If You Find This

by Matthew Baker

  I wrestled the bottle from the hollow. The cork in the mouth of the bottle was jammed stuck. I shook the bottle, something metal (forte)clinking inside. The clink of key against bottle. Goosebumps flew along my spine, from tailbone to skull.

  That’s when a wave twice the size of the others tackled me.

  I toppled underwater. My body slammed into the lakebed. I kicked abovewater, (forte)gasped, saw everyone lit by a dying firework, as the wave (forte)bashed into the rocks, surged at the lake again. I (forte)shouted for help, and then the wave sucked me back under.

  The undertow dragged me through seaweed, across sand, into rocks. I fumbled with the bottle. The water (sforzando)roared like blaring trombones. I kicked, but the undertow wrenched me upward, downward, sideways, like a kid trying to break a cheap toy. My shirt thrashed with the current, like from some wind, the cloth leaping, plunging, twisting around me. I clawed at the sand, clutching the bottle with one hand. Underwater, even screaming fortissimo is screaming pianissimo. The undertow spun my body, left me clawing at nothing, then loose ridges of sand, a log slick with muck, then suddenly nothing again, in the dark, as my body ripped backward through the water. I couldn’t fight the undertow without both hands. It was drown or drop the bottle. I imagined losing the key, losing the heirlooms, losing my brother. I couldn’t drop the bottle. I imagined boats combing the lake for my body in the morning, my parents hunched over an empty coffin at the funeral, my teachers touching the coffin. I didn’t want any of that. But I didn’t have much air. Without both hands, fighting the undertow was hopeless.

  I stopped screaming. I stopped kicking. Bubbles spilled from my lips, and then the bubbles stopped, and my chest was empty. I couldn’t tell anymore if I was upside down or downside up. I was alone, and I was afraid, but I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I chose this. I hugged the bottle and let the water carry me.

  I bounced into a chain.

  I groped at it, my fingers slipping along its links. I wrapped myself around it, yanked myself up it, hauled myself abovewater. I hung there, from the anchor of the shipwreck, (forte)gulping for air.

  The truth is that, even when I had known it was only water, it had felt like the hands of drowned fishers, drowned sailors, drowned swimmers, dragging me under.

  Using the shipwreck for handholds, I struggled toward shore with the waves. My knuckles were cut from rocks. The bottle hadn’t broken.

  I grabbed my knife, then tore down the beach, along the tree line, pounding footprints into the sand. Wannabe Isaacs were flying back toward where their sailboat was anchored, their faces streaked black with smoke. Jordan and Zeke had vanished. Our rowboat had been knocked crooked. Waves (crescendo)surged onto shore, (decrescendo)foamed away again, trying to drag the boat into the lake. Farther along the point, Little Isaac and Big Isaac were standing at the tree line, throwing stones into the trees, kicking sand, (forte)shouting. I stopped, watching the Isaacs. A stick (mezzo-piano)cracked. Branches (mezzo-forte)snapped. Behind me, Jordan leapt from some trees, grabbed my arms, (piano)hissed, “Move move move…!” We ran for the rowboat, trampling the paper shells of fireworks, the stony shells of mussels. His lip was split, his sweatshirt was torn, he was (piano)laughing. We (forte)splashed into the lake, dragging the rowboat. “What about Zeke?” I (piano)whispered, but then Zeke shot out of the trees straight between the Isaacs and darted toward the lake, (forte)howling. The Isaacs spun and chased him. He snatched the duffel bag and (forte)stumbled into the shallows. I hauled him into the rowboat. Jordan heaved at the oars. The Isaacs (piano)tripped through the shallows, dove headfirst into the waves, swam for the boat. As the boat lurched away into deeper waters, the Isaacs finally stopped, treading water, slapping waves, (pianissimo)shouting threats and curses.

  Zeke dumped the duffel bag onto a seat.

  “You got the key?” Zeke (forte)said.

  I waved the bottle.

  Zeke (forte)yipped, all dimples, pumping his fists.

  “We are my heroes!” Zeke (forte)cheered.

  I shook the bottle over my head, making the (forte)clinking sound, celebrating.

  “Did you win the duel?” I (forte)said.

  Jordan (forte)laughed and (forte)laughed, rowing us into the lake.

  “Nobody won! Skulltooth shot Little Isaac in the foot—”

  “—but before that Big Isaac started shooting fireworks too, at Jordan, a firework exploded exactly where Jordan had been standing, I still don’t know how Jordan isn’t dead—”

  “—then one of the other kids tackled Skulltooth—”

  “—they were cheating! So I broke their armlock and yelled the duel was over and hid in the trees—”

  “—but before that I had Little Isaac in a headlock, and Skulltooth drew a heart on Little Isaac’s cheek—”

  Zeke (forte)laughed, (forte)barked again, flopped onto a seat. His fingers were streaked black with smoke. A firework had burned a hole through the duffel bag.

  We didn’t have any trouble finding the wharf again. The wharf was where the trouble was.

  As we rowed past the pier, the lighthouse keeper was waiting for us, squatting there with Mr. Carl and Mr. Tim. The lighthouse keeper (forte)shouted, pointing at the rowboat. Jordan kicked into the flippers and (mezzo-piano)dove into the water, I grabbed the bottle and (mezzo-piano)dove after, and we (piano)swam away from the lights of the docks, already vanishing into the dark of the water.

  Zeke had said he was coming, but when we looked back, Zeke was still there, bobbing with the rowboat. Too afraid of the drowned to swim away. To save himself.

  We hid under a dock, gripping the edge, watching Mr. Carl and Mr. Tim haul the rowboat onto shore. The lighthouse keeper was hurrying from dock to dock, clutching his cap, frowning, searching for us.

  “We better go,” Jordan (pianissimo)whispered.

  My teeth were (piano)chattering. My body was shuddering. Mr. Carl and Mr. Tim pulled Zeke from the rowboat.

  “He’ll be okay?” I (piano)whispered.

  “He’ll be fine. With Mr. Carl and Mr. Tim? Maybe they’ll yell at him for stealing the boat, but that’ll be the worst of it,” Jordan (piano)whispered.

  The lighthouse keeper (forte)tromped past our dock. Zeke was nodding at something Mr. Carl and Mr. Tim had said.

  “Okay,” I (piano)whispered.

  We shimmied from the water onto the docks, bolted from the docks into the trees.

  KEY OF X

  I slumped against my house, clutching the bottle. Dead leaves blew through, (piano)rustling. I dripped water onto the grass. My brother was bending, was peering forward, was watching everything I was doing.

  I (fortissimo)broke the bottle against my house.

  Fingering through the broken glass, I didn’t find a key. I found a pair of keys. An iron key the length of a hand and a brass key the length of a finger. The bow of the iron key said X. The bow of the brass key said ROSE.

  I stared at the X key. I stared at the ROSE key. Which was the key to the trunk? I already knew Grandpa Rose wouldn’t remember.

  I changed into a dry sweatshirt. I stepped into wool socks. I wrapped myself in a blanket.

  I was eating a plate of leftovers, my hands trembling still from all of the rowing, when I heard a (forte)tapping at the door.

  Kayley Schreiber stood there among the whirling moths. She was wearing unlaced boots, mismatched socks, a shirt the size of a dress. The blotches on her cheeks were different, had changed shapes like drifting clouds. She was clutching a book of keynote speeches. Staring at me, her expression kept wavering, like there was some new string inside of her that she was trying to tune, some feeling that wasn’t quite yet at the right pitch. She handed me a folded note.

  Before I could even speak, she shuffled into the darkness. I memorized the sound of her (decrescendo)footsteps. I liked every sound she had ever made.

  I found a pencil. I drank some water. I sat at the table to translate the binary in the note.

  But when I unfolded it, it wasn’t bin
ary.

  I had been given the black spot.

  FROM THE NOTES OF GRANDPA ROSE

  The sentence was for eleven years. The charges included conspiracy, bootlegging, and assaulting an officer. The sentence could have been worse. The police didn’t know about the bodies.

  The prison was a squat tower in an inland city. Prisoner Thirty-Four, that was the name he was given there, the number sewn to the breast of his uniform. His cellmates included a murderer who snored, an arsonist who stuttered, and a seventy-nine-year-old bootlegger who was as toothless as a baby. Once a week, Ana drove the truck in from town to visit, brought baskets of homemade biscuits. Monte would share with the others, always: Since the bootlegger had trouble chewing, the murderer would carefully dampen a biscuit with water, then mash the biscuit with his fingers into bites the bootlegger could swallow. Their cell faced the sunrise, would flood with bright light every morning, waking everybody. One morning, though, the bootlegger never woke; the bootlegger had died, sometime during the night, curled into a humped ball. With stiff fingers the bootlegger was clutching a scrap of paper that read Arch Stanton. Nobody knew what the paper meant. Still, Monte considered the incident an omen. He wasn’t wrong there; his father died the very next day. That week Ana brought a flower with the biscuits, and cried. The murderer, who was especially sensitive, cried some too after he heard, and the arsonist said shucks. Monte himself though didn’t know what to do or say, so did and said exactly nothing.

  Going to prison was like going to college. He learned about hijacking trucks, about printing counterfeits, about scamming bookies. He met prisoners who had come from other states, from other countries. He was promised various jobs after he had been freed.

  The country was changing. The guards pored through comic books about superheroes, flipping past pictures with bright sound effects, kapows, zwaps, bloofs, fwaks, speech balloons that captured voices. The economy had collapsed and recovered, villages of shanties had been set up and torn down, farms had been deserted and bridges erected, all somewhere beyond his barred window. Prohibition had ended years ago: Selling liquor wasn’t illegal anymore. But there were plenty of things that still were; there were always things to smuggle.

  Here, this here, is something he remembers: a memory of leaving prison, pockets loaded with returned possessions, the day he became an ex-con. The sun flaring, the seagulls wheeling overhead, the truck waiting beyond the fence. She was humming a jingle. She was wearing that light blue dress. She drove the truck back to the village, winding through the trees along the lakeshore, honking at the children leaping from rope swings into the waves. Ana was renting a cottage across from the storehouse. The world was at war again. America wasn’t, yet.

  He shaved, bathed, ate three eggs. He drove her to the orchard where she worked picking apples. Then he drove to the house his father had built.

  The house looked the same. The roof was coated with leaves. A family was eating popcorn on the porch. The father had a pitted face. The mother wore a patterned dress, had a wooden leg attached to a knee stump, was gathering popcorn the children had spilled.

  He had been told his father had died. But that was the moment he understood his father actually was dead; on the porch his father had built, strangers were eating popcorn.

  He had sworn he hated his father. As a kid he had needed somebody to blame. The voice went like this: Why didn’t you drown, instead of my mother? Seeing those strangers eating popcorn on the porch, though, all at once, all of that hate became love. He has a memory of that feeling. He didn’t have to pretend to hate his father anymore. He didn’t have to blame his father for anything. He was thirty-one years old.

  Seated in the truck, still watching the family, he slipped the music box from his coat and wound the crank. That song had the power to wake his father from even the deepest slumber. But the crank wound down, and the music stopped playing, and his father was still dead. Monte did not like crying; after that he carried the music box with him everywhere, and never let himself listen to the song again.

  Later that afternoon the family drove away wearing swimsuits and beach towels. Monte broke into the house. He dragged the bathtub away from the window, popped the floorboards. The other heirlooms were still there. The clock still ticking, the bellows still breathing. Monte carried the heirlooms to the truck. Still hanging from a hook in the shed he found the thick ring of iron keys the smugglers had given him. Monte carried the keys to the truck. He shut the window he had forced open. He hadn’t bothered shoving the bathtub back where the bathtub belonged.

  He broke into the house again a week before being married, sat in the kitchen, staring at nothing. He broke into the house again a day after becoming a father, sat on the fireplace, staring at nothing. He kept breaking into the house, between smuggling jobs, whenever he came home from troublemaking, just to sit there in the quiet and to stare at everything and to remember.

  Rumors that the house is haunted—that the families that lived there were driven away by a ghost—may have begun then.

  The bathtub moved, the chairs drifted, handprints formed in the fireplace’s soot.

  There was a ghost.

  Monte.

  THE BALLAD OF DIRGE AND KEEN

  In the morning I scrubbed my face with soap at the sink in the bathroom. Brown and gold specks of sand still crusted my eyebrows, clung to the curves of my ears, from the night before. The keys were in my bedroom, hidden under my pillow.

  “Before, you said you always just told other kids that Grandpa Rose was dead,” I (forte)said.

  My mom rubbed lotion into her arms, bent over the bottle, hair hanging over her face.

  “I did,” my mom (mezzo-forte)said.

  “So when did you tell Dad that Grandpa Rose was actually alive? When you were my age? Or later?” I (forte)said.

  “Dad found out the same way as everybody else,” my mom (mezzo-forte)said.

  She squirted out another dollop of lotion.

  “Grandpa Rose liked to act like a mobster, but he wasn’t. He was harmless. A petty crook. Hired from job to job, loading and unloading boats, trafficking things for the actual mobsters,” my mom (mezzo-forte)said. “That second time he was arrested, he was fifty-nine. They were crossing the lake in a boat, counterfeit money belowdecks, probably worse, when they saw other boats coming. Police, official police boats, shooting toward their boat! Their boat was junk, couldn’t outrun the police.” She wiped lotion from between her fingers. “The other crooks started dumping the cargo overboard. Grandpa Rose didn’t. What he did next, it was crazy, at his age. He threw himself overboard! Leapt, from the boat, into the lake! Wearing his shirt, his pants, his shoes, everything! Then he swam for an island. His heart could have stopped, he could have drowned, he probably almost did. After the other crooks had betrayed him, that’s where the police found him, a few hours later. On the island, sitting on the beach, an old man in soaking clothes. He was too tired to run.”

  I stopped, clutching the soapy dripping towel, imagining Grandpa Rose. Bottling the keys, leaping from the deck, struggling against the waves. Splashing onto the island. Stumbling to the hollow. Collapsing onto the sand. His face wrinkled. Untattooed.

  “The newspaper printed an article about the trial. Everybody heard the story,” my mom (forte)said. “Before that, everybody at school believed my father was dead, which was bad enough. After that, everybody at school knew my father was a crook, which was even worse.”

  She capped the bottle.

  “Oatmeal?” my mom (forte)said, smiling.

  Before breakfast, I ran outside to talk to my brother the tree.

  OUR MOTHER HAS BEEN COMING INTO THE BACKYARD MORE AND MORE, STANDING ON THE DECK, STARING AT ME, my brother’s song said.

  SHE MISSES DAD, my song said.

  My brother was changing, growing older, his limbs thicker, his bark rougher. He had been wearing grasshopper shells on his branches, lately, porcupine quills at his roots. Tokens from his friends. I was proud of the life
he had made for himself, here in these woods.

  HAVE YOU FOUND THE HEIRLOOMS? my brother’s song said.

  NOT YET, my song said. BUT I WILL NOT STOP LOOKING, EVEN AFTER EVERYTHING WE OWN HAS BEEN PACKED INTO BOXES AND CARRIED ONTO TRUCKS AND DRIVEN AWAY AND THE LOCKS ON THE DOORS HAVE BEEN CHANGED AND THE NEW KEYS HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO THE NEW FAMILY AND I HAVE BEEN TAKEN AWAY TO A DIFFERENT HOUSE FOREVER, I WILL NOT STOP LOOKING, I WILL COME BACK FOR YOU.

  PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME, my brother’s song said.

  Somehow my brother understood how desperate things had gotten—was scared enough now to beg me for help.

  I WILL NEVER STOP, my song said, but then my mom (forte) shouted for me, and I ran into the house.

  My mom was laying the phone in its cradle.

  “We’re going to close on the house!” my mom (forte)said.

  I almost dropped the violin. I tried looking happylucky, because that’s how my mom looked. But the kids in my brain were (fortissimo)shouting, “You’re out of time, Nicholas, you’re out of time!” The truth was that after the closing the heirlooms would be worthless. I couldn’t come back for my brother after the closing. The Yorks already would have chopped him down.

  “That’s great,” I (piano)whispered.

  I downed some juice. I bolted some toast, hardly even chewing, standing at the counter. I kicked into my high-tops, pocketed the X key, the ROSE key, the scrap of paper with the black spot. Then I grabbed my backpack and ran for the bus.

  Zeke wasn’t at school.

  As per usual, I ate lunch in a bathroom stall.

  In math class, I was working on problems about limits. Say you had a function, like f(x) = 1/x. When x = 1, f(x) = 1. When x = 0.001, f(x) = 1,000. When x = 0.000000001, f(x) = 1,000,000,000. So as x approached zero, f(x) approached infinity. But a person was also a sort of function. I was a function, and sometimes I felt there was some infinity my brain was approaching, like when my arms were saying things with my violin that there were no words for, or when my fingers were saying things with numbers.