Since You've Been Gone

“Fine with me,” my dad said, pushing his glasses up on top of his head and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Just make sure you have her over here too, to thank her. Okay?”

I nodded, thrilled that this had been so easy. “Sure,” I said. “Great.”

I started to go when I realized my mother was still looking at me, her head tilted slightly to the side. “When’s Sloane back, Em?”

“Oh,” I said, surprised by the question. “I—I’m not exactly sure.”

“Sloane,” my dad said, leaning back in his chair and shaking his head. “Is she doing okay?”

I looked at him, completely confused by this. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

“She just always seemed a little . . . lost to me,” he said. I was about to take a breath, try and refute this, since it was the opposite of everything I’d ever thought about her, but my dad was putting his glasses back on and squinting at the computer. “Do we really have to have the death scene with the pigeon?” he asked with a sigh.

“You know we do,” my mother said, shaking her head and leaning closer to her own monitor. “I’m as happy about it as you are.”

Normally, I stayed out of my parents’ writing process. They either told me far more than I wanted to know, or got defensive if I asked the simplest questions. But I was not about to let this one slide. “Pigeon?”

My dad was already typing with one hand, and used the other one to point at my mom. “As Tesla was dying,” she started.

“In a hotel room,” my dad interrupted. “Can you think of anything sadder?”

My mom went on. “As he was dying, he kept telling people that he was in love with a pigeon outside his window.”

I just stared at them. “A pigeon.”

She nodded. “He said it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. That it could see into his soul. That it was special.” She started to type again as well, and I knew that I could go now, having secured my permission to go, and that my parents were a few seconds away from not even being able to tell if I was still in the room. But I didn’t think I could leave it like that. “And?” I asked. “Was it? Special, I mean?”

My mother glanced over at me and gave me a sad smile. “No,” she said. “It was just a pigeon.” They both started typing again, their keyboards making a kind of music together. I listened for just a moment before I backed out of the dining room and closed the door quietly behind me.

“Any idea what this is about?” Dawn asked me as we both got out of our cars and walked toward the front door. I had a sleeping bag rolled under my arm, and I saw that Dawn did as well—and that she’d also been smart enough to bring along a pillow, which I now realized I’d forgotten. It had stopped raining an hour or so before, but everything was still chilly and damp, and there was the feeling in the air like the rain could start up again at any moment.

“None,” I said. Frank had texted me an address that hadn’t meant anything to me, but as soon as I’d pulled into the driveway, I’d recognized it. It was the spec house, the one that was sitting empty, the one we’d passed while running.

Frank pulled open the door before we’d even had the chance to knock, and stood on the threshold, smiling at us. “Hey,” he said, holding the door open. “Welcome to indoor camping.”

“Indoor what?” Dawn asked as we stepped inside. I immediately took off my flip-flops and put them next to Frank and Collins’s shoes, and Dawn followed my lead. The walls of the foyer were bright white and the wooden floors were pristine, and the last thing I wanted to do was to track mud all over the place.

“Indoor camping,” Frank repeated. He gave me a look. “Someone once told me that in a well-ordered universe it’s the only way to camp.” He smiled and then led us into the main room, and I saw what he meant. The room—the whole house—was totally empty, no furniture anywhere, not a single decoration or knickknack cluttering up the place. Except, that is, for two round camping tents that had been erected in the middle of the room. There was an entire camp set up in the empty room, including folding chairs and a Coleman lantern. “It seemed like the next best thing.”

“And plus, no bugs,” Dawn said. She rolled out her sleeping bag next to one of the tents. “This is awesome.”

“Is it okay we’re here?” I asked Frank in a low voice.

He shrugged. “It’s not like anyone’s bought it,” he said, a bitter note in his voice that I hated to hear. “So as long as we don’t wreck the place, I think it’ll be fine.”

Since there was no electricity—or any lights or appliances that ran on electricity—it was actually more like real camping than I’d been anticipating. When it got dark outside, it got dark inside the house as well, the only light coming from the flickering lantern we’d set up in the center of the “camp.”

Collins, for some reason, had been withdrawn all night, not really participating or hanging out with us, and he’d retired to his tent pretty early and zipped the flap closed. I could see that Dawn looked hurt by this, but kept up a brave face anyway, trying her best to join in when Frank decided we should tell ghost stories, despite the fact that all she could seem to contribute was a recap of the last slasher film she’d seen. She decided to call it a night pretty soon after that, moving her sleeping bag so that it was next to Collins’s tent, and zipping it up around her shoulders.

And then it was just me and Frank and a flickering lantern throwing huge shadows against the unadorned white walls. He headed into his round orange tent, and I spread out my sleeping bag on the floor, now really regretting not bringing a pillow along with me. I had balled my sweatshirt up under my head, and was trying to find a place where my face wasn’t hitting the zipper, when Frank stuck his head out of his tent.

“Night, Emily,” he called, reaching over to turn off the lantern.

“Night,” I called back, giving him a smile and trying not to wince as some of my hair got caught in the zipper.

“What are you doing?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

“Nothing,” I said, a little defensively. “Just . . . you know, sleeping.”

“Where’s your pillow?” he asked. There was a loud sigh and the sound of someone turning over in Collins’s tent, and Frank glanced over at it, then walked closer to me, kneeling down in front of my sleeping bag. “Where’s your pillow?” he asked, more softly.