“They went home this morning,” Alfie said. “I got lost early in the morning.”
The man chewed on his lip. “Well, where’s your phone?”
“I left it in my tent.”
This lying thing was coming easier to him than he’d thought. He wondered if it was because he was so tired. He was half dreaming, and lying is kind of like talking about a dream—an alternate reality.
The man shifted his hip and rooted around for a phone, extracted it, punched in his passcode, and handed it to Alfie. “Do me a favor, will you? Call your parents? You can come home with me and have some dinner.” He gestured at the pizza. “I feel for you, but I don’t want to be making that drive tonight to get you home.” He glanced at Alfie. “How old are you? Fourteen or something?”
Alfie nodded, “Almost.”
“Yeah, thought so. I got three. But they’re all gone now, off doing their own thing.”
Alfie dialed his mother’s number. It rang and rang, then went to voice mail. He started to leave a message, but hung up because he felt weird talking in front of the man and also because he didn’t want to say the wrong thing and on top of that he felt his stutter like an ache in his jaw, waiting to pounce. He didn’t know anybody else’s numbers by heart, so he handed the phone back to the man.
“No answer, huh?” The man made a turn and went down an even darker road.
Alfie wondered briefly why his mother wasn’t picking up. Was she asleep? Did she miss him at all? Suddenly he felt the alonest he’d ever been in his life, as if his body were an oversized walnut shell and his consciousness locked inside and him hurtling through space all on his own.
“Well, we’ll try again from my house. The cell signal out here is terrible.” He slowed and turned into a gravel driveway. “I swear sometimes they keep it this way to keep people from moving up into this area.” He turned off the ignition. “You know, to keep the population down.”
Alfie wasn’t sure who the man was talking about and even less sure of his logic, but this was how he felt around most people, so he was almost comfortable. In fact, the talks with Owen, and the clarity of them, the way his words had resonated with Alfie, were the unusual ones. As he followed the little man into his tidy house, he reflected that in his life he’d met three people whose conversations did not confound him—his mother, his father, and Owen Hopper.
The man busied himself turning on lights, getting paper plates off a counter and onto an old, wooden kitchen table. He placed the pizza box on the table and looked uncomfortably at Alfie.
“You want to try calling your mom or dad again or something?” he asked, pointed at a fuchsia cordless phone half-buried under receipts, napkins, and take-out menus.
Alfie called, got no answer, and hung up again. “She’s not picking up,” he whispered, and looked down, noticing to his embarrassment the mud he had tracked in with his plastic foot-bags. He leaned against a wall and unwound the plastic from his feet, sheepishly balling it up. His feet looked terrible—bruised, scratched, filthy, and bloody. He wondered how he wasn’t in more pain. Then he wondered if he’d gotten frostbite after all.
“Geez,” the man said, and shook his head. “Come on, why don’t you take a shower and wash all that off. I think I have some of my son’s clothes in a box somewhere.” He brightened. “Yes, good. Shower, put on some clean clothes, eat, and then if you still can’t reach your parents, I’ll take you to the police station. They’ll be able to notify them.” He coughed, looked away. “I just can’t make that long of a drive anymore.” He rubbed his hip. “Sciatica.” A wince, and then he poured soda into a glass, took a sip. “You’ll know when you get old.”
Alfie followed the man to a narrow bathroom, hot-pink plush toilet seat cover and bathmats, black-and-white zebra-printed towels.
“My ex.” The man shrugged. “She was really into pink.” He laughed a short, uncomfortable laugh and closed the door.
The shower hurt. Whereas as long as his feet had been half-frozen and glued shut with mud and plastic, he’d barely felt the lacerations, now the skin softened and opened, the cruel cuts stinging. He climbed out of the tub to find a pair of old jeans, too short and loose in the waist, a gray sweatshirt with a purple falcon on it and the number 00. Socks. Glorious, thick, calf-length, white gym socks. He opened one drawer after another until he found Band-Aids and did his best to tape his oozing skin back together. Then he folded his ruined clothes and opened the door.
He ate the pizza (just the one slice, unsure if it would be polite to ask for more, so he didn’t) and drank the soda, and all the while the man told him about the town, and the men who ran it, and their backroom deals with the governor, who, the man said, wanted to keep this tiny town tiny and refused to add public transportation or extra garbage pickup days or even a stoplight at that intersection at the top of the mountain where three car crashes had killed nine people in as many years.
After he crumpled and threw away the paper plates and napkins, the man laughed his nervous little laugh and said, “Well, I guess I’ll take you to the police station now. They’ll get you home.” He chewed his lower lip. “All I found were these dress shoes, though. Bobby took all his shoes with him, and I don’t think I have anything else that will fit you.” He pointed to a dusty and cracked pair of brown loafers that looked like they’d been in the back of a closet since before Alfie was born. Maybe before his parents were born. But they were shoes! With real soles!
Alfie shook his head. “That’s okay, sir. I’m grateful for everything. My mom will return your things to you if you give me your address.”
The man gave him a funny look as he ushered him back outside and into his now considerably colder car, where the lingering pizza smell had turned stale and garlicky. He packed Alfie’s filthy clothes into a plastic bag and Alfie hugged the bag on his lap. The shoes were too big, and he had to shuffle to keep them from falling off, but he guessed that was better than too small, considering that the white socks were already turning brown with seeping blood.
He thought again about those sirens he’d heard earlier. Had they really been going to Hopper’s house? He couldn’t be sure. And if they were, and Hopper was alive and in some hospital (Alfie pictured him wrapped in bandages, suppurating and bleeding), was he telling the cops about Alfie’s role in the fire? Arson and attempted murder. Alfie shifted uncomfortably. He wanted to go home more than anything he ever wanted in his life, but he did not want the police knowing about him.
And why wasn’t his mother answering her phone?
Halfway up the mountain they came against a barricade and pink flares quivering on the road. A state trooper bent to the driver side window and said, “You need to turn around, sir. Bad accident up ahead.”
The man clicked his teeth in annoyance and did a U-turn.
“Wasn’t I just telling you they needed a stoplight up there? How many people have to die before someone comes to their senses?” He grimaced in a strange mix of pity and irritation. “We’ll have to go down and around and up the other side. Adds twenty minutes to the drive!” Irritation was clearly winning out.
Alfie stared through the windshield, imagining the mangled cars and bodies at the top of the murderous mountain, wishing he knew why his mother wasn’t picking up her phone.
They pulled into the small police station’s parking lot around nine PM. Alfie climbed out of the car, reluctant, feet hurting, and stood leaning on the car door, watching the station’s windows. He did not want to go in.
“Go on,” said the man. “Go. They’ll get you home. Go on.” He had the falsely jovial, high-pitched voice people use to persuade little children or pets to do something. Alfie heard the frustration behind the words. The man was tired. The man wanted rid of him. The man had done a lot for him and didn’t feel Alfie was his responsibility any longer. And of course he was right.
Alfie closed the car door and limped slowly toward the station. A few paces in, he turned back and said, “Thank you, sir. Thank you for helpi
ng me.”
The man, relieved now, happy he could go home, smiled and waved and got into his car. Alfie took a few more steps toward the station and waved at the man. He waited until the man backed out of the parking spot, turned around, and drove away. He counted to one hundred.
Then he shuffled toward the road, looked at the night sky, found the Big Dipper, then the Little Dipper, then Polaris, and thus situating himself, began walking south.
Twenty minutes later, a trucker picked him up and agreed to drive him halfway toward Sylvan. During the hour-long drive, the trucker offered to suck Alfie’s cock. When Alfie politely demurred, the trucker paradoxically relaxed and spent the rest of the time telling him about his nearly bald wife, who, he said, wouldn’t give him the time of day, and his three children, who he was convinced were not his, and never once asked why Alfie was hitchhiking down a dark mountain road at night, in winter, without a coat or hat or gloves.
The trucker let Alfie out on Route 84 near Newburgh. It was now nearly eleven, and Alfie wondered if he’d have to spend the night under a bush by the side of the road. He decided to keep walking south on Route 9W, his thumb up, and around midnight a car full of teenagers pulled up.
They were coming from a rock show up by Poughkeepsie and they all stank of skunky weed, cigarettes, stale beer, and fruity cologne. They found his loafered, jacketless state hilarious. By then he was too tired to answer any questions save where he was going, and they, cheerful and pumped on the stimulation of the show, invited him in, enveloping him in their jokey, stinky exuberance. They were going to New Jersey, but Sylvan was on the way, or enough so, and they let him out five miles from home.
During the drive with them, Alfie marveled at the ease with which they laughed at and teased each other, at the names they called each other without taking offense, even for a second. As spent as his mind was, he still paid attention and cataloged the conversation and the wisecracks. He’d analyze them later.
The walk homeward was surreal. If he felt isolated before, lonely, unmoored, now he hobbled along the familiar road like a zombie, lurching and swaying, favoring first one foot, then the other. There is no quiet like the quiet of a country road in the dead of a winter night. No dogs bothered to bark at his passage, everyone and everything snug inside the dark houses, asleep under thick blankets. Even the deer who ventured into the backyards for the scant greenery they offered this time of year were absent.
He rounded the corner of his street two hours later, the familiar curve of the road soothing, welcoming. Slowly, his feet so sore he could barely put any weight on either, he staggered toward his driveway.
A car waited there.
Not his mother’s car.
CHAPTER
50
LANEY WATCHED THE policemen and the fire chief walk through the building, writing notes, taking pictures. She wanted to ask if they suspected arson but hesitated. In any case, if Alfie had started the fire, it was in self-defense. It must have been.
Once she pulled out of the driveway and away from the house’s dead zone, she saw Ed had called numerous times.
“Are you sure it’s Alfie’s jacket?” he asked when she called him back.
“Yes,” she said. “Absolutely.”
“And whose house is it again?”
“A woman named Jane Hopper. I know she’s related to Owen Hopper, but I don’t know how yet.”
“Did you know her?”
“No. No, of course not.”
Silence.
“How did you know to go there?”
She sighed. “Accurint, CLEAR, FINDER. I still have contacts with access to the databases.” No need to say the contacts weren’t the ones doing the detective work.
More silence. “Okay. What else did you find out?”
She chewed her lip. “I missed him, Ed. By hours.”
“I know,” he said, his voice softer, less cop, more friend. “But he’s alive. The sergeant I just spoke with said there’s no sign of blood or violence. I mean, a lot would have been destroyed in the fire, but they’re pretty sure nobody was killed in the house.”
She stared at her phone in disbelief. “Wow, Ed. That’s some bedside manner you got. I’m glad the sergeant is kinda, pretty, sorta sure my son wasn’t murdered by a convicted felon in a secluded house in the woods.”
“Laney, I’m coming up there now. We’ll go through the whole place, and if there’s anything their cops missed, we’ll pick up on it.”
“Okay, Ed.” She hung up. Opened the glove compartment and dug around until she found the ancient granola bar she suspected was still hiding in the back. She had a habit of keeping a couple of them for Alfie at all times, since he was always starving lately. Choked it down. She had a long drive ahead of her, and no friend with whom to share the loneliness. She needed the calories to stay lucid.
She made the turn toward the rural route that would take her home. She was plumb out of ideas. She had been able to figure out where Owen Hopper had gone. She had been able to predict he had Alfie with him. But she was too slow. She’d arrived too late.
Her son was still missing. The vengeful murderer who’d kidnapped him was still roaming the world. Her best friend was in a hospital with a broken ankle and possibly broken jaw. And there was no way around this realization—everything that happened was her fault.
She rolled down one window for the cold air and sat up tall. There were more names on that spreadsheet of hers. There were more places where Owen Hopper could have gone. Hopper was not stupid. But his world was narrowing. She’d come home and she’d do more detective work, make phone calls, visit people. That’s what she was good at. That’s what she had always been good at—the work.
The route took her up a mountain. Her headlights, even with the high beams on, barely broke through the country dark. When she saw the pink flares and barricade, she came to a stop, apprehension like a cold hand on the back of her neck. She pulled to the side and checked her phone’s GPS, then saw with horror she’d lost the signal. She hadn’t been listening to the GPS at all, her mind churning through next steps, and so had not noticed when it stopped talking to her.
She coasted back down the mountain, gripping the steering wheel with rigid fingers. She had no idea where she was. And, as she glanced at her dashboard with desperation, she was very low on gas. She’d been planning to stop at the first gas station she came across, assuming there’d be a few near the highway.
“Fuck,” she said. Then she hit the steering wheel. Then hit it again. “Fuck. Fuck this fucking road, and fuck this fucking car, and fuck you, Owen fucking Hopper, and especially, fuck the fuck Theo, you fucking loser fuck, leaving us, you’re his fucking father, what am I supposed to do, how am I supposed to do all this alone!”
She heaved with suppressed sobs, emotion, exhaustion, fear, and surprise. She hadn’t expected Theo to come to the surface like that. As far as she was concerned, she’d excised him from her mind, from her heart, from her memories. She didn’t depend on him, she didn’t want anything from him.
Yet there he was. Letting her down even in her own mind. She coughed and peered at her gas gauge. It lit up, blinking, as if it had waited for her attention. She had no choice but to keep going onward, since behind her the road was closed and so far she hadn’t come across any intersections.
“Help me,” she said, into the dark air, into the charcoal shadows. “Help me.” If there were no people who could help, no one she could call on, then she would ask the universe. And if the universe was uncaring, then maybe there were forces within it she could turn toward herself simply through the strength of her need. “Help me.”
CHAPTER
51
OWEN HOPPER’S CAR.
Alfie backed away, his breath coming quick now, loud; he couldn’t get enough air inside, and the dark world around him spun. He tried to run, but his feet had their own knowledge, and they knew home, they wanted home, and they refused to carry him away from it.
He stumbled and g
rabbed onto the trunk of the old maple in his front yard.
If Hopper’s car was in the driveway and his mother’s car wasn’t, where the hell was his mother?
He looked around, as if she might have gone visiting one of the neighbors and maybe had decided to park in another driveway. He shut his eyes and waited for the world to stop spinning. Waited for his breath to normalize.
Was Hopper inside? A part of Alfie relaxed. If Hopper was in good enough shape to drive all the way here, then Alfie hadn’t killed him. This was a good thing. Wasn’t it? He tried to decipher whether he felt relief because this meant he couldn’t go to jail for murder or because he was not a murderer. Thou shalt not and so on.
But all he could grab hold of was a feeling of reprieve. He didn’t want to go to jail, and he didn’t want to be a murderer. What he wanted was to deal with whatever was in the house before his mother came home. Did Hopper come for him or for his mother? Either way, it was his problem now, even if his mother had put Hopper away in the first place. It had been his problem for months already. He just hadn’t recognized it.
Alfie pushed away, released the tree trunk.
He took an unsteady step toward his house, then another. He crept, out of debility rather than by intent, toward the back door and turned the knob. It opened easily into the dark hall, three steps leading up into the silent kitchen.
Alfie entered his home. He had to use his hands to pull himself up the stairs, then leaned on the counter, the sink, the counter again, the fridge, the wall, and this way dragged himself into the hall and the living room beyond. The smell, faint when he was still in the kitchen, was stronger here—a mix of woodsmoke, blood, urine, alcohol—vile and frightening.
Owen’s form was an absence of light, a black outline of a person against the tan couch. He was sitting, awake, alert—Alfie knew this by the angle of the man’s neck, his tense, still shoulders, the faint, oh so faint, breath wheezing out of his burnt throat.
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