by Isla Morley
“Why do they call it dirt? It’s beautiful.”
I tell Adam it’s time to go, but he trickles dirt on his legs, then shakes it off, then repeats the process. It looks like he might roll in it. I have to insist.
I hold out my hand to him as he struggles to his feet. “We have to hurry, son. There will be time for all of this later.” I pull my shirt up over my nose, hoping to blunt the shock of fresh air.
He slips a handful of dirt into his trouser pocket and faces the night, his head tipped back all the way. I look up, too. Above us is no ceiling, only a startling brilliance, an aperture in the expanse. A peephole, like a giant eyeball is about to roll in front of it, like just maybe there is someone up there looking out for us.
“The moon!” Adam reaches for it, like he can pluck it from sky and pocket it. “It’s so close.”
He twirls slowly, still looking up. “The sky, Mom!” He names the world for me. He names it as though I’ve never known it. And perhaps I haven’t ever known it, not really. It certainly feels utterly foreign.
“Yes.”
“Why isn’t it black?”
The sky is layered with orange, purple, and gray streaks. Around the moon is silvery-blue. A blinking light appears in front of him.
“A falling star!”
“It’s a firefly,” I tell him. Adam has his finger out to see if the light will land on it. “Where’d it go?” He sees another blinking light and stumbles after it, stepping out beyond the triangle of light from the door. I hear the air go out of him. I look to see what has caused him to stop dead in his tracks, and it happens to me, too.
There is no wall. There is no beyond. Here goes on for miles. So overwhelming is this fact that we might as well be faced with a gap too wide to breach.
Adam takes a step backward. His voice has a quaver to it. “Whose is it?”
“Whose is what?”
“This. Outside.”
Some invisible border parcels off that which belongs to Dobbs, but I’m sure this isn’t what my son is after. I turn to him. He has retreated even farther from the dark mass. In my most reassuring voice, I say, “It belongs to everybody.”
He looks at me dubiously. “Us, too?”
I nod.
“Me?”
“Yes. You, especially.”
He seems a little more reassured.
“It’s probably going to be better if you stay focused on the things that are close,” I add, and realize how ridiculous this is. As though the expanse is going to wait for our permission before it advances, a black hole asking politely of the star if it may swallow it. Terrible to think of it this way. The air has given me a headache. No more deep breaths; too much oxygen. I am on the brink of hallucinating.
Adam draws my attention to the fact that there are weeds all around us by pulling one out of the ground and smelling it. “So this is mine?”
“If you want it, yes.” Try not to cower at the dark immensity nosing up against us.
He puts it in his pocket and picks up a rock. “This?”
“Yes.” Where is Dobbs’s car?
Adam goes about stuffing his pockets with stones and leaves and weeds, while I turn my face to the sudden breeze. It’s abrasive, like someone has taken sandpaper to my cheeks. It smells wrong, too.
The darkness hisses and whirrs, approaching and retreating. Something is not quite right about the night. Where there should be some sense of triumph, there is in me a growing sense of dread. It should be wonderful—the moon, the fireflies, a young man filling his lungs with fresh air and his pockets with dirt. It is his wound I am worried about, I tell myself. It is the contents of the backpack over my shoulder. It is the need to hurry. It is the hundred things that can go wrong between now and when I find the hospital.
Although it can’t possibly be the case, all manner of gnashing, screeching, panting creatures seems to be stalking us. I can’t shake the feeling that we are prey. Or specifically, that Adam, injured, bloodied, is prey. For a crazy moment, I feel the urge to turn around and make a dash back to the door. The meek shall inherit the earth was what Reverend Caldwell always used to say. I’m not so sure. The earth doesn’t seem to be waiting for anyone to inherit it, least of all someone as meek as my son. What if the world has turned into a hungry beast? What if Adam is nothing but a morsel?
Adam has found a boulder. I tell him no way. I tell him it’s time to leave. One last thing: I return to the door. Dobbs can’t chase after us, but I slam it shut anyway. He is now the one locked up.
Instead of parked in front of us, Dobbs’s car is thirty feet away. It’s Adam who points it out. I’d mistaken it for a tangle of bushes. We approach it cautiously, as though every step could trigger a booby trap. Compared to our confined quarters, the vehicle seems enormous. I pull off the camouflaged netting and hesitate.
Were it not for the urgency of the situation, I’d sooner walk a hundred miles barefoot on a trail of thorns than get in the Oldsmobile again. A century could go by and I would have no less of an urge to smash its windshield, rip the doors off their hinges, slash those leather seats. A car that drives a girl to a hole in the ground has no business carrying any more passengers, least of all my son, who is opening the door on the driver’s side. Wincing only a little, he scrambles in. “A car, Mom!” There he sits, manhandling the wheel.
My ears are playing tricks on me. Either that, or the darkness is growling. “Move over.” I slam the door, then lock it. A little relief. The night still keeps its unblinking eye on us.
“Jackpot!” Adam is lifting a pair of Dobbs’s galoshes. Among Adam’s possessions now packed in the suitcase are clothes suitable only for a seventy-four-degree controlled climate. Because he has never needed them, he has no shoes. “Can I have them?” He is peeling off his socks.
I nod.
“Can you drive?” Adam stamps his feet, pleased with his find.
“Sure,” I reply, putting the key in the ignition. Truth is, I’d probably do better if this were a tractor. Daddy had given me only a few lessons in a car before Dobbs took me. I ask Adam to hold the flashlight so I can scrutinize the pedals and the gearshift. The dashboard has more dials and buttons than seems possible for one person alone to operate.
“You have to put it in reverse,” he says, yanking the lever to R. Adam has always been fascinated by cars and has read everything he can on the subject. A few years back, Dobbs brought him the Oldsmobile owner’s manual, and it didn’t take him long before he’d committed every detail to memory. From its diagrams and using his own ingenuity, he recently constructed a chassis from salvaged junk that Dobbs brought.
I bat Adam’s hand away. “Fasten your seat belt.”
Adam leans forward and splays his fingers against the invisible barrier separating us from the outside. He raps on it. “You never see any pictures of windows in books, only what’s on the other side of them.” He turns to the window next to him and shows it the same reverence. He pushes his nose against it, then his lips, and then gives it a big lick. The world is turning him into a boy again.
I turn the ignition, and the car shudders. Startled by the roar, Adam presses his hands against his ears, then fixes his gaze at the door of the silo. Beneath the full moon about only a dozen yards or so away, it appears to go nowhere. It looks, in fact, like an invitation. If I’d wandered across the prairie and come to a door such as this, I would have wanted to see what was on the other side of it. I’d have gone down those stairs to see if it led to another world. From this angle, there is no trace of my existence for the last seventeen years. Nothing of Adam’s childhood. Nothing of the horrors. A door can be such a terrible thing. If I ever live in a house, it will have only windows.
I back the car out from its surrounding nest of bushes before it stalls. I try again, and this time the car hops. I shift the gear into drive, and get a little too eager on the gas pedal turning the car around. It moves in fits and starts down the gravel path while Adam gives me instructions as though he’s the
expert and I’m the novice. Perhaps he is, and perhaps I am, for this landscape is nothing like the one I remember.
Adam doesn’t turn around to see what we are leaving behind, but I keep looking at the door in the rearview mirror. Soon, it is nothing more than a matchbox, and then it isn’t anything but a dot. By the time Adam has figured out how to turn on the headlights, there isn’t anything to look at, just a place where light leaks from a hole in the sky.
“This is incredible!” Adam has rolled his window down all the way. A chill blows in. He sticks out his head. I grab his shirt to anchor him, even though I’m only going ten miles an hour. I keep my eyes trained for familiar landmarks. This is not a dream, I keep telling myself. This is really happening.
There is nothing to tell what year we’re in. It could be a thousand years in either direction. It’s almost as disorienting as living underground where there is no day, week, year, no history. Below there are no seasons, and for the life of me I can’t seem to figure out what season it is out here. Dobbs mentioned recently it being January, but he must have had it wrong. There’s not a scrap of evidence of a Kansas winter. No snow, no frost, no ice on the road. All there is is that dank smell and the chill.
Finally, the country road. It doesn’t matter what year, or what season; it only matters that the road leads us home.
Over the years, I’ve had all kinds of fantasies. Each one has begun with a road or ended with a road or had a road going right through the middle of it. Usually, it would be a smooth two-laner with a lot of traffic. Sometimes, it would be an unpaved road, its surface like polished steel, so hot you have to walk where the weeds grow on the shoulder. This road I barely remember.
“Have you forgotten which way?” Adam asks.
I’ve forgotten how to decide, is the problem.
I turn right.
One headlamp is out, but there is more than enough moonlight to see the overgrowth. I stick to the center line to avoid driving over ground cover. There are so many more trees than before. A hedge runs rampant alongside us. Adam is still calling out everything he sees in a breathy, unfamiliar voice. I want to roll down my window, too, and shout, “Hello, trees! Hello, prairie! Hello, world!” There must always have been this much of it and I just never noticed.
Not too far up ahead should be the intersection. You live one place your whole life there isn’t a road you don’t know, but now I have the sneaking suspicion that we are one wrong turn from being utterly lost. I consult my memory for directions, but it keeps insisting it is seventeen years ago, only with more trees.
“The moon’s following us!” Adam’s blond hair is sticking up straight from being wind-whipped. He is short of breath, his voice pitched high with excitement. “Go faster! Let’s see if we can outrun it.”
I smile and ease down on the accelerator. The speedometer needle bounces up to fifteen and then twenty miles an hour. It’s fun for about five seconds until we hit a ribbed section of road and the tires make popping sounds and the car bounces us up and down. I start to feel queasy. Too much for someone accustomed to being stationary. Adam also seems to have a bout of motion sickness because he rolls up his window and doesn’t protest when I go a little slower.
The bitter air has gotten to me, too. How they say venom affects a person is what the cold is doing to me. First, it was stinging, but now it’s numbing. I wonder if soon my entire body won’t give way to paralysis. I have to force myself to concentrate on the road.
“Is that”—he pauses, runs his fingertips against the knobs—“a radio?”
“Go ahead, turn it on.”
Adam pushes a button. The sound of static startles him, and he flinches as though he’s been given an electric shock.
“It’s okay, here, let me show you.” I fiddle with the tuner. Nothing but dead air.
Just as I am about to push the AM button, a monster rises up in front of us and blocks our path. I jam on the brakes and swerve sharply.
Adam is thrown against the dashboard, and knocks his head.
I look behind me. It lingers just at the edge of the brake lights’ red glow.
“Stay here.”
As soon as I get out, there’s that smell again. Those same noises are still in pursuit of us. I much prefer being in the car than out in the open. Forcing myself onward, I walk ten yards before I see it. I still don’t understand. Sticking right up through the tarmac in the middle of the road is a tree.
“What is it, Mom?”
“Get back in the car, Adam.”
“What’s wrong?” he asks, as though it is perfectly natural for a tree to be growing on a broken yellow line.
I usher him back into the car. This time he doesn’t argue with me when I tell him to put his seat belt on.
Not too long down the road, we pass a sign I’ve never seen before: a blue triangle with an emblem that looks like a whirligig. There’s another tree in the street, and behind it three others. Slowing down, I steer the car around them. Vines are snaked across the street so thick I can’t see the asphalt. And then there is no going forward. Nothing short of an encroaching army of timber barricades our way.
Through the windshield, I watch the scraggly tops of these giants shake their heads at us. Instead of growing straight, their trunks are bent at impossible angles, their twisted branches reaching toward us. Adam is out before I can tell him no. He approaches the front line cautiously, as you would a herd of elephants. By the time I get to him, he is stroking the base of one of the trees. He looks at his fingertips, as if he expects the bark to have stuck to them. He puts his arms around it. “They are wonderful!”
No, not wonderful. I pace from one end of the road to the other. In either direction, the line of trees seems to stretch indefinitely.
When I turn around, Adam is gone.
“Adam?” I wave the flashlight frantically. The beam is scattered against the dense foliage.
“Adam!” I yell. I can feel the earth spinning on its axis. Either that or the road is bucking me. I have a hard time staying upright. “Adam, where are you?”
I rush between two trees, and find myself in a forest so dense I immediately lose my bearings. Did I come from this direction? Or that? “Adam!”
“I’m right here.”
I swing the flashlight to the left. He is sitting on a branch that is bent all the way to the ground.
“Don’t you ever—” I notice him holding his side. He is laboring.
“I just wanted to climb a tree.”
I am trembling so hard when I get him back in the car that it is an effort to turn the ignition. “You cannot just wander off like that! Do you hear me? Ever!”
Theo once wandered away from Mama and me at the grocery store. It didn’t take but a minute to find him in the candy aisle filling his pockets, but Mama took him by the shoulders and shook him and yelled loud enough for everyone to hear how he could have been lost forever. On top of everything, there is this new fear. How easy it is going to be for the big, wide world to wedge itself between Adam and me.
“It’s okay, Mom.”
I nod in agreement, suppressing tears. Neither one of us is terribly composed. Adam starts chewing on his thumbnail, something he hasn’t done in years. I try to steady my hands by taking a firm grip on the steering wheel.
“What do we do now?” Adam asks.
Without answering, I turn the Oldsmobile around. We go back the way we’ve just come, back down this godforsaken road just like all those years ago when Dobbs Hordin was in the driver’s seat and I was the teenager who didn’t think anything bad could happen to a person.
TO ADAM, ANY direction is as good as another, but I don’t know how to get to Lawrence going this way. At least we are going. Going. There has to be a signpost up ahead.
It’s silly to think the backwoods has fallen into rank behind us and is advancing on us, but I drive a little faster and keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. Picking up on my cue, Adam looks over his shoulder out the back window, too. I turn
on the overhead light. Who’d have thought electrical lighting would be such a comfort?
Gone from Adam’s face is the wonder from earlier; it is now bleached with fear. Chewing on his lip and his arms crossed at his chest, he squints into the darkness as though things are about to fly at us out of it. Adam knows nothing at all about anticipating, because in a controlled environment he’s never had to anticipate. He can’t possibly know to protect himself. This now terrifies me. More terrifying is how terrible I have become at anticipating. How, then, am I to protect him?
It has become stuffy in the car. I roll the window down just an inch. Adam cringes at the cold, pulls his collar up around his ears, and draws his hands into his sleeves. He appears to be shrinking in his clothes. I locate the switch for the heater, but nothing other than cold air blasts through the vents.
I can’t decide what exactly the weather is doing. It feels like a storm, but mostly the sky is clear. I used to spend hours describing weather to Adam—gully washers, hail, you name it. I was so good at describing sticky, hot summers that we’d strip down to our skivvies and shoot each other with water guns made from straws. This here, there’s no good description for it.
Where is that intersection?
Adam groans when we go over another bump, which I now realize must be tree roots rumpling the pavement. We pass the turnoff to Dobbs’s property. Not only is there no gate, the ten-foot barbed-wire fence that used to front the property is gone, too. All that remains is the same NO TRESPASSING sign.
The car rumbles along. Something in the air catches in my throat. Adam looks over at me.
“It’s just a tickle,” I tell him, but the cough revs up. Soon it is bad enough that I have to pull over to the side of the road, except there is a thicket where the shoulder ought to be, so I stop the car in the lane and hope a truck doesn’t come blaring down on us. Or maybe that would be just fine. I could get out and say, “I am the taken girl. I am Blythe Hallowell,” and that would be the end of it.
“Something’s in the air. Do you smell that?”