by D. K. Wall
“Give us five minutes to change.”
30
Nurses’ voices filtered through the closed door, and their shoes squeaked on the tile floor as they went about their rounds. PA announcements too muffled to understand sounded more like squawks than words. A raven flapped past outside, the noise of its wings audible through the window. Somewhere in the distance, a horn honked, and an engine revved.
The sounds indicated a world continuing to revolve outside the room, but inside their warm cocoon, the Lathan family rested in the quiet comfort of reunion. Jaxon lay back on the pillows of the inclined bed, slowly inhaling and exhaling in a restless sleep. His fingers twitched with his dreams as his hand rested on Connor’s arm. The older boy sprawled in a chair, his head tilted back at an awkward angle, allowing soft snores to emerge from his open mouth. The equipment surrounding the bed hummed and beeped, a soft mechanical background rhythm behind the boys’ breathing.
Heather stood at the head of the bed and admired her boys. Her fingers ran through the thick mat of hair on Jaxon’s head while her mind imagined stroking the soft, silky mane of a little boy years ago, sitting in her lap as he sounded out words from a picture book. She wanted to step out in the hallway and call Donna to come work on his hair, but she didn’t want to risk waking them.
The hair stylist would do wonders for the boy, not just make him look better. She had a knack for listening and making someone feel like she had all of the time in the world for them. Heather had shared her dwindling hopes for finding the boy while settled in Donna’s chair as scissors snipped. They’d compared notes between Connor’s mischief and Donna’s three children’s antics. After each layoff at a town factory, when more jobs went overseas, they mapped out plans to revive Millerton and, more immediately, ways to help those suddenly without jobs. They planned fundraisers and covered-dish suppers.
A simple call to Donna, and she would come scrambling. Heather smiled to herself, recognizing that Donna would show up if for no other reason than to be the first outside the family to witness the return of the missing boy. Demand for appointments in her chair would increase as she passed on what she had seen and heard. And she would plan how to help. Heather wouldn’t be able to pay for anything in town for weeks as the town rallied around her. It’s what Millerton did.
She tucked Jaxon’s hair behind his ear with a gentle swoop of her finger and then slid her light touch across his forehead. She traced the bridge of his nose, relearning the shape of his face. The boy’s eyes shot open with a start, and he jumped, but a smile spread across his face as recognition grew in his eyes. They stared at each other as she let the tips of her fingers bounce over his chapped lip and along the peach fuzz on his chin. Her caress traveled up the side of his face before tracing the scar along the side of his face. “Will you tell me how this happened?” she asked.
He turned his head away, and the smile faded. “You don’t want to know.”
“I know all of Connor’s scars. And I want to know the stories behind yours. That’s what families do—share scars.”
Awakened by the soft conversation, Connor leaned forward over the bed and pointed at a small scar on his lower right arm. “Skateboard into the side of a parked car down at the Dollar General. An old white Cadillac. I bled all over the hood. Old Man Tompkins was so pissed about that.”
Heather shook her head at the profanity, but Connor continued in his carefree way. With a giant grin across his face, the boy’s finger traced a faded inch-long pink line peeking above his eyebrow. “Wiped out my bike into a fence post trying to impress Cecilia Wyatt with my mad skills. She laughed her ass off, but she also said ‘yes’ when I asked her to go to a movie as blood dripped down my face.”
Connor stood tall and lifted his shirt to his shoulders, exposing a toned abdomen. He pointed at the center of his chest. “This scar is where she broke my heart when she dumped me and started dating Carlos Estrella. Guess she liked baseball stars better than BMXers.”
Jaxon sat up and squinted as he studied his brother’s hairless chest. “I don’t see a scar.”
Connor slowly lowered his shirt. “It’s a joke, Jax.”
Jaxon flopped his head on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. “Oh.”
Heather smiled at the disappointed look on her eldest son’s face. He had slipped naturally back into the role of big brother, trying to get the younger boy to laugh at his silly jokes. She hoped time would allow Jaxon to ease back into their banter, but he wasn’t ready yet.
The younger boy turned his head and looked out the window. The wind whipped around the corner of the building. He exhaled deeply and whispered, “Never let them see you.”
Heather leaned over Jaxon, tears filling her eyes, and softly kissed the scar. “You never need to hide your scars from us.”
“Not the scars.” Jaxon’s gray-blue eyes drifted down to look into her face. “That was his first rule. Never let them see you.”
“Who’s them?”
“Anyone. If someone came to the house, we were supposed to stay quiet and not draw attention to the basement. Never let them see you.”
“A lot of people visited?”
He paused in thought. “No. We could go months between. Hunters sometimes stumbled out of the woods. Or somebody heard they could buy moonshine, though it wasn’t true, ’cause he didn’t sell to people he didn’t know, and people he knew wouldn’t dare show up at his house.”
He adjusted himself in bed. “A preacher showed up several times.”
Heather and Connor exchanged a puzzled glance. She asked, “A preacher?”
“We giggled because the preacher kept asking him if he had been saved. Hell, we needed saving, not him, but the preacher never had a clue we were there. The last time the preacher came, he pointed a shotgun at him and told him to never come back or he would get to see God up close and personal.” His eyes focused on the ceiling tiles above his head. “I hope he has met God really up close now.”
She replied, “I don’t think God will waste any time with him before sending him straight to hell.”
“Nope.”
She reached to trace his scar, but he pulled back. She tucked her hand to her side and asked, “None of the visitors ever saw you?”
“Never.” Jaxon ran his tongue along his chapped lips. “Until the hiker. He’s the only one who ever did.”
“Hiker?”
“We were sitting in the basement like always when we heard him come out of the woods and ask for directions. He said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail but took a side trail and got lost. His voice sounded real happy, like a guy just out to have fun. He called out, and then…”
Connor and Heather exchanged glances, waiting for Jaxon to continue. “Then he answered. He didn’t sound mad or angry but almost nice. He told him real calmly how to get back out to the road. Took his own sweet time telling him too. Guess he didn’t have that shotgun close. Anyway, the hiker would have left, but...”
Heather reached out to stroke Jaxon’s hair and was surprised to see her fingers quaking. Do I really want to know what happened? Connor’s scars came from childhood antics, silly stunts to impress his friends or some girl. But Jaxon’s scars were delivered by someone else. Dread filled her as she quietly asked, “What happened?”
Jaxon picked at the bandage on his left hand. “You gotta understand, it’d been really bad for a couple of weeks. He had gone hunting and left us alone. We rationed the food, but we never knew how long he would be gone. You want to make it last, but it’s hard when you don’t know when more is coming. By the time he got back, we hadn’t eaten for a couple of days and were starving.”
“He brought back a deer or something?”
A wry smile crept across the boy’s face as if he was the only one in on the joke. His eyes clouded. “Not that kind of hunting. For a new… boy.”
“Oh.” Heather swallowed hard. “Did he find one?”
“Yeah.” Jaxon turned his head away and looked out the window
. His voice became mechanical and emotionless. “He had one, but the kid was real sick. He shoved him down the steps and told us we better get him healthy or else.”
“What did you do?”
“The only thing we ever could do was give kids food and water, and for normal sick stuff, that worked. Well, usually it worked. But we were out of food and real low on water. And this kid told us he was a diabetic and needed insulin every day.”
Jaxon inhaled deeply. “A dictionary teaches you tons, but it doesn’t do everything. Diabetes—any of various abnormal conditions characterized by the secretion and excretion of excessive amounts of urine. We didn’t even understand what to look for. Insulin was a little more helpful because it said glucose—a crystalline sugar.”
He pulled the blankets up to his chin and closed his eyes. “But we couldn’t ask for sugar. You didn’t ask him for anything. You took what he gave you. And you figured out how to deal with everything else. We tried. Tried everything we could think of.” He took a slobbery breath. “But… he didn’t make it.”
Connor leaned over until the boys’ foreheads touched and whispered, “That ain’t your fault, Jax.”
“I know. Sometimes, it just happens.” His eyes fluttered open. “But see, we knew what would happen next. We knew how mad he would be. He had just gotten the kid, and now he was going to have to go hunting again, or one of us would have to…”
Jaxon swallowed, and he turned his eyes away from them. “It was just Kevin and me then. We were older than what he...”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “We’d failed. And he was madder than I’d ever seen.”
31
I dug the grave. I always did. He said it was one of my jobs.
I liked most days I got to be outside, but not that day. He sat on a tree stump with that shotgun across his lap. He pointed it at me and asked if I thought I was faster than buckshot. It was like he was daring me to try.
It wasn’t the shotgun that kept me from running. It was Kevin. He was still locked in the basement. If I didn’t come back, he would be all alone.
I got winded and leaned on the shovel to catch my breath. A dirt clod zinged me in the back of the head, and I fell to my knees. “Stop being lazy!” he yelled and threw more clumps at me ’til I staggered up and started digging again.
“Damn useless boys is what you two are. You got one simple job—keep the young ’uns I bring ya alive and quiet ’til I’m ready for ’em. If you can’t even get that right, why do I waste my time feeding ya and keeping a roof over your stupid heads?”
Another dirt clod pegged me between the shoulder blades. I kept digging as fast as I could as he ranted. “Now I’ve got to go back out huntin’, and it’s your damn fault. It’s getting hard out there with damn cameras everywhere. Even on those damn cell phones people carry. They take videos with ’em, and the police can look at ’em later and see ya even when people don’t remember you were there. Didn’t use to be that way, but that’s what I have to deal with and all cause you two ijits can’t keep a boy alive.”
When the hole was deep enough, I rolled the body of that little kid into it. He landed all twisted, but he was facing up. It was like he was looking at me as I started shoveling dirt in as fast as I could. I was pushing dirt so hard and so fast, and I got dizzy—lack of food, I guess, and I fell in the hole. My face was right against that kid’s face.
He kicked a bunch of dirt on my head and yelled, “Maybe you should just go right ahead and dig two more holes so I can put you and your damn useless friend in ’em and be done with both of ya. Dumbass useless brats.”
I scrambled out of the hole and went back to work. When all the dirt was piled back in that hole, he jammed the shotgun in my back and marched me over to the shed to hang the shovel back up. Then he walked me back through that house to the cellar door. I waited while he unlocked the padlock, and then I started down the steps. He shoved me really hard in the back, and I rolled head over heels to the bottom. Kevin helped me sit up and whispered about how crazy he was getting.
That was Kevin and me from the very first day he got there, years and years earlier. He was a tough little kid from the beginning. He didn’t sit around bawling like the others. He sure didn’t just curl up and die like some of them. We played checkers with pebbles and a board drawn in the dirt. We read the few books we had down there, stuff kids had with them when they got taken. He invented a game with that dictionary we found, asking each other the meaning of the next word. We shared our food rations with each other and told each other our real names, though he was smart enough to embrace Kevin as his name. We shared stories about our lives before we got there.
I always knew he liked Kevin better than me. Every time that damned door opened, it was Kevin’s name he called, not mine, and I often wondered why. I didn’t care, but I was thankful, at least until that door would shut and the darkness enveloped me. Then I would sit in the shadows with my ears peeled for every creak, or groan, or scream. I prayed for the sounds to stop, but when they did, I dreaded the silence even more. I stared up the steps at the locked door, waiting, dreading as much for it to open as for it to not.
And then the door would open, and my friend would stumble down the steps. I would wrap my arms around him, hold him, let him sob against me.
And then one day, the door opened, and Kevin hung his head and started to stand up. But he didn’t call Kevin’s name. He shoved this new sniveling little kid down the steps and told us to welcome our new brother. That hadn’t happened in a long time, but Kevin was happy because that meant his name wasn’t always called. And when that kid left, another new kid came. And another after that one.
For some reason we never figured out, he let both of us live. We tried to take care of the kids he brought, we really did, but most only lasted a few months. Long stretches would pass where it was just Kevin and me, but he mostly left us alone down there. He said we were too old. We could hear him coughing and wheezing, getting drunk and stumbling around. Those were the best times, when it was just us, but it never lasted, because he would go hunting again. Then he would tell us we needed to do a better job with the new one.
And the latest one had only lasted a few days. We’d failed.
We were sitting there, whispering, when we heard a hiker coming through the woods. We looked at each other all wide-eyed. We knew if the guy had emerged from the woods a half hour earlier, he would have seen me digging that grave.
Kevin whispered, “Will he see it?”
I shook my head, “Shouldn’t. I spread leaves over it.”
I scrambled up onto Kevin’s shoulders and peeked through the window. Between the two of us, we had become tall enough to get a look at the outside world that way, and we took turns climbing up like that.
“What’s he look like?” Kevin asked.
“Scraggly beard but not like a mountain man. Purple T-shirt, fancy hiking shorts, boots, and a real bright bandanna tied around his hair.”
“College boy,” Kevin said mockingly. The man hated all sorts of people and bucketed them into groups. Guvment people. College boys. Rich pricks. Tourists. And he could say it in a way you just knew how disgusting they were.
“Yeah, exactly. He’s got a fancy-looking backpack and all sorts of gear. Looks rich.”
“What’re they saying?”
“Getting directions. Said he got lost off the Appalachian Trail.”
“Wow.” Kevin was quiet for a second. “It must be close.”
“I guess.”
“That means maybe others aren’t too far.”
I looked down at Kevin and realized he was getting himself all worked up. I should’ve noticed. If I had, I could’ve stopped him from yelling, but I didn’t, and the next thing I knew, he was shouting, “Down here! Help! Help! We need help!”
I jumped off Kevin’s shoulders and grabbed him. “What are you doing?” I hissed.
“It’s our only chance,” he replied. “We can get away. Go home.”
The
hiker must’ve heard him, ’cause he leaned down and looked through the window right at us. His eyes grew wide, and he asked, “What’re you two doing down there? You okay?”
I tried to grab Kevin and stop him, but he answered anyway, “We’re kidnapped. He’s holding us. You gotta help us get out of here. Please! Please!”
“Kidnapped? Really? Who—”
I’m not sure if I saw the ax or heard it first, the glint of the blade coming down or the sickening wet noise as it sunk into his brain. The guy’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell against the glass, shattering it. Blood dripped down the wall inside. He coughed and sprayed blood. And then… he stopped. Blood ran down his face and dripped off his chin, puddling on the floor in front of us.
We saw the boot come down on the back of the guy’s shoulders. He pulled the ax out with a horrible sucking sound even worse than when it went in. He wiped the ax off in the weeds and sank it back into a log on the woodpile being built for the coming winter.
I wish he had kept the ax. It would have made things go faster. We heard the sound of his boots clomping across the floor over our heads. He ripped open the door and stomped down the steps. Maybe we should have rushed him, tried to get past—maybe we would have made it. But we cowered.
I stood with my hands out in front of me, begging him not to kill Kevin and pleading for his life.
He backhanded me. The ring he always wore caught my ear. I felt it rip down the side of my face, to my lips. The skin flapped down around my jaw. I watched a tooth fly through the air and bounce off the wall. The world swam, and I fell backward onto the ground. Before I could move, he kicked me hard in the stomach. I curled up as he kicked over and over.
Kevin shouted at him to stop, and he grabbed his arm and pulled him off-balance, but just for a second. And then I heard the crunch as the man’s fist shattered Kevin’s nose. Kevin screamed, a muffled wet sound, but then I heard him get hit two, three more times. Kevin fell to the floor, blood dripping from his nose and mouth, his eyes rolling back up into his head. The man kicked him in the ribs, and Kevin coughed, splattering us both with his blood.
