Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

by Nancy Wayson Dinan

  Kevin thought she was speaking to him and seized her phone from the cup holder to poke around on the map. She let him, even as irritated as she was. Wouldn’t do them any good for her to snap at him.

  Lou banged briefly on the window: “Help.” Then she ran away again in Aunt Fern’s direction. Lucy Maud and Kevin exchanged glances and got out of the car. Lucy Maud saw her twin sister running away, but Aunt Fern was too far away to see.

  They followed Lou about twenty yards down the road before Lucy Maud realized she should have turned off the engine. With each step, the sound of its running seemed farther away, as if the night were an insulation, the acoustics not quite what she’d expected. Thank God she’d turned off that Fleetwood Mac song, as that would have been unbearable, that music hanging in this thick air, feeling a mile away instead of a hundred yards.

  They could no longer see Lou. In fact, they could see little, their eyes not having adjusted to this dark.

  “Kevin, there’s a flashlight in the glove compartment.”

  “All right.” He turned back. Lucy Maud kept walking, picking up speed, wanting to catch her sister but scared of tripping on something. She could tell by the wet sound of the gravel on the asphalt that rain had recently passed through here. The whole world was wet now.

  “Lou?” she called, her feet sliding on the gravel because, in the dark, she was not sure where to put them. “Fern?” She looked back but could not see Kevin, even though she could see the car’s headlights illuminating twin beams of limestone dust. “Lou?” Nothing. On the air, the sound of running water and the night.

  She stopped on the road, her hands on her hips. She couldn’t walk forward anymore; she couldn’t see a thing. But how could Lou and Aunt Fern see anything either? Aunt Fern was old and not so quick. How far could she have gotten? Surely they were still on the road. Surely Aunt Fern would not have ducked off into the underbrush or gone down the hill.

  Lucy Maud realized that she could not be sure what Aunt Fern would do. She hadn’t been around her in so long. Lou was the caretaker. But Lucy Maud wouldn’t have called her twin that before now. Until the moment when Fern stepped out of the car, Lucy Maud would have called Lou Aunt Fern’s companion. Until this moment, Lucy Maud hadn’t realized the extent to which her aunt needed help. But the signs had been there: that story at the rehearsal dinner, which nobody knew and which was obviously from a movie or a book. And just a few days ago, Fern had stripped naked and ambled down to the lake. Boyd had brought her back. Lucy Maud hadn’t realized how like a child Aunt Fern was. She knew Lou left Fern every morning to go to her AA meetings, and Lou also worked part-time at H-E-B. What happened to Aunt Fern when Lou was away? Did Fern wander off then?

  Lucy Maud could not go any farther in the dark, and Kevin had not returned with the flashlight. She turned around. She would get the car, drive slowly back down this road, headlights on and windows down, calling for her twin and aunt. She didn’t know if she should be worried about Kevin, who was a perfectly capable adult but who should definitely have returned by now.

  When she reached the car and opened the door, she saw him, sitting in the passenger seat, on the phone. She knew with whom, too, even without the guilty look on his face when she opened the door and the dome light illuminated him. She stopped.

  A betrayal, certainly, but of what magnitude? Lucy Maud knew about the graduate student. But no. Now Lucy Maud was the woman on the side, and the graduate student didn’t know about her. She could tell by the way Kevin exited the car in a hurry and walked away, before Lucy Maud could say anything. He was afraid his Austin girlfriend would hear her.

  She got in and leaned her head on the steering wheel. What was she so upset about? She knew him for what he was, knew that so much of what had happened between them could be said to be her own fault. But this betrayal hurt her anew, and after a minute she figured out why. He was supposed to be helping her. This was an emergency. Boyd was missing, and now Lou and Aunt Fern were out there in the dark. And Lucy Maud herself had been standing in the dark, waiting for Kevin to bring her a flashlight. But here he’d been, seizing the moment to reassure the Austin girl that he wasn’t doing exactly what he had been doing.

  Lucy Maud put the car in reverse, turning around. Her sister and her great-aunt were out there. She wasn’t going to sit here and ponder her soon-to-be ex-husband’s latest betrayal. She rested her right hand on the passenger headrest, looking over her shoulder. She hit the gas a little harder than she meant to, and the car bucked backward. She heard Kevin’s footsteps as he realized what was happening and ran to get in. “Love you, too,” she heard him say, then he hung up.

  “Jeez, Lucy Maud, what are you doing?” He shut the door and put his seat belt on as if they were going for a long drive.

  “Well, I couldn’t very well keep going in the dark.” She refused to look at him and instead rolled down her window. Still without looking, she rolled his down, too.

  “Lou?” she yelled, driving back the way they’d come. She didn’t know how fast to go; Lou had been running after she’d banged on the car. Lucy Maud had no idea how fast Aunt Fern would be but didn’t want to run over one of them in the dark. She increased her speed to fifteen miles per hour, thinking that was a four-minute mile. No way Lou or Aunt Fern was that fast. But they’d had a head start. How many minutes had passed since Lou had banged on the car asking for help?

  They continued down the road, paved once but mostly gone to gravel, like so many of the other roads around here. Nothing in the headlights: no trace of the two women. After a mile or so, Lucy Maud grew frustrated with only being able to see in front of her, so she reached in the glove compartment and got the flashlight she’d sent Kevin for. Here she finally looked at him, hoping he could read her contempt. Useless, she thought, narrowing her eyes. She could never depend on him.

  They drove for a bit, calling and seeing nothing. After ten minutes, she calculated that they had gone two to three miles. They’d seen no sign of Lou and Fern. Lucy Maud knew, too, that they were coming to the end of this section of road, and she was reluctant to leave it, knowing as she did that her sister and her aunt were somewhere behind her. To her left was a wet-weather creek, a gully that would normally be dry but that now coursed with water. She hoped that Aunt Fern had not wandered into that.

  She stopped and reversed again, ready to go back down the road. As she turned around, her headlights fell on a silver Subaru in front of an A-frame cabin. A cabin just off the road, down one of the long driveways. “Hey, isn’t that Ruben King’s car?”

  Kevin looked at her. “I haven’t seen Ruben King in five years. I have no idea what he drives.” When Lucy Maud was silent for a minute, thinking about how much of Boyd’s life he had missed, he added, “You did a good job, Lucy Maud. You always were a good mother.” It was almost as if he could read her mind.

  She softened. She knew she was being manipulated, but what did it matter? He was a supremely flawed human being, but she loved him anyway. For years—decades—they had been so much to each other, often, other than for Boyd, the only thing. It was hard to believe now, but she’d once been astonished at his tenderness, at how solicitous he had been. The way he’d waited on her when she’d been sick, giving her a bell in the bedroom so that she could call him as he worked in the kitchen. The time in Austin when she’d offhandedly remarked that she’d always wanted a swing, and her surprise to see one hanging from the live oak the very next day. The way he’d reach over in the night, both of them sleeping, just to make sure that she was there. All of this before she’d aged, before he, too, had aged but had not yet come to admit it. “Sweet-talking your way out of everything,” she said, and let it drop. There were the two missing people to worry about, and now she was 90 percent sure that was Ruben King’s car. Even in the dark, she could see the black rectangle of a bumper sticker. She thought she knew what that sticker said: YOU MAY ALL GO TO HELL AND I WILL GO TO TEXAS. DAVY CROCKETT. She could not see the window where Ruben King had a Wh
eatsville Co-op sticker.

  Now the dilemma. Did she go knock on that door or did she keep looking for Lou and Fern? She thought about sending Kevin back down the road one more time, but part of her thought that if she let him go, if they split up, she’d lose him, too. She felt that there was something about the night that she couldn’t trust.

  “Kevin, I know that car belongs to Isaac’s father. I’m going to knock on that door to see if he will help us find them.” She thought for a second, then turned the car around so that the headlights shone back up the road. Then she turned to him. “Stay here.” I don’t want you getting lost, too.

  He nodded, not taking much convincing.

  She added, “Watch for them,” and got out of the car. She didn’t even want him to get in the driver’s seat, sure that if he did, he would drive off.

  She lingered for a moment, bent at the hip, head inside the car, body outside. Who could explain why you loved a person? How many years had she known this man, and still, her heart quickened when she saw him. She remembered him: gangly, before he’d grown into his height, finishing undergrad. He’d tried to take her to an Ayn Rand objectivist meeting. She should have known then that one of his defining characteristics was a self-centeredness that was not quite meanness. The man had always looked out for number one. Ah, but how she’d loved him, and how she still did.

  She nodded once, resolutely, stood up, and closed the door. She walked away, headed to the A-frame cabin. They’d come out here to find someone because they’d lost someone else—and lost two more people. The math was not on their side. She should never have let Lou bring Aunt Fern.

  11:00 P.M.

  Boyd, asleep on the ground. A smell on the air. The sea. The ancient animals passing through, stopping to gaze at the pool of trapped river perch. And Boyd, dreaming of rafts on the Rio Grande and Guadalupe, the bats of the summer dusks, the carpet of bluebonnets in the late spring. Sleeping deeply until the man knelt beside her and shook her by the shoulder.

  Still, she was reluctant to wake. She felt adrift in something amniotic, as though parts of her were still being formed. A sense of starlight and fusion. The golden heart of ore on an anvil, dotted with the black specks of the exterior’s quick cooling. But the man continued his shaking, urgent and undeterred.

  “Miss?”

  In the place between sleep and wakefulness, she perceived that he spoke an old-fashioned German and that she understood it. She stretched and her shoulder slid out of his hand. When she opened her eyes, she saw him, rocked back on his heels in a squat, his elbows resting on his knees. His face was lined around the eyes but still young, his beard and mustache neat, his sideburns robust, his clothes homemade and worn.

  She sat up and saw beyond him a woman, hair so light that it seemed silver in the moonlight. She wore a long dress of dark calico, and bare toes peeked out from the hem. Boyd thought the woman drew the moonlight. The woman opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  Boyd sat up, scratching her head and shifting to chase the sleep from her limbs. She didn’t know what time it was; the moon was still high, but the woman held a lantern.

  “So sorry to wake you,” the man said. “Have you seen a child? A small boy?”

  Boyd got her feet under her and rose. She was taller than the man, and she was only five feet four inches. She was still unsure about the world, still remembering the strange events of the day before. The air had a quality she could not describe; it spoke of storm, of a rift in sky and space, the atmosphere knitting itself back together.

  “Please,” the woman said, taking a step forward. “You must help us. Have you seen a little boy come through here?”

  Boyd had not seen a little boy. She did not know how to help. She looked into the darkness, her head turning first this way, then another. Then she remembered.

  “Oh, Mother,” the man said to the woman. “We must find him. The ground is already crisp with frost.”

  Boyd looked now at the ground and stepped in place a couple of times to test it. It was the end of May in central Texas. There was no danger—no possibility—of frost.

  Of course Boyd would help them, though she was nearly positive the search was futile. She shouldered her backpack anyway. “I’ll help you look.”

  The man and woman glanced at each other. Boyd did not know what they were thinking; their faces were expressionless. “Thank you,” the man said, and the woman walked forward, past the pool of trapped perch. “Caleb,” the man yelled. Boyd fell in line behind them, though they had just confirmed her suspicion: the search for this boy would not bear fruit. The search had had exactly one chance to be successful, a night more than a century ago, and having failed that night, it was doomed to fail this night as well. Nevertheless, she joined them, cupping her hands around her mouth and calling the boy’s name into the forest. The thought came to her that she was counting on their not finding him. What would it be like to be alone in the dark with these two people when they came across what was left of their child, with his toothless mouth revealing his decay, and his constant hum of fear? Would their discovery end his discomfort?

  She tripped, stumbling as she stepped on her own shoelace, but caught herself, her hands reaching out instinctively to brace her fall before she tumbled forward under the weight of her pack. When she’d righted herself, she knelt to tie the shoe, feeling as well as she could in the dark. The woman marched forward, carrying the lantern light.

  When Boyd stood, the light was gone, and so were the man and woman. “Hello?” Boyd called. She hadn’t gotten their names and couldn’t remember them from the pioneer graveyard. “Hello?” she shouted again, though the couple had vanished. Instead, the forest answered her: wind in pin oaks, the drip of rainwater from Ashe juniper, the hiss of night wings on the sky.

  She had not been afraid before, not really, and was not sure she was afraid now, but she felt suddenly how unprotected she was here, how out in the open. She had only followed the couple for ten minutes or so, maybe a quarter of a mile, but she was certainly in a different place from when she had started.

  She removed her pack and sat, her back against a different tree now, a hackberry with gnarled bark, even though hackberry was a fence-line tree and here she was in the middle of the woods. She could not possibly go back to sleep; the night air had infiltrated.

  A hand on her shoulder, and she jumped, startled. “Miss?” the man said.

  She stood quickly, grabbing her pack. “You’re back! I lost you.”

  “So sorry to wake you. Have you seen a child? A small boy?”

  “No. Remember, we were looking for him?”

  His figure, foregrounded, cut into the woman’s circle of lantern light.

  “Please,” the woman said, taking a step forward, the light circle expanding. “You must help us. Have you seen a little boy come through here?”

  Boyd, nonplussed, wondered if she was dreaming again. “But we were looking for him. Together. Just a second ago.” Neither expression, dimly lit by flickering lantern light, responded. The woman raised the lantern, her arm parallel to the ground, her fist closed around the iron loop. Boyd saw she was missing a thumbnail, the nail bed raw and exposed. Things were falling off the woman.

  “Oh, Mother,” the man said to the woman. This time he did not turn his head to look at her but stayed fixed on Boyd. “We must find him. The ground is already crisp with frost.”

  Boyd hesitated, unsure what to do. It was not in her nature to refuse help to someone who asked for it. But these people appeared to have no knowledge of her helping them already, and she had been led so far from the river.

  The woman, now sensing Boyd’s hesitation, took her hand. Boyd flinched, but when she looked down, she saw that all of the fingernails on the hand not holding the lantern were accounted for.

  She allowed herself to be led forward, stepping on ground that was decidedly not crisp with frost, falling in line behind the woman with the man bringing up the rear. Soon, Boyd found herself shouti
ng into the night, “Caleb? Caleb!” She did not want to run across Caleb, and that made her wonder what these people were, whether they were ghosts or merely some record of a horrible night, some fabric of that time mis-woven into this.

  After a few minutes of walking, Boyd realized that her footsteps crunched gravel and oak leaves, sometimes acorns or yucca pods, her weight enough to crack them. The woman in front of her made no such sound, but instead almost a tinkling, a sound of broken glass or ice. Now the woman in front of her was going faster, opening up a distance between them, and Boyd struggled to speed up. The gap between Boyd and the woman widened.

  The tinkling sounds were also close on Boyd’s heels, only a couple of inches behind her. She felt his breath on her neck, sensed that he would walk right through her, that his body would pass through hers, that she would bear this imprint of the past inside her for the rest of her life. She panicked and stepped briefly off the trail.

  He went on, just missing her, a blur now matching the speed of his wife, the tinkling sounds of footfalls still audible, though she could not see his feet rise or fall. She stepped back on the path, following slowly, unsure she wanted to catch them. After a minute, the lantern light was gone, and she sat down to let her eyes readjust to the dark, noting the white cast to the landscape around her, limestone without much topsoil, and she wondered if they’d been climbing. Yes, she thought, considering this possibility, remembering how she had leaned forward as she walked, the rise of land here but nearly imperceptible. She felt exposed again, defenseless to a different wind and air. She could sense, too, the time that this would cost her, the urgency of Isaac in the tree, water rising around him. What that loss would mean to her. Whether she would end up wandering these woods, asking the rare passerby for help.

  She had followed different footsteps from the garden to the lake, wondering how to get to Isaac. The river had seemed the most logical choice, a direct shot northwest, straight to where she had sensed Isaac in the tree. She guessed it was now around midnight; she would not be able to find the river again until sunrise. Isaac, too, must be alone in the night, assuming—which she did—that he was still holding on.