and would have to stay in her tent to avoid the hundred-degree sun — despite all this, they were going to spend the weekend in the desert because they did it every year. His mother had explained this to him several times, as if trying to convince herself it was a good idea. Jonas wondered if perhaps their family were a dying organism. It was like those praying mantises who end up getting eaten by their partners but keep mating anyway, out of habit, despite the fact that they were missing a head.

His family thought he was strange, a weirdo, but it was everyone else that was crazy. Why did people take trips into the desert, where there was no water or electricity and you were even more likely to feel like someone’s imaginary friend? Jonas had a hard enough time believing in himself at home. Sometimes he’d spend all day around the house, practicing his fencing moves or watching TV while his family swerved around him, barely glancing his way as they rushed to the phone or slammed out of the house. It was as if the real Jonas had been picked up by a stranger and whisked away for good, locked up somewhere nobody could find. It was a feeling he could not explain to anyone, because he did not understand it himself. His mother had begun to kiss him lately, as if to make sure he was still there, but her need to keep proving it all the time only made him feel more like a ghost.

Jonas went into the kitchen, where Lyle was filling water bottles in the sink. A bag of marshmallows sat untended on the counter. After ripping the bag open with his teeth, Jonas impaled one of the marshmallows on a skewer and turned the stove up all the way, the burner sparking into a squiggling blue jellyfish. There was a real science to marshmallow roasting. The trick was to turn the thing ever so slowly, ten to twelve inches from the fire, so that it bruised magically but never crisped. He glanced up at his red-skinned sister, hoping to impress her, but she was already staring at the browning marshmallow. There seemed to be a connection between them. Jonas inched the skewer closer to the flame, and she winced. To get her attention, he was not above inflicting mental distress.

“Do you have to do that in here?” Lyle asked him.

“The stove’s in here. I’m practicing my technique.”

His mother popped into the kitchen, Mr. Leonard limping at her heels. She eyed Jonas’s marshmallow with lovely spellbound interest before bending to kiss him on the head. Jonas waited for his mother to look at him that way, so that his missing self would return. Instead she grabbed a marshmallow from the bag on the counter and stuck it in her mouth, chewing it like a horse. Lyle and Jonas stared at her.

“Did you just eat a marshmallow, Mom?” Lyle said. “For breakfast ?”

“Big whoops.” His mother grabbed the bag off the counter, turning to Jonas before heading back outside. “We’re leaving in five minutes. Don’t forget to turn the stove off.”

Jonas nodded, returning his attention to the marshmallow. It had gone black on one side, hopelessly crinkled.

“Did Mom just say ‘big whoops’?” Lyle asked.

“I think she meant one whoop,” Jonas said. “Singular.”

Lyle left the kitchen, slow as an astronaut, and he sat down with his burned marshmallow at the table. As he ate, tears of marshmallow dripped onto the open newspaper in front of him. Jonas closed the newspaper, trying to hide his mess, and a stillness uncurled around him. On the front page was Mandy Rogers’s father, a bouquet of microphones pushed into his face. He was standing in front of his house, holding a photo of her in his hand. The headline said: MANDY ROGERS FOUND DEAD IN ANAHEIM; MAN ARRESTED FOR FIRST DEGREE MURDER. Below the picture of Mandy’s father was a quote, a single sentence, that read: I hope they kill this sick animal even if he’s the last man on earth. The house was perfectly quiet. Jonas glanced at his orange cords and wrinkled orange Izod and felt a sudden desolate click, like a door being locked. He went into his room to change his clothes, his legs strange and flimsy, afraid to glance at the mirror in his closet. The air seemed to pass through him, a trickle of dust. Someone honked from the driveway. He parted his curtains and looked outside, where his family was waiting for him to appear.

Lyle’s idea of infernal punishment was riding in the backseat of the Volvo, still hobbled with sunburn, while the Boys of Killarney piped from the stereo. Even in her wildest imaginings of hell, she’d failed to incorporate any elbow horns. She’d failed to include a tin whistle performing the vocal line to “Hotel California.” She recalled her near-death experience in the bathtub, wishing now that the radio had fallen in the water and fried her like a doughnut. She could have spared herself the Boys of Killarney, not to mention a weekend in the Mojave Desert.

“Can we listen to the news?” she asked, interrupting a jiglike rendition of “Go Your Own Way.” Her mother was still snacking from the bag of marshmallows on the dashboard. Perhaps no one had informed her that they were made of sugar and pork skin.