by Andrew Pyper
“Maybe. Or maybe I was born in St. Louis or Des Moines or Toronto. For all I know, this is the first time I’ve ever seen the ocean.”
Bridge looks directly at me and waits until I turn to her.
“I have this idea,” she says. “There’re some things we’re born remembering. The ones that are always there no matter what. The stars.” She shifts her eyes back to scan the blue horizon again. “The ocean.”
We remain like this, the tide distant and massive as a crowd marching in the streets.
“What about you?” Bridge asks after the sun slips behind a wayward cloud and a coolness returns us to wakefulness. “What do you remember from the beginning?”
“Just one thing,” I say. “Just you.”
67
IT TAKES A LITTLE OVER an hour to panhandle three dollars. Enough to pay for a half hour on a computer in an internet café, but it turns out we only need five minutes to look up the news stories about the missing Olivia Goldstein and figure out where she lives.
We share a chocolate bar with the leftover change and walk over the course of the afternoon. Neither of us says much. Olivia has a mother and a father and a brother who are about to have the dead returned to them. The thought of this, the startling, frightening joy it will bring, takes hold of our thoughts.
It’s a fancy neighborhood, but in the Seattle manner. Which is to say it’s not about the grandeur of the house, but how well it’s hidden, in this case obscured by a wall of hedge and the junipers behind it.
The two of us stand at the end of the curving drive, peering up at what we can glimpse of the Tudor facade: the basketball net over the closed garage, the uncollected newspapers wrapped in plastic on the front walk, the neglected lawn growing wild.
“They must be so sad,” Bridge says. “You can feel it from way out here.”
“Not for long. You’ve come back.”
“Yeah. I’ve come back.”
I wait for her to move but she only looks at the GOLDSTEIN stenciled on the mailbox and then back up at the house.
“They’re strangers,” she says.
“They’re your family.”
“But I don’t remember them.”
“It’ll come back. And if it doesn’t, you’ll learn. They’ll help you.”
“What about you? What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you going to go away? Will I—”
“I’m not going anywhere. Nowhere far.”
Later, I’ll try to recall if she was crying when she put her arms around me, gentle as she could so as not to disturb the bandages over my cuts. It’s because it was hard for me to see her face through my own tears, which came without warning and wouldn’t stop.
When she pulls away, she squeezes my hand twice. Our code.
I squeeze hers back. One time. One more.
“See you Tuesday?”
She doesn’t understand for a second, and then it comes back. Our standing dinner arrangement. The secrets shared over tables in Chuck E. Cheese or downtown oyster bars. She laughs without making a sound.
“Tuesday,” she says before she turns and starts up the drive.
• • •
I stay there for a time. It’s hard to say how long.
Piece by piece the world tells me. The spinning leaves of an oak in a neighbor’s yard. The distressed yowl of a cat. The smell of the sea. All of it asking the same thing.
What now? What now? What now?
Maybe freedom always feels like this.
My file is still folded in my pocket. The answer to who I really am that, with each breath, feels more disposable.
Where does the path lead after it ends?
I take a step. And another. Each one a little faster than the one before, testing my strength. Nameless and unhistoried and light.
I’ll go on.
I’ll run.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Anne McDermid, Peter McGuigan, Chris Bucci, Jason Richman, Kevin Hanson, Laurie Grassi, Crissie Johnson Molina, Siobhan Doody, Nita Pronovost, Catherine Whiteside, Sarah St. Pierre, Randall Perry (and the whole team at Simon & Schuster Canada).
To my children, Maude and Ford, and to my wife, Heidi, thank you for listening to the idea early on and nudging me in the right directions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HEIDI PYPER
ANDREW PYPER is the author of The Only Child, which was an instant national bestseller in Canada. He is also the author of seven previous novels, including The Demonologist, which won the International Thriller Writers award for best hardcover novel and was selected for The Globe and Mail’s best 100 books and Amazon’s top twenty best books. The Killing Circle was a New York Times best crime novel of the year. Three of Pyper’s novels, including The Homecoming, are in active development for feature film and television. He lives in Toronto. Visit AndrewPyper.com and follow him on Twitter @andrewpyper.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
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ALSO BY ANDREW PYPER
The Only Child
The Damned
The Demonologist
The Guardians
The Killing Circle
The Wildfire Season
The Trade Mission
Lost Girls
Kiss Me (Stories)
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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This Simon & Schuster Canada edition February 2019
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cover design by Sian Wilson
Author photograph by Heidi Pyper
Pyper, Andrew, 1968–, author
The homecoming / Andrew Pyper.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-982108-97-7 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-982108-98-4 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS8581.Y64H66 2019 C813'.54 C2018-903482-3
C2018-903483-1
ISBN 978-1-9821-0897-7
ISBN 978-1-9821-0898-4 (ebook)