by Andrew Pyper
I’m sprinting forward. The hammer raised over my head.
Feeling the weight of it, what it can do if I bring it down hard enough, takes me to a different moment. A different place. Something I’d forgotten from overseas.
The men emerging from the trees. Coming into the village with the machetes held at the level of their waists, swinging and slashing. And me doing the same thing. My hand gripped to a blade of my own. One that finds the arms and hips and throats of the men from the forest. Attacking the attackers. Cutting them down.
Stop!
It sounds like me. The part that wishes this wasn’t happening, that would rather be running away from the bad thing than at it.
Aaron! Don’t!
Hearing my own name is the first correction that brings me back to this forest, this night.
The second is seeing that it’s not the Tall Man I’m about to bring the hammer down on, but Ezra.
He has his hands held up in front of him, and once I’m still, he brings them down to show how frightened he is. Not just by me about to attack him, but by whatever he’s gone through, whatever he’s seen.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“It’s okay.”
“I thought you—”
“I get it. But could you put that thing down?”
He means the hammer. It takes a moment to lower it, as if the metal and wood have interests of their own.
“How’re we doing here?” Jerry asks, approaching with caution.
“We’re good,” I say. “Bridge, Franny, Mom, Lauren. Everybody’s safe. What about you? You find anything?”
“Maybe we could talk about it inside,” Jerry says. “I’m about done with this walking-around-all-night shit.”
• • •
Jerry had told Ezra to wait out front while he walked around the lodge, making sure there were no signs of break-in before knocking at the door. By the time he returned, I was charging at his brother with a hammer.
“I wasn’t going to wait for someone to get in,” I explain in a whisper, the three of us along with Franny standing in the front foyer.
“It was a good plan,” Jerry says.
“He nearly cracked my head open,” Ezra says.
“But the plan was good.”
“What about you two?” Franny asks. “You make it all the way around?”
“Every damn foot,” Jerry says.
“Find anything?”
“There was an old lady,” Ezra says. “We both saw her.”
“What did she do?”
“Nothing. Just watch us.”
“Did you try to get closer?”
“We figured she might be looking for us to do just that,” Jerry answers. “And if that’s what she wanted, it may not have been a good idea.”
“You think the Tall Man was with her?” This is me, whispering again, not wanting Bridge to come around the corner to hear whatever the answer is.
“Is that what you’re calling him?” Jerry says.
“You got a better name? Slim, maybe? Frederick?”
“The Tall Man it is. And no, we didn’t see him.”
“Anything else?” I ask.
“Three things,” Ezra says. “There’s nothing on the other side. No power lines, no roads, no buildings. Two, we took one of the shovels with us and tried to dig under the fence by the gate. Didn’t work. It goes down deep. And the metal underground is charged just the same as aboveground.”
“The third thing?”
“There’s no way out.”
“What about a ladder?” Franny asks.
“We don’t have a ladder,” Jerry answers.
“Maybe we could make one? With the tools in the shed?”
“It would need to be twenty-five feet high at least. To build that without lumber? Using a can of finishing nails? Not gonna happen.”
Even though the four of us knew all of this, we were holding on to threads to the outside world. Now they’ve been cut once and for all.
“Not through the fence. Not over it either,” I say, spinning a new thread. “But there might be another way. We’ll just have to get a little lucky.”
35
THE PLAN I PITCH AT the front door is simple: stand by the fence’s gate and wait for whoever delivers the supplies to return. When they do, have them open the gate, and if they can’t, ask them to call an ambulance to treat one of us at the lodge for emergency medical assistance.
“Why tell a story?” Jerry asks. “Why not just say we’ve been kidnapped or whatever is actually happening to us?”
“The truth could be something they already know about and have been instructed how to handle,” I say. “But if we tell them there’s a problem, it could push them off their game. Get them to act spontaneously.”
This will either strike all of us as a good idea or we’ll be too tired and shaken to come up with anything better. Franny and Ezra wait for Jerry’s response.
“So who’s going?” he asks.
I’m not planning to volunteer. But Jerry holds his gaze on me after asking his question, and it’s clear he’s not about to head out there again after walking around the entire estate in the night.
“Guess it’s my turn,” I say.
Jerry gives me a damn-right-it-is nod, but I don’t read it as bitter. We’re a team now and I’ve been tapped to take a shift.
“When’re you heading out?” he asks.
“Now.”
“In the dark?”
“Nobody said the deliveries would come during daylight.”
Jerry pulls his headlamp off and hands it to me.
“Take some batteries with you,” he says. “Believe me. You don’t want this thing to go out.”
• • •
I pull together a plastic bag of food, one of the steak knives from the drawer, the batteries Jerry suggested, an empty pickle jar of water. Tie the arms of a sweatshirt over my shoulders. When I’m back in the foyer after making Franny promise to keep Bridge safe until I return, Lauren is standing there.
“Ezra filled me in,” she says.
“He woke you up just to give you bad news?”
“You think I was asleep? That’s really funny.”
She raises her arm to show me a plastic bag of her own.
“I’m coming too,” she says.
“You don’t have to.”
“No. But if you go alone and we have to wait a long time for you to come back, it makes sense to have a messenger.”
“You didn’t mention how I might not come back at all.”
“I didn’t think I needed to mention that,” she says, and clicks her headlamp on, blinding me.
• • •
It’s still dark when we arrive at the gate. After a sip from the water in the pickle jar, we nestle down in the grass at the edge of the road. Lauren faces to the left and I to the right. We don’t pull the steak knives out. It’s as if doing so will risk materializing the danger that, for now, remains waiting just beyond the range of our headlamps.
Should we speak? Would that make sitting here, slapping mosquitos from our necks, any better? The dark decides it for me. There’s too much of it to not attempt to push it back with conversation.
“Lauren?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got something I’d like to ask you.”
“That makes two of us. You go first.”
“How did Dad die?”
She pauses. Not upset by the nature of the question, only working to retrieve the answer.
“A cardiac event. That’s what the lawyer said. Or did someone else say it? Jerry or one of the twins? I definitely remember that word, anyway. Event. Like it was an opera or wedding reception.”
“Did you ask for any details?”
“I suppose I didn’t need any. You?”
“Same.”
“A man Dad’s age—it happens.”
“It’s not how he died I’m stuck on. It’s how little we know about it.”
“
He’s a man of mystery.”
“Yeah, but this time the mystery isn’t him. It’s us.”
Around us, within the space of seconds, the plants, the trickling stream at the bottom of the ditch, the road’s gravel, all of it gains a muted color. The dawn painting the forest.
“My turn,” Lauren says, pulling her legs up and wrapping her arms around her knees.
“Okay.”
“What was that about you forgetting how to be a doctor? After Elias was—after what happened?”
“That’s not exactly how I’d put it. Forgetting. But I’m not lying, Lauren.”
“I’m sorry. That sounded like an accusation. I was just laying out the logical problem—”
“I know what the logical problem is. And I don’t have the answer to it.”
“Then what do you have?”
A feeling of helplessness. Being an alien to myself. Angry without knowing who to be angry at.
These are all the things I consider saying but don’t. They don’t get at the larger thought I’ve been having, something I haven’t arrived at fully in my own mind, so I take a run at it now.
“I wish I could have done something for Elias,” I say. “But since coming here—there’s been a change. That’s the only way I can describe it. Which makes me wonder if you feel the same.”
She doesn’t answer this right away.
“Being here—” Lauren stops with a tiny gasp. “Let’s just say it’s made me question who I am.”
The morning continues to color itself into existence. But instead of the different shades of the forest’s green making it less formidable, it reveals its capacity for deception, to hide in plain view.
“I was thinking about our families,” Lauren announces.
“What about them?”
“Don’t you find it interesting that none of us have romantic relationships to speak of? That none of us, other than Franny, ever had kids?”
“I blamed Dad for that. It’s kind of automatic for me now. You got trouble making friends? Dad. No girlfriend? Dad. Feel like only half a person most of the time? Dad.”
“I came to the same conclusion myself for a long time,” she says. “But now that I see all of us here together, the absences we share in our lives, the same dream we have at night—they’re conditions I recognize from my practice.”
“Trauma. That’s your specialty, right?”
“So I’m wondering if we’ve all been through something. I’m wondering if that’s why I was drawn to this area of therapy in the first place.”
If Lauren is right, why don’t any of us remember? She’d probably say this is precisely the way trauma works—it conceals its own scars; it masks, obliterates. But wouldn’t something come through?
It’s my powerlessness to grasp what might have been done to us that brings the outrage. If I knew what my trauma was—the one before what happened overseas, the one that feels like it might have involved Dad somehow—maybe I could have shielded Bridge from it. I could have stood up to whatever wanted to take part of our identities away (Let’s just say it’s made me question who I am) instead of filling the space with work or dope or whatever each of us put at the top of the daily to-do list that we pretended was a life.
“Shhh.”
Lauren hears something. Then she sees it. Her eyes widening before she wills herself into composure, stands up, and walks toward the fence.
36
A WHITE PANEL VAN. NO writing on the sides, no windows in the rear, as nondescript a vehicle as there exists. It seems to slow its approach when it spots us so that it rolls up to within twenty feet of the gate at a walking pace, the individual stones grinding and popping under the tires.
It stops. The engine cuts off. The audible ratchet of the emergency brake being set.
Nobody gets out.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the driver would be under orders to have no contact with those on the other side, that he might turn around and no van, this one or any other, would ever come back. How do we appear to whoever considers us through the windshield that mirrors the patch of sky overhead so that we can’t see who sits behind the wheel? A man and a woman. Respectable, intelligent sorts under normal conditions, but desperate now. People to avoid.
Lauren doesn’t speak. I can only assume she fears what may happen if she does. The sound of our voices, calling for assistance, will be the end of it. It would be so easy to not help. Any additional nudge from us might decide the matter.
The door opens. The driver, a man, gets out. Slow as someone trying not to antagonize a bad back, though this may only be what suspicion looks like.
“Well, well,” he says, louder than necessary as he comes a few steps closer but leaves the van’s door open. The seat belt warning bell tolling from inside, but he doesn’t go back to close the door. “Good day to you!”
The delivery man is middle-aged, portly, his bald head covered by a wool cap set at a comical angle atop his head. The fleshiness of his face welcoming in the way of a contented husband and father, a lover of simple pleasures: extra gravy on his potatoes and telling stories to the grandkids who climb onto his knees. A man who would not only provide you with directions if you asked, but offer to drive you where you’re going.
“Can you help us?”
I ask this as plainly as possible. A reasonable man asking another reasonable man a question; there’s no need to see it as anything but what it is. And while the delivery man mostly appears to hear it this way, his round face droops a little. His natural friendliness, the muscles used to hold his grin up loosening at the indication of something not quite right.
“You two don’t work in there, do you?” he says.
“No, we don’t.”
“Then who are you?”
“My name is Aaron Quinlan, and this is my half sister, Lauren. We’re being held prisoner. One of us—a child back at the main building—has been seriously injured—”
“Hold on now, hold on—”
“Needs medical attention. Could you open the gate?”
By the look on his face he hears this last part as if it was something to take offense at. An insult directed at his wife. His country.
“Open the gate?” he repeats.
“Let us out. Or if that’s something you’re not able to do, could you get on your phone and call for an ambulance?”
He scrutinizes me through the woven metal. Takes his time. The friendliness incrementally vacates from every aspect of him.
“Wait, wait, wait,” he says finally, as if a number of options have cohered in his mind all at once. “Y’all refugees or something?”
“What?”
“The fence. All the hush-hush. This one of those detainment facilities?”
“No. It’s not that—”
“You must be pretty special if you’ve got the whole place to yourselves,” he says, too pleased by his internal detective work to pay any attention to me. “Most camps I’ve seen on TV are a lot more filled up with illegals than this here. How many are you, anyway? Half dozen? Dozen? Man, you’ve got to be bad news. You’ve got to be spies.”
Lauren quiets me with a little back wave of her hand. This isn’t working and now it’s her turn.
“I understand what you’re thinking, but we’re not refugees or spies or anything like that,” she says, her tone confiding, respectful. “We’re the victims of a crime. Kidnapping. If you don’t believe us, that’s fine, just tell the police we’re here. It won’t be on your hands.”
“But it will, lady. I’ve got instructions. ‘Don’t tell anybody what’s going on up there.’ Good thing is, I don’t even know. Boom! Done.”
“You’re making a mistake. We’re—”
“No. Uh-uh,” he says, shaking his head so hard his jowls shudder. “You made a mistake. If you’re in there? You made a big mistake, and I promise you, it’s not touching me.”
The delivery man starts toward the van.
“We’ll die in here!”
&
nbsp; Lauren’s cry stops him. He looks back at her, then at me. He appeared so likable and open a moment ago. Now the hatred alters his features even as we watch, transforming him. He looks through the fence and doesn’t see a man and woman. He sees the cause of every problem he’s ever had. Why me? Why hasn’t it been easier? Why haven’t I gotten all I wanted? And the answer is us.
“I’m not helping you,” he says. “I quit. What’s more, I’m not telling them I’m quitting. And I’m the only one who drives these boxes up.”
“Please. Don’t—”
“Shut up! Please, please, please. That all you people do? Beg for handouts?”
He regards us with the same exasperation he would a pair of stray dogs who keep coming around scratching the paint off his door. It firms up the decision he’d only tried out seconds ago.
“Well, you can starve in there. Understand?” he says. “Because I sacrificed for my country. My family was born here. So it’s what you deserve, far as I’m concerned.”
A handful of sentences run through my mind, appeals I might voice aloud.
I can give you millions of dollars.
Do you have any children? You do? Because my little sister, my fourteen-year-old sister, is in here too.
I’m trying to decide between them when the delivery man hops up into the van and pulls the door shut.
It’s the engine throat-clearing to life that starts us shouting for him to come back. There’s no argument anymore, no attempt to reach his emotions or loyalties. Lauren and I wordlessly holler and wave the same as anyone standing on the wrong side of a fence.
The van reverses and goes forward twice, making sure not to slide into the ditch. When he’s got himself straightened out, he rolls off down the road, the brake lights winking as he goes.
37
WE TRY TO TELL OURSELVES someone may still come for us. The delivery man will have a change of heart. Even if he carries through with not bringing us the supplies he’s supposed to, his employers will figure it out and replace him. There must be a system in charge of this operation, some kind of oversight.