The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  The more Lauren and I work to buttress these arguments, the less convincing they sound. The forest itself seems to mock our attempts at hope. When we finally give up, the willow leaves applaud in a breeze too high up for us to feel.

  When we make it back to the lodge, Franny is standing at the door. I assume she’s waiting for us. But she’s not looking our way, her gaze seemingly fixed on the mound where Elias is buried.

  “Franny!”

  She swings her head around and clasps her hands to the doorframe as if steadying herself on the deck of a rolling ship.

  “She’s gone, Aaron! She’s gone!”

  • • •

  It’s true that life can flash before your eyes.

  It’s also true that life may not be your own.

  As I rush to the lodge’s door, Franny’s tear-puffed face coming into detail with each stride, I measure my existence through the Tuesday dinners I’ve had with Bridge. The “cocktails” with Shirley Temples (for her) and lager (for me). The comic books created on napkins to kill the time as we wait for our orders to arrive. The permission we’d give each other to be goofy, a pair of bratty kids out on the town.

  Bridge is gone and she’s taken both of us with her.

  “Where’d she go?” I demand of Franny when I reach her, grabbing her hard by the knobs of her shoulders. “What happened?”

  “She didn’t say she was going. She didn’t—”

  “I told you to stay with her!”

  “No, no, no,” Franny says, stepping out of my grasp. “Not Bridge. Mom.”

  And she’s there. My little sister approaching from behind Franny and squeezing into the space between us. Looking up at me.

  “Mom left us,” she says.

  “Why?”

  I’m not expecting an answer from her. But she offers one anyway.

  “I’m not sure. But I think she went to look for Dad.”

  38

  NOBODY SAW HER LEAVE. THE others were keeping to themselves, waiting for Lauren and me to return, and then Franny noticed the front door was unlocked and Mom was nowhere to be found inside. Jerry offered to go out and look for her but Franny begged him not to. There were forces trying to pull them apart—something the Tall Man and the old woman were part of, but more powerful than the two of them put together—and they had to resist.

  “We have to find her!” Bridge shouts at me when I lean against the foyer’s wall to avoid slumping to the floor.

  “I know. I—”

  “Aaron!”

  “Just give me a second. Just—”

  “Please! It’s our mother—”

  “Stop it!”

  Franny’s shout quiets both of us.

  “It’s scary that Mom’s not here, Bridge,” she goes on once all of us are looking at her. “I’m fucking scared too. But now is the time to work through things. Be smart. Wouldn’t Mom want that? For you to do the right thing not just for her but for everybody?”

  This reaches Bridge the same as it reaches me.

  “Yes,” she says.

  Bridge sits cross-legged on the floor. A student who’s made a presentation and now it’s someone else’s turn.

  Jerry and Ezra take the opportunity to ask me and Lauren questions. When we’re finished relating the exchange we had with the delivery man, Jerry speaks for us all.

  “Nobody’s coming for us.”

  Lauren attempts to reason how there must be people who know we’re here, that they wouldn’t just leave us like this.

  “Nobody’s coming,” he says again. “Fogarty said thirty days. Maybe they’ll open the gate, maybe not. But we’re on our own until then.”

  Now that we hear someone say it all other possibilities dissolve.

  We talk about whether or not we should look for Mom. Without referencing Franny’s earlier mention of “forces” or what happened to Elias, it’s decided it’s too dangerous to just fan out into the woods calling her name like we’re searching for a lost dog. We’ll wait until late afternoon to see if she comes back on her own. If not, we’ll consider our alternatives.

  All I want is to rest. Talk with Bridge about anything other than what’s happening so that the fear I can see in the way she’s now breathing through her mouth instead of her nose might be quieted. But Franny won’t let me. She pulls me into her room and closes the door.

  “I saw him, Aaron.”

  She means Dad. I’m so sure of this I can see him too, waving at us through the great room’s windows, laughing in the superior way he did when we’d tell him the bedtime stories he told were too scary, as if the only humor he responded to was seeing how unstoppably the seeds of irrationality could grow in inferior minds.

  Which means Dad isn’t dead.

  Which means this really is only a game. Soon Elias will walk in wiping the dirt of his grave off his face. Fogarty will show himself too, ask if he can keep the silk Princeton tie as a souvenir. The limo drivers will arrive to return our phones and laugh as they pull corks from champagne bottles. It’s over. We can go home, wherever that might be or how it might be changed after Belfountain.

  Then again, it could be another kind of game altogether. One that was never intended for anyone to win.

  “He was there, just outside the window. While you were gone,” Franny goes on. “It was him. It was Nate.”

  Who’s that? I almost say. A second of forgetting followed by a burning shame.

  “You’re under a lot of stress,” I hear myself say, my voice as empty as the words it speaks.

  “This wasn’t stress. This was my son. This was Nate. He was there. Looking through the glass like a kid at the zoo. He was cold. He was shivering, Aaron.”

  “He wasn’t there, Franny.”

  “Because he’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way.”

  “That’s grief. That’s denial.”

  “You’re telling me about denial? About grief?”

  “I was only—”

  “I’m not arguing. I need you to understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  Franny takes a moment to line up the words in her head.

  “I’m not sure what dead or alive mean anymore,” she manages finally, slow as someone reading a book aloud by candlelight. “This side of the fence or the other. All those lines, those boundaries. They’re not what we thought they were.”

  “What are they then?”

  “They’re stories.”

  Franny doesn’t look well. If anything, she’s gained weight since coming here, but it’s been added to parts of her that needed it least. Her jawline, her hands. She appears swollen instead of well nourished.

  “Ghosts aren’t real,” I say.

  “But in stories they can be. When Dad talked about this place, they were.”

  I’m back to where I’ve always found myself with Franny. Even during her good stretches, we’d come to the point where she revealed herself to be less strong than she proclaimed, less changed for the better. The circle always returned to the essential Franny: making empty assurances or spinning ridiculous narratives of conspiracy and victimhood. The only thing different about this time from all the others is that even as I see her as having lost her hold on reality, I don’t entirely disagree with her.

  “I miss him too, Franny,” I say. “I miss Nate too.”

  They’re magic words that achieve two things. The first is how they bring Franny to hold me close. The second is how they show me how much I do miss him, that my sister’s not the only one who’s been broken by the way her son was taken from the world.

  39

  I MUST HAVE FALLEN ASLEEP on Franny’s bed. When my eyes open, bridge is there, sitting in a chair in the corner of the room.

  “Hey there,” I say.

  “Hey.”

  “How’re you doing?”

  “Take a wild guess.”

  “Worried about Mom. About everything.”

  “Aren’t you?”

&n
bsp; I’m worried about you.

  “Of course,” I say.

  Only then do I notice the box resting on Bridge’s lap.

  “Whatcha got there?”

  “That’s what I want to show you.”

  She pulls her chair closer into the circle of light from the lamp on the table. I look at her to continue, but she says nothing, only glancing down at the box.

  “What’s in it?” I ask.

  “That part’s interesting. But so is the box.”

  “How?”

  “Look again.”

  So I do. As if new particulars have been added to it as we spoke, I see it for what it is. A tackle box. The same one I opened to pull out the silver X-Acto blade I used to cut a hole in Bridge’s throat.

  “How did you bring that in?”

  “I didn’t. I found it.”

  “Where?”

  “In the shed. Yesterday, when the rest of you were looking for shovels and tools. I saw it right away and brought it inside.”

  She sets it on the bed. Its reality deepens without my touching it. An enhanced, hyperrealism to the bulbous handle, the scratches in its paint that show the steel beneath.

  “How’d it get here?” I ask.

  “Dad must have brought it.”

  “Why? There’re no rivers or lakes I’ve seen to do any fishing.”

  “He wasn’t using it to fish.”

  I’m supposed to open it. I think of those potato chip cans with springs inside that look like snakes that leap out when you pull off the lid. Then I think of worse things.

  The lid is cold to the touch, as if Bridge had hidden it in the freezer. It requires one hand to grip the box and another to wrench the lid up, which comes away with grinding complaint.

  I have to lean directly over its dark insides to see what’s there.

  A key. Different from any car or house key I’ve seen. The neck rounded and long, the jagged end cut more deeply and numerously, so that it looks like the mouth of a miniature creature, grinning.

  “Was there anything else in here?”

  “Nope.”

  “Does anyone know about this? Even Franny or Mom?”

  “Just you.” She’s not looking at the key. She’s looking at me. “You know what it opens, don’t you?”

  “I have an idea.”

  Bridge has aged in the last two days. I have a similar initial impression every Tuesday when we meet. She’s growing up. But this is only what it is to be fourteen years old. Going around shocking the people who know you with all the ways you’re not how they remember you or how they would prefer to hold you in time.

  “It’s not the fence we have to get over, Aaron,” she says. “It’s something else we have to find.”

  I’ve read a study about how married couples can read each other’s minds. Not just anticipate the other’s decisions and actions based on precedent, but complex webs of reasoning dictated almost word for word, picked up from the other like a radio signal. It’s also true between brothers and sisters at least some of the time.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll go.”

  “You’re not leaving me behind again,” she says, and slams the tackle box’s lid closed so hard I’m worried someone will hear it all the way down the hall.

  “It’s not safe, Bridge. And I—”

  “Why are you always doing that?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Pretending you’re the brave big brother even when you’re scared shitless. It’s not an act, Aaron. Being the Good Guy isn’t the same thing as being good. Being you.”

  She almost yells this, and what’s far more alarming than any concern she’s been heard outside the room is how acute her frustration is.

  “You’re right. I’ve got that mixed up my whole life,” I say. “But here’s the deal. I care about you. Mom and Franny too. My patients. I want everyone to be okay and I’ll put on the Good Guy costume—no matter how bad it fits me, no matter how itchy it feels—if it helps make that happen.”

  “You are good, Aaron. But that doesn’t mean you have to be alone.”

  This hits me harder than her raised voice of a moment ago. It’s the simple truth of it that’s so striking.

  “Okay,” I say. “Come with me.”

  She doesn’t need to hear where I might take her. We’re together in this now, no more leaving her hiding under beds pretending it will make a difference. I won’t go without her, and she’s prepared to wait for the next step.

  “Take it,” she says, and I pull the key out, half expecting it to be sharp enough to cut me.

  “What about the box?”

  Bridge has it under her arm as she goes to the door.

  “This?” she says. “This doesn’t mean anything to anyone but us.”

  • • •

  We start a fire in the great room’s hearth because it’s something to do. Soon the heat from the blaze has all of us sweating, keeping as far back as the room allows, waiting for the flames to die down.

  “Maybe Mom will smell the smoke and follow it back,” Franny offers.

  Nobody replies to this. I don’t think any of us can picture Mom pushing through the underbrush, led home by her sniffing nose. And then there’s the consideration of what else might be drawn out of the forest.

  Once the fire has calmed, Jerry smothers it in ash, and it hisses and pops with demonic threats.

  “There’s about two hours of daylight left,” he says when he turns to us. “Either we go out there now and try to find your mom, or we let her go it alone all night.”

  “She’s not strong enough,” Franny says to me, and I take her not to mean Mom’s chances of surviving a meeting with the Tall Man, but the night itself. I can’t say I disagree. The thought of our mother poking around somewhere out in Belfountain’s hundreds of acres isn’t sustainable for long before it collapses, dissolving like a sugar cube in a warm rain.

  “So we do a search,” I say. “Two groups, with somebody staying behind to man the fort.”

  Bridge comes to stand next to me, indicating her intentions. Lauren raises her hand.

  “Could you use a third?” she asks.

  I look to Bridge, who nods. “Sure. Jerry and Ezra, you good?”

  “Good to go,” Jerry says.

  All of us separate to collect headlamps and water, but I stay where I am to speak to Franny.

  “You okay with this?”

  “What do I have to do? Not open the door? Yeah, I think I can handle that.”

  “It means you’re going to be here on your own.”

  Franny slips her hand into the front pouch of the hoodie she wears. Pulls out the gift Dad left for her. Nate’s baby rattle.

  “I won’t be alone,” she says.

  “Let’s go! I want us back by dark,” Jerry calls out, and I leave Franny where she stands, swaying from side to side as if rocking an infant to sleep.

  40

  BRIDGE STARTS FOR THE GREEN trailhead before anyone else decides which way they’ll go. Lauren and I follow after her. Once the trees have obscured the lodge from view behind us and we’re well out of earshot, I ask Bridge why we’re going this way.

  “This is where you found the way to the camp, right?”

  “Yeah. But I’m not sure I can remember the exact direction I took.”

  Bridge turns to face us. Pulls her compass out. “You find the side trail that took you there. I’ll take care of the coordinates.”

  “Hold up,” Lauren interjects. “What camp? What’s happening here?”

  I look to Bridge. “Can I tell her?”

  Bridge comes back to take Lauren’s hand. “Lauren should know everything,” she says. “But let’s keep moving while you talk. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “So we’re not looking for your mom anymore?” Lauren asks.

  “We’re looking for her,” Bridge says. “We’re also looking for a way out.”

  Bridge pulls on Lauren’s hand, and the three of us march up the trail’s steady
grade, the forest’s air heavy in our throats.

  • • •

  The born-again Christian camp. The underground gate. The key.

  I bring Lauren up to speed as swiftly as I can, in part because I’m also keeping an eye out for the side trail, in part because it all sounds less unsettling with some of the details edited out. The claustrophobic darkness of the stairwell under the walk-in freezer. The sense that some living thing breathed on the other side of the door.

  When I’m finished, she doesn’t say anything, and I wonder if it was a mistake sharing any of it with her. Bridge and I have a history, a trust that goes without question. The two of us like Lauren, and based on that we brought her in, but we’ve overlooked that she belongs to a different family from ours. She’s obliged to tell Jerry and Ezra about all this just as I was to tell Bridge, and now she’ll turn and start back.

  But that’s not what she does.

  “I’m assuming you don’t want my brothers in on this?” she asks finally.

  “This puts you in a difficult situation, and I’m sorry about—”

  “Just tell me, Aaron.”

  “No. We’d like it kept between ourselves for now.”

  “Fine. I think that’s the best way to go too,” she says, putting her hand on Bridge’s shoulder. “Let’s see if that key works.”

  Just when I start to think there’s no way I’m going to find the path I started off on before coming upon the camp, I stop at a divot in the soft ground off to the right. My shoe print. Already partly overgrown in a weaving of grass and clover.

  “This way,” I say.

  “Wait,” Bridge says, pulling a small notebook out. She scribbles down the readings, the estimated distance we’ve traveled from the lodge, the side trail’s direction. When she’s done, she signals for me to carry on and the two of them fall in line behind me.

  I’m worried there won’t be time to find the camp, discover we were wrong about the key opening the door, and get back before nightfall. I’m worried even more about what we’ll find if the door can be opened. But I believe Bridge is right. The only possibility of escape isn’t over the fence, or through it, but deeper into the ground beneath our feet. It makes me think of Elias. His body being dropped into the hole. How where he is now, in the cool soil, is closer to the outside than we are.