Emma had always known she was different from her siblings, but that was the first time she’d felt it, really felt it, something sharp and sudden as a bee sting.
She’d grown used to being the token unexceptional one in a family of uncommon intellect, but sometimes it was an awfully lonely position. And though Emma was used to being on her own—may have even preferred it, in fact—she suspected this was only because it had become a habit, like anything else. It made her different from most kids her age, who clung to friendships like lifeboats, terrified of drifting too far. But Emma knew that if she were to allow someone into her life, then they might just discover what she secretly feared: that perhaps she was just as odd as the rest of her family, only without the brains to back it up.
The way she figured, it was okay for poets to be quirky. Professors are supposed to be absentminded, and geniuses are notorious loners. But Emma wasn’t any of these things, and still she found herself easily distracted, prone to daydreaming and wandering, with a habit of zoning out when anyone attempted to explain things to her. She hated directions and instructions and had little patience for studying. She was almost seventeen and had no real friends. She wasn’t exactly normal, but she wasn’t exactly abnormal enough either.
Lately she’d begun to wonder whether her twin brother would have been the same way. She liked to imagine that he might have been the sort of person to appreciate silly jokes and funny movies, the kinds of things that evoked blank stares from the rest of the family. He would have scoffed at science and laughed at math. He would have found poetry to be pretentious and confusing. He would have been her accomplice, her cohort, her partner in crime.
In fact, in the days since her discovery of the short and presumably tragic existence of Thomas Quinn Healy, Emma had begun to reflect on her life with the eye of a filmmaker. It was far easier than she might have expected to conjure up the brother she’d never known—a bit taller than herself, slightly less skinny, same dark hair and pale eyes—and she found herself simply adding him into all those places in her past where it had seemed something was missing.
Like the time Jimmy Winters gave her a bloody nose in the third grade. Emma had been in the process of explaining to him the difference between apes and humans—only very subtly implying that he might come closer to the former—when he knocked her cold on the wood chips. But if her brother had been there, standing at her side the way twin brothers do, she felt sure he would have stepped in between them, clocking Jimmy before he even had a chance to close his meaty little hand—opposable thumb and all—into a fist.
In much the same way, Thomas Quinn Healy—Tommy, for short—was now inserted into every family Christmas, every trial of summer camp, every day she’d endured alone in the school cafeteria, surrounded by the pretentious children of other professors or the too-rowdy kids belonging to the townies.
None of this was particularly difficult to imagine. The surprise wasn’t how easily he fit into the gaps in her life. It was how naturally he took up residence there, quickly becoming a permanent fixture in her short history, a welcome revision of her past.
Chapter six
There’d been an edge of static in the air as Peter walked home from the Healys’ house after breakfast yesterday, that undercurrent of electricity that precedes summer storms. The sky had turned a sallow green in the distance, and the trees waved recklessly at the gathering winds. Peter kept his head low and his hands in his pockets, blinking away the bits of dust that were blown carelessly about. He paused at the end of his driveway, frowning at the squat and darkened house, then continued around it and toward the backyard.
Where a plot of grass should have been—a swing set or a barbecue, a basketball hoop or a bench—was instead a second driveway, a haphazard and bulging circle of asphalt like a tumor growing off the main one. There were three cars parked there at the moment, lined up neatly with their headlights pointing at the kitchen window like a cavalry awaiting charge. There was an ancient, rusted-out Chevy that had been there as long as Peter could remember, a maroon minivan his dad had recently impounded after it had been left for two weeks in front of the grocery store, and a blue Mustang convertible, not unlike the one he’d seen Emma drive off in just yesterday morning.
This one had shown up a couple of months ago, discovered on the side of the highway by some kids a few miles outside of town. Peter always wondered about the stories behind these abandoned cars, left like orphaned children on country roads. Most of the ones that came in were here on a more temporary basis—someone ran out of gas or collected one too many parking tickets, and the car was towed in to wait until its owner showed up to reclaim it—but the lengthier residents of this little parking lot always fascinated him. He imagined one day being the kind of person who was so accustomed to life on the road that leaving a car behind—to break up the monotony, to get a change of scenery, to hitch a ride and feel a different sort of vehicle surge beneath you—was just one more story to add to an ever-growing repertoire.
He walked past the minivan and toward the convertible, running a hand along its hood. The sky to the north had turned an angry purple now, and the air felt charged and ready. Peter looked over at the house, and the empty windows of the kitchen gazed back at him. He jiggled the handle on the convertible, but the door remained shut tight, and though he knew about the drawer full of keys in his dad’s desk, he pulled his library card from his back pocket and slid it down into the groove between window and door—a move he’d learned from a book, though he doubted it would work on a more reliable car—and the lock sprang open.
Peter didn’t have a car of his own. His driver’s license, which he’d gotten just less than a year ago, was more or less decoration, permanently stuffed into the depths of his wallet. He’d learned to drive on his dad’s squad car and had since seen very little of the road. But still, he liked to sit out here on certain gray afternoons, facing down the house and the sky as if in challenge, his foot poised above the gas pedal, his hands resting on the wheel, just a key turn away from motion and distance and velocity.
He sat down now on the scarred white leather of the driver’s seat and closed the door as the rain started up, sweeping heavily over the car. Peter leaned his head back and closed his eyes and listened to the sound, like a thousand drummers attacking their instruments at once, but hollow and faraway and somehow comforting.
He’d always considered himself a wholly practical person, dependent on numbers and facts and statistics. But logical or not, there was something about sitting inside these motionless cars, these vehicles without destination or purpose, that always stilled his busy mind long enough for him to think about his mother.