The Returned. Jason Mott

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      Harold put out his cigarette and cleared his throat—which he always did before trying to get Lucille’s goat. “You mean that devil?”

      She waved her hand at him. “Shush!” she said. “Don’t you call him that!”

      “You called him that. You said that’s what they all were, remember?”

      She was still short of breath from chasing the boy. Her words came staggered. “That was before,” she huffed. “I was wrong. I see that now.” She smiled and leaned back in exhaustion. “They’re a blessing. A blessing from the Lord. That’s what they are. A second chance!”

      They sat for a while in silence, listening to Lucille’s breath find itself. She was an old woman now, in spite of being a mother of an eight-year-old. She tired easily.

      “And you should spend more time with him,” Lucille said. “He knows you’re keeping your distance. He can tell it. He knows you’re treating him differently than you used to. When he was here before.” She smiled, liking that description.

      Harold shook his head. “And what will you do when he leaves?”

      Lucille’s face tightened. “Hush up!” she said. “‘Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking lies.’ Psalm 34:13.”

      “Don’t you Psalm at me. You know what they’ve been saying, Lucille. You know just as well as I do. How sometimes they just up and leave and nobody ever hears from them again, like the other side finally called them back.”

      Lucille shook her head. “I don’t have time for such nonsense,” she said, standing in spite of the heaviness of fatigue that hung in her limbs like sacks of flour. “Just rumors and nonsense. I’m going to start dinner. Don’t you sit out here and catch pneumonia. This rain will kill you.”

      “I’ll just come back,” Harold said.

      “Psalm 34:13!”

      She closed and locked the screen door behind her.

      * * *

      From the kitchen came the clattering of pots and pans. Cabinet doors opening, closing. The scent of meat, flour, spices, all of it drenched in the perfume of May and rain. Harold was almost asleep when he heard the boy’s voice. “Can I come outside, Daddy?” Harold shook off the drowsiness. “What?” He had heard the question perfectly well.

      “Can I come outside? Please?”

      For all the gaps in Harold’s old memory, he remembered how defenseless he’d always been when “Please” was laid out just so before him.

      “Your mama’ll have a fit,” he said.

      “Just a little one, though.”

      Harold swallowed to keep from laughing.

      He fumbled for a cigarette and failed—he’d sworn he’d had at least one more. He groped his pockets. In his pocket, where there was no cigarette, he found a small, silver cross—a gift from someone, though the place in his mind where the details of that particular memory should have been stored was empty. He hardly even remembered carrying it, but couldn’t help looking down at it as if it were a murder weapon.

      The words God Loves You, once, had been etched in the place where Christ belonged. But now the words were all but gone. Only an O and half a Y remained. He stared at the cross, then, as if his hand belonged to someone else, his thumb began rubbing back and forth at the crux.

      Jacob stood in the kitchen behind the screen door. He leaned against the door frame with his hands behind his back and his legs crossed, looking contemplative. His eyes scanned back and forth over the horizon, watching the rain and the wind and, then, his father. He exhaled heavily. Then he cleared his throat. “Sure would be nice to come outside,” he said with flourish and drama.

      Harold chuckled.

      In the kitchen something was frying. Lucille was humming.

      “Come on out,” Harold said.

      Jacob came and sat at Harold’s feet and, as if in reply, the rain became angry. Rather than falling from the sky, it leaped to the earth. It whipped over the porch railing, splashing them both, not that they paid it any heed. For a very long time the old man and the once-dead boy sat looking at each other. The boy was sandy-haired and freckled, his face as round and smooth as it always had been. His arms were unusually long, just as they had been, as his body was beginning its shift into an adolescence denied him fifty years ago. He looked healthy, Harold suddenly thought.

      Harold licked his lips compulsively, his thumb working the center of the cross. The boy did not move at all. If he hadn’t blinked now and again, he might as well have been dead.

      * * *

      “Do you want to keep him?”

      It was Agent Bellamy’s voice inside Harold’s head this time.

      “It’s not my decision,” Harold said. “It’s Lucille’s. You’ll have to ask her. Whatever she says, I’ll abide by.”

      Agent Bellamy nodded. “I can understand that, Mr. Hargrave. But I still have to ask you. I have to know your answer. It will stay between us, just you and me. I can even turn off the recorder if you want. But I have to have your answer. I have to know what you want. I have to know if you want to keep him.”

      “No,” Harold said. “Not for all the world. But what choice do I have?”

      Lewis and Suzanne Holt

      He awoke in Ontario; she outside Phoenix. He had been an accountant. She taught piano.

      The world was different, but still the same. Cars were quieter. Buildings were taller and seemed to glimmer in the night more than they used to. Everyone seemed busier. But that was all. And it did not matter.

      He went south, hopping trains in a way that had not been done in years. He kept clear of the Bureau only by fortune or fate. She had started northeast—nothing more than a notion she felt possessed to follow—but it was not long before she was picked up and moved to just outside Salt Lake City, to what was quickly becoming a major processing facility for the region. Not long after that he was picked up somewhere along the border of Nebraska and Wyoming.

      Ninety years after their deaths, they were together again.

      She had not changed at all. He had grown a shade thinner than he had been, but only on account of his long journey. Behind fencing and uncertainty, they were not as afraid as others.

      There is a music that forms sometimes, from the pairing of two people. An inescapable cadence that continues on.

      Three

      THE TOWN OF Arcadia was situated along the countryside in that way that many small, Southern towns were. It began with small, one-story wooden houses asleep in the middle of wide, flat yards along the sides of a two-lane blacktop that winded among dense pines, cedars and white oaks. Here and there, fields of corn or soybeans were found in the spring and summer. Only bare СКАЧАТЬ