by Robert Levy
“Okay, then.” Jason stood. “I’m sorry, but we have a lot of ground to cover. And since it’s getting late . . .”
He turned toward the door but Gabe shot up from the couch. “Wait,” the boy said, and grabbed Jason’s arm. “Please.”
Jason stared at Gabe’s hand for a moment before he shook it off. “Let’s go.”
“Jason!” Gabe lunged to take hold of his arm again. “Please. Sit down.”
“Others have been taken,” Cronin said, standing himself now. “The cops won’t admit it but it’s documented. Your friend—you might not know who he really is, but I do. He’s one of them. The night I saw the lights—”
“I’ve heard enough.” Jason stepped to Cronin so fast that without so much as laying a hand on him, the man fell back into his seat. “We can’t start chasing phantoms right now. I need some concrete answers. Something real, you know?”
“Suit yourself.” Cronin shrugged and stared at his scarred knuckles, his cigarette burned down to the filter. “If you’re not ready, you’re not ready.” He looked at Gabe. “But when you are, we can discuss it further.”
“Thank you for your time,” Gabe said. He shook the man’s hand and waited for Jason to follow suit, which he did, finally and reluctantly.
On their way out the door, Cronin handed Gabe a stack of yellowed papers that reminded Jason of the mimeographed worksheets from his elementary school days. “A little bedtime reading,” Cronin said. “For those with an open mind.”
Jason could feel the man’s eyes burning a hole in the back of his head as he and Gabe walked to the car, the sensation lingering long after they pulled out of the driveway and onto the main road.
As the car ascended Kelly’s Mountain, the sky blue but for a thread of gray clouds over the horizon, Jason thought about Cronin navigating the very same route that long-ago night. As delusional as the man was, he was no liar; he really did believe he’d seen the mysterious beings he had tried to describe. But if magical alien fairies really did take Elisa and Blue—to breed them, Jason thought, and laughed out loud, howling up through the Caddy’s open sunroof—then there wasn’t a goddamned thing anyone could do about it.
An image shuddered inside his head, one of Blue and Elisa. Their hands upon one another, hungry and desirous like rutting animals, all flesh and savage sex . . . It was an imagined home movie that Jason had rewound and replayed many times over many months, never more so than the past few days.
Jason pushed the thought away. “Ultraterrestrials,” he said. “Can you believe that guy?”
Gabe let out a quiet titter from the passenger seat, imitative of a laugh. Other than that, he was silent, absorbed in Fred Cronin’s decomposing papers.
“Wait.” Gabe clenched the pages in his hands. “Wait a second. Stop the car.”
“What? What is it?”
“Pull the car over. Now. You have to see these.”
Jason’s first thought was that the newsletters were a hoax. Fred Cronin could have come up with the story only yesterday, spun it whole cloth after Blue and Elisa’s disappearance. But no. The crumbling circulars emblazoned with the Starling Cove Believer nameplate were authentic, dashed off years ago on a dinosaur of a printing press. Twenty-five years come and gone since a boy named Michael Whitley vanished, in this very stretch of woods. The first time.
They pored over the documents, pages and pages of reflections on various supernatural occurrences in and around the cove, including the disappearance of “The Starling Cove Hansel and Gretel,” as Cronin had dubbed them. In October 1981, two young children, Blue and a girl named Gavina Beaton, went missing one afternoon without a trace. Cronin included references, quotes, and reproductions of articles from legitimate press like the Cape Breton Post. Though there was a local panic involving vague accounts of a drifter seen camping in the vicinity, the authorities seemed to have had few leads. Eerily, the search was hampered by forest fires, then as now.
Two weeks after the disappearance, Blue and the Beaton girl wandered out of the woods. They behaved as if nothing had happened; both claimed to have no recollection of their time away, in the woods or otherwise. According to Cronin’s account, however, there was far more to the story than the police, the media, or the children’s families would let on. His papers didn’t claim to have any firm answers, though they contained a great deal of loony speculation about who might have wanted the children and why.
The newsletters were peppered with references to local media coverage, ink-smudged phrases with erratic capitalization: “WHAT The CAPE Breton POSt does NOT want you to KNOW is that tho there was no SIGN of abuse the children were found NAKED. This indicates a possible GENETIC and/OR personality RECONFIGURATION such as is found consistently in abduction LITERATURE across the GLOBE.” As the story developed, Cronin’s dispatches became increasingly bizarre, insisting that despite all appearances, the children who returned from the woods were not the same as the ones who had gone missing. “THEYre rePLACEments. THEYre reCONSTRUCTEd BEings, disGUISEd and possibly malEVOLent. Why do THEY NEED us?!”
“Sure, he’s a bit of an oddball,” Detective Jessed said over the phone as nightfall settled across the cove. “But Fred’s harmless. Trust me on that.”
“I wasn’t saying he might be involved,” Jason said, though his implication in calling the police had been exactly that. “I just thought it was interesting that he was the only one who put together the fact that as of thirteen days ago, Michael Whitley has gone missing in these parts not once but twice now. Don’t you find that unusual?”
The detective breathed into the receiver; it might have been a sigh of exasperation. “We’re aware of Mr. Whitley’s history in our community.”
“What? Since when?”
“It’s nothing to be concerned with at this time. We’ve asked the press not to report on certain details of the case—extraneous or otherwise—that might jeopardize the investigation. Of course, that never stopped Fred much. Excuse me one second.” Jessed sounded as if he was thumbing through papers. “In any case, you should rest assured that the department has been exploring every angle. We want you to know that we won’t stop until we’ve found the both of them. But as you know, we have our hands full with the fires on the mountain.”
“The fires. Right. Tell me, how often do these forest fires happen?”
A long silence. “I understand why you would want us to pursue this angle, Mr. Howard. But let’s focus on facts, and not go chasing after the Devil.”
“All I want—” Jason’s voice caught. “All I want is for you to find them.”
“Of course. Of course. And we will make every effort.”
After he hung up the phone, Jason brooded over their past conversations, searching for a clue as to what the police believed had actually happened. Did they really think that Elisa and Blue had skipped town? He suspected from the start of the whole ordeal that they would be stonewalled, seen as outsiders by the authorities. But now that he grew to understand the cove and the dynamics of its population—mystics and philosophers and draft dodgers, sweat lodgers and marijuana growers and meth cookers—the entire community’s reticence made more sense. How do you go missing from a place people go specifically to get lost?
“That didn’t sound good.” Gabe fed the woodstove before returning to the cracked leather club chair in front of the fire. In his lap were the faded copies of The Starling Cove Believer, which he read and reread with the focus of a code breaker attempting to crack an encrypted cable.
“They already knew about Blue disappearing as a child,” Jason said. “Makes you wonder what else they’re keeping from us.”
Or who else. It was bad enough trying to get in touch with Elisa’s mother, but he had even less success reaching Blue’s. The woman didn’t pick up her phone. The only time Jason had managed to speak with her was the day after the disappearance. Jason was well aware of her deteriorated physical state and tried his best not to alarm her, but she despaired at the news nevertheless,
and in spectacular fashion. “I told him!” she cried in a mournful wail that fast dissolved into a tubercular cough. “I told him. I told him . . .”
“I wouldn’t worry just yet,” Jason had said by way of reassurance. “I only thought you might have some idea where they might have headed. They probably, you know, went on an adventure,” he added, parroting the line the police had used on him.
“Not the first time,” she muttered, and not much else.
Not the first time. Now Jason knew what she had meant.
He picked up the phone again and called the Cape Breton Post reporter who had interviewed him in the days following the disappearance. The woman essentially confirmed Detective Jessed’s account, saying she had been asked not to report on the prior vanishing. When Jason asked her what she thought might have happened, the reporter pleaded ignorance and suggested he take it up with the police. This fresh angle, like all the others, was going nowhere.
He tried to clear his mind by returning calls to his clients, the ones he hadn’t already referred to a colleague with whom he shared offices. At this rate, he thought, I might not have a practice to go back to. “We can pick up right where we left off,” he promised Walt Kerner, a sixty-something phobic with a debilitating case of OCD who refused to be treated by anyone else; it was enough work getting him to his scheduled appointments. “One more week and I’ll be back.”
Jason cursed himself for lying. How could he ever go back to New York, when Elisa was still out there somewhere? But he felt a queasy thrill at the thought that he could hit the road and put the Cape Breton Highlands in the rearview, disappear himself and let someone else clean up the mess for once. Gabe, for example, who would probably stay forever, in his own rudderless way. How terribly unexpected it would be for Jason to up and leave! How very out of character!
Which was why he knew he could never do it. Jason was far too adept at his role, the One Who Makes Everything Better. Even if that phone call from the doctor’s office had meant what he feared (and he was intermittently able to convince himself that in fact it did not), he could never leave. Not unless he was forced.
It was well past dark when Jason finally ended his last phone session. Gabe sat before the woodstove, scribbling furiously as usual in his sketch pad amid an increasing array of reference materials: Fred Cronin’s newsletters, maps and local histories, apocryphal lore culled from the local library and the shelves of the MacLeod House, a growing collection of scrawled-upon pages scattered all around. Jason studied him. They’d gotten along quite well these past few days, the shared activity of the canvass having brought them closer. Though the twenty-year-old was technically a man, Jason couldn’t help but see Gabe as a child, one mixed up in something he had neither the depth for, nor the constitution. Jason had lost his wife, but at times it was Gabe who was distraught to the point of seeming widowed, when he had only lost, what, his boss? A friend? Or more?
In truth, Jason actually didn’t know Gabe terribly well; the boy seemed to have no friends or family to speak of, as if he’d sprung fully formed out of the ether, having just kind of shown up in their lives one day. The day, Jason supposed, that Blue had decided he needed someone else besides Elisa.
It was a subject of gossip—unclear, even to Elisa—if the connection between Blue and Gabe was romantic or not. Blue had drawn more than his fair share of admirers, but their relationship appeared rooted in something greater than base attraction, at least on Gabe’s end. It was obvious the kid adored him, the same way Elisa had. Now here Jason was, stuck in this deceptively bucolic purgatory with no one to lean on but a virtual—and exceedingly young—stranger.
“What?” Gabe caught him staring, and snapped his sketch pad shut. Is he drawing me? Jason wondered. “What is it?”
“Just thinking.” Jason shook his head. “You hungry?”
“Nope.” Gabe raised his beer bottle. “Thanks, though.”
Jason reheated some grilled chicken from the previous evening, food he had set aside for Gabe. Gabe, who never so much as considered eating it, who didn’t seem to eat much of anything anymore, save a handful of sugar cubes or a candy bar here and there. Jason microwaved the plastic-wrapped plate and sat down to eat at the dining room table, mere feet from Gabe and the woodstove. He took his time tasting each bite, allowing the food and a freshly opened bottle of Pinot Noir to rouse him from thoughts of bad endings.
People, after all, had a tendency to vanish on him. His father had cut out on his mom soon after she’d given birth to Jason, having simultaneously knocked up another woman. Even years later, Jason’s mother would drive up to Harlem to deposit him and his older sister, Deirdre, on the doorstep of their father’s apartment as a kind of passive-aggressive reminder of his former family. One night, their mother brought a rusty-handled revolver as well, and blasted a hole in the door, nearly killing their father in the process. Seven-year-old Jason could hear the neighbors laughing at his mother—“Check out this crazy little Oriental bitch!”—as his father’s second wife cursed them down the hall and into the elevator.
They returned the very next day. Their mother waited for a neighbor to exit the building before she slipped inside and marched them upstairs to their father’s hastily repaired door. She stood them behind her and banged on the dinted metal until her knuckles welted red. “What in goddamn hell do you want from me?” their father shouted, yanking the door open. His expression shifted from anger to fear when she pulled the revolver from her handbag, then shifted again to shock as she raised the gun and put the barrel to her temple. “I told you!” she shouted. “You did this! You did this!”
Jason went for the gun, but it was too late. In an explosion of sound and dust, his mother’s brains were spattered across the sickly green walls, along his outstretched arm, his face, bits of meat in his sister’s hair and against the wall, everywhere. Their father dropped to his knees over her body, pant legs soaking up the blood that pooled on the dirty-white linoleum. Though it was their mother who had died, they never saw or spoke to their father again.
They moved in with their mother’s mother in Bay Ridge, where they lived with her for the next fifteen years. It wasn’t long after their grandmother passed away that Jason’s sister—never the most reality-based soul—finally lost it altogether. Deirdre was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and admitted to Clearside Hospital in Queens, less than six miles from their mother’s gravesite in Flushing Cemetery. Jason had faithfully made his weekly pilgrimage to his sister’s ward for two decades now, another responsibility he’d shirked in the past three weeks. Did Deirdre, in her Trifluoperazine-induced haze, even grasp that he had failed to show, had in fact failed her, as he was now failing to find his wife?
The closest he ever came to seeing their father one last time was in high school, when he was on the Brooklyn Tech track team and had a meet with Thurgood Marshall High in Harlem. “Hey, Howard,” his teammate Brian had said while scanning the draw on the coach’s clipboard, “I think you’re supposed to race yourself.” At first he thought the duplicate name was an error, but sure enough, there was a boy on the Thurgood Marshall team named Jason Howard.
He scoped out the competition, and there was no mistaking him; it was like looking into some kind of distorted mirror. The moment he laid eyes on the sixteen-year-old—his same height and build with his father’s same eyes, an all-black version of himself, as if the Korean half had been bled out of him—he knew what had happened, and who the kid was. His father’s other son, the very same age and also named Jason, after his father’s father.
Jason had begun to shake. He eavesdropped on the boy and his teammates, on this other imposter Jason who could talk cool; not like Jason, who prided himself on his locution. It was easy for him to brush off the ribbing he got from some of his reverse ’round-the-way friends for sounding white, since he knew he was going places, but seeing this other Jason rattled him to the core, made him feel he was lesser, half a man. This other Jason, he was what their father had always wa
nted; he was the son good enough to keep. And then the thought hit him like a punch to the stomach: What if my dad is actually here?
His heart racing, Jason turned toward the stands. He scanned the half dozen rows of bleachers, his watering eyes straining as he searched for angry or bewildered stares, the only expressions he could remember ever seeing on his father’s face. But everyone looked so pleased. A wall of beaming parents, cheering students, younger siblings jockeying for a better view of the field. All so happy and proud.
And then he found him. Second row from the top and grinning like a big old fool in a Thurgood Marshall baseball cap: Dad! Jason was about to call out when he saw the man seated beside his father had the exact same features: the square jaw, the pronounced, leonine cheekbones, his big brown eyes. Not only him, but the woman right below them, and also the toddler she had balanced on her knee. They were all him now, every single person in the stands was him, each wearing the same shit-eating grin. Dad and Dad and Dad and Dad. A sea of his father’s faces, and now they were all laughing as well. And just like that, the bright sky above went midnight dark and Jason swooned, taking a knee as he dry heaved beside the dusty green track.
“Howard?” Brian appeared beside him and placed a hand on Jason’s back. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, and shrugged him off. But as he tried to get up he listed, then keeled over and passed out. When he awoke he was being loaded into an ambulance behind the sports facility, an EMT adjusting an oxygen mask upon his face and exhorting him to breathe, just breathe.
Even then Jason craned his neck out the back of the ambulance, a vain attempt to try to catch a glimpse of his father, who probably wasn’t there in the first place.
He never ran track again.
“Jason?”
He looked up from the table to find Gabe watching him. “You okay?”