The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  Had a past.

  That this is something close to the feeling I’ve had my whole life takes me by surprise, as I’ve always assumed Franny was shaped by more objective injuries. What’s different is that she feels that coming to Belfountain has triggered it. Unlike me, who’s felt this way for as long as I can recall.

  What’s important is that Franny is telling me this. Reliably unreliable Franny. What she’s experiencing is a symptom of withdrawal, most likely. A warped perception of time triggered by the anxiety of being here. All of it bringing her back to the loss that pulled the ground out from under her.

  “This is about Nate, isn’t it?” I say. “Trauma like this—it can strand you from what you know, what you love. It’s like losing yourself. But he’ll always be with you.”

  “That’s just it. All I have is my love for him.”

  “And once we’re out of here, what you carry of him inside—”

  “You don’t understand, Aaron,” she says, and steadies herself, pushes aside her frustration for one last try. “I love Nate. But the boy that love was for, the games we’d play together, his first words, the shape of his face—all the things a mother never lets go of—aren’t where they should be.”

  There are at least two deaths that result from dying. I’ve seen it a thousand times. The first is the failure of the body. The second is the failure of the living to remember. I’d always assumed the impact of the latter was buffered by its gradual retreat, the pulling of images out of the mind’s photo album, one by one. But maybe for some—for Franny—it can come faster than that. Maybe it can come all at once.

  Never had a past to begin with.

  “I meant to tell you this, was waiting for the right time—but you know how it is with right times.”

  “They never come.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you more than you already were. Maybe I was chickenshit, and just ran away,” I say, and pull in a ragged breath. “No, it was that. Might as well admit it.”

  Franny looks up at me about as soberly as a person could. “Is this about Nate?”

  “Yeah. After he died.”

  “Tell me.”

  So I do.

  I tell her about coming back to my condo a few days after the funeral, looking around at the collection of furniture and unread magazines and unhealthy plants that made up my life, and deciding to clean the place. Top to bottom, floors, corners, the whole deal. I’d been doing it a lot after I’d come home from overseas. My therapist called it “mental cleansing.”

  What was different this time was that it wasn’t the attack I was thinking of as I dusted and scrubbed. It was Nate. And as if these thoughts of him brought part of him back, I was moving the sofa to reach the vacuum behind it and found a balloon. Green. Still fully inflated, with streamers and fireworks stenciled on it. A leftover from the little birthday party I had for Nate a few weeks earlier.

  “It felt light in my hands but warmer than it should have, as if a pair of other hands had been holding it before passing it to me,” I tell Franny, and she watches me as I speak, her chin trembling. “I don’t know why I did it, but I untied the knot and let the air out. Just stood there feeling it pass like a warm breeze over my face. Except it wasn’t a breeze. It was the air from Nate’s lungs. He was the one who blew up the balloon. And I’d helped him do it, holding it as he huffed and puffed, and then tying the end when he was done. It was him. This thing I could feel. This voice I could almost hear.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Something like, ‘This is me. I was here. I was alive, Uncle Aaron.’ But not in words. Just breath.”

  Franny is crying, but her body is more still and solid than it’s been the last twenty-four hours.

  “Thank you for bringing him back,” she says, and gets up on tiptoes to give my cheek a cold kiss.

  • • •

  For dinner, Mom pulls out the lasagna leftovers, but when Ezra spots the aluminum trays, it’s as if he sees a portrait of his lost twin in the baked cheese and noodles they made together, and we all silently agree to return it to the fridge.

  “Ham sandwiches?” Mom offers with the same brittleness as when she would sell us a menu for school lunches on a Monday morning.

  As we eat, to avoid complete silence, I ask the others what gifts Dad left for them. In addition to a compass for Bridge and the neon running gear for me, Lauren found a magnetic chess set in the bottom of her duffel bag.

  She tells us it was the only thing she and Dad ever did together, just the two of them. He never let her win. Something she appreciated, actually. It meant he took her seriously. His intent was to teach her to look three, four, five moves ahead. What she came to learn was that you saw the way the game would play out not by tactics alone, but by thinking the way your opponent thought.

  “It was psychology. Getting past the rules and strategizing in order to reach into the motivations of the person across the board from you,” she says, before putting her sandwich down on her plate. “Once I understood that, we never played again.”

  Ezra and Elias were meant to share their gift. Dad’s watch. The vintage Bulova they were always asking to wear.

  “I don’t remember that watch,” Lauren says. “Do you have it on now?”

  Ezra pulls back his sleeve to show us his bare forearm. “I left it with Elias,” he says, and we all involuntarily glance at the wall as if we have the X-ray vision to see the freshly covered grave thirty feet on the other side.

  This wasn’t where I wanted the conversation to go. I ask Franny what was left for her, and as soon as I do, I realize this was an even bigger mistake.

  A baby rattle. She found it in a drawer in the bedroom she and Mom are staying in. A really beautiful one, hand painted with colorful birds flying over a lake with snowcapped mountains in the background. Japanese, she guesses. Something Dad brought back from one of his trips for Nate, his only grandchild.

  When she finishes, Franny glances over at me, and I can tell she doesn’t recall the rattle. It’s something else that’s been lost to the years of junk put in her veins or, if she’s to be believed, stolen by Belfountain itself in the time she’s been here.

  “What about you, Jerry?” Lauren asks.

  “Me?”

  “You’re the only one left. What souvenir did the old man leave for you from the great beyond?”

  Jerry digs into his pocket and pulls something out. Brings his hand to his mouth and blows.

  Tw-eeeeee-t!

  So shrill it jolts all of us in our chairs. When he’s done, Jerry drops the referee’s whistle onto the table.

  “What do you make of that?” he asks nobody in particular.

  “You’re a coach,” Lauren says, reassuring. “It’s what you do.”

  “I know! I know that! Wouldn’t he also know I’ve already got a damned whistle?”

  You don’t have to be a psychologist to see it. Jerry hasn’t yet let go of being a player, the guy on the field that people watch from the bleachers. He’s a teacher now, but one still young enough, fit enough, to think he could get back into the game someday. The whistle tells him something different. It says there’s only the sidelines left for him.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he says to Lauren.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re assessing one of your clients.”

  “I’m actually on your side here, Jerry.”

  “My side? What does that mean, exactly?”

  Lauren takes a steadying breath. The kind I imagine a therapist must make before venturing into a topic she’d prefer to avoid.

  “It means we’re family,” she says.

  Jerry stares at her, and I almost expect him to ask her to repeat what she’s just said because he hadn’t heard it.

  “That’s one of those things that depends on how you look at it, am I right? Family,” he says. “Consider us, for instance. Consider you. The twins had each other from birth. I had Mom to hold up. And you, Lauren? The special
little gift who arrived late in the game? You were the observer. Watching us like you were the director of the psych ward. And this was when you were eight years old! You found your calling early, I’ll give you that.”

  All of Lauren remains still except for the pooling tears in her eyes, thickening but not yet falling. She won’t let them.

  “That’s not fair, Jerry.”

  “Maybe not. But it’s true.”

  He rises with his plate in his hand.

  “Thanks for the sandwich, Eleanor,” Jerry says, and with his free hand picks up the whistle, weighs it in his palm, the plastic marble rolling around inside, then stuffs it back into his pocket.

  • • •

  There’s more howling that night.

  It comes through the wall of glass and reaches me in the chair I’ve almost fallen asleep in, which makes it hard to guess its distance, though I’d say it’s closer to the lodge than it was when we were at the gate.

  Not coyotes. A single animal. Throaty and hoarse.

  I can’t tell if Ezra or Jerry, the ones who’ve chosen the sofa and other chair, hear it too. They don’t move. They don’t ask in a whisper if anyone else is awake.

  Which probably means they are.

  32

  WE DON’T ASK IF WE all had the dream again. We just start to talk about the ways last night’s was different. The new details that, as Bridge puts it, make it like one of those invisible spy papers kids play with where the message is only revealed after shading with a pencil until the whole page is covered.

  “So you go first,” I say to Bridge in the kitchen as I spread peanut butter on her half of the bagel we’re sharing. “What’s your spy message?”

  “My page isn’t totally filled in yet,” she corrects me. “But last night there was a boat.”

  The activity in the kitchen—Franny pouring Lucky Charms into her bowl, Jerry pulling hash browns from the toaster oven, Ezra cutting an apple, Mom frying up a storm—comes to a stop.

  “It was sinking,” Ezra says.

  “Yes.”

  “The tallest part, where the captain steers, it went down last,” Franny says.

  “Yes.”

  “And then the outer space singing again,” Jerry says.

  “But it wasn’t coming from space.”

  “It was coming from the water,” I say.

  That’s not all that was different. This time, Bridge was in it too. Floating next to me but struggling, too tired to keep treading water, her arms slapping at the surface before she started going under.

  I woke up then. Even in my dreams I can’t tolerate the idea of anything bad happening to her.

  “If we’re all thinking what each other is thinking,” Jerry says, “then you know what I think we ought to do this morning.”

  “Hypnosis therapy?” Franny suggests.

  “No. How about you, Aaron? Take a guess.”

  “See if there’s another way out through the fence.”

  “That’d be it.”

  “I’ll go,” Ezra says, popping the last of the apple in his mouth.

  I would volunteer but I don’t want to leave Bridge here on her own, not again. Jerry reads my hesitation, seems to understand it and approve as he looks my way with the smallest shake of his head.

  “It’s the two of us then, Ez,” he says, and starts to pack his breakfast up in the plastic bag the bagels came in.

  None of us can estimate how long it will take to hike around the entire perimeter of the estate. The terrain may be variable in the corners of the property we haven’t seen. Whether the brush has been cleared away from the fence or allowed to grow thick against it will be a factor too.

  What we’re dancing around but not addressing directly is the thought that Jerry and Ezra may have to spend the night out there.

  “What if there’s another gate and it’s wide open?” Franny asks before they go. “You won’t just skip on out, right? You’ll come back and let us know?”

  “I will,” Ezra says.

  “We both will,” Jerry says, and follows his brother out the door. “We’re family, right? Leave no Quinlan behind.”

  33

  FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE morning, Mom, Franny, and Lauren take stock of what’s left in the kitchen so that we can ration it into portions if we have to. There’s still enough to get us through the next couple days. More if we’re careful. And there’s no reason we can’t expect further deliveries will be made to the main gate. Still, with the electrification of the fence and with it the removal of the option to leave, our dependence on supplies worries me almost as much as the Tall Man.

  I’m sitting on the enormous slate slab that juts out from the base of the fireplace, a modernist plank of stone floating a foot off the floor, when Bridge joins me. She sits next to me, and I can feel the undercurrent of sorrow coming off her like heat from someone who’s just finished a run, though she hides it with playfulness.

  “You know what day it is?” she says.

  “No idea.”

  “Tuesday. If we were back home, we’d be having one of our dinners tonight.”

  “God. You’re right.”

  She looks up at me. “Tell me about them.”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “Of course. I just want to hear you tell me.”

  “Well, we’d talk. I usually didn’t have much to report, but you always had news.”

  “What was the news of my life?”

  She’s looking for a way out of this place. So I do my best to give her one.

  When she was six and I first started taking her to a Chuck E. Cheese or a steakhouse (we took turns choosing), Bridge was still in the tail end of the Princess Era. This was a time when she’d happily spend an hour wearing the plastic tiara or white elbow-length gloves I’d buy for her, retelling the plotline from Sleeping Beauty or The Little Mermaid, which always ended with her eyes closed, imagining the scenes in her head.

  Eight was the Age of Dance. Modern, ballet, hip-hop—her twice-a-week teacher singling Bridge out as her most promising student. Dance was the first career pursuit she ever declared, and based on my impressions when I attended her recitals, she actually had a shot. I was disappointed when she quit (a twisted ankle, then displacement as the teacher’s favorite at the hands of a rival). But forever after I could detect the trace of sophistication she brought to the simplest movements as she returned a jar of pickles to the top shelf of the fridge, or waved goodbye and ran to the front door after exiting the taxi when I brought her home.

  At ten came boys. Crushes. Jealous conflicts with classmates over the cute new kid (or the kid who everyone had ignored for years who’d returned from spring break with a haircut that elevated him to cuteness). Longing. Its reach swinging between the innocent to the worrying borderlands of grown-up desire.

  During those dinners, what Bridge wanted to know about me above anything else was when I had my first date, first girlfriend, first kiss. The precise dates of these events were of crucial importance. She kept a literal calendar of when, based on my responses, she could expect these milestones to happen to her, and she would pelt me with questions when they didn’t.

  Our most recent meetings, from the age of twelve to the present, carried over many of the issues of romance but combined them in a newly curdled pubescent mixture of unpredictable moods, bodily alterations, ruthless girl politics. Bridge no longer looked to me for answers on any of these matters. What I offered was a dumping ground, a place to disgorge the self-contradictions I couldn’t offer a prescription for even if I tried.

  Tuesday dinners with Bridge are, by a wide margin, the event I look forward to most. They’re not just a way of connecting with her, but with time. I told her this when we last got together. How following the stages of her life meant more to me than my own.

  “That’s because you haven’t had stages, Aaron,” she replied matter-of-factly. “You’ve always just been you.”

  Is this true? Did I enter the world feeling obliga
ted and angry and alone?

  “How’re you doing?” I ask her now.

  “I’m okay. We’re getting out of here. I keep telling myself that. Seems to help.”

  “I was asking about you.”

  “I don’t feel the cancer coming back, if that’s what you mean.”

  “It’s not,” I say, though in truth it more or less was. “Just checking in.”

  Bridge gets to her feet, pats the top of my head. “Next Tuesday?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  34

  I DON’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT. Wandering through the lodge like a ghost looking for other ghosts.

  Everyone else is in their rooms at the end of the hall in the direction I think of as north even if there’s no way of saying for sure, the direction of the sun these past days pursuing a random course through the clouds. The moon too. An angled crescent false as a clown’s smile.

  I’m trying to find the light of it through the trees, moving from the great room’s glass to the small windows on either side of the front door, when I see it.

  Not the moon. A figure standing outside. Watching.

  There’s not enough light to confirm it’s the Tall Man. Whether it is or not isn’t the right question anyway. It’s about saving lives now. About Bridge. Is the best way to do that waiting to make sure a monster stands outside? If he moves back into the trees, this could be a lost opportunity. If he finds a way in, it could be a danger I won’t have a chance of heading off.

  “Aaron?”

  Franny is in the foyer. One look at my face and she can see there’s something outside.

  “Lock the door behind me,” I say.

  I’m outside before Franny can demand I come back. Not that she does. There’s only the clunk of the bolt sliding shut.

  I hold a hammer in my hand. The one that Jerry used to nail the two-by-fours over the smaller windows. It felt heavy and decisive a moment ago. Now, in the cool night air, it shrinks to the size of a fork at the end of my arm.

  The figure doesn’t shift. Fifty feet away, maybe less. A distance that if crossed at a walk would give him the chance to square into position. But at a run, there might not be time for that.