New Dead Families

It’s not that anyone was afraid of them, the mask boys, skulking in the shadows with their faces obscured by matching shells of black plastic. No mouths, no nostrils, no decoration. Featureless. Only ovals, eyeholes, and strands of wide, white elastic running above and behind their ears, bunching up their hair.

Tonight, the mask boys are not moving. They’re just sitting on the curb in front of number 18611. The marching band was just out earlier in the summer, stenciling new numbers onto the edge of the curb. The marching band felt real good about it: increasing visibility for fire trucks! the marching band told our parents. And only fifteen dollars to you! they told them. And it goes to a great cause! the marching band said. Our band trip in October! So all the parents paid for it, and we all had fresh stenciled numbers on our curbs.

18611 belonged to one of the mask boys. I’d never seen him without his mask. I’d never seen any of them without their masks, but maybe I had. Maybe that was the point of the masks.

Or maybe all they had was their masks.

At sunset I sit on my own curb, across the street from the mask boys, with a bright orange popsicle melting in the September heat, dripping speckled stains onto a white eyelet dress I should’ve grown out of two summers ago, if not physically then emotionally, but I’m still wearing it, and I’ll probably wear it next summer, too, faded orange dots marking this day.

“Ruby,” one of the boys says, words wet and hushed against the plastic of his mask, nodding to me. “Come on out with us tonight, Ruby,” he says.

I shrug. I don’t want to talk to him, or any of them, and I also don’t want to not be cool.

“We’ll let you drive, Ruby,” the boy says. Another mask boy laughs, more of a snicker.

“No thanks,” I say.

“You can bring your sister,” the snickering boy says. He’s nodding toward my house behind me, so I turn, and I’m annoyed with how compliant I am.

My sister Mae, a year older, sixteen, leans against a porch column, one hand on a hip. I didn’t hear her come outside. I didn’t even know she was home. I can’t really remember the last time I saw her. This morning, or maybe it was yesterday, or maybe it’s been days. We stare at each other for a while. There’s nothing in her face, no signal of excitement or of fear or of: this is a bad idea. I just see boredom.

“I still get to drive,” I say.

Only four of the mask boys come. I sit in the front, and the boy from 18611 sits shotgun. It’s 18611’s dad’s car, a 1970s Buick with a bench seat in the front. My sister sits next to me, and the other three masks are in the back.

“An hour and a half till the desert,” one of the mask boys in the back says, thumbing a phone. “Ocotillo.”

“The desert?” I say. Be cool. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be dumb. Don’t be prude. Prudy Ruby.

“Shut up, Ruby,” Mae says.

“That’s a long drive,” I say. “At night.”

“It’s not quite night,” 18611 says. “We have so much time. Besides, you haven’t come out here with us since we were kids.”

I glance toward him and the car swerves a little. The steering wheel, gritty, disintegrating brown leather, moves heavily back and forth as I try to steady a car I don’t know how to drive. A car I’m not legally allowed to drive.

“Do I know you?” I ask. “I mean, have I always known you?”

18611 doesn’t answer, nobody answers.

After a while, Mae rests her head on my shoulder and I roll the window down. 18611 takes a pack of cloves from the glove box and lights one. It smells beautiful, but he chokes and it sounds like shit. He pulls the mask horizontally an inch away from his mouth for each drag, but I can’t see anything on account of the burgeoning darkness and my sister’s head in the way. On account of: is there even anything beneath the mask? On account of: when’s the last time anyone saw the mask boys without their masks?

“Take it off,” I say.

He laughs. “Ruby.”

“I’m turning around. Unless you take it off.”

“I’ll take it off,” and his voice is kinder than I’m expecting, “when we get there.”

I’m quiet. 18611 hands over the clove, and I take it and rest it against the steering wheel.

“Deal?” he asks.

I take a drag and it tastes worse than it smells. I try really hard not to cough. The end of the cigarette tastes of blood, coppery and sharp-edged.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Your sister is asleep,” 18611 says. I hadn’t noticed, but her head is heavy and unyielding against my shoulder.

I glance in the rear view mirror. Nobody else seems to be awake, each of the three matching black masks tilted askew to the one next to it.

“Don’t fall asleep, too,” I say, and I want a do-over. I want to be able to say that again without sounding so desperate.

“Ruby, never,” he says.

“What’s your name?” I ask. “I just call you by your address.”

“You talk about me?” If he has a mouth it is smiling. “To your friends?”

“I don’t talk to anybody about you.”

“We’re almost there,” 18611 says. “Take the next turn-off.”

“I like your car,” I say, tugging against the steering wheel to turn. “It feels really strong.”

“I like you, Ruby,” he says. “You say such weird shit. You always have.”

“Tell me who you are.”

“I’ve lived across from you your whole life, Ruby. I’m hurt,” he says. A laugh.

It feels cruel, both the laugh and that I have no memory of him before the masks. I have no memory of that house at all. Was it always there? Was it ever there? Was my sister ever this tired so early in the evening?

“Pull over here,” 18611 says.

I slow to a stop and shove the steering wheel’s hand gear into park. The car rocks forward and then back just a touch. 18611 twists his torso and puts both hands on my sister’s cheeks, lifting her head away from my shoulder and tilting it against the seat.

“She’ll be asleep a while,” he says.

I grip the steering wheel.

“You can trust me, Ruby,” he says. “You’ve always trusted me.”

I glance in the rearview mirror.

“They’ll be asleep a while too. I’m glad, though. They were getting on my nerves. Don’t worry, they’re not hurt. They won’t feel hurt. I wouldn’t let anyone get hurt, Ruby.”

I get out of the car. I can’t make sense of my trust.

“Remember that one time we held hands underwater in your pool, for Mae’s birthday?” he asks.

I don’t.

18611’s fingertips graze against mine as we walk and it’s going to be a moonless night and the sky is already chock full of stars and when he laces his fingers between mine I remember, I remember a pool, and I remember a boy with fingers the same length as mine. 18611’s fingers are thicker than mine and thicker than all the other hands I’ve held in my short life—all girls and women. I remember that: he doesn’t feel like girl. I remember brown hair. Nothing else. I squeeze my eyes shut, but still, nothing. Nothing else. I want a name, I want eyes, I want a face. If I hold his hand tighter we’re in the pool, wading, knees lifting higher than normal walking knees and I can almost remember that night. I can almost remember how I wanted to let go and swim, how I felt so childish in my one-piece swimsuit, yellow, stretched out and gaping in the butt. I can almost remember how I’d always watched him.

“Ruby,” he says. “You have a nice mouth and nice hands.”

I want to tell him I didn’t think he had a mouth.

“You have nice hands,” I say. My voice sounds strong and I’m pleased. I don’t feel strong. I feel somewhere between dead and alive: ephemeral, ectoplasmic, ethereal.

“Am I dead?” I ask. “Are you dead?”

18611 laughs.

“If being dead feels this wild,” he says, and he takes a big breath in, and then out, “then I wanna die tonight.”

“I don’t think being dead feels good,” I say. “I don’t think that’s the point.”

18611 lets go of my hand.

“Here,” 18611 says when he stops walking, and he sits me down on the smooth, flat plane of an outcropping of boulders. “Look.”

I look and everything is vast and dark, nothing really, just the spiked ocotillo skyline of the desert against a grey, starry sky.

“Watch,” 18611 says, and he disappears. I try not to panic for a moment until I realize that I don’t need to try. That I’m actually already pretty calm. The desert is loud when I let it be loud. Wind rustling the stiff brush, the wispy edges to the ocotillo, whistling through boulders and caves. Hisses of insects, reptiles, the cries of coyotes, the staccato screech of burrowing owls.

“Ruby?”

It’s my sister’s voice.

“Mae,” I whisper. “Where are you? I’m here.”

“Ruby?” Her voice is edgy, shaky, and she’s crying and all the other sounds are gone now.

I want to call for 18611, but I feel stupid using his address as his name. I want to find my sister.

I stand and walk in the direction of the car. I see the road. I think. I see the shape of the car. I think. I don’t really remember the car. I try to remember number 18611, the actual house, the driveway, and what kind of car is parked there. A small car, small and new. No. No, no. Remember driving here. I drove here. I drove here, didn’t I? It was old, large, boat-like, my sister’s cheek against my shoulder.

“Ruby,” Mae says again, from behind me this time. I spin around and it’s just 18611.

He laughs in Mae’s voice and I run to the car.

Mae is lying across the front seat, stretched out across the entire thing. I pull open the door and shake her.

“Wake up,” I say, hoarse. I don’t remember losing my voice. “Mae!”

In the back the other boys are awake and they are pulling at their masks but the masks hardly budge, a suctioned wet sound as the masks tug away from where faces are meant to be.

“Ruby,” Mae says. “What’s going on?”

“Mae, get up. We have to get away from here.”

“Ruby!” I hear, and it’s 18611, his normal voice. “Did you like my trick?”

He’s leaning against the car and I remember again. I remember this time, sitting on the front lawn, swimsuits, eight years old, sprinklers behind us, chicken nuggets in cardboard boxes between us.

“We were best friends,” I ask 18611. “Weren’t we?”

I glance in the backseat and the other boys are asleep again. 18611 doesn’t answer me, and there are six of us out here, but if I’m the only one worried then maybe I’m no better off than being alone.

“I want to go home,” I say.

“We just got here. Show me around,” Mae says, and I hate the tone of her voice. I remember how she’d do this, to 18611 mostly, and she’d change her voice to be flirty. “I love the desert,” she says. “Especially at night.”

I want to laugh and point out how she hates the desert at night, if camping last summer was any indication, but I feel overwhelmed with the need to be close to my sister. I reach my arm toward her, and Mae slowly lifts her hand to mine. She watches our hands the whole time I pull her from the car, a look of marvel on her face.

“Are they drugged or something?” I ask 18611.

I hear him laugh behind me, but only for a second and then he’s quiet. The boys in the back of the car are still again, heads tilted against the seat, pubescent Adam’s apples jutting sharply out from their stretched necks. Asleep.

“Am I drugged?” I say. “I can’t remember anything.”

“That’s not drugs,” is all he says.

Mae climbs out of the car and holds my hand as we follow 18611. He walks a few paces ahead of us, slowly.

“Do you remember when we were little?” she asks, “and we’d come out here, and Rex would be in the backseat climbing all over us?”

I laugh.

“But out here he’d just go crazy and get so tired out?” Mae says. Her voice softens. “And on the drive home he’d stink of dog even more than normal, but at least he’d just sleep at our feet.”

“You remember everything out here,” 18611 says quietly, and I think I want to call him Raj. I think his name has always been Raj. I think my name is Ruby.

“You don’t remember things at home anymore,” he says.

“What?”

“It’s home,” Raj says.

“Home is safe,” Mae says, defensive. “I think,” she adds. “I can’t remember.” She looks up. “It’s beautiful here and there isn’t even a moon.”

“Raj,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“I know you.”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t I know you at home?”

“It’s just the beginning,” he says, without elaborating. Ask him about the masks, I think. Ask him. Now’s a good time. He wanders off. I don’t ask him about the masks.

“Mae,” I say. “Remember your birthday that summer, and Raj and his brother were in the pool with us?”

“I never forgot that, Ruby,” Mae says. She’s so nonchalant it’s like she’s known all along that I’m the only one.

“I’m not the only one,” I say. “What about the others, with the masks, in the backseat? They were fucking pulling them off,” I say, and I’m trying to be frantic but Mae is holding my hand and I’m all right.

Why am I okay with this? I think I say.

#

The popsicle is gone, but I didn’t eat it. It’s a puddle on my lap, yellowish orange at the hem of this white dress and I’m clutching the stripped popsicle stick between a gooey thumb and forefinger. Mae isn’t holding my hand because I’m home, I’m sitting on the curb, facing number 18611, and she’s in the doorway to our house. The boys are there, across the street, sitting on their own curb, and they have faces, no masks. There’s Raj. He’s smiling at me and I remember him: my friend.

I push my hair from my face and now I know why I didn’t eat the popsicle. I have no face, just a black mask. Hard plastic. No mouth, no features, just two eyeholes. I scream.

#

“It’s really the only place we’re safe still,” Raj says. I blink twice because we’re in the desert. His mask is on. Mae is holding my hand. I think I remember Raj.

“I remember the pool,” I say. “I remember the curbs out front of our houses. I remember the popsicle. I remember you, Raj,” I say.

He takes my other hand. The sky is darker now, but our vision is okay. We’ve had plenty of time to adjust. Despite the darkness, I see the hobbled movement of a horned toad scurrying from some tree, some sort of chaparral, or maybe it’s an elephant tree. It looks skeletal, the tree.

With Raj on one hand and Mae on the other, Mae tilting her head against my shoulder as we walk, it feels like this night will never end and part of me can even remember my parents.

“Do we have parents?” I ask Mae.

Mae doesn’t answer. She’s humming a song, and I think I recognize the tune from the radio. It’s old. Kind of happy, slow.

“Are they worried?” I ask.

Raj squeezes my hand. A sky full of stars reflects as tiny pinpricks of light across the sheen of his mask.

“How far away are we from the car?” I ask, and then I see the other boys, their masks on, and they’re not trying to pull them off, and they’re squatting around a circle of rocks, gathering sticks, building a teepee-shaped firestarter.

“They were just in the car,” I say.

“They’re building a fire,” Mae says. “Can we sleep here? I want to sleep here,” she says.

She stops walking, and she lets go of my hand. “I don’t ever want to go home,” she whispers.

The boys have a paper grocery bag and it has juice boxes and tortilla chips inside, but nothing else. They’re the kind of juice boxes that are tiny plastic bottles shaped like miniature versions of actual bottles, the kind you bite off and spit out the lid, and drink from the bite-tattered hole your teeth make. Nobody is eating or drinking anything yet, but Mae takes a red bottle and rolls it back and forth between her palms.

“We have to stay here,” Raj says. I think his name is Raj. He lives at number 18611.

The other boys nod their heads, their masks moving slowly, up and down, synchronized.

“I don’t think we can go home,” one of them says. The others shake their heads. Masks side to side. Slowly. Synced.

I want to say that the masks creep me out. I want to ask them to take them off. I want to maybe just ask something like, What is the deal with the masks? But I don’t. I can’t. What I can do is reach out my arm, straightening it at the elbow, palm out, and touch the nearest boy’s mask. I run my fingertips over where the mouth should go and trail across the air to the next boy’s mask and do the same, and then the next boy, and then the next. I am not creeped out by the masks. I do not want the boys to take them off. I bring both my hands to my mouth and press all my fingers flat against my lips. I’m the wildest and the tamest I’ve ever felt.

In the early morning I wake wrapped in the limbs of the boy who lives in 18611. Raj. The sky is both grey and golden, barely enough light to see by. I prop myself up on my elbows and Raj’s hands and legs adjust to my movement, but do not release. He curls. Silhouetted against the dawn, the ocotillo seem larger, more frightening. A cactus wren perches on the highest point of the tree, twitchy and hoppy against the stillness of the morning.

Raj has no mask on. He has no face. Just darkness, nothing. Empty. Black. His mask is nowhere. I scrunch my eyes shut tight, willing this all to go away. I will myself home, to some time just on the edge of memory before the masks, before the memories slipped away, but nothing happens. I open my eyes and the cactus wren is gone, the sky is brighter, and Raj’s mask is in place. He burrows his body into my side and I notice that the mask is the same temperature of the air, of his skin, and his penis is erect, insistent against my thigh. I wonder what things I’ll never remember.

#

I’m home and I don’t know where my parents are and this time my dress is pale green, chiffon, short, a prom dress maybe. I wish I could remember because it looks like I cared, it looks like it mattered to me where I was going and who I was going with and how I looked. The house is empty and dark and I can’t find the light switches. I don’t remember where any of the light switches are. In the living room, I look through the lacy curtains at number 18611. There’s a light on upstairs. I wonder if it is the boy’s room. I wonder who bought these curtains. They’re the kind of curtains a mother would buy. They’re the kind of curtains someone would buy to try to be a mother.

Raj approaches his window and stands there, naked, but I can’t see low enough. I wonder if he can see me through the lacy window, in the darkness. He doesn’t turn the light off while he jerks off, and he also doesn’t look away. He’s looking at this window. My window. I touch my hips, my breasts, and I run a hand, swishing against the chiffon, between my legs. My other hand runs up my neck, towards my hair.

But instead it snags on plastic. I look back at Raj’s window, his face, no mask. He is beautiful. He crumples almost in half, shoulders slumping forward. I pull against the thick elastic of my mask, but it won’t budge. It’s not a mask. It’s part of me.

#

“Ruby,” Raj says. “Ruby!”

I open my eyes to sharp pain, brightness, shouting.

“Stop scratching your face,” Raj says through his teeth except I can’t see teeth, just the mask.

My face is my face. No mask. Gritty desert floor beneath me, cracked and dry.

It’s midday when I realize I haven’t seen Mae since before sleeping.

It’s midday when I start running.

It’s midday when I realize I don’t know which direction is home.

By late afternoon I can follow the sun as it traces the sky to the ocean. I want to go that way. I walk slowly, too tired to run for more than a minute at a time, clutching my sandals by the ankle straps in one hand, the other reaching out to touch the stalky weeds growing along the edge of the highway.

I try to worry about Mae. I try to force it. Mae is missing. I can hardly fight the peace I feel. I can hardly fight against the urge to go back, to find the car, the camp, to sit with the boys with the masks. I move slowly because it’s all I can manage. I want to go back. I don’t want to worry about Mae. I don’t want to worry.

“Do I have parents?” I say out loud to the empty highway. My feet are sore, but not really sore, that callus-making stage. Or maybe they’re worse than they seem and whatever has taken hold of me means I can’t even feel my feet. I don’t look.

Every so often, though, I touch my cheek. I feel for flesh.

#

I watch the sun set ahead of me two times before I’m home.

#

But it’s not home. It doesn’t feel like home.

#

I sit on the curb in front of 18611, directly across the street from my house. My house is empty, they all are. From what I can see, the insides are blackened out, almost like smoke, but the air smells clean, fresh, like a winter morning rain, but it’s still hot and it feels late and like the sun will never let up.

All the houses on the street are like this. Silent, empty.

The sun is sinking again, and I’m afraid of the dark now that I’m home. I feel things again, things like worry and fear and pain. I miss someone. I can’t remember anything but I know I am missing someone. Something. Do I have a family? Do I have friends?

I stand and take a deep breath. My stomach hurts from hunger. I squeeze my palms into fists and cross the street without checking for cars because I am alone. It feels like the entire world left me here. It feels like maybe I left with the entire world, but I made a mistake and came back. I feel regret. I feel it in the grid of bones in my chest.

At my front porch, it feels wrong to knock, but I don’t want to anger anyone. Have I ever felt this afraid? Is this my house? My home? Is this my street? Is this me? I knock and wait. Knock and wait. Knock once more, wait once more, and then finally twist the brushed nickel door knob. The door swings open.

I move quickly into the house and it hurts my chest to breathe, to be in here. It hurts my skin to walk. A palm flattened against eggshell paint on the hallway wall seems electrified, seared.

And then I see the masks. Like shells. Piles of them, all over, slick black plastic, industrial white elastic, just like the masks on the boys. They seem severed, bodiless in a way that unworn masks aren’t supposed to seem. Incomplete.

Mostly the masks seem like whatever removed them no longer has anything in their place. A dark hole? Stringy, torn flesh? Skinless muscle, pink, meat? Bone, nothing but skull and eye? The masks are clean, but there are so many I have no choice but to step on them. They don’t crack. My ankles roll on a few and I have to shuffle my feet instead of normal walking. So many masks. A river in the hallway, a lake in the living room, an ocean in the kitchen.

I think I am screaming.

I think this is what mourning feels like.

I turn and run, stumbling on the masks, falling once, twice, and the third time my face lands against a mask, aligned just-so, and I panic and swat it away like there’s a bee and I crawl until I spill out onto the porch, into the clean evening air, hot, relentlessly hot.

I gasp to breathe, and this is probably what birth feels like.

“Ruby,” I hear. “Ruby!”

“Mae?” I whisper, squinting against the setting sun, and I hold out my palm, blocking the light. I still can’t see her, only bright spots.

“Ruby.”

I stand and I can smell her before I see her or feel her: orange popsicles, laundry detergent. My sister takes my hand and guides me down the front steps, down to the street, and I can make out more than shapes and shadows now. It’s Raj, and the other boys. I can finally count them: four. I can finally see their faces. No masks. Every other time I’ve felt like this, when I’ve seen their faces, I’ve been the one with the mask. I bend my elbow and slowly bring my hand to my cheek. Checking for plastic.

It’s skin. It’s my face. Sweaty, maybe a little oily. I laugh, breathy. I laugh! I can’t remember laughing. I think I’m laughing for the first time.

“Mae,” I say. “Mae. I’m okay. The mask boys are okay.”

Raj says, “We’re okay.”

We walk to the boys and stand together in the middle of the road, black masks at our feet, and I think: we’re watching the world burn, but nothing is on fire. Mae slips her hand around my forearm. She tilts her head and rests it against my shoulder. Like she always does.