Reverie

by Ryan La Sala

  Daintily, Kane picked himself out of the muck and padded up the bank, his boots making indecent squelches. Ursula followed at a distance.

  “What were you doing down there?”

  Kane glanced at her. She was dressed in a ratty, long-sleeved shirt that read in handwritten letters, BEAT PAVEMENT, NOT PEOPLE. TRIATHLON TO END DOMESTIC VIOLENCE. Sweat glazed her pink shoulders, her neck. Her copper hair was pulled into a sloppy bun that looked more like a nest than a hairstyle, and her bangs were a frizzy awning above thick-lashed, worried eyes. She wore no makeup, not even ChapStick from the looks of it.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked again.

  “I’m fine,” Kane lied. He scanned the night for those creatures and, not seeing anything, began scraping the mud from his boots. It was hopeless. He was caked up to his knees. His ass was soaked. His whole body prickled with heat. He wished he could just vanish.

  Ursula kept trying to restart the conversation. “I was on a run and I heard something. I didn’t know people were on the path so late, so I thought maybe it was an animal, but then I found your backpack, and then I saw you fall into the river, and…”

  “I didn’t fall into the river.”

  “Okay, well I saw you sort of stumble into the river, and—”

  “I didn’t stumble.”

  A dimple of worry bore into the flesh between Ursula’s eyes. “But are you okay?”

  Kane looked up at her. “Why are you asking me so many questions? Do I look okay to you? Can’t you read context clues?”

  Another person would have pushed back, but Ursula only tugged at the hem of her shorts and stared at the ground, embarrassed. In the awkward silence there was space for Kane to feel what he always felt toward Ursula Abernathy: guilt. Ursula, like Kane, was an easy target growing up. They should have been friends, but Kane was no nicer to her than anyone else. He was perhaps even meaner, to show just how different they were, or how much more she deserved their classmates’ ridicule. A survival tactic of his that he was not proud of. In third grade he’d made a joke about how Ursula Abernathy was adopted from a dog shelter. He didn’t remember how it turned into a rumor—only that it was a mistake—but by the next day it was a school-wide legend. He still felt bad about it, especially the part where someone put a BEWARE OF DOG sign on Ursula’s desk. Whenever he saw her, he saw her as the red-faced girl facing down a room of kids woofing at her. She looked that way now.

  Kane had never apologized. He wondered if she knew it was him.

  “I’m sorry,” Kane said. “I’m okay, really. Do you…do you want to walk me to the street? I’d appreciate it.”

  Ursula glanced around, possibly for an excuse not to, but relented. They walked along the path in silence, Kane doing his best not to show that he was still shaking. He played it off as shivering, though the night was warm.

  “How’s school?” he asked.

  This surprised Ursula. “School is school. We miss you.”

  “We?”

  “Yeah, like the teachers and everyone. People were really worried.”

  “But I’m fine.”

  Ursula gave him a once-over that told Kane she did not think he was fine. He hated how she stared, like a child at a zoo.

  “Well, you know. Your whole… The whole incident with the mill.”

  “Incident?”

  “Right, right. Sorry. Your accident. Everyone heard about it from Claire Harrington—her dad’s a cop. There were a ton of questions, and the school called for an assembly in the gym and opened up the counselor office hours for anyone who wanted to talk.”

  The horror Kane felt surpassed everything from the night so far. An assembly. About him? This was his hell, manifested.

  “I’m fine. And Claire Harrington makes shit up all the time.”

  Ursula kept pulling at the hem of her shorts. She rolled her lips together, unsure.

  “Everyone was really happy to hear you woke up, even though Mrs. Keselowski said you were still pretty confused, and Mr. Adams said it was important to give you space and privacy.”

  “Why are the school counselors telling people things?” Kane snapped. “Isn’t that like, against their privacy code or something? And I’m not confused. And if people really cared about me, maybe they wouldn’t make shit up or pry into my business.”

  Ursula hugged herself. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Wait.” Kane stopped before they reached the road. “You talked to the school counselors? Like, you went to their office hours?”

  Even in the darkness, Ursula’s face glowed red. She had.

  Kane felt something in him soften. He picked his words carefully. “Look. I’m sorry for…I don’t know. For whatever this is. For how I am. Thank you for stopping. I know we’re not really friends but I appreciate it.”

  Ursula gave a meek smile. “Any time.”

  They were at the path’s entrance. He expected her to run off, but instead she leaned in as she handed him his backpack and whispered, “Is it true? About your memories? Tell me quickly. They’re probably watching.”

  Kane pulled away. There was a hardness in Ursula’s stare now that had not been there a second ago, that had never been there. Right now, there was no meekness about her whatsoever.

  “Your memories. Tell me. Please,” Ursula pressed. “I need to know.”

  “I remember everything,” Kane said, defensive.

  Ursula was unflinching as she assessed this for the lie that it was.

  “You don’t. It’s true. The others were right.” She glanced around until her eyes tracked upon something over his shoulder, as though she saw things in the shadows he could not. The hair on the back of his neck rose up, and his burns prickled.

  Beware of dog flashed in Kane’s mind.

  “I remember…” Kane again felt his lost memories trying to guide him. “I remember Maxine Osman.”

  Ursula’s eyes went wide, and Kane knew his guess had struck something. She edged even closer so that cricket song swathed them in chatter, as though she were afraid of being overheard.

  “Never say that name again.”

  “But—”

  “I can’t help you. You have to find your way back to us on your own, Kane. Check the treasure chest.”

  And then the old Ursula returned. Meek and unsure. Rounded by anxiety. “It was nice running into you,” she murmured, unable to even look him in the eye. “See you back in school.”

  She jogged toward the path, messy bun bouncing. Kane watched her go, watched the dark where she vanished, and only moved when he felt the dark watching him back.

  • Four •

  FAR-FETCHED

  “Kane. Wake up.”

  Toes jabbed Kane’s ribs. He rolled over and pressed his cheek into the rug.

  “C’mon. I have to practice.”

  “Go ahead.” Kane yawned. “I like when you play the violin. It’s nice.”

  “Viola,” Sophia said, jerking open the curtains in her room. He hissed and shriveled up in the late afternoon light, but Sophia didn’t laugh. She hadn’t been too friendly since he hung up on her a few days ago.

  Kane was pretending he didn’t care. He yawned. His head hurt. He tried to remember the dream he’d been having, but all he found within himself was the usual soupy gloom. And, beneath the gloom, the same simmering dread that had kept him awake every night since he’d encountered those things on the path. And, of course, Ursula Abernathy. Check the treasure chest, she’d said, a riddle that wouldn’t let him rest. He only slept during the day now, and only by accident, waking up at the kitchen table with a spoon in his hand, or slumped over in the sunny spot on the landing, or draped across the living room ottoman with his PlayStation still humming.

  “Let me guess.” She unlatched her viola case. “You’ve been lying here for hours, despond
ent.”

  “Yep.”

  “Did you eat?”

  “Yep.”

  “What?”

  “Fruit snacks.”

  The instrument hummed in Sophia’s hands as she removed it from the velvet interior. “Fruit snacks? Sounds like cannibalism to me.”

  Kane propped himself up. “Was that a gay joke?”

  In response, a pleasant, fat note rang out as Sophia carved the bow across the strings. She smiled at Kane vacantly the whole time, holding it extra long and finishing with a flourish.

  “Why yes, it was a gay joke.”

  Kane frowned. Sophia’s face was as blank and cold as the moon now, and she felt just as distant. Secrets were a new and uncomfortable thing between them. He wouldn’t tell her about his meeting with Dr. Poesy, or being chased on the path, or Ursula Abernathy. In exchange, he sensed she was keeping her own bank of secrets locked away. And so things had been tense, and her questions had become pointed. Kane had becoming both the prison and the prisoner within their locked-up siblingship.

  “You got a haircut,” Sophia said.

  “Mom tricked me into it to get me out of the house.”

  “You look like a poodle who was drafted into the military.”

  “Thank you.”

  The metronome ticked on as Sophia ran through her warm-up. Kane let his mind drift between the wobbling notes. He wished he could tell her everything, but ever since he’d learned about Maxine Osman, his pain felt fraudulent, unearned, as though Maxine’s death forfeited his right to feel bad for his own near-death. The guilt didn’t just disarm him; it formed a new armor around him. A heavier guard that made the very idea of asking for help, or even sympathy, impossible. Kane wasn’t scared to talk about his pain; he was scared of making other people listen.

  So he kept it all to himself. And, just like Dr. Poesy had said, in the absence of his own telling, his story was taken up by others. The Hartford Courant ran a piece on the accident, promising a follow-up as the investigation progressed. They didn’t name Kane, but they didn’t have to. East Amity was small, the town going silent around Kane every time he left the house. People whispered and told their own stories. It had been a very awkward haircut.

  The heat of the memory spurred Kane up and out of Sophia’s room. He found his mom downstairs in her office.

  “Sophia says I look like a poodle that just joined the military.”

  His mom considered him. There was no denying this. The barber had left Kane’s curls tufted on top and done their best to clean up the hair that had gone crispy around Kane’s burns, which were more prominent than ever.

  “What about wearing a hat? You used to love to wear your grandmother’s beret.”

  Kane shook his head. He couldn’t afford to be any gayer.

  “Hmm. I don’t know, honey. I think you kind of look rock-and-roll, you know? Like, a tough guy. A tough-guy poodle.” She grinned. “Or should I say…a ruff guy.”

  “That’s not funny, Mom.”

  “Well, it certainly seemed to give you…paws.”

  Kane tried not to laugh and failed. Things had been tense with his parents, too, and this moment felt like progress. They had tried everything to get him to open up, but when he simply didn’t, their warmth had cooled to firmer kind of love. Something like fear, actually. Moments of easy banter were rare, and Kane leapt at the opportunity to pretend nothing was wrong.

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree,” he said.

  “That’s not really the right pun, Kane.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Throw me a bone?”

  “Better, but your jokes are a little far-fetched.”

  “Mom, please. Do I have to go back to school looking like this?”

  The question flipped her from Pun Mom into Clinical Psych Mom, which Kane was ready for; she taught psychology to freshman at St. Agnes, and these flips happened a lot more since the incident.

  “While a haircut is not a good enough reason to not return to school, your father and I have been meaning to discuss the option of homeschooling with you. That is, if you feel like the pressure of returning would be a further distraction. Is that something you’d like to have a conversation about?”

  Kane’s usual gloom closed back over the fleeting brightness he’d just felt. Dread rose up within him like bile. Perhaps the only thing worse than returning to school was spending even more time trapped here. It creeped him out the way the house changed in the late summer’s heat, with doors clicking open and rooms taking big breaths when the breezes hit. Plus, his mother wouldn’t go into her job, maybe fearing he might hurt himself. Kane imagined himself as a rare bird: well loved, but still caged.

  “No, I’ll go back. Just…not yet. Okay?”

  His mother considered him, then flipped out of psych mode.

  “Perhaps going back to school will be the perfect thing for your…”

  “What? Another pun?”

  “I can’t. I’m your mother.”

  Kane crossed his arms. “Say it.”

  “Melan-collie.”

  “You’re sadistic.”

  She laughed, and, because he was not entirely heartless, Kane laughed, too. Then she booted him from her office with a cheery “Dinner is at six, bitch.”

  Kane wandered through the house. The urge to read The Witches came over him, but it’d been lost to whatever had chased him down the night he met Ursula. He considered going back to Sophia’s room, but she’d closed her door. Doing some writing in his journal about his fear of school was always an option, but he didn’t think that’s what Dr. Poesy was interested in. Really, he should be searching for clues and do what he’d been avoiding since he’d gotten home from the hospital.

  He should explore his own room.

  Kane pressed his forehead against the door, hand hovering over the knob. He’d only entered his room for a few minutes each day, to grab clothes or a book, but then the sheer discomfort of being surrounded by all that stuff drove him out. Most of his things he recognized, but some things were entirely foreign. He hadn’t told his parents this yet, or even Sophia, but it proved that much more than the summer was missing from his memory. Whatever happened to him, not all of him had made it back. Maybe not even most of him. So who did that make him, the boy against the door? The boy afraid to enter, trapped outside his own life, afraid to discover just how much he had lost.

  Kane reminded himself, again and again, that he was not an egg. Whoever he was, he needed to figure out his own story. Perhaps that was the key to finally coming home.

  The door creaked as he entered.

  It was a large room shrunken by clutter on every surface. Kane tamped down the prickling unease and began with his desk. It was a waste of half-read books and comics. There were half-filled sketchbooks and half-finished crafts. A birdhouse, half-painted, waited in a dried pool of its own colors atop some newspaper. Kane didn’t own a bird. He did own a fish, though.

  “Hey Rasputin,” he said to the fishbowl. The black betta regarded him nervously, then slid behind a miniature castle.

  “Me, too.” He pinched a few flakes into the bowl and tried to imagine what it was like to have your food magically appear above you, without warning. Then he thought about how he knew the fish’s name, but not where it was from.

  Kane moved on to the bookcase, a heavy mahogany beast anchored to the wall because he used to climb it. Kane poked through the knickknacks on the shelves and marveled at what was probably the early signs of a hoarding habit. There were jars of shells from the Connecticut coast, ceramic mugs crammed with bristling paintbrushes, plastic superhero figurines prized from cereal boxes, dingy stuffed animals with threadbare smiles, a milky-eyed antique camera, a handful of sea glass placed meticulously into a figure eight, and books. Countless books, spines cracked and pages spotted and covers peeling and corners rounded. The titl
es whispered to Kane, bidding for his attention, but he resisted the urge to open up one and close himself within. That was the old Kane. The new Kane needed to focus on the real.

  He ran his shaking hands over it all, searching for the holes in his memory. There were many, and without the patina of nostalgia, everything felt like junk. Useless junk.

  A few tears creeped from the corners of his eyes, but he pushed them back across his temples. It was not just sadness he felt, but homesickness. He was homesick for a place he could no longer visit, for a home that was no longer his. Then his eyes fell upon the old jewelry box on the very top shelf.

  It had been his grandmother’s, willed to him when she passed. It was a fitting gift. Kane had always loved to rip open the drawers when he was a toddler, taking the jewels out of their velvet coffins, until one day he managed to lose the key. His grandmother, who loved pranks, told him this meant she’d have to blow it up, jewelry and all, and start her collection over. Kane was so hysterical about it he begged his father for a hammer to crack it open. The tool was solemnly supplied and, to Kane’s delight and his grandmother’s amusement, just one tap did the trick. It wasn’t until years later that his grandmother showed him—and only him—that applying pressure to the topmost drawer’s upper-right edge opened the compartments without much fuss. The lock had never worked.

  She had called the heirloom her treasure chest.

  One room over, Sophia’s scale shifted into a minor key. Chills swept over Kane’s skin as he remembered the chatter of crickets on the path, and Ursula’s words all over again: Check the treasure chest.

  The viola’s minor scale peaked. Kane dragged the jewelry box to the floor, his hands grazing the familiar ridges until he found the pressure point, and pushed. Something clicked and he eased open the top drawer, half expecting something horrible to crawl out. A swarm of locusts, or some Pandora-style curse. Instead what he found was…

  More junk.

  A pair of gold-handled sewing scissors, bunches of thread, and a small pincushion shaped like a raspberry stared up at him from a worn velvet backdrop. But in the next drawer he found a photo of two people: the first was curvy and tall, with an untidy knot of red curls and sporting a goofy smile. Her arm was flung around the other person’s shoulders with chummy familiarity. Undeniably, unmistakably, it was Ursula Abernathy.