Page 18 of The Bright Lands

JOEL

The whiskey pulsed in Joel’s head. He shielded his eyes from the morning light, squinted at his phone through his fingers. A stone formed in his gut. A new message awaited him.

u never tried to understand me. how many years u lived in the city u nver bothered to ask am i ok is everything ok until i had 2 beg u to help its too late joel i never want 2 talk to anyone from that fucking town again. go home. u make mom sad

Fuck all of yesterday’s doubts. Dear God, just let this be Dylan texting him.

Joel typed:

A ticket to NYC. No questions asked. You can stay with me or I’ll get you a place. No one will know. Please Dylan, talk to me.

He rose, paced, couldn’t wait.

Dylan, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I should have done everything and I should have done it more. I know. I know. Please Dylan, please come home.

He didn’t realize he was crying until he saw a tear spatter across the glass of his screen.

I never realized how much I cared.

fuck u joel. go home

He found his mother in the kitchen dressed in her church slacks, powdering her face at the table. She glanced at Joel, at the phone in his hand. “Any word?”

He fumbled for coffee. “No.” Something—maybe paranoia, maybe some strange protective pride—kept him from mentioning the messages, let alone informing the police of them just yet. It persisted, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it: that gnawing suspicion that the person on the other side of these messages wasn’t his brother at all.

“He must have caught a big one.”

“A big what?”

“A fish.” She spoke sharply, softened. “He’s fishing, right?”

Joel said nothing.

Paulette untwisted her lipstick. “You can’t win as a parent, Joel. I hope you remember that.”

“I doubt I’ll ever need to.”

“Your father used to say the same thing.”

Joel put down his coffee. His belligerent father used to say a lot of shitty things, the last of which (before a choked blood vessel burst in his brain) was,“What part of headache don’t you fuckers understand?”

The man hadn’t been missed. The fact that Paulette would mention him at all told Joel plenty about her current state of mind.

“Oh hell, Joel,” Paulette said. “It’s going to be alright, alright? Dylan’s been thrilled all week to see you.”

This didn’t soothe him.

Darren tooted the horn of the truck outside. His mother gathered up her Bible and a little plastic carrier of muffins. Joel, desperate for anything to say, asked, “Did Mrs. Malacek say we’re Methodists now?”

His mother rolled her eyes. “We’ve been Methodists ever since the Baptists took an opinion on my moving Darren into the house without rings on our fingers. I swear to Jesus, Joel, some of those ladies act like God made pussy just to keep yeast in circulation.”

Darren tooted the horn again. She wrapped Joel in a quick hug, kissed his cheek. He felt an anxious heartbeat in her hand. Saw, in the brisk way she twisted on her tall heel, a stubborn effort to fool the world into behaving itself.

“Dylan’s fine,” she said. “And if he ain’t fine, you call me—I got my phone on ring.”

Joel paced the empty house. He studied his brother’s Instagram, spotted faces from the game on Friday, noted the ways the boys either posed in their football pads spreading their fingers intoW’s like gang signs (it took him far too long to realize that theW’s stood for “win”) or else leaned against truck beds and lockers with their hands cupped over their crotches, their eyes, broody and vacant, fixed to the camera. So serious, so young. What were the odds, Joel wondered, that Dylan and his friends pulled on this showy angst to conceal a truer turmoil inside?

Joel bounced around Instagram profiles. He settled on Bethany Tanner’s, his brother’s girlfriend, but learned little in studying it. Bethany was the sort of petite, strong-boned blonde darling Joel used to be told he should desire. He detected the glow of money in her impeccable skin and finally realized why her name was so familiar: the Tanner family owned a cattle ranch west of town. If the ranch was still running—which, judging from Bethany’s gleaming Lexus, it was—those cows must be one of the few moneymaking ventures left in Pettis County.