Since You've Been Gone

The biggest issue with the car, however, was that the roof was always open. The panel that closed the sunroof had been long gone when my dad bought the Volvo, and I just hoped it had been there when the car climbed Mount Washington. I had a tarp I could put over it for when it was raining in the summer, and my parents had gotten the set construction guys to cut a piece of wood that fit inside and made it nearly airtight in the winter. Sloane had loved this part of the car, and had never wanted the roof covered, even when we had to crank the heat and bundle up in blankets. She was always stretching her hand out to let the wind run through her fingers, and leaning forward into the sunlight that spilled down onto the seats.

“All set?” I asked as I slipped on my black Ray-Bans and slammed my door. I’d asked out of habit more than anything else, since Beckett was clearly ready to go. I started the car and pulled out of the driveway, after making sure that there were no strollers or runners heading our way.

“Who’s Tesla?” Beckett asked as I started to head toward downtown. I’d looked up IndoorXtreme’s address on my way downstairs, wanting to minimize any and all delays that I was sure would be caused by expecting Beckett to know where we were going. And despite the fact that when I was his age, I’d mastered the New York subway system—or at least the stops in Brooklyn—my brother and I had had very different childhoods. I’d been the child of two struggling playwrights, moving wherever my parents were workshopping a play, or where they’d managed to land adjunct professor or writer-in-residence gigs. We lived in Brooklyn, in San Francisco, in Portlands both Maine and Oregon. I was usually sleeping on the couch in the apartments we were subletting, and if I did happen to have my own bedroom, I never hung up my boy-band posters or keepsakes, since I knew I wouldn’t be there for long. But everything changed with Bug Juice. My miserable summer at camp had led to a Broadway play, a subsequent terrible movie, and then countless community theater and school productions, the play taking on a life of its own, my parents an overnight success after ten years of struggle. But most importantly, the play led to my parents securing two tenure-track positions at the same school, which even then I’d known was a big deal. And so we’d moved to Stanwich, and while my brother claimed to remember our early, horrible apartments, for the most part, he’d never known anything but security, his posters hung firmly on his walls.

“What?” I asked, glancing up from the directions on my phone, weighing whether Beckett could be trusted to read them to me, or if he’d lose interest and start playing SpaceHog.

“Tesla,” Beckett said carefully, like he was trying out the word. “The play they’re writing?”

“Oh,” I said. I had no idea who that was, but at the moment, didn’t really care. My parents’ play was not my priority—Sloane’s list was. “I’m not sure,” I said. “Want to look it up?” I handed over my phone, and Beckett took it, but a moment later, I heard the SpaceHog theme music.

I was about to tell him to try and pay some attention to the directions, when he said, his voice quiet, “You think this one’s going to last?”

“The play?” I asked, and Beckett nodded without looking up from the game, his curls bobbing. I took after my dad, with my straight hair and tallness, and Beckett was like a mini version of our mother—her curly hair, her blue eyes. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. It seemed like it would, but they had certainly had false starts before.

“Just ’cause Dad and I were supposed to go camping,” Beckett said, punching the screen of my phone hard, making me wince. “We had a whole plan and everything. We were going to eat fish we caught for dinner and sleep outside.”

“You don’t even like fish,” I pointed out, only to get a withering look in return.

“That’s the whole point of camping—to do stuff you wouldn’t normally do.”

“I’m sure it’ll still happen,” I said, crossing my fingers under the steering wheel, hoping it would be true. Beckett looked over at me, then smiled.

“Cool,” he said. “Because—” He stopped and sat up straight, pointing out the window. “There it is.”

I made the left into the half-filled parking lot of a huge building; I was pretty sure it had once been a warehouse. I put the car in park, but while the engine was still running, Beckett unbuckled his seat belt and got out, racing for the entrance without waiting for me. Under other circumstances, this might have bothered me, but today, I was thrilled to see it, since it seemed to prove that he wouldn’t care that I left him there while I headed off to Stanwich Avenue. As I got out of the car, I glanced at my gas gauge, even though this was pointless, and realized I probably needed to fill up soon—yet another reason to drop Beckett off and go. I followed my brother across the parking lot and inside, heaving open a heavy steel door, the handle shaped like a mountain peak.

IndoorXtreme was big—a huge, open space with ceilings that might have just been the tallest I had ever seen. There was a counter with a register, and shoe and equipment rentals, but the rest of the space seemed devoted to all the ways you could injure yourself in air-conditioned comfort. There was a half-pipe with skateboarders flying down one side and up the other, a bike course with jumps, and, along the back, a vertical climbing wall, with climbers making their way up or rappelling down. The wall had hand- and footholds along it, and it stretched up almost to the top of the ceiling. The whole place seemed to be made of steel and granite, and was painted mostly gray, with the occasional splash of red. It was cold, and the low hum of the industrial air conditioner mixed with the shouts from the skateboarders and the just-louder-than-background-music techno.

Beckett was waiting for me by the counter, having hoisted himself up to see the options, his feet dangling off the ground. He informed me that he wanted the all-inclusive kids’ pass, which included everything except paintball, and even though I winced at the price, I got it for him, figuring that the longer Beckett was occupied, the more items on Sloane’s list I might be able to accomplish. I’d just planned on the one, but maybe I could even do two. Maybe, if I somehow figured out how to do the really frightening ones, I could have this thing done inside of a week.

I paid the bored-looking guy behind the counter, whose name tag read Doug and who picked up a thick paperback the second we walked away, leaning his elbows on the counter to read. Then Beckett ran over to a bench carved to look like a boulder—or maybe it actually was a boulder—and started putting on the climbing shoes that Doug had swapped for his sneakers. “So are you all set?” I asked, not even sitting down. I was already planning out my route to Stanwich Avenue. If I didn’t stop for gas, I could be there in ten minutes. “I told you, I have those . . . errands to run.”