The Last Romantics. Tara Conklin

once, for the first time that night, I felt afraid.

      “Sit down,” she ordered, and we sat at the kitchen table.

      A car had been parked at the bus stop, Renee told us, a brown car with a man in the driver’s seat. An elbow out the window, sunglasses although it was dusk, the sun nearly gone.

      “Baby,” he called to her. “I’ve seen you. Want a ride?”

      It was a fifteen-minute walk from the bus stop to our house. Renee did not want a ride, not from this man, and she told him so, but he began to follow her, the car inching along the road. No other cars passed, and Renee felt cold and very weak.

      “I didn’t think I could run fast enough,” she said. Renee, who was a natural runner, whose thighs were the circumference of my arm, who galloped along the rocky cross-country trail in meet after meet, winning medal after medal, the child of a mountain goat and a gazelle. She had never before said there was a race she couldn’t win.

      “I didn’t know what to do,” she continued. “I was afraid he would follow me here, so I went down another street and then another, and then he stopped the car behind me, and I ran and hid in the Hunters’ backyard. There was a swing set with a slide—like in the yellow house, remember? I hid under the slide until I heard Joe calling for me.”

      Joe had wandered the neighborhood, walking in circles away from our house, he told us, calling Renee’s name.

      “But what about your cheek?” I asked. “Who hurt you?”

      Renee gingerly touched the spot on her face as though discovering it for the first time. “Oh. I … um …”

      “She scraped it on the slide,” said Joe. “She ran out so quickly she didn’t duck low enough. So she hit it.”

      Renee nodded tentatively, then with more force. “Yes, that’s it,” she murmured, again touching her face. “The slide.”

      The man who called Renee “baby” never returned. It was an isolated incident, but it infected us in a way I didn’t understand until much later. Renee stopped taking the late bus and would now wait until her coach was finished for the night and could drive her home. Caroline’s nightmares doubled in frequency and ferocity. I stopped roaming the neighborhood as freely as I once had. Perhaps this was for the best—a check on our behavior, a lean toward safety—but I remember it only as a chill up my spine, a dampness to my palms. The idea that someone was watching us. That we were unsafe.

      The incident made us all feel vulnerable, although in different ways. For Joe it was fear of what might happen to us, his sisters. But for us, Joe’s sisters, it was fear for ourselves. The man might come again for Renee or for me or for Caroline, but he would not come for Joe. Only girls remained at the mercy of men with bad intentions. Men in cars that were brown or red or gray, who wore sunglasses or didn’t, who were young or old, white or black, strangers or known to us.

      This fear uncovered the tenuousness of our position during the Pause. The cracks became evident, and I watched them widen. Caroline and Joe began to fight frequently, Renee to cry without reason, to serve us dinner with shaking hands. Joe spent more time with his friends, girls in particular. He was the tallest boy in fifth grade, and girls took a spirited, wholesome interest in him as though he were a fuzzy stuffed animal in need of cuddling. Kim, Ashley, Shannon, Julie. I remember their ponytails and squeaky Keds and sticker collections in hard-backed photo albums with plastic pages. In school they would tease Joe gently and give him the Oreos and juice boxes from their lunches. They refilled his water bottle at baseball practice. They told their mothers that their friend Joe needed a ride to the movies, or a new pencil case, or construction paper for the science report about mammals, and could they please help? Joe accepted their attentions. He began to spend more time with these girls, away from the house and me.

      In my notebook I wrote the words dust, dirty, drafty, alone, Gilligan, cold, island, tv, shipwrecked.

      * * *

      NOT LONG AFTER the man followed Renee, Joe took me to the old yellow house. It was only after the accident that I placed the two events together, not in the way of cause and effect but a more amorphous push-pull. A sense of growing unease. A secret interior turmoil finding its way into the open air.

      The day we walked back to our old neighborhood was beautiful: sunshine and crisp air, clear sky, the rustle of flaming leaves underfoot. Autumn in full bloom. New people lived at the yellow house, a family with boys and girls, apparently. Joe and I stood for a spell on the sidewalk and surveyed the bikes, footballs, Frisbees and hula hoops that lay abandoned across the front lawn.

      “There’s no car,” Joe said. He was holding my hand. “They must not be home.”

      “But what about all this stuff?” I replied.

      Joe shrugged. “Let’s go check.”

      He led me around to the back door—down the side alley, past the garbage bins, turn left, cut across the lawn, over the patio, and there, the back door painted a bright white. I knew that door so well. It took my breath away to see it again.

      “Maybe we could go in and look around,” Joe said.

      “But, Joe …” I protested, though weakly. I wanted to go inside, too. I liked the idea of freely examining other people’s things, taking time to sort through the mother’s makeup bag, to check the Scrabble game for marked-up score sheets. Maybe I would find a journal, a notebook like the one I kept, filled with the secret thoughts of another girl. The possibility gave me a shiver of delight.

      I followed Joe as he pushed open the back door and called “Hello! Hello!” We stood in the kitchen, our old kitchen, and listened to the quiet ticking of the clock, the silent settling of the house. The room looked the same, different only in small, frivolous ways. A new round table. Photos of unfamiliar faces pegged to the fridge. The smell was different, too, heavier than I remembered it, and more chemical.

      “Let’s go upstairs,” Joe said.

      Slowly we climbed the creaking steps. I went immediately to my bedroom but paused in the doorway. Unlike the kitchen, this room was fundamentally changed: bed, curtains, stuffed animals, all different, and, strangest of all, in a corner stood a bubbling fish tank that glowed blue. I saw no board games, no tantalizing notebooks. I stepped inside my old room and watched the fish dart in a mindless dance. They were the same size as the minnows from the pond, but these fish were brightly colored with stripes and spots, and they moved faster, with less purpose. There was nothing for these fish to do, nowhere for them to go. They were trapped.

      “Fiona!” Joe called from the hall. “Fiona! Come here!”

      I found him standing in what had been our parents’ bedroom. This room, too, was unrecognizable, with glossy furniture set in odd places and a large abstract painting on the wall.

      “I thought he’d be here,” Joe said.

      “Who?” I asked.

      “Dad. We’re looking for Dad. That’s why we’re here.”

      “Dad?” I barely remembered our father. I thought of him rarely and only with reference to Noni and all that she’d endured. “Joe, are you sure?”

      “Yes I’m sure,” he whispered fiercely. “Now, shhh. I know he’ll come.”

      The yearning in Joe’s voice shattered the still air into a million pieces. It shocked me into a stunned silence.

      And so we waited, standing in the middle of a room that no longer belonged to our parents. The air became heavier, the walls moved inward. I could hear Joe’s labored breathing and the faint tick-tick of a clock from another room. The moments lengthened and spun like a carnival ride. I chewed the inside of my cheek and waited for Joe to be finished. Everything about this made me light-headed, vaguely nauseous. Back then I didn’t believe that we would ever see our father again.

      Without warning I began to giggle. The silence, the discomfort, the ache in my knees, the outright strangeness of it all.