Autumn (2 page)

She looked up and screamed.

Her father—her very, very dead father—was standing right behind her.

Chapter Two

Lou jerked her head around, but the space behind her was empty, and when she turned back to the mirror, he had vanished there as well.

Her heart was hammering, and her hands trembled violently. She took one last look over her shoulder, but he was gone. A figment of her imagination, perhaps, but a cruel one.

She knew for a fact her father was dead. She’d been sitting next to him at the hospital when the machine that monitored his heartbeats had stopped making its sad mechanical beeps and settled into a flat line.

Flatline.

One green measure that signified the distance between life and death, and she’d seen her father succumb to it. She’d been holding his hand when he simply ceased to be.

So there was no doubt in her mind he’d passed. She didn’t harbor any fantasies that he’d be walking back into her life. Yet she’d just seen him standing with her, and that had felt as real to her as his passing had.

She staggered out of the bathroom and into the too-bright sunshine of the Nevada afternoon, blinking away her tears by staring right at the sun. Her hands were still damp because she’d been in too much of a hurry to flee to bother with a paper towel.

Wiping her hands on her pants, she turned back to look at the unassuming wood door with a Ladies sign on the outside, half-expecting her father’s ghost to burst out and start howling at her.

Nothing happened.

This had to be a sure sign she was losing her mind. Leaving Fresno had been the last straw, and her fragile psyche had decided to abandon ship. That was a totally valid explanation.

“I was starting to worry you’d fallen in,” her mother called out, leaning against the hood of the U-Haul and inspecting their new GPS.

Lou plodded towards her, still too shaken up to manage a quippy retort. “Sorry.”

“Can you read this thing? The only thing I managed to do was change the voice setting so now it’s William Shatner.” Her mother grinned, squinting at the small screen as if it was written in a different language. For all Lou knew it was, since her mother had once accidentally switched it to Mandarin.

Taking the small box from her mother, she tapped the screen to zoom out so they could have a better look at the road ahead.

“Another sixty miles, then we start going south,” Lou translated.

“Thanks, baby.” Her mother placed a kiss on Lou’s cheek and climbed back into the truck, reattaching the GPS to the dashboard mount. Captain Kirk told them to turn right as soon as possible.

When she opened the door, a plastic bag was waiting on Lou’s seat containing a bottle of Diet Coke, a big bag of Twizzlers, some sugar-free gummy bears and a new issue of
National Geographic
. Normally Lou might have sneered at the magazine and asked why her mother hadn’t gotten her
Cosmo
, but she took it gladly, without argument. There was an article on a lost tribe of villagers in Borneo that sounded like just the thing to distract her from what had happened in the bathroom.

She kicked off her shoes, propped her feet on the dash then tore into the plastic package with the Twizzlers, handing her mother one before popping a second in her own mouth and gnawing on the artificial strawberry sweetness.

“You good?”

Lou wondered if her shaky fear was evident on her face, and tried to focus harder on the magazine. “Sure, why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well…you didn’t complain about the reading material, and you offered me candy without my having to ask. Since you are still a teenager—last I checked—this might be a sign of serious head trauma. So again, are you okay?”

Lou shifted uncomfortably under the new scrutiny. She hadn’t argued about the magazine because she hadn’t wanted to talk. Now that plan had backfired by arousing her mother’s suspicions.

“I’m fine. Just stir crazy, I guess.”

“I hope you had a decent stretch. I want to get a good long way before we take another break.” Her mom started up the U-Haul and made a big show of carefully backing away from the pumps, still not all that comfortable with the giant vehicle.

“I’ve got this now.” Lou waved the yellow magazine and continued to chew on her licorice. She rifled through her messenger bag and wrestled her iPod out, untangling the veritable string theory her headphones had transformed into. Popping the white buds into her ears before her mother had an opportunity to complain, she cranked the volume up just loud enough she could claim to be ignorant of anything said around her.

Before she’d moved, Priss had made her a playlist with enough songs to last the whole trip. Everything from sixties-era pop songs to eighties hair metal, with a bit of Jack Johnson and sad-boy-with-guitar songs mixed in to create a perfect sort of chaos.

As they pulled onto the highway, Motley Crue sang “Kickstart My Heart”, but Lou didn’t think she needed any extra assistance getting her blood pumping.

She closed her eyes and saw her father’s face in the mirror, his cheeks hollowed from the ravages of disease and his skin an ashen shade that marked him somewhere between the living and the dead. It was how she remembered seeing him last when he’d still been alive.

In the bathroom his mouth had opened as if to speak, a black gaping hole that might well contain the answers to all the questions plaguing her.

Why did he die? Why were they moving to Texas? Why hadn’t he fought harder?

But she hadn’t stayed long enough to hear what he might tell her.

If he had been real and not a sign she was losing her mind, then she’d missed possibly her only chance to say whatever it was she needed to say, and to hear what he had to offer. Instead of listening, she ran.

Maybe that’s what her life was going to be now, a long series of events she was simply going to flee from.

She turned the volume up and let Vince Neil’s high-pitched voice distract her as she counted telephone poles and tried to imagine what hell was waiting for her at the end of the road.

Chapter Three

Earthquake
.

It was the first semi-rational thought to come into Cooper Reynolds’s mind when his bed began to bounce violently. Instead of getting up to hide in a doorframe or protect himself in any logical manner, he threw his pillow over his head and closed his eyes, hoping the trembling earth would respect his
five more minutes
policy.

“Get up, you lazy jerk.
Up, up, up.
” His sister Mia’s voice was distinctive even through the muffled mass of fabric and feathers blocking his ears. She was only fifteen but had the husky tone of a sixty-year-old jazz singer, all raspy and a bit too deep for her tiny frame.

“Screw off, Mia, I’m sleeping.”

She continued to bounce, and her bare feet against his calf were freezing. Cooper sat up and whacked her with his pillow.

“I said,
screw off, Mia
.”

“You’re up now, may as well come have breakfast.” She hopped down, sticking the landing nimbly, and dashed into the hall before he could hit her again.

For a moment Cooper considered rolling over and going back to bed, but he
was
upright, and he
did
smell a little foul. Maybe a shower and a good breakfast wasn’t such a bad idea.

Once he was clean-ish and his dark brown hair wasn’t in such a state of disarray, he lumbered down to the kitchen and pulled up a chair at the island. Saturday was one of the rare days his mom didn’t
have
to work, so it was nice to look forward to a breakfast that wasn’t cold cereal.

Mia was scrounging through the fridge, her nearly black hair pulled away from her face in a messy bun, and she was still wearing her penguin-print pajama pants and her volleyball shirt from the previous season. She handed their mother a bottle of milk and a carton of eggs.

“Pancakes?” Cooper asked hopefully, rubbing some stubborn sleep from his eyes.

“French toast.” His mom smiled at him over her shoulder, her short dark hair perfectly styled in spite of the early hour. “Is that okay?”

He shrugged. “All tastes the same with syrup on it.”

“Your enthusiasm is touching.” She laid strips of bacon onto a cookie sheet and put it in the oven, trading it for another sheet of already crispy meat. When the oven door opened, the kitchen was filled with the salty, delicious fragrance of bacon, and Cooper’s stomach growled audibly.

“Here.” She dabbed the tops of the strips with a paper towel then dumped them onto a plate, placing it in front of him. “You two dig in.”

He saw the way her mouth curved into a frown when she said
two
and knew without a doubt she was thinking about Jeremy. He didn’t mention his brother’s name because it had become second nature to pretend Jer hadn’t existed, but seeing the way her face momentarily let the pain show through, Cooper knew she hadn’t forgotten.

Mia snatched the first piece of bacon off the plate and climbed up on the kitchen counter, reaching into the spice cupboard to hand their mother cinnamon and the family French toast secret—cardamom.

The other guys on the team might tease him for knowing what went into baking, but that would have required them to spend any time with him outside school.

When the first piece of soggy bread hit the skillet, a satisfying
hiss
swam through the air and with it the sweet, satisfying scent of bread. Since Mia was up on the counter, Cooper moved to the fridge to find the syrup and grabbed a half-full carton of OJ while he was at it.

Extra pulp.

Gross
.

He put it back on the shelf and closed the door, plunking the syrup down next to the bacon plate.

“Are you guys getting excited for school next week?”

Cooper’s gaze wandered to the family calendar on the fridge door where
First Day of School
was written in big red marker on September third. He wasn’t sure if Mom had written it that big because she was excited to be rid of them, or so she wouldn’t forget. It could have gone either way.

“Meh,” Mia said, her fifteen-year-old grasp on linguistics managing to summarize both their feelings in one syllable.

Technically, Cooper had already been back for a couple of weeks. Team practices started in the height of August heat because the football team
had
to be ready for games when school began. If there was one thing his school took seriously, it was the pride of their athletics department.

A football season in Texas was no laughing matter.

Cooper crunched on his bacon until he realized his mother was staring at him, waiting for his response. “Oh. Yeah, sure. I guess.”

She turned back to the skillet, sighing, “My son, the wordsmith.”

It was Cooper’s senior year, so perhaps she was expecting more jubilance, but it was hard to be psyched about going to school when no one really talked to him.

He’d done what he could to fit in, joined the right teams, did well in class—but not so well he’d be branded a nerd—and avoided stepping on toes, but sometimes he felt his mere presence was a problem for those around him.

Mia had taken a different route. After Jeremy left, she’d dyed her hair black, gotten rid of any color in her wardrobe and started spending her time with Max Dawson and his clan of weirdo goth kids. It seemed to work okay for her. She had people to sit with at lunch, and Max always had spare eyeliner for her to borrow.

They ate breakfast in relative silence, since Mom seemed to understand she wasn’t going to get too much out of them as far as chitchat went. She was out of practice with them, considering they only saw her once or twice a week when there wasn’t some emergency situation at the Poisonfoot Sheriff’s office.

“
Oh
,” she exclaimed, taken by a sudden thought. “Do you guys need school supplies?”

“Mom, we’re not seven,” Mia said. “We don’t need new colored pencils.”

“But new binders? I don’t even know what you might need. Pens?”

“We have pens,” Cooper assured her.

It didn’t matter. She was on her feet and looking in her purse before they could convince her they were fine using last year’s binders and calculators. When she returned to the table, she was holding her wallet. “Cooper, take your sister shopping.”

“
Mom
,” Mia protested, clearly horrified by the idea of being at the mall with her brother. For Cooper, his only complaint was missing an afternoon watching baseball when the Rangers were playing the Yankees. He didn’t much care who saw him out shopping with Mia.

Their mother handed Cooper her credit card. “Don’t go too crazy, but get some new notebooks, and pick out some new clothes. Something with a little
color
,” she added pointedly to Mia.

“Black is a color.”

“Black is the absence of color,” Cooper corrected. “Don’t they teach you anything in science anymore?”

Mia stuck out her tongue. “Why does
he
get the credit card?”

“Because
he
won’t spend it getting something pierced,” their mother replied.

Mall
was a polite term for what Poisonfoot had. The closest
real
shopping was in Laredo, and that was too much of a drive on a normal day, let alone one Cooper hoped to salvage in some way. He so rarely got a break from practice, all he wanted to do was sit on the couch, snarf Doritos and watch baseball.

The mall had a Walmart—quite a scandalous addition when it had moved in three years earlier—a hair salon, a grocery store, and a handful of specialty clothing and goods stores. The local video rental place had closed earlier that summer, meaning if Cooper wanted any new Xbox games, he now had to part with allowance money to buy them.

He’d wanted to get a job, but his football schedule didn’t leave enough time for one.

Mia had her phone out the whole drive over and didn’t let up texting once they were inside.

“Who are you talking to?” he asked, not bothering to mask his annoyance.