Eric Puchner - Model Home

Lyle’s father stared at his lap, fidgeting with his wedding ring.

“You shaved your beard,” Lyle’s mom said, watching him.

“What?”

“In October, you still had it.”

“That’s what I wanted to tell you,” her father said. “I’m back, um, selling knives.”

“You are ?”

“Last week I was top seller. Beat the Gold Blade of the Month.”

He said this ironically, though not without a sparkle of pride. If he was trying to impress Lyle’s mom, it was a lost cause: she’d told Lyle several times that they were not getting back together. “We have different goals for ourselves” was how she’d put it. Lyle had almost smirked, this sounded so much like her old mom — except that her old mom would never have left.

On TV, a jouster sitting atop a flying ostrich was battling some red knights mounted on buzzards, who had the unseemly habit of laying eggs as soon as they were killed. Since Jonas had run away, Lyle’s mom had bought him a pogo stick, a Mongoose dirt bike, and an Atari 7800. Lyle was beginning to worry about Christmas, only a week and a half away.

“Is there an object to this game?” her dad asked.

“Yes and no,” Jonas answered without glancing from the screen. “You’re supposed to kill the enemy knights with your lance and then squash their eggs before they hatch. If you fly too close to the lava, the lava troll will pull you under.”

“The lava troll.”

“You have to flap with the button. It’s very lifelike.”

“What do you get if you kill all the knights?”

Jonas seemed nonplussed by this question. “Nothing. Another wave of them come out.”

“I see what you mean,” Lyle’s father said, nodding.

Lyle wandered into the kitchen, where Dustin was stirring a gigantic soup pot with a spoon. He was cooking a birthday lunch for Taz, who was due to arrive any minute. He was hosting the lunch here so she wouldn’t have to drive all the way out to Auburn Fields and concoct a lie for her parents. That’s what Dustin had said, but Lyle suspected there was another reason, too: he wanted them all together, a family, so he could show Taz off. He would never admit this, but there was something in him that craved their approval. When they first moved to California, before Lyle or Dustin had friends, he used to stop by her room with his unplugged guitar and sing her the songs he’d written, blushing as he waited for her verdict. Now it was rare for him to visit at all. Lyle saw him more than her father — once or twice a month — but not enough.

Dustin looked up from the pot, his face flushed from cooking. The surgeries — Z-plasty, and something to release the tugging under his eye — had been called a great success. In truth, they hadn’t made him look better so much as different. In some ways he looked even stranger: the lopsidedness was mostly fixed, so you had to look even closer to see what was wrong, how the two halves of his face failed to match up. Even with more surgery, the hard truth was he was never going to look normal. There’d always be something off about him, an ugliness posing as a riddle.

Except for Dustin, they’d all been deceiving themselves.

“It’s taking forever to boil,” he said.

“It’s electric. The stove. Mom’s always complaining about it.”

Dustin knew this, of course; he wouldn’t be cooking otherwise. Certain things — gas flames, the crinkle of tinfoil — still upset him. He covered the pot and then squeezed past her to get to the sink. It was a tiny kitchen, barely big enough to cook in, but there was relief in its cabinet-like functionality. Their old life had happened almost entirely in kitchens, and look what had happened to them.

“Mom told me you got in early to Columbia,” he said, washing his hands. “I forgot to congratulate you.”

“I was sure I wouldn’t get in.”

“I knew you would. You’re the smartest person I know.”

Lyle blushed. She’d been too nervous to tell him herself, convinced he’d despise her. The phone rang on the windowsill; Dustin picked it up and fell immediately into a crouch, cupping the receiver with both hands, his voice shrinking to a murmur. Taz. Lyle left him alone and went into her room, unable to bear the awkwardness of the living room. The shag carpet felt cold between her toes. The rug was hideous, brown as a turd, but she loved it. When she’d gotten the letter from Columbia, she’d lain in its plush woolen grass and stared at the ceiling for an hour, grinning like an idiot. It was hard not to feel a sort of postcoital glow over the whole thing. Back in October, working on her essay, she’d had the strange, vaguely titillating feeling that she was trying to coax Columbia into bed. Even the term “early action” seemed to imply she was trying to get into its pants. In the end it was her mother who’d helped her, filling out the financial aid forms and proofreading her essay for the millionth time. The essay had made her mother cry. Lyle knew this because she’d spied on her from the balcony, hidden behind the ficus tree that was supposed to block their view of the Harbor Freeway. When her mom had looked up from the table, face wet with tears, Lyle had felt a jolt of astonished pride.

In gratitude, perhaps, Lyle had decided to help her stop smoking. Whenever her mom got the urge, Lyle would fix her a Coke. Actually, what she fixed her was the Platonic ideal of Cokeness: a tall, fizzing, ice-packed glass, the kind that tickles your nose when you drink it. The first time she’d tried it, Lyle’s mom had closed her eyes between sips, dazed and speechless, like someone savoring a joint. “Sheez,” she’d said, staring into the glass. Recently they’d begun watching TV together after Jonas had gone to bed, drinking Classic Coke on the sofa and taking in Moonlighting or Miami Vice . Sometimes Lyle’s mom would drink four or five glasses.

Now, in her room, Lyle opened her desk and found what she was looking for, the thing she wanted to show Dustin. From the kitchen she heard him raise his voice, yelling something into the phone. Eventually the receiver clattered back onto the wall. When she emerged from her room, he was sitting out on the balcony off the kitchen, half-hidden behind the ficus plant. Because he was her brother, and because she didn’t know how to ever really leave him alone, she went out on the balcony, too.

“Is Taz coming?” she asked timidly.

“I don’t know.”

“She didn’t say?”

Dustin scratched his arm. He’d stopped wearing his Jobst shirt and glove in July; Lyle was still getting used to the nakedness of his arm, brown and plastery with scars, like a wall that had been sloppily repaired. “She hung up on me.”

“You haven’t been getting along?”

“Less and less.”

Lyle surprised herself by not feeling pleased about this. She sat down in a deck chair, watching the river-slow current of cars in the sun, the shush of traffic as soothing in its way as waves on a beach. Bordering the freeway was the refinery she used to see driving to Wilmington: the row of giant tanks and Erector-set towers and chimneys burning like candles or sending up speech bubbles of smoke in the wind. Hector’s house — its weight bench in the driveway, covered in plastic — was just on the other side. Lyle hadn’t seen him since the week of Jonas’s disappearance; none of them had. He’d become another cruddy twist of fate, an event they never talked about.

“Look,” she said, handing Dustin the homemade book in her hand. “I dug this up when we moved.”

“What is it?”

“The Land of Underwater Birds.”

It was in surprisingly good shape, staples lining one side like a column of ants. Dustin stared at the cover. Painstakingly drawn in colored pencil was an underwater vista of strange-looking birds, strings of bubbles rising from their beaks. They swam on outstretched wings, gliding like manta rays, floating peacefully or bringing worms to nests sitting in the seaweed. You could tell which ones were Dustin’s because of the blobs of bird shit sinking from their tails. Lyle’s birds tended to have lipstick and long eyelashes. In the sky, more indifferently drawn, were fish: a shark with saw-blade teeth, an octopus lounging on a cloud. The octopus had on a name tag that said CLAUDE.