The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  “What was the question?”

  “ ‘Where does the path lead after it ends?’ ”

  I let the words tumble around in my head until I can’t tell if they’re familiar to me or I’ve just made them seem so.

  “What do you think he meant?”

  “It was Dad. How do I know?” Bridge says. “Something about coming to the end and deciding whether to go ahead and make a new trail or go back on the one already there.”

  “Sounds like a Hallmark card.”

  “The way I’m saying it, yeah. But the way he said it—it sounded like this Big Idea. Everything he said, especially that day—Me! Dad! Alone together!—seemed big.” She pauses. “It’s strange, but when I try to think of him, it’s hard to even remember what he looked like.”

  I’d heard of this before. The way even the most significant people fade in the memory of those who live on after they die, the physical being of the person translated from photographic portraiture into a collection of feelings, words, scents, or touches. Yet no matter how normal I know it to be, as I try to summon a picture of my father’s face to mind, there’s little other than the thick-framed glasses, an on-again, off-again moustache, ears that revealed long filaments of hair when he stood with the sun behind him.

  There’s still the sound of his voice though. Still the sense there was something missing about him that went deeper than him being gone so much. Not just an absence. An erasure.

  I stop walking, and Bridge, head down, bumps into me. I turn around and she’s readying a laugh, as if I caught her off guard on purpose, but one look at my face and she sees I’m not joking.

  “Geez, Aaron,” she says. “What’s up?”

  “I want to ask you something. And I want you to know that whatever your answer is, it’s between the two of us.”

  She crosses her arms. “Okay.”

  “Dad never hurt you or anything, did he?”

  “Hurt?” she repeats, dwelling on the word, as if it belonged to a language she only partly spoke. “You mean like abuse?”

  “Not violence. Not, you know, hitting. The other kind. Anything that was wrong.”

  I expect her to have to think about her answer, align her memory with her standards of certainty, but she replies right away.

  “No,” she says. “What about you?”

  “I’m pretty sure not. But the pretty sure nags at me a little. More now that he’s gone.”

  Bridge steps closer. Rises on tiptoes to press her finger to my temple. “What’s going on in there?”

  “That’s what I’m not a hundred percent about. When I think of him sometimes, it’s like I’ve hypnotized myself. Or maybe he hypnotized me. Isn’t that the way some of the survivors of bad stuff describe it? Like it’s a shape they can barely make out through a fog?”

  Bridge lowers onto the flats of her feet again and looks out into the snarled curtains of forest as if scanning for something there, a visual puzzle that asked you to stare at a pattern until a second pattern showed itself. After half a minute, she shakes her head, looks back up at me.

  “Just because there’s a fog around us doesn’t mean there’s anything in it,” she says, stepping around me and carrying on up the slope of the trail.

  7

  THE TRAIL THAT HAD BEEN level at first now slopes downhill, a change that makes it easier to walk with our packs but also pulls a deeper darkness over us. From out of the forest comes something new. A thrumming. Mostly unheard when vibrating at the bottom end of its range and prickly as static at the top. Insects. But something else too. Alive in ways that reach beyond the animal or vegetative kinds of life. An intelligence.

  I don’t ask Bridge if she hears it too. I don’t want to make her afraid. And I don’t want to make me more afraid if she doesn’t.

  It’s hard to guess how far we’ve gone. Four hundred yards? Six hundred? I’m about to suggest heading back. Not just to sleep in the lodge for the night but to head back to the city at first light. The words are there, my lips shaped to speak them, and then our headlamps find the square outline of a cabin.

  “Cozy,” Bridge says, walking around me, opening the single door and disappearing inside.

  Illuminated only by the swinging circles of our headlamps, the room looks merely unfamiliar: a scratchy-looking sofa, amateur forest landscapes hanging crooked on the walls, a round pine table covered with black knots like worrisome moles. But once we find the light switch, a pair of tabletop lamps spill gold up the walls and I see that Bridge was right. It’s cozy.

  “I’ll take this room,” she announces, already having turned on the lights in the small but workable kitchen, the bathroom, and each of the two paneled bedrooms with windows the size of shoebox lids over the headboards.

  I drop my bag in the room next to hers, and I’m about to see if there’s toothpaste and soap in the bathroom when I notice the closet door is open an inch. Was it that way when we came in? Something about it strikes me as intentional. An invitation to see what’s inside.

  “Hey! Check this out!”

  Bridge comes in holding something in the palm of her hand. A circular, solid brass lid that she lets me click open.

  “A compass,” I say.

  “Pretty cool, right?”

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “In a box in my closet. I’m actually really into geography and stuff like that at school, and we did orienteering last summer at my camp. Remember? But the compasses we used were crap compared to this one.”

  “Like it was meant for you.”

  “I’m definitely keeping it, so yeah. Why don’t you look in yours? Maybe you got something too.”

  I know before I step over and pull open the closet door, just as Bridge knew it too. There will be another box and inside of it will be something just for me.

  “Yours is bigger than mine,” Bridge says when she sees the cardboard box wrapped with a single white bow on the closet floor. “Why don’t you open it?”

  I bend and hold the box in my hands a moment, measuring it for movement from inside more than for its weight, before untying the bow and lifting its lid.

  “Shiny,” Bridge says.

  A running shirt and matching shorts. The super-lightweight kind I used to buy when I was serious about races, every gram I reduced from what I wore resulting in a theoretically improved pace. The fabric bright neon orange, dazzlingly reflective even in the cabin’s dull light. Beneath these, my brand of running shoes, and in my size.

  “This one’s mine all right,” I say.

  “Don’t you like them? You look scared or something.”

  “It’s just strange. Don’t you think?”

  “That Daddy left us gifts?”

  “Not the gifts. But that they were in the right cabin, the right room, before we even decided where we were going to stay the night.”

  Bridge considers this blankly before frowning.

  “Well, I like mine,” she says, and scuffs back into her room, closing the door before I can explain how that’s not what I meant at all.

  • • •

  Before we fall asleep, Bridge speaks to me through her door. Something I’ve heard a hundred times. A strange kind of lullaby that calms her just as it does the same for me.

  “It was July up at the lake,” she says, and pauses, as if this is the story’s title. “So hot the waves were like syrup. You and I standing at the edge of the shore’s highest boulder, doing that countdown we thought was so funny. One-ah, two-ah, three-ah . . . diarrhea! Airborne long enough to wonder if we’d ever come down. Then everything went dark.”

  “But I was there.”

  “You were there. My big brother. We pulled ourselves up onto the floating dock. Started on the picnic we’d floated over in the rowboat. Laughing and eating and jumping around. Playing Peter Pan.”

  “You were nine.”

  “I was Wendy. And you were Hook, slicing the air with a dill pickle. We were having fun—and then we weren’t. I could tell some
thing was wrong from the look on your face. Before I knew I couldn’t breathe.”

  “You ate too fast.”

  “Or laughed too much. Either way, you did what they told you in med school.”

  “The Heimlich.”

  “But it doesn’t always work. It didn’t work. All I’m thinking is I’m dying. But I’m almost okay with it, you know? Almost accepting. I’m watching you jump into the rowboat and pop open the tackle box like it’s happening in a movie. You flicking through the rusted hooks and lures and pulling out a silver X-Acto.”

  “Less than ideal.”

  “Much less than ideal. But even when I figured out what you were about to do, I was fine with it. I trusted you. Even as I laid down on the dock and you cut a line through my throat, you told me with your eyes that you were my brother, that I would be fine.”

  “That’s what I was praying for.”

  “And I am. I am fine.”

  That’s how it ends.

  A true story of panic that’s somehow more calming than any song, and soon everything is quiet.

  • • •

  I’m awakened by a voice.

  It’s not that—it’s something animal, it must be—yet it arrives as a human utterance, however shattered and alien. Outside the walls of the cabin. Distant, but piercing. A shriek of alarm that comes with the first blaze of pain, as long as the breath I hold in my chest.

  When I finally exhale, it’s gone. The night and the bedroom’s darkness are comingled, endless.

  I try to tell myself it was only some small, wild thing in the woods calling out in its death, the soundtrack to the forest’s nocturnal cycle of hunting and hiding, but then it comes again. Unmistakable now.

  My sister Franny. Screaming into the trees.

  8

  THE NIGHT PASSES OVER ME like a veil.

  I remember this feeling. The sensation of running without looking at the ground, each stride a launch into the air, its molecules ready to break apart and admit me to whatever lay beyond. A bargain between myself and the universe that, if I was fast enough, I could put gravity behind me once and for all.

  Back then, I ran to be free of being.

  Now I run toward my sister’s voice.

  I’d gotten out of bed and put on the shoes and neon shirt and shorts that came in the gift box without thinking about it. My body is fully in charge for the first time in years and it feels right.

  Before I left, I shouted at Bridge to stay inside and lock the door. Will she do as I told her?

  She will or she won’t, my heart tick-tocks in reply.

  Every question in my mind is spoken through the swing of my legs.

  There’s time or there’s not.

  I’m aware of cresting the slope up from the cabin and speeding faster down the other side, following Franny’s voice more than the trail. I haven’t hit a sprint like this since I was training for real, and now my lungs catch fire at the same time I fly out of the trees.

  She’s nowhere to be seen.

  I carry around the lodge’s closest corner, the saplings snuggled up to the walls slashing my cheeks and taking bites from my hands like attacking, unseen birds.

  The pain stops the same time I do. My body making one last decision—Don’t go any closer—before handing control back to my mind.

  My sister is alone.

  Standing in the powdery rectangle of light that comes through the wall of windows at the rear of the lodge. Staring into the trees with the stillness of someone who’s just been shown something whose existence they would have never thought possible. It occurs to me only now that she’s not screaming anymore.

  “Franny?”

  She doesn’t turn. It forces me to walk closer, my eyes jumping between her and the spot she’s focused on in the darkness.

  I touch her shoulder.

  “Aaron?”

  She doesn’t jump, doesn’t face me. Only this word.

  “I’m here.”

  She throws herself into me and I hold her. I’d like to go inside, but I’ve forgotten how, at certain moments, being in a family is a performance. Right now I’m the older brother who must appear fearless, so we stay like this.

  “There was a man,” she says when she finally steps out of my arms.

  “Where?”

  “Out there.” She sweeps her limp fingers across the line of trees. “He was staring at me.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Tall. I couldn’t really see his face. But I could see his mouth. Made me think of Mrs. Grainger, my third-grade teacher. If she saw a kid with his mouth hanging open like that she’d say, ‘Are you trying to catch flies?’ That was funny. But whoever this was? He wasn’t funny at all.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No,” Franny says. “Once he knew I saw him, he came closer. Not really walking. Sort of—so slow, like he was floating. Like he—”

  “Shh.”

  I look and listen. Not expecting anyone to walk out toward us, but hoping to detect some evidence of retreat, the returning swing of a disturbed branch or thud of a boot on the hollow earth. We stay that way for perhaps a full minute. The only thing my eyes catch on is something glowing on the ground a few feet away. A tongue of gray curling out of its orange mouth.

  “Shit, Franny. Were you smoking?”

  “Why the hell else would I be out here?” Her face sours, and she’s the teenaged Franny again, ready to fight or lie or threaten. Do whatever was required to get away with it. “Are you judging me?”

  “No. I just don’t want you to set the whole state on fire.”

  She laughs at this, one that turns into a cough. “Too late. Haven’t you been watching the news? The whole country’s on fire.”

  I step over and crush Franny’s cigarette butt under the heel of my shoe. When I look up from making sure it’s out, I catch a glimpse of motion through the trees. A figure—or parts suggestive of a figure—that’s there and then, in no more than a stride or two, soundlessly gone.

  “Aaron? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You saw something, didn’t you?”

  I turn to my sister. “I didn’t see anything.”

  It’s impossible to say if Franny accepts this or not. I spend virtually all of my waking hours working with other doctors and surgeons and lab technicians whose jobs require the straightforward exchange of blunt opinions. I’m not used to withholding troubling news. Which maybe makes Mom right. Makes me a bad liar.

  Franny starts back toward the glass rear door of the lodge without saying anything more.

  “Mom isn’t up?” I call after her.

  “Thick walls and Zoloft. I guess they really do the trick.”

  “What do you think it was, Franny?”

  She looks back at me.

  “I don’t know, big brother. I didn’t like it. And I don’t think it liked me either.”

  She lingers, so I go ahead and say it. It’s meant only as a harmless consolation, but instead the words come out too loud, too sure, striking into the night as a provocation.

  “There’s nobody there.”

  Franny snorts.

  I should have done more for my sister; I know this. We both do. It’s why I forgive her the angry glaze she pours over most of the words she directs my way. I don’t forgive myself so easily. Bridge says everybody has a “thing,” a defining talent or passion or problem. If she’s right, then mine is an allergy to witnessing people in pain. I think of it as that—an allergic reaction, itchy and stinging—because to see suffering triggers it in me. It’s why I became a doctor. But while as a surgeon I can work to diminish my patients’ discomfort, Franny’s kind is different. It comes not from physical damage but as a reaction to invisible assaults, the sense of not being wholly loved, not entirely wished for. I know because it is the kind of pain that afflicts me too.

  Franny slips inside. I watch her pass through the living room and turn off the dimmed pot lights. The windows turn to
blackboards smudged with the chalk of a quarter moon.

  There.

  It’s not a sound that makes me look up. My response is automatic in the way one turns to see whatever has snapped a branch underfoot.

  Someone’s there.

  So far off it’s only the irregularity of the human shape against the backdrop of branches and tree trunks that renders it visible. Not the figure I might have caught a glimpse of as I put out Franny’s cigarette.

  An old woman.

  Hunched, arms hanging too low at her sides, the gray aura of frizzled hair. She wears what may be a hospital gown or frayed bathrobe open at the front so that, as she sways slightly from side to side, the material shifts to reveal the downturned points of her breasts.

  I want to run back the way I came. To prove courage to myself, I walk instead. But as soon as I’ve turned my back on her, my legs stretch their stride without my being able to hold them back, and my body is in charge again, building speed, carrying me away on the instincts of retreat.

  9

  I DON’T RETURN TO BED that night.

  After telling Bridge a muted version of the truth—Franny being Franny, she’d gone out for a smoke and scared herself silly all alone in the woods—I promised her she was safe here with me. Whether it was this assurance or the weight of her fatigue, she was snoring like a puppy by the time I pulled her door closed.

  There’s an overstuffed leather chair in the cabin’s living room, and I stay there until dawn, dozing off only to be rewarded with a foul dream I can’t recall that left me coughing for air.

  The old woman in the trees. Not a dream because I can see her and I’m awake. Not a dream because she was there.

  But she wasn’t. There’s another line of thought reminding me of this. At once calm and bullying. No matter what you saw, it wasn’t real. Words spoken in my father’s voice.

  I push it away as best I can. Listen for footsteps outside the cabin’s walls. Get up half a dozen times to check that the tab on the handle is turned up in the locked position. Each time I do, I put my ear to the wood and try to feel if something else does the same on the other side.