Bentley Little - The House

Early morning traffic--cross-country trucks and occasional cars--was beginning to congest the formerly empty roadway outside.

Then the realization hit him.

Kristen is dead.

He nearly dropped the cup but managed through a sheer effort of will to force his trembling hands to replace it on the saucer. He had no idea how she had died or why, there were no specifics, but he knew with certainty that she was gone.

He was the only one left.

He had not seen his sister in over a decade. When he'd left home, she'd been a sixteen-year-old girl with braces, just emerging from that ugly duckling stage, the beautiful woman she would become visible in the arrangement of her features but still a year or so away. It had been harder to leave Kristen than his parents or friends or anyone else, and it was for her that he'd almost stayed. He'd tried all that summer to convince her to come with him, to convince her that she could only escape by uprooting herself and running like hell as far away from Dry River as she could, but she'd told him that she didn't want to escape, didn't need to escape, was happy where she was.

Now she was dead.

In the back of his mind, he'd known it would come to this, and he felt guilty for not making more of an effort to save her, for not going back to talk to her. Of course, he'd sent letters, but that was not the same, and his letters had always been about himself, not her, about where he was, what he was doing, where he was going.

He had not felt bad when his father died. The information had come to him, he'd registered it, then gone on with his life. It was then that he should have gone back for Kristen. He'd thought about it. He'd been living in Colorado Springs at the time, working in a frame shop, and had been on his afternoon break, sitting on the steps in back of the shop, smoking, looking up at the clouds, when the knowledge came to him that his father was gone. He knew he should feel sad, and part of him had wanted to feel sad, but too much had happened over too long a time, and all he could feel was a slight regret that the two of them had not been able to make a closer connection.

He'd finished smoking his cigarette, ground out the butt with his boot, and gone back into the shop to finish his afternoon shift.

That was when he should have returned home. That was when he should have gone back for Kristen.

He'd considered it, and that night in his apartment he'd gotten as far as dialing the number of the house. Strange how he hadn't forgotten the number after all those years. But he'd hung up after the first ring and had spent the rest of the evening staring at the phone.

He'd half hoped that Kristen would call him, but of course she couldn't. Even if she had sensed something, she didn't know his current phone number.

The next day he'd quit his job at the frame shop, collected his last paycheck, and sent a postcard to Kristen as he headed toward Utah.

Kristen.

He'd failed her. More than anything else in the world, he had wanted to protect her, save her, keep her from becoming trapped like all the rest of them, but in that he had failed utterly. He had not been there for her when she'd needed him, had been too afraid for himself to go back for her.

The smart thing now would be for him to keep moving, not look back, to grieve for Kristen on his own, in his own way, and to continue on with his life. He had not gone home in all this time; there was no reason for him to return now. Everything would be auctioned off and sold in an estate sale when he could not be located and then it would all be over.

But he could not do that. Not this time. He owed it to Kristen to tie things up, to go back.

And he had to know how she'd died.

Dawn was giving way to morning, and outside the window he could see date palms where before there had only been trees. He picked up his cup, drank the last dredges of the cold coffee. Denny's was starting to fill up. There were families of travelers in two of the booths to his right, casually clothed construction workers ordering breakfast at the counter.

Mark reached down for his backpack. Through the door walked an old woman and her teenage niece or granddaughter. The young girl was dark, with long black hair, and for some reason she reminded him of Kristen.

All of a sudden he felt like crying.

He scooted out of the booth, left a dollar in the ashtray for the coffee and a tip, and walked quickly outside.

He stood in front of the restaurant, breathing deeply.

The air was warm and dry and felt good in his lungs, each breath seeming to siphon away the tears threatening to well up in his eyes.

What had Kristen been like as an adult? he wondered.

Or had she ever been an adult? She was twenty-six years old, but years meant nothing. In his mind, he still saw her the way she was when he'd left, obsessed with cute boys and popular music and schoolgirl gossip. He remembered how she'd cried when he left and how he'd promised to come back and visit, and he remembered the way her arms had felt around him as she'd hugged him goodbye.

He began to cry.

Angrily, he wiped away the tears. He took a deep breath, shouldered his backpack, started walking. Most people, he knew, would want someone to talk to, a shoulder to cry on, but he was glad he was alone. Grief, he believed, was a private experience, not meant to be shared. He did not want to think about other people's needs at this moment, whether he was soaking their good shirt with his tears, whether he was keeping them from an appointment or making them late for a meal, whether he was being too needy or too emotional or not emotional enough. He needed at this moment to be completely alone, completely selfish, so that he could feel what he had to feel for as long as he had to feel it without the influence of another person affecting his emotions.

A pickup sped past him, and a half-full McDonald's cup splattered on the ground at his feet, coffee splashing onto the cuffs of his jeans. He heard a harsh laugh as the driver drove away.

"Asshole," Mark mumbled.

Still, the encounter had brought him back into the real world, the practical world, and for that he was grateful.

He thought for a moment, then hurried across the highway to the opposite side. He faced the oncoming traffic, held out his thumb. He'd been heading for southern California, planning to look for construction work in Los Angeles, but now he was going to do something he should have done a long, long time ago.

He was going to go home.

The Land Rover drove down Highway 60, the driver silent, Mark still mulling over in his mind the fact that his sister was gone. He'd slept last night in the desert outside of Quartzite, and though he'd expected to spend the entire night unable to sleep, staring up at the stars, he had dozed off almost immediately after crawling into his sleeping bag and had not awakened until the sun had come up over the mountains.

The Power was fading. As long as Kristen had been alive, as long as there had been that blood connection, he had been able to tap into it, reference it, but now it was growing weaker by the hour, only a faint pulse remaining, and soon it would be gone. Already, he was having to use his own memory, to rely on his own thoughts and hunches. He was dismayed to realize how much he had relied on The Power, how much a part of him it was, and now that it was disappearing, he felt more isolated than he ever had in his life, as though one of his senses--his sight or his hearing--had been taken away.

He hadn't even been aware of how often he used it.

That was a little scary.

He probably wouldn't have gotten into this vehicle if he hadn't been able to take a reading of the driver.

It looked like his hitchhiking days were over.

Kristen was the real loss, though. Not having The Power was a mere inconvenience. Kristen's death was a tragedy.