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Hector picked him up gingerly with two hands and lifted him out. He was cold and stiff and toylike. Hector went into the living room, where his grandmother was watching two women in fur coats scream at each other on TV. She seemed amused by their fury.

“You killed him,” he said, showing her Raoul.

“
Sí?
” she said, smiling.

“
Lo mataste! Está muerto!
What were you doing, trying to feed him?”

She grabbed at the dead chameleon as if it were a gift. Hector pulled his hands away, and his grandmother searched the room.

“Almost dead,” Hector said mockingly, in English. “Why don't you die for real?”

He went into the kitchen and found a shoe box under the sink and laid Raoul inside of it, curling his tail gently so it wouldn't break, too sick at heart to feel ashamed. He sat down at the table, cradling the shoe box in his lap. Beneath his venomous sadness for Raoul, simmering with his fever, was a self-pitying desire that Lyle could see what she'd turned him into. He still couldn't quite believe she was in on her father's scam.
Honestly, I wouldn't live ten miles from this place unless you like the smell of shit.
That was what one of the construction workers had said, after telling him what they were digging in the middle of the desert. It had not occurred to Hector that Lyle knew about her father's treachery, but then he'd seen her at the beach and she hadn't even waved. She'd stared down at the sand, too guilty to face him.

Hector walked to the window and parted the blinds with two fingers, watching his mother hang wash on the clothesline. She leaned over the hamper and clutched her lower back, wincing with her eyes closed. The pain in her face fanned Hector's self-pity. His teeth chattered. He grabbed his jacket from the closet and put it on. He'd find some way to get back at the Zillers; it would come to him spur-of-the-moment, a gift from the gods.

“Where are you going now?” his mother asked in Spanish, catching him as he walked to the pickup. For the first time, the license plate embarrassed him. His mother glanced at the shoe box in his hands before fixing on his rumpled clothes. “When's the last time you had a shower?”

“Don't start.”

“You're dressed like it's winter.” She stepped closer and he recoiled, clamping the shoe box to his chest. “What is it,
mijo
? Did you break up with that girl?”

He laughed. “No. I killed her with Cheerios.”

She stepped back. “Hector, what's wrong with you? You're scaring me.”

Hector got in the pickup, driving up Anaheim toward the verdant hill of Palos Verdes rising like a volcano above the smokestacks. He was shivering so much he could barely steer. He hunched over the wheel, trying to decipher the blurry grid
of stoplights. Though he'd promised to stop thinking about it, the instant on the beach flashed through his mind again. Hadn't there been something else, too, before Lyle's frown? A split-second smile? He'd driven himself crazy with it, trying to remember if she'd really brightened or not, if he'd imagined her face beaming happily when she first caught his eye. Sometimes, clinging to a thread, he imagined that he'd misinterpreted the whole thing. Perhaps she loved him; it was all a mistake; she hadn't recognized him for real.

No, she'd seen him clearly and hadn't even managed to lift her hand. Let her call and cry her eyes out—he wouldn't rise to the bait of making her feel better.

Near the entrance to Herradura Estates, Hector parked out of sight of the gate and crept along the shoulder of the road, clutching the shoe box with two hands. Bud was reading a magazine in the guardhouse. Hector thought about talking his way inside, but he hadn't been to work in a week and couldn't bear to show his face. The clock that he and Lyle had broken was still hanging on the wall, stopped at the time of their first fuck. It was like something you'd find in a dream, twinkling with menace. Hector crouched past the guardhouse and hiked along John's Canyon Road until he reached High Street, turning down the sleepy, tree-lined, untoxic road toward the Zillers' house. Soapberries popped under his sneakers. There were no cars in the driveway or parked under the carport. Something about the house, the unnatural quiet of it, told him the Zillers weren't home.

He decided to wait for their return. First, though, he'd take a look inside. He'd see the house once and for all, even if Lyle had never invited him over. The day was clear and beautiful, bees bounced on the rosebushes along the driveway, but he was too feverish to feel the sun's warmth. Hector rounded the garage until he was facing a window whose blinds were open to the sun. He rested his head against the glass. A bedroom of some kind, probably Lyle's parents'. A creepy picture of Pac-Man floating in some clouds hung on the wall across from the bed.

Laying the shoe box in a bed of azaleas, Hector picked up one of the decorative rocks at his feet, lifted it to his chest, and then heaved it through the bedroom window, which shattered in a rain of glass. He waited for an alarm to go off. It would almost be a relief. When nothing happened, he retrieved the shoe box and
stepped as best he could through the window frame, avoiding the stalactite of glass jutting from the top.

The room was cold as a cavern. Hector could barely think. Still carrying the shoe box, he walked past the bed and down a narrow hall lined with puke-colored artwork and ended up in what looked like the Zillers' living room. Except for an old patio chair and a TV set, there was no furniture. One of the vinyl straps of the chair was broken, a blob of bird shit meringued to one arm. Hector bent down to pick up a piece of popcorn buried in the rug. A bit of anger unflaked from his heart. He wanted to curl up in the lounge chair and go to sleep but was worried he might not resurrect himself. He looked up at the windows over the TV. The curtains were neatly drawn, letting in a thin cord of sunlight. In the foyer, beside the front door, lay a jumble of old camping gear and what looked like a telescope still packed in its box. For the first time, it occurred to him that the Zillers were out of town.

He walked into the kitchen, where the windows were also curtained. A charred bagel, black as a fossil, peeked out of the toaster. On the counter beside it was a handwritten list titled
THINGS TO BRING ON TRIP
. Hector's teeth were still chattering. He wondered if he was dying. Laying the box on the counter, too feverish to think, he walked over to the stove and turned on the burner, trying to warm himself over the flame. It scorched his fingers but did nothing to thaw the coldness in his bones. On the back guard of the stove, lined up in a row, was an array of baffling teas. Lemon Zinger. Evening in Montana. Lotus Flower Dream. He glanced around for a kettle before grabbing a small pot hanging from a rack under the cupboard, filling it to the brim in the sink. Tea might help. Warm his fever. He shivered over to the burner again. By mistake he splashed a bit of the water on the flame, which hissed and sputtered and flowered again under the pot.

It would not boil. Not if he watched it.

Hector grabbed the shoe box and wandered down the hall. He recognized Lyle's room right away. The wall of paperbacks; the poster of Morrissey in a stupid-looking pompadour; the
calaveras
taunting him from the windowsill, dressed comically as bride and groom—everything she'd described to him on the phone. Even the smell, a mixture of cigarettes and perfume, was dizzily familiar. Gently, though his hands were shaking, Hector lifted Raoul from his shoe box and laid him on the pillow of Lyle's bed. He tried
to roll his tail back into a spiral, but it was as stiff as a pencil. The chameleon seemed smaller than before, obscene in its stillness. Something about the way it looked—tiny, helpless, eternally dead—made Hector ashamed.

His head throbbed. He hobbled over to Lyle's desk. Clutching the chair with one hand, he opened the drawer and stared at the mess of tapes and letters and photographs, startled to see a piece of paper with his own handwriting on it. The poem he'd given her. It was crinkled and worn, a tear beginning along one crease. Beneath it was another sheet of paper: a different poem, written in Lyle's handwriting. It had no title and began in the middle of the page. Hector pulled the poem out, trying to control his shivering enough that he could follow the words.

Mustache

A word made up of two:

Must ache,

A command,

As though I'm supposed to hurt like this

A job I have to finish

Or a formula for missing you

Must + ache =

No bristles kissing me

A lizard on TV

A red pickup that isn't yours

An inflatable castle

A clock that's stopped on us

A second name for my heart

Hector's legs felt weak.
A clock that's stopped on us.
He read the poem again, lingering over the last stanza. He remembered the inflatable castle, the kids all screeching with joy as they bounced up and down together, hair flapping like wings. When had he told her about that? Feebly, he folded the poem into a square and stuffed it in his pocket. He could barely stand. He felt suddenly foolish. Misplaced—the way you feel when you wake up somewhere strange, a friend's couch, and don't know where you are. His head whistled with pain. If he returned home, if he climbed
back into bed where he belonged, his mother would take care of him.

He left Raoul on Lyle's pillow. Training his eyes on the floor in front of him, he managed to shuffle down the hall and back to the empty living room, finding the door to the house. Hector closed it carefully behind him. For a second the twittering of birds made his head swim. Then he hunched down the Zillers' driveway to his truck, thinking vaguely—and just for a second—that there was something he'd forgotten.

Warren pulled on his clothes, breath clouding in the brittle air, and hiked up the boulder to where the sun shone. The light warmed him immediately. It was like entering a different room. Below him, cocooned in sleeping bags, his family slept peacefully around the fire pit, a ring of question marks, their legs tucked up from the cold. There was something remarkable about seeing them in a circle. The shade in which they lay moved imperceptibly as Warren watched, shrinking like a tide and illuminating their faces one at a time, as if they were emerging from the deep.

He felt sluggish and happy. Last night, he and Camille had made love after the kids were asleep, slow as insects, their long johns shackling their ankles. He'd woken this morning with an afterglow of well-being. His family would be all right, so long as they stuck together and confided their failures. He felt this wholeheartedly but was afraid to move in case the feeling dissolved.

Later that afternoon, driving home, Warren gripped the wheel with two hands to keep the wind from yanking it sideways. Tumbleweeds bounced in front of the car. Jonas insisted on listening to a radio show called “The UFO Connection,” which featured an interview with a “spirit photographer.”
I asked the blue orbs for a little show,
the photographer said,
and they really hammed it up.

“They should show a little dignity,” Lyle said.

“What's a ‘blue orb'?” Jonas asked.

“An orb that's having a bad day,” Warren said, trying a joke.

No one laughed. Warren glanced in the rearview mirror at Dustin, who hadn't said a word since they'd stopped for lunch. The McDonald's straw he'd been chewing on was flat and man
gled, sticking out of his teeth. If not an actual smile, Warren hoped to elicit an acknowledgment of some kind—a nod or a glance, something reminiscent of the camaraderie they'd had drinking beer together. Warren stared back at the highway. Ahead of them a gray cloud towered ominously, flickering with brilliant wishbones of lightning.

“How long have you known we were broke?” Dustin said from the backseat. His voice was slow and deliberate, as though he'd been preparing the question in his mind.

“Since January, probably. I don't know.”

“What about UCLA?”

Warren avoided looking at him. “These tumbleweeds are out of hand. It's like an asteroid belt.”

“Jesus, Dad. You haven't even talked to them, have you?”

“Let's talk about it later.”

“We could have been applying for financial aid! Something! School starts in September.”

Warren looked at Dustin: he was bolted to his seat, tense as a jack-in-the-box. The car thickened with the smell of rain, sweet and manurey and oddly singed. “I thought college was for ‘capitalist sellouts.' You want to be a rock star.”

Dustin's face clenched with rage. Warren shouldn't have said it. It was a stupid thing, a way of turning the tables. Rain began to hit the roof, a few lone smacks building into a torrential roar. He flipped on the wipers and then looked back at his son, hoping to apologize, but he'd strapped his headphones on and was glaring out the window, lost again to his music.

At home, Warren pulled into the driveway and waited for the stillness to catch up with his thoughts. The kids—Dustin included—were slumped sideways in the backseat, leaning together as if they were taking a hairpin turn. Even Camille had fallen asleep, her face mashed into the headrest. Warren sat there for a minute, not wanting to disturb his feeling that the world had stopped. Mr. Leonard snored geriatrically from the far back. Except for Mr. Leonard, for the ticking of the engine, there was no sound at all. A swallowtail landed on the hood for a moment and then flapped away. Dustin opened his eyes, yawning. The left side of his headphones had slid off and were wedged behind his ear like a hearing aid.

“We'll find a way to get you through school,” Warren said.
“I promise.” He glanced away from the mirror. “I did call them once, the aid office, but they never called back.”