by Jason Mott
Five
IT HAD BEGUN small, as most large things do, with just one government-issue Crown Victoria containing only one government man and a pair of too-young soldiers and a cell phone. But all it had taken was that one phone call and a few days of things being moved around and now Bellamy was entrenched in the school but there were no students, no classes, nothing but the ever-growing numbers of cars and trucks and men and women from the Bureau who had been setting up shop here for the past several days.
The Bureau had developed a plan for Arcadia. The same isolation that had kept the town’s economy stifled for all the years of its existence was exactly what the Bureau was looking for. Sure, there were hotels and restaurants and facilities and resources in Whiteville that the Bureau could use for what they were planning, but there were also people. Close to fifteen thousand of them, not to mention the highway and all the various roads that they might have to secure sometime soon.
No. Arcadia was as close to a nonexistent town as they could want, with only a handful of people, none of whom were anyone of note. Just farmers and millworkers, mechanics and laborers and machinists and various other denizens of hardscrabble existences. “No one anybody would miss.”
At least, that was how the colonel had put it.
Colonel Willis. The thought of him made Bellamy’s stomach tighten. He knew little about the colonel, and that made him uneasy. In an age of information, never trust a person who can’t be found on Google. But that was something Bellamy only had time to ponder in the late hours of the night back at the hotel before he nodded off. The day-to-day business of his duties, the interviews in particular, took his full attention.
The schoolroom was small. It smelled of mildew, lead-based paint and time.
“First of all,” Bellamy said, leaning back in his chair, his notepad resting on his thigh, “is there anything unusual that either of you would like to talk about?”
“No,” Lucille said. “Nothing that I can think of.” Jacob nodded in agreement, most of his attention resting squarely on his lollipop. “But I figure,” Lucille continued, “you’ll be able to ask whatever questions you’re supposed to ask that’ll help me realize if there maybe was something strange going on. I imagine you’re quite the interrogator.”
“A bit of a harsh word choice, I think.”
“Maybe,” Lucille said. “I apologize.” She licked the pad of her thumb and wiped a candy smudge from Jacob’s face. She’d dressed him handsomely for his interview. New black dress pants. A bright new white, collared shirt. New shoes. Even new socks. And he was doing his part to keep everything clean, like the good boy that he was.
“I just like words, is all,” Lucille said. “And, sometimes, they can come across a bit harsh, even if all you’re trying to do is add some variety.” Lucille finished cleaning Jacob’s face, then turned her attention on herself. She straightened her long, silver hair. She checked her pale hands for dirt and found none. She adjusted her dress, shifting her weight in her seat so that she could nudge her hemline farther down—which is not to say that the hem of her cream-colored dress had been high, gracious, no, but only to say that any respectable woman, Lucille felt, made it a point, when in mixed company, to show that she was going through all manner of effort to conduct herself with modesty and propriety.
Propriety was yet another word not used nearly enough in conversation for Lucille.
“Propriety,” she muttered. Then she straightened the collar of her dress.
* * *
“One of the things that people have been reporting,” Bellamy said, “is trouble sleeping.” He took the notepad from his thigh and placed it on the desk. He hadn’t expected that a schoolteacher in such a small town would have such a large desk, but such things made sense when you thought about them long enough.
Bellamy sat forward and checked to be sure that the recorder was running. He scribbled in his notebook, waiting for Lucille to respond to his statement, but soon began to realize that no response would be coming without elaboration. He wrote eggs on his notepad to look busy.
“It’s not that the Returned have trouble sleeping,” Bellamy began, once again trying to speak in a slow and non-Yankee tongue. “It’s just that they tend to sleep very little. They don’t complain of fatigue or exhaustion, but there have been accounts of some of them going for days without sleep, only to rest for a couple of hours and be completely unaffected.” He sat back, appreciating the quality of the wooden chair beneath him in the same way he had appreciated the quality of the desk. “But maybe we’re just grabbing at straws,” he said. “That’s the reason we’re having all these interviews, to try and see what’s an anomaly and what’s nothing at all. We want to know as much as we can about the Returned as we do about the non-Returned.”
“So is your question about me or Jacob?” Lucille said, looking around the classroom.
“Eventually, both of you. But, for now, just tell me about you, Mrs. Hargrave. Have you been having any trouble sleeping? Any disturbing dreams? Insomnia?”
Lucille shifted in her seat. She glanced toward the window. Bright out today. Everything shiny and smelling of springtime, with the scent of a humid summer not far off. She sighed and rubbed her hands together. Then she folded them and placed them in her lap. But they weren’t content there, so she brushed her lap and placed an arm around her son, the type of thing a mother should do, she felt.
“No,” she said, finally. “For fifty years I’ve been awake. Each and every night I’ve sat up, awake. Each and every day I walked around, awake. It was like I couldn’t do anything else but be awake. I was sick with being awake.” She smiled. “Now I sleep every night. Peacefully. Deeper and more soundly than I hardly imagined or hardly remembered was possible.”
Lucille placed her hands in her lap again. This time they stayed. “Now I sleep the way a person is supposed to sleep,” she said. “I close my eyes, and then they open again all on their own and the sun is there. Which, I imagine, is the way it should be.”
“And what about Harold? How is he sleeping?”
“Just fine. Sleeps like the dead. Always has and probably always will.”
Bellamy made notes on his notepad. Orange juice. Beef (steak, perhaps). Then he scratched out the bit about the steak and wrote ground beef. He turned to Jacob. “And how are you feeling about all this?”
“Fine, sir. I’m fine.”
“This is all pretty weird, isn’t it? All these questions, all these tests, all these people fussing about with you.”
Jacob shrugged.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
Jacob shrugged again, his shoulders coming up almost to his ears, framing his small, soft face. He looked, briefly, like someone’s painting, something created from old oils and technique. His shirt bunched perfectly about his ears. His brown hair seemed to grow down over his eyes. Then, as if anticipating the prod from his mother, he spoke. “I’m okay, sir.”
“Can I ask you another question, then? A harder question?”
“Can you or may you? Mama taught me that.” He looked up at his mother; her face was caught somewhere between surprise and approval.
Bellamy grinned. “Indeed,” he said. “Okay, may I ask you a harder question?”
“I suppose,” Jacob said. Then: “Do you want to hear a joke?” A sudden focus and clarity came to his eyes. “I know a lot of good jokes,” he said.
Agent Bellamy folded his arms beneath him and sat forward. “Okay, let’s hear it.”
Again Lucille prayed silently—Please, Lord, not the one about the beaver.
“What do you call a chicken crossing the road?”
Lucille held her breath. Any joke involving a chicken had the potential to turn very vulgar very quickly.
“Poultry in motion!” Jacob answered before Bellamy had much time to consider the question. Then he slapped his thigh and laughed like an old man.
“That’s funny,” Bellamy said. “Did your father teach you that one?”
“You said you had a hard question for me,” Jacob said, looking away. He watched the window as if expecting someone.
“Okay. I know you’ve been asked this before. I know that you’ve probably been asked this more times than you care to answer. I’ve even asked you myself, but I have to ask again. What’s the first thing you remember?”
Jacob was silent.
“Do you remember being in China?”
Jacob nodded and, somehow, his mother did not reprimand him. She was as interested as everyone else in the memories of the Returned. Out of habit, her hand moved to gently nudge him into talking, but she checked herself. Her hand returned to her lap.
“I remember waking up,” he began. “By the water. By the river. I knew I’d get in trouble.”
“Why would you get in trouble?”
“Because I knew Mama and Daddy didn’t know where I was. When I couldn’t find them, I got scared some more. Not scared of getting in trouble anymore, but just scared because they weren’t there. I thought Daddy was somewhere around. But he wasn’t.”
“What happened then?”
“Some people came. Some Chinese people. They spoke Chinese.”
“And then?”
“And then these two women came over talking funny, but talking nice. I didn’t know what they were saying, but I could tell they were nice.”
“Yes,” Bellamy said. “I know exactly what you mean. It’s like when I hear a doctor or nurse telling me something in all that hospital talk. I don’t understand a thing they’re saying most of the time but, from the way they’re saying it, I can tell they mean it in a nice way. You know, Jacob, it’s amazing how much you can tell about a person just by how they say things. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes, sir.”
They then talked more about what had happened after Jacob was found by the river in that small fishing village just outside Beijing. The boy was delighted to tell it all. He saw himself as an adventurer, a hero on a heroic journey. Yes, it had been painfully terrifying for him, but only in the beginning. After that, it had actually become rather fun. He was in a strange land with strange people and they fed him strange food, which, thankfully, he quickly acclimated to. Even now, as he sat in the office with the man from the Bureau and his lovely mother, his belly rumbled for authentic Chinese food. He had no idea of the names of anything he had been fed. But he knew the scents, the tastes, the essences of them.
Jacob talked at great length about the food in China, about how kind they had been to him. Even when the government men came—and the soldiers with them—they still treated him kindly, as if he were one of their own. They fed him until his stomach simply could not hold any more, all the while watching him with a sense of wonder and mystery.
Then came the long plane ride, which he held no fear of. He’d grown up always wanting to fly somewhere; now he was given almost eighteen hours of it. The flight attendants were nice, but not as nice as Agent Bellamy when they met.
“They smiled a lot,” Jacob said, thinking of the flight attendants.
All these things he told his mother and the man from the Bureau. He did not tell them in such an eloquent form, but he said them all by saying, simply, “I liked everyone. And they liked me.”
“Sounds like you had yourself quite a good time in China, Jacob.”
“Yes, sir. It was fun.”
“That’s good. That’s very good.” Agent Bellamy had stopped taking notes. His grocery list was complete. “Are you about tired of these questions, Jacob?”
“No, sir. It’s okay.”
“I’m going to ask you one last question, then. And I need you to really think about it for me, okay?”
Jacob finished his lollipop. He sat up straight, his small, pale face becoming very serious. He looked like a little, well-dressed politician—in his dark pants and white, collared shirt.
“You’re a good boy, Jacob. I know you’ll do your best.”
“Yes, you are,” Lucille added, stroking the boy’s head.
“Do you remember anything before China?”
Silence.
Lucille wrapped her arm around Jacob and pulled him close and squeezed him. “Mr. Martin Bellamy isn’t trying to make anything difficult and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. He’s just curious, is all. And so is your old mama. But I’m less curious and more just plain ol’ nosy, I suppose.”
She smiled and poked a tickling finger into his armpit.
Jacob giggled.
Lucille and Agent Bellamy waited.
Lucille rubbed Jacob’s back, as if her hand against his body might conjure whatever spirits of memory were contained within him. She wished Harold were there. Somehow, she thought this moment could be helped if Jacob had his father rubbing his back and showing his support, as well. But Harold had launched into one of his rants about “the damn fool government” and was being generally disagreeable today—he behaved the way he did when Lucille tried to drag him to church during the holidays—and it was decided he should just stay in the truck while Lucille and Jacob spoke with the man from the Bureau.
Agent Bellamy placed his notepad on the table beside his stool to show the boy that this wasn’t simply about the government’s need to know. He wanted to show that he was genuinely interested in what the boy had experienced. He liked Jacob, from the first time they’d met, and he felt that Jacob liked him, too.
After the silence had gone on so long as to become uncomfortable, Agent Bellamy spoke. “That’s okay, Jacob. You don’t have to—”
“I do as I’m told,” Jacob said. “I try to do as I’m told.”
“I’m sure you do,” Agent Bellamy said.
“I wasn’t trying to get into trouble. That day at the river.”
“In China? Where they found you?”
“No,” Jacob said after a pause. He pulled his legs into his chest.
“What do you remember about that day?”
“I wasn’t trying to misbehave.”
“I know you weren’t.”
“I really wasn’t,” Jacob said.
Lucille was weeping now, silently. Her body trembled, expanding and contracting like a willow in March wind. She fumbled in her pocket and found tissues with which she dabbed her eyes. “Go on,” she said, her voice choked.
“I remember the water,” Jacob said. “There was just water. First it was the river at home, and then it wasn’t. Only I didn’t know it. It just happened.”
“There was nothing in between?”
Jacob shrugged.
Lucille dabbed her eyes again. Something heavy had fallen against her heart, though she did not know what. It was all she could manage not to collapse right there in the too-small chair beneath her. She felt that would be painfully rude, though—for Martin Bellamy to have to help a collapsed old woman. So, as a matter of etiquette, she held herself together, even when she asked the question upon which all of her life seemed to hang. “Wasn’t there anything before you woke up, honey? In the time between when you…went to sleep, and when you woke up? Was there a bright, warm light? A voice? Wasn’t there anything?”
“What’s an owl’s favorite subject?” Jacob asked.
In reply to this there was only silence. Silence and a small boy torn between what was he incapable of saying and what he felt his mother wanted.
“Owlgebra,” he said when no one answered.
* * *
“That’s some boy you’ve got there,” Agent Bellamy said. Jacob was gone now—in the adjoining room being kept company by a young soldier from somewhere in the Midwest. Lucille and Agent Bellamy could see them through the window in the door that linked the two rooms together. It was important to Lucille that she didn’t lose sight of him.
“He’s a blessing,” she said after a pause. Her gaze shifted from Jacob to Agent Bellamy to the small, thin hands that sat in her lap.
“I’m glad to hear that everything has been going so well.”
“It has,” Lucille
said. She smiled, still looking down at her hands. Then, as if some small riddle had finally been sorted out in her head, she sat erect and her smile grew so wide and proud that it was only then that Agent Bellamy noticed how thin and frail it had been. “This your first time down this way, Agent Martin Bellamy? Down south, I mean.”
“Do airports count?” He sat forward and folded his hands on the grand desk in front of him. He felt a story coming.
“I suppose they wouldn’t.”
“Are you sure? Because I’ve been in and out of the Atlanta airport more times than I can count. It’s odd, but somehow it feels like every flight I’ve ever been on has had to go through Atlanta for some reason. I swear I took a flight from New York to Boston once that had a three-hour layover in Atlanta. Not quite sure how that happened.”
Lucille barked a little laugh. “How come you aren’t married, Agent Martin Bellamy? How come you don’t have a family to call your own?”
He shrugged. “Just never really fit in, I suppose.”
“You should see about making it fit,” Lucille said. She made a motion to stand, then immediately changed her mind. “You seem like a good person. And the world needs more good people. You should find a young woman that makes you happy and the two of you should have children,” Lucille said, still smiling, though Agent Bellamy couldn’t help but notice that her smile was a little dimmer now.
Then she stood with a groan and walked over to the door and saw that Jacob was still there. “I believe we just missed the Strawberry Festival, Martin Bellamy,” she said. Her voice was low and even. “Happens about this time every year over in Whiteville. Been going on as far back as I can remember. Probably wouldn’t be all that impressive to a big-city man like yourself, but it’s something folks like us like to be a part of.
“Just like it sounds, it’s all about strawberries. Most people don’t think about it, but there was a time back when a person could have a farm and grow crops and make a living off it. Doesn’t happen much nowadays—almost all the farms I knew of as a child been gone for years. Only one or two still around. I think that Skidmore farm up near Lumberton is still running…but I can’t say to a certainty.”