After the family photos come down—all except one of just the two of us, brother and sister, taken at a CVS photo-shoot two years ago when we were six and eight and set in a circular silver-filigreed frame on the living room side board—after they’re taken and boxed up and after living with boxes and bare walls for two weeks, on a Sunday, which is the fourth such Sunday since the separation, Dad arrives with seven art prints purchased from the poster racks at Barnes & Noble and spends the morning placing the prints in colored frames where each frame’s color is meant to complement a secondary or tertiary color in the painting, rather than the dominant color, which creates an effect, he says, for the viewer, of, quote, “A hard-to-place sense of well-being, an alignment felt in the subconscious,” and each of us—Raymond and Ella that is—should pick a poster for our rooms and we pick Matisse’s Dance II and Van Gogh’s Starry Night, the latter of which Dad says is a “safe” pick but he’s not here to judge and he’s going to park himself on the couch for some r&r and HGTV and here’s a nail for you and a nail for you and you’ll have to take turns with the hammer.

Mom sees the art on Wednesday. Says, “Ick!” These prints were printed on ass is her assertion. The glossy finish makes Adele Bloch-Bauer look oily. Like she just came from a fried chicken binge. Where did he buy these? Why’d he do this? Did he even use a stud finder? She juts a sharp pink nail at us. “Did you two see him using a stud finder?”

We say, “A stud finder is what?”

It tells you where to nail, we learn. “It looks like a calculator,” she says. “You point it at the wall. Did he do that?” Mom stands on the red suede couch holding Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. It’s a big print. We can’t see her face. Her voice is half-muffled by the geometric women. We can’t recall a stud finder. We were busy putting prints up in our own rooms.

She lays Les Demoiselles down on the coffee table and runs off to look. We inspect the painting Mom left behind. One woman’s face looks like the tribal mask from their honeymoon in Morocco. They fought over where to hang that up too. Dad wanted it in the living room. Mom wanted not to be the kind of white people who hang tribal masks in their living room. We wonder who got it in the settlement. We hear Mom talking to nobody upstairs. She wonders did he Google search the seven most generic paintings ever? She comes back down, says she’s got to go for a run. “I need to get this out of me,” she says. She yanks her laces like a serial strangler. “I mean,” says Mom, on her way out the door, “The Great Wave? The Great Wave?!” Probably referring to the painting with the big wave. Dad put that one in the bathroom.

“Where there’s water,” he said.

The settlement says Mom lives here from Wednesday evening to Sunday morning and Dad lives here from Sunday morning to Wednesday evening. Between one leaving and the other coming there’s always about an hour where we get to be alone, just the two of us. That’s by design, so they don’t bump into each other. We live here full time and there’s no school because it’s summer. “It’s called nesting,” they said, and we are being, “spared the trauma.” It’s the same home we’ve always lived in but it’s also different because so much has been taken out. We wander, exploring the house like we don’t know it. The home office especially is gutted. There’s nothing in there but the wood floor and the window with its heavy purple shades and a desk with a black pencil cup. Standing in the middle of the space, we ask one another if either of them have gone in here at all lately. We say we can’t think when. This is our room now, we conclude. But what do we do with it?

When Dad walks into the living room he says, “Where’s all the art?” and we point him to his pallet in the basement where Mom stacked them. They each have a pallet down there piled with boxes with their names written on them and they each have two drawers in the master bedroom bureau that are just their drawers and they each bring little toiletry bags with them when they come and go and they always change the sheets on the adult bed so they aren’t sharing sheets and Dad says he’s never slept on clean sheets so often and what a revelation! He goes around the house putting the prints back up, re-inserting nails in the holes Mom took the nails out of, saying he can’t believe her, it beggars the imagination, and telling us that, it’s just unconscionable. 

He grumbles and stews all day and the next as well and on Thursday evening, when he’s ready to make himself a mug of warm water with cayenne and honey which is this new thing he’s trying, he sticks his nose in his black galaxy mug—which is just black until you fill it with something hot and stars appear on the side—and, taking a sniff, asks if Mom’s been using it because he can’t stand green tea and this cup’s got a “bitter residual tang” and Mom does sometimes get a devious look around the mug shelf we admit and he says if she wants to play it that way then he’ll play it that way and it’s homemaker o’clock and we all get in the car and drive to Home Depot at 7pm. When we get there he says we can each pick out a piece of decor because it’s our home and we should be able to decorate it how we like—“Mothers be damned”—and he’s going to go look at bathroom tile prices, and off he goes with a cart with a bum wheel…

And for a few minutes, it’s just the two of us. Home Depot’s aisles are cut deep like canyons. The greenhouse entrance is a misty green glint way at the back. We stop to peer through the glass of an empty twenty-gallon tank and a helpful guy in an orange vest tells us that they don’t also sell fish. Nearby, a bag of black sand manages to both be black and sparkle. We jab a finger at it and say, “How much is this?” The guy says that we need to pick our substrate based on which animals we’ll be getting. This sand is perfect for any animal that likes to bury itself. But maybe if what we’re getting would prefer pebbles, pebbles would be better. We should ask our parents.

When we find Dad again, he’s frowning at two different tiles he’s holding, both rectangular, both very much the same shade of blue, except one is shinier, almost plastic-y, and the other isn’t and looks more like a really smooth river stone. We tell him we need to buy some black sand and also here are a couple succulents we like and he says, “Just these—these are just cactuses” and we say we know but we think they’re neat and he says, “Black sand?”

And we say, “Because of the ants.”

And Dad says, “Ants?” And he didn’t know you could use black sand to deal with ants or that we had ants and we tell him it’s not a substrate they like and he shrugs and says, “I didn’t know black sand could mitigate an ant problem,” and we say that Mom said we needed like forty pounds and Dad says, “Oof.”

Mom asks why the sign. She means the sign on the home office door. We're eating Fruit Loops for lunch. Sitting at the kitchen island. Yellowish milk flecks dot the marble counter. “Keep out?” she asks. She just got here. She’s holding her black mesh pencil cup. Must’ve picked it up off the desk in the hall. We dragged it out there, the desk. You’ve gotta squeeze past.

“We need to move that desk to the basement,” we tell her.

“That’ll be a conversation about whose pallet it goes on,” she says. “Dad put up the sign,” we say. Mom makes a face like that man! 

“We need a space that is just ours, he says,” we say. “To mitigate the trauma.” 

Mom says, “Mitigate? Where did you hear that? A therapist?”

We say, “Yes.”

She puts the pencil cup down hard. She says, “Are you two doing counseling with Dad?”

Yes again. We are in deep. “The counselor says we need the room,” we say.

Mom tells us we already have two rooms. She storms around. Says it's just like Dad to be out here building trust on the sly. She goes into the bathroom to scream, screams, comes back. Also, “The shower?” she asks. “New tiles? That man!” Mom says home renovation is not in his wheelhouse. She takes her computer out. “We're doing therapy too,” she says. Twenty minutes later we have a family counseling session set for Friday. “It's digital,” Mom says. She does a loop of the house, taking down Dad’s art prints. That’s the routine now. She leaves the sign up on the home office. She doesn’t go in. We can’t believe our luck. At night she watches heist movies. She likes it when people have a plan. She takes us to a fitness shop. She buys this large jungle-gym type thing to install in the living room. We find some good stuff there too. One of us knocks over a display of workout water bottles. Cylinders of semi-transparent plastic tumble. Lots to pick up. “These puppies can roll!” says one employee. We fill our pockets. Walk out with fistfuls of stolen stuff. Mom has no idea. The new jungle gym looks like a little prison in our living room. Lots of bars connected to other bars connected to other bars connected to the wall. Mom does pull-ups. “Oh yeah, it’s secure,” she says. You bet she used a stud finder. It takes up about a quarter of the living room. “It’s dynamic,” she tells us. Two days later we meet Jada, the family counselor, over Zoom. “Your mother’s told me a bit about the two of you via email,” she says. “I’m excited to get to know you on your own terms.” Mom mentions that Dad's doing this same thing separately. “I think that's great,” says Jada. Mom says she suspects foul play. Dad’s trying to get the better parental bond she bets. Jada says speculating probably wouldn't be productive. Mom tells Jada about the home office. The Keep Out sign.

“Interesting,” says Jada. “Sort of a safe space. Consistent. Unaffected by parental comings and goings.”

That Sunday, Mom leaves at her usual time and Dad arrives late because he was volunteering at a potluck at the Episcopalian church, which is a new thing he’s trying. With the extra time alone, we take black trash bags and cut them halfway down their centers with the box cutter so that they unfold like wings, like how Dad showed us to butterfly a chicken breast. We layer the floor of the home office with the trash bags, taping them to the lacquered planks and to one another. We pour the black sand out across the floor and swish it around with our feet. The substrate unfurls, sparkling. Our arcing toes draw furrows and ridges, the shifting a delicate hiss. On the wall, a woman with a blue head-wrap looks at us over her shoulder, one of Dad’s prints which we took for ourselves. We get the two cactuses from our rooms and bury their bases at the back corners of the room, mounding the sand up around them. We bury the bicycle reflectors for cyclists and the ankle and arm band reflectors for runners—all stolen from the workout store—the reflectors all pointed up, patches of red and orange refraction nestled in the diffuse sparkling of the black sand.

“What is this?” we ask one another. “What have we made?” An indoor sandbox? A sand garden? A fish tank interior? “Except,” we say to one another, “this tank needs, like, one of those model pirate ships. It needs more light to make the sand really shine. It needs a fountain of sand, maybe. It needs something else.” We don’t know what—something complementary, something that will produce an alignment felt in the subconscious. We lie on the floor and nestle the backs of our heads into it. “I wish it was deeper,” we say.

For consistency’s sake, we tell Dad that about Jada and, seeing as our “bond with Mom” has grown so wonderfully, dangerously strong, suggest that we should do the same thing with him and he says that he’s pleasantly surprised with our maturity and he’s also surprised by Mom’s maturity, frankly, and he’s willing to try this—“a new thing!”—and he finds a counselor named Lukas who’s available to see us the next day and in-person. When we get to Lukas’s office, we see that he has a little display shelf way up high behind his desk and one of the items on that shelf, sitting on the stand that holds it upright, is, to our infinite delight, some kind of light-producing apparatus with a bulb and a lens all strapped into this black steel construction that looks like it was designed to put the bulb and lens into a state of unease and we nudge one another and raise our eyebrows and Lukas explains that one effect of nesting can be emotional whiplash where the children find that the “emotional character” of their home becomes radically different based on which parent is currently there and that, in some cases, children actually benefit from going back and forth between their parents’ houses because the trip itself, the literal act of going from one place to the other, creates a sort of reassuring physical correlate to the psychic shift of traveling from one “emotional sphere” to the other.

“If that makes sense,” he says, looking at us.

Dad says that he certainly hasn’t benefitted from going back and forth between the house and his new apartment and Lukas asks Dad if he would feel comfortable leaving the room for a few minutes so that he can talk to us “without the parental element” and Dad leaves but we can hear him clomping around the waiting room. We ask Lukas about that bulb-and-lens thing up there and he says it’s a working replica of a lighthouse light and we say, “Wow, a lighthouse light,” and, “that’s the kind of light we’ve been looking for,” and, “maybe what should happen next, after we talk about how we’re feeling, is we should leave the room so that Dad can speak without the child element,” and when we tell Dad our idea he tells us he’s better than fine with it and thinks it would be great to talk to Lukas “mano a mano.”

Lukas runs his practice out of the second floor of an office complex. Lukas’s suite—Suite 211—contains, first, a waiting room, broken into two parts by a dividing wall separating the seating area and the secretary’s cubby and, secondly, Lukas’s office itself. There are bathrooms in both the first and second-floor halls for communal use. At the front of the building, a security guard sits at a little lectern. He asks you who you’re here to see and tells you where they are even though you already know. We tell Lukas’s secretary—this young woman with lightning-blond hair—that we are going out to use the bathroom. Then, in the hall, we pull the fire alarm.

The siren comes whistling down like a storm wind. We run down the hall, down the staircase—because you always use staircases in the event of a fire—and split up. One of us goes outside to wait by the entrance and tell Dad, when he comes out, that the other has gone to the car, which won’t be true but it buys a little time. The other, ducking away, hides in the first floor bathroom. Waiting in a stall, hardly breathing, this one, alone, hears a tremendous number of feet slamming past. It’s like listening to popcorn: first one person goes by, then another, then more and more in a great rush, and then one or two stragglers, and then nothing but the siren. Then the waiting one goes back into the hall, back up the staircase, back into Dr. Lukas’s suite and through the waiting room into his office.

The lighthouse light is too high to reach but we have recent experience with desk relocation. The desk is quickly shoved over to the wall and the object snagged. It really is a beautiful little thing. The one of us who is there runs our hand along the lens. Its curved glass doubly curves the bulb beyond it, carving it into a transparent blossom that bulges and doubles back impossibly—a single space sharing so many glass petals, not simply overlapping but actually on the same point. A trick of the eye. An alignment felt in the subconscious. We, the one of us, leaves the building via the back entrance and loops through the forest to the parking lot. The lighthouse light is placed in the trunk, tucked behind a stack of still-unwashed casserole dishes from the last Episcopalian potluck. Everybody from the building stands in a group watching the road, waiting for the firemen. Dad is calling the name of the one of us who stayed inside and the one of us who is with him, seeing the other approaching, points and says, “There! There!”

Mom says nesting is for the birds. The parental well-being is way off. “We’ve been speaking,” says Mom.

We say, “What?!”

They went behind our backs, she says. The last few weeks of counseling have revealed that the situation sucks. All this space-sharing will kill them. Going back and forth is ass, she asserts. They each need their own home. It’ll be good for us. They will be better parents, she says. This: the product of their secret conversation. We’re losing the house.

“Mothers be damned!” we say. We text Dad asking, “Is this true?”

“‘Fraid so,” he says.

Parents be damned.

We go back to Mom. Tell her this is our house. She’s in her torture gym. That big network of bars bolted to the wall. She’s doing dynamic crunches. “Well,” she says, speaking between reps. “Technically. Legally. It isn’t.” The only bit of her body outside the structure is one white toe’s tip. “It’s actually. Kind of good. Dad re-did. Those tiles,” she gasps. “Resale,” she says. “Value,” she says. One of us is sobbing and buries their face in the couch. “Look at us!” one of us says. “You can’t do this to us.” She’s going to go for a jog, she says. Give us space to cool off.

The situation in the home office is that they still haven’t gone in there because they don’t think there’s anything in there anyway. Whatever else we’re imagining for the space probably isn’t doable and we have no time and no money. For no reason other than numbness we pick through Mom and Dad’s pallets. They already don’t have enough space for their own things, never mind ours.

“My new apartment,” says Dad, “is very space-limited.”

Mom says, “I have no space!”

We find mostly out-of-season clothing and old papers from previous tax filings, but also Mom’s high school diploma, and a lot of boxed-up books. In one of Dad’s boxes we find the honeymoon tribal mask. Our first thought is to hang it on the office wall, but we are sick of nails and studs. Instead, we half-bury it in the sand in the middle of the room, a face staring up at the ceiling, little bulbous hills of black sand poking up through the eye-holes like no human eyes ever. We lie beside it, looking up. The lighthouse light sits in one corner, plugged into the wall outlet, its beam smashing across the space, jarring off of black sand particles. The bike reflectors so bright you’d expect them to burn up. We still don’t know what this room is. The plain beige ceiling is wrong, though. We get a step-ladder to take a closer look at it.

“There should be a window up there, a skylight,” Raymond says.

He gets the hammer, starts hammering the ceiling. Hammering at it until chunks are falling all over the room, all around me. “Stop,” I yell. “Stop!” He’s trying to break through to the open air. Plaster dust rains down, dulling the black sand. I run to the window, push back the curtains, shove it open. “Mom,” I yell, “Dad!”—at the empty road. In comes the wind. Sand shifts across the floor, revealing more sand below, the new top layer now also shifting, showing more, shifting too, all collecting in a black mound against the far wall. 

AIDAN O'BRIAN's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sewanee Review, AGNI, EPOCH, Gulf Coast, West Branch, The Greensboro Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the recipient of The Nancy Lynn Schwartz Award for Fiction. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College and earned his bachelor’s at Sarah Lawrence College, where he received the creative writing department’s Jane Cooper Scholarship. He is currently working on his debut novel.