The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  Jerry sits in the empty chair next to me. Takes a delicate sip of his coffee.

  “Seems we’re the eldest of our clans now,” he says. “What do you think of that?”

  “I think Ray Quinlan was one messed up son of a bitch.”

  “I’m figuring we’ve got a majority vote on that.”

  “And I think you’re right. Each of us has to make a decision.”

  “About what exactly?”

  “Whether we stay or go.”

  Jerry puts the coffee down. “This is a lot to take in. A lot of confusion. A lot of hurt. But I agree with Aaron. We have to put that aside as best we can to think about the core issue here.”

  “You’re talking about money,” Franny says, sniffing.

  He turns to her. “Sure. Yes, I am. Because it’s what’s owed to us, what we deserve. Think of it as just money if you want. Me? I’m inclined to think of it as a second chance. I mean, if you do the math on—”

  “Math? I thought you taught gym.”

  Jerry grins as if Franny is trying to flirt with him, even though it’s fairly clear he represents something she can’t stand. One of those outwardly flawless guys she never knew how to start with, the kind she saw the world handing over everything to just for showing up.

  “I think even I can sort it out,” he says, sustaining the grin. “Thirty days here to claim one-eighth of what? Thirty million? Forty? It’s a weird ask, no doubt about it. But still, not much of a decision if you ask me.” He looks from me to Lauren before landing on the twins. “What do you say?”

  “If it means not having to say ‘Ah poop!’ a hundred times while getting our picture taken at a fan convention in Des Moines, I’m in,” Ezra says, and Elias winces his agreement.

  “Lauren?”

  “I’m a psychologist,” she says. “I’m in it for the research paper.”

  “There you have it,” Jerry says. “The Quinlans of Kirkland are all signed up. How about the Mercer Islanders? Any of you looking to thumb a ride home?”

  I look to Bridge.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she says, and squeezes my hand three times. It’s just me and you.

  “Franny?”

  “Thirty days? Shit. I’ve done half a dozen rehabs longer than that.”

  I consider shouting out to Mom to ask how she’d like to vote, but considering what she’s already said on the matter, I don’t see the need.

  “We’re in,” I say.

  “There it is! A full ship!”

  Jerry grins his football-hero grin at me, an invitation to friendship. It decides something for me.

  I want our side to win.

  16

  IT’S THE TWINS’ IDEA TO have a “campfire” outside to mark the second Quinlans’ arrival at Belfountain. Jerry seconds the motion so fast I don’t have time to suggest otherwise. It’s not that I’m concerned about the things we may or may not have seen in the woods. After all, Franny and I had stood unarmed, and they hadn’t approached, let alone threatened us. And that’s assuming there was anyone there in the first place.

  My hesitation has to do with letting ourselves see our time here as fun. Mom sent all of us to summer camp growing up, and while I loved the swimming and hiking, I preferred the quieter, solitary activities over the stories told around bonfires that ended with collective screams when the guy with a hook for a hand showed up. It cheapened the experience somehow. Things that weren’t funny that we were all expected to laugh our heads off at.

  I help Jerry and the twins carry out some of the firewood from next to the hearth and foldout chairs Lauren finds in the front hall closet along with those jigsaw puzzles Fogarty had mentioned. Soon we’re sitting around a blaze in the circular driveway out front, sending our laughter out into the dark, sparks rising like fireflies to tame the night.

  The twins in particular are the stars of the show. Their give-and-take is practiced, yet it doesn’t come across that way. A series of comic routines that culminate in an epic tale about swapping dates in the middle of their prom without the girls being able to tell the difference between them.

  “Until, you know, the big reveal,” Ezra says with a lewd smirk.

  “Or, in your case, the little peep show,” Elias replies.

  “We’re identical twins!”

  “Not that identical.”

  “I don’t know if I’m comfortable with this.”

  We turn to Lauren, who in fact looks a little queasy.

  “You’ve heard these gags a thousand times,” Jerry says. “You always thought they were funny.”

  “There’s just a lot for me to wrap my head around.” She looks at me and Franny and Mom and Bridge. “We all had our problems with Dad. But he’s gone. It’s why we’re here.”

  “That may not be totally accurate for some of us,” Franny says, not unkindly. “We’re here because the will forced us to be.”

  “He’s not forcing us,” Lauren says, her voice shriveling.

  “None of this was our idea. It was him, it—”

  “He was my father!”

  Lauren gets up and heads off into the lodge. I consider going after her, but she’s not my sister, and I wait for Jerry or one of the twins to fulfill their role. But none of them move.

  “We all have different takes on Dad,” Jerry explains, shifting to squint at us through the licks of flame. “It’s probably the same with you guys.”

  “Yes,” Bridge answers.

  “Well, in our case, Lauren is the soft touch,” Jerry says. “The benefit-of-the-doubter.”

  “She has a point,” Elias says.

  “Maybe we should think of Dad in ways we can—” Ezra says, searching his mind. “What’s the word?”

  “Memorialize.”

  “Yeah. Maybe we should memorialize him.”

  “Okay,” Franny says, clapping her hands together. “I’ve got one.”

  I didn’t expect there to be as many Dad stories as we come up with. Through it all the tone remains light, almost affectionate. The edge of hostility, lurking beneath every anecdote, only increases the deliciousness.

  “There was nobody worse at carving a turkey,” Ezra announces.

  “Nobody in the turkey-carving world,” Elias agrees.

  “To be fair, that’s because he always got called away before he could finish the job,” Mom says, automatically defending him before she can prevent herself.

  “Remember the Thanksgiving when he had a cast on his arm?” Jerry says. “He was fighting with that big old bird, hacking at it with one hand. When I offered to help he said, ‘Why would I need any help, Gerald?’ and kept whacking at it until the carving board looked like a crime scene.”

  “Wait, I remember the year he had that cast on too,” Franny says. “He chopped up our turkey the same way. But if Dad was at your house for Thanksgiving dinner, how could he be at our house too?”

  “Maybe it was a different night,” Elias says.

  “We always had holiday dinner on Thursday,” Bridge says.

  “Us too,” Jerry says.

  “It’s because he was at both houses,” I say. “He started at yours and got a call. Then he came to ours, got another call—”

  “And he was gone,” Jerry says.

  The fire makes a sound like snapped fingers.

  “All those years, those times we thought he was ours,” Mom says, “he was yours too.”

  In the quiet, there’s a sound all of us hear. Somewhere a great distance away, well beyond the estate’s fence, comes the repeated boom of a shotgun. It’s followed by a gun of a different kind. A tat-tat-tattling of an automatic. Then it stops too. We’ve grown used to these noises over the past months. They happen, and we move on, pretending they hadn’t.

  “It’s getting bad out there,” Bridge says.

  “It was always bad out there,” Ezra says.

  “He’s right. We only caught glimpses of it before,” Franny says. “Now all the ugliness is breaking through.”

  Franny
’s words make me think of hands punching up from the soil of freshly covered graves, of shark fins rising out of the water, of spiders skittering and spreading from nested holes in the ground. Buried things finding a way to the air.

  “We better put this baby to bed,” Jerry says, meaning the fire.

  The whisky has left us dry-mouthed and headachy. We throw handfuls of dirt onto the fire until it’s a sputtering mound of embers. Before going back inside, we pause to listen for gunfire again but there’s nothing. It makes me wonder if we ever heard it at all.

  17

  FAMILIES TEACH US WHO WE are. That’s what the kids’ movies I watched growing up and the sappy commercials they air over the holidays tell us. Family binds us. It’s the download for our politics and faith software. The way to see yourself more truly than any mirror.

  And maybe it is all that. But I would define it as something else.

  A family is a group of people who have different versions of the same experience.

  What I remember of our years in the Mercer Island Cape Cod with a red-brick chimney and the Stars and Stripes hanging limp from a pole out front isn’t what Franny remembers, and is probably further still from what Bridge took from living under the same roof.

  Not that it was bad. There was a station wagon that puttered us to practices and birthday parties, a rec room where we played the music loud, a living room where we’d prop a fresh-cut spruce in the corner and hang strings of popcorn from its branches once a year. But there was something distinct about our house compared to the homes of our friends. It was like we were acting at being a family instead of living as one.

  I may be alone in this.

  Or maybe I’m not.

  Sometimes I think something happened to me growing up. A harm of the suppressed kind. I’ve wondered, if I went to one of those therapists who puts you under and takes you to the place you least want to return to, what I might find way back there. Would I know it was real if such a moment came to mind? How is a story distinguishable from history?

  Chances are there’s nothing there. What I am only reflects my particular scars from growing up as Ray and Eleanor Quinlan’s son.

  But they did nothing wrong.

  They did nothing.

  • • •

  Once the fire is quieted, the second Quinlans collect the duffel bags the limo drivers had dropped outside and go off to find their quarters. It’s decided that the twins will take the Red cabin, Jerry the Green, and Lauren the Yellow while me and Bridge remain in Orange and Franny and Mom in the lodge. I leave Bridge with Mom and offer to accompany Lauren along the trail to her cabin, throwing her bag over my shoulder and immediately regretting it, my legs still wobbly.

  “I can manage,” she says at the trailhead, pulling the bag off my shoulder. “But I appreciate the company.”

  “Are you a runner?” I ask as we start off into the trees.

  “I try to get out a few times a week. Why do you ask?”

  “I can just tell. Skiers know skiers, hunters know hunters. Or so I’m told.”

  “So runners know runners.”

  “That’s it.”

  The trail narrows, forcing Lauren to proceed a step ahead. There’s only the sound of our breathing, the dull clumping of our feet, the swinging light of our headlamps.

  “It’s bizarre, isn’t it, to think about Dad making the drive up and down the I-405 between our two houses,” I say, “and none of us having a clue about it until today.”

  “There’s a lot none of us had a clue about until today.”

  “I can’t stop imagining him in his car, heading a few miles north from dinner at our place so he could tuck you in for bed. What could he have been thinking?”

  “I couldn’t say. But I’m pretty sure he wasn’t worried about getting caught.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because someone who would keep two separate families, with two wives, two homes—those kind of men never are.”

  The trail takes an abrupt turn to the right and starts a switchback down a slope much steeper than the one that leads to the Orange cabin. It takes us a while to work our way left and right and back again, tackling the degree of descent in small servings. Once the trail levels out again, there’s still no sign of any clearing or cabin ahead. The darkness is thicker here. Seamless.

  “Did you get along? You and Dad?” I ask Lauren, genuinely curious. What if Dad loved her and Jerry and the twins more than us? What if we were the real second Quinlans and they the first?

  “We didn’t fight, if that’s what you mean,” she says. “I don’t think he cared enough to get involved like that.”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant.”

  “He was benign. As in not there. But when you’re in my field, you know that that can leave its own kind of scars.”

  “Do you think it was harder for you being adopted?”

  Lauren stops to look at me, and I wonder if I’ve offended her and then realize all the ways she’d have a right to be.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “That was an incredibly stupid thing to—”

  She raises her hand, the index finger up to show my apology isn’t necessary.

  “We’re all adopted, if you think about it. At least it’s how I think about it,” she says. “None of us choose our family. We just arrive, one way or another.”

  “And make the best of it.”

  “Or the worst.”

  She starts on again and it takes a moment to catch up.

  “So what’s your theory?”

  “Theory?”

  “On Dad,” I say. “What he did for a living. Who he really was.”

  “Well,” she says, and comes to a stop again, turning to scan the endless green around us. “It certainly paid well.”

  “And was classified.”

  “He didn’t tell my mother, as far as I know. And he certainly never told me. So maybe secrecy was required of him. Or maybe it was something he chose. Either way, he practiced it to perfection.”

  “Franny and I have wondered if he was maybe involved in espionage in some way.”

  “No chance.”

  “Why?”

  “He was too interested in his own project, whatever it was, to work for some institutional bureaucracy.”

  “Something on the corporate side then.”

  “Could be. Likely a branch of the sciences or engineering. If you’ve discovered something useful, there’s somebody who’ll pay you enough to buy your own national park.”

  “It must have been good.”

  “I’d say bad, more likely. Think about it. If he parented his children and conducted his marriages the way he did, what do you think he was capable of in his professional life?”

  “You think it was illegal?”

  “I’m not saying that. But it’s a professional hazard of mine to profile people, even the ones closest to me,” she says, and grimaces, what I take to be a hint at the failed relationships in her past. “I see Dad as a more extreme case than my brothers do.”

  “An obsessive.”

  “A sociopath.”

  “Which would mean he didn’t ask us here to hold hands around the campfire and promise to get together at Thanksgiving.”

  “I don’t see that, no.”

  “So what do you see?”

  “This? This is a humiliation,” Lauren says, bitterness sharpening an edge to her words. “He couldn’t feel, but he was interested in managing how other people felt. So here we are.”

  I’m not sure I agree with her but it’s clear that her anger is not something to be tested. I also see now that it wasn’t love for Dad that made her storm away from the fire earlier. It was her finding it wrong to be acting normal when none of this is normal. When Dad wasn’t normal.

  Lauren carries on ahead. I’ve got my foot raised to follow after her when my body goes still.

  The sensation of being watched.

  When I turn to look, I see that I’m right.

  A tree
that’s not a tree at the top of the slope we’ve just made our way down. A quarter of the height of those around it and unnaturally shaped, its limbs hanging downward, a bulbous squirrel nest at the top. And moving. Weaving side to side in a way that has nothing to do with the direction of the wind.

  These are the tricks the brain tries to play to prevent me from seeing what it knows is there.

  The Tall Man Franny saw last night. Now revealed in more detail. Each announcing its unforgettability in the instant I notice it.

  The mouth hanging open like his jaw’s been broken. Arms at his sides. His hands lost inside what appear to be a pair of construction gloves that are too big for him, fattened and leathery. The look of something that’s lost and has been that way for a long while. Unreachable.

  Even though we’d covered a hundred yards of trail from where he is now, only a quarter of that distance separates us in a line up or down the slope.

  As if reading my thoughts, he starts forward.

  Not on the trail, but coming straight at us. Plowing through the brush, a controlled fall that his legs are able to negotiate, he is advancing at a seemingly impossible pace.

  Trying not to trigger him into an outright run by seeing me do the same, I speed-walk up to Lauren.

  “Don’t stop. Don’t turn around, okay?”

  “Why?”

  “Just drop your duffel bag and keep going.”

  “What are you—”

  “Do it now.”

  She drops the bag.

  Then she does what I asked her not to and turns around.

  “Jesus Christ,” she whispers, her fear lowering her voice into the tenor of an actual prayer.

  The Tall Man breaks through the last of the brush to emerge onto the trail at the base of the hill. Unobscured by the forest, in the electric flash of our lights, he shows more of himself now—glaring and gut flipping and real—so that it’s difficult to stitch all of him together. He can’t be taken in as whole but only as a loose collection of particulars you see and move your eyes from only to see something else, something worse than the thing before.

  A patchwork of a man. One who’s no longer a man. An undead scarecrow who leapt from his post.

  Clothes so stained—by dirt, by blood—they cling to him like plastic wrap.