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Mrs. Welland didn’t have any family that I knew of, so it was a surprise to see the car. It was a Civic, with no logos for cleaning companies or anything on the sides. I saw a California license plate, and I knew that my security cameras would get a record of the number.
If you’re going to rob or murder someone, the worst place you can do it is on my fucking street. I’m always home, I never sleep, and I have a ton of very advanced electronic surveillance.
“Hey, asshole,” Nick said from the sofa. “Remember me?”
I looked back at him. He was scowling at me. He and Evie had gotten married at City Hall, which was wheelchair accessible. I’d worn a suit. Our mother came—she’d been out of our lives for a long time, but now she was back. Our father didn’t, because no one had invited him. As far as I knew, he hadn’t even been told that the wedding happened.
We were a fucked-up family. Nick should go to Hawaii if he wanted to, be happy if he wanted to. He’d dropped out of college when I had my accident and he’d never gone back. I was a selfish asshole. It was only two weeks. I was thirty fucking years old. I could do without him.
“Don’t you have a plane to catch?” I asked him.
“Not for a few hours yet.”
There was hesitation in his voice, and I hated to hear it. In that moment, I fucking hated it.
“Go,” I said. “Go sit on a beach, snorkel in the ocean, climb a volcano. Drink fruity drinks. Get laid. Just go.”
I wasn’t going to do any of those things. Technically I could drink a fruity drink if I wanted, but that would be pretty lame sitting alone in my house in Michigan. As for getting laid, even though the equipment worked just fine, there was no chance in hell. To get laid you generally have to leave the house and have a working body. You also have to have a personality that even slightly attracts women. All of which crossed me out.
I couldn’t do those things, but Nick could.
“Go,” I said again. “I’ll be fine.”
He reluctantly got off the couch, found his baseball cap, and put it on. “The schedule is on the fridge, with the phone numbers,” he said.
“Yes, Mom.”
“I’ll call you later, asshole,” he said, and I heard the door close behind him.
I tried not to feel the hollowness in my chest, the tightness in my throat at the sound. I just sat there and took one breath, and then another. That was how I got through a lot of the harder things. One breath after another. If you can take one breath, then you can take another and another after that. If that’s all you can do, then you do it.
I looked out the window again. Nick’s car pulled out of the driveway and drove off. The Civic was still across the street.
As I watched, the driver’s door opened and a woman got out. She had blonde hair cut just below her chin. She was wearing jeans, a tight black T-shirt, and flip-flops. when she closed the door and turned, I saw a long sweep of bangs falling over her forehead to her cheekbones and big, dark sunglasses that took up half her face, movie-star style. Below the sunglasses, her nose was perfect and her lips were full and glossy. The T-shirt saidGet the fuck out of my businessin bold white letters.
She hitched a purse up on her shoulder and slammed the car door like she owned the whole block. She glanced up and down the street and then tilted her head back in akill me nowdramatic gesture. Then she rounded the car, walked to the door of Mrs. Welland’s house, opened it with a key from her purse, and was gone.
I watched for a while longer, but she didn’t come out again.
Had she bought the house? It hadn’t been listed for sale; it was too soon. Or was she an inside buyer?
If she wasn’t, then who the hell was she?
TWO
Andrew
It wasnone of my business. And it didn’t even matter. I didn’t know any of my neighbors because I never left my house. I wouldn’t know this one either.
I moved my hands to wheel away from the window and realized I still had the sketch pad in my lap. It had the unfinished drawing of Lightning Man on the beach, grinning in his lounge chair with his hands locked behind his head. I’d started the outline of a woman standing next to him—I’d planned to draw Judy Gravity, the heroine of the comics, who was brainy and wore dark-framed glasses. Judy was a bit uptight, so from time to time I’d draw her naked or scantily clad just to amuse myself. It always got a rise out of Nick when I did it. I’d planned to draw Judy standing next to Lightning Man’s chaise, about to take her bikini top off, as a goodbye present to Nick, but I’d gotten distracted and he’d left before I could finish it.
Now I looked at the drawing and pictured a different woman instead. A real one instead of the made-up Judy. One with bobbed blonde hair, sunglasses, pouting lips, and attitude.
Desperate much, Mason?
I put the sketch pad aside and wheeled to the bank of computer monitors I had set up in my living room. Even though Nick and I were independently wealthy—our parents’ trust funds saw to that—I’d worked for years as a freelance computer programmer. I was good at it, it was something I could do from home, and it kept me busy.
Lately I’d been turning down programming work to draw the Lightning Man comics more and more. Nick and I had a Lightning Man website now, where we sold downloads of all the issues as well as print copies. It had started small, but every month we saw more and more downloads. It was pretty fucking awesome, seeing readers enjoy something you made. It was much better than spending my days dry-eyed, staring at PHP.
