After school, I followed Seth to the park downtown. I realized this was the second time I’d followed him. I hoped this one turned out better than the first.
—
The park was already getting dark. Phillips Park. It’s still there, just nobody goes anymore and the swings are all rusty. Truth is, they were rusty back then too, and on this particular day it was pretty much empty. It was the perfect place for Seth to go.
I found him huddled under a dogwood tree, arms wrapped over his knees. Damned if he wasn’t shaking.
I sat down beside him and didn’t say a word. He knew I was there but didn’t look at me.
I waited for him to stop crying and said, “This is the second time I’ve chased you down.”
He didn’t even look at me.
“You know, you never even said thank you.”
He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have bothered, but thanks.”
I shrugged. “You’re welcome. Jake and Ronnie don’t like new kids. That’s all.”
Seth let out a sad kind of laugh. “Is that all? Jesus, they tried to murder me.”
There was an awkward pause. I didn’t know what to say.
“You should have died that day,” I said finally. “How’d you stay under so long? You were sunk for a good four minutes.”
He brushed his long bangs out of his face. “Is that what you followed me down here for?”
“Not really, but I do wonder. I mean, that night, after it all happened, I filled the sink up with water and, you know, tried it. I barely lasted two minutes.”
“That’s a good way to die.”
I didn’t respond, and I think he realized he’d hit pretty close to home.
“You were probably thinking on the bad stuff. The way your lungs ached. How bad it hurt. That sort of thing.”
I shrugged. “Nothing else to think about. You don’t have much choice.”
“I’ve got this thing,” he said. “It’s something I’ve learned. You go somewhere else. You know, inside. Once you do that, there’s nothing you can’t endure.” He smiled weakly, and I wasn’t sure if he believed his own words.
“I’m not following.”
He plucked some grass and tossed it out in front of him. “You train yourself after a while to think about positive things. Here, let me show you.” He reached out and grabbed the fat of my arm between his thumb and forefinger, pinching so hard I jerked away.
“Ow! What was that for?”
“To show you. All you thought about was the pain. You let it overwhelm everything else. Now, think about something that makes you really happy.”
“Huh?”
“Just do it. It doesn’t matter what it is, just make sure it’s something good. And picture it. I mean really see it in your mind.”
I thought of Tina Bray. I imagined me and her walking together in the park, her hand in mine. I saw her leaning her head on my shoulder, whispering in my ear.
“Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
He pinched me again.
“Holy shit, that hurts!” I said.
“But not as bad as before, right?”
I shook my head. I didn’t feel a difference.
Seth shrugged. “It takes practice. The point is, the world is a different place when you come at it from in here.” He tapped his forehead. “Everything sort of opens up. You look hard enough, you can find a way to escape anything. Even pain.”
I rubbed my arm. “So that day, you thought about something besides drowning, something besides all the sand and grit in your mouth and lungs, and that helped you stay under longer?”
“I guess, if that’s the way you want to look at it. I wasn’t really there, so I don’t remember.”
I took this in. Truth be told, I thought he was full of shit, but there might be something to it. He had managed to stay under much longer than I ever could.
“So where did you go that day, when Ronnie held you under?”
“Same place I always go. The swamp. But it was only a brief visit. I call it a glimpse. It’s like a catnap instead of a long night’s sleep.”
I had no idea what he was going on about. I decided I liked Seth fine, but he was weird. I couldn’t shake the sense that he believed every word he was saying.
“The swamp? A swamp doesn’t sound very nice.”
He shrugged. “Well, it is. It’s beautiful.” Maybe he saw the doubt in my face, because he added, “You wouldn’t understand.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Nothing. I just doubt you would understand.”
I stood up. “You act like your life is so hard. How bad can it be?”
He closed his eyes. I don’t know, maybe he was thinking of the swamp, maybe he was just trying to decide how to answer my question. Finally, he said, “It can be bad, Walter. Really, really bad.”
I believed him. Any fool could see his life was hard. I’d seen some of it firsthand. The rest was in his eyes, the way he carried himself, but I was still put off by him because I hurt too. It wasn’t like he had cornered the market on pain.
“What’s so bad? What about today?” I asked. “You know something about this missing girl?”
“No.” The instant he said it, I knew he was lying. It was the way he ducked his head when he answered, the way he looked away and then back at me after the lie. I’d seen my daddy lie to my mama so many times, I felt like a polygraph test.
“So what’s eating you?”
He shook his head. “My mother disappeared years ago. It just reminded me of her. That’s all.”
I could tell there was more, but I didn’t want to push him. Hell, he was pretty much the only friend I had now. Jake wanted to kill me for what I’d done to him, and Ronnie would always be with Jake as long as he never learned to have a will of his own. He was the kind of person Jake lived for. I had other friends at school, but those kids were more like acquaintances because even back then, these woods were isolated. School was the only time I saw anybody besides Seth, Ronnie, and Jake. So I didn’t push Seth. I figured time would eventually tell all. We sat there, talking about other stuff—movies and books, mostly—until the sun was gone and the park was completely dark.
The last thing I remember before starting home that evening was getting that feeling again. I knew Seth from somewhere. He carried it in his face, his hair, the slope of his shoulders, the same traits of someone I knew but had somehow lost.
Chapter Six
DANNY
I never really believed that my mother and sister were dead. Sometimes, I thought everyone else did except me. But then I’d remember my grandmother. She was my mother’s mom, and she was a resourceful woman who had managed a farm in north Alabama and worked full-time as a real estate agent for fifteen years since her husband’s death. She’d also lived through the Great Depression, two world wars, and the deaths of three of my mother’s siblings. Fatalism wasn’t an outlook for Gran; it was ingrained in her like a personality trait. All of this made Gran incapable of saying anything but what she thought was the truth, feelings be damned.
The last time we visited her was a few months after they disappeared.
Dad and I had driven up for a change of scenery, hoping that putting some distance between ourselves and those silent woods behind our house would help in some small way. It might have if not for Gran’s stubborn fatalism. Still, I loved her for what she was—an amazing woman. Nothing could shake her, and I think it was her indomitable faith that she would survive in the face of whatever life threw her way that made me want to spend time with her even when Dad found her negativity hard to swallow and spent most of the weekend out in the garden pulling up potatoes and radishes.
We were sitting in her den watching professional wrestling, something Gran had enjoyed as far back as I could remember. I had tried, without succe
ss, to explain to her that it was fake, but she wasn’t having it so I eventually gave up and enjoyed it too.
The subject of Mom and Anna hadn’t come up yet, and I was fine with that. By then, I had talked to reporters, friends, neighbors, and everybody else about their disappearances. It always came back to the same thing: They were gone and nobody knew where or why. A commercial came on and Gran put down the peas she was shelling. “You got to be strong now, Danny.”
I looked up from the commercial. “What?”
She stood and came over to where I was sitting on the couch, sat down, and took my hand. Squeezing it, she said, “I know it’s a hard road to walk right now, being the one she left behind, but please don’t think of it like that. Your mama has got problems, and always has had them. In her mind she did what she had to do.” Gran squeezed my hand more tightly. “Hard truths are just that, Danny. Hard. But we’ve got to face them head-on. I’m going to tell you what your daddy won’t tell. Your mama left you. She took Anna—God bless that child—and left. And don’t you for a minute think she’s coming back. That either one of them is coming back. They’re not coming back, Danny.” When I tried to pull away, she gripped my hand more tightly. “Your daddy isn’t ready for that yet. But he will be soon enough. I know this is hard on you, but life won’t never be easy. Life is relentless. It just keeps coming at you. The sooner you accept the truth, the happier you’ll be.”
“She didn’t leave us,” I said, an edge in my voice.
She let my hand go and stood, sighing.
“I’m telling you this because I think you need to know. Your mother is a selfish woman. It’s no reflection on you.”
I glared at her. “How do you know? What makes you so sure?” I was scolding her, something no one did to Gran.
She cocked her head at me and raised her eyebrows. “I know because I know my daughter, and I know about the choices she made. She wasn’t always like this, but she changed, and now I don’t think any of us will be able to reach her.”
I stood up, and I could feel the blood rushing to my face. “Don’t say that. Never say that.” I was trembling, barely able to control my rage. I don’t know what I would have said or done from there if Dad hadn’t walked in.
He looked at us, about to speak. His mouth opened, and some sound came out. Then he stopped, his eyes going from Gran to me—standing over her, fists clenched—back to Gran. “What’s going on?” he said.
Gran regarded me with something like pity. “Just a talk, Frank. Setting some things straight.”
Dad was in no mood to get involved with anything stressful, so he only nodded and continued to the room—Mom’s old room—where he was staying in the back.
Gran stood and put her hand on my shoulder. “One day you’ll see I’m right, Danny.” Then she picked up her shelled peas and headed back to the kitchen, leaving me alone with my anger. But as I stood there, I felt the anger changing to fear. Gran understood the world in ways I could barely imagine. What if she was right? What if my mother had left us?
—
Doubt, according to the preacher whose church we stopped going to about a month after Mom and Anna vanished, was a natural part of faith. They were two vines that grew together, intertwined. That was what I remembered when I had doubts about my mother and sister.
It was hard to explain why I felt we’d be reunited. Mostly, there was a sense that I would somehow feel it when my mother passed. Her presence had been so large in my life for the first fourteen years that I felt it like a warm breeze forever at my back. The breeze was still there, and until I couldn’t feel it anymore, she was alive. And if she was alive, I refused to believe she’d left us on purpose, which meant they were somewhere out there and they wanted to come home. And foolishly, I believed I could bring them back.
—
Cliff and I went to his house for lunch, a place I never grew tired of. His house was so large—three stories on seven acres of land—that you could literally get lost inside it. Really. It happened to me once when I was eight. His mother found me wandering on the second floor, trying to find my way back to Cliff’s room on the third floor. His father had invented some kind of chip for computers in the early seventies, and now, more than twenty years later, he did nothing except count his money and tend his azaleas and roses in the walled garden behind their house. Cliff’s mother was a lawyer, but not the type that argued cases in court. According to Cliff, she spent all her time poring over dusty law books and typing up long documents on their computer.
We ate shrimp sandwiches out by the pool. Yeah, shrimp. It was fresh shrimp too. Cliff’s dad was fanatical about fresh seafood, so much that he had bribed the truck that delivered to the Birmingham restaurants to make a special stop out here in the country. The sandwich was good, but then again everything was good at Cliff’s house. It was an odd place for me during the months after Mom and Anna’s disappearance. I simultaneously craved the normalcy of being in a place with two parents, while nursing a deep-seated jealousy of what Cliff had. His parents were far from perfect, but they were there. Most of all, when I saw them together, they displayed a genuine easiness with each other, a kind of quiet confidence that my parents lacked, even when times had been good. I knew parents could fake stuff when they thought you were watching, but Cliff’s parents never felt like poseurs. Rich assholes, maybe, but never poseurs.
“So, do you think he did it?” Cliff asked, his mouth stuffed full of shrimp.
“Who did what?” I knew exactly what he meant—did I think the man from the cabin killed my mother and sister—but something about the question pissed me off, so I decided to play dumb.
“You know . . . that man. Do you think he . . . was responsible?”
“Responsible for what?” Okay, I was just being a jerk now. I should have let him back out gracefully.
“You know.”
“For their deaths?”
“I didn’t say that.”
I dropped my sandwich and stood up, suddenly not hungry anymore. I went over to the edge of the pool, kicked off my shoes and socks, sat down, and put my feet in. The water was warm. Mid-July tended to do that to swimming pools in Alabama.
“It just seems like it might be a relief, that’s all.”
I cocked my head but didn’t turn around to look at Cliff.
“I’ll drop it,” he said.
I waited, splashing water with my feet in high arching sprays. If he wanted to drop it, fine. Something told me he wouldn’t, though.
“All I mean to say is that it might be a relief to find out who was responsible for what happened. I mean, that way you wouldn’t have to worry about . . . You know . . . Your mom being, I don’t know . . .”
I sat perfectly still, daring him to say it, feeling the old anger flexing itself inside me, my muscles tensing, my pulse starting a dull thud in my head, my fists clenching and unclenching. It was an anger I’d been nursing since the day they disappeared; I’d been caring for it, tending its needs, letting it grow inside me. Always managing to keep it down, but even when I did, it was still wreaking havoc on the inside.
“What?” I said, turning. “Just finish your sentence, Cliff.”
He must have seen the anger etched hard on my face because he looked down and shook his head. “Never mind.”
I stalked over to him, infuriated. I grabbed his shirt collar in my fist and pulled it so hard the fabric ripped.
“You get one damned thing straight,” I said. “My mother did not kidnap my sister. Do you hear me?”
Cliff looked afraid, his glasses falling down his nose, his eyes wide with something like awe.
“Do you hear me?” I said again, louder, spitting the words in his face.
“Yeah, Danny. I hear you.”
I let go, disgusted with myself. I turned and felt a sudden need to cry, to sob, to call out for my mother, but I held it in. I swallow
ed it back down inside like bile. Then, in a flurry of motion, I ripped off my shirt and sprinted for the pool, diving in headfirst and sinking slowly to the bottom, where I would stay for as long as I was able, until my lungs burned and I had to come back up for air.
When I finally did come back to the surface, I noticed that the sky far to the west was beginning to gather clouds into a thick, black coil of impending fury.
Chapter Seven
Something clicked inside me while I was underwater. Cliff was right. It would feel better to know that someone else was responsible besides my mother. There had been rumors, innuendos, lies in the months after her disappearance. Her drinking problem, her frustration with raising two children, one of them autistic. Some people said she left on her own and took Anna with her because she knew my father could never make it with us both alone. Others—and these were the ones that bothered me most—whispered that they were both dead.
This was unthinkable to me, a notion I refused to consider, even in the lowest depths of my grief.
Despite all of the things I didn’t believe had happened to Mom and Anna, I had very little—if anything—that I did believe might have happened. I was out of ideas, lost at sea, and the feeling burned inside me, spurring me to do something. Anything.
I left Cliff’s house at two in the afternoon, knowing I would have at least three hours, probably more, before Dad came home. My plan—well, to be honest I didn’t have a plan. I was heading for the cabin in the woods to confront the man who had stood in the rain on my front doorstep for two nights, possibly more. I was still acting on the same anger that had caused me to almost hit Cliff, the same anger that made me identify with the gathering storm above me.
I crossed the highway, noting the storm was closer than I had thought. The clouds formed a great stack of darkness, infused with what appeared to be an unnatural light, causing the edges of the cloud mass to glow a dull green. It was heading west, and from the looks of it, I’d have no more than a half hour before it hit. I broke into a run, not only to avoid the storm, but also because I feared my nerve might fail me.
The Year of the Storm Page 5