The Invisibles Read Online Free Page A

little.
    â€œYou think he’s in there?” Brianna pinched a cigarette above the filter, breaking it as she sometimes did when she was nervous. She let it fall on the cracked lot. Her voice grew quiet. “Why would someone want to sleep here?”
    Randall walked over to the van and knocked three times on the heart-shaped window. Against the thick, curved glass, his knuckles made a hollow sound that echoed in my chest. Doing a good job of looking unafraid, he stood looking up at it, then smiled at us. Brianna and I watched the window for a terrible face.
    Randall threw back his head and laughed like a cartoon villain who has just tied a woman to train tracks. Even at his most raucous he couldn’t draw attention from the main parking lot. He cackled until Brianna snapped another cigarette in her shaking hand, and I put my arm around her tiny shoulders. She looked so helpless, her lip shaking, her stick palm dotted with tobacco.
    â€œYou’re such an asshole,” she blurted. “I’m not going to couples-skate with you if you don’t come back right now.”
    â€œOkay, okay.” Randall returned to the little field of safety we seemed to occupy between the brown steel door and the dormant air-conditioning unit. Above our heads, a light snapped on, and I could see how pale my friends looked, how afraid, and knew they could see it in my face, too. Randall squeezed between our bodies, with an arm for each of us. “Shall we?”
    As if he could make us forget the unknown behind the dark window in the maroon travel van, he ushered Brianna and me toward the entrance around the corner, where, if she recognized us each Thursday night, the obese woman in the ticket booth would give no sign.
    My mother had bad habits which arose as a result of being an invisible. She stared at strangers. She burst into laughter. These were marks of her frustration. She liked to tell cashiers that she’d already paid and make them admit that they hadn’t been totally attentive. Then she’d give the money back.
    One day my father and I came home from the farmers market to a house that bore all the signs of her presence. The garagedoor was open, revealing the backside of her blue sedan. In the oven, cooked blueberries pushed through the flaky crust of an un-watched pie. Suspecting she was hiding in one of her usual places, I parted the dresses in her closet and looked under my parents’ tightly made bed. Outside my father walked the rows of the well-tended vegetable garden, and I balanced myself on the patio rail and stood, searching for her face in the field of swaying cornstalks that enclosed our house. Hiding was a game we played together, and with each shift of my eyes I expected to find her grinning among the rows.
    When we grew tired of shouting for her, we went into the house, set the pie out to cool, and waited for her to emerge. I was excited to learn what new hiding spot my mother had found, but my father was upset over her absence. He slumped beside me on the couch and pinched the bridge of his nose. A fidgety, bald-headed man who knew numbers and tax laws, he was always forcing himself to keep his mouth shut around his wife.
    The detective we spoke to offered no answer.
    â€œSometimes people disappear out of their lives,” he said. He kept a neat steel desk with a rectangular wire basket on one corner beside his computer monitor. Beneath a glass reading lamp he’d arranged a scene with cast-iron miniatures, an eyeless, large-chinned policeman interrogating a tied criminal who glared up with red eyes. “They just vanish, you know what I mean.”
    â€œNot like this,” said my father. The very suggestion she’d left infuriated him. “That’s on the highway, on long road trips. Hitchhikers disappear.” He didn’t quite look at the policeman, directed his ire internally. His entire forehead seemed to throb. He held my hand with incredible