The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

side of the comics, reading them together like children’s books, each of them pressed gently into the other’s side, until Kay yawns and Avi follows her upstairs.

When she’s asleep, her body leaden heavy with wine, Avi slips out of bed. He goes to Emmeline’s room and eases the door open. A wedge of light from the hall falls across her sleeping face. Every decision he makes has become weighty and permanent. It’s felt that way since she was born, a change, the introduction of consequence. It’s what people mean when they say there’s the kids to think of. But that implies the option of not thinking of one’s kids. When Avi made the worst decisions for himself, he was thinking about Emmeline, if only with guilt that even she was not enough to get him to stop or that it was in part the responsibility of her and to her that necessitated the bad choices.

He wonders about Owen Curry’s mother. What decisions had she made that produced him? Was it that she couldn’t love what he was? Or understand it? Did she fail to give him a context in which to see himself? A word for what he’d become? How do I save my daughter from becoming like him? he thinks.

He takes out his phone and enters the number Kevin Bishop gave him. It was not, he noticed, the same as the one on the check to Kay. Avi takes some pride in this, graced with the direct line.

I want her to meet you, he types. Then adds, all.

Monday morning, Avi offers Kay a ride to the El station, and she accepts because it’s viciously cold out. At the station, Kay leans over the emergency brake and kisses Avi good-bye. They understand that this must be done. Neither can leave the other without a kiss even if they’re angry. Even if they’re not speaking. A marriage runs on love initially, but as it gets polluted with battles and betrayals and resentments, it relies on rules. Rituals. Parts of their life together have a workmanlike quality to them, but it works. It holds them together on days when they don’t share a grand passion and gets them through to the times when they feel that again. Drive and structure. Fire and skill.

Kay gets out of the car and goes to Emmeline’s window. Emmeline’s been quiet since she got up. She stared into her cereal bowl, then went upstairs to get a sweater. She sat on the bench in the front hallway, waiting for Avi and Kay to be ready to leave. She rolls down her window and kisses her mother, a loud smack. A stage kiss.

I made it through the morning without lying to my wife, Avi thinks as she dashes through the station doors. It’s a teenage thought, relying on technicalities to absolve him. His omission is so large that it can’t be called anything but a lie.

“You want to hop up front?” he asks Emmeline. She’s too slight to ride in front, but the car is one area where he and Kay have both adopted a we did it that way and we grew up okay approach to parenting. Settled in the front seat, Emmeline looks like a toy.

“You want to talk?” Avi says. Emmeline shakes her head. Avi turns up the radio, the classic rock station whose scope includes bands Avi listened to when he was a teenager. A song comes on he hasn’t heard in years, “Drain You” by Nirvana. Avi remembers the first time he saw them on television. Cobain’s sullen magnetism. A charisma that shone through all the singer’s efforts to cover it up. Maybe he was one of them, Avi thinks.

He makes the turn onto North Clark, heading home.

“I’m not going to school, am I?” Emmeline says.

“You can if you want,” Avi says. “Some people are coming by the house who’d like to meet you. People like you.”

“Are they going to take me away?” she asks.

“No, honey,” Avi assures her. “No one is going to take you away.”

It isn’t a lie or an omission on his part. Simply a mistake.

—

Emmeline hasn’t been up to the attic since she was tiny enough Avi could strap her into the baby carrier and climb the ladder. That magical time he could set Emmeline down in a circle of toys and books and the girl would exist there, happy, for hours.

Avi sits in the red chair and watches as Emmeline, still wearing her puffy purple coat with the mittens attached to the cuffs, investigates the space. She flips through his records. She plays with the orange tassels along the edges of a rug. She opens a drawer on the file cabinet, peers in, and shuts it. Seeing it through Emmeline’s eyes, Avi is aware how shabby his office is. What he thinks passes for kitsch might be junk. The threadbare furniture. The ugly rugs. How do you explain ironic furnishing to a seven-year-old?

“Leener,” he says, “they’ll be here in a minute.”

“Should we go let them in?” she asks.

“Wait,” says Avi. “Come here.” Emmeline climbs into his lap, and he swivels the chair so it faces the western wall. “Watch,” he says.

The first time Kimani arrived, Avi hadn’t seen it coming. Now the two of them watch the spot where the door appeared. Avi imagines a point of light at the floorboard, a sparking little star, rising up like an acetylene torch burning through sheet metal, tracing a molten line six feet into the air then turning, traversing, descending.

It’s not like that at all. There is no door. Then there is.

Emmeline gasps like it’s a magic trick, and Avi is relieved. He needs all of this to be strange to her, too. If they can’t discover it together, if Emmeline has come preloaded with the ability to make sense of all this, he’s lost her already.

Kimani opens the door and pokes her head out. “Is