It was many hours, even days later when he awoke again, groggy and head swimming from the length and nature of his nap. He was tucked under a flannel blanket that made him slightly too warm as he slept in the passenger seat. It was evening, and his family wasn’t there in the van with him. What was he doing? The sun was going down and Locust was going to be waiting for him. He grabbed the door handle, shifting to sit up and ignoring the way the world spun at the motion. It was when he looked outside that he felt all of his guts drop from their usual spot in his abdomen and land at his feet. A large city, sitting in the distance surrounded by miles of orange desert baking in the last vestiges of the sunlight as it slipped below the horizon.
No trees, no commune, no Locust.
He’d avoided crying until that point, afraid Locust would see him all gross and splotchy. He’d kept his anguish to shouting and thrashing and sniveling, but he hadn’t truly cried.
Now he couldn’t. Like he was scrubbed of any brushland for the fire to spread to, it just died in his chest. Like he had left all of his passion and excitement and fear and despair in that forest. In that waterfall. In the stare that could see it inside him and point it out so it couldn’t be shunned. He gripped his own half of the wishbone he’d gotten and felt nothing. It was gone, a forgotten dream that had never actually been real. It had never actually happened.
When he met Locust, he was calm. Of all the things he’d seen, he thought calm looked most like the ocean when it was still. She’d made the waves rise and crash to shore and forced him to endure the damage. She’d shown him how to sail and taught him a longing for an entirely different adventure that he never knew he wanted. It was something he could never take back once it happened, a deal he could never break, a hex she’d laid on him and he’d been more than willing to let her.
This felt different than calm...like the ocean had been drained, leaving only dry cracked earth in its place. Unmovable and empty. He had nothing inside him left to calm down. It was a desert that held no waves, no change, no excitement, and no adventure. Much like the desert of Nevada that he now stared down at through his van window. He was barren and abandoned and dry of any life he once held.
He was empty.
The man who’d gone with them didn’t stay longer than a year. Who knows where he went? But he was gone and he didn’t come back. There was a comfort in returning to life before the commune. The driving and the moving and the constant change.
Except none of it mattered.
It was much harder to live in a van in a desert. The behemoth wasn’t well-ventilated, and the air conditioning had been broken since before Fred was born. They spent their days out in the towns, looking for water or shade or something to cool off in the dreadful dry heat. Fred complained about this incessantly, and Albert did his best to ditch him in the shrublands outside town, but the kid always found him. In the night they kept in the van, warned by their mom about the hostile nature of the people of these sparse cities in the sandy waste. They had to lock the van at night, plugging the perpetually open passenger window with a towel and turning the heat up high to stave off the bitter cold that fell on the desert in the dark. Fred and Olivia did, anyway. Their mom spent her nights out as she often did, and Albert spent his nights on the roof of the van. He wasn’t afraid of the supposed danger, he didn’t feel the bitter cold, and he didn’t go by ‘Felix’ anymore. He was empty.
He coped fine, he supposed. He picked up easily at the new school. He played pranks on his brother and took his turn watching his sister. He spent his time like most children did, playing and getting into trouble. He no longer had the feeling in his chest, like he was about to lift off the ground. He no longer talked in quiet whispers in the night, spilling his thoughts and feelings and secrets to the fantasy of someone who wasn’t there. Perhaps that was good, and he was finally becoming sane again.
He was fourteen, his brother Fred was twelve, and his sister Olivia was eight.
In a waiting room, in a clinic, in Mercury NV.
They’d been there for several hours, in and out to receive very little news about Fred. They hadn’t noticed a difference in his constant stress in the van. His nausea and cramps and headaches were all things that had been normal for the sensitive child. It was far too long, far too long before the signs of dehydration were noticed. Albert tried not to blame himself, but who else was supposed to notice something so serious if not his own brother? It had happened so quickly, the vomiting and the fainting were finally enough to get their attention after a couple of days. They took him to the nearest hospital-adjacent establishment they could find and prayed it wasn’t too late.
He’d remembered the mumbling Fred had done as he held his stomach, whispering the lines of that prayer the church taught them so many years ago.
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray The Lord, my soul to keep.”
It was a long and stressful night where no one spoke in hushed whispers around Albert. No one assumed he couldn’t hear or understand. They spoke behind closed doors and stayed where he couldn’t listen. Where he couldn’t know if everything was ok.
He found out why when the sun rose the next day.
Frederick Theodore Felix, 2000-2012.
Died of dehydration from untreated salmonella poisoning over two days.
Albert had gone to the funeral, but he didn’t remember it. He remembered the ocean that had drained out of him. He remembered his feelings were left raw and barren from this ordeal like a vast desert where water once was, but his brother's death shook the very ground. The land rolled and cracked, splintering into unrepairable pieces. He was empty until he saw his brother for the first time since the incident. He could feel the landscape snap and split open like the logs in a fire. Fred looked like he was asleep, dressed up like a little doll in a box. Not the Fred who wore dusty cutoffs to play kick the can with the commune kids, made handprint turkeys in the dirt, got sick on long car rides, and still prayed to an unseen force a kind woman with orange juice taught him to believe in when he was at his most frightened.
“If I should die before I wake, I pray The Lord, my soul to take.”
Albert remembered the Fred that wasn’t…in that box. He remembered he still couldn’t cry because he’d left it all behind in the world where Fred was his brother, and he was in love with his Locust, and the van was a house on wheels that never moved, and it was the best summer of his life. He remembered the red behind his eyelids like the sun shining so brightly and stinging his eyes and the anger.
He remembered the anger most vividly.
The pain was anger, and the sadness was anger, and the unbearable feeling of longing for a passion he couldn’t remember how to have… was just anger. It was all so much easier to fit inside the box of his small chest and slam it shut if it was all just red and stinging anger.
He didn’t remember the funeral much, but he remembered being dragged out. He remembered the trashed flowers and thrown chairs he didn’t remember taking his anger out on.
He sat on the roof of the van.
His mom was out, he didn’t know where. He had nothing to do while he sat in the desert and waited for her to return. It was just Albert and his mom, now. Frederick Theodore Felix died three weeks prior and Olivia Lydia Felix was in the custody of some child services agency he didn’t bother remembering the acronym for while they investigated his mom. She assured him that once the formalities were out of the way they’d have her back, but Albert didn’t care. His mom had given up all her kids the moment she let one of them die. It wasn’t like things would go back to normal.
He often sat on the roof in the desert, but it wasn’t for no reason. He stared at the bright and impossible canvas of stars above him, only visible in the complete darkness of an empty wasteland. On some nights, when it was dark and bitter cold and the wind blew at its loudest, he would close his eyes and pretend the sound was rushing water. He would force himself to feel the frigid air without a coat and pretend it was water freezing to his skin, pretending he could borrow her coat again if he waited just another minute. She would stare at the stars, his Locust, and they would reflect and swirl in the pools around them like the silver nighttime portals to another world outside of everything.
His mom had said crushes went away with time, but even after three years she’d never truly left him. He didn’t speak to her, and he felt no excitement at her memory, but she was still there. Her stare was there in the endless expanse of desert that made him feel so small, exposed him so openly to the dark and frightening sky like he was nothing. Like he was see-through. Her words were there in his days of mourning the loss of his family, the nights of longing for something he never even got to have. They echoed in his ears and almost sounded like her sage guidance, but they weren’t, and he wasn’t smart enough to imagine her advice effectively. He’d been empty when she disappeared, but he wasn’t empty now. The broken, barren land that had once been a sea had quaked at the loss of his brother. It was forced into motion once again after it had given everything it had. After it had been dried of anything Albert could possibly feel it had still rolled as the ground itself was stirred.
He felt it, and it was the first thing he’d felt there in so long.
He could hear the tune in his mind, still, of that song she said she’d read in a book, but he couldn’t replicate it out loud. He’d never sung much. Still, he muttered the words to himself from time to time, the parts he remembered anyway.
“Distant see the blinding light…resist the pain the flame invites…”
Softly, perhaps experimentally, he whispered to the night air. He was certain no one was around who could possibly hear his question to a ghost he hadn’t spoken to in three terrible years.
“Do you like the stars here?”
She didn’t answer, she never did, but he still imagined what she’d say. He still saw the way that terrible stare would widen at the sight of so many more stars than shone in those woods. He still heard the way she’d tell him they were the same stars that were always there, just clearer without so many distractions. He still felt her presence beside him like a friend who’d never left. It had been so long since he let himself speak to her, or since he could even remember how. He imagined showing her something new, something beautiful, something to impress her like she had constantly impressed and fundamentally changed him. He felt himself smile, wide and against his will although there was nothing in his life to smile about. He felt himself grin madly at the simple imagination of her enjoying the stars. She would’ve enjoyed them so much more than he did, and since she was in his head, he could feel the joy secondhand. The first joy he’d felt in far too long.
It was dangerous, how quickly he couldn’t be without it.
Like rain in that desert, her memory brought back what he knew feelings were supposed to feel like. The memory of the excitement and passion that once drove him to pace in fast circles. Drove him to push through thorns and forest for the uncontrollable urgency inside him. Not the real thing, but the closest he’d come in so long. He followed that feeling, that longing for something that was no longer in him. That promise that maybe if he tried the right thing, went to the right place…He could have it back.
That hope, be it false or not, was suddenly the only thing that made him want to keep going.
He followed her as she stood on the van, bare feet making no noise as she walked to the edge. She hopped to the sand and rocks below, weightless like the imaginary ghost she was. He sat down as he continued to speak to her in his mind, unable to stop, unable to go back. She said ‘Follow me’ as he slid from the top of the van onto the ground beside her. She said ‘The night feels different here’ as she spun, and began running through the desert, playfully dipping around the sparse plants and finding the road.
“Where are we going?” He asked her, breathlessly, as the world faded away in the night around them. The darkness swallowed everything that wasn’t the two of them. The only people in the world.
‘On an adventure.’
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