Before the Returned

by Jason Mott

  “But there was never any resolution. She just disappeared, was taken away. And somewhere along the way she died, and even though we all knew it, none of us really, truly wanted to believe it. To believe it meant giving up on her, and none of us was willing to do that. So throughout our marriage, while I won’t say I’ve exactly cheated, there’s always been someone else.”

  Samantha exhaled. A part of her had always known this, but she had never heard it put to words before.

  “The truth is I don’t know what’s going to happen once I get there,” Peter said. “Once I see her, I guess that’s when I’ll know how I feel about everything.” He shook his head. “But maybe not even then. Who knows?”

  “I just want you to know that, whatever happens, it’s over between me and Daniel.”

  “Okay,” Peter replied, committing nothing in his tone. “But I have to ask,” he continued. “Why do you want to see her?”

  “Because she’s a part of our life.”

  Peter went to speak, then stopped himself. Instead, he simply nodded and, somehow, his wife believed he truly understood what she felt.

  * * *

  When they reached the Whitlands’ farm, it was as if time had been standing still since he was last here. The farm was in upstate New York, at the end of a long, winding road traveled by few. Mountains rose up out of the earth around it, as if protecting it, and at the end of the road the Whitland home perched in the center of an open, rolling field. There were oak trees planted along the driveway, their shadows stretching over the road.

  “It’s beautiful,” Samantha said.

  “It’s exactly the same as I remember it,” Peter replied.

  Peter turned off the car and he and Samantha sat silently and watched the house. Both of them half expected Tracy to come racing out of the front door, her arms wide open, her eyes full of tears, screaming for joy the way teenagers often did.

  But the house remained still, as if giving them one final chance to change their minds.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Samantha said.

  “Okay,” Peter replied.

  And then it was as if the magic that had been holding this place in quiet pause was broken. The front door of the house opened and, just as Peter and Samantha had imagined it, Tracy came bursting out—still seventeen, still looking just the way she had all those years ago.

  “It’s really her,” Peter said, stepping out of the car. His voice sounded detached and faraway, as if it were someone else speaking for him. “Dear God…it’s really her.”

  The girl was tall and lithe, with long blond hair and deep blue eyes. Her face beamed. She looked just the way Samantha had imagined her.

  She ran over the yard at a full sprint, a wide smile on her face, her arms pumping ferociously as she ran. When she was near enough, Tracy leaped into Peter’s arms and knocked him against the car. She clung to his neck, weeping and laughing all at once, calling his name over and over again.

  Peter held his breath, still trying to process it all, still trying to believe what his senses were telling him: that, after all these years, she was real again…and here with him. “Tracy,” he said finally. Then, at last, he put his arms around her and hugged her.

  Samantha only watched, her stomach churning, her heart racing. She watched and waited to see how it would all unfold.

  “Oh, Peter,” Tracy said, over and over again. Her parents emerged from the front door, looking old and withered against the teenager’s youth and vibrancy. Nathaniel had his arm around Evelyn, who stood wringing her hands with an expression on her face that settled somewhere between nervousness and joy.

  Samantha looked from Nathaniel and Evelyn to Tracy and Peter. She felt like an invader. “I’ll be inside,” she said, and started off toward the house. Peter looked at her, he began to speak, but Samantha held up a hand to stop him. “Not yet,” she said. “I’ll leave the two of you alone.”

  Then she went and stood on the porch with the Whitlands as Peter and Tracy walked off down the road, lost in time, lost in one another.

  “What do you think will happen?” Evelyn asked. Samantha and Nathaniel looked at one another, not sure exactly who she was asking.

  * * *

  For a very long time they did nothing but walk. She clutched his hand in hers, squeezing and pawing at him, with her head on his shoulder, their steps in unison, just as they used to be. When they had walked for a very long time, they came to a tall oak tree near the base of a large hill. They sat and looked back in the direction they had come. Far off in the distance, they could just see the house, anchored in the landscape.

  “I’ve missed you,” Peter said, finally.

  He had a thousand other things he wanted to say. Questions he wanted to ask. He longed to know what had happened to her all those years ago. He wanted to ask how she had returned. How long she would be here. What it all meant.

  But, in the end, he did not ask anything of her. He only rested beneath the shadow of the oak tree with the girl he’d grown up loving and he tried not to think of anything. He tried to exist only in this one moment.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Tracy said to him.

  “Me, too,” he replied sheepishly.

  “They didn’t want to tell me where you’d gone. I thought I might never see you again.”

  “I know the feeling.” He tried to laugh, but it failed him.

  She began talking then. Telling him about the last couple of weeks with her parents. The arguing, the fighting. She was everything she had been all those years ago. Still beautiful, still curious, still uncertain about her place in the world. Peter replied, but his answers were hollow. Mostly, he just said whatever he felt he needed to say to keep her talking. The more she talked, the more her voice churned around inside him, the more everything he thought and felt about this situation—this decision between his family and the girl he used to love—seemed to sort itself out.

  And so he listened as she talked, until the sun went low and the shadows stretched long and evening was not far off. Then, just as the sun was setting, Peter happened to look down at his hand. His thumb shimmered a strange, bright green in the dimness of the approaching night.

  “What’s that?” Tracy asked, motioning toward his thumb.

  Peter looked at his hand and thought. Then a smile spread across his face. “It’s nail polish.”

  “What?”

  “Lisa put it there. My daughter.”

  “Your daughter?”

  And that was the moment when the decision became clear for Peter. In spite of everything that Tracy was, in spite of everything she represented, in spite of the life that was never allowed to happen, that was not who he was anymore. Time, in fact, had not stood still. It had been racing by. An unstoppable river.

  And although Tracy had come back to him—through whatever means had brought it about—he was not seventeen anymore. He was not who he had once been.

  “I’ve got a daughter,” he told Tracy. He never took his eyes off his one painted finger.

  Explanations would follow. He would tell her about the past eighteen years without her. Whether or not she understood it all, he could not be sure. But, in the end, it did not matter. Time had changed him. It had transformed his love for her into something greater: love for his wife and daughter. Love for who he was rather than for what had been—which was the only way things could ever truly be.

  So for the rest of the evening they talked. And, sometimes, Peter wondered how things might have happened differently if he had not met Samantha, had not married, had not moved on, if he had spent his life waiting for Tracy, longing for the life he’d had before she disappeared. For some people in this world, that was what the Returned were, a longing for life as it was. For others, the Returned were simply a manifestation of a life that was never intended.

  Death was different for everyone, but of all the rules in the universe, one had always held true: the dead were meant to stay dead. The return of those long gone was unse
ttling, and, whether it was a miracle or an omen of the end, something had to be done. Things like this were happening all over, and there were choices for everyone to make.

  But, for Peter, the choice was clear.

  Eventually, they went back to the Whitlands’ home. And when he came through the door, Peter walked over to Samantha and took her in his arms and kissed her and said simply: “Let’s go home.”

  * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from The Returned by Jason Mott.

  One

  HAROLD OPENED THE door that day to find a dark-skinned man in a well-cut suit smiling at him. At first he thought of reaching for his shotgun, but then he remembered that Lucille had made him sell it years ago on account of an incident involving a traveling preacher and an argument having to do with hunting dogs.

  “Can I help you?” Harold said, squinting in the sunlight—light which only made the dark-skinned man in the suit look darker.

  “Mr. Hargrave?” the man said.

  “I suppose,” Harold replied.

  “Who is it, Harold?” Lucille called. She was in the living room being vexed by the television. The news announcer was talking about Edmund Blithe, the first of the Returned, and how his life had changed now that he was alive again.

  “Better the second time around?” the announcer on the television asked, speaking directly into the camera, laying the burden of answering squarely on the shoulders of his viewers.

  The wind rustled through the oak tree in the yard near the house, but the sun was low enough that it drove horizontally beneath the branches and into Harold’s eyes. He held a hand over his eyes like a visor, but still, the dark-skinned man and the boy were little more than silhouettes plastered against a green-and-blue backdrop of pine trees beyond the open yard and cloudless sky out past the trees. The man was thin, but square-framed in his manicured suit. The boy was small for what Harold estimated to be about the age of eight or nine.

  Harold blinked. His eyes adjusted more.

  “Who is it, Harold?” Lucille called a second time, after realizing that no reply had come to her first inquiry.

  Harold only stood in the doorway, blinking like a hazard light, looking down at the boy, who consumed more and more of his attention. Synapses kicked on in the recesses of his brain. They crackled to life and told him who the boy was standing next to the dark-skinned stranger. But Harold was sure his brain was wrong. He made his mind to do the math again, but it still came up with the same answer.

  In the living room the television camera cut away to a cluster of waving fists and yelling mouths, people holding signs and shouting, then soldiers with guns standing statuesque as only men laden with authority and ammunition can. In the center was the small semidetached house of Edmund Blithe, the curtains drawn. That he was somewhere inside was all that was known.

  Lucille shook her head. “Can you imagine it?” she said. Then: “Who is it at the door, Harold?”

  Harold stood in the doorway taking in the sight of the boy: short, pale, freckled, with a shaggy mop of brown hair. He wore an old-style T-shirt, a pair of jeans and a great look of relief in his eyes—eyes that were not still and frozen, but trembling with life and rimmed with tears.

  “What has four legs and goes ‘Boooo’?” the boy asked in a shaky voice.

  Harold cleared his throat—not certain just then of even that. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “A cow with a cold!”

  Then the child had the old man by the waist, sobbing, “Daddy! Daddy!” before Harold could confirm or deny. Harold fell against the door frame—very nearly bowled over—and patted the child’s head out of some long-dormant paternal instinct. “Shush,” he whispered. “Shush.”

  “Harold?” Lucille called, finally looking away from the television, certain that some terror had darkened her door. “Harold, what’s going on? Who is it?”

  Harold licked his lips. “It’s…it’s…”

  He wanted to say “Joseph.”

  “It’s Jacob,” he said, finally.

  Thankfully for Lucille, the couch was there to catch her when she fainted.

  * * *

  Jacob William Hargrave died on August 15, 1966. On his eighth birthday, in fact. In the years that followed, townsfolk would talk about his death in the late hours of the night when they could not sleep. They would roll over to wake their spouses and begin whispered conversations about the uncertainty of the world and how blessings needed to be counted. Sometimes they would rise together from the bed to stand in the doorway of their children’s bedroom to watch them sleep and to ponder silently on the nature of a God that would take a child so soon from this world. They were Southerners in a small town, after all: How could such a tragedy not lead them to God?

  After Jacob’s death, his mother, Lucille, would say that she’d known something terrible was going to happen that day on account of what had happened just the night before.

  That night Lucille dreamed of her teeth falling out. Something her mother had told her long ago was an omen of death.

  All throughout Jacob’s birthday party Lucille had made a point to keep an eye on not only her son and the other children, but on all the other guests, as well. She flitted about like a nervous sparrow, asking how everyone was doing and if they’d had enough to eat and commenting on how much they’d slimmed down since last time she’d seen them or on how tall their children had gotten and, now and again, how beautiful the weather was. The sun was everywhere and everything was green that day.

  Her unease made her a wonderful hostess. No child went unfed. No guest found themselves lacking conversation. She’d even managed to talk Mary Green into singing for them later in the evening. The woman had a voice silkier than sugar, and Jacob, if he was old enough to have a crush on someone, had a thing for her, something that Mary’s husband, Fred, often ribbed the boy about. It was a good day, that day. A good day, until Jacob disappeared.

  He slipped away unnoticed the way only children and other small mysteries can. It was sometime between three and three-thirty—as Harold and Lucille would later tell the police—when, for reasons only the boy and the earth itself knew, Jacob made his way over the south side of the yard, down past the pines, through the forest and on down to the river, where, without permission or apology, he drowned.

  * * *

  Just days before the man from the Bureau showed up at their door Harold and Lucille had been discussing what they might do if Jacob “turned up Returned.”

  “They’re not people,” Lucille said, wringing her hands. They were on the porch. All important happenings occurred on the porch.

  “We couldn’t just turn him away,” Harold told his wife. He stamped his foot. The argument had turned very loud very quickly.

  “They’re just not people,” she repeated.

  “Well, if they’re not people, then what are they? Vegetable? Mineral?” Harold’s lips itched for a cigarette. Smoking always helped him get the upper hand in an argument with his wife which, he suspected, was the real reason she made such a fuss about the habit.

  “Don’t be flippant with me, Harold Nathaniel Hargrave. This is serious.”

  “Flippant?”

  “Yes, flippant! You’re always flippant! Always prone to flippancy!”

  “I swear. Yesterday it was, what, ‘loquacious’? So today it’s ‘flippant,’ huh?”

  “Don’t mock me for trying to better myself. My mind is still as sharp as it always was, maybe even sharper. And don’t you go trying to get off subject.”

  “Flippant.” Harold smacked the word, hammering the final t at the end so hard a glistening bead of spittle cleared the porch railing. “Hmph.”

  Lucille let it pass. “I don’t know what they are,” she continued. She stood. Then sat again. “All I know is they’re not like you and me. They’re…they’re…” She paused. She prepared the word in her mouth, putting it together carefully, brick by brick. “They’re devils,” she finally said. Then she recoiled, as if the
word might turn and bite her. “They’ve just come here to kill us. Or tempt us! These are the end days. ‘When the dead shall walk the earth.’ It’s in the Bible!”

  Harold snorted, still hung up on “flippant.” His hand went to his pocket. “Devils?” he said, his mind finding its train of thought as his hand found his cigarette lighter. “Devils are superstitions. Products of small minds and even smaller imaginations. There’s one word that should be banned from the dictionary— devils. Ha! Now there’s a flippant word. It’s got nothing to do with the way things really are, nothing to do with these ‘Returned’ folks—and make no mistake about it, Lucille Abigail Daniels Hargrave, they are people. They can walk over and kiss you. I ain’t never met a devil that could do that…although, before we were married, there was this one blonde girl over in Tulsa one Saturday night. Yeah, now she might have been the devil, or a devil at least.”

  “Hush up!” Lucille barked, so loudly she seemed to surprise herself. “I won’t sit here and listen to you talk that way.”

  “Talk what way?”

  “It wouldn’t be our boy,” she said, her words slowing as the seriousness of things came drifting back to her, like the memory of a lost son, perhaps. “Jacob’s gone on to God,” she said. Her hands had become thin, white fists in her lap.

  A silence came.

  Then it passed.

  “Where is it?” Harold asked.

  “What?”

  “In the Bible, where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “Where does it say ‘the dead will walk the earth’?”

  “Revelations!” Lucille opened her arms as she said the word, as if the question could not be any more addle-brained, as if she’d been asked about the flight patterns of pine trees. “It’s right there in Revelations! ‘The dead shall walk the earth’!” She was glad to see that her hands were still fists. She waved them at no one, the way people in movies sometimes did.

  Harold laughed. “What part of Revelations? What chapter? What verse?”

  “You hush up,” she said. “That it’s in there is all that matters. Now hush!”