Hurry Home

by Roz Nay

  “Who’s the third kid, Alex?”

  I have my arm around him in the photo, making sure he’s safe and doesn’t topple backward off the gate. Both of us have skinned knees from all our fun and adventures.

  “You have a little brother?” Chase spits out the word. “Were you ever going to tell me about him?”

  No, Chase. No, I wasn’t.

  PART TWO

  THE RUNNER

  ALEX

  There’s a reason I can’t talk about the past even though I’m tied to it with a hundred feet of rope. Over the years, I’ve learned to swallow the long coil. What happened in Horizon sits piled in the deepest pit of me: I push it down; I keep it there. But my sister found the end of the rope, yanked it with all her might. And now here comes everything, rancid and foul as it’s ripped upward, pulling all of my insides out.

  Chase’s voice sounds distorted as if he’s speaking underwater. He’s saying something about my little brother. He knows his name. Pim. It’s a name I haven’t uttered out loud for years.

  I can’t stay any longer. I can’t be here. I turn and make for the door, the photograph still in my hand.

  “Alex!” Chase calls after me. “You can’t just—”

  But the door swings shut, and I clatter down the stairs, through the lobby, and out into the heavyweight afternoon sky.

  * * *

  On the day it happened, my mother finished the dishes, making sure everything was clean before she left. I stood by the fridge, peeling at an old sticker of a rainbow. Half the color was gone. Mom wiped her hands on the front of her apron, unwrapped it from around her hips, and switched off the radio. The lack of bluegrass was suddenly abrupt. The sound of the crickets outside took over. It was September on the farm, that golden part of the year when everything looks dipped in honey, and the three of us—me, Ruth, and Pim—lined up in the kitchen, barefoot and scruffy. Dad was outside. I could hear him starting up the truck.

  Mom turned to Ruth. “Ruth Van Ness,” she said, “you’re the oldest, so you’re in charge. We’ll be an hour, no longer. Don’t touch anything electrical. And look after your brother and sister.” It was the first time she’d ever left us.

  Ruth was thirteen and almost Mom’s height. “I’ve got it,” she said. “Go and have fun.”

  “I want to come, too,” I said, because I was eight years old and the world felt wrong without my mom in it. “Why don’t you ever take me?”

  “You’ll survive for an hour, Alexandra. Willem Van Ness, are you going to be good?” She’d christened him Willem—a nod to our Dutch heritage—but for all four years of his life we’d called him the traditional shortener, Pim.

  “Ruth says I can jump off the roof if I want.” Pim’s big eyes were earnest. “I’m going to make a parachute umbrella.”

  “I never said that.” Ruth smiled. “And he won’t be doing that.”

  Mom took her wedding ring from where she had hooked it over the white china bird on the windowsill and pushed it hard back onto her finger. Then she walked down the line of us, pressing her lips to the tops of our heads.

  “Goodbye, my owl,” she said to Ruth. “Goodbye, my little tiger,” to me. And for Pim, “Goodbye, my little hazelnut.”

  The three of us filed through the screen door and onto the porch. We watched as Dad helped Mom into the truck, then took off out of the driveway, bumping down the gravel road. They were going into town to buy hoses. I remember it because it sounded like a boring reason to go on a journey. Couldn’t my father have gone on his own? The humdrum of their chore—a walk down an aisle in a hardware store—should never have run parallel with an afternoon like that one. It seems impossibly cruel. But that’s the thing about life’s tragedies: they’re always hidden in something small.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun was baking the sky. I watched the truck until it was a speck on the grid road and the diesel roar had faded.

  “Come on.” Ruth put her arm around me. “We can fill an hour. It’ll go quickly.”

  “Will you play a game with me?” I asked her. There were no other farms for miles around, just rolling, empty hills seamed by gullies and creek beds.

  “A board game? Sure, whatever you want. But maybe not Monopoly. You know how you get.” Ruth steered me back toward the front door.

  “Are they coming back?” Pim asked. He looked up at me with his beautiful eyes and grabbed my hand. He was brown from a wide, blue summer spent outside, the white of his T-shirt stark against his skin. As much as our mother scrubbed his hair in the tub, it grew sideways and dusty through every August, a mocha color that would only darken again in the fall.

  “Don’t worry, Pimlet,” I said. “Mom and Dad will be back soon. Ruth said so.”

  “What game are we playing? Can we all jump off the roof with umbrellas? I’ll go first.”

  “We don’t have enough umbrellas.” Ruth winked at me.

  “But inside is boring!” he grumbled. “Let’s play in the fields!”

  “Okay,” Ruth said. “But come inside first—we should put on shoes.” She moved us back into the kitchen. “Put shoes on, Pim. The grass is spiky back there. And there might be nails.”

  Pim ignored her, of course. That summer, we had devised a game that Pim called “hurry home,” and we played it endlessly from sunrise to sunset. We must have gotten the idea from capture the flag, or kick the can, or one of those other childhood games that involved defending a base and chasing off invaders. There was a patch of farmland out of sight of the house, a grassy corner behind the granary that was surrounded by trees and grew wild every summer, since it lay beyond the turning circle of all the harvest machines. While one of us guarded home—a square marked with an old wooden clothespin driven into the dirt—the other two circled as thieves, picking a moment to fly out from behind a tree or a disused tractor and steal the peg. Then the thief had to race around the grain silo and make it back to home without being tagged. If the thief made it back, they were awarded the more coveted role of guarder. I see you, I see you! Pim would shout as he ran. He was always the guarder and would never venture far from his clothespin.

  Sometimes in my dreams, I’m caught in an endless game of hurry home, except that my legs won’t run, my mouth won’t open, my eyes are sewn shut. I’m always an adult in those dreams, but Pim remains a little boy. And in my nightmares, he’s still so much faster than I am.

  “I want to be the guarder,” I said as the three of us walked out of the kitchen onto the porch, the old screen door banging behind us. The last few times we’d played, Pim always caught me and I’d had enough of that. He gripped the clothespin, his thumb on the very top. He’d scratched our initials down the side of the wood, slept with the peg in his fist at night.

  “Hand it over,” I said. “It’s my turn. I’m only playing if I’m the guarder.”

  “Pim, she’s right. It is her turn,” Ruth said gently. “Remember how it’s good to share?”

  I crossed my arms, tapped my foot on the old planked porch with a feigned sternness. I loved hurry home. My favorite part was the secrecy, the hidden spots I’d developed to watch home from that were faraway and elaborate, too sophisticated for my brother or Ruth to ever spot. I was good at it: the attack was all in the timing. But my speed as a runner didn’t match my sneakiness. It was rare I didn’t get tagged. Even so, why couldn’t I have let Ruth be the guarder that day? At her age, she straddled the world of adulthood and children. She may have seen danger coming when I did not.

  “You can be guarder again next round,” she said to Pim, which wasn’t true because there were rules. You couldn’t just break them. With a sigh, Pim passed me the clothespin, and when we reached the tree-lined arena, Ruth put her arm around both of us in a huddle.

  “Ready, you two? And remember it’s just a game, okay? We’re just playing, and we’re not staying out here for long. There’s lemonade in the fridge, and the winner gets first glass.”

  She shouldn’t have said that.
Because I decided right then I wanted the lemonade. I would have it, and I would drink it all down in one go, watching my brother’s face through the bottom of the glass. Ruth and Pim took off to hide. I ground the peg into the dirt, stamped on it twice to be sure. I was ready. The air hung heavy with heat, the only sound the occasional droopy peep of a bird.

  With nobody in sight I waited, then edged away from home base slowly, slowly, daring myself to go farther and farther. I was inviting my siblings to take their chance at stealing the peg and felt primed for the race that would follow. But when Pim darted from his hiding place to make a bid for the win, I saw him only after he’d swooped, after he’d already grabbed the trophy from the hole in the ground. He was so quick, the lightness of his frame, his ribs visible through his T-shirt.

  “I see you, I see you!” I shouted, and I took off after him, the dirty soles of his feet kicking up as he flew into the long grass, giggling. He picked a clean line through the stalky, dryer patches of land that three months of heat had turned brittle. All I knew was I was going to catch him; I was going to be the guarder next round. He wasn’t going to steal my lemonade. I followed, thirty, forty feet behind, my sprinting body reflected strangely in the dull chrome of the granary walls.

  At the foot of one of the grain trucks Pim stopped and turned, dwarfed by the huge black rubber of a wheel. He was breathing so hard. His little chest rose and fell, but I didn’t slow down. There was a second when he realized I was still coming for him, that he’d never make it home before I tagged him. I saw a shimmy of panic run through his body as he searched for an escape route. He spotted the ladder on the side of the truck, and he scaled it as fast as he could.

  By the time I got to the bottom rung, he was already on the eighth. It was a metal ladder, welded on, the dark peeling paint hot under my fingers. How could he climb so fast without shoes on? Why was he always ahead of me? The injustice coated everything inside my head red.

  “Stop, Pim!” I shouted. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just stood there, holding the burning ladder, fuming.

  I’ve buried the truth so deep that it’s lost. It has no sound, no contour, no other details to help me verify it. What I’m sure of is that Pim didn’t stop climbing until he was at the top of the ladder, where he crouched on the very rim of the grain truck, holding the edge with his fingers and toes, his body huddled like a sparrow in the rain. He was looking down at me, my little brother. My little bird.

  “Pim!” I called, for certain now, a crack in my voice. I climbed up the ladder until I was near enough to reach him, stretching one arm to grab at him as he teetered on his ledge.

  “No! Pim!” I yelled, and as I climbed up the last two rungs, he lost his balance completely. I remember his eyes going wide, his mouth becoming a round O. By the time I reached the top, my brother was sinking into the grain, yelling in terror and flailing. Then he breathed in the flax and the yelling stopped.

  The more he moved in the silky quicksand of that flax container, the deeper he sank. I lunged out to him, I tried, but his arms were so thin, and he couldn’t paddle toward me. He could only sink further. He was snot and saliva, savage, primal eyes, and I screamed at the top of my lungs, thought wildly of jumping in too, but I didn’t. I just hung there, waving my hands in the air near him. Only his head was visible now, those big dark eyes looking up at me, pleading. A few seconds later, even those disappeared. I watched as the last of his hair was swallowed up. I squeezed my eyes tight, my nose and throat gummed in panic. Please God, when I open my eyes, let everything not be this.

  I had one foot over the container edge when Ruth reached the bottom of the ladder. I think only a minute contained all the chaos, a minute where she’d heard me and ran from the tree line.

  “Get down!” she shrieked, climbing rungs herself, grabbing at the hem of my T-shirt.

  “Pim’s in there!” I screamed.

  “He’s what?” she clambered past me on the ladder, treading on my fingers, straddling the rim of the container. “Pim!” she shouted. “Jesus! Pim! No, oh God!”

  I gaped at her, my face red-hot. I’d never heard Ruth swear before. Earnest, steady Ruth, who kept a Bible beside her bed and brushed her hair a hundred strokes every morning. In one smooth motion, she clamped both palms over the edge and dipped her whole body down into the grain.

  “Ruth!” I sobbed. “Don’t!” Even though she had a grip on the rim, I was sure she’d disappear, too, and in so many ways she did. We both did. Whatever we had of ourselves was lost in the few minutes that Ruth swished and swirled her body through the grain, hoping that Pim would grab a leg, a foot, as if he was sitting underwater with his eyes open, holding his breath. Ruth’s face contorted with the effort and eventually she slowed, pulled herself back up out of the grain. She hung with her ribs over the side, heaving.

  “Get down,” she gasped. I descended the ladder, my knees rattling. She slid down too, facing forward, all but falling, three-quarters of her covered in a strange flax dust that had turned her clothes and skin moth-silver. Her shoes were spilling seeds, little flecks of it that we’d find for weeks in our bedroom, in folds of our clothes.

  “Where are the drivers?” Ruth stammered, looking around frantically. We both knew Dad had let them all go early that Saturday, a rare moment of generosity because it was so hot, so easy just to go home. “We have to empty the truck!” She started fumbling her hands along the sides of the huge vehicle, looking for a lever there, something to tip the container upward and free Pim.

  “We need to get help!” I said, following Ruth as she banged on the metal siding. “We have to call nine-one-one!”

  “That will take too long! We need to tip the truck!” She ran to the driver’s door and tried to open it, but it was locked. The window was partway down. She slithered in, scraping her knees, all the while her breath coming out in rakes.

  “There are no keys!” she shouted, as if I were holding them, as if I could just pass them to her and solve the problem. The next second she crumpled over the steering wheel, great sobs racking her as I watched from outside the driver’s door.

  “Look at our clothes,” I said. “Mom’s gonna be mad.” My voice had dulled somehow, gone flat. I rubbed at my arms and legs, which were all I knew, as I smeared dirt and dust and the tang of metal from them. Nothing else in the world felt real.

  Ruth got out of the truck, stumbled toward me, and we collapsed into stalky grass.

  “What are we going to do?” she cried, her lack of solutions all the more terrifying. “We need Mom and Dad.”

  “I chased him,” I said, my hands shaking as I grabbed at her. “I didn’t mean to! I chased him, Ruth, up the ladder.”

  She hugged me until I stopped wriggling and we sat interlocked, all of our limbs shuddering like it had suddenly turned to winter.

  Fat tears rolled down my grimy cheeks, and Ruth smothered me, rocked me, our ribs knocking. The truck loomed behind us, cold and silent, a hideous catacomb. Far away on the unbending grid road, we heard the diesel roar of my father’s truck coming back from town. They’d been gone only about a half hour. Ruth stood. She looked down out me, her face dirty and streaked with tears. She held out her hand for mine, and together we staggered back to the porch, through the razor blades of grass that poked and scraped at our ankles.

  “I love you,” she kept saying. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

  “Will Pim be okay?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat.

  “Just keep walking,” she said. “We need Mom and Dad.”

  Ruth sat me on the porch steps. She wiped my face down with her cold hands, emptied her shoes into the sunny dandelions. Then she slid down next to me. The truck was getting closer, closer. There was a catch in her chest every time she breathed in, like the start of a terrible sickness.

  When my parents pulled into the driveway, Ruth took my hand and brought me to stand beside her. Mom got out of the truck first, her head tilted, already knowing something was wrong because she knew us
, she knew our faces. I wanted to run to her, but Ruth’s grip was a vise.

  “What’s happened?” Mom asked. She stood, one hand on the door of the truck, the other holding a woven basket with a few groceries as well as a hose.

  “We can’t find Pim,” Ruth said. Her chin wobbled as she spoke. “He ran off, and we can’t find him.”

  What was she doing? Why did she say that? She squeezed my hand tighter and tighter.

  My father rounded the truck. What could he see in us? My father, who never missed a trick. “Pim!” he shouted into the field, elbows sharp at his sides. “Pim!”

  “Have you looked for him?” Mom’s basket slanted. “Is he inside or outside?”

  “He’s outside,” Ruth said.

  “We were playing, and…” Ruth’s fingers clenched so hard around mine that it stopped me from saying anything else.

  “He was running,” Ruth said. “We don’t know anything else.”

  Dad walked briskly toward the field. “Pim!” I’d never heard his voice louder. He turned back to Ruth. “Why would he just take off?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruth said.

  “Ruth?” Mom’s brow creased. “Ruth Van Ness?” She turned to me. “Alexandra, where did you last see your brother?” Her eyes were granite. My whole body shook.

  “The grain truck,” I whispered. Ruth’s knees buckled and then straightened again.

  My mother let go of the basket she was holding, the groceries spilling onto the hard-baked ground.

  Dad started running toward the back of the field, to the trucks. “Lottie, take the girls into the house,” he called as he ran.

  Mom didn’t look at Ruth. Ruth tried to wrap herself around her, but it was like hugging a statue. “Come inside” was all Mom said.

  She held the screen door open for us, and we entered into the kitchen. Ruth and I stared up at our mother’s face, which was flat and expressionless. By the stove, Pim’s sneakers lay toe to heel, loose and abandoned. They were sky blue with race-car laces.