Free The Isle of Youth: Stories by Laura van den Berg Page A

robot, the first thing that comes into her mind are its arms.
    “What do you think?” Pinky says.
    “Nice work.” Dana flicks the cigarette into the lot.
    He tweaks some wires and the robot starts lurching in Dana’s direction. It squeaks and sighs. A suction cup slips forward. It’s working! She can’t believe it. She stands up and begins to applaud. She feels proud of her brother for building something. For finding a way to escape his circumstances.
    The robot takes one full step before toppling to the ground. The eyes pop off and slide under a car. The head gets dented. Pinky rights it and adjusts the wires, but he can’t bring it back to life. Dana stops clapping. She sits down on the sidewalk.
    He carries the robot over to her. “Do you want to hold it?”
    “Sure.” She holds it away from herself. It’s surprisingly light.
    “On TV people build robots that can talk.” Pinky licks his lips.
    “It probably takes a lot of practice,” she says.
    An old woman with flame-red hair shuffles past and disappears into a motel room. Above them Dana hears slamming doors.
    “I don’t want to leave,” Pinky says. “I want to stay here and keep practicing.”
    “You want to stay in Galesburg?”
    Pinky tells her that whenever they leave a place, he worries they won’t make it to the next town. He worries the car will break down and no one will give them a ride and they’ll starve to death or get heatstroke or something equally horrible. He’s breathless. His eyes are glassy. She pictures his rabbit heart pulsing under his ribs. Probably leaving him in Galesburg would be the best thing for him, though she knows she could never do such a thing. She was the one who took him away from the farm and now she has to live with the consequences.
    She gives the robot back to him. She doesn’t tell him that if they die, it won’t be from starving to death in their car. Instead she says everything is going to be fine, just like she used to in Elijah. No one is going to die. Soon he’ll have all the time in the world to build a new robot.
    “Does this one have a name?” she asks.
    “Donald.” He squeezes the robot’s metal stomach and asks Dana what she thought their father was building in the barn.
    Dana shrugs. She’s never given much thought to what he was doing. She just remembers looking out her window and seeing him trudge into the mouth of the barn at dawn and not emerging until after dark. His skin would be caked in dust, straw caught in his hair. But mainly she had been preoccupied with figuring out how to live her own life, with how to spend her time. Dana wonders if her father is still working on his project in the barn, whatever it was. She imagines going back to Elijah one day and finding him a shrunken old man, and feels an ache shoot through her chest.
    “I snuck in there once and watched him.” Pinky describes pliers and cords and strips of metal. He talks about smelling smoke and seeing tiny silver sparks. “I think he was building a robot. I think that’s what he wanted to do.”
    Dana looks at her brother and feels woozy. She never should have taken him along. It was a game at first, but now it’s something much more serious and he is becoming an attachment she doesn’t need.
    “You know what they say in the movies?” she asks him.
    “What?”
    “They say you have to be cool.” She can see a man in a ponytail delivering the line, but can’t remember which movie it’s from.
    “Okay.” He’s staring at the ground. She can tell she’s not getting through.
    “Say it to me.”
    He keeps hugging the robot. In his arms it looks like a heap of trash. It’s only recently occurred to Dana that some people might call what she did—taking her brother away from their parents—kidnapping.
    “Be cool,” he tells her without looking up.
    “You got it,” she says.

    4.
    Dana was questioned by the police only once. It didn’t have anything to do with the Gorillas. Rather, she was a witness