Salvage (13 page)

"
Frère
Owen
, frère
Owen
, dormez-vous? Dormez-vous
?" Lori sang, sitting upside down on the loveseat, her head hanging over the edge, face turning red, blonde hair touching the floor. "
Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines, ding dang dong, ding dang dong
." Having sung the whole thing without breathing, she inhaled deeply, and puffed the breath out again. "I'm
bored
."

"No shit, Sherlock." Owen glanced up from playing
6 Golden Coins
on his Game Boy, his nimble thumbs making Mario leap and smash. "If you weren't such a little squirt, I could be doing something else instead of babysitting your ass."

"I'm not a baby." She turned right-side-up, the color rushing out of her face. "And quit calling me squirt. You're barely even taller than me."

Owen mimicked her. She stuck out her tongue and sat cross-legged on the chair. After a long moment of watching the snow fall, she said, "Let's do something."

"I
am
doing something," Owen said with a grin, not looking up from his game. "I'm ignoring
you
."

Lori leapt off the chair and approached him. She flicked his shoulder.

"Get lost, shrimp!" He shooed her with a swish of his hand.

"I thought you were ignoring me."

"Who said that?" Owen said. "Must be a ghost."

Lori scowled. She flopped down beside him on the sofa. After a while watching over his shoulder while he played, she sighed. "Why can't we have a Christmas tree like everyone else?"

"You know why."

"No I don't."

"Sure you do. You 'member how nuts Mom got when Gerald tried to get us to pray that one time before dinner?"

"Boy, do I." Lori rolled her eyes. "What does that have to do with gettin' presents?"

"Christmas is religious, dumbwit."

"Oh yeah." She slumped her shoulders. "I guess that means Mom's not gonna let Dad take me to the Christmas concert?"

Owen raised an eyebrow in her direction. "At the church? Are you crazy?"

She slumped further. The telephone rang in the kitchen. Owen paused his game and got up from the couch. He'd been waiting on a call from his sort-of friends about a party that night, and thought it might be one of them. He hurried to grab it, catching it on the third ring. "Hello?"

The caller was a telemarketer, looking for his mother. "I'm waiting on a phone call," Owen said curtly, then slammed the receiver down.

Back in the living room, he saw that Lori had left. "Good," he said. He loved his sister, but he hated having to stay home with her while their mother worked. Not that he had much else to do. Aside from a handful of burnouts and losers, there were very few people he'd call friends. He sat back down on the sofa before realizing his Game Boy was gone. "That little asshole," he muttered, pushing back up. "Squirt!" He went to the stairs, and shouted up, "Hey, squirt! Get your ass back here with my Nintendo, or I'm gonna kick it!"

Silence greeted him.

"Lori…?"

He returned to the kitchen. A scrap of notepad paper lay beside the phone. On it, Lori had written
I am in a dark place
.

Lori's game. They hadn't played it in… must have been two or three years.

"A dark place," Owen said, thinking. He tucked the page in his pocket and went looking, vaguely aware she had tricked him into playing with her, and realizing he didn't mind so much. At least it would take his mind off of the phone call he suspected he'd never receive.

He opened the basement door and slid his hand along the cold stone for the switch. Flicking it, a bare bulb came on downstairs, illuminating the small space: the clean concrete floor; a shelf filled with old paint cans and cleaning supplies; the door leading to the furnace. It smelled damp, and certainly it held many dark places for Lori to hide. But there was no way she would have gone down there without the light.

He flicked it off again and back-stepped into the kitchen, not wanting to turn away from the darkened basement until the door was safely shut.

Where else? The shed?
No, she would have had to get past him to go out back, unless she'd gone out the front, and he would have heard the heavy front door shut if she'd gone out that way.

Where then? One of the closets?

A stifled giggle signalled her location. Owen followed the sound back to the living room.

"I heard you, you little twerp…" A dark place. There were no dark places in the living room, except… "Aha!" he said, leaping onto the sofa and peeking over the edge. Lori sat crouched in the space behind it, holding the Game Boy. She burst out laughing as he snatched it from her.

"Nice one, wiener," Lori said.

"That's dim, not dark."

Lori stood. "Picky picky."

Owen sat back down and took the game out of pause. Lori hoisted herself over the back of the couch and sat beside him. "Aw, c'
mon
. Let's play some more, huh?"

He put down the game with a melodramatic groan, loathe to admit he'd had a good time in the short while they'd been playing. "All right, but no more cheating."

"Whatever," she said, rolling her eyes.

For the next twenty minutes, they hid objects from around the house and wrote each other clues. Lori hid a pen in the cookie jar (
I am in a sweet place
), which he found quickly, and Owen hid one of her My Little Ponies in the laundry hamper (
I am in a dirty place
). It took her many trips around the house to find it, and after she'd dug it out of his dirty socks and underwear, pinched between two fingers, she slugged him in the shoulder. Because of this, he'd assumed
I am in a wet place
meant she'd put something in the toilet, but when he'd lifted the lids to the bowl, she'd snickered at him behind her hand.

"I am in a painful place," she read aloud, the two of them now standing in the kitchen. She looked up at him, at a loss.

He shrugged, having saved the best for last. "No hints."

She gave him a shrewd look. "It better not be in a mousetrap."

Owen laughed, wishing he'd thought of it. She took off hunting, peeking under the dining room table and behind the blinds. She came back and reached for the basement door handle. "It's not in the basement," he told her. He avoided the basement when he could, and wouldn't go down there by himself for a stupid game. Lori shrugged and moved on. As she mounted the stairs to the second floor, the telephone rang again. He snatched it off the hook.

"Hello!" Owen said excitedly, but the tone of Darius's greeting told him what he'd already suspected. Darius, a friend since the fourth grade, had somehow propelled to cool status when the two of them transitioned to high school, and he'd since maintained their friendship with obvious begrudging. He had promised to ask Wendy Packer, whose parents were away for the weekend and had planned a big party with no supervision, if Owen could come as his guest.

"Yeah, so uh, Wendy didn't invite you, so it's probably a good idea if you don't tag along," Darius said.

Tag along
. Owen had grown tired of hearing those words. In fact, he was pretty sure Darius hadn't even asked Wendy at all. "That's cool," he lied, holding back tears. "I didn't really want to go anyway."

Darius begged off, worried he'd be late for the party, and Owen hung up, swallowing a bitter lump of sadness. It was just like his so-called friends to leave him behind. Everyone left him, eventually.

"
Fuck
them," Owen muttered to himself, the forbidden word feeling good on his tongue as he threw the pen and notepad at the wall. He slumped back to the living room and took the Game Boy out of pause, before remembering what he'd been doing when the disappointing phone call had interrupted him.

He crossed to the table by the window, where their mother kept potted flowers in the sun, most of them still blooming even in the winter. The pendant and chain were just where he'd left them, draped over the cactus. Owen plucked it off carefully and tucked it in his pocket, then went hunting for Lori.

Not in her closet, not in his; she wasn't under her bed, and she couldn't have hidden under his, because it had drawers. Owen crept into their mother's bedroom, wary of the forbidden territory, and lifted the duvet cover to peer under the large bed. Nothing. Before he got to his feet, he spotted a slat of light on the floor, and followed it to its source: the closet.

"Gotcha," he said under his breath, and approached the closet door.

He tore the door open, startling Lori into dropping the thing she'd been holding. The black book fell on its back, the words HOLY BIBLE in burnished gold glimmering under the bare bulb. Lori looked up from where she sat cross-legged on the floor amid their mother's many pairs of shoes, caught. She breathed a sigh when she saw it was just Owen.

"Mom'll kill you if she finds out you've been in here," Owen warned, looking down at the mess she'd made: an opened shoebox stuffed with papers and old photographs. He knelt down beside her. "What is all this stuff?"

"Just a whole bunch of old pictures and junk. Here's one of Mom." Lori plucked one from the box and held it up for Owen to see. Their mother, much younger, stood in front of an old white house in a winter jacket on a crisp-looking day, squinting from the sun in her eyes. "She was pretty," Lori remarked. Owen shrugged, not wanting to think of his mother in such a way, more concerned with the Bible, anyhow. Considering the time his mother had yanked him out of class, scolding the teacher for subjecting him to "religious oppression," it was surprising to see a Bible in her closet.

"You ever wonder how come Mom doesn't have any pictures of you when you were little? I mean
really
little?"

"No," he lied. Of course he had wondered. He rifled through the photos in the box, hoping to find some, but they were all of strangers, except the ones that also had their mother, and in many of these she was actually smiling.

"Who are all those people?"

"Mom's old friends, I guess," he said, tucking them back in the box. "How come you came in here, anyway?"

"Your clue said I'm in a painful place. This is where Mom comes to cry."

Owen picked up the Bible. He turned it over in his hand. The cover was worn, and the pages were wrinkled along the edges, as if something had been spilled on it, or it had been left near water.

Comes to cry?
he thought.
Mom never cries.

She never smiles either
, he reminded himself,
except in all those old pictures.

"
You better make sure you put all this stuff back in the right place," he said absently, leafing through the book. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.

Owen read the words again:
Let there be light
. He thumbed through the pages like a flip-book. It stuck on a thicker page, and he opened the book, revealing an old, sepia-toned photo.

His breath caught. Lori looked up from putting the photos back in the shoebox with a questioning look. She looked at the photograph in his trembling hand. The closet suddenly felt very small, as if the walls were closing in on him, and his vision grew swimmy as the world around the photograph grew dim, narrowing like an iris wipe in an old movie.

"Who's that man?" she asked.

Lori's words snapped him from his trance. He tucked the photo back into the Bible, stacked the book on the photos, and the lid on the box. "Nothing. It's nobody."

"That's him, isn't it?"

"Him, who?" He stood. "You're not making any sense, squirt."

"
The ghost
," she said, invoking the name she'd given the man Owen had seen the day they'd gone to the beach at China Cove, when Lori had made a run for the water and the man—the
ghost
—had been standing up to his shins where it had been far too deep to stand. And now, to see the same man in an old photo his mother kept as a place-marker in the Bible they never knew she had...

Was he a ghost?

The squeak and rumble of tires coming up the snowy drive startled them. They turned to each other with mortified looks, saying, "Mom's home" in unison, both of them scrabbling out of the closet. Owen flicked off the light, thinking:
Let there be dark
. He closed the door behind them and they scurried downstairs, back to where this had all begun, on the sofa and the loveseat, trying to slow their panting as their mother stepped in through the front door.

All throughout dinner that night, Owen wondered about the man in the picture. Who was he? Why did their mother have a picture of him? What had he been doing in the lake that day, standing above the water?

Forget it
, he told himself. And why not? He'd already forgotten the man before, hadn't he? Until just then in the closet?

But he couldn't seem to put the man out of his mind, even later that night. He'd been playing his Game Boy on his bed, distracted by thoughts of the man in the lake, when Lori knocked on the door.

"What do you want?"

Lori sidled by the doorjamb. "I've been thinking…"

"I thought I heard the little hamster wheel squeaking."

She scowled. "Ha ha." She plodded into the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. "I think we should look at that stuff in Mom's closet again tomorrow. While she's at work."

"No way, José. If she finds out we've been in there, we're in big trouble."

"She
won't
find out." She mimed zipping her lips. "Zip it, remember?"

"I remember."

Lori sat silently, kicking her feet on the mattress, while he pretended to be interested in his game. Finally she said what he suspected had been on her mind: "We need to figure out who the ghost is. I was thinking if we make a photocopy of the picture, maybe we could do a library search—"