25.

The sun has shattered.

Late afternoon slips between the leaves, strewing shards of light upon the grass.

The wind combs the treetops.

Grilled meat hangs on the breeze, the last barbecue of the season for Oscar Foster.

Toby is wearing sweat pants that match the autumn sky. A sacred color, the color of the Virgin’s mantle. Except there is nothing pure or saintly about this boy. He’s ready to crack teenhood like a can of beer. Sweat slickens his arms and neck, gives him an unhealthy shine like he’s just emerged from the womb. His red face, breathless, squinched in ferocious determination, adds to the effect. A radio on the picnic table in the southwest corner of the yard blasts Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” so loudly that it almost covers the heavy breathing and intermittent moans and grunts, the carnal noises of Toby’s free-weight lifting. These are similar to, but slightly quieter than, the noises of his masturbation, which McKenna hears every night, sometimes three times a night. McKenna hears it all and doesn’t move. Not a finger.

It’s arms today, and upper body: Toby’s pride and joy—his “guns”—as well as his “holsters,” which McKenna can only assume means his shoulders.

McKenna and Audrey watch their brother from the second floor window of the twins’ bedroom. Audrey is kneeling atop a pine toy trunk no longer filled with toys. Now it holds baseball cards—Topps, mostly, some Fleer. Inside this single-compartment trunk, a plywood board, sawed to fit, has been inserted as a divider, forming two compartments. One side is McKenna’s, one Toby’s.

Toby’s baseball cards aren’t visible. They’re filed away in narrow, white cardboard boxes, each box labeled with team name and years. Every card he owns has been painstakingly logged onto a yellow legal pad, the details written in crisp, careful (primitive-looking) capital letters—MILT WILCOX, PITCHER, 1982, FLEER, CONDITION PRISTINE.

None of Toby’s cards are anything less than “pristine.” But still, he writes this word on the note pad.

McKenna’s half of the trunk, by contrast, looks like it’s filled with vomit. The loose cards are scuffed, bent, and jelly-stained. Their corners are mashed, their statistics faded from merciless hours of sifting, of searching for Pete Rose only to find Johnny Bench instead, which sends her scrambling for Lance Parrish in order to compare how many attempted steals each catcher has thrown out. A few of her misfit toys—My Pretty Pony (“Brown”), three Trolls, Papa Smurf and Smurfette—hide within the pile of cards.

The pine trunk is now closed, and atop it kneels seven-year-old Audrey. Her nose is smooshed against the window. Her breath makes a white circle. She leans back, revealing the outline of two lips on the glass. McKenna stands beside Audrey, studying her. Audrey’s profile is delicate, meaning she has soft curves of the chin and forehead, round cheeks, remnants of infancy in a head that is still slightly too large for her wiry frame. This only adds to her doll-like quality. She is utterly perfect. Her hands pressed to the glass have left the smudges of fingers and palms. And now, with the added impression of nose and lips, it appears as if a ghost is pushing through the window toward them.

Audrey smells like a carrot. Or a potato. Some freshly unearthed legume or root. Maybe, McKenna thinks, her insides have finally turned into dirt. Then again, she’s way past eating dirt by this point. Audrey glances up at McKenna, and a smile opens on her face, revealing gray teeth. Black ballpoints are her latest kick. With her paper route money, McKenna buys bags of twenty-four at ninety-nine cents apiece. Ten bags a week.

It’s no longer a secret from the family, of course. How could such a noise be covered or explained away, even by a resourceful big sister? The popping, grinding, snapping. Sounds that do what the Hand-Held Alarmer Bell was supposed to do—reach around corners, traverse walls, find you where you’re hiding, tap you on the shoulder.

“Build her a feedbag,” Grandma Pencil likes to snarl.

Murray may be doing just that. He has changed from flesh and blood into sound and motion. Months now with only glimpses, noises, speculation. A series of phlegmy coughs in the kitchen. The crinkling of Stouffer’s Salisbury steak tin foil. A blur of blue (his work shirt?) on the staircase. The slamming of a door.

Is he crafting another pair of feet? Designing armor and a broadsword for Toby? Inventing a combination salt and pepper shaker/transistor radio? (Wait, he’s already made that one.) How about a robot Dad that will actually spend time with its kids?

How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?

The world may never know.

Audrey is on her knees atop the closed pine trunk that Murray built. Her dress is gauzy and loose. McKenna can see down the front of it, to her chest, like a boy’s except for the smallest hint of tightening skin, of trouble rising from beneath the two dime-sized nipples. McKenna’s own breasts have already arrived, without fanfare, unable to fill a training bra.

“Now you do a face,” Audrey says.

McKenna leans to the window, exhales. Through the translucent fogging, she can see Toby down there, twisting his skullcap in his hands, fertilizing the lawn with his sweat. He looks up at the window, raises his middle finger. He mouths the word “faggot.”

In the circle of misted glass, McKenna draws a smiley face with her fingertip.

“My face is better,” Audrey says. “It’s creepy.”

“Of course it is. Look who made it.”

She elbows McKenna in the ribs. “Shut your piehole!”

McKenna wraps her arms around Audrey, drapes her over her shoulder. In the center of the room, she spins until they’re dizzy, laughing, sick to their stomachs.

McKenna lies on the carpet, breathing. This small exertion has left her rubbery.

Twenty minutes later, before Toby comes inside, Audrey wants to eat. McKenna opens the pine trunk. One by one, she feeds Audrey the 1978 Saint Louis Cardinals. So delicious, so pristine.