by Mark Powell
“Is he with her?”
“Who,” his mother said, “Reed? John, we just love him.”
“Where did they go?”
“Your father and I were just saying how much—”
“Where are they?”
“What’s wrong, son?” It was his father now, stepping forward, sleeves rolled and forearms flecked with soap bubbles.
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to scare either of you. I just need to know where they are.”
His mother’s lip gave the first tremor of fear.
“What’s wrong? We like him so much. We were just saying—”
He had his phone out but there was no image, only a black square onto which he might project some future life he would prefer not to live.
“I have to know where they are.”
“They went out walking,” his father said.
“Where?”
“Just out. On the trails I guess. What’s going on?”
“Is Kayla okay?” his mother said.
“If she comes back without me keep her here.”
“John.”
“Call the police, Dad.”
“It’s Christmas Eve. I can’t get the law out here for no reason.”
“Just call them.”
It was at that moment he took out the pistol Stone had given him. In part it was to check it, but it wasn’t that, not really. He wanted it to register on his parents’ faces, he wanted them to see what their boy had become, what their boy had always been.
“John,” his father said. “Stop for a minute. Look at me, son.”
“Just call them.”
“And tell ’em what?”
“Tell them your boy just shot a man.”
49.
Tess ran as far as the pier, cut onto the road and followed Periwinkle for the length of its seven blocks. When she came to the end of it she zigzagged her way along the bike paths and back through the grid of streets, the houses tucked behind palm trees trunked with lights, plastic reindeer beside plastic mangers. A few driveways were crowded with cars because it was almost lunch now, people would be gathering.
She looped again and headed back toward the beach.
She liked the shoes. Fifty minutes and there was no rubbing, no slippage. The cushion was better than she thought.
At the pier she cut back down onto the sand and it was the same as before: a few couples hand in hand, metal detectors, surfcasters. All beneath a hem of gray clouds, the sun having made some agreement with itself: it would not shine.
She ran the sand, parallel to the ocean off to her left.
Sixty minutes. Sixty-one.
She wasn’t far from her parents’ house now and was glad for it. She felt calmer, and if her mind didn’t hold the same clear light it held when she first woke it was at least empty of darkness.
She could see the boardwalk over the dunes and slowed to a jog and then a walk, stopped her watch at 1:03:24. She would run the half in March and thought she could win it. Laurie would be a year old and that would be something, some sort of milestone, maybe, like stepping into an early spring.
She took her socks and shoes off on the sandy stairs and let her vision drift out past the breakers to the flat silver of the Gulf.
She would take John with her to see Kayla compete in her fitness contest. She was mad at John, but not really. There was no anger in her, no real heat. They had maybe hit bottom and what was left was to climb out. They could do it. There was no reason they couldn’t do it.
She watched the pelicans hitting the water and thought again of St. Simons. Except this time she was thinking not of their winter there, but of their honeymoon, that better time, that time that had come to seem less real but she knew wasn’t. It was a good sign, maybe. This shift in her thinking.
The pelicans hit the water.
A swallow-tail was in the air.
Down in the surf a boy stood staring out to sea, out, maybe, toward the blue whales, navigating, finding their way. She would go in and apologize to Wally. Take the boys and spend the day walking the beach.
The boy was knee-deep in the water, intent.
She would take her father’s boat.
That first trip just before Laurie was born, seeing the pod, it had been like a blessing and there was no reason to doubt it wouldn’t be again.
The boy was out to his thighs and she thought of saying something then she saw a woman walking toward him, his mother, calling to him, and Tess turned up the boardwalk toward the house.
Everyone was inside, gathered as before around the television.
Her mother feeding Laurie in her highchair.
Her father in his recliner.
She wiped the sand from her feet and fixed a glass of water, took a banana and sat down on the floor to stretch. They were watching something they probably shouldn’t be watching, but she wasn’t going to say anything. It was fine, there were worse things.
Then she noticed Wally wasn’t there.
“Where’s Wally?” she asked the room, and no one answered.
“Mom, where’s Wally at?”
“What?”
“Is Wally in there with you?”
“I don’t know where he is, honey.”
Neither did her father.
“He showed us the video he made, the whales. He’s amazing, Tess.”
She plucked Daniel off the couch.
“Honey, where’s your brother? Where’s Wally?”
“He went looking for you.”
“Where, baby?”
“Looking for whales.”
“Whales?” And it took her a moment and then she saw again the boy in the surf, his steady motion as he shuffled out to sea, and a light burst inside her and she was running, panicked, yelling to her mom to call John, to call him right now.
50.
John found their tracks along the shoulder of the road. The snow was coming harder now, but they were still visible, and he started jogging back toward the highway, hands in his pockets, phone and gun bouncing until he gripped each. A half mile down the gravel stood the marker for the trailhead where a laminated map was pinned beneath the shingled overhang.
They had stopped here. He could tell from the tracks.
He took out the gun and the phone and was trying to make sense of their direction when an image flashed onto the screen. Her red coat against a backdrop of white: she was somewhere up ahead of him in the woods.
He started up the trail and within a few steps couldn’t hear a thing, not even his panting. Only the muffled silence, the whisper and tick of snowflakes that appeared incapable of settling. But they were settling: thirty or so meters up the trail there was no trace of anyone having passed. Just falling snow and swirling particulates of ice, his eyelashes and hair full of them. But no sign of Kayla’s passage. The image was gone too. All that was left was the snow that heaved down through the sun-starved understory. The mountain laurel beginning to fold beneath the weight, the limbs of pine and fir betraying the first sign of slant.
“Kayla?” he called into the forest, and felt his voice go out from him, but out into nothing, out into the hush of the day. He started jogging up the left trail, the snow deepening. Called her name a second and then a third time and then thought better of it. Switched his way up to the ridge but all he could see here was the glare of sunlight, a bright luster that nearly blinded him, and for a moment he stood not in the National Forest but back at the small cemetery in Peach Creek, Kayla’s plot in the back corner beneath the crows and mourning doves, and what he saw was not snow falling on the trees but dirt falling on an open grave, its length no longer abbreviated because she wasn’t nine anymore.
“Please,” he said out loud, and found his right hand going not to the gun but to the prayer rope around his wrist. But the prayer rope was gone. He had somehow lost it. Then he remembered that he hadn’t lost it: he had thrown it away.
“Please,” he said again, and felt his eyes blur with tears so that he almost m
issed the movement down in the far valley.
But it was there: the flash of a red coat, Kayla there and then not.
He started running, not down the trail but down the slope.
They were somewhere ahead of him. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there.
He stumbled back into the tree line and there in front of him was the trail, there in front of him were boot prints, two pair pressed and scrubbing their way through the snowfall.
Then he was running again.
Ahead was a small rise and as he topped it he entered a clearing. A stream ribboned darkly along the edge and by it stood what was left of the old home place, the tarpaper roof just beginning to disappear beneath the snow. Through the open door he saw her red coat, still now, someone beside her. Then he looked at his phone and on the tiny screen he saw in great detail that she was kissing someone, she was kissing the boy from the lake house. He looked at the home place and then at the screen and neither felt more real than the other.
“Kayla?” he called. “Kayla?”
“Dad?”
He stumbled forward, no more than thirty feet away, and now his daughter came toward him, emerging from the house with her coat unzipped, shirt half-tucked. Her face was flushed and he stood there panting, his heart grinding.
“Dad,” she said again, as if not quite believing in him.
Then movement. In the air he saw the boy behind her within the window. On the screen he saw the gun the boy held. He saw it rising.
“Dad?” When she smiled he saw the glimmer of her scar and then her smile was gone. “Are you all right?”
He didn’t answer. He was looking down at the pixelated boy and the pixelated gun he held.
“Dad, are you okay?”
Her eyes had locked on what he held in his hand, which was the gun, except it wasn’t—somehow he had put the gun away and all he held was his phone.
It was the boy who held the gun, the boy who brought the barrel up in a slow graceful arc, pointing. But not at John or his daughter. Framed on the screen John saw where it was going and then Kayla turned and opened her mouth to say his name—Reed!—but the report swallowed the sound. It swallowed everything. The birds flew—somehow he knew they flew. Even if all he heard was the blast of the gun. Even if all he saw was the bright flash contained within the window, the bright flash contained within the screen, and then the great slump of the body, collapsing as if in exhaustion, as if it knew no other way to be.
Then the screen was gone and the boy was dead and he realized his phone was ringing.
He realized it had been ringing the entire time.
51.
Tess sprinted down the boardwalk and the first thing she saw were the people on the beach, a knot of them, waving and calling. An elderly man in orange trunks was jogging into the water, hands cupped to his mouth as he yelled into the breeze, because out beyond him was her son, out beyond him was Wally.
She ran past the man into the waves, the water to her knees and then her thighs and then she was swimming. Behind her came the siren of the beach patrol, the flash of blue lights out over the gray gulf drawn like the skin of a drum, but she kept going because she knew it was Wally.
She knew it was Wally because the woman running beside her said it was.
The woman running beside her told her to go, to hurry.
Don’t be afraid, Tess.
Only listen.
And she was. Tess was screaming his name, screaming and swimming, but she was listening too. Her son was clicking. The first wave went over his head and then the second, but the entire time—the third wave now, and then there was no fourth because she could no longer see him—the entire time, even as he disappeared beneath the surface, she could hear him.
The creaks, the slow clicks, the codas.
It had been her complaint from the very start, hadn’t it, the noise?
But not this, not her son.
And she kept swimming and praying and calling his name because somehow he had gotten out ahead of her. But she wasn’t afraid. She knew she would find him. The woman swimming beside her had taken hold of Tess’s hand and was leading her to her son, leading her toward the clicking. And then they turned and the tide was with them. The woman swimming beside Tess had taken hold of her wrist and the wrist of her son, and was pulling them back toward shore. The tide was with them and the woman was pulling them.
Karla was pulling them and would not let them go.
52.
The phone was still ringing and Kayla was running toward the cabin and John’s heart kept hammering not just in his chest but in his ears and eyes and out to the farther reaches of his body because he understood, he understood, I forgive everyone for everything. For Site Nine, for Hassan Natashe, for the senseless squandering of life. I forgive everyone for everything. It beat in him like the tiny muscled heart of one of Karla’s fragile birds, like the giant-valved heart of one of Tess’s lost whales. I forgive everyone for everything. He could barely breathe with it, it beat so strong and so right and he wanted to sit down, almost stumbled, but somehow remained standing, and he was looking at the screen and what he saw was not the dead boy but the white snow and the white sky and the scratch of darker trees that ran between. It was on the screen and all around him yet he was unable to tell where one ended and the other began and perhaps that was the point, he thought, that there was no line, no distinction, there was simply one, simply this.
So while his daughter was chanting the boy’s name
Reed
Reed
Oh God, Reed
and the phone was ringing, John shut his eyes and squeezed them tight because it was a prayer he felt forming, and if it wasn’t the right prayer, he knew too it was the only prayer he was capable of praying. And he did, he prayed it, he prayed I forgive everyone for everything.
Now forgive me.
Forgive me.
Acknowledgments
My love and gratitude to so many good people: Darnell Arnoult, Casey Clabough, Beverly Coyle, Michael Denner (and Sasha!), Pete Duval, Julia Elliott, Patricia Engel, the Goodworth family, Adam Griffey, Jonathan Haupt, David Joy, Adam Latham, Erik Reece, Ron Rash, Janisse Ray, James Scott, Jon Sealy, Bob Shacochis, Zuzka Tabackova, John Warley, the Weiss family, Charles and April White, Randall Wilhelm, and Terri Witek. Love and thanks to everyone at the Stetson Low-Residency MFA Program; all my colleagues at Appalachian State University; the U.S. and Slovak Fulbright Commission; the faculty at the University of Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra, Slovakia; and all my family, especially Denise, Silas, Mamma and Daddy, Dennis and Jane, Joy and Bryan, James and Stacie, Brooke, and Cliff.
I am fortunate to have a brilliant editor in Ben LeRoy, and an incomparable agent in Julia Kenny.
This book is dedicated to my daughter Merritt and her fierce spirit, and in memory of Pat Conroy, a writer whose honesty and talent was matched only by his kindness and generosity.
About the Author
MARK POWELL is the author of four previous novels. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and in 2014 was a Fulbright Fellow to Slovakia. In 2009 he received the Chaffin Award for contributions to Appalachian literature. He holds degrees from Yale Divinity School, the University of South Carolina, and The Citadel. He lives in the mountains of North Carolina where he teaches at Appalachian State University.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Mark-Powell
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First Gallery Books hardcover edition June 2017
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Interior design by Colleen Cunningham
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Author photo by Pete Duval
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-5072-0338-5
ISBN 978-1-5072-0339-2 (ebook)
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