Gone

said, “Give me one of the big garbage bags.”
    Quinn peeled one off.
    Ten minutes later Sam was done. He dragged the bag with its sad contents across the carpet to the front door. He hefted it by the drawstrings and carried it out to the wagon.
    “Like taking out the trash,” Sam said to no one. His handswere shaking. He felt so angry, he wanted to hurt someone. He felt angry enough that if he could have gotten his hands on whoever caused all this, he would have choked the life out of them.
    Mostly Sam was angry at himself. He had never really known this family. It was a one-parent home, the mom and various boyfriends. And the little boy. The family weren’t friends, or even acquaintances, but still, he should have thought to check on the baby. That should have been his first thought. He should have remembered, but he hadn’t.
    Without looking back at Quinn and Brooke, Sam said, “Open some windows. Let some air in there. We can come back when it’s not so…when the smell is gone.”
    “Brah, I’m not going in there,” Quinn said.
    Sam quickly closed the distance between them. Seeing his face, Quinn took a step back. “I picked the baby up and stuffed him in a trash bag, all right? So go in there and open the windows. Do it.”
    “Man, you really need to step off,” Quinn said. “I don’t take orders from you.”
    “No, you take them from Caine,” Sam said.
    Quinn stuck his hand out, almost taunting. “I’m sorry, am I annoying you? Why don’t you just burn my hand off, magic boy?”
    Sam and Quinn had had many arguments over the years. But since the coming of the FAYZ, especially since Sam had told Quinn the truth about himself, simple disagreements had turned quickly poisonous. They were in each other’sfaces now like they might both start swinging. Sam was mad enough to.
    Brooke said, “I’ll do it, Sam.”
    Sam, his face still just inches from Quinn’s, said, “I don’t want it to be this way between us.”
    Quinn relaxed his muscles. He forced a grin. “No big thing, brah.”
    To Brooke, Sam said, “Open the windows. Then go tell Edilio to dig another hole. I’ll go do my house. It would be nice if you could pull the wagon downtown. But if you can’t, I’ll understand.”
    Without another word to Quinn he stormed off but stopped short at the end of the walkway. “Brooke, see if you can find a picture of him and his mom, okay? I don’t want him to be buried alone. He should have…”
    He couldn’t say any more. Eyes half blinded by unexpected tears, he marched down the street and stumbled up the steps to his own home, the house he hated, and slammed the door behind him.
    It took a while before he even noticed his mother’s laptop computer was gone.
    He went to the table. He touched the tabletop, right where the laptop had been, as though to reassure himself he wasn’t imagining things.
    Then he noticed the open drawers. The open cabinets. The food hadn’t been taken, just tossed around, some of it ending up on the floor.
    He bolted for his room. The light was still there. His weakattempt at camouflaging it had been torn down.
    Someone knew. Someone had seen.
    But it didn’t stop there. In his mother’s bedroom the drawers and the closet had been ransacked.
    His mother kept a locked, flat, gray metal box in her closet. Sam knew because she’d pointed it out to him on more than one occasion. “If anything ever happens to me, this is where my will is.” She was very serious, but then she’d said, “You know, in case I get hit by a bus.”
    “We don’t have any buses in Perdido Beach,” he’d pointed out.
    “Hmm. I guess that explains why they’re never on time,” she’d said, and then laughed and hooked him in for a hug.
    Holding on to him she had whispered, “Sam, your birth certificate is in there, too.”
    “Okay.”
    “It’s up to you whether you want to see it.”
    He had stiffened against her embrace. She was offering him a chance to know what it said on the birth certificate. There would be three names listed: his, his mother’s, and his father’s.
    “Maybe. Maybe not,” he had said.
    She held him tightly, but he gently disengaged and stood apart from her. He wanted then to say something. To apologize for what had happened to Tom. To ask her whether he had also, somehow, scared off his true father.
    But his was a life with secrets. And even though his mother had made the offer, Sam knew she didn’t want him to violate the code of secrecy.
    For