Free Among the Missing by Dan Chaon Page B

mumble, first in my father’s, then my mother’s voice. Then, loudly: “What will happen to him?”
    I sat up straight, my heart beating heavily, because it seemed that something must have happened, they must have discovered something. I felt certain that I was about to be exposed: my spying, my breaking and entering, my stealing. I was quiet, frightened, listening, and then after a while I got up and crept downstairs.
    My mother and father were at the kitchen table, speaking softly, staring at the full ashtray that sat between them. Mymother looked up when I came in and clenched her teeth. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “Andy, it’s two-thirty in the morning! What are you doing up?”
    I stood there in the doorway, uncertainly. I wished that I were a little kid again, to tell her that I was scared. But I just hovered there. “I couldn’t sleep,” I said.
    My mother frowned. “Well, try harder, God damn it,” she said.
    I stood there a moment longer. “Mom?” I said.
    “Go to bed!” She glared.
    “I thought I heard you guys saying something about that man that just moved in down the block. He didn’t say anything about me, did he?”
    “Listen to me, Andrew,” she said. Her look darkened. “I don’t want you up there listening to our conversations. This is grown-up talk and I don’t want you up there snooping.”
    “He’s going to be the new science teacher,” I said.
    “I know,” she said, but my father raised his eyebrows.
    “Who’s this?” my father said, raising his glass to his lips. “That weirdo is supposed to be a teacher? That’s a laugh.”
    “Oh, don’t start!” my mother said. “At least he’s a customer! You better God damn not pick a fight with him. You’ve driven enough people away as it is, the way you are. It’s no wonder we don’t have any friends!” Then she turned on me. “I thought I told you to go to bed. Don’t just stand there gaping when I tell you something! My God, I can’t get a minute’s peace!”
    Back in my bedroom, I tried to forget what my parents had said—it didn’t matter, I thought, as long as they didn’t know anything about me. I was safe! And I sat there, relieved, slowly forgetting the fact that I was really just a strange twelve-year-oldboy, a kid with no real playmates, an outsider even in his own family. I didn’t like being that person, and I sat by the window, awake, listening to my parents’ slow-arguing voices downstairs, smelling the smoke that hung in a thick, rippling cloud over their heads. Outside, the lights of Beck melted into the dark fields, the hills were heavy, huddled shapes against the sky. I closed my eyes, wishing hard, trying to will my imaginary city into life, envisioning roads and streetlights suddenly sprouting up through the prairie grass. And tall buildings. And freeways. And people.
    It has been almost twenty years since I last saw Beck. We left the town in the summer before eighth grade, after my parents had gone bankrupt, and in the subsequent years we moved through a blur of ugly states—Wyoming, Montana, Panic, Despair—while my parents’ marriage dissolved.
    Now we are all scattered. My sister, Debbie, suffered brain damage in a car accident when she was nineteen, out driving with her friends. She now lives in a group home in Denver, where she and the others spend their days making Native American jewelry to sell at truck stops. My brother, Mark, is a physical therapist who lives on a houseboat in Marina del Rey, California. He spends his free time reading books about childhood trauma, and every time I talk to him, he has a series of complaints about our old misery: At the very least, surely I remember the night that my father was going to kill us all with his gun, how he and Debbie and I ran into the junkyard and hid in an old refrigerator box? I think he’s exaggerating, but Mark is always threatening to have me hypnotized so I’ll remember.
    We have all lost touch with my mother. The last