by Isla Morley
I scamper after Adam, who follows Dobbs through the right-angled turns of the entrapment vestibule.
“Running off to your girlfriend?”
Dobbs’s rounded shoulders always make him look as if he’s caved in, but never more so than when he turns to face Adam. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“There wasn’t any apocalypse.”
Because someone has to put an end to this, I grab his arm. “Adam, could you stop this nonsense, please? If you have questions, then come and sit with me, and we’ll talk about them.” I have my own questions: What’s this about Charlie?
He shakes free of my grip, all but snarls at Dobbs. “If it’s such a disaster out there, why haven’t you gotten sick and died?”
Dobbs scowls at me. This is my fault, his look says. Fix it.
“Come on, Adam, let him go.” I am trying very hard to keep that picture of the farmhouse from going fuzzy.
Adam won’t be budged. “I am not staying down here anymore. And neither is she. We’re both going Above, right now. Open the door!”
Instead of taking out his notepad and punching in the code, Dobbs puts his hand against Adam’s chest and drives him all the way back to the stairs. For a second, I think he’s going to push my boy down them. “You’re fifteen and you think you know everything, right?”
Dobbs demands he stay put, then hurries to the middle blast door.
I try to coax Adam down the stairs, but instead, he pursues Dobbs with something behind his back. He yells for Dobbs to turn around. When Dobbs does, the something from behind Adam’s back gets pressed against his throat.
“Don’t be a fool, boy!”
“You!” Adam charges.
Yes, but for what crime?
“My boy, please! Put the knife down. Before someone gets hurt.”
The knife stays put. “There are people up there who are well. The only people who are sick are the ones down here!”
“My boy, please.”
Dobbs blinks but will not answer.
“She needs to see a doctor.”
“Your mother’s fine,” Mister replies. “It’s you that brings her trouble.”
“No more lies. We’re going up. Open that door!”
“Baby, please—”
“Touch me, Mom, and I’ll slit his throat!” A tiny bead of blood proves his point. “I said, open the door!”
“You’re right! There was no apocalypse!” I yell.
Adam pushes the knife even harder.
“Put the knife down, Adam! I’ll tell you everything!”
My son turns to me, wavering. There’s no taking back the words now. He looks like I feel: shattered.
Dobbs strikes Adam’s arm, knocking the knife from his hand. It skids across the floor. Adam, startled, tries to regain his position, but the war is lost. Dobbs twists Adam’s arm behind his back and pushes him against the concrete wall. “Don’t you ever threaten me again! You hear me? You leave this place when I say you can leave! Pull a stunt like this again and you’ll be sorry you were ever born!”
“Dobbs! Let go of him!”
“Shut up, the pair of you! I don’t want to hear another word!” Dobbs shoves Adam so hard, he sprawls at my feet. Adam doesn’t lift his head.
“You put him up to this!” Dobbs accuses me.
I keep shaking my head, even though it is surely true. Every book I read Adam, every lie I ever uttered, every truth I ever hid. Yes, I put him up to this.
“I come down here again and find you’ve not taken care of this, I’m taking matters into my own hands!”
I am so busy nodding that I don’t notice Adam rising from the floor. Suddenly, he launches at Dobbs. For just a second, the blade glints in the light. And then it is buried in the struggle. The two fall together, a ball of rags and coats and shoes.
A terrible moan. I cannot make out whose.
“Adam!”
From the pile, it is Dobbs who rises. “I didn’t mean to . . . I was only trying to . . .”
Oh Jesus.
“Get the first-aid kit, Blythe.”
“Adam!”
THE WOUND, DOBBS contends, is not deep but does need stitches. He tells me to fetch more towels and to sterilize one of my sewing needles in boiling water.
“You can’t do this; you’re not a doctor.”
“Get the cough mixture. He’s going to need several slugs of that. All right, buddy? A few small stitches, and you’ll be as good as new.”
“What if it hit an organ? How do you know it’s not bleeding worse inside? You have to take him, Dobbs.”
“Would you shut up and do as I say!”
I bring the cough mixture, then hurry to fill the kettle. It takes forever to boil the water.
“I’d take him if I could. If there was someplace to go. You know that, right?”
I put the bowl next to Dobbs. I kneel beside Adam and smooth his hair, tell him everything’s going to be okay. He keeps trying to say something, and I keep putting my finger to my lips.
“Even if I did, there’s no telling how long before I could bring him back. If I could even bring him back.” Dobbs opens the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. There’s only a drop left. This panics me almost as much as the sight of all that blood. “A thousand things that could go wrong up there. You don’t know who to trust. I take him up there, I put his life at risk. Is that what you want?”
Blood soaks another tea towel.
“You’ve got to take him to a doctor.” All the same, I’m handing Dobbs my sewing kit, letting him pick the color of thread.
He bends toward Adam, says real loud like the boy’s gone deaf, “I need you to be tough now, Sport. This is going to hurt, but it’s got to be done. All right?”
Adam struggles fiercely.
“You’re going to have to hold him harder than that, for godsake!”
Adam wrestles against my weight, and his blood soaks through my clothes, too.
Dobbs unclips his keys from his belt, hands me the one for the medicine cabinet.
“No,” I answer.
“Hurry up, or do you want him to bleed to death?”
I bring Dobbs the bottle of chloroform. Instead of taking it, he gives me his handkerchief. “You do it. Just a couple of drops, now.”
When I hold the wet cloth over my son’s face, when he bucks and twists under Dobbs’s full weight, I can’t help but think of little Charlie.
I come unglued the moment Adam passes out. I hold myself around my waist and start to cry. Dobbs tells me to shut up so he can concentrate, but I can’t stop. I watch Adam twitch and jerk.
After stitching him up, Dobbs scrubs his hands, and says, “It’ll get better. Just have to give it time to run its course.” He is a great believer in things running their course.
“I didn’t tell him about Charlie.”
He doesn’t believe me. “You’ve been trying to turn this kid against me for years. You think I haven’t noticed? You think I don’t know what you’re up to? You should be ashamed of yourself! You did this!”
While Dobbs is cleaning up the mess, I tell him I’m going downstairs to fetch Adam a clean shirt. I hurry down to Adam’s room to see if I might find a clue.
Adam doesn’t like me to go snooping among his things, though this won’t be the first time I do. I search his workspace. From aluminum cans, he has fashioned all manner of blades. He’s in the process of making a handle for one of them with my hairbrush. Dobbs would have a fit if he saw these. I hide them among Adam’s old toys. There is a new kinetics sculpture, but nothing out of the ordinary. I move to his cot. I rifle through the stuff piled on it. Nothing under the bed, either, or on the shelf next to it.
I glance around the room one last time. Some of the stories we’ve shared are reflected on his wall, and some are less stories than they are yearnings. In all, his mural is a thing of beauty, with migrating bison and shooting rockets and creatures with propellers. In Adam’s panorama, the sky is shoring up the
earth, and where clouds ought to be are machines. In the middle are a knight and a frumpy, toothless hag whose facial features bear a frightening resemblance to mine. The hooded figure with the sack over his shoulder is Dobbs. Winding itself like a road through the surreal landscape are fighting words, values I’ve tried to explain, values that the people Above would die defending: freedom, justice, truth. The latest addition is a girl—or rather I think it is. Adam’s attempt at someone from the opposite gender has mostly to do with long hair.
I grab a clean shirt and head out, and that’s when I see it. Sticking out from behind the door is a strap. Even soiled, there is no mistaking it. The red canvas bag is Charlie’s backpack.
Immediately, I am back to that moment: Dobbs’s shout; Charlie’s eyes snapping open, taking a moment to figure out it was not a cloud above his face but a pillow; my tongue flapping some ungodly words; Dobbs casting me aside, taking Charlie up in his arms and rushing out. There must be an error in my memory, because I distinctly remember handing the backpack to Dobbs before he took Charlie away.
If someone wants to know what it is like to hold a ghost on your lap, let him come and ask me. I will tell how the blood fizzes through hardened veins, how a perfectly clear head turns icebox-cold, how a spine turns to rubber.
I unzip the bag.
Charlie’s lunchbox. What was inside is now a tarry black scar. A green folder contains three faded crayon drawings and a typed note from the preschool director.
Dear Parents,
There has been a case of conjunctivitis reported in the four-year-old class. The symptoms of pinkeye include redness around the eye, swelling, mucus in the eyes, and itchiness. Should your child experience any symptoms, contact his/her health-care provider.
On a happier note, we are all looking forward to next week’s pageant, especially the children, who have been preparing for weeks. Arriving early means being assured a good seat. Overflow parking will be available at Shepherd’s Field. We look forward to seeing you there.
I look in the backpack again. Goofy is still there. I pull him out and hug him. At the bottom of the backpack is one of Adam’s socks. Adam has put something inside it which rattles—marbles, perhaps, or coins. I turn it over and empty the contents on my lap. The room turns cold. A collection of white pebbles.
But they are not pebbles. They are not anything my brain wishes them to be.
Swiftly, I arrange them from largest to smallest, as the tectonic plates grind apart. The land is surely plunging into the sea, caves must be opening their mouths and swallowing mountains whole. The world is being rent in two as a tiny hand holds up five skeletal fingers and waves from an upturned grave.
THE SIGNS OF Dobbs’s agitation are apparent: shirttails hanging out; neck reddened by heat rash; forehead blistered in sweat. He is scanning one of his pamphlets.
“What did you do to Charlie?”
“Adam,” he emphasizes, “should never have had a knife in the first place. You play with weapons, you’re going to get hurt.”
He thinks I have my boys mixed up. “I’m not talking about Adam. I’m talking about Charlie.”
He groans. “Not you, now.”
“You never returned Charlie.” Even I don’t recognize my voice.
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Listen, you should get some rest; you’re going to need it when he wakes up.”
I open my palms so he can see Charlie’s hand in mine.
The only thing that moves is the pamphlet, falling from his fingers. His face goes stiff and pale. I can count on one hand the number of times Dobbs has been at a loss for words. “Oh no.” Having found two words, he repeats them again and again.
All these years I’ve believed Charlie was the found child I never was, the one written about in the papers, the one whose homecoming made an entire nation rejoice. He became the symbol of hope for every missing child. Whenever I pictured him, he was taking up the life that was meant for me. He was supposed to have traded secrets with the same friend since grade school, shamed the bullies, surprised his teachers, and carried his family name proudly. When I thought of Charlie, I thought of having bequeathed my life to him.
“You told me you dropped Charlie off at a park down the street from his house. You told me you made a call to the police from a telephone booth. You said it was on television, him and his family getting back together.”
“I wanted to spare you the truth. I thought it would be better to tell you what you wanted to hear.”
I cover my mouth with my hand.
Dobbs reaches for me, but I sidestep him. “I thought I’d tell you when you got stronger, but then you had a little one on the way, and I kept thinking about what happened with the first baby, and well—there just never seemed like a good time to bring up the subject after Adam was born.”
Tell me what, exactly?
There’s a tremor so large going on inside him that he cannot keep it from traveling to his arm. I notice his fingers are a mess. Every single nail has been chewed to the quick. Hangnails have been ripped clear down to the knuckle.
I stand utterly still. “You kept him down here all this time.”
Dobbs has taken on the symptoms of hypothermia. Even as his teeth chatter he gets out his feeble excuses. Listening to him lie is like listening to someone chew ice. “I tried to save him. I did what I could, but he was already way past it. You saw how he was.” He clasps his hands around his forearms, drops his head. “Last thing I wanted was for him to—”
As if dying was Charlie’s choice, as if it had nothing to do with what Dobbs did or failed to do. “You could’ve taken him back!”
He leans toward me. He looks like he’s got his arms around a tree and is trying to yank it out of the ground. “I couldn’t take him back, you know that.” His voice is high-pitched with effort. “Our entire plan would have been in jeopardy. The police, the media—they’d have questioned him, and something would’ve come out that would’ve led them to this place, and then what? All this would have been for nothing.”
And so it comes back to the Plan. Always the Plan. Our plan, he has the gall to say.
Whatever he registers in my face makes him start to plead. “I tried to save him, Blythe. I know what this must look like to you, but it wasn’t like that. I sat with him, for hours. Wait, I’ll show you. I kept notes—they’re somewhere in this stack—” Dobbs starts shuffling through piles of papers because he has run out of lies.
“You didn’t try to save him. You’re lying. Just like you’ve been lying about taking us out of here!”
“You’re not listening to me; I am trying to tell you—”
“What about the baby? Did you keep her down here, too?”
Dobbs is shaking his head. He keeps rummaging through papers, knocking entire columns of notebooks to the floor. “No, look, you’ve gotten the wrong idea about all of this. I told you I buried her. If I can just find—”
He stops when I ask, “Where did you put Charlie?”
Dobbs won’t answer. Instead, he starts to snivel. I realize that there can be only one place. The silo. Adam must have broken in and gone down that shaft to get his notebooks and found Charlie’s remains instead. And all at once, I know that Adam is in grave danger—not from his injury but of winding up like Charlie.
In all the many years I have spent hating this man, I cannot deny the times I have felt sorry for him—isn’t this precisely how the devil gets away with murder? But what I feel for him now is nothing akin to hate. You could fire up hell’s furnaces with what I feel for this man. You could drill down to the earth’s cauldron and find nothing near as fiery.
We are in the kitchen. Dobbs is trying to get me to listen. I am trying to still the hundred voices screaming in my head, not least of which is Charlie’s.
Dobbs is not crying anymore; he’s gone on the offense. “I get it; I’m the beast. Is that what you want? You want me to be the bad guy, fine. I’ll be the bad guy.
“You should
thank me, instead of looking at me that way. The lengths I went to to keep you happy—getting the child, then trying to keep him alive for you, even though you near done him in yourself. Unfit is what you were back then. Don’t you remember that?”
It’s welcome, the sting of his words. It’s acid eating through maggoty flesh.
Dobbs sits at the table, more sure of himself now that he doesn’t have to bear both his weight and the weight of his lies. Doing us all a favor is what he’s going on about, and I can’t see straight for the picture of Charlie.
Turning my back to him, I battle for breath. The silence is screeching now. I go to turn the kettle off, but there is no kettle. The screeching is coming from someplace else. It is so loud I have to force myself not to press my hands over my ears. And then I notice the bottle of chloroform has not been put away. I pick up the washrag. I pretend to wipe the counter.
Dobbs is still talking when I quietly open the bottle and empty it into the rag. I turn around. He is still talking when I rush at him and knock back his chair. With every bit of strength I clamp that rag against his nose.
He bucks. I latch on even tighter. Adam is not going to end up like Charlie.
Dobbs wheels onto his side. My grip slips. I go for his face again. He claws me, gets ahold of my shirt and pulls. In the process of wrestling, I strike him in the head. It’s the first time I’ve ever hit him good and proper, and it’s as if I’ve reached in a fire and picked up burning coals. It feels that good. Dobbs strikes me back, and something in my mouth gives way, which feels even better. This is what I should have done years ago, instead of all the arguments and the raging silent protests, the hunger strikes and bargaining, the whoring and hoping. I spit out the tooth and make another go for his jaw, this time knuckles first. My swing is knocked off its trajectory by his hand. Somehow, I still manage to get a handful of hair. His neck is seamed by the knotty, purple vein. I bite it, hard as I can. He grabs my hair, rips my head back. His other hand lashes out and catches me in the windpipe. I keel over.
Dobbs rights me, then twists my arm behind my back and knees me forward, past the doorway and down the stairs. “You want me to show you what I did? I’ll show you!”