Fire Solves All Problems Perfectly pt 59

The devil’s in your room, Dillon says, and crashes his Landspeeder into the wall. It’s missing its third engine; it was snapped off and dropped to the bottom of the lake at your grandmother’s house a month ago.

Where, you ask him.

Under the ray-daytor, Dillon says, and points to it in the corner, copper colored and cold to the touch. Your father says that in the winter this is where the heat will come from.

Dillon starts picking up his toys. I’m going to go listen to my records. He is like this, will get up and leave in the middle of board games and water fights and great toy battles, and there’s never any talking him out of it; his interest can be for five minutes or five days, and there’s no guessing which it will be.

Your brother goes to his room and closes the door, and then locks it; you shared a room since both of you were born, so having a door, keeping the door closed, and the ability to lock each other out has been the highlight of your new house so far, though your mother says you’re going to regret being mean to each other when you’re older. What he doesn’t know is that you’ve been practicing with a screwdriver and you can get the doors open any time you want.

You look at your radiator in your now silent room; sometimes Dillon gets ideas about things, and if you try to get him to explain what he means he’ll just look at you like you’re so stupid that you can’t understand plain English. For a long time he claimed that an elephant lived in the drain of your old bathtub; your mother and father tried to get him to tell them what he meant, but that was all he would say, that an elephant lived in the drain, and he even fed it until your father caught him stuffing peanut butter down the drain and spanked him. Your mother asked him if there was a new elephant in the drain now and Dillon told her that elephants lived in the zoo, not in the bathtub.

You realize that you will never get free candy from Mr. Joe anymore. Not ever again.

Before long your mother comes upstairs with more clean clothes – she’s always doing laundry, piles of it that never go away – and she sits down on your bed. I heard what Jason was saying, she says to you. I don’t want you talking dirty.

I’m sorry, you say, hoping that might clear everything up.

Your dad need to talk to you, she says, and you must look like you’re going to jump out of your skin because she laughs a little, covering her mouth with her hand. You’re not in trouble, she says, picking up a shirt from the floor and folding it in her lap and then refolding it. You’re just getting older and it makes sense that you’re . . . I think there’s some things your father should tell you. She turns little red.

While she yells at Dillon for having his door locked, you turn off your light, letting your mother kiss you before she turns on the box fan in the hallway so there will be some air circulation; it’s the same thing you do every night your father is gone, none of you sleeping very easily when he’s on duty. Her footsteps down the stairs fade, and then the hall light blinks off. You lay in bed with your eyes stretched open as wide as you can make them, trying to see. You can hear the city sounds coming through the open window, the crickets and the mill, and sometimes a car.