The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  “The watch,” I say, voicing my observation at the same time I take note of it. “The one Dad gave the twins.”

  “What about it?”

  “You’re wearing it.”

  Jerry looks cross-eyed at the Bulova on his wrist. “Nice, right?”

  “Ezra left it with Elias when we buried him.”

  “And I dug it out,” Jerry says. “No point leaving one of the only souvenirs from dear old Dad in the dirt like that.”

  Jerry shifts focus from the watch to us. Grips the knife in his right hand and waves it in front of him. It pushes the three of us back deeper into the cabin’s living room. When the backs of our legs hit the sofa’s edge, he holds up his hands for us to stop.

  “Seeing as you’re curious, I don’t remember everything,” he says. “But yeah, I’ve got some ideas.”

  “Who were you?” Lauren asks.

  “A serviceman. Maybe a cop. But then I was given another assignment when the priorities got switched up. Domestic security.”

  “What did you do?”

  “The good stuff. Illegals. We were given quite a bit of latitude. And what I mean by that is we could do absolutely whatever the fuck we wanted.”

  Jerry shakes his head as if at the recollection of a college stunt, an accomplishment that, while perhaps foolish, demonstrated the boldness and stamina of his younger self.

  “I remember them, that’s for sure,” he says, his amusement now curdling with something else, poisonous even for him. “How terrified they were. Some of them saw us coming and literally shit their pants. And we hadn’t even done anything yet.”

  “Why?”

  This is Bridge. Her voice firm but without accusation. The steadiness of a prosecutor bringing a witness to the place they must go.

  “Why what, sweetheart?”

  “Why kill your brothers?”

  Jerry shakes his head and gives Lauren a Can you believe this? look.

  “Well, first off,” he says, “they weren’t my brothers.”

  “But you didn’t know that when you did it.”

  “You got me there,” he says, making a sucking pop with the inside of his cheek. “I guess I’m just exercising my rights and freedoms. It’s what smart people do. So when we got driven up here and I saw there was thirty million on the table and that there was nobody to tell me what I could and couldn’t do—well, I seized the day.”

  “By killing Elias.”

  “You got to start somewhere. And I started when I walked into that big house and saw that pretty little hatchet by the fireplace. All polished up like this designer feature. I figured I could put a few scratches in it. And I did. But then Ezra heard me working on Elias out in the woods, and I had to leave the blade in him. When we all came out and it was gone—that’s when I was sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “That the homeless guy—or whoever he is—he’d be my cover. That once he took the hatchet you’d all figure it was him. I mean, I would have done it all anyway most likely. But sometimes the breaks go your way, know what I’m saying?”

  He shifts his hungry gaze from Lauren to Bridge, and for the first time I see the potential in him for actions worse than killing. Ways of hurting intended only for the pleasure in delivering the hurt, watching what it did.

  “Why did you let us go to the fence?” I ask him, drawing his attention to me instead of them. “It looked like you wanted out as much as the rest of us.”

  “I couldn’t take you all down at the same time. So I had to go with the flow. But even if that gate opened, I doubt any of you would have made it through.”

  Jerry straightens his knees, stands at his full height. A motion that is the precursor to something else.

  “Listen to me,” I say, and he does, but only partly. “There’s no money. No estate. We didn’t know that before. But we do now. Getting rid of them—of us—isn’t going to make your cut any bigger.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe not.”

  “Jerry, please. We won’t say anything—”

  He comes at us as I speak and Franny sees it all before I do.

  Sees the blade drive into her. Hears the screech of the steel as it grinds against the bottom rung of her ribs. Screams the second before it happens.

  The knife is pulled away almost as quickly as it goes in.

  Once it’s out Franny goes quiet. As if her pain was activated by a circuit that’s been broken, leaving her puzzled and then, when she looks down to see what comes out of her, astonished.

  She sidesteps away. An attempt to recover her balance but she can’t, and she slams against the wall and slides down the paneling to the floor. Nothing moves but her hands. Scrambling into the pouch sewn into the front of her hoodie like a pair of spiders trying to find shelter from the rain.

  The four of us watch her.

  “How’s that?” Jerry says to himself. At first intrigued, then awestruck. “How’s that?”

  I’m moving as he speaks. Going at him. A good-sized man slamming into a smaller, thicker man who remembers how these things go.

  But I remember too.

  Something from my life before that is familiar with the shifts required to throw a body to the floor. The simultaneous struggles to get on top. To hold arms under the weight of knees. To push down with the thumbs into the cradles of bone that hold the eyes.

  I remember this but forgot he has the knife.

  He’s under me, pinned at the shoulders. It allows him to bring the blade up but limits the arc to the length of his forearm. Still, it’s a good enough reach to cut me.

  The pain rolls me off him and I end up next to Franny against the wall. Her eyes frozen, mouth agape. Her characteristically mocking face.

  I look up in time to see Lauren starting toward Jerry where he still lies on the floor, her leg pulling back to deliver a kick to his head. The knife stops her. Raised and warding her off like a crucifix holding a vampire at bay.

  He takes his time getting to his feet. Blinking, rolling his shoulders.

  “That shouldn’t be too long,” he says, referring to my wound. The slice he made to the soft flesh at the top of my chest.

  He will make more cuts now.

  There will be nothing I’ll be able to do as he steps over and brings the knife down where I’m slumped, my legs jerking at the knees. He’ll do it again and again.

  What he actually does is worse.

  “Let’s go,” he says, turning to Bridge and Lauren.

  Lauren takes Bridge’s hand and opens the door. The two of them wait there in the pale light that blinds me nonetheless.

  Before she goes, Bridge looks back at me.

  The dark is coming. It could be death, it could be one of the increments along the way. All I’m sure of is how the core of me has gone prickly and cold.

  Jerry is nothing but a smudge of shadow in the doorframe, leering in and out of focus. But I can still see his teeth. The upper row of perfectly aligned slabs like a miniature, marble wall.

  “You look like all the others,” he says, an observation that provokes what sounds like pity in him, but it’s not that.

  There’s a throbbing in my throat that wasn’t there a second ago. Something trying to come up. Hard as stone, turning and scratching.

  I open my mouth and what comes out is my sister’s name but I’m the only one to hear it. And then even I’m not here anymore.

  57

  I REMEMBER EVERYTHING.

  A July afternoon so hot it thickened the waves to syrup. Standing at the edge of the shore’s highest boulder—

  One-ah, two-ah—

  Then everything went dark.

  Thinking you’d been under too long—

  My sister. My little sister.

  Broken phrases. Coming to me out of the air. Trying to recall how they fit together, the precise wording, helps bring me back. Lifted into consciousness by threads of meaning.

  The little sister is real, even if the memory isn’t.

  Bridge.


  He took Bridge.

  Moving hurts but not as much as I’m expecting. I’m able to sit up, straighten my legs. I’ve made the same mistake that Jerry had in overestimating the extent of the damage his knife did. He thought I would bleed out, but the cut isn’t so deep. I slip my hand under my shirt and feel the skin below my shoulder. It’s almost dried, the bleeding mostly slowed. If it opens up again, it may still bring me down. Just not now.

  Before I attempt to rise, I notice how one of Franny’s hands has slipped out of her hoodie’s pouch. The fingers wrapped around the baby rattle Dad left for her. The hand-painted birds flying over a Japanese lake.

  I stand up. Franny seems to congratulate me for this simple triumph with her look of mock amazement.

  “I’ll find her,” I say.

  A promise made to the dead. A stranger I’ve known my whole life.

  • • •

  I wonder if it’s the lack of food or water or blood that makes the air feel so cool on my skin. In typical Pacific Northwest fashion, it has never been outright hot nor cold in Belfountain. But there’s a damp weight to the place now, a pressure, like a drizzle of soil falling over me.

  I’m curving back along the Red trail. That maddening switchback feels like it’s only inching me closer to the lodge when I see something up ahead.

  The witch laughs when I spot her.

  “Where did they go?” I shout, my voice so hoarse it’s on the verge of evaporating.

  The old woman flaps her hands with the excitement of a child.

  “Where did he take them?”

  She plows away into the deeper bush.

  It’s all I can do to keep up with her. It’s not her speed so much as the way she doesn’t seem to feel the thrashings and bites of the branches and roots. I let them thrash and bite me too.

  She’s leading me nowhere. I see this too late.

  We aren’t going to Bridge or the lodge or a secret passage through the fence. She’s a madwoman doing a mad thing and all it means is I’ve wasted time I don’t have.

  “Wait!” I call to her. “Wait!”

  She keeps going as if she hadn’t heard me. It makes me even more furious. Rushing up to her and, when I’m close enough, grabbing her arm so that she looks at me.

  “Where is she?” I gasp at her. “Where’s my sister?”

  There isn’t anything in her face to indicate comprehension. All that reaches me is the smell of her. Salty and mineral like a creature of the sea.

  Her free arm lifts up. Points through the trees.

  It can’t be there. But it is.

  The house I grew up in. The Cape Cod with a red-brick chimney and the Stars and Stripes hanging limp from a pole out front. Exactly as I remember it except it’s here, gardenless, in the middle of Belfountain’s woods.

  The front door opens.

  I back away, but now it’s the old woman’s turn to hold me by the arm, her grip strong. She knows who’s opened the door. She wants me to see too.

  A figure steps out. It takes a second to match its identity to a living person, because the person who’s there isn’t alive.

  She waves.

  My mother. Welcoming me home.

  58

  SHE KEEPS STANDING THERE. KEEPS waving.

  I go to her and the old woman follows just behind me. When I reach the porch, Mom seems to give a signal, a half wink I’m not sure has even happened, and the witch stops at the bottom of the steps.

  “Come in, Aaron,” she says, backstepping deeper into the front hall.

  It’s my mother speaking. Telling me to do something, which means I do it. But this moment, one that ought to provide familiarity and comfort, delivers only the opposite. Walking over the threshold into my home to approach my mother in the hallway is the most frightening thing I’ve done.

  “What happened to you?” I ask her.

  “I was here,” she says, not sounding like herself, not like she did before. A barely masked impatience, the hostility that comes with seeing others as standing in the way of where you alone can go. “And there.”

  “This is wrong.”

  “What is?”

  “You.” She backs away from me. A retreat that instead of making me feel safe communicates a threat. “Who are you?”

  “Well, you know who I’m not.”

  It comes to me then. How Mom’s file hadn’t been among the others Franny found. How there hadn’t been a pod with her name on it.

  “Who are you?” I ask again.

  “Aaron. Don’t move, okay? Don’t—”

  “Where’s Bridge?”

  “There’s no need—”

  “Tell me where she is!”

  She reaches for something around the corner behind her. A countertop that, from memory, held the notepads and mug with pens and pencils. When her hand returns to view, it’s holding a revolver.

  “The living room,” she says.

  The interior here is as I remember it too. But I can also see the evidence of haste in its construction: nailheads poking out where they hadn’t been entirely hammered in, sections of exposed plywood wall, the way the Laura Ashley wallpaper doesn’t reach all the way to the ceiling. In the corners there are stray crates marked ’80s and ’90s and inside them random items: a rotary-dial phone, packs of Marlboros, a Rubik’s Cube. On the glass coffee table a variety of magazines from different periods of the past: Michael Jackson on the cover of Time, a Sports Illustrated with the Blue Jays winning their second World Series in a row, a stack of yellow-spined National Geographics.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s nothing.”

  She considers this, then nods in the manner of a teacher congratulating an unpromising student for his effort.

  “In fact, it was rather unnecessary in the end,” she says. “We built this place for the photo shoots, the home videos, but we could have done that in any studio. The idea to do it here was to have you and Bridge and Franny spend a little time walking around the space, absorbing it all. But it didn’t work. Even half out of it, each of you could tell it was fake. So we ended up having to erase that from you as well.”

  The gun looks alien in her hand, a thing of magic, as if she wields a hissing snake or glowing wand instead of a Beretta. How do I know what kind of gun it is? I feel sure it belongs to a set of knowledge not given to me in the pod. Another piece that’s slipped through. More and more of it is returning. Held back for a time but now too powerful to be resisted, forcing its passage like the tide dissolving a wall of sand.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “What a question!” she exclaims, and flutters her free hand over her heart. Yet her expression doesn’t match the horrified intent of her gesture. She remains detached, observing me.

  “Are you going to tell me or not?”

  “I’ll confess to improvising at this point, Aaron,” she says. “My current thinking is that I need to find the others, particularly that half brother of yours, once he’s done with whatever he’s up to. You may well be helpful in accomplishing that. You’re motivated, aren’t you? A surprise. Your profile didn’t suggest that you’d be the most emotionally involved of the group, but I’m rather proud of the impact that the imprinting had on you.”

  She moves to stand with her back to the bay window so that to look at her leaves me squinting to see her through a corona of light.

  “We have a little time,” she says in the brisk tone of an executive heading up some marketing spitballing session. “I’d be curious to know how you’re responding to all this.”

  I want you to suffer. I want to squeeze your throat closed and never let go. I want you to feel what it is to have not just one but two lives taken from you.

  “Not well,” I say.

  “Do you have any specific queries?”

  “Where’s Bridge?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Really? You’re sticking with the devoted big brother arc?”

  “Where is she?”
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br />   “With Jerry somewhere. Care for me to speculate?”

  She’s clearly bored by this—the concern of one doomed subject over the fate of another doomed subject—and there’s a risk of losing her interest.

  “Please don’t,” I say. “Tell me about Yourstory instead.”

  “You found your files, along with some of the promotional documents. Were they not clear?”

  “What I don’t understand—how all this—what do you call it? The business model. If you take this to market, how do you get away with destroying people like this?”

  “Destroying doesn’t strike me as remotely the right term, Aaron.” She clears her throat to articulate a string of words she’s said before so many times they come out by rote. “People want oblivion, Aaron. It allows them to carve something new out of the ashes. It’s what will make Yourstory possibly the most important, transformative therapy since early humans devised their first god to pray to.”

  “And you own it,” I say, the words prompting a wave of physical illness that almost silences me. “You’re the ‘Dad.’ Ray Quinlan. The workaholic with all the secrets. You fashioned him after yourself.”

  “I gave him some of my best lines too.”

  “So this place—Belfountain—it’s all yours.”

  “It’s special, isn’t it? There were a few parcels like it elsewhere—some I could have set up with more straightforward construction, to be honest—but it was the old summer camp that sold me. All those Bible-thumpy messages about forgiveness, new life. Born again! Not to mention the additional advantages of having Camp Belfountain already marked on the maps so all the excavation that had to be done could happen under existing structures. Dig a hole right under the old dining hall and connect it to a cave system. If you happened to be looking at the site from a satellite, you wouldn’t think anything had gone on down there in thirty years.”

  “It must have cost a fortune,” I say, and it comes out with unintended admiration.

  “Fortunately, I was in possession of a fortune. I sold some neural implantation patents a few years ago—really interesting stuff, emotional variation, antidepressive stimulation, amazingly lucrative pharmacological alternatives. But making sad people less sad wasn’t my real interest.”