Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

  Amanda had theories. A mother always did. An errant step into an unused well, a hundred feet deep, disguised by the fulsome St. Augustine grass. A bough, sundered by that noise, falling from overhead. A snake bite, a twisted ankle, a bee sting, maybe she simply got turned around. They couldn’t call 911! Who would save them?

  G. H. took the downstairs door, closed it gingerly. The grass was damp and thick.

  “I’m going up front.” Clay did just that.

  Ruth was afraid; once you had a kid, you knew to be afraid. “We should look in the garage.” Ruth led the way.

  Amanda followed her.

  Archie walked past the yard to the little shed. He knew his sister wasn’t in there, but he had to look. The door stood open, and Archie leaned against the structure, looked back at the house. Stupid little kid. He knew she’d gone back into the woods. Why wasn’t he able to say this out loud? And how did he know it? It didn’t matter. Archie shivered the way you might when you walk into a spiderweb, the way you might if you saw a spider dart from beneath your pillow and lose itself in your mosaic-printed bedsheets, the way you might if a spider crept from your shoulder up your neck and nestled into the comforting cave of your ear, the way you might if a spider dropped from the ceiling and landed on your hair and then picked its way forward carefully down the slope of your nose so you could barely see it with your wide-set eyes, the way you might if a spider started and bit you and its poison dripped into your bloodstream and then became a part of you, inextricable as your DNA, the thing that made you. His left knee felt funny, then gave out beneath him, and Archie doubled over, and he started to vomit but it wasn’t vomit, just water, a bit of blood. Guess what? It was pink like—

  36

  CLAY COULD FEEL THE GRAVEL THROUGH HIS FLIP-FLOPS. They were almost worn out, at the end of their life. If you wanted to mitigate your guilt over making garbage, you could mail them back to the manufacturer, gratis, who would dump them in Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia, some place like that where NGOs taught people to snip them into pieces and stitch them into rubber mats for white people to buy. There was nothing out front, there was nothing past the hedge, just the very same view that had taunted him the day before. Was that only yesterday? “Rose!” His voice didn’t carry. It didn’t go anywhere. It fell to the verdant ground.

  In the garage Ruth pointed out the ladder up to the loft. A girl might want to play up there! Ruth had half-plans to someday turn it into a guest apartment. Amanda scooted up the ladder, but there was nothing up there.

  The women came out of the garage as Clay rounded the corner and G. H. completed a circuit of the house. The four of them looked at one another.

  “She’s gone?” Amanda didn’t know what else to say.

  “She can’t be gone—” Ruth meant gone, finality, disappearance.

  Whatever this was, it wasn’t the rapture. Rose definitely would have been saved, but Clay knew they couldn’t yield to pure myth. “She must have just—gone somewhere.”

  “She was so curious about other houses. And the eggs! Maybe she went to the egg stand.” Ruth had her doubts.

  “Where’s Archie?” Clay looked toward the backyard.

  “He was right there.” Amanda could hold only one thing in her head at that moment.

  “He seems better.” Such optimism! It only worked if he excused the fact of the boy’s missing teeth, but parenthood meant occasional magical flights of fancy.

  Ruth nodded. “One of us should go down to the egg stand.”

  Amanda strode away, impatient. “I’ll go. Clay, go to the back. Look in the woods. But don’t go far—”

  “I’ll look inside again.” Ruth dismissed the two men. “You go out back.”

  He and G. H. cut through the front door, and from the back deck Clay saw his son, prone, in the grass. He called his name. He ran toward him. He could no longer remember what he was supposed to be doing.

  The boy was on his knees and his chest like a Muslim in prayer. Clay slipped a hand into his armpit and pulled him back.

  “Dad.” Archie looked at him, then leaned forward and vomited once more, a beautiful plash of liquid onto earth.

  “What’s happened?” G. H. was demanding an explanation. “You’re all right, you’re all right.”

  Ruth saw this from the deck. She hurried, knowing she was needed. They braced the boy’s body between theirs and walked at the deliberate pace of the elderly. The boy kept choking, or seizing, but there was nothing left in him to escape his mouth. His eyes were almost but not exactly closed, fluttering like the eyes of a kind of now-antiquated camera, but did they see? Did they capture anything?

  Ruth was cataloging. They had old antibiotics. They had a hot water bottle. They had that powdered drink for when you were down with flu. You dissolved it in hot water and slept for hours. They had sea salt and olive oil and basil and laundry detergent and Band-Aids and a huge package of those little travel packages of tissues that were so handy to have in your purse. George had ten thousand dollars in cash tucked away for emergencies. They were rich! Would any of that be a salve to whatever this was?

  “Let’s get him inside.” G. H. captained this endeavor. They proceeded, awkward, up the wide wooden steps. The pool’s filtration system began its scheduled cycle, which told him that it was 10:00 a.m. It whirred and gurgled joyfully.

  They laid the boy’s body on the sofa. “Archie, honey are you okay? Can you tell me?”

  Archie looked up at the trio. “I don’t know.”

  Clay looked at the other adults. “Where’s Rose?”

  “I think she’s probably playing down the road. She borrowed one of the bikes. I know she’s been bored. She’s just having—she’s playing.” G. H. tried to make this sound inevitable. “Let’s get Archie some water. We can’t have him dehydrating.”

  Clay did know that Rose loved to do. She was always with a book, and in her books, girls her age had big hearts and appetites for adventure. They did unlikely, brave things, facing down private fears, then chastely held hands with boys with beautiful eyelashes. These books had given her a sense of the world as something to be conquered with derring-do. Books ruined everyone—wasn’t that what his academic work was meant to show? “Water. Right.”

  Ruth had already filled another glass. “Drink this up.”

  “Sit up, easy now.” Clay’s body remembered the pose of early parenthood, ready to leap and right your toddler’s toppling body.

  “We have to go to the hospital.” George had decided. “We have to go now.”

  “You can’t leave me.” Ruth unfolded the blanket on the sofa’s back and draped it over the boy’s body.

  “He’s sick. You see that.”

  “We can’t go without my daughter—”

  “We’ll go. You and me. We’ll take Archie.”

  “No. You can’t, George, you can’t leave.”

  “Ruth. You find Amanda. You two find Rose. You stay here.”

  Did she have it in her to do this? Wasn’t she bored with having to be strong and noble and competent, best supporting actress? Wasn’t she allowed to be hysterical and afraid? “George, please.”

  He looked into his wife’s eyes. “We’ll come back. We’ll come right back.”

  “You’ll never come back. Don’t you see that something is happening? It’s happening right now. Whatever it is, it’s happening to Archie, it’s happening to all of us, we can’t leave.” Ruth was not crying or hysterical, which made what she said more unsettling.

  Clay did not notice the tingle in his knees, his elbows, or he did and took it for fear. “Ruth, please. We need help.”

  This was his moment. Men of his generation made decisions, they waged wars, they made fortunes, they acted with conviction. “We’re going. Clay, take Archie to the car. Bring that blanket. Ruth, get him a bottle of water. Archie, you lie down in the back seat.”

  “George. I won’t let you do this. I can’t let you do this. I can’t.”

  “This is the only thing
we can do. This is the thing that I have to do.” George held the keys in his hand. He didn’t spell it out for her because he knew Ruth and knew she’d understand: if they weren’t human, in this moment, then they were nothing.

  Ruth didn’t know how to enumerate the things she could not do. She could not do any of this. “You’re coming back to me. You’re coming back for us.”

  “Set a timer. Get your phone. Set the alarm. One hour.” G. H. was sure he could do this.

  “You can’t make promises you can’t keep!” Ruth fumbled with her phone.

  “It will take one hour. Less. I’ll drive to the hospital. I’ll leave them and turn around and come back for you and Amanda and Rose. You’ll find Rose. Do you understand? I’ll set a timer too.”

  “It won’t work. It won’t work out.”

  “It will. There is no choice. Look.” He pressed the digital display, and the seconds began counting down. “I’m going to leave Clay and Archie there, and then I’ll be back for the three of you by the time this goes off.”

  “How do you know the hospital will be—” Clay faltered.

  “Clay.” George did not think it worth discussing. He knew what was supposed to happen. “We’re going. Get him into the car.”

  “Come on, honey.” Clay helped his son to his feet and remembered his hands at the toddler’s waist. So skinny he could circle it, fingertips touching.

  Ruth draped the blanket around Archie’s shoulders again. “One hour.” She pressed the button on her phone, and the seconds started ticking. “That’s what you get. You’ve promised.”

  “It’s nothing to worry about.” George gripped his keys, heavy to connote luxury. Was he lying? Was he hopeful?

  Ruth didn’t believe in prayer, so she thought of nothing.

  37

  G. H. KNEW THEY WOULD FIND ROSE. THAT WAS WHAT MOTHERS did. Some secret sonar, like those birds that hide a hundred thousand seeds in October and stay fat all winter. The car came to life like the reliable, expensive machine that it was.

  Archie shivered on the leather back seat.

  “You tell me if you need to stop and be sick.” The way he said it, it sounded like George was thinking of his car, but a parent was versed in vomit and worse, baptized in it, able, for the rest of life, to find not horror but pity. Seven-year-old Maya on the corner of Lex and Seventy-Fourth, vomiting whole flakes of white fish into his outstretched hands. Just another memory, just another moment, but he’d do it again if it had been his adult daughter in the back seat, toothless and in the grip of some ailment for which they had no noun. You were a father forever.

  Clay shifted to the left to retrieve his wallet from his right back pocket. Incredible he’d remembered it, some secret instinct. He thumbed through plastic chits in search of their insurance card. They used Amanda’s plan; it was better than the one at the college. An exhale upon finding it, the relief of something, finally, going right.

  “We’re going to get you to a doctor.” Clay turned around to look at his son. Was he thinner, was he paler, was he frailer, was he smaller? “You’re okay. You’re okay.”

  “I’m okay.” Obedient Archie was determined to take this like a man. Archie was a man now.

  The car turned from driveway to access road to main road. George drove more slowly than normal, despite the quickened heartbeat, the sense of rush, the seconds accruing on the timer. None of the men in the car noticed the little egg shack, none of them knew that Amanda was inside it, finding, instead of Rosie, only the goodly scent of farm labor. The Mudds, whose land that was, would never again bring fresh-laid eggs back to that little shed.

  It all swam before Clay, green, green, rich, wet, thick, menacing, useless, impotent, angry, indifferent green. “I saw someone. When I went out before.”

  George did not mark this. “You said you got lost. Pay attention. There’s pencil and paper in the glove box. Draw a map. We turned right from the driveway, and I turned left back there. We go over this hill and make another right.” He was planning for contingencies. What if they were separated? What if—there were endless scenarios.

  Clay opened the glove box, where there was a pad and a pencil, the owner’s manual, the insurance and registration information, a package of tissues, a slender first aid kit. Order, preparation, tidiness. Everything about G. H. and Ruth’s life was orderly, prepared, tidy. Rich people were so lucky. “There was a woman. On the road. She flagged me down. She was speaking Spanish.”

  “You saw someone—yesterday, when you went out?” Absurd that was yesterday! G. H. tried but could not answer what day of the week it was. “Why didn’t you say?”

  “She was—she was standing on the side of the road. She flagged me down. I talked to her. Well, I tried to.” He knew his son was listening. It was terrible to be ashamed in front of your own child.

  “We asked you what you had seen.” George was irritated. He needed all the information before he could decide what to do next.

  “She was dressed like a maid. I guess? In a polo shirt. A white polo shirt. I thought—I don’t know. I couldn’t understand her. She was speaking in Spanish, and I don’t know what she was saying, and I would have used Google Translate but I couldn’t and then I just—” He didn’t know if he could say it in front of Archie.

  G. H. thought of Rosa, who kept their own house in order, whose husband sculpted and tended the hedge, whose children played quietly, sometimes, as their parents worked in the summer heat, pretending not to see the swimming pool, though Ruth had once told Rosa the children were welcome to swim. They never would. It was not in them. Had it been her? “A Hispanic woman?”

  Archie was listening, but Archie understood. He didn’t know what he would have done; he knew that it was foolishness to pretend that anyone would know what they might do in such a moment.

  “I left her there. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know something was happening.” Clay could never have imagined anything so specific as the unexplained birds, the lost teeth. What if Rose, right then, was wandering on the side of the road, and sought help from some passing motorist? Why would she? He had no idea what she thought, his daughter.

  “Never mind.” G. H. didn’t think morality was a test. It was an ever-shifting set of concerns. “Pay attention. Draw a map that you’ll be able to read. Write down what we do.”

  “I left her. She needed help. We need help.” It was karma, was that it? Clay thought the universe didn’t care. He was probably right. But maybe it did; maybe it was math.

  “We’re going for help. You see this bend in the road? There’s a farm just past there, McKinnon Farms. It’s a landmark.” It was odd to try to see the whole thing with fresh eyes. G. H. never thought about these roads. He possessed them without having to see them. This was their place, but it was also not their place. He didn’t know who the McKinnons were, if they still had anything to do with the farm that bore their name. He and Ruth hadn’t gone round to shake hands when they closed on the house. How would the locals take that, the black strangers in the eighty-thousand-dollar car? They holed up. They didn’t even like to stop at the grocery or the gas station, conspicuous and tense. Would he need a gun, in the days to come? G. H. had never believed in the things. Would the cash in the safe in the master bedroom closet do anything to help them?

  Clay drew some lines on the paper. They were inscrutable the second he removed the pencil. His heart was not in it. His heart was in the back seat; his heart was wherever Rose was. “You don’t understand.” The sight lines were unobstructed, and the fields rolled away in their irritating and persistent way. “I didn’t know what to do. I can’t do anything without my phone. I’m a useless man. My son is sick and my daughter is missing and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do right now in this moment right here, I have no idea what to do.” His eyes horribly damp, Clay tried for composure. He swallowed the sob like it was a burp. He was so small.

  George did not trust the place. If he’d had a c
ardiac event, he’d have paid the three thousand dollars for a helicopter lift back to Manhattan, where people took on faith the humanity of black people. This place was not good enough for him, beautiful as it was. Here, people were suspicious, resentful of and beholden to the rich, the outsiders. Here, people prayed that Mike Pence was an agent of the godly in the imminent end. All that research that doctors and nurses thought black people could take it, and withheld the palliative opioids. “I know what to do.”

  Clay couldn’t say out loud that he didn’t think the doctor would have anything for them. He had put the child’s teeth into a Ziploc bag. It was in his left pocket, and he worried it like some gruesome rosary. “Maybe they’ll be able to explain everything at the hospital.”

  “Before that. We need to stop. We’re going to Danny’s house.”

  “Whose house?”

  George couldn’t explain his faith that Danny, of all people, would understand what was happening, and have, if not a solution, a strategy. That’s the kind of man he was. They could go to Danny and say the girl was missing or the boy was sick or they were all afraid of the noises in the night, and Danny, like the Wizard of Oz, could grant good health and safe passage. “Danny was our contractor. He’s a neighbor. He’s a friend.”

  The day outside seemed so normal. “We have to get Archie to the hospital.”

  “We will. Ten minutes. We’ll stop for ten minutes. I’m telling you, Danny will help, he’ll have an idea.”

  Clay was supposed to fight, he felt sure, but he only shrugged. “If you think so.”

  “I do.” George had made his life this way. Problems had solutions, and Danny would have information and also might lead by example. He and Clay could come back, roll up the sleeves of a chambray shirt, and protect the people they loved.

  “There’s no one around.” Clay wondered if they’d see that woman again. He’d huddled with his family in the comfort of the king-size bed with its lovely semen-stained sheets, and that Mexican woman—but maybe she wasn’t Mexican—had passed the night . . . he had no idea where.