Broken Branch

by John Mantooth

  But she’d found her way to the other side. She could only hope that Rodney would find his.

  She was approaching the cabin now, her hand outstretched to the door. She touched it and she stopped being able to think of anything at all, as her mind stretched and finally broke like a tree in the most magnificent wind.

  Read on for a special excerpt from the next title by John Mantooth

  THE YEAR OF THE STORM

  Available June 2013 from Berkley!

  DANNY

  A storm is a kind of magic.

  I’ve lived through a lot of them, but none of them were like the ones I experienced when I was fourteen.

  Watch the news in the spring. You’ll see footage of flooding and devastation and broken homes scattered like wood chips from an almighty Skilsaw, any previous illusion of constancy the houses held shattered in short seconds of earsplitting fury. As I grow older, I watch these scenes on the nightly news a little differently. Of course I still grieve for the people whose homes and lives have been uprooted by the weather, but I also study the pictures and video a little more closely. I look for the way things have been altered, the way one world is gone and another moves in to take its place, and if this isn’t a kind of terrible magic, then I don’t know what is. After the news, when the lights are off and I lie atop the covers, not even pretending that sleep might eventually transport me away from these nagging thoughts, I marvel at the way scientists can deconstruct a thing, pulling it apart fiber by fiber until the whole of it is unwound and every piece labeled and comprehended. I tell myself that if the right scientist could get hold of my life, if that scientist could put the events of my fourteenth year under a microscope, he’d be able to explain them away. But then the magic would be gone, and that would keep me up at night too.

  Now, I’m almost thirty, and I make weekly visits to a therapist who insists I call him Dwight instead of Dr. Reynolds. He slaps me on the back at the beginning of every session and hugs me at the end, just before letting his hand linger until I stuff a check in it. Oh, he’s not a bad guy, and he seems genuinely fascinated by my story. He likes to explain everything in psychological terms and ask a lot of leading questions. Sometimes I think he’s even on to something when he talks about “subconscious mythmaking” and “the profundity of illusion.” But other times—and these are the nights I sleep best—I dismiss his words as easily as the straight-line winds dismiss trees, snapping them like brittle sticks. When I think like this, I remember it all, and if there are pieces of the puzzle that I can’t work into place, I ignore them and focus on the pieces that do fit. And these pieces are the people—Pike and Seth and Cliff and even my little sister, Anna. Most of all, I focus on the great things that the brain is capable of and how like a storm it can be, wild and ravaging, erasing landscapes and building new ones in the wink of a eye.

  I was fourteen the first time I came in contact with a real storm. It cut a line right down the center of my life, pulling my sister and mother away from me and cleanly dividing that year into a before and after so radically different that I’ve come to think of fourteen as not only the longest year of my life, but also the most important because it was the last year of childhood and the first year of the rest of my life, a life that would be forever marked as different in subtle and insidious ways from the people around me.

  Fourteen was the year my mother and sister disappeared, the year I lost my mind. The year I learned secrets that will stay with me until I am no longer able to think of them.

  And fourteen, most of all, was the year of the storm.

  • • •

  Despite dealing with the presumed deaths of my mother and sister, at fourteen I still believed that magic and God were the same thing, or if they weren’t, that they were wound so tightly together and threaded through the spaces of our lives as to become a length of double-braided rope whose ends had not yet begun to fray.

  My father was forty-one when I was fourteen, and like me, he was knocked back by the storm. But unlike me, his world then was a rigid place. Neither magic nor God existed for him except in books and memories. Storms were storms, and any transformation that came from them was incidental, swept away in a flood of adult problems.

  Before my mother and sister vanished, we weren’t a perfect family, but we were complete, a strong knot of individual strings, each wrapped over the other. If one string pulled too tight while another string fought to breathe more, how was that different from any other family? The point was that we were a knot, and then we came unwound. At fourteen, I was foolish enough to think I could tie the knot back, and we’d go on like always.

  After it happened, Dad felt every kind of emotion—rage, hate, resentment, despair. But mostly, I think he was jealous. Jealous of a world that took his happiness, that swallowed it without leaving a scrap, and then went back to the same quiet, sleeping place it had always been.

  But ten months into my fourteenth year, the world shifted in its slumber.

  • • •

  Midnight, and a man I had never seen before stood outside our front door, a cigarette nub burning between his knuckles, his long white hair wild in the wind. Beside him on our front stoop was an oxygen tank he’d lugged up the steps. I watched from my bed, leaning over to peer out my upstairs window as he flicked his cigarette to the ground and stepped on it, extinguishing it against the concrete. He faced our front door, lifted a hand to knock, but faltered. Instead, he turned back to his oxygen tank, taking up the clear tubing and placing it inside his nostrils. He was still. I looked out over the yard and saw the immense oak trees swaying in the wind, saw the highway—empty and lonesome—and beyond that the great silver fields of cotton, rippling in the moonlight. On the horizon, a massive thunderhead gathered and advanced steadily toward the house.

  I should have been asleep. Sleep came in fits those days, a dream of my mother’s face always a few breaths away. Across the hall, Dad was snoring, and I wondered if he still dreamed about them too.

  Shrugging off the covers, I stood and made my way down the steps, the same ones my sister, Anna, used to count each time she went up or down. There were twelve. Dad and I both knew that the same way we knew Anna’s closet was her sanctuary from the world, the same way we knew that when a bad storm came, bad like the one that was rolling in now, Anna had no sanctuary except within herself. She was autistic and only four years old when she disappeared. She’d be five now, and though her doctors said it wasn’t possible, I still wondered if she had gotten any better. It was a foolish hope, but I was fourteen and believed things that no rational person should. Things like my mother and sister were still alive.

  Downstairs, I waited on the other side of the door. Would he knock? Or did he mean to simply stand outside our home, a strange presence that touched our lives without invading them? Maybe he stood outside every night while we slept. Maybe he was one of the moonshiners Dad had told me about, who lived beyond the margins of society, setting up stills in the deepest parts of the woods and living hand to mouth on what they could catch with a fishing pole or shoot with a rifle. Or he might have come from some faraway place, riding the rails like a lost hobo arriving at our house by pure chance or by some more sinister motivation. Or maybe he was the man responsible for taking those two girls back in the sixties, whose sad spirits seemed to linger and haunt these woods like fireflies in the darkest hollows of the night. Maybe he was the man who took Mom and Anna too, and now he’d come back for the rest of us. And maybe, just maybe, I’d go with him willingly.

  Dropping to my knees, I moved across the den until I was under the front windows. Carefully, I lifted my head, pushing aside the curtains so that I could see out one of the lower panes. He was still standing there, illuminated by the moon, his hair glowing vivid white. Somewhere behind him, across the highway, lightning struck the cotton fields, followed by a sharp crack of thunder. The man did not jump or start or even seem to notice. He only stood
at our door, filling his lungs with oxygen.

  I let the curtain fall back in place, and I lay down on the floor. I’d been hearing the stories about these woods since I was a kid. Most of them were the generic campfire variety, the same urban legends reshuffled and personalized for different times, different settings, but one story was more than that. One story had the ring of authenticity. It was unique to these woods, and unlike the tales of hook hands and insane asylum escapees, it never seemed to fade away. Two girls, Tina and Rachel, lost in the woods behind our house. I grew up knowing their names just like I knew anything else. They were a part of the landscape, a part of the place where I lived. It didn’t matter if I’d never seen them or heard them speak or even gotten the whole story straight about their disappearances. I felt their presences intimately, and their loss settled on the woods like a heavy fog. When I walked through the darkest parts behind my house near dusk, sometimes I thought I saw them in the gloom, floating, transparent, made from spiders’ webs and dying streaks of light mingled with shadow. Their sad visages slithering round tree trunks and drifting past blooming moonvines. I shuddered, thinking that the man responsible for these disappearances might be standing in my front yard.

  I’m not sure how long I lay there before I decided to check again, but when I looked up the second time, rain was hitting the roof in torrents, and the man was gone.

  • • •

  The next morning, I woke, back in my bed. I’d fallen asleep beside the window, but I vaguely remembered Dad picking me up in the dark hours of the morning and carrying me upstairs. It was still raining and when I fell into my own bed, in the throes of half sleep, I felt a simple, forgetful peace. It was the kind I used to feel each time my head hit the pillow and Mom leaned over me, saying the prayers I could not yet articulate, the same prayers I later repeated to myself, trying to work them out like jigsaw puzzles.

  Summer meant I could sleep all day if I wanted, but I got up anyway, determined not to give in to the stifling depression that hung around our house as heavy and dank as the Alabama heat.

  My best friend then was a kid named Cliff, who had a lazy eye and the biggest collection of Marvel comics I had ever seen. Together, we spent our summers chasing phantoms through the woods, imagining ourselves as Iron Man and Captain America, and lately, fantasizing about girls, specifically Rhonda Donovan and Betty Dozier. The double Ds. That was what we called them, and sometimes, in our more nerdy moments, D and D.

  Usually, getting up on a summer morning meant going to Cliff’s house. There were a million things to do—a trip into town to the comic book store, a day watching movies in his home theater, a jaunt into the deep woods as imaginary superheroes, a clandestine journey out to the honky-tonk on County Road Seven where we’d heard the women got drunk and danced topless.

  But that morning was different. Dad came into my room as I was pulling myself from the bed.

  “I found you in the den last night,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Wonder why.”

  Dad did this sort of thing, this almost talking to himself that only served to make me feel like he really didn’t want to talk to me at all. Which was true. He didn’t want to talk to me. He hadn’t wanted to talk to me since Mom and Anna disappeared. He wasn’t mean about it. In fact, Dad was about as gentle with me as he’d ever been, but the hardness grew inside him, in his eyes that sometimes slipped out of focus, and in his lips that were always too stiff to smile.

  “The storm got to me. That’s all.”

  He sat down on my bed.

  “The sheriff called today,” he said to the floor.

  “And?”

  He shook his head. “It’s been nine months. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. How could I not know that? “What did he say?”

  Dad shook his head and studied the floor.

  “What did he say?” I asked again.

  “Same old bullshit. The woods are a dead end. The dogs have canvassed every part of it.” He shook his head again, this time with more determination. “Dead ends. That’s all we have. Damn dead ends. I told the sheriff—”

  He stopped suddenly and looked at me, as if remembering who he was talking to. Yeah, Dad, it’s me. Remember not to tell Danny anything relevant because he’s too young to understand. It was infuriating.

  “What?” I said. “What did you tell the sheriff?”

  “Nothing important. He’s going to do some more interviews with people at her work, extended family, that sort of thing. We’ve heard it all before.”

  “That’s good news, though. Right?”

  Dad looked up, his eyes skimming past my face, but not focusing until they settled on my closet where the clothes I was quickly outgrowing hung like ghosts, pieces of the past that Mom and Anna had once touched.

  “Good news?” he said, almost to himself.

  “Yeah, I mean, well, at least we still have some hope.”

  He looked at me then, and I saw that he hadn’t been taking his pills. Looking back, I can’t say I blame him much. The ones Dwight prescribed for me didn’t work. Sure, they made sleep easier to come by, but my real issues were too deep for any medicine to touch.

  The proof Dad had given up was in his face, his eyes, the way he hadn’t shaved today or yesterday. Was he even going to work today? I wondered.

  He shook his head. “Hope. That’s funny.” He looked at me for a second, expectant, as if daring me to argue with him. When I said nothing, he stood up, swinging his arms together, letting his fist connect with his palm, a gesture he used to do all the time, a gesture that seemed strangely devoid of the happy-go-lucky spirit it was meant to suggest.

  “Danny,” he said, speaking my name earnestly like saying it mattered somehow. “Why don’t you and me do something fun today? Just the two of us?”

  “What about work?” I said.

  He shook his head, dismissing it. “I’ll call in. I haven’t missed a day in the last five months. They won’t blink. Are you with me?”

  “Sure. Yeah. Sounds good.” I tried to sound bright, happy, but it came out shrill, needlessly high-pitched and awkward. Dad pretended not to notice. It was the one thing we had gotten good at over the last nine months: pretending.

  • • •

  We went for a walk in the woods.

  It doesn’t make sense, I know. Nine months earlier, your mother and little sister disappear into these woods, and when your father and you need some time together, some time to get away, to decompress, to try to leave behind the sadness that has overwhelmed your lives, you choose to go for a walk in the very same woods.

  What can I say other than it’s complicated? Both my relationship with my father and the woods. They’re tied together, the woods and my father. From the time I could walk, I followed him through the trees, wondering at the solitude and dark quietness that no other place I’d been could match. In the winter, we hunted in the woods, and in the spring, summer, and early fall, we walked a well-worn path to our special place to fish. We called it Big Creek because that’s exactly what it was. There was a swift current and at its widest point, I could barely throw a rock to the other side. We never caught much more than wild creek fish, which are pretty small, but they make a good meal if you serve them with slaw and hush puppies and don’t mind picking through the tiny bones.

  It was where we went when we were happy. And more than anything, we wanted to be happy again.

  The woods were bigger than us, massive and untamed, and they seemed like a great mystery. Each time we walked into them, dragging fishing gear or hunting rifles or skipping along the path, weighed down by nothing other than ambition, there was some hope—unspoken or otherwise—that we’d return at the end of the day with something life-changing.

  Before we left that afternoon, Dad asked if I wanted to fish. “Had some rain,” he said. “Creek will
be high. Might be a river gar that’s got lost from the Black Warrior.”

  I smiled. This was an old joke. He used to tell it to me when I was very little when I actually believed we’d catch one. I shook my head. “Why don’t we just walk? I got a feeling that the river gar will probably stay in the river.”

  He nodded his assent and we started off, trudging along the same path Anna and Mom had taken the day they disappeared.

  In reality, I didn’t enjoy fishing as much as I used to, although I still treasured any time that Dad and I had together in the woods. I wanted to go to Big Creek for a different reason. Along the banks were drifts of sand that collapsed under the weight of small animals, sucking them in. I’d seen a baby deer struggle for hours in the sand, before finally extracting his thin body and hopping feebly away. Everybody called it quicksand. It was the first thing I thought of when Mom and Anna went missing. In my mind, I saw Anna stepping into the muck, one tentative foot. I saw her thinking better of it, changing her mind, trying to pull it out, losing her balance and falling face forward. I heard Mom screaming and saw her diving in to save her daughter. Then they were both sinking, eyes upturned, struggling to glimpse the sky through the tops of the swaying trees.

  According to my best friend, Cliff, quicksand was mostly a Hollywood invention and actually sinking to your death was next to impossible. Something to do with the density of the human body—I never could follow it all—but the authorities must have agreed because they made little effort to search the area, focusing most of their attention on the little cabin a couple of miles away. Whenever I tried to ask Dad about the cabin, he always shook his head and said the same thing. “Dead end.”

  At Big Creek, we stood and watched the current jumping the smooth rocks, saying nothing, probably thinking the same thoughts. The day was cloudy and standing under the trees near the water made it seem much later, almost dusk. Somewhere overhead, a bird began a song and another joined in, dueling with the first. Dad picked up a rock and skipped it across the creek. He was a tall man, but he seemed hunched now, weak in the shoulders, bending in the slight breeze.