She opened her eyes and people were walking up the aisle. Walking is the wrong word. They were shuffling or hobbling or wheeling was more like it. There were people in wheelchairs and people holding children older than she was who couldn’t walk by themselves. They came up to the front and they said their names and all of them were related to each other. I’m Sister Green. I’m Brother Morgan. Like that. One after the other. And all of them were sick. They were all part of the same sick family, with toothaches and stomach cancer and gout and clubfoot and blindness and palsy. She’d never seen so many different varieties of pain.
Maybe some of them had been healed that day, but she didn’t think so. She didn’t remember if they had. All she remembered was being shocked that the world had so much pain in it, and the unfairness that one family should take on so much of the suffering.
And her granddaddy was dead now. He’d gone to Tulsa to buy some tractor equipment and collapsed on the sidewalk with a heart attack, and since no one thought it strange to see a black man lying there or stopped to take him to the hospital, he died on the sidewalk under the hot sun. And her grandma died a few years later, from grief. And her mother a few years ago, from diabetes. And now Tommy, too, was dead.
And now it was her turn.
“I’m sorry—”
That was Charlie’s voice. Faint, troubled, carried on the wind; she’d know her own child’s voice anywhere.
Charlie was out there, somewhere, in trouble. Thinking it was his fault.
No, no, Charlie. Not your fault. My fault.
I should have checked on him sooner. I should have called the police. I was enjoying the quiet. I should have checked on him sooner and then I could have called the police because time was of the essence. Who didn’t know that? When a child was missing you needed to get on it right away, that was rule number one, the golden rule of the Amber Alert Bible. You called the police. Right away.
But she didn’t know he was missing and so it had been hours and hours by the time she had called.
Not your fault, Charlie.
She had to tell him. She had to tell him not to be sorry, that he had nothing to be sorry about.
I should have been a better mother to Tommy. And to you. To you.
All this time he’d been waiting for her, her Charlie. Years had gone by, and she’d left him alone, she’d lost track of him, and yet there he was, still waiting for her somewhere, waiting for her to say: not your fault, baby. My fault. All mine.
Can God set a table in the wilderness?
She opened her palm and looked at the twelve half-crumbled pills that had been clenched so tightly in her fist. She considered them for a moment, and then she ran into the bathroom. Threw all the pills into the sink, sending the water rushing down over them, pushing the white residue down the drain with her fingers. She washed her hands well and dried them. She straightened herself in the mirror, smoothing down her hair, wiping her face with a wet towel. Nothing to do for those eyes.
Then she walked down the stairs and out into the night to find the place where Charlie was.
Thirty-Two
The lizard was gone. That’s what Charlie had noticed first. Someone had taken Horntail from the tank in his room.
His high had faded now but for a jittery feeling that nothing was right and nothing would ever be right again. It was a familiar feeling. The feeling of not being stoned.
He was looking for the kid and he saw Horntail missing and then he knew. He just fucking knew where the kid was.
He slammed out the back door, through the yard, beyond the birdbath, until he reached the very edge of the woods. There was an old oak tree there that had wooden pegs pounded deep into its bark, and at the top of the pegs there were some planks of wood that his father had nailed together one day in an attempt to make a tree house. The tree house had never been completed—building the thing was more complicated structurally than his father had counted on. He had sworn up and down about stability and bracing and never finished it, and their mother had forbidden them to go up there, since it was only a floor and nothing else, without any sort of railing or walls to keep them from tumbling down. But he and Tommy snuck up there anyway, sometimes, when they didn’t want to be found. It was high up and in the summer you couldn’t see it through the leaves.
They used to call it their fort. They kept stuff up there—the diary Tommy wrote in for a few months, Charlie’s rock collection, gun and car magazines they had stolen from the dentist’s office. Sometimes Tommy liked to take Horntail there and let him run around like it was the jungle. Until last year Charlie used to go up to get high.
Now he had to push his big body through the hole.
The kid sat there on the planks of wood in the dark with his hands around his knees, Horntail lolling on his arm. The kid was a mess. His eyes and nose were running up a storm.
Charlie squatted down next to him. “They’re all looking for you, you know.”
“Our room is different.”
“What?”
“Our room. The stuff is gone.”
“What stuff?”
“The lizard books. My glove and my bats and my championship trophy.”
“Oh, you mean Tommy’s stuff. Well, we had it there for a while.”
He was afraid to look him in the eye. Did the kid have some kind of power like a weird kid in a movie? Maybe he saw dead people. Maybe the ghost of Tommy liked to hang around him. He didn’t much care which it was; it was all spooky and he wanted no part of it. He wanted to get this kid down into the house and out of his life.
“How come you took my stuff away?”
“I didn’t. Papa made Mama do it. He said it wasn’t good for me once I came back here.”
His face brightened. “You came back, too?”
“Well, I was staying at my grandma’s, you know, for the first six months or so. While Mama and Daddy were out looking for—for Tommy.”
Those long months at his grandma’s. He hadn’t thought of them in years. Kneeling on the shag carpet, Grandma’s gospel music playing on her old record player, wondering what was happening back home, if they’d found his brother yet. They never talked about that. “If anything happens we’ll be the first to know,” she’d said, “so let’s leave those folks alone to do what they have to do. All we can do is pray that he’ll come home.” She was bad off already by then, her feet swollen so much she could barely get down out of the armchair to kneel. He couldn’t pray, though. He was too scared.
“Who took care of Horntail?” the kid said.
“I took him with me to Grandma’s,” he said, and started to laugh. “I let him loose on her carpet one time just to freak her out. She didn’t like that one bit.”
“Nah, she hates lizards.”
“Yeah.”
“And snakes.”
“Yeah.”
He looked down through the branches. He could see the lights from the police flashlights moving through the fields and the woods. They were looking for the kid, but the kid was floating high up above all that, the kid was somewhere else entirely.
“I’m sorry I broke your sub,” the kid said.
“My sub?”
“Your submarine that Papa gave you.”
“Oh.”
The last time he’d seen Tommy. That last day. They’d had a big fight. His dad had come back from a long tour and he’d brought Charlie a shiny new submarine and Tommy had gotten only a book and, boy, was he mad. Tommy wanted to play with his sub, just one turn, he kept saying, but Charlie never had anything Tommy wanted, it was always the other way around, and he loved his shiny new sub that Tommy wanted and he said, “No way.” He said, “Get your own stinkin’ sub.”
“Just one turn,” Tommy had said.
“No,” Charlie said. “It’s mine and you can’t even touch it.” And Tommy had grabbed it out of his hands, right then, breaking the periscope in two.
“Anyway, I’m sorry about it,” the kid was saying now.
“That
’s okay. It was my fault. I should have let you try it,” Charlie said. It occurred to him that he was talking to the kid as if he were Tommy. That was followed by another thought (the thoughts were hitting him like blows, one after the other, making him see stars) that only he and Tommy knew that Tommy had broken the periscope. He had meant to get his brother in trouble for it but he had disappeared before Charlie had the chance. He looked out in the dark through the rustling branches and felt overcome with vertigo; he sat himself down on his bottom and pushed his long legs out across the floating floor. Look: here was his body, his legs covered with goose bumps, his shiny shorts, his high-tops.
“I broke it ’cause I was mad. It was so nice,” the kid said. “I never had a sub like that.”
“That’s okay.”
Charlie was sitting there with his mouth open. It occurred to him he ought to close it. “You’re him, aren’t you?” he said, wondering at the words as they came out of his own mouth. “How can you be him?”
“I don’t know how,” the kid said.
They were silent. The kid ran his palm over the spikes on the lizard’s back.
“Thanks for watching Horntail.”
“It’s nothing,” Charlie said. He was proud of himself, all of a sudden, for keeping Tommy’s lizard alive all these years. He felt his whole body flush with pride, like when he was a kid and he’d thrown a good pitch and Tommy had said, “Good pitch, Charlie!”
The kid stroked the lizard up and down his sides, Horntail looking back at him with its yellow eyes. He wondered if it had missed Tommy and recognized him now or if it was just another day for the lizard.
“I’m sorry about what happened to you,” Charlie said finally.
“You didn’t do it.”
“I maybe coulda stopped it though.”
“Nah, Charlie. You were a little kid.”
Charlie gulped. His chest hurt. He could feel the words burning up through his throat and then he said them. “Mama told me to tell you to come home for lunch. To come home from Oscar’s. She told me to tell you that. But I was mad at you for breaking my sub and I didn’t want to talk to you and I didn’t do it. And maybe if I had said that you would have come home early—maybe then—”
“Nah, Charlie. Anyway, I was dead already.”
“You were?” Charlie said.
“Yeah. I was dead pretty fast.”
“What happened?” Charlie said. He’d been waiting years to know. The kid didn’t answer. His nose started running again. The lizard ambled down his arm to the floor, so Charlie picked him up and held the cool, breathing body in his hand. After a while he heard a rustling sound down below. Someone else was down there, breathing. The person didn’t say anything.
“I saw him,” the kid said at last.
“Who?
“Pauly.”
“Pauly?”
“Pauly. Down the street?”
“You mean Paul Clifford?”
He nodded.
“He’s the one … that killed me.”
“Paul Clifford? Pauly down the street? He’s the one who—he killed you?”
He nodded.
“Fuck. Paul Clifford? What’d he do?”
“I don’t know. It happened so fast.”
The kid took a deep breath.
“I was on my bike riding to Oscar’s and I saw Aaron’s brother Pauly was there. He said—he said he had this rifle and did I want to take a shot with it, it would only take a minute. So I said okay ’cause he said just a minute and you know Mama never let us touch guns.”
“Yeah.”
“So we went to the woods to do some shooting and he shot all these bottles and he wouldn’t give me a turn at all. So I asked him if I could have a turn and then he shot me.”
“He shot you? Because you wanted a turn?”
“I don’t know why. I don’t know. I was standing there and then I can’t see anymore, it’s all black. And when I wake up I’m falling.”
“You’re falling?”
“My whole body is falling and it’s a long way down, and the water’s cold. It’s real cold in there, Charlie, the water’s way up over my head and cold and bad smelling. I try to keep my head up over the water and I yell and yell, but he doesn’t get me out, Charlie, he won’t let me out, and so I yell and yell and it hurts every time in my body, my body really hurts, but I keep on yelling and no one is coming and no one comes and I’m all alone in there, I’m all alone, and I can’t do it. I try, Charlie, I try real hard, but I can’t keep my head up anymore. It’s cold under there and I can’t breathe. I can see the sun shining down through the water, it’s shining down really hard making the metal pail bright. It’s really shiny. I can see it shining right through the water. And then I died.”
“Man. Oh, man. Oh, man.” He couldn’t say anything else but that. He saw his brother Tommy drowning. They were all of them down there, Tommy and himself and their mama and his papa, too, all of them down there, drowning in the cold water.
“Fuck. Paul Clifford. Why’d he do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know. I tried to ask him why’d he do that to me, but he wouldn’t tell me. He ran away.”
The kid didn’t say anything else for a minute. His nose was running down into his mouth and he wiped it on his sleeve. He mumbled something in a low voice.
“What?”
“She don’t want me, Charlie.”
“Who?”
“Mama. She don’t want to see me. She forgot all about me. And I been trying to get back here since the day I was born.”
He didn’t know what to say. He put a hand on the kid’s back and rubbed it in little circles. The kid’s back was moving back and forth as he took big gulps of air. That’s all right, Charlie thought. You go on breathing. You just breathe now. Breathe for all of us. You got some catching up to do on that score.
All his feelings for Tommy had been locked up in a room somewhere and now the door was open and they were running amok.
He looked at the kid. Little snot-nosed white kid who was and wasn’t his brother. He couldn’t take it in. He didn’t even try.
Thirty-Three
“Tommy?”
Denise stood beneath the tree and heard the name come out of her own lips. It felt strange on her tongue and sounded strange to her ears, as if she was just trying it out, as if she’d never said that name before in her whole life.
She had stood there listening and felt her mind spinning in the dark and she wasn’t grabbing hold of anything; there was nothing to grasp onto except those two voices that sounded just like her own two boys talking in that rickety pile of lumber they used to hide out in. Her own two boys, she’d know them anywhere, only it wasn’t. She had heard and she hadn’t. There was a thing she had to do but she didn’t know what it was and she didn’t know what was real anymore and then she heard a voice that was her own voice speaking the name.
“Tommy?”
She didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to see. It wasn’t Tommy up there. She knew it wasn’t Tommy. She heard and didn’t hear. Tommy was dead and this was another boy.
But she grabbed hold anyway of the wooden steps nailed into the tree trunk and she climbed her way up through the hole, scraped her long body through.
The boy didn’t look like her son. He was a small white child, his hair golden even at nighttime like a picture in a JCPenney catalog. Not like her sweet boy with his light brown skin that seemed lit from within and his grin that split your heart in two. Nothing like her boy that was lost.
This was a different child sitting there with Charlie’s hand on his back.
The child looked up at her. He was all scratched up, his cheeks smeared with dirt and blood and tears, as if he’d crawled right up from the bowels of hell itself.
“Oh, baby.” She held out her arms to him and he scrambled over and threw himself at her, pressing his small body against hers so tightly it made her draw in her breath and lean back against the bark, so real and rough and ha
rd against her spine.
She didn’t know if it was Tommy in there somewhere. She didn’t know how it could be. She thought that probably in her confusion she was making an honest mistake by wishing so hard that it was so. But she had known him by the look in his eyes that matched the look in her own eyes; he was one of the lost, one of her own.
Thirty-Four
Paul woke up. It was dark. He felt cleaned out. Clean. He must’ve passed out. He lay flat on the pine needles, looking through the trees at the night sky. A clear night. He could see stars looking back at him. There were so many. He always liked the stars. They weren’t coming down on him or judging him. They were just looking. None of it matters, that’s what the stars said. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.
He didn’t want to move. If he moved his eyes from the sky, he didn’t know what would happen to him.
Men were coming. He could hear them rustling. He could sense the flashlights invading the dark. They were moving through the woods. It was like a movie, only in the movie there’d be dogs. He’d be running in the movie, breathing hard. But he wasn’t. He was lying calmly, facing the sky.
“What’s that?”
“I thought I saw something!” He heard the real voices and the high, toy voices crackling from their walkie-talkies.
“Something’s here!”
Not something. He thought. Someone.
He thought he should run. He should be running. The boy had known somehow and he had told them and they had come for him. But he felt his body settling in deeper into the pine needles and the dirt.
He was remembering that day, now. June 14. He realized he had never really left it, he had always been there, in that day, hearing the boy crying out from the bottom of the well.
* * *
It had started with the cat.
He had been aware of the cat for at least a couple of months, its skinny body and black and white spots as much a part of the scenery as the shitbrown grass or the cornfield behind it or the gray fence that separated their property from the McClures’ and that the cat walked across every day. He watched it without thinking while he got ready for school, the way it walked down their fence one foot carefully after the other like it had a master plan it was following step by step, and he’d envied that mangy cat, that it could go wherever it wanted to go.
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