It only makes me more insistent. “You can’t keep telling him—”
“You were the one to mention going on a mission, not me.” This is how it is with us now—completing each other’s sentences, reading each other’s minds, remembering a shared history as though it were a rerun of a favorite TV show. Lord help me for the times we behave like this, an old married couple.
“I’m trying to give him something to look forward to! If you cared for him at all . . .”
Dobbs sighs. “I’m working on it. Give me a few more weeks.”
I raise my eyes to the ceiling.
“I promise, Blythe. I give you my word.”
AS SOON AS
Dobbs goes to his study, Adam comes back upstairs.
“You want your dinner now?” He doesn’t answer but heads straight for the bookshelf.
“Where are my notebooks?”
“He confiscated them.”
“Why?”
“Can’t you show him a little respect?”
“Why should I respect him? You don’t.”
He’s right. I haven’t done a good job of hiding my feelings. Rather, I bake my loathing into Dobbs’s favorite meals, spoiling them with too much salt. I stitch it in the shirts he gives me to mend, sewing cuffs closed.
“Am I going to get them back?”
I am still deciding how to answer this when he says, “Can’t you just say yes or no? Why does there always have to be a story?”
Why does there always have to be a story?
Stories keep the fire burning inside us, stories keep us from dashing our heads against the wall. Without stories we’d be lost, dead, forgotten. I am a story, I should tell him. There used to be a girl who lived in a town where nothing bad ever happened. You are a story. Play your cards right, and you might live in a town one day, too. How about that for a story?
“Please just try and be nicer to him, that’s all I’m asking.”
Adam grabs a load of books from next to Dobbs’s recliner and leaves the room in a huff.
After enough time has passed for Adam to cool off, I go down with a sandwich and a cup of hot cocoa. His private barracks is next to the generator room. He doesn’t seem to mind the cramped space, the fuel smell from next door, or the engine noise when the generators kick on.
He’s hunched over his desk. I put the plate next to him, keep my hand from landing on his head and smoothing the static out of his white-blond hair, and notice he’s scribbling in one of Dobbs’s prized books.
I seize
The Coming Race
from him. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Frantically, I leaf through the others. Scribbled over the text of
The Survivor’s Primer
are silly riddles. In
The Alpha Strategy,
Adam has drawn cartoons.
“Adam! How could you!”
He grins. “What else am I supposed to use?”
“You aren’t going to be able to hide this from him, you know. He’s going to find out.”
“So let him.”
“Adam, this behavior of yours—it has to stop.” Every time I get a clear picture of that weathered farmhouse on the edge of town, where Adam is outside breaking sticks across his knee like a regular kid, there is this. Whatever the name for this is.
“He’s the one who took my stuff. Why don’t you yell at him? Why do you always take his side?”
“I don’t always take his side.”
“Yes, you do. It’s always got to be his way, keeping him happy, like he’s God or something.”
“You’re not being fair.”
He shakes his head. “Is it fair that he gets to come and go as he pleases and we have to stay here all the time?”
“We will stay here forever if you do not get your act together!”
Because there is no taking the words back, I spin around and march out of the room, Dobbs’s books packed tightly in my arms.
Nobody says a word when Dobbs comes upstairs. He’s bathed and changed his shirt, and his hands are pink from all the scrubbing, as though to get rid of any trace of her. “Movie’s ready.”
All he has to do is take one look at Adam’s face to know something’s amiss. He catches me looking at the bookshelf. He walks over to it. The second book he pulls out, and the game is up.
I go to him, explaining we’re living with an adolescent now, that we have to adjust.
He storms downstairs. Adam and I chase after him. Dobbs loads every single one of Adam’s notebooks into a cardboard box, and uses the dolly to wheel them along the utility tunnel. Adam yells at him to stop. I stand in front of the silo door, but Dobbs pushes me aside. He unlocks the padlock and opens the door. The place reeks. He rolls the cargo onto the platform and up to the railing. As Adam screams his protest, he empties the load over into the darkness.
“You let me know if you want anything else disposed of,” Dobbs tells Adam on his way out.
Adam might be small for his age and very pale, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a straight bone in his body, but he is not one to cower at a challenge. This is going to end badly.
I wake to find my son sitting at the table eating cereal.
“Good morning,” I call to him.
“ ’Morning.”
I put on my robe and amble to the table. He is smiling that sunrise smile I used to take for granted. He is not going to retaliate, and Dobbs is not going to hold a grudge, and we are going to live in that farmhouse after all. And then I see why Adam’s smile is so buttery. He’s covered
himself in small print. On his arms, on his neck, all over his hands are words and diagrams and maps. It’s not ink poisoning I’m worried about; it is the poisoning that comes from thinking you can win.
“My boy?”
I read him while he sleeps. With the pocket flashlight, I look at what Adam has refused to scrub clean. It is like being in Tutankhamen’s tomb, reading the history of the ancient Egyptians. I discover my son has learned to swear.
FUCKING SHIT
, is wrapped around his heel. More alarming are all the pictures of weapons—daggers and cannonballs careening across his arm, a missile, a gun. If someone else were to read this, they’d get entirely the wrong idea about my son. Adam is still the sensitive, soft-natured boy he always was. He is just fed up with being kept down here. And with the ones who keep him down here. The caricature of me is unflattering, if not downright unkind. The one of Dobbs is vulgar. From what I can tell, the rest is a story of a young hero on a quest to slay a dragon and return a magical stone to its rightful heir.
Adam wakes up, startled. I didn’t realize I had touched him.
There is a wall of darkness between us when I quickly switch off the flashlight.
He leans toward me, following my breath. With his face all but superimposed on mine, he says, “What are you doing, Mom?”
I find his cheek, stroke it. I have learned to distinguish color in the darkness. Gauging from the heat at my fingertips, I’d say he’s steamed.
He bats my hand away.
“I’m sure he’ll get your notebooks back for you.” I lay my hand on his thigh, give it a little pat. It is as stiff as an ironing board. “You can’t let him get to you, though. It’ll only make things worse.”
Again, no response.
“You’re going through a lot of changes at the moment—physically, emotionally—”
“Mom, please!”
“Can you just drop it?”
“I don’t know how to talk to you anymore without you getting upset. We used to be able to talk about anything. And now you are keeping things from me, and I don’t like it.”
He sits up now. “Turn on the flashlight. Let’s talk.”
Instead of being joined by the dark, we are now separated by a measly column of light. I barely recognize the person on the other side of it. His blond hair stands up like brush bristles, and his eyes are still the same midnight blue, but it’s in the way he holds himself that’s new, like an arrow readied on a bow. I can’t look at him without thinking, Hurt; someone’s going to get hurt.
“We have to get out of this place,” he says.
I shush him. The generators are off, which will make it easier for Dobbs to eavesdrop. “We can talk about this when he’s on a mission,” I whisper.
Adam tags behind me, following the thin beam all the way back to my cot. “You always do this! You say you want us to talk, but you mean
you
want to talk. You never want to listen to what I’ve got to say.”
“You’re right, honey. You should talk and I should listen. Just not right now. He’s going Above tomorrow; we can talk then.”
He shakes my arm. “We’ve got to get out of here or we’re going to rot!”
All you have to do is take a look at my teeth to know he’s telling the truth straight-up. “Don’t say things like that. Nobody’s rotting.”
He can’t keep his voice from rising. “He’ll listen to you. If you tell him to take us Above, he will. You just have to insist.”
Sometimes I think putting up with Dobbs and playing by his rules is being strong, but sometimes, like now, I wonder if I didn’t misplace my backbone somewhere. “Is it getting cold in here or is it just me?” I pick up my blanket and hand it to him.
Adam throws it on the floor. “If he won’t take us up even for a short time, like at night or something—”
“—then we’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“We’ll know he’s lying to us.”
All the care we’ve taken—I’ve taken—in remodeling the universe, every apostrophe and comma and parenthesis, and still he is on to us. How can it be, when I did such a painstaking job of re-creation? Sure, God spoke the world into being—a grand speech that went on for six days. Big deal. What the Almighty authored, I had to edit. It has taken fifteen years to boil it all down to something that has allowed my son go about his days in these fixed dimensions and not make mad dashes for the outside. I’ve even broken down man’s greatest achievements into itty-bitty piles. Cities, I’ve told Adam, weren’t all they were cracked up to be. I’ve chopped off the tops of skyscrapers, made them no higher than the cottonwoods growing along the flood plains. I’ve shortened freeways, lowered bridges, given parking lots back to the cows. It wasn’t a big, wide world to begin with, I’ve told him; don’t believe everything you read in books. Despite all this paraphrasing of the world, my boy is still spoiling for a fight to experience it.
“There are others who have had it a lot worse.” When Dobbs takes us out of here, I will happily take the blame for the lies, but until then, I have to keep my end of the bargain, or Dobbs might keep us here forever.
He scoffs. “Here we go again.”
“Adam, I want what’s best for you, don’t you know that?”
“I don’t want to live like this for the rest of my life!”
The particles that make up darkness are much denser than those that make up light because they amplify sound. Either that, or my boy is shouting at me.
“Lower your voice.”
“You know what? I am not going to die down here. I’d rather go Above and get rounded up by the vigilantes. I’d rather have my head shot off or get skin cancer or whatever the big threat is exactly, than—”
“That is quite enough!”
We are both taken aback by a new sound. Like a sheet being torn through the middle, the crack of thunder.
A slap.
It is the first time I have ever hit my child.
After an initial gasp, he utters not another sound.
My God, I’ve killed my son. “Adam?” I reach for him, but he draws himself out of my reach.
On my palm is Adam’s cameo, a stinging silhouette. I now understand the punishment of chopping off a hand for the crime of stealing. It should also apply to mothers who strike their children. What have I just stolen from Adam?
I say, “Go to your room. Right now.” But he is already gone.
“Get that light out of my face!” I hear Dobbs shout from below.
I leap out of bed, run downstairs. Dobbs is standing in front of his study door. Adam is interrogating him with a flashlight. “Adam! What’s going on?”
“Who was here before me?”
The flashlight makes Dobbs look very pale. Either that, or he is. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Listen to your mother, and go back to bed.”
“I’m going to ask you one more time. Who was here before me?”
This doesn’t have the ring of a question but the tone of accusation. Adam is so upset, he’s trembling. Before tempers flare any further, I say, very calmly, “Military personnel. The ones who worked here long ago, before we came. The Cold War, remember—we read about that.”
“Children don’t man missiles, Mother.”
“You mean, someone your age? No, honey, children weren’t in the armed forces, you’re right about that.” And don’t shove me away with that word—
Mother
.
“Then, who’s Charlie?”
“What?”
“Look, I don’t know what nonsense your mother’s been filling your head with this time, but I’m not about to put up with this.”
Adam tries following Dobbs into his room, but he slams the door and triggers the latch. We hear him unlock the safe and gather his keys. A minute later, he barges out. He unlocks the fuse box and flips the switch. The generators groan in response, and a second later the fluorescents snap on. The light makes Adam look sick and Dobbs as guilty as sin. Lord knows what it is doing for me.
Dobbs glares at me with pure loathing. I know what this means: he’s going on a mission and it might be days, a week perhaps, before he’ll be back.
Adam intersects him at the stairs up to the entrapment vestibule. “I am coming with you.”
“I haven’t got time for your games!”
“This is not a game. I’m coming with you.”
Dobbs glowers at me.
“Adam . . .” I respond weakly. I can’t think straight, much less speak. How does Adam know the name Charlie?
Dobbs slings the duffel bag over his shoulder, giving me the I-told-you-this-would-happen face.
I scamper after Adam, who follows Dobbs through the right-angled turns of the entrapment vestibule.
“Running off to your girlfriend?”
Dobbs’s rounded shoulders always make him look as if he’s caved in, but never more so than when he turns to face Adam. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“There wasn’t any apocalypse.”
Because someone has to put an end to this, I grab his arm. “Adam,
could you stop this nonsense, please? If you have questions, then come and sit with me, and we’ll talk about them.” I have my own questions: What’s this about Charlie?
He shakes free of my grip, all but snarls at Dobbs. “If it’s such a disaster out there, why haven’t you gotten sick and died?”
Dobbs scowls at me. This is my fault, his look says. Fix it.
“Come on, Adam, let him go.” I am trying very hard to keep that picture of the farmhouse from going fuzzy.
Adam won’t be budged. “I am not staying down here anymore. And neither is she. We’re both going Above, right now. Open the door!”
Instead of taking out his notepad and punching in the code, Dobbs puts his hand against Adam’s chest and drives him all the way back to the stairs. For a second, I think he’s going to push my boy down them. “You’re fifteen and you think you know everything, right?”
Dobbs demands he stay put, then hurries to the middle blast door.
I try to coax Adam down the stairs, but instead, he pursues Dobbs with something behind his back. He yells for Dobbs to turn around. When Dobbs does, the something from behind Adam’s back gets pressed against his throat.
“Don’t be a fool, boy!”
“You!” Adam charges.
Yes, but for what crime?
“My boy, please! Put the knife down. Before someone gets hurt.”
The knife stays put. “There are people up there who are well. The only people who are sick are the ones down here!”
“My boy, please.”
Dobbs blinks but will not answer.
“She needs to see a doctor.”
“Your mother’s fine,” Mister replies. “It’s you that brings her trouble.”
“No more lies. We’re going up. Open that door!”
“Baby, please—”
“Touch me, Mom, and I’ll slit his throat!” A tiny bead of blood proves his point. “I said, open the door!”
“You’re right! There was no apocalypse!” I yell.
Adam pushes the knife even harder.
“Put the knife down, Adam! I’ll tell you everything!”
My son turns to me, wavering. There’s no taking back the words now. He looks like I feel: shattered.
Dobbs strikes Adam’s arm, knocking the knife from his hand. It skids across the floor. Adam, startled, tries to regain his position, but the war is lost. Dobbs twists Adam’s arm behind his back and pushes him against the concrete wall. “Don’t you ever threaten me again! You hear me? You leave this place when I say you can leave! Pull a stunt like this again and you’ll be sorry you were ever born!”
“Dobbs! Let go of him!”
“Shut up, the pair of you! I don’t want to hear another word!” Dobbs shoves Adam so hard, he sprawls at my feet. Adam doesn’t lift his head.
“You put him up to this!” Dobbs accuses me.
I keep shaking my head, even though it is surely true. Every book I read Adam, every lie I ever uttered, every truth I ever hid. Yes, I put him up to this.
“I come down here again and find you’ve not taken care of this, I’m taking matters into my own hands!”
I am so busy nodding that I don’t notice Adam rising from the floor. Suddenly, he launches at Dobbs. For just a second, the blade glints in the light. And then it is buried in the struggle. The two fall together, a ball of rags and coats and shoes.
A terrible moan. I cannot make out whose.
“Adam!”
From the pile, it is Dobbs who rises. “I didn’t mean to . . . I was only trying to . . .”
Oh Jesus.
“Get the first-aid kit, Blythe.”
“Adam!”
“You can’t do this; you’re not a doctor.”
“Get the cough mixture. He’s going to need several slugs of that. All right, buddy? A few small stitches, and you’ll be as good as new.”
“What if it hit an organ? How do you know it’s not bleeding worse inside? You have to take him, Dobbs.”
“Would you shut up and do as I say!”
I bring the cough mixture, then hurry to fill the kettle. It takes forever to boil the water.
“I’d take him if I could. If there was someplace to go. You know that, right?”
I put the bowl next to Dobbs. I kneel beside Adam and smooth his hair, tell him everything’s going to be okay. He keeps trying to say something, and I keep putting my finger to my lips.
“Even if I did, there’s no telling how long before I could bring him back.
If
I could even bring him back.” Dobbs opens the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. There’s only a drop left. This panics me almost as much as the sight of all that blood. “A thousand things that could go wrong up there. You don’t know who to trust. I take him up there, I put his life at risk. Is that what you want?”
Blood soaks another tea towel.
“You’ve got to take him to a doctor.” All the same, I’m handing Dobbs my sewing kit, letting him pick the color of thread.
He bends toward Adam, says real loud like the boy’s gone deaf, “I need you to be tough now, Sport. This is going to hurt, but it’s got to be done. All right?”
Adam struggles fiercely.
“You’re going to have to hold him harder than that, for godsake!”
Adam wrestles against my weight, and his blood soaks through my clothes, too.
Dobbs unclips his keys from his belt, hands me the one for the medicine cabinet.
“No,” I answer.
“Hurry up, or do you want him to bleed to death?”
I bring Dobbs the bottle of chloroform. Instead of taking it, he gives me his handkerchief. “You do it. Just a couple of drops, now.”
When I hold the wet cloth over my son’s face, when he bucks and twists under Dobbs’s full weight, I can’t help but think of little Charlie.
I come unglued the moment Adam passes out. I hold myself around my waist and start to cry. Dobbs tells me to shut up so he can concentrate, but I can’t stop. I watch Adam twitch and jerk.
After stitching him up, Dobbs scrubs his hands, and says, “It’ll get better. Just have to give it time to run its course.” He is a great believer in things running their course.
“I didn’t tell him about Charlie.”
He doesn’t believe me. “You’ve been trying to turn this kid against me for years. You think I haven’t noticed? You think I don’t know what you’re up to? You should be ashamed of yourself! You did this!”
While Dobbs is cleaning up the mess, I tell him I’m going downstairs to fetch Adam a clean shirt. I hurry down to Adam’s room to see if I might find a clue.
Adam doesn’t like me to go snooping among his things, though this won’t be the first time I do. I search his workspace. From aluminum cans, he has fashioned all manner of blades. He’s in the process of
making a handle for one of them with my hairbrush. Dobbs would have a fit if he saw these. I hide them among Adam’s old toys. There is a new kinetics sculpture, but nothing out of the ordinary. I move to his cot. I rifle through the stuff piled on it. Nothing under the bed, either, or on the shelf next to it.
I glance around the room one last time. Some of the stories we’ve shared are reflected on his wall, and some are less stories than they are yearnings. In all, his mural is a thing of beauty, with migrating bison and shooting rockets and creatures with propellers. In Adam’s panorama, the sky is shoring up the earth, and where clouds ought to be are machines. In the middle are a knight and a frumpy, toothless hag whose facial features bear a frightening resemblance to mine. The hooded figure with the sack over his shoulder is Dobbs. Winding itself like a road through the surreal landscape are fighting words, values I’ve tried to explain, values that the people Above would die defending:
freedom, justice, truth
. The latest addition is a girl—or rather I think it is. Adam’s attempt at someone from the opposite gender has mostly to do with long hair.
I grab a clean shirt and head out, and that’s when I see it. Sticking out from behind the door is a strap. Even soiled, there is no mistaking it. The red canvas bag is Charlie’s backpack.
Immediately, I am back to that moment: Dobbs’s shout; Charlie’s eyes snapping open, taking a moment to figure out it was not a cloud above his face but a pillow; my tongue flapping some ungodly words; Dobbs casting me aside, taking Charlie up in his arms and rushing out. There must be an error in my memory, because I distinctly remember handing the backpack to Dobbs before he took Charlie away.
If someone wants to know what it is like to hold a ghost on your lap, let him come and ask me. I will tell how the blood fizzes through hardened veins, how a perfectly clear head turns icebox-cold, how a spine turns to rubber.
I unzip the bag.
Charlie’s lunchbox. What was inside is now a tarry black scar. A green folder contains three faded crayon drawings and a typed note from the preschool director.
There has been a case of conjunctivitis reported in the four-year-old class. The symptoms of pinkeye include redness around the eye, swelling, mucus in the eyes, and itchiness. Should your child experience any symptoms, contact his/her health-care provider.
On a happier note, we are all looking forward to next week’s pageant, especially the children, who have been preparing for weeks. Arriving early means being assured a good seat. Overflow parking will be available at Shepherd’s Field. We look forward to seeing you there.
I look in the backpack again. Goofy is still there. I pull him out and hug him. At the bottom of the backpack is one of Adam’s socks. Adam has put something inside it which rattles—marbles, perhaps, or coins. I turn it over and empty the contents on my lap. The room turns cold. A collection of white pebbles.
But they are not pebbles. They are not anything my brain wishes them to be.
Swiftly, I arrange them from largest to smallest, as the tectonic plates grind apart. The land is surely plunging into the sea, caves must be opening their mouths and swallowing mountains whole. The world is being rent in two as a tiny hand holds up five skeletal fingers and waves from an upturned grave.
“What did you do to Charlie?”
“Adam,” he emphasizes, “should never have had a knife in the first place. You play with weapons, you’re going to get hurt.”
He thinks I have my boys mixed up. “I’m not talking about Adam. I’m talking about Charlie.”
He groans. “Not you, now.”
“You never returned Charlie.” Even I don’t recognize my voice.
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Listen, you should get some rest; you’re going to need it when he wakes up.”
I open my palms so he can see Charlie’s hand in mine.
The only thing that moves is the pamphlet, falling from his fingers. His face goes stiff and pale. I can count on one hand the number of times Dobbs has been at a loss for words. “Oh no.” Having found two words, he repeats them again and again.
All these years I’ve believed Charlie was the found child I never was, the one written about in the papers, the one whose homecoming made an entire nation rejoice. He became the symbol of hope for every missing child. Whenever I pictured him, he was taking up the life that was meant for me. He was supposed to have traded secrets with the same friend since grade school, shamed the bullies, surprised his teachers,
and carried his family name proudly. When I thought of Charlie, I thought of having bequeathed my life to him.
“You told me you dropped Charlie off at a park down the street from his house. You told me you made a call to the police from a telephone booth. You said it was on television, him and his family getting back together.”
“I wanted to spare you the truth. I thought it would be better to tell you what you wanted to hear.”
I cover my mouth with my hand.
Dobbs reaches for me, but I sidestep him. “I thought I’d tell you when you got stronger, but then you had a little one on the way, and I kept thinking about what happened with the first baby, and well—there just never seemed like a good time to bring up the subject after Adam was born.”
Tell me what, exactly?
There’s a tremor so large going on inside him that he cannot keep it from traveling to his arm. I notice his fingers are a mess. Every single nail has been chewed to the quick. Hangnails have been ripped clear down to the knuckle.
I stand utterly still. “You kept him down here all this time.”
Dobbs has taken on the symptoms of hypothermia. Even as his teeth chatter he gets out his feeble excuses. Listening to him lie is like listening to someone chew ice. “I tried to save him. I did what I could, but he was already way past it. You saw how he was.” He clasps his hands around his forearms, drops his head. “Last thing I wanted was for him to—”
As if dying was Charlie’s choice, as if it had nothing to do with what Dobbs did or failed to do. “You could’ve taken him back!”
He leans toward me. He looks like he’s got his arms around a tree and is trying to yank it out of the ground. “I couldn’t take him back, you know that.” His voice is high-pitched with effort. “Our entire plan would have been in jeopardy. The police, the media—they’d have questioned him, and something would’ve come out that would’ve led them to this place, and then what? All this would have been for nothing.”
And so it comes back to the Plan. Always the Plan.
Our
plan, he has the gall to say.
Whatever he registers in my face makes him start to plead. “I tried to save him, Blythe. I know what this must look like to you, but it wasn’t like that. I sat with him, for hours. Wait, I’ll show you. I kept notes—they’re somewhere in this stack—” Dobbs starts shuffling through piles of papers because he has run out of lies.
“You didn’t try to save him. You’re lying. Just like you’ve been lying about taking us out of here!”
“You’re not listening to me; I am trying to tell you—”
“What about the baby? Did you keep her down here, too?”
Dobbs is shaking his head. He keeps rummaging through papers, knocking entire columns of notebooks to the floor. “No, look, you’ve gotten the wrong idea about all of this. I told you I buried her. If I can just find—”
He stops when I ask, “Where did you put Charlie?”
Dobbs won’t answer. Instead, he starts to snivel. I realize that there can be only one place. The silo. Adam must have broken in and gone down that shaft to get his notebooks and found Charlie’s remains instead. And all at once, I know that Adam is in grave danger—not from his injury but of winding up like Charlie.
In all the many years I have spent hating this man, I cannot deny the times I have felt sorry for him—isn’t this precisely how the devil gets away with murder? But what I feel for him now is nothing akin to hate. You could fire up hell’s furnaces with what I feel for this man. You could drill down to the earth’s cauldron and find nothing near as fiery.
We are in the kitchen. Dobbs is trying to get me to listen. I am trying to still the hundred voices screaming in my head, not least of which is Charlie’s.
Dobbs is not crying anymore; he’s gone on the offense. “I get it; I’m the beast. Is that what you want? You want me to be the bad guy, fine. I’ll be the bad guy.
“You should thank me, instead of looking at me that way. The lengths I went to to keep you happy—getting the child, then trying to
keep him alive for you, even though you near done him in yourself. Unfit is what you were back then. Don’t you remember that?”
It’s welcome, the sting of his words. It’s acid eating through maggoty flesh.
Dobbs sits at the table, more sure of himself now that he doesn’t have to bear both his weight and the weight of his lies. Doing us all a favor is what he’s going on about, and I can’t see straight for the picture of Charlie.
Turning my back to him, I battle for breath. The silence is screeching now. I go to turn the kettle off, but there is no kettle. The screeching is coming from someplace else. It is so loud I have to force myself not to press my hands over my ears. And then I notice the bottle of chloroform has not been put away. I pick up the washrag. I pretend to wipe the counter.
Dobbs is still talking when I quietly open the bottle and empty it into the rag. I turn around. He is still talking when I rush at him and knock back his chair. With every bit of strength I clamp that rag against his nose.
He bucks. I latch on even tighter. Adam is not going to end up like Charlie.
Dobbs wheels onto his side. My grip slips. I go for his face again. He claws me, gets ahold of my shirt and pulls. In the process of wrestling, I strike him in the head. It’s the first time I’ve ever hit him good and proper, and it’s as if I’ve reached in a fire and picked up burning coals. It feels that good. Dobbs strikes me back, and something in my mouth gives way, which feels even better. This is what I should have done years ago, instead of all the arguments and the raging silent protests, the hunger strikes and bargaining, the whoring and hoping. I spit out the tooth and make another go for his jaw, this time knuckles first. My swing is knocked off its trajectory by his hand. Somehow, I still manage to get a handful of hair. His neck is seamed by the knotty, purple vein. I bite it, hard as I can. He grabs my hair, rips my head back. His other hand lashes out and catches me in the windpipe. I keel over.
Dobbs rights me, then twists my arm behind my back and knees me
forward, past the doorway and down the stairs. “You want me to show you what I did? I’ll show you!”
He aims to lock me up. The silo!
We get to the utility tunnel. I jut my leg against the doorjamb and propel myself backward. He lunges against me with his shoulder, as though I’m a gate he is determined to bust through. I stumble forward and quickly do an about-turn. I grab his shin and sink my teeth into it. As Dobbs screams, I scramble out of the tunnel and fly up the stairs. I make it all the way to the living room before he tackles me from behind. He cinches his arms around my narrow waist and tries jostling me upright. My hands clamor for something to hold on to—a table leg, a chair. The only thing within my reach is my crochet work.
Somehow, Dobbs manages to sling me over his shoulder. He stumbles toward the exit.
I can see where Dobbs is balding, see the scabs between his hair follicles. He has a wet-dog smell. He grunts as he tries to get me through the doorway.
I free the crochet needle from its stitching. I raise my hand. Before he steps across the threshold, I slam it into his neck as hard as I can.
The hook plunges in with little resistance, kind of like driving a screwdriver into a bag of seed corn. It’s the sound that’s off-putting—the emptying of a pail of slop. I drive it in even farther. His grip around my thighs tightens. I wonder if I am going to have to pull the darn thing out and stab him again. But his arms loosen and then become slack, and next, we are making a graceful arc toward the floor.
After checking on Adam, I unlatch the keys from Dobbs’s belt. They jingle when I shake them. The sound seems to distress Dobbs. It is less of a groan, more of a gurgle as he tries to speak. I bend down. His fingers beckon me closer. I put my ear right up next to his mouth.
“Don’t,” he manages.
“Don’t what?”
The darkness is edging in, the walls are stooping forward, the ceiling is lowering itself. Something of the hell I’ve lived with comes for him now.
A shudder runs through him. “Don’t . . . leave me.”
Ah, yes.
I make sure he sees me put the keys in my pocket before taking his head in my hands. His eyes close slowly, mistaking the gesture for a caress perhaps, then flick open when I pivot his head to the other side. He now has nothing to obstruct the view of me walking about, able for the first time in years to do as I please. I step over him and follow the stairs down. Not something I please, but something I must. As much as I want
to grab Adam and dash outside, I cannot leave Charlie at the bottom of the pit.
At the entrance to the utility tunnel, I take a deep breath. I unlatch the flashlight from its mount on the wall and take determined steps to the silo door. The padlock and chain are lying on the floor.
Penetrating the rank darkness of the silo takes every bit as much will as stabbing Dobbs. There are no lights in here. A beam not much wider than my index finger is all the flashlight can muster against the immensity of the darkness. Dobbs used to frighten Adam about this place with tales of demons, just as he did with Scalpers Above. “The ladder goes all the way down to hell,” he’d say. I believe it. I tell myself it is the air finding release, but the sounds coming up from the depths are like the dead calling out a warning.
A narrow platform of rusty metal grates runs alongside the perimeter of the outer wall. Separating me from the yawning void is nothing but a puny rail. I aim the flashlight above. Somewhere up there are two massive doors that used to open for a rocket. I have to take Dobbs’s word for it because it seems nothing like being in the earth. Deep space is what it feels like. I shift to the right. Huge metal contraptions are attached to the wall. What I see bears no resemblance to those old blueprints. To me, this looks like the decaying innards of a beast.
With the flashlight trained to the platform and my steps ringing out across the hollowness, I concentrate on not falling. Some of the platform’s grates wobble like loose rocks. In several places, the going is slow, especially near the rickety landing of the freight elevator, which seems in danger of coming unbolted from the wall.
I know from Dobbs that the shaft is 174 feet deep. This information is of no use. I take out the glow sticks, snap them, and throw them over the rails. I count to time their descent. They make no sound when they land. Might as well be no bottom.
I come to the creaky, spiral staircase. Armed with the sliver of light, I take a deep breath, tighten the straps of Charlie’s backpack, and test my foot on the first rung.
If this is a skyscraper, I am scaling it with a fraying rope.
It’s just a building, I keep telling myself. Yes, but what building is large enough to create its own weather? The air was dry where I started; now I am descending into something dewy. I can smell it too—coppery. Like thunderstorms.
I can hear my breath running too fast and too shallow. I am beginning to feel light-headed. I am very grateful for the handrails and the rungs. Until all of a sudden there isn’t a rung. My foot dangles in the air. I wave the beam of light until it catches the place where the ladder picks up again. To continue going, I have to breach a gap almost the length of me.
It is a tricky feat, maneuvering the dead space. My arms ache and my hands are sore from gripping, but I make it. The rungs, if not entirely stable, are again evenly spaced. My breath becomes more regular, and with the repetitiveness of putting down one foot after the next, my mind begins to drift. I wonder if I haven’t gone to sleep, haven’t entered the dream of landing on the moon, when my foot finally finds solid ground. I put a second foot down and even then do not trust what I am standing on.
Turning from the ladder, I sweep the light in front of me. In the green fog is a reeking heap. Burst garbage bags, a tangle of hoses, aluminum tiles, old consoles, an upholstered chair with the springs poking out. Most of the stuff appears to be fixtures from when the place was operational, but there is a lot of Dobbs’s trash, too. In an old toolbox is a bolt cutter. I put it in the backpack. I come upon a couple of Adam’s notebooks. They go in the backpack, too.
I scramble among the rubble until I find the tiny clothes—a blue shirt, a gray pair of pants. I scoop up the bundle and wrap it in my sweater. Even if I live to be a hundred, there will never be enough ways to atone. “I’m taking you home, Charlie.”
“See this?”
Dobbs parts his eyes slowly. A gargle comes from his throat.
“No, don’t say anything. I want you just to look.” I show him Charlie.
More gurgles.
“When you’re burning in hell, I don’t want you to think about me. I want you to see this child. I want you to picture Adam, too. Picture them in a meadow. Picture them free.”
His mouth moves into a “What?” shape, and then a “Why?” shape, and finally it is the shape of a dark, deep well. From it seeps the last that’s left inside him, spit and blood. If there are regrets in his last breath, they’re lost on me.
Groggy, Adam moans and holds his side. I help him sit up and give him half a painkiller and a cup of water. He scratches the rash around his mouth and nose.
“It’s from the chloroform. It’ll go away soon,” I tell him.
His face looks blotchy, his lips are cracked, and his shirt is damp from sweat. He folds a corner of the bandage to look at the wound.
“Does it hurt real bad?”
He shrugs. “It’s okay.” He notices the suitcase. I’ve packed what we can carry: a change of clothes; the knitted stuffed toys I made him; the family of orphaned sock monkeys; Grandpa’s watch; the notebooks. “Maybe we can get someone to come back for the rest of your stuff.”
“We’re leaving?” He struggles to his feet and notices the body in the doorway. “Is he . . . ?”
“Yes.”
There comes no how or why or when. Just that same wounded look of someone who’s been lied to his whole life. “We weren’t here because of the Disaster,” Adam says.
“Because there was no disaster.”
“That’s right.”
Adam starts shaking his head. “I don’t understand. Why are we here?”
“He stole me when I was a girl, two years before you were born.”
“And Charlie?”
“He stole him, too.”
“And that was him down in the silo?”
“Yes. I have him now. We’re going to give him back to his family.”
“Did Mister . . . ?”
“Yes, he did.” And I played my part in that tragedy, too.
“He was never going to let us go, was he?”
“No, he wasn’t.”
I pick up the suitcase. “I’m going to do my best to answer all your questions.” I lay my hand on his arm. “But first, we must get you to a doctor.”
I look around the place one last time. It seems different. Not the blood or the smell of death—like sorghum. Everything is exactly as it’s always been. And yet, it’s all changed.
You can’t see change; you can only feel it.
I bend down and pull the notepad from Dobbs’s top pocket. We step over his body and pass through the entrapment vestibule. I give Adam the notepad. He flips it open to the codes. He punches in the numbers. We look at each other, listening to the locks slide. Adam seems to pay no mind to the pain. Both of us are fixed on one thing, and one thing only—the door at the top of the stairs. Over the years, my mind turned it into the size of a ceiling, and here it is, no bigger than a closet door.
When we get to it, Adam turns around with his eyebrows raised, expecting me to say something.
What is there to say?
My keeper is dead. All that’s left of him is the secret. And what a pitiful little secret I have turned out to be. A secret, even a long-held one, can turn out to be such a liar. My son is about to know the extent
of this. If only there was one thing I could say, one thing that could explain everything. And if not to explain it, then perhaps to prime the pump for the forgiveness that is his to withhold. And if not to explain it, or have it forgiven, then to prepare him before the lies come at him like starved wolves.
“There are others,” I finally manage. “They are not all like him. There are so many who are good, who will be kind to you. Let them.”
“Okay.”
As for the whole truth—it can’t be told; it can only be shown.
I nod. “Go on, then.”
He turns the handle and gives it a shove. I can barely utter the words. “We’re free.”