by Mark Powell
And they were all out the door and yes, I love you, and yes, I’ll be here, and yes, have fun and listen to Nana and Papa, all right, boys? Kiss me one more time. And they did, and then they were gone, Tess alone on the front step waving goodbye as the car pulled away.
When they were out of sight she stood on the front steps, stretching her hamstrings and debating going back to John’s old bedroom and plugging the USB drive into her laptop.
She tightened her laces.
What else might she find?
She was on the verge of finding out, and knowing as much, she sprang into the yard and onto the gravel of the road, running.
14.
James Stone’s heart hurt. Not a metaphor in this case but some actual myocardial throb. Radial pain like a constellation of falling stars, as if he were finger-tipping his way around some distant nebula. It was a bad sign. He was probably dying—he granted the point—but dying would have to wait. He intended to find Reed Sharma first.
Thus the van.
Thus the fact Jimmy was driving the streets of midtown Atlanta looking for him.
The kid had gone too far, obviously, and Jimmy felt some responsibility—how could he not? Jimmy had encouraged him, teased him. Pushed him toward the sort of radical act Jimmy needed in order to make a move. Now he’d lost him. Not so much as a puff of smoke since he’d run into Reed’s pseudo-girlfriend outside the duplex in Kirkwood. Which had been stupid. He realized now he never should have allowed himself to be seen. But that wasn’t his worst mistake.
Jimmy’s worst mistake, his first mistake, was failing to realize the kid was serious. His mistake was failing to realize all of it was serious, or if not serious, inevitable. That once you waded in hip-deep you couldn’t exactly hop right out. It had its own engine, self-aware, self-propelled. But serious wasn’t exactly the word. The kid was malleable. He wasn’t a criminal but could easily enough be made into one. That was the game a lot of folks played, call it the conversion game. Take the lonely but harmless kid and make him harmful. Hand him a shoebox full of fake explosives and when he goes to plant them descend like an avenging angel. It was how it was done. Run a successful sting and next thing you knew you’ve climbed another pay grade.
But that wasn’t Jimmy’s game.
It was the reason he’d made a call in New York, couple of years ago this was, and had some fun at the kid’s expense. The Voice of Goddamn Reason—Jimmy had made it up on the spot, convincing an actor buddy and his wife to help him out with a harmless little joke, and what a joke it had been. But all for the greater good of shaking the kid out of his wobbly passion.
But let’s confess, Jimmy, to the fact that your little plan failed miserably.
Let’s confess to the fact that the kid was now hanging around the wrong crowd at the wrong mosque and for it had acquired an FBI tail in the shape of a shapely pretend Emory coed calling herself Aida. Living in some sleazy Kirkwood duplex with torn window screens and an air conditioner made during the Nixon administration. Hosting gatherings of ShariaNow! and such bullshit.
Let’s confess to the fact that this was Jimmy’s fault.
Now Reed Sharma was undeniably missing. Jimmy had kept tabs on him for months but suddenly the kid was gone. The rumor was Reed had become Professor Hadawi’s bitch and if that was the case that was a big-league problem. Hadawi was running his own shop and if the kid was involved he was playing a very serious game. More serious than the kid could handle, which he would realize sooner or later, and when he did . . .
Jimmy had this fear the kid was going to kill himself. A recurring nightmare replete with all the moving parts. The self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The suicide note of full-throated earnestness. Jimmy his reluctant confessor. Sometimes he composed the kid’s mea culpa in his head, imagined him bleeding ink in some cheap motel by the interstate. An ice machine in the breezeway. The indoor-outdoor carpet soggy with rain. The kind of place that attached the room key to a giant spoon. The paper itself would be crumpled and then smoothed, as if he couldn’t decide whether or not to pull the trigger, debating the this versus the that right up until the moment he removed the rear wall of his cranium.
Dear Jimmy,
I am sitting here.
I am sitting in a motel not far.
I am writing you because I don’t know how else to explain things.
The rest would be boilerplate regret. A confession of getting involved with some nasty people.
Unconvincing bullshit. Bottom line: he got inside a Hefty bag with a pistol and blasted his way out.
At least that was how the nightmare played.
Fuck it, though. Jimmy wasn’t worried at this point. If his heart exploded in the next twenty-four hours—and he thought it just might—it was all irrelevant. The professor could make his move, the kid could make his, and the world would know or it wouldn’t. Either way, it was just another something floating in the cloud of unknowing. Mind traffic for the conspiracy theorists.
Some goddamn hipster honked at him.
He was on Peachtree, wheeling past a farmers’ market and trying not to spill a pomegranate-and-prune concoction all over the Econoline van he’d rented from the fifth floor of a strip mall. Walked in to find the girl asleep on the couch with a ratty terrier in a rhinestone collar. It was no way to run a country, and the moment filled him with doubt, every second of their exchange draining his hope just a little. She had no idea who he was and when he handed her the reservation form she seemed to resent him for it. Puffy-eyed. Acid-washed jeans. Cute girl if she would just get off her ass and wash the sleep from her eyes.
But he had the van.
What he needed was the kid. He kept telling himself it was a moral obligation, kept running through the possible versus the merely probable. Possibly the professor had the kid squirreled away somewhere, a gear in some greater machine. Possibly they were at the mosque, prostrating themselves and trying on the fall line of suicide vests, the new cutesy things with Velcro straps like so, the pastel colors suitable for Easter Sunday. Then there was the possibility of a training camp somewhere in the mountains to the north. Jimmy was hearing rumors—it wasn’t just Reed’s bullshit bragging. It was possible the kid was there.
But it was equally possible he was off drunk with his buddies, haranguing high-school girls on the Internet and generally wasting his parents’ money. Doing, you might say, what drifting twenty-somethings do.
But Jimmy was hearing otherwise.
Jimmy was hearing doom and gloom of the Do not doubt this book variety.
He was hearing monkey bars and bombs, and this was not a good thing to hear.
Whatever was going to blow up would blow very soon. The kid, the situation, Jimmy’s actual physical heart—
He had his left arm out the open window, fingers tingling.
Somebody tell me please I’m not dying here, somebody convince me.
And if his heart didn’t get him his bowels would. But he didn’t want to think about that. He was trying hard not to consider the fact that he was badly constipated, trying hard not to allow it to affect his worldview.
Another horn.
The intersection full of assholes.
Women in knee boots carrying their heirloom squash and what the fuck is artisanal okra anyway, can someone tell me, please, I’m asking here?
At this point he didn’t even know where his hotel was, but that was beside the point. The point was to drive around, to get a feel for things. The point was that the kid was going to just saunter by, all innocent-like, and Jimmy would be on the evening flight to Miami, conscience assuaged. He’d get back to work, throw himself into it. All that footage of Keyes. He was serious about a film, sort of serious. The Gatsby of Silicon Valley. An Internet robber baron in skinny jeans and ironic tie. Let’s not hide it under a bushel—that was his worldview. He had Keyes on film and now that he was dead the footage had that ghost story appeal. He could make the movie, sure, but then what?
Then nothing
.
Retire to Sedona. Get his Obamacare and watch the sunset. He could sell the place on St. Simons for three times what he paid for it, drop the money in the bank and live off the 6 percent interest. Unlike John he wasn’t haunted by what they’d done at Site Nine. What they’d done was exactly what had to be done and if mistakes were made, well, fuck it. Land of the free and home of the brave, right?
Another horn.
Did they understand the cosmological implications of the finger over here?
They honked again.
It was so freaking common in cities, these constant horns. He liked the countryside. He liked rural places where the honking of a horn was justification for the employment of small arms.
He palmed the Glock that rested inside his jacket, pulled to another stoplight, waited.
The kid was out there. The kid was going to walk right by.
Except when he looked up it wasn’t the kid walking by, but my God—
Crossing the intersection without a care in the world was Professor Edward Hadawi.
And damn if he didn’t appear to be in quite the hurry.
15.
The trail started a half mile back toward the highway, an overgrown footpath that angled off the gravel, the ivy and sumac only beginning to thin in the gathering cool of fall. The trailhead had a laminated topographical map, a swirl of yellow and red and green paths that paralleled the dark ovals that marked elevation. Tess ran the yellow, a meandering loop of nine miles, but so long as she went right at every junction it eventually took her back to here.
It was National Forest and she saw no one. She liked that, liked the way she could pass through stands of black walnut and dogwood, thickets of mountain laurel and flame azalea. There was an aloneness to it, but she wouldn’t exactly call it loneliness. The loneliness was for John. Also the distrust.
He had about him some hint of evasion, an air of offensive friendliness, a sort of preemptive concern. The questions he was always asking—they were practical questions, the right questions: feedings, naps. But Tess wasn’t buying it. There was something withholding about him, the way he eased around the corners of things unsaid.
She stopped at the top of a ridge, the mountains spread before her. Stopped her watch and ate one of the two vanilla GU packets she kept zipped in the waistband of her running tights, drank half of the eight-ounce water bladder. Zipped everything back up and started along the ridge before she could get stiff from standing.
Let the downgrade of the slope carry her, dew flicking onto her shoes and calves.
Fog over the trees.
At night she felt his toes moving. Or maybe this was the running. The running brought with it a frightening lucidity, it always had. But there were days now it crossed some invisible bridge and carried her into a land of paranoia. Imagined grievances that would become real if only she could figure out what the hell they were. If that even made sense. Which she knew it didn’t.
Neither did going left when the trail forked at the bottom of the ridge.
To stay right was to get back, to know her way. To go left, to step off the yellow trail onto the red or green was to acknowledge some form of disorder. It was to make a mistake. But she did it anyway.
The path re-entered the trees, the bristling white pines, the soft-needled path. Darker here, cooler. When it leveled off she picked up her pace and it felt a little as if someone was behind her, as if she were being chased. Not by the men she kept seeing, but by something less—corporeal was the word, ridiculous as it sounded. She ran hard through a field of wildflowers and black flies, crossed a footbridge, the creek a hush of fast-moving water, started up another rise.
John—
Sometimes she saw in him a man engaged in exotic danger, some cutting-edge project meant to propel humankind. Other days he seemed like a man consciously broken, but working hard to hide it. A man who counseled girls with eating disorders or handed out pamphlets explaining the legal intricacies of date rape. A man working to counteract an entire planet’s worth of unhealthy body images.
There were nights he stroked her nipple for what seemed hours, just one nipple. The motion was circular and singular. Never the prelude to sex. Just this meditative act that seemed to ground him physically: John in this bed, in this life.
She turned around at the top of the next rise, a little confused or maybe—
Not lost, the word wasn’t lost. Though turning around she knew she’d have difficulty finding her way back to anything recognizable. For the last forty minutes she had made lefts and rights, no pattern to it, no deliberation beyond the vague idea that she wanted to disappear for a while. She thought of the whales in the bay, that missing day—what had happened, besides the obvious, of course? Besides the fact they had somehow found their way home. She’d been running for ninety-three minutes now. Even on the rugged trail time enough to have completed her run.
She ran another half-hour and ate the other GU packet, left maybe an ounce of water in the plastic bladder if only for motivational purposes. Started jogging again, a little slower now, observant. She wanted that hit of panic, the blood spiked with adrenalin. But it never came. In its place was a detached coolness that carried her down into another clearing, one she hadn’t seen before because there on the edge of a creek—the creek she’d crossed earlier, or a different creek?—stood what appeared to be a wooden outhouse.
Maybe slightly larger, she thought as she grew closer. Maybe a cabin of some sort, the plank siding a deep shade of moisture and age and lichen and moss. She stopped her watch and stood on the clearing’s edge. The outhouse, the cabin, the whatever it was sat preposterously close to the creek, the denuded bank nearly undercutting one of the cinder-block supports, and though the land must have once been cleared it had grown back unchecked. A roadbed had sprouted saplings, wisps of pine that rose to her waist and waved like hands when the breeze moved across the field. Then she realized she was looking at the old home place, the original cabin.
Inside was a shrine of some sort, the walls tacked with crucifixes and loops of beaded jewelry hung from roofing nails. Photos too warped to make sense of. There was a bench and a bowl of what she thought might be holy water, or maybe water from the creek, whatever difference it made. There was a kneeling cushion, and to kneel there was to stare up at the largest crucifix, the one mounted on the wall. Or to not look, to kneel and not look, though eventually she came to look. Eventually, she came to make the sign of the cross against her body, though she thought it more out of superstition than belief.
The tightening in her legs brought her back.
She crawled out into a brilliant day, no idea how long she had been inside. Maybe two minutes, maybe two hours. But the day was alive, resurrected in a cloud of butterflies. The fog gone and the sun blinding, white and nearly directly overhead. Birds sang. The creek ran.
She felt her skin prickle. That feeling of someone near her, of someone watching her.
The weight of some bodiless threat.
She made no move. It seemed important to remain calm, still, one of those decisions you’d look back on and thank God you didn’t panic. She drank the last swallow of her water, and ridiculous as it was she felt a thousand eyes watching her, or one eye, and then she felt it so near it seemed to scrape against her arm and then crawl over her, and for a moment she saw not the sliver of creek she could see before her but the sliver of road she had glided right off. Karla, she meant. John’s wife. The sliding a long ache, something more than mere psychics, what she felt. What Tess felt was the presence that had sat with them, mother and daughter, the presence that had held them, and, even as they took flight, refused to let go.
*
It took another hour to get back to the main road and another fifteen minutes beyond that to get back to John’s parents. Whatever bliss she had experienced, whatever moment she might have had, was gone now. Spiraled down the drain of hunger and fatigue. Her throat was dry and her feet hurt—there would be blood in her pinked socks
. She felt her blood sugar scrape bottom. She’d run for almost four hours but walked the last 200 meters, too exhausted to register anything more than a faint relief at the sight of the house, her van and her father-in-law’s car parked before it.
John’s father was in the kitchen and he jumped up as she entered.
“There you are. We were just about to get worried.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re okay? Sit down, Tess.”
“I’m fine. I’m sorry about this.”
“Sit down, honey. Let me tell Glenda. She had me driving up and down the road looking for you.”
“Are the children okay?”
“The children are fine. Let me tell Glenda.”
The children were in the backyard making pinecone bird feeders. You spread the peanut butter, sprinkle on the birdseed. Out the window Tess could see her mother-in-law wore Laurie in the BabyBjörn, the straps splayed to accommodate her wide frame.
Her father-in-law walked out, spoke to his wife, and a moment later returned.
“I didn’t mean to be gone so long.”
“I’m just glad you’re okay,” he said. “You got lost?”
“Yes. No.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. I guess I did.”
“Not much up there but trees and wild hog. Deer.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“I drove up and down the road honking the horn.”
“It’s okay. What’s this?”
“I didn’t know where else to go.”
“It’s okay. What is this you’re watching?” she said, because she had just noticed it. CNN playing on the small screen where a few hours before it had been Tom and Jerry. “Is this?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, my God.” The TV was muted but it was plain enough. Another video from Syria, another video from ISIS. The hooded jihadi, a man in an orange jumpsuit. Middle-aged, down on his knees. He showed the knife, the standing man, the swift parabola of blade, and then it cut back to the studio, it cut to commercial. She collapsed into the wicker chair, let herself sink into the patterned cushion, salt lines describing her mouth, legs mud-flecked, chiggers and thorns caught in the fabric of her tights.