Eric Puchner - Model Home

Save me, Warren believed he was saying. At least that’s the way it sounded in his dreams.

Warren did his best to forget these memories, but they infested his sleep nonetheless. One in particular seemed to haunt him: Dustin on fire, Warren hugging the flames from his body as they rolled together in the grass. The strange smoke choking Warren’s lungs. Of course, he would never be able to describe this to anyone. How could he hope to explain what it was like to choke on Dustin’s flesh? To breathe it into his lungs? The blanket in his arms going still and quiet, panting on top of him, no other sound from inside except a faint, buttery, unforgettable sizzling? All that day and night, half-crazed at the hospital, Warren coughed up black gobs of smoke, spitting out mouthfuls of his son.

Warren passed through the permanently raised gate of Auburn Fields and pulled into its empty block, the same one he’d painstakingly planned with the architect in order to maximize its density while maintaining a sense of neighborly warmth. Just as Dante’s sinners had their own punishments in hell, Warren had this putrid block of vacant homes. It was demonically tailored to his own sins. First he’d moved his family to California, to a house they couldn’t afford. Even when he might have pulled out, he’d pushed through with the project anyway, investing money intended for his children’s future. He’d lied to honest people about the dump. Now he’d gotten what he deserved, the same home he once tried to con others into buying.

Warren parked the Oldsmobile at the curb. He’d bought the car from some community college students for $500, when they — Warren’s family — were still living at the motel. It was in surprisingly good condition, the only drawback being a gigantic sticker on the back window, a red, white, and blue skull bisected by a lightning bolt. The college kids had said it would be easy to scrape off, but Warren had not found this to be the case, giving up after ten minutes of negligible progress.

Warren waited in the car, preparing to face his hungry children. The desert trilled around him in an endless throb of static. With the two-hour commute, Camille rarely got home before eight. By then she was so exhausted, talking to her was like bleeding around a shark. Warren couldn’t say hello without it turning into a fight. He’d been overwhelmed last summer when she’d seemed to forgive him; all their difficulties, their ingrown estrangement, had seemed to lift with the burden of his secret. But now Dustin’s accident had shown this reprieve for what it was: a cruel joke. If Camille had not blamed him before, if forgiveness had seemed like the answer to their problems, this did not seem to be the case any longer. Warren couldn’t look at her these days without feeling as if he’d lit Dustin on fire himself.

Inside the kitchen, Jonas was standing in front of the fridge, holding the door open as if to waste as much energy as he could. For a reason Warren couldn’t comprehend, he was wearing ski goggles. Warren’s toes curled. He knew that Jonas had left the stove on by mistake, but still he’d watch him stare into the open fridge, or forget to take his shoes off before tracking dirt all over the carpet, and his heart would clench with something close to loathing. It was wrong to feel this way, he knew it, but since Dustin’s tragedy he’d given up caring why he favored one son over the other — it was a fact of life, as irreparable as what Jonas had done.

Lyle walked in and checked the cupboard above the stove. The laminate had started to unpeel from the corner of the cupboard door. Still sitting on top of the fridge, in a blanket of dust, was the dish towel bar that Warren had ripped from the wall a year ago.

“Where’s Dustin?” he asked.

“Where do you think?” Lyle said. As if on cue, the sound of gunfire crackled from his bedroom. “What’s for dinner?”

“There’s a French bread pizza in the freezer, I think.”

“We had pizza last night,” Jonas said, “and the night before.”

Lyle and Jonas looked at Warren as though this were his fault. At the grocery store, he let them buy whatever they wanted, partly so he wouldn’t be held accountable. “What would you like instead?”

“Maybe some vegetables?” Lyle said.

“Have you ever heard of the food pyramid?” Jonas asked helpfully.

“Yes,” Warren said. He turned to Lyle. “Why is your brother wearing ski goggles?”

“I was going to slice some onions,” Jonas said, “for an omelet. But we don’t have any eggs. So I decided to slice some onions anyway, hoping you’d sense it telepathically and bring some eggs home, sort of like a rain dance, but it didn’t work.”

Warren looked in the freezer. Besides the pizza, the only things left were a frosty bag of spinach, a carton of Chocolate Chocolate Chip ice cream, and something called Sizzlicious Pixie Crisps. “There’s some frozen spinach.”

“For a main course?” Lyle said.

“How about BLTs?” Warren said.

“We don’t have any tomatoes. Or bacon.”

“We have Bac-O-Bits,” Jonas said.

Warren checked the cupboard. “There’s a can of tomatoes! Right here.”

“Those are stewed .”

“Look, I’m trying my best. You’ll have to be a little flexible.”

Warren threw the spinach in the microwave and then drained the tomatoes, slicing them as best he could. Jonas and Lyle watched him without speaking. After making some toast, he scooped a seaweedy puddle of spinach onto a slice of bread and covered it with a few tomato globs, sprinkling the whole thing with Bac-O-Bits. He made three sandwiches this way. It was a figurative act of despair — he didn’t expect his kids to eat them. When he was done, he carried two of the sandwiches over to the kitchen table, where Jonas began to devour his without complaint.

Lyle stared at her dinner. Then she fetched her camera from the other room and began to take pictures of the sandwich, snapping it from different angles. “Jesus, do you hear that?” she said, putting down her camera. The coyotes were at it again, kiyi- ing like crazy. “What do you think’s wrong with them?”

“I’m sure they’re just in heat or something,” Warren muttered.

Lyle frowned. “Maybe they’ve gone, like, crazy from boredom.”

Warren left the kitchen, carrying the third plate to Dustin’s room. The room reeked of beer and musty sheets and something else — rotten banana peels — though Dustin himself smelled tropically feminine, perfumed with the moisturizer he went through like Budweiser. An old pizza box, open to reveal a single petrified slice, sat on top of the VCR. Warren’s son glanced at him idly from the bed before returning his eyes to John Wayne inspecting a shish kebab of human scalps on TV. The Searchers, his new favorite. Before the accident, Warren had wondered whether Dustin should spend so much time reading about punk bands, poring over homemade-looking magazines called SweatBomb or Narcoleptic Assassin . Now Warren would have been delighted to see his son do anything but watch TV. At one point he’d thought about taking the television away, but didn’t have the heart actually to do it.

Warren held the sandwich out for Dustin, who refused even to glance at it. For some reason, the droopy strangeness of his eye made the room seem stiller. Warren checked his watch: past six. They were supposed to be doing exercises. At the clinic, when the OT had helped them put together a rehab plan, she’d mentioned to Warren, privately, that there might be “some resistance.” Warren remembered his naive response—“Nothing I can’t handle”—with nostalgia. He had not anticipated the depth of his son’s hatred of him, or the exhausting heartbreak of doing daily battle.