The Night Archer

by Michael Oren

  Strange, then, the way he murmured “Mom” at the dinner table and pointed to his scoop of potatoes. There, on the crown beside a dollop of butter, was a bright red dot. Then another, on the lambchop, and several stippling his plate.

  “Nothing, hon, a nosebleed.” But there was no stopping the flow, no explaining the pallor, the bruises, and the weight loss. No preventing the doctor from pronouncing the word that made that very same universe shatter.

  And now in the night she stands over him, the patient who never complains, the darling of doctors and nurses, who snorts “Jesus, Mom,” every time she cries. Who, even in sleep, reminds her that there is more to lose than life itself and that she is helpless to save it.

  It’s then that she remembers the dream. Or the memory—she’s not sure which—only that it recurred to her for a reason. Somehow, she knew it would, was yearning for it. The scrunch of mulch and the rich scent of duff. The clearing and the knoll. And the light, most desperately the light. There, in the antiseptic ward, by the glow of her son’s vital signs, she decides to act on the impulse she’s had now for weeks. Stepping out into the corridor, cupping her phone so the medical staff won’t overhear, she makes three improbable calls.

  * * * * *

  The first forces her to distance the phone from her ear. Hooting, applause, a whistle or two, followed by Marla’s laugh, part honk, part thunderclap. She’s backstage at a comedy club, about to go on, but can’t ignore the name on her cell.

  “Randy! Sweetie! Whaaat?”

  Another of Marla’s signatures, that whaaat. Depending on the tone, it could mean “how are you?” or “is this for real?” or “holy shit.” In this case, though, it stands for “why is my camp friend from a zillion years ago suddenly calling?”

  She tells her, trying to sound serious as she shouts.

  “Jessie. Sweetie. That really sucks.”

  She imagines Marla bulging out of that too-tight, too-short outfit she wears when performing, an essential prop in an act about the fat frizzy redhead trying to get laid, about sagging breasts and desiccated vaginas, her fans alternatively tantalized and repelled. Randy has seen her on cable TV and might have been disgusted if not for the memory of Marla going into sixth grade, overweight and outrageous. Marla, who could never be surprised by anything, no matter how weird, responding as she now does to Randy’s request with another ear-splitting laugh. Another “whaaat?” this time meaning “are you nuts?”

  Randy admits, “Yeah, I know,” then explains how all the therapies have failed and that this is her final option. “It happened, Marl. You saw it. We all did. And now we have to go back.”

  “We?”

  “I don’t think I can find my way alone. It might not appear just to me.”

  “And why exactly?”

  “The wish. I didn’t make one…” The silliness of this, once spoken, embarrasses her. Randy considers hanging up but instead breaks out sobbing. “Don’t make me beg!”

  Weeping is the last thing a stand-up needs to hear right before going up, yet it somehow triggers a laugh. “Hey, I’m the one, sweetie, who begs.”

  On stage, Marla’s name is announced and instantly the audience erupts. The phone again flies from Randy’s ear but not so far that she can’t hear Marla’s final whaaat. “Don’t be an idiot,” this one says. “Of course, I’ll come.”

  The next call, made mid-morning in a time zone only one hour behind, catches Jane in the sanctuary. Here, too, there is background noise, but a different kind, softer, sacred. A children’s choir, tremulous voices singing a prayer of some kind, to the tune of Scarborough Fair. Normally, Jane lets nothing interfere with her duties, certainly not an incessantly vibrating phone. But the name on the screen tells her that this interruption is justified. Though she hasn’t spoken with Randy for some time, her attention sapped by professional and personal demands, social media has kept her informed. Laying her guitar on the nearest pew, she steps to the rear of the hall, away from the singing, and summons her tone of condolence.

  “I am so sorry…”

  “Hold on, Jane, nobody’s died,” Randy stammers, resisting the urge to add “yet.”

  “Thank God.”

  “And nobody might if you help.”

  Unlike with Marla, there is no need to explain Randy’s reasoning—or lack of it. Jane already inhabits the world of faith, dwelt in it even as a teenager, as infused with spirituality as others were with hormones. The only one of their foursome to actually say the Sabbath prayers and attend the voluntary services, to succor the weak and befriend the unpopular, and to try to understand what she, Randy, was going through that summer. An infinitely caring soul, Jane’s, but encased in an inadequate body. Even now, Randy imagines her swamped in her robes, a wispy woman bowed by the weight of her skullcap, fragile-featured and wan. And yet, she totally expects Jane to say yes to her proposal, even to coordinate the trip. What she doesn’t anticipate is the cracking voice in her ear, that all but mutes the canticle.

  “I’m going through some stuff in my life just now. Difficult stuff.”

  Randy’s reaction, too, is surprising. “I am going through difficult stuff,” she snaps. “My son’s stuff is difficult.”

  “I understand, of course.”

  Understanding, Randy knows, is the first step to conceding, to acknowledging that a person of her piety cannot ignore the prayers of a half-crazed mother, the pleas of her old Willowbrook friend. That a believer in mana from heaven or the parting of the Red Sea cannot doubt the power of one little marvel in the woods. Randy knows that, without saying so, Jane has already agreed, even as the singing stops and another voice intrudes. Some woman reminding her, “the children are waiting for you, Rabbi Jane,” with cloying petulance. “Our children.”

  A twang of strings escapes the phone as Jane accepts the outstretched guitar. “Coming, love. Sorry,” she apologizes but not to Randy. To her she whispers, “Just tell me when,” before clicking off. “I’ll be there.”

  That leaves Danielle. Who should have been her first call, seeing as she was always the leader, the captain of their team in color war, the fastest runner, swimmer, thinker. Convince Danielle and the others would have followed willingly, just as they did as children. But Danielle was no longer sleeping in a bunk next to them or plotting their course through the trees. Her cabins are now first-class and her planning fiscal. The head of a multi-national firm, she sits in an office high above the city surveying its forest of skyscrapers, handily navigating through.

  Reaching her at that altitude proves exasperating, though. It means wading through pools of secretaries and administrative assistants, all of them asking who she is and why she needs to speak to the president. And how should Randy answer? Tell them that their boss is needed for a reunion with three of her friends, searching for the vision they glimpsed only once but that changed their lives forever? That the life of a boy exactly the same age they were back then might very well depend on it?

  Instead, “Just want to reconnect,” Randy lies. “Five minutes, no more.”

  Finally, she hears her name on the phone. Broken into two even syllables, each one pronounced like a sentence. “How are you?” she inquires and then, when told, says, “Dreadful.”

  “Oh, my God, no!” would be the reply of a fellow mother, but Danielle’s never had kids. Unlike Marla, twice-divorced, and Jane with her longtime wife and their adopted Dominican daughters, Danielle had no time for marriage and easily intimidated men. Most emotions she keeps at a distance—as much an asset in the corporate world as in relationships susceptible to loss. Rather, she stands aloof as she did on the cover of a waiting room magazine Randy once saw, in a custom-made suit and clipped bronze coiffure and an expression both imperious and knowing. A hard, handsome woman with a face devoid of curves, only angles, jagged as broken glass.

  For that reason, though, Danielle is the least likely to agree. Even Randy finds it difficult to picture her plying through the woods today in jeans and sneakers, leading th
em as she once did with aplomb. Not unexpectedly, she hears, “I can’t be away from the firm.”

  Unlike with Marla, there is no sense of empathy to appeal to, none of Jane’s mystical bent. But there is another route. “You be firm,” Randy assuages her, “Show them who’s the boss.”

  “I am the boss,” Danielle declares, seemingly to herself, before coming back to Randy. “Besides, that camp was knocked down ages ago. The forest probably, too.”

  “And if it wasn’t?” Randy persists, “We need you to guide us again.” Subtly, her I has morphed into we. “We can’t do it without you.”

  “No, you couldn’t…”

  Someone enters Danielle’s office, a secretary or junior exec. She’s wanted in the boardroom, he says. Not a request. “Send me the info,” she rasps to Randy. “I’ll schedule it.”

  The line goes dead but for minutes she remains at the nurse’s station, stunned. Randy has won something but she’s unsure what. An irrational hike through non-existent woods to a cave most likely mythic? To recreate a moment perhaps produced by their prepubescent imaginations, that probably never happened at all?

  Orderlies whisk by and downcast visitors shuffle, but Randy’s still staring at her phone. At the screen with its photo of T.J., healthy and beaming in his baseball cap. His smile, alone, suffices to remind her why she’s doing this. And superimposed over her son’s image is her own, shockingly haggard, and behind that, yet another. A palimpsest of an eleven-year-old confused and frightened by the harshness of the world and yet open to the possibility of wonder. Who gazes out across the years and imparts the secret words that not even Randy dared utter. With a finger to her lips and the wink of one innocent eye, the young girl whispers, “the Betsybob.”

  * * * * *

  There were many secret words that summer. “Puke fest” for the bowls of Sloppy Joes served every Wednesday night for dinner and “Gold-digger” for the girl in their bunk fond of nose-picking. “Dartboard,” described their sadly-acned counselor while the captious unit head was “Godzilla.” Willowbrook’s owner, Samantha Shapira, the gauntly elegant Auntie Sam who first interviewed them in her mid-town apartment and now oversaw them from the camp’s highest hill, was simply “God.”

  This was their fourth summer together and their last, though they could not have known the financial crisis the camp was in or their lives’ divergent paths. Rather, they existed in the present, as unaware of the date as they were of the dangers, reveling in a friendship that had no origin they remembered—no common interests or hobbies—only that they were and always would be a team.

  An anomalous team comprised of the reticent, reflective Jane, and Marla, a wisecracking butterball. At its head, Danielle, long-limbed and flaxen-braided, giraffe and gazelle-like in height and speed. And Randy. Like the others, born into a well-to-do home with maids and piano lessons, vacations on capes and ski slopes, but a home that was breaking up. Her father had moved out, leaving her mother in the company of bottles and their daughter alone fearing that the tiniest mis-move, the merest slip, could collapse the remains of her world.

  So she was happy just to tag along, silently for the most part, to witness and keep their secrets. Not yet interested in boys, these focused mainly on nicknames and pranks—short-sheeting bunks and rearranging footlockers—and disseminating rumors both comical and cruel. In impermeable circles, they giggled, they snickered and shared. Girlish in a way that girls can be just before they become women. And feeling inestimably special.

  Randy needed that feeling just then, the summer of her worthlessness, and never questioned Danielle when she proposed even the most devious schemes. Even when she told them about the cave.

  “It’s in the woods. Not too deep. Near the dining hall, there’s a trail…” Danielle’s features, even back then, were razor-like, lacerating the air as she spoke. Her sky-blue eyes seemed to darken. “We follow it, far, but we can’t be afraid ‘cause at the end of it there’s a place with no trees, only this cave, and inside the cave…”

  Marla was already bouncing on her pudgy feet and Jane, if incredulous, was too in love with Danielle to question her. Randy merely listened, feeling both privileged and afraid but saying nothing, nodding as Danielle spoke.

  “Inside the cave is…the counselors’ hideout! Empty beer cars, dirty pictures, maybe even some drugs. We find it,” Danielle declared, “and we will be queens of Willowbrook!”

  Stridently, braces flashing, Marla laughed, and Jane nervously chortled. Randy imagined herself crowned. But when could they do this, how, what with every minute taken up with activities and Auntie Sam observing them from her porch, with a cigarette in one hand and in the other, reportedly, binoculars? “No problem,” Danielle assured them. “I’ve got it all planned.”

  They’d get up the next morning and go through the usual routine—breakfast, flag-raising, inspection—until first period. Then, slipping away from whatever they were doing, archery or crafts, and rendezvousing behind the dining hall, they could hurry to the cave, peep inside, and be back in time for lunch.

  Marla might have objected—first period, drama, was her favorite—and Jane hated to skip guitar lessons, but Danielle’s decision was made. And Randy was only too thrilled to miss swim class, the pond water icy and metallic-tasting. She wouldn’t have to wear the bathing suit that displayed her body in all its formlessness, lusterless hair plastered around a face she, herself, judged nondescript. In the forest, rather, she’d be feather-like, as graceful and shimmering as the fairies her father used to tell her about, nighttimes while putting her to bed.

  And like all of Danielle’s schemes, this one began auspiciously. Each managed to sneak off undetected and meet up at the rear of the dining hall, between the concrete loading dock and cast-iron boilers. From there they embarked. Four girls—lithe and blubbery, diminutive and professedly bland—in their yellow Willowbrook t-shirts and shorts, filed through a break in the woods.

  The trail was not well-trodden. Brambles crisscrossed it, prickling their knees, and sumac that would later inflame their ankles. Mosquitos whined, the deadwood shifted, and for seconds all of them, even Danielle, pictured getting lost, with no trace of them ever found. But forebodings faded the deeper they penetrated the bush. The sun, sluicing through the treetops, backlit the butterflies and bejeweled a single web. Breezes applauded in the leaves. Dripping with dew, the foliage waved them inward.

  But an hour passed, or so they felt, and they could no longer hear the camp’s shouts and whistles, only their sneakers’ crackle. The trail all but disappeared. “Maybe there is no cave,” Marla hazarded, airing the other two’s thoughts. “Maybe we should turn back.”

  But Danielle, supple arms folded, dug in. “It’s here, I know it. Just keep quiet,” she insisted. “Follow me.”

  They followed until the trees converged around them and the day grew unnaturally still. Yet Danielle keep thrashing, snapping off branches as she plunged. The others stumbled after her, panicky, when suddenly they heard her bellow, “Eureka!”

  The clearing they entered was perfectly round, as if deliberately carved from the wild. As though the forest, itself, had recoiled—out of reverence, perhaps, or fear. Once inside the circle, though, they felt a strange sensation, half-tingle, half-kiss, on their skin, and a dizzying intensity of air. Then they heard the music. A high-pitched hum, neither electronic nor human. Angelic.

  “There!” Danielle announced. “It’s coming from there.”

  She was pointing at a knoll rising from the clearing’s center, a heap of rock slightly taller than their heads and ivy-draped. This was it, the home of the cave and its many dirty secrets, the beer cans and cigarette butts. They’d found it! Giddily, they broke into a run, slaloming around half-buried boulders and tree stumps, only to stop abruptly. Shooting through the vines were rays of light so cylindrical they almost looked solid and brighter than any flash.

  Marla exclaimed, “Whaaat?” and the rest of them gasped. But Danielle pressed on. She thrust
her hands between the creepers and pulled them apart as a blast of light sent her reeling. They all did, hands thrust over their faces, with hollers of “Jesus!” and “holy shit!”

  But, as in darkness, their eyes grew accustomed to the blaze. They stood, blinking but otherwise frozen, before a mossy opening smaller than a cave—a grotto, though they would not yet know the word—and inside, a being. That was the only way to describe it, an entity, a presence, for while vaguely flame-shaped with a cowl-like taper at the top, it had no body to speak of, only luminance. And no face except for darker patches, like sunspots, where the eyes could have been, and a translucent line for a mouth. Even those patches seemed to gleam at them. The line curved upward in a smile.

  Randy shuttered and Jane audibly prayed. Marla started chuckling, anxiously, until Danielle told them all to calm down. “I think it wants us to do something.”

  In unison, “Like what?” they replied.

  “I don’t know. Make a wish.”

  “In that case,” Marla chimed. “I want to be famous!” and Jane mumbled something about love.

  “Rich!” Danielle announced and then turned and glared at Randy. They all did, but all she could do was shrug.

  What could she possibly wish for? That her father would come back home, that her mother abandon her bottles, that they would make up and be a family again? No, she couldn’t ask for that, not out loud in front of her friends.

  “Come on, Randy. Wish!”

  She shrugged again and ogled the being in the cave. It seemed to be glimmering right at her. That’s when she remembered the pony. The frisky Shetland she’d always wanted, that would follow her around and nuzzle her, rubbing its velvety nose on her neck. That she would ride, clutching its silvery mane, across beaches and fields of tulips. The pony she fantasized about as a younger child and now ached for. The dappled pony of joy.