Contenders. Erika Krouse
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annoying people.
Isaac scratched some dried egg from Kate's upper lip and she batted his hand away. Kate could never act, or even lie. Her pale face and squinting eyes would betray her. She could do some kind of public service commercial about neglected kids, maybe. She glanced at him, looking just like her dad for a terrifying moment before it passed. Unexpectedly, she plugged her hand into Isaac’s damp one, as they watched the costume designer scuttle around with duct tape and cheese. At that second, Isaac missed Kate’s father with a new ferocity, undaunted by the sorrow of the day before.
He cleared his throat. “I booked us a flight to Denver next Monday.”
“I’m scared to fly,” she mumbled and started kicking his metal chair leg.
“You’re too young to be afraid of flying. Please stop that.”
Kate swung her foot in the empty air.
“What are you afraid of?”
“Dying.”
Isaac pulled a pencil and scratch pad from the coffee table. He drew a plane that looked like a flying hot dog. He pointed with the pencil. “An airplane’s wings are tilted like this, see? When it moves forward, more air goes underneath the plane than the amount that goes on top.” He drew a bunch of arrows pointing under the wings. When Kate’s face didn’t unscrunch, he drew darker arrows. “The air sucks the plane into the air. So it doesn’t fall down.”
“I’ve fallen off monkey bars before,” Kate said. “The air didn’t suck me up. And a plane is much bigger than I am.”
“It’s aerodynamics. Size doesn’t matter.”
From Kate’s scowl, Isaac saw that no woman, no matter how young, seemed to buy that argument. “The wings don’t flap.” Kate ate like she was feeding a meter.
“I fly every week for work. If we’re going to be living together, even in the short term, you have to fly. Don’t you want to try to find your aunt?”
Kate’s cheeks bulged, food stashed in them. “I guess so.” She chewed and chewed, swallowing several times. “She’s my only relative.”
Isaac glanced at her and away. That was the issue, wasn’t it? In his will, Chris hadn’t given custody of Kate to Isaac, his best friend of twenty-three years. Instead, he had given custody to his renegade sister Nina, wherever the hell she was.
Despite a measure of relief (Isaac had never even changed a diaper, and wasn’t exactly ready to father a child who wasn’t his—not that he’d have to change Kate’s diaper, she was almost nine, but even so), he was somewhat baffled by Chris’s choice, and he burned with low-grade resentment. Nina was lost. How would Isaac find her to dump Kate on? Which he wasn’t even sure he felt comfortable doing. I mean, who knows what the situation was there. Why did Chris choose to give Kate to the Ghost of Sister Past, when it was Isaac who was there the whole time, in the flesh?
Except he hadn’t been around much, either.
He had only disappeared at the end. Until then, Isaac had been around plenty when he wasn’t working, and on weekends after Chris got sick. He had helped Chris through his wife’s death, through Chris’s own medications and their failures. He had helped them move to that Section Eight place once Chris got too weak to work at the service station. Isaac had downgraded his own apartment to pay for Chris’s. He had handled Chris’s mail for him, paid his bills with his own money.
It wasn’t easy taking care of an indigent widower with drug-resistant AIDS. Chris had thrown up all the time. He had lost his hair in clumps on the carpet. He had constant diarrhea. Isaac went south every day and cleaned up. He deodorized. He had power of attorney. He was the point person, right up until Chris went into the hospital for his last weeks on earth.
Then Isaac never visited him.
Instead, he went to nine auditions. He had sex with eleven women, once each. He cried on his sofa fifteen times, and six times in bed. He went to a grief counselor seven times. He picked Kate up from the school bus, took her to the hospital for visiting hours, and cried into his hands outside the door until Kate came out. He stopped when she emerged, and drove her to his Hollywood Hills apartment. He fed her dinner every night and tucked her into bed on a mattress made of air, and while she pretended to sleep, he cried some more.
Chris died two days before his own twenty-eighth birthday. Kate was in the hospital room with him when he died, alone. Isaac heard her howling and grabbed a nurse, who found Kate wild-eyed, pulling on Chris’s dead finger, shrieking, “Wake up! Wake up!” Kate kept screaming until they left, and afterward for a time, too.
Now, Isaac tore at his manicure until something broke through the sound barrier and into his head. It was Kate’s voice. “What?” he asked.
“I said, is she like me?”
“Who?” He willed his eyes to focus on the girl. Her hair stuck to the side of her dried-out face.
“Aunt Nina.”
Isaac’s memory flashed on Nina, silent and vicious as a treed raccoon. She and Kate were different species. “I haven’t seen her since high school. I don’t even know where she is.”
“I thought she was in Denver.” Kate stopped chewing. “Did you call her?”
“I only have an address. There was a postcard from her old teacher among Chris’s things, so we’ll try his house. It’s a place to start, anyway.” Isaac cleared his throat. “Kate, even if we don’t find her right away, you can always stay with me. Actually, your father, he said…” he trailed off when Kate stopped eating entirely and looked at her lap.
“Isaac,” the assistant director said. “We’re up.”
“As soon as I nail this, we’ll go home to pack,” Isaac said. Kate stared at the crusts of the sandwich crumbling in her hands.
Isaac walked to his spot under the lights. He stood with his legs apart, ready to emote. The day before, they had watched Chris get buried. Chris had chosen a cheap cemetery in South Los Angeles, away from their neighborhoods. Neither Isaac nor Kate would pass it on the way to something else. They’d have to go there specially. Chris was one hundred and nine pounds when he died; his wife, Bethany, had been only seventy-five. A nearby grave was decorated with used hypodermic needles stuck into the ground in the shape of a heart. Isaac kept an eye out during the funeral. The cemetery was in a dangerous area of town, and he thought Kate probably wouldn’t go back there until she was old enough to buy herself a gun.
~
Grand Junction, twelve years ago:
Isaac pulled over at the Black house on 28½ Road. Chris and Nina climbed into the Jeep. “Take us high above this shit,” Chris said. Their mother had left them two weeks before, and Chris and Nina looked like they hadn’t slept since. Their father being what he was, Nina probably hadn’t dared to.
Isaac drove away from the shacky houses and trailer parks until he hit dirt, curling the Jeep up the Book Cliffs. Under a greenish-blue sky, they crawled along the high desert until they found a herd of wild horses grazing in a shallow canyon crusted with random ridges of snow.
“Just like the Stones song,” Chris said. He leaned back and whispered something to his sister, and she ducked her head. It occurred to Isaac for the first time that Chris might tell things to Nina and not him, and he felt briefly jealous of both of them. Even though Chris and Nina were the twins, Isaac was convinced that his and Chris’s futures lay in a twisted double helix, an appropriated DNA that comes with the kind of friends you don’t know how to live without.
They were planning to go west on the last day of school. Isaac had found his parents’ cash stash in a piece of tinfoil they kept in the freezer, and Chris had some money from his job at the gas station. They had almost enough money for the two of them to get to Nevada, or California if they got good gas mileage. Isaac glanced at Nina. Chris was planning to send for Nina once they had enough money. Probably.
“You