Dad and Kiara weren’t back yet, and as usual, Mom worried. But when they still weren’t back after two more hours, I got worried, too.

Homesick

by Trismegistus Shandy

part 2 of 3

This story is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The next day, we went out to look for work again. And again, we found nothing. After we met up again at midday, we went to a pawn shop and pawned the two newest phones and Mom and Kiara’s jewelry. Dad wanted to keep two phones to dial 911 with if necessary — one for each group when we split up. We got almost three hundred dollars, and after a couple of hours of careful discussion about how to use it, we wound up buying a tank of gas, some more groceries including fruit, cheese, and gallon bottles of water, and some toiletries — four toothbrushes and a single tube of toothpaste, a canister of baby wipes to clean ourselves with, and a bottle of no-rinse shampoo. By the time we bought four blankets, a flannel shirt for Dad, and an anthology of short stories at the thrift store, it was too late in the day to look for work anymore. We sat in the car, taking turns reading aloud to each other, until it was too dark to read.

Tuesday morning in the restrooms at a gas station, we got cleaned up a bit for the first time in days. Just a bit; our hair and teeth were clean, but we were still wearing the same clothes we’d worn to the theater Saturday, plus the sweaters, flannel shirts, and coats we’d bought at Goodwill, because it was starting to turn cold again. We’d needed the blankets last night, and one blanket each hadn’t been enough as the night wore on and got colder; Kiara and I wound up huddled together with both our blankets covering both of us. When winter really set in, blankets might not be enough, and we’d have to run the engine for the heat — if we had money for gas.

Again, we split up, and Mom and I found nobody willing to hire us under the table — most weren’t even willing to talk to us for more than a few seconds, except one guy at who offered Mom fifty dollars to have sex with him. We walked out of there, but I wondered if Mom would ever get hungry enough to consider that. And whether Kiara had gotten any offers like that, and she and Dad hadn’t told us. For that matter, there were probably gay dudes who would pay for sex with someone my age, and if it were that or starve...

Mom and I returned to the car a little after noon and ate a little, splitting an apple and eating some crackers and a little cheese. Dad and Kiara weren’t back yet, and as usual, Mom worried. But when they still weren’t back after two more hours, I got worried, too. We’d discussed our itineraries before we split up that morning, so we left them a note in the car and set out in the direction they’d gone, looking for work and asking people if they’d seen them.

A lot of people refused to talk to us, but of those who would talk to us, nobody remembered seeing them, or would admit to it, anyway. Not even the managers at the first couple of restaurants we tried, who said they’d been on duty that morning and would have talked to anybody who came in asking for work.

We were out until past sunset looking for them, and returned to the car to find them still not there and the note we’d left undisturbed. Mom was crying too hard to drive, so I drove us to another shopping center less than a mile away, and then we huddled in the back seat under all four blankets, for consolation and warmth.

We had no idea what could have happened to them in the short distance from the car to the first restaurant Dad had said they were going to. It had been broad daylight and this wasn’t a high-crime area. But they were gone.

The next morning, after washing up in the restrooms of a nearby fast food place, Mom said, “It’s been almost twenty-four hours since we saw them last. Let’s call the police.”

We couldn’t actually call the non-emergency police number because we had no minutes on our phone, no account even. Mom called 911. I listened in as she said: “My husband and daughter have been missing for twenty-four hours — I haven’t seen them since this time yesterday... Hello?” Raising her voice, she said: “Can you hear me? — Hello? — NO, it’s not a prank call, you asshole, my husband and daughter are MISSING? — Hello? — Damn it,” she said, putting the phone down and sobbing.

I put an arm around her. “Bad connection? Let me try, okay?”

So I dialed 911, and got no better results. The operator couldn’t hear anything I said. At first she was pretty patient, asking “Hello? Is anyone there?” a bunch of times, but after a minute or so she said she was going to have to hang up, and she did.

“We’ll drive to the police station,” I said. But I didn’t know where the nearest police station was. We were still nearer to Grandpa and Grandma Haines' house than where our house used to be, and I wanted to report Dad and Kiara missing in the same county where they disappeared, not at the police station I knew about back home. So I left Mom in the car and went in to the restaurant. There were three people in line to order food.

“Hey,” I said to the Hispanic guy at the tail end of the line. “Do you know where the nearest police station is? Or could I borrow your phone to call the police?”

He glanced at me, but his eyes sort of glided off me and he returned his attention to whatever game he was playing on his phone. He stepped a little closer to the young black woman in front of him in line, and she in turn shuffled a little further from him, giving him an annoyed glance but not looking at me.

Asshole. I decided I’d just stand in line and ask the cashier where the police station was.

The next customer to come in, a sharply dressed middle-aged white woman, gave me a wide berth as she got into line, standing a good four or five feet from me. I could guess why. Despite my efforts at cleaning up, I smelled pretty ripe after days of walking for hours and wearing the same clothes, and Mom was almost as bad. I couldn’t really blame the people who’d refused to even talk about hiring us yesterday. Against hope, I asked the woman if she could direct me to the police station or let me borrow her phone to call the police. She treated me the same way.

But before I got to the head of the line, a big guy in a restaurant uniform came down the hall from the restrooms and the staff entrance to the kitchen. He was the first one who’d looked at me for more than a moment, but even he didn’t quite meet my eyes.

“Sir,” he said, “you’re disturbing our customers. I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“Could you please tell me where the nearest police station is? My dad and my sister are missing and I can’t report it except in person because my phone’s —”

“Sir, please leave, or I’ll have to call the police.”

“Yes! Do that! Let me talk to them. Or I’ll tell them when they get here.”

He repeated his demand that I leave a couple more times and then manhandled me out of the way of the customer line, nodding at the woman behind me and the old guy who’d come in behind her. I was never all that strong, and several days of limited rations had weakened me further. He was able to get me out the door of the restaurant and into the parking lot without much trouble.

“I’m going to stay in your parking lot until you call the police,” I said desperately.

He didn’t seem to pay any attention to that, but went back inside. I went back to the car (which was over in the main part of the shopping center parking lot, rather than right by the restaurant) to tell Mom what had happened.

“Did you find out where it is?” she asked. I didn’t like the look in her eyes.

“Nobody would give me the time of day,” I said. “I think we smell and look enough like homeless people now that hardly anybody will pay any attention to us unless they’re forced to. I asked two customers and a manager to please tell me where the police station was, or if I could borrow their phone to call the police. The customers ignored me and the manager threatened to call the police, then manhandled me out the door.”

“We need to go before the police get here,” she said. “You getting arrested won’t help — they’re not going to pay attention to a missing person report from somebody they’re arresting for vagrancy or trespassing or whatever. And if I’m arrested too, we’ll lose the car and everything in it, and be completely destitute when we get out.”

“Okay,” I said, cranking up the car. I drove a little way down the road, back toward the place where we’d last seen Dad and Kiara, and parked in the nearest shopping center to the one where we’d parked the day before yesterday.

Mom and I went into a grocery store that had just opened, split up and tried asking different staff and customers where the police station was, with no better success. Everyone ignored us, except for a cashier, who called her manager, who asked us to leave.

“Let’s go to the library,” I said. “They don’t open for a couple more hours, but we can look up where the police station is without actually talking to anyone.”

“I’ll need a restroom before then,” Mom said. “Let’s stop at a gas station or something on the way.”

I followed Mom into the gas station, figuring I might as well pee again before sitting in the library parking lot for two hours. Once I’d let out the little trickle of stuff that had accumulated in my bladder in the last hour, I waited for her just outside the ladies‘ room, half expecting a clerk or manager to come up and tell me to leave. But no one did. Customers came and went, but Mom didn’t come out of the ladies’ room. I went back to the car to make sure she hadn’t come out before me and gone there; it was empty. I spent twenty minutes waiting outside the ladies‘ room, then asked the next woman I saw who was heading in there if she could please check if my mom was okay. She ignored me, sidestepping me when I tried to plead with her and ducking into the restroom. After two more repetitions of that with other customers, and going back to check the car again, I decided I’d barge into the ladies’ room and look for her myself.

One of the weirdest things that had happened yet, aside from our house disappearing and everyone forgetting us, happened then. There were two women standing at the sink, washing their hands or adjusting their makeup, and neither of them reacted to a sweaty, stinky, homeless teenage boy walking in. One of the stalls was occupied, and I knocked on the door. “Mom?” I called out.

Nobody answered; the women dried their hands and left. I looked into the empty stalls and made sure no one was there. A few minutes later, one of the women I’d seen enter earlier came out of the occupied stalls, also ignoring me, and went to wash her hands.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but have you seen my mom? She’s a couple of inches shorter than me, about 5'7", and she’s wearing a blue sweater with yellow kittens on it and blue jeans —”

She put her hands under the automatic blow drier, drowning out my voice. I gave up. It was futile asking her if she’d seen Mom; she’d come into the restroom just a few minutes before me, and Mom must have left while I went to the car to look for her — and then not gone back to the car, and missed seeing me when I returned after a few moments? That was hard to believe, but it was the only thing I could think of.

I walked all around the gas station and the neighboring shopping center looking for Mom, but once the time approached for the library to open, I went back to the car and drove over there. Nobody bothered me or told me to leave; I sat down at a computer, looked up the police stations in this county, figured out where the nearest was, and left.

And when I got back to the parking lot, the car was gone. Along with all my food, water, and blankets. I had nothing except for my clothes, including a packet of crackers in my coat pocket and a little money — Mom had had most of it in her purse. We’d lived in fear that we might come back from one of our job hunt expeditions to find the car had been towed or ticketed, but how could it have been towed in the four or five minutes I’d spent in the library?

No, the same thing must have happened to it that had happened to our house. And Dad, and Kiara, and Mom. Was there any point in telling the police they were missing? Probably not, I decided, but I had nowhere else to go. Maybe I could make a scene and get myself arrested, getting a couple of meals that would taste terrible but might be more nutritious than the saltines I’d been eating.

I walked to the police station. It took a while; I was tired and hungry and had to stop and rest several times. When I finally got there, well after noon, I walked up to the front desk and said, “I’d like to report some missing persons — my parents and my sister.” I’d considered reporting the car stolen, too, but decided against it — the license plate number wouldn’t show up in their database.

The guy at the desk didn’t look away from his computer screen. I rapped on the desk and repeated myself. Still no reaction.

I tried that with everyone I could see in the public area at the front. Nobody paid me any mind or gave any sign they could see or hear me. Even when I grabbed hold of someone’s arm or sleeve, they wrenched out of my feeble grip without any conscious effort and continued on their way.

I followed one of the officers through a Staff Only door and explored. Still nobody reacted to my presence, any more than the women in the gas station ladies' room. I found a break room and raided the refrigerator, eating someone’s pastrami sandwich and someone else’s microwave burrito and someone else’s fruit salad and drinking a cup of orange juice, a cup of coffee, and a cup of soda before I finally felt sated. Several cops and support staff came and went during my feast, and none noticed me.

This invisibility had some advantage, I though. I’d lost everything; at least I could take comfort in this stupid super-power I never asked for. The grief from losing Mom, Dad, and Kiara finally hit me full force and I laid my head on the breakroom table and cried, and cried, until I couldn’t cry any more.

I don’t want to talk about what came next. I don’t remember it very well. I stole food from office breakrooms, restaurants, and grocery stores for a few days until I stopped feeling hunger. I slept on the bed displays in furniture stores for a few nights until I stopped needing to sleep. I briefly spied on the girls in the locker room at a high school, but realized I’d already lost my libido along with my need for eating, elimination, and sleep. Finally I settled into a pattern, walking all night and sitting and reading in a library or bookstore all day.

For a good while, I stuck to public places. I had a sort of mental block against going into people’s homes, even though I knew they wouldn’t notice me any more than they did when I stole food off someone’s plate in a restaurant or took a nap on a bed in a furniture store. But early one morning, I was trudging down a residential section of a major road, and saw a guy about my dad’s age and two boys, the older of them a little younger than Kiara, hauling luggage from their house out to a minivan. “Looks like they’re going on a trip,” I said to myself. (I’d been talking to myself a lot since people stopped being able to hear me.) Then the idea occurred to me to stay in their house while they were on vacation. So I walked up the driveway and went in the front door.

The mother was in the kitchen, loading an ice chest and a cardboard box with food. “Brandon,” she called out after a bit, “this box is ready to go.”

The father came into the kitchen and picked up the box. “I think this is pretty much it,” he said. “Anything me or the boys can help with here?”

“No,” she said, “I’ve almost got the ice chest done too.”

Listening to more of their conversation, I realized they were going to the mother’s sister’s house for Thanksgiving. I’d lost track of the date, and I realized with a shock that it had been a whole month since our house disappeared.

I stayed out of their way for the last few minutes as they finished loading the van, turned off the lights, locked the door behind them, and drove off. Then I turned the lights back on started exploring the house.

There was a living room, with sofas and chairs and a bookcase, some of whose contents looked interesting, but no TV. The TV was in a den that seemed to be a converted garage. There were also four bedrooms. The master bedroom and the boys' bedrooms were easily identifiable from the decor, and they looked obviously lived-in; the bedclothes were rumpled and there were baskets of dirty clothes at the foot of each bed, toys scattered on the floor of the younger boy’s room, schoolbooks, graded tests and homework, novels, and drawings scattered across the desks. But there was also what looked like a teenage girl’s room — posters for a magical girl anime and a boy band, pastel curtains and sheets, and so forth — and it was spotlessly tidy, the bed made and no dirty clothes anywhere. Not even an empty basket.

At first, I guessed the girl had gone to stay with her aunt (and probably one or more girl cousins) a few days early. But closer inspection showed there was a thin layer of dust on the top of the dresser and vanity, covering not only the bare surfaces, but the girl’s purse and makeup kit and so forth. She wouldn’t have left that here if she was going to stay with her aunt, would she? No, wait — Mom and even Kiara had more than one purse to go with different outfits.

But then I studied the family photos in the hall. The oldest showed the man and woman, much younger, alone or with a baby girl (probably a girl, anyway, judging from how lacy her white dress was). Then an older version of the girl, two or three years old and wearing a Dora the Explorer T-shirt, with a baby boy in a sailor suit on her lap. Then all three kids together, or all five of the family, at different ages... and then, in the latest pictures where the boys' appearances matched the kids I’d seen an hour ago, the girl wasn’t present. I was pretty sure the girl was dead, and her room was preserved as a kind of shrine.

The girl didn’t look that much like Kiara, but she was apparently around Kiara’s age when she died, and this all brought my own recent losses back to me so hard that I broke down crying for the first time in weeks. I curled up on the girl’s bed, hugging a koala plushie that reminded me of one of Kiara’s plushies, and sobbed for a long time.

Finally, some time after my tears dried, I got up and looked around some more. I wandered into the master bathroom and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

I hadn’t been in a bathroom for weeks, since I stopped feeling any need for a toilet. I was bundled up in layers of clothes that I’d stolen here and there in my first few days alone, while I still felt cold and heat; nothing was visible of me but my hands and face, and my face looked... not quite right. A little vague, like my personality had drained out of it. I didn’t recognize myself; I could have been any teenage boy in a crowd.... for that matter, I could have been a girl, the way my layered shirts and coats and pants obscured my figure. Had I looked like that to Mr. Starrett? Had Mom looked like that to Grandpa Haines? Surely not... I’d never noticed Mom, Dad, or Kiara looking different, except that we’d gotten more rumpled and disheveled as the days wore on.

Without conscious thought, I started stripping off all those layers of clothes. It took a while. And I discovered that I wasn’t myself anymore. I wasn’t a boy, nor a girl either — kind of a Ken doll, but more androgynous-looking. I had no nipples, no body hair, nothing at my crotch.

“Huh,” I said. “No wonder those showering girls didn’t look too interesting. And no wonder I haven’t need to pee for a while.”

After staring at myself in the mirror for a minute more, taking in this latest loss, I shrugged and started adjusting the shower temperature. I wasn’t sure if I’d quit sweating at the same time I quit peeing and pooping, but I hadn’t noticed my own smell for a good while now, and apparently no one else did, either. But I still thought the flow of hot water over my skin would feel nice, and I was right; it did. I got out a long while later, ten or twenty minutes after the hot water heater ran out (the cold water was nice, too, in a different way) and looked at the filthy clothes on the bathroom floor.

“Nope,” I said. “Not putting those back on.”

I thought about borrowing some clothes from the father of the household — Brandon, that was his name — to wear while walking to a store to steal some more stuff that fit me. The boys' clothes would be too small for me, I thought, though I wasn’t sure I hadn’t lost a little height along with my nipples and junk. But on further thought, I didn’t see any point in wearing clothes at all. I didn’t have any private parts to conceal, and even if I still had them, nobody would notice. And I didn’t seem to mind the cold anymore. So I gathered up those old clothes and sorted through them, throwing away the underwear and the tattered socks, and setting aside the other stuff to wash and drop off in a donation box after I left — probably around the time the family came home from their Thanksgiving trip.

I figured while I was washing my clothes, I might as well wash some of the family’s stuff too. I filled the washing machine up the rest of the way with dirty towels and washcloths from the bathrooms, and a few pairs of underwear and socks from the boys‘ rooms. While they were washing, I looked around for something to read. The living room shelf was mostly history and biography, with a little popular science and some bestselling novels; the boys’ rooms had mostly children’s books or YA novels. The dead girl’s room had a mix of teen romance and YA fantasy, and I wound up picking up Liar by Justine Larbalestier off her shelf and curling up on the sofa with it until the washing machine was done, and again while the dryer ran.

By the time they came home from their aunt’s house, I’d washed all the clothes and dishes and put them away, as well as the sheets from the master bedroom and the boys' bedrooms. I finished Liar and made a good dent in the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I’d lost track of time again, and was curled up on the sofa reading about Ben Franklin’s system for self-improvement when I heard a key in the front door lock, and the door popped open.

For just a moment I felt self-conscious about my nakedness, but that passed as the boys burst into the house and dashed for the hall bathroom without taking any notice of me. A few moments later, Brandon walked in, carrying a small suitcase in each hand, and then his wife, carrying a duffel bag and a dry cleaning bag.

I followed them to their bedroom. I wondered if they’d notice the empty clothes baskets or the freshly-made bed. Back when I’d still felt hunger, waiters had never noticed me taking a plate off the platter they were carrying until they got to the customer’s table and realized it was missing.

Listening to their banal conversation as the woman unpacked and Brandon brought in more bags, I learned the woman’s name (Lauren) and the boys' names (Dustin and Mitchell), but didn’t hear any evidence that they’d noticed my cleaning. I finally decided it was time to go. It had been a pleasant few days, but I shouldn’t stay any longer. I gathered up the bundle of clean clothes, wondering if I should try to return some of them to the stores I’d stolen them from, and realizing I couldn’t remember what I’d stolen where. I walked out while Brandon was going out to the van for the last load of luggage and started walking toward the nearest Goodwill.

I'll post the last chapter on Sunday or Christmas Eve, if all goes well.

Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.