Eric Puchner - Model Home

“This made it through the fire?” Dustin said, amazed. At the bottom of the page, in different-colored letters, were their names: DUSTIN AND DELILAH ZILLER.

“It was in the garage, I guess. With the other junk that survived. I didn’t even know till I found it in storage.”

Dustin flipped through the pages, sending up an acrid must of smoke. It amazed Lyle how much they’d written. How they’d looked forward to it, rushing upstairs after day camp or swim lessons to sit in the closet and dream up more details. It snows when it’s hot outside. Caterpillars are more beautiful than butterflies. Also, movie stars have terrible faces. When Dustin reached the drawing for this — an acne-riddled man with a long, bulbous nose, bumpy as a pickle — he stopped smiling, staring at the man’s face.

“Did I draw that?” he said.

Lyle nodded. The cars on the freeway had begun to move in starts, bunching and unbunching like a snake. Dustin closed the book and handed it back to her.

“Mom sent me a copy of your college essay,” he said finally.

Her heart sank. “She did ?”

“At first I was pissed. ‘My Brother’s Life Is Fucked, I’m Not Going to Fuck Over Mine.’”

“It was about all of us.”

“I know. You told the truth.” He looked off at the refinery. Lyle wondered which part of the essay he was talking about: the bit about seeing him in the burn unit for the first time, how some teensy part of her had been happy he wasn’t more beautiful than her anymore? “Will you write me from Columbia?” he asked.

She had to clear her throat to speak. “Yes. Every week.”

“You’ll forget to. But that’s okay. It’s enough that, you know, you think you’re going to right now.”

Lyle wanted to assure him she wouldn’t forget, that she would write him every day if that’s what he needed, but somewhere inside the unkempt crannies of her mind she knew he was right. She would get pulled into a new life, frantic with friends and classes. It occurred to her that her brother would never apply to college; he was too frightened to leave his hideout in the desert. He’d end up working somewhere like Mojave Video for the rest of his life, the strangeness in his face seeming less and less like an accident. At some point he’d become one of those men who look older than their bodies, trolling the supermarket with a cart full of frozen steaks. In the land of underwater birds, they say good-bye for hello. Lyle’s stomach growled so fiercely that Dustin heard it over the traffic, looking at her in surprise.

“I forgot to have breakfast,” she said. Maybe she was wrong; maybe Dustin would do something great with his life, as unexpected in its way as what had already happened to him. She tried her best to convince herself of this.

“We should eat,” he said, frowning. “Taz can fucking celebrate with her friends.”

In the bathroom, Camille washed her hands, fighting the urge to smoke the cigarette hidden in her pocket. She’d had to escape the awkwardness of the living room. In the mirror, the face peering back at her seemed pale and tired, tiny wrinkles creping the skin above her lip. The lines around her neck seemed deeper than usual. She reached into her pocket and touched the Camel Light. It was the only one she had; she didn’t dare smoke it yet, so early in the evening, no matter how much she wanted to.

She began to organize Lyle’s and Jonas’s things, putting the cap back on some deodorant and collecting a stray Q-tip that had dropped on the floor. She’d done what she had to do; she’d left Warren in the desert to nurse his failure, to watch over their poor, bitter, sick-hearted son. So why did she feel so wretched? Perhaps it was having Warren in the apartment with his wedding ring. Her own was in a drawer, tucked inside an old prescription bottle. Running the sink to seem busy, she wondered if she’d made a mistake in leaving him. At the time it had been a matter of survival. She could forgive him for moving them out to California, perhaps, for bankrupting them in pursuit of some fantasy of wealth, for falling victim to a malady of shame he could never pay off — she could forgive Warren these things, but this was different from getting over them. In the end it was her disappointment in him that had proved toxic. He’d squandered the life they might have had together, the one he’d promised her those moose-eating days in Chicago before they were married. After Dustin’s accident, he’d given up completely, in love with his own misery. Or so she’d thought. Now that she’d left, she could see him more clearly: a broken man, well-meaning but not as brave as life required, who’d become something he’d never imagined.

But perhaps you could never imagine it. She’d wanted to be someone else, a glamorous woman in black. But she wasn’t. She was a woman who assembled newsletters, who looked better in pastels, who’d found a small, fragile, unexpected peace with her daughter.

Camille turned off the sink and stepped out of the bathroom, where Warren was standing in the hall. She wondered if he’d been waiting for her. In his hand was a present, a Bullock’s box wrapped up in a bow. Camille felt suddenly ashamed; she hadn’t thought to buy Taz anything for her birthday.

“That’s thoughtful,” she said. “I should have gotten something, too.”

Warren held the present out to her. “It’s for you.”

“What?”

“I wrapped it myself,” he joked. His hand — the whole present — was trembling. He could barely look at her. Camille took the present from him, as much to relieve her own discomfort as his.

“Warren,” she said helplessly.

“An early Christmas present.” He laughed. “Anyway, I’m not used to having an income. I don’t know what to do with my money.”

Camille looked at the ribboned box in her hand. She knew he couldn’t afford his own health insurance, let alone a gratuitous gift from Bullock’s. Still, she had no choice but to open it. Folded ineptly inside some tissue was a black stole with a viney pattern woven around the edge. Possibly it was cashmere. For a second something caught in her chest. She pictured Warren taking the stole out of the box at home, making sure there was nothing wrong with it before folding it up again as best he could.

“It sort of reminded me of that shawl you used to have. The Western one? But, you know, without the fringes.”

“It’s beautiful. Warren, it is. But I’m not moving back to Antelope Valley.”

“It’s only a present,” he said.

“I just got Jonas enrolled back in school here. And what about Lyle?”

He frowned, gazing at the ribbon she’d handed him. “I’m not saying right now. Maybe when the school year’s over.” He gestured vaguely at the hallway. “You can’t stay in this tiny place forever. You don’t even have room for a Christmas tree.”

“I haven’t had time to pick one up.”

Warren avoided her eyes. “Anyway, I found a big one. A tree. You can spend the night at the house.”

“Maybe the kids,” she said, shaking her head.

Looking at her husband’s face, its chronic, communicable unhappiness, Camille knew she hadn’t made a mistake. She’d escaped for a reason. When she’d first moved out and found the apartment, Warren had seemed to think it was worse than their place in Auburn Fields: “dark as a forest,” he’d called it. He seemed to hold himself responsible for its gloominess. Of course, it would never occur to him that she loved it. The tiny kitchen whose windows fogged up when she cooked. The shag carpet that harbored old coins, causing a racket when she vacuumed. The wallpaper in the living room that Lyle called “inkblot beige” because of its tacky Rorschach blobs. Even the sound of the freeway at night, steady as a waterfall, a mindless roar that helped Camille sleep. It might seem cramped to anyone else, even cavelike, but mostly what she felt was space: the freedom to be happy if she wanted to.