* * *

When my sister, who was older than me, was still with us, she’d say again and again, “Let’s get out of the city. There are places in the country where no one’s going to bother us. Wide-open spaces.”

That stuck in my mind: wide-open spaces. I remember shopping trips and stuff to the suburbs when I was just a kid, back when we still had our home and Mom. But Adalia was talking about something else, someplace grander, I always thought. Wide-open spaces probably meant there wasn’t any danger of somebody overhearing what Dad said. No threat of arrest. I’ve had to be afraid of the police all my life. Thanks to Dad. Dad and his dipshit beliefs, which I went along with for a long, long time, and now am so sick of I can’t stand it.

My sister left. Cut and ran. She even told Dad she was going, but he didn’t-couldn’t- stop her. Adalia is just a jumble of images to me now. Mostly I remember that she was the practical one. Like Mom was, I think. Only, Adalia didn’t waste away in a hospital bed, with Dad weeping and praying over her until an orderly heard and told him she’d call the cops if he kept it up.

That was a while ago. Things are different. Dad wouldn’t get a warning now.

* * *

I’m not with him every minute of the day. Today, for instance, I have to go get his eyedrops. I’ve got a pharmacard that identifies me as Bright Estabrook, a name I like a lot better than my own. I look like the picture on the card, which Dad got from somewhere. Dad’s eyes give him headaches, but I got to give him this-he doesn’t bitch about it. He’s had this trouble with his eyes since he was a boy, he says.

Stains wipe off my coat; it’s some slick synthefabric. I look presentable when I go into the pharmacy. But, like I said, I’m not a kid anymore, and on the way out with Dad’s drops some adults standing on the corner notice me. They wave, call me over, with friendly smiles.

I know I should keep on walking, but I don’t. A little of that is the thought of an extra few moments of discomfort for Dad; but the rest of it is curiosity, a tingle of strange excitement.

“Hey, man, how’s it goin’?”

“You on your own?”

“What’s your name, little bro?”

There are four of them, and the one who hasn’t asked me anything is a woman half a head taller than me, with hair a darker blond than mine is and a face that makes me think about beautiful sunrises and the first taste of hot food after a long time without it.

Nobody makes a grab for me. No one asks what’s in the bag. These are rough-looking types, maybe not living on the streets but close to it. Their friendliness seems real, though.

“I’m Bright,” I tell them. They like it. They laugh, but they’re not making fun of me. One has a smoke going, cupping it against the wind. The marijuana scent blows right over me. As it gets passed around, one tough asks if I want a toke. “I’m underage,” I answer, expecting mocking laughs this time.

But the woman, who I’ve been trying real hard not to just stare at, says, “That’s smart, Bright. You wouldn’t want to do it out here where anybody could see, right?” She takes the cigarette, sucks in the smoke, releases it and adds, “Maybe we’ll see you.”

It’s a dismissal, but she’s not gruff. More like she’s treating me like a grownup. I like that. Like it a lot.

I bring Dad his eyedrops. He’s pacing across the mouth of an alley, jaw clenched so tight it’s white. It isn’t just the ache from his eyes. The nimrod is trying not to pray out loud.

* * *

I know I should miss our home, but I don’t, really. I remember it, sort of. A familiar series of walls, a bed to sleep in every night. Before Mom got sick and while Dad still had his job, we ate regular meals and were warm, with a roof over our heads. I remember our TV.

But it wasn’t all fun. It was like we were in our own separate world, Dad, Mom, Adalia, me. Dad ran it. He told us what was right and wrong. He told these big, powerful, wild stories that were sometimes like nightmares. He said we were being watched, every second. I thought he meant the cops, because he told my sister and me that the government was looking for people like him. But what he really meant was somebody else. Somebody bigger.

Sometimes I got to watch cartoons on the TV, but mostly Dad had it tuned to a pirate broadcast. That’s something else you don’t get any more of today. A man with white hair raved and sweated before a bare concrete wall, and waved around a big black book. Sometimes the same program showed up again and again, an hour of the man shouting the same things. Dad kept us in front of the TV for hours. He watched, rapt, and repeated the parts he could remember.

He said I had to believe, so I did. I memorized what he told me to memorize. He wasn’t mean, he never hit me when I got something wrong, but he kept at me and at me. It was harder work than school.

Mom said I had to believe too, but it was easier, I think, to hear it from her. Sometimes it was even nice, all of us standing in the living room, heads bowed, holding hands. Like we were sharing something gentle and good.

* * *

Another time I get away from Dad is when he goes into the VR parlors. Not the sex ones, but the ones that have violent stuff. I’m too young for either, so I wait outside.

He’s not there for the entertainment. He does what he always does, mutters his words, tries to slip them in sideways into people’s ears. I know this is what he’s doing in there because twice I’ve seen him get chased out, with someone yelling “Faither!” at his back.

This time the waiting is different. Across the littered street I see the blond-haired woman.

My breath stops in my throat. She’s alone. She turns, sees me, is about to keep walking; then she stops and cuts across, right toward me. My stomach does this bounce thing.

“Hey, I know you. You’re Bright.”

Just like that. She remembers me. I expect I’ll barely be able to speak, but I say without any trouble, “Yeah. I saw you and your friends outside the pharmacy.” That pretty much covers our history, but I don’t want to stop talking to her, so I ask, “What’s your name?”

She smiles, a little tug at the corner of her mouth. “Brett.”

I love the way she says it-with a lot of breath, making the name sound exotic. I thought

Brett was a man’s name, but thankfully I don’t say so. Instead, “It’s nice to see you again, Brett.”

That sounds manly, grownup. I like it.

I guess she does too. She purrs a little laugh that makes the wispy hairs on my arms stand up. “You’re on your own, Bright?”

One of her pals asked me the same thing before. I like Brett, but I’ve been out on the streets a long while and know that bad stuff can happen to unattached people, especially young ones.