Read Klickitat for Free Online

on the window, though by that time I think they’d given up on the locks because she always found a way out. Above her bed, where her hands had been outlined in black marker, there was now another pair of hands, a little higher. Larger hands.
    I stood for a moment in the doorway, not going in, and then I felt Mom, behind me, in my parents’ room. I turned, but she didn’t see me. She was sitting at the computer desk, her side to me, and her face was glowing red from the computer screen, then orange, then blue as the pattern changed. Her mouth moved, but made no sounds. She wore headphones over her ears, and her hair was pulled back tight with a rubber band, which made her head look smaller, her eyes squinted down.
    She was barefoot, too, sitting at the computer. All the colors on the screen burst and twisted and unfolded from each other so slowly. Circles and swooping curves, and she sat perfectly still and stared into them, her eyes half-closed.
    These are visualizers, these things she does. I knewthat if I talked to her she probably wouldn’t hear me, or maybe she was ignoring me. I knew in her headphones there was soft music with no voices, so soft that it’s hardly music at all. Mom had tried to get me to do it. She said it was a meditation, refreshing like sleep only even better than sleep. She also has a light shaped like a triangle that is supposed to shift her rhythms, to help her sleep, that she sometimes sets next to her at the dinner table. It tries to convince her body that the sun hasn’t gone down.
    â€œVivian!” she suddenly said, not quite turning around. She’d seen me in the reflection of the screen. “That’s creepy, sneaking up on me.”
    â€œI was just standing here.”
    Now her headphones were off, she was facing me. I could tell she was trying not to be angry. Behind her, blue spirals bounced against each other, around the screen.
    â€œIt’s okay,” she said. “Here.”
    I stepped closer to her, where she was holding out her arms, but we didn’t touch. She knew it wasn’t always easy for me to touch people.
    â€œWe have to try and help each other,” she said. “Tobe a family. With your sister the way she is right now and everything—”
    â€œOkay,” I said.
    â€œWe’re more than some random people put together in a house.”
    â€œI know,” I said, feeling awkward, standing there. “It’s not your fault.”
    â€œWhat’s not my fault?” she said.
    â€œHow things are,” I said. “With Audra, with me.”
    Turning, I tried to walk like a fox, silent on the edges of my feet as I went back into the hallway, down the stairs, and through the kitchen.
    Downstairs, all the little glass squares of Dad’s radio were dark, the red needles still. There’s enough light from the windows up by the ceiling, along the driveway. I sat in Dad’s rolling swivel chair, the seat patched with tape. Behind me in the darkness, the washer and dryer sat, silent. A pad of paper hung on a hook, but it just had numbers and times listed on it, no real writing. I found another notepad wedged behind a box on the desk, and I took it out and leaned close, squinting to read it—
    Iceland is talking about the Number
    Stations again. She says the volcano
    can block radio waves but that her
    transmitter is mobile. She’s using the
    Earth-Moon-Earth technique, bouncing
    her signal off the Moon and down to
    me. Imagine her voice, traveling all
    that way through outer space and
    all that static to reach me. It’s so
    surprising how people are brought
    together, and which ones.
    Dad’s handwriting is printing, kind of like you learn in school, only smaller, neater. If you looked at his writing from across the room you might think it was lines of numbers.
    I took the headset from its hook and fit the padded black foam over my ears. I could hear nothing, only a faint rushing. The