The Visibles by Sara Shepard

lives in Colorado,” my father said quickly. “Moved out there years ago.” His face had tightened so drastically that I didn’t dare ask anything else.
    My father shuffled his feet on the shabby burgundy carpet. Mario bleeped as he jumped the barrels on the screen. My father looked around and scratched his head. “I don’t get it. Did someone else use this room? I have no clue where this TV and the video games could have come from.”
    “Oh, Ruth bought them for you,” Stella said. “She bought you all kinds of stuff. I guess she always thought you’d bring Summer and Steven here more often. She bought tons of crap from that space movie, too. It’s all in boxes in the closet. What was the name of one of the characters in that movie? The nookie?”
    “The Wookie ?” Steven fished, after a pause. “You mean Star Wars ? Chewbacca?”
    Stella frowned, annoyed. “No. That’s not right.”
    When Mario died, Steven turned off the game, bored. He wandered into a bedroom down the hall, and my father and Stella returned downstairs. But I stayed in the old room, looking at the posters on the wall. There was one of a Playboy girl, her bathing suit straps sliding down her arms. I couldn’t imagine my father looking at girls in that way, let alone taking the time to buy the poster and hang it up, neatly pushing tacks into each corner.
    Slowly, I opened the drawers of his desk. In the very bottom drawer, I found a photo of a guy with shaggy, longish hair and sideburns. He wore a football jersey and held up a paper cup to toast. Next to him was a small, pale, freckled girl with a guarded, uncertain smile. Her long blond hair was parted in the center. They stood in front of the eye-shaped Dairy Queen sign. I turned the picture over. Mark Jeffords and Kay Mulvaney, (secret!) engagement, 1970. The handwriting was neat and orderly, definitely not my father’s crabbed, crazy scrawl.
    I looked at their faces for a long time, especially her, dead now. Then I tucked the photo back under a bunch of papers and shut the drawer tight. “This place is really creepy,” I whispered aloud, then went to find Steven to see if he thought so, too.
    Steven was in the next bedroom, which was done up in green-and-gold-checkered wallpaper. I found him on the floor next to the bureau, his knees bent, his hands behind his head. His cheeks inflated then deflated, and he breathed out in puffs.
    My chest knotted. Steven noticed me. His face reddened.
    “Why are you doing sit-ups ?” I burst out.
    “I’m in training.” He lowered down.
    “In training for what ?”
    “The Marines.”
    I couldn’t help but laugh. “Like from your G.I. Joe days?”
    Steven’s forehead crinkled and his mouth became very small. After one more sit-up, he stood and swished by me for the bathroom, not answering my question.

six
    M y father and Stella sat around the kitchen table and drank cans of beer. Steven closed his bedroom door so I couldn’t barge in again. Samantha was smoking on the front porch—Stella just let her smoke—and was making a face that indicated she didn’t want me to come near her.
    The sky was a dirt-brown color, as if it were about to storm. There were no shadows on the road, and the wind blew the leaves on the trees upside down. I ran my hands over the rusty tin mailbox of my father’s old neighbors. The name stenciled on the box said Elkerson. I’d seen that name all over Cobalt on our drive in—Elkerson’s Grocery, Elkerson’s Auto Tag & Notary, Elkerson EZ Car Wash. In an ad circular on the kitchen counter was an ad for an Elkerson Used Auto dealership, specializing in Dodges and Fords.
    The Elkerson house was as slumped and beaten-down as my grandmother’s. In the front yard was a large plastic deer. A smaller deer was next to it, tipped over. There was rolled up, waterlogged newsprint on the gravel driveway. It wasn’t a real newspaper, though, just a fat booklet of coupons. On the front page was an ad for Uni-Mart, the