Clicked

Christmas morning

Almost three years earlier

My sister Caitlin screams—I can hear her all the way up in my room on the second floor.

She stayed out all night, again. Now, she’s back in the house and the endless arguments within my family, mostly between Dad and Caitlin, rage. It’s another battle in their ongoing war, but I seem to be the only casualty.

Once Dad stops, Mom takes over. I leave my room and move to the top of the stairs.

“We were so worried,” Mom says. Her words bounce around the high ceilings.

“Don’t lie to me,” Caitlin shouts back. “Nobody in this house cares about me.”

I want to shout from the top of stairs, ‘I care, Caitlin. I love you!’, but say nothing.

“What’s this morning’s melodrama, Caitlin?” Carol asks. The contempt in her voice rises like stench from the garbage. Unlike me, who tries to clutch onto Caitlin as she slips away, Carol kicks her to the curb.

“If you want to stay here, you’re going to do things our way!” Dad yells. He’s shorter than me, only five eight to my six one, but he yells with the fury of a man over seven feet tall.

“I’m not perfect like Carol. I’m just a fuck-up!” Caitlin shouts. “So I do what I want and there’s nothing any of you can—”

Dad cuts her off. “You need to leave now. That’s enough. Caitlin, you need to leave.”

Loud. Firm. Final.

“Tossing your daughter out on Christmas,” Caitlin says.

“Your actions, your consequences,” Mom says.

“I messed up. I want a second chance,” Caitlin says.

“You’ve used up your second chances,” Mom says.

And now Mom and Caitlin are at it, with Carol adding snide comments like a dog lifting his leg. “Seriously, Caitlin, you are such a cliché—the messed up middle child, I mean—”

“And that’s what I hate the most!” Caitlin shouts back. And it’s on between the sisters.

“I can’t live like this anymore,” Dad says, his words fading, followed by heavy footsteps.

“Daddy, where are you going?” Caitlin shouts. More steps, a door opens, closes.

“Caitlin, we ground you. You ignore it,” Mom says. “We show we love you and you look at us with such hate. I don’t know what else we can do since you won’t change.”

Caitlin mumbles something in return. I hope they are words that save her, save us.

“If we can’t love you or control you, then we can’t have you live here,” Mom says.

“I’m so sorry, for everything,” Caitlin says, I think through tears. “This time I will change.”

“But you don’t change. You say you will and you don’t,” Mom says. “There are—”

But her words are cut short by the sound of the door opening, then heavy footsteps. Dad’s probably back. It’s his last chance to say something or do something to save his family, but the only noises are shouts from the women. Mom’s the loudest.

“Oh my god, James, no,” Mom yells. “What in God’s name are you thinking?”

“Daddy, what are you doing?” Caitlin asks. Carol yells something similar.

“Caitlin, here’s my pistol. Take it from me,” Dad says in a stone cold voice. “We can’t live with you out of control like this. Take the gun and end this! Either kill yourself or kill us.”

Then there’s silence for ten seconds.

I hear nothing except the beating of my heart.

Twenty seconds.

I want to run downstairs, save my family, but I’m frozen in the heat of the moment.

Thirty seconds.

The silence of a life and death decision is the loudest sound in the universe.

Finally Caitlin screams, “I hate you,” and there’s the metallic clicking sound of a trigger against an empty chamber. I hear the sounds, I can’t see the faces. I can only hear questions spinning in my head one after another. Who was Caitlin speaking to? Who held the gun? Did that person know the gun wasn’t loaded? Who pulled the trigger? Where was the gun pointed?

Seconds later I hear another loud clicking sound—that of Caitlin’s always high heels against the hard floor. A door slams, and I worry I’ll never see the sister I love so much again.

* * * *

Friday, October 8th

Evening of Fenton High homecoming football game

“Welcome home, Carson,” Dad says as I walk in the front door.

I mumble a non-response, then quickly scale the family photo-free stairs as my head spins with the simple significance of that compound word—homecoming.

Homecoming is no ordinary word. I should know because as a future bestselling, award-winning novelist, I’m good with words. Tonight, homecoming means the football game that I watched to report on for my school paper. Tomorrow will be the homecoming dance, which I won’t attend. I’m glad not to be attending a school dance, thanks to my prom fiasco with Thien. As I walk up toward my room, I’m not thinking about last spring’s prom, but of that Christmas morning when Caitlin ran away.

Every morning I Google her name, ‘Caitlin Banks,’ but she remains a mystery, like a haunting memory or elusive mirage. My parents gave up searching, mentioning her name and even having her photos in the house. I pray they still have hope. I do.

In seconds my dependable four-year-old MacBook Pro comes on and I start clicking away at the keyboard and mouse, the sound echoing in silence. I see on the screen that I’m not the only one in front of a computer instead of a keg. It looks like many of my friends—National Honor Society all-stars and newspaper nerds—are online as well. I chat to fight the loneliness that a weekend like this magnifies a million times. Finishing the football story for the paper comes easily, so I quickly transition into the online pursuit of seventeen-year-old boys everywhere. Every time I look at porn I feel guilty, but I’m not sure why. It’s free. It’s exciting, and nobody gets hurt. Besides, one-hand fantasies and wet dreams are the extent of my sex life. Given how things ended with Thien at the prom, that’s probably just as well for me and all Fenton High girls.

I sit alone in my room in my parents’ soon-to-be-foreclosed-on house in suburban Flint, Michigan, surfing worldwide porn when I see a thumbnail of a white guy and a black guy, between them a young blonde girl with nice, natural tits. I click the image. The picture gets larger while my world grows smaller. The naked blonde girl on the screen is my sister Caitlin.

Saturday, October 9th

Morning of Fenton High homecoming dance

“Good morning, sunshine,” Dad says. It’s ten in the morning. He’s been up for hours. He sounds as bitter as the coffee grounds he’s pouring hot water through, probably for the fourth time. He runs his hand through his gray hair. He’ll dye it brown if he ever gets a job interview. It’s been months.

I yawn, rub my eyes and say nothing. The anger passes quickly. If I had a life like Dad then lost it through forces I couldn’t control, maybe sarcasm would be the only thing I’d have left too.

“What are you doing today?” Dad asks in a tone that implies I’d better have a good answer.

I reach for cereal. I can’t say, Same thing I did until six in the morning, you know, looking for porn pictures of my sister, your daughter. I can’t say it because it’s cruel, and because I couldn’t find any more in the thousand other pix and vids I explored. There was only one set of stills of her from the Homemade Hos #115 DVD. I found the web page of the company who produced it and sent an email asking how to contact the actress in the interracial threesome.

“You deaf like Grandpa Chuck?” Dad asks. “Except you don’t have the excuse. You didn’t hang hoods in a GM plant for thirty years. So, what are you doing to do today, Carson?”

I hate when Dad gets like this, all in my face. He’s not mad at me. He’s just angry. Bored. Out of work two years now and going on forever.

“Looking for a job.” But not right away since I look like hell. My light brown-almost-blond hair sits flat rather than turned up in front and my pathetic attempt at a beard remains stunted, both desperate attempts to attract the attention of actual females.

Dad laughs, a big, hearty yet totally fake laugh. “Good luck with that.”

I fill a cereal bowl with knock-off corn flakes and shovel them into my mouth without milk so I can stop this conversation before I say something mean. I need to find a job because I need money. I always need money but now it’s essential. If—I mean when—I find Caitlin, I’ll bring her home. I’ll save her from the life she’s fallen into somehow. I doubt she’s in Michigan—probably LA or Vegas, the porn capitals of the United States. That means I’ll need travel cash.

Mom walks in the room. She’s dressed up for work, not that she brings in much money. She observes the out of place, bemused look on Dad’s face and smiles. “What’s so funny?”

“Carson says he wants to get a job,” Dad says. Another fake laugh.

Mom frowns. “If you need money,” Mom says, but stops. There’s no money. The auto industry collapse and the human cyclone Caitlin took it all. Parts of the auto industry bounced back, but for older workers like Dad, it left nothing but tread marks. Mom wears her ‘I’ll sell a house today’ smile, a bright yellow dress to match her fake blonde hair and faker gold jewelry.

“No, I need a job.” I walk over to make myself some coffee. A tall, skinny and wired guy like me needs caffeine like Superman needs steroids, but I’m hooked on the rush.

“We’re working on a way to pay for college,” Dad says. If there’s money, and that’s an elephant-sized if, he wants me to attend the engineering program at Michigan Tech in the Upper Peninsula. If not, and if I can get in—another elephant—he’ll settle for Kettering in Flint, but he doesn’t like the ‘changing’ neighborhood, which is code for black. I don’t share my dreams of going to Princeton like my hero F. Scott Fitzgerald or to a small liberal arts school like Oberlin with a strong creative writing program.

“This isn’t about college,” I say. “It’s about earning money for myself, not from you.”

“It might be hard to find a job,” Mom says. She’s sympathetic. She’s knowledgeable about finding jobs. In the almost eighteen years of my life, Mom’s had six careers and ten jobs—or is it six jobs and ten careers? She thinks each one is going to be the dream job that makes us rich. Mom’s as delusional as suckers playing the lottery or selling Amway crap.

“If you work, then I assume you’ll take over car expenses,” Dad says then sips his coffee.

I reply the same, stalling. He’s trying to sound tough, fatherly, but it fails him. They treat me like this delicate thing, afraid I might break. My parents used to be strict. That worked with Carol, backfired with Caitlin. The jury’s out on how it will work with me, their youngest child. The oldest, Carol, was the dream child—Miss Homecoming Queen Honor Roll Student Council. Then on the Boston College Dean’s list and now in San Diego working for a big software company. Second child, the troubled middle one, Caitlin Autumn Banks. A failure, a parent’s nightmare. On the road to becoming a Carol clone until tenth grade when the cyclone of her chaos blew into our lives. I’m the tiebreaker—my parents’ fates, as parents, hang in the balance of my life.

“We had a deal about car expenses,” I push back. I hate to lie or argue with my parents. They need no grief given what Caitlin put them through, especially her aborted senior year.

“Maybe we need a new deal,” Dad says.

“Thank you, FDR,” I joke, but he doesn’t laugh. Our deal is they count my being active in things, like newspaper or the new creative writing club that I helped form, as working. Every hour I put into school activities, they pay me—far under minimum wage—to fund expenses related to driving Mom’s more rust than gray Malibu. That’s also Caitlin’s legacy. Caitlin never attached herself to any club at school, just the wrong cliques and worse boys, then older men.

“Why do you need money?” Mom asks, trying not to sound too concerned, so as not to surrender her upbeat salesperson charade. It’s Saturday and she’s off to sell houses in Flint, which is like trying to sell Bibles at Mecca. If she wants to sell houses, then maybe she could start with ours before the bank takes it away. “Are you in some sort of trouble?” Mom used to be cheerful but Caitlin took Mom’s joy with her when she walked out of the door.

“Mom, everything’s fine.”

She smiles and swallows the biggest lie I’ve ever told.

Over omelets, we continue the eggshell conversations, my parents interested and concerned, but trying not to push too hard. Me, desperately wanting to tell them the truth, or even a part of it, but instead showing them mercy. By the end of breakfast it’s resolved that before she goes to work, Mom will take me to Target to buy interview outfits. I’ll start applying for jobs and they’ll stop asking me why. Given that all Caitlin did was suck money out of the house, you’d think they’d be happy with me bringing some in, but I know it’s not about that. They want—no, they need—me reliant on them so they still have a purpose as parents. But I know I can’t depend on them for this task. I need to find Caitlin without their knowledge or help.

After breakfast, as I walk up the stairs, I remember all the times I got sent to my room when my parents had it out with Caitlin. Even if I told my parents what I saw last night online, I’m not sure it would do any good. They’d be relieved to find out she was alive, but I just know they couldn’t bring her home, especially given her last words from her lips—’I hate you’—and what I guess was her last action with Dad’s gun, click.