“Who? Did you happen to see which one threw the brick?”
“Do you know for how many years I’ve been looking out my window?”
Arlo shook his head.
“I grew up here. But all my friends moved away. I’m like Peter Pan,” Peter said with a smile.
“Sure.”
“I know these people like the ridges of my stumps.”
“Yeah?”
“They’ve always been predictable. Sleep and eat and work, it’s always the same. And then this thing happened.” He nodded his head in the direction of the hole. “And it’s all different. They’re different.”
Arlo stayed crouching in front of Peter. His knees wobbled, off-balance, and he steadied himself by lowering his hands to the bitumen-sticky ground. “What’s different about them?”
“Did you know I was in Iraq?” Peter asked.
“I figured.”
“A kid set off a homemade bomb. He was holding it. His parents made him do that, I guess. Or whoever.” Peter’s eyes stayed far away. “The boy died instantly. So did my CO. I wasn’t hurt that bad. His bones turned to shrapnel inside my legs. The problem was that pieces of his marrow got mixed. The boy’s immune system grew inside me. That’s why the amputation. That’s why the mirror therapy. My whole room’s covered in mirrors. People think it’s made up. I’m a junkie. But it’s real. Did you know that?” He didn’t wait or look to Arlo for acknowledgment. “It hurts so much that I can’t even wear the prosthetics—they’re just for the mirror therapy. I wear them to see my reflection as a whole person. So my brain gets confused and thinks I’m healed. Anyway, when it happened, when that boy did that to me and my CO, I heard these cheers. The people in hiding. Civilians. Neighbors. They cheered.”
Arlo pictured that. Tried to.
“There was this energy to the place. It wasn’t happy cheering.”
Arlo gave up crouching and balanced himself by holding on to the sides of Peter’s chair. Up close he saw that Peter wasn’t as old as he looked. It was just his sunken eyes.
“Maple Street has that same electricity.”
“What is it?”
“It’s hysteria. And I don’t even know why. I don’t know if it’s about you. You’re just the target.”
Peter nodded behind him, at a handicap-accessible airport shuttle van. A man was loading luggage while a couple in their seventies, the senior Benchleys, waited at the curb. “It’s too hot for them. They’re making me leave for Florida.”
“Bet you could use a change of scenery.”
Peter nodded.
Dark had settled over Maple Street. You could see movement through the open, lit-up windows of half the houses. There weren’t any night sounds, though. No crickets or cicadas or hooting birds. It made their own voices carry that much farther.
“I wanted to tell you about my therapy mirrors,” Peter whispered.
“Yeah?”
“When I use them, I don’t hurt,” Peter whispered. “I mean, it’s agony if I don’t do my hour or two. Every day. But it’s getting better. Every year, it’s a little better.”
“Sure.”
Peter held Arlo’s eyes. “People around here don’t know about my mirrors. They don’t come over. They think we’re weird. We stayed too long. I’m grown. Not a little kid. We don’t fit in. But Rhea Schroeder’s nosy. She got my mom to give her a tour. You see what I mean?”
“She’s nosy,” Arlo said. “She’s a lotta things.”
“But I wasn’t home yesterday. I was at the VA for my checkup. So were my parents. When we got back, we saw FJ Schroeder and Adam Harrison running out from around our backyard. The Harrison kid was crying.”
“Yeah?”
“And when I got inside, all my mirrors were broken.”
Arlo felt his scalp tighten, because yeah, now he did see the point of this conversation.
“Maybe I’m crazy,” Peter said, looking around, still whispering. “I have a hard time, knowing what’s real and what’s not.”
“You seem to be doing okay.”
“But somebody wrote a word across the shards. I didn’t tell my parents. They don’t need this. The word? It was snitch.”
“Shit. I’m sorry you got mixed up in this,” Arlo said.
Peter kept talking, not hearing Arlo at all. “I used to have to clean latrines once in a blue moon—that’s just the deal, it wasn’t a punishment. I was a good soldier. I got a Purple Heart and I deserved it. But I had to clean latrines. You see?”