The sky overhead was a perfect blue, and his heart leapt. He swiveled in his chair and looked at the time in the corner of his computer screen. Maybe he’d be able to leave early. If he left early, he could grill up those chicken thighs, and he and Laura could have a picnic on the porch. If he stayed even another hour, he’d be too tired for that. There would be plenty of light, but that wouldn’t matter. The traffic would do him in.
When he opened his eyes, it was dark and his breath adhered to his throat as though it were lined with tape. He gasped and squeezed his lungs and sucked at the air around his face. Then he remembered the boy.
Shadows had pooled between the rocks, and he leaned over to ruffle the leaves there. He patted with his hand and felt Dylan’s bony head.
“Hey,” he said. “Wake up.”
The head didn’t move, and Eddie thought maybe it wasn’t a head at all. “Come on,” he said, and the head rose from beneath his palm. Eddie felt the boy’s shoulders and his hot, dry back.
“Give me another drink,” Eddie said, and the boy handed him the bottle.
The woods were too dark to walk through, but they would have to try.
“We have to go. Give me your hand.”
He reached down and the boy took his hand.
“We’re leaving,” Eddie said. “Say good-bye to all this.”
They walked along the edge of the streambed, just inside the bank where the sand was still soft underfoot. Eddie let go of Dylan’s hand and followed just behind him. It was as if they were walking toward a dark picture with a smear of gray at the bottom, and the smear of gray never came into focus. When Dylan slowed, Eddie touched him between the shoulders. “Left, right, left,” he said. “March on, little soldier.” They walked for a long time. The woods up the slope were so black they weren’t woods at all—only something penetrable. Eddie gripped his fists, testing the strength in them, imagining what he might do if they were seen.
When Dylan stopped, Eddie stopped, too.
“We need to drink,” Eddie said.
Dylan held the bottle to his lips again.
“Take more,” Eddie said, but Dylan shook his head. “Give it to me, then.”
He filled his mouth and let the water sit warmly on the sides of his tongue. His skull felt full of water, too, but it was water he couldn’t reach. There were reserves he had no access to. He’d have to wait for them.
When he swallowed, the dryness was there again in his throat, as though his mouth had not, a moment earlier, been wet.
“Let me just hold it for a second,” he said, and he held the bottle and let the pale light off the sand reflect inside of it.
Then they walked on into the silence. The smear of gray that was the streambed disappeared ahead of them, and when they walked to the end of it, Eddie saw that it hooked sharply to the right. Dylan sat down.
“Get up,” Eddie said.
Eddie stood beside him and saw how the slope was graded. The trail next to the streambed was wide there.
“Okay, stay where you are, then,” he said. “Rest for a little bit.”
Up the trail was a guardrail for a road, and beyond it, the dim lines of a crosswalk. Eddie stood at the trailhead, looking out into the street.
“This way,” he called down. “Come on. This is the way up here.”
He went down to grab the boy, to carry him if he had to, but felt him pass by his legs.
“Look for something silver,” Eddie said. “She might have left it for us to follow again.”
He ran his hands over the guardrail and kicked at the dirt by the road, but there was none of the silver thread.
“She knows I know the way,” he said when he didn’t find any.
The shoulder of the street was wide and empty, and the grass had been mowed close to the ground. It disappeared underfoot and left more dark footprints behind them. Eddie recognized this street. They were at the edge of the park, and if they kept walking, they’d come out near the exit for the highway.
“You stay close,” he warned. “If you hear anything, you tell me.”
The shoulder was shadowed by thick trees at its edge, and Dylan followed him, taking big steps to match his footprints. Eddie crinkled the plastic bottle against his hip to make sure that he was still carrying it.
The street opened out onto another and the streetlights hung darkly in the air overhead. Rectangular sections of the night sky were blotted out as if redacted where signs for the highway were attached to thick metal poles.
The on-ramp was ahead, curving up and over the highway. It was clean of debris, and they followed it, Eddie touching the concrete wall marred with fender paint.
He held up his hand to Dylan, and they stopped and surveyed the stretch beneath them. On the highway, there were a few cars at odd angles, but nothing was moving there.
“If we see people, we can go into the woods,” Eddie said.
They circled along the ramp and emptied out onto the lane to merge. The asphalt seemed to shiver beneath their feet. Eddie imagined trucks bearing down on them. On the other side of the guardrail was a footpath, and Eddie stepped over onto it.
“Raise your arms,” he said, and Dylan raised his arms up over his head. Eddie grabbed beneath his armpits and hoisted him up and over.
They walked along the path, and the highway stretched before them like a strip of prairie carved into the woods. Eddie’s eyes were heavy. He looked behind him and saw Dylan wobbling.
“Come on,” he said. “Sit here.”
They sat on the guardrail. Eddie took another sip, and offered it to Dylan again, but he refused.
“When’s your birthday?” Eddie asked, testing him.
He had to clench his brain like a fist to remember his own.
“Mine’s in March,” Eddie said, finally.
They kept going. Eddie’s legs burned in his hips. He thought soon the sun would break over the horizon, but it didn’t. The next time he looked for Dylan, he wasn’t there. He was sitting down in the dirt behind him.
“Come on, pal,” he said. “You stay in front of me now, okay?”
Dylan’s legs were bent beneath him in a figure four, and Eddie stooped to lift him by his pits again, but his body was limp. Eddie stood him upright, but he only slumped back to the ground again.
“I need you, buddy,” Eddie said. “I need you to be my scout. I bet you have eagle eyes. We’re looking for a bridge. It goes all the way across the bay. There are big silver supports that go up into the sky, and wires that come off those. That’s what you’ll see first, okay? Those big metal supports. They’re like towers. I need you to look for them.”
This time, when he picked him up, he stood. And when Eddie prodded him between his shoulder blades, he walked. Eddie walked close behind, staring at his ashy back as if walking into the cast of his own shadow.
They went on and Eddie closed his eyes, but even then, they kept walking.
“Eddie, wake up,” Laura said. “Wake up, Eddie.”
Her hand was on his chest, rousing him as if for work. She stood next to him, wearing a green T-shirt.
“Keep going,” she said. “You have to keep him with you. You can’t just leave him behind.”
She walked beside him for a long time in silence, and Eddie watched her. To her side, off the highway, the tree branches reached out into small leafless networks. There were buds on them. Even the air felt like spring. The woods were full of sound. Voices. There were people in the trees, and light streamed through them like water through a net. Ahead, the highway was obstructed by something Eddie couldn’t see. He looked at the woods again, but the trees were just dead poles in the darkness.
As they got closer, he saw the obstacle more clearly. It was a wreck. Only one car remained, and its nose was crumpled in. Glass and plastic were spread out over the highway and over the path where he walked.
A warm familiarity spread through his body. The wrecked car was his car. He knelt down in the path and began to pick up shards of plastic.
Most were small, but a few were long and pointed. He put them in his pockets.
“What are you doing?” Laura asked.
He turned and looked over his shoulder to where she was standing, but it was only her voice. Her body wasn’t there.
“I’m collecting it.”
“Don’t,” she said. “You have someplace to be.”
“I’ll need proof for the insurance.”
“What proof? You think that’s going to be proof?”
He crouched there and looked at the destroyed car.
“Anyway, it’s not yours,” Laura said. “You weren’t driving on this highway. This is the way to my parents’ house. You were coming home from work.”
Eddie looked out onto the wreck and saw that she was right. This car had been an SUV.
“Where’s the boy?” she asked.
“Dylan.”
“Where is he?”
Eddie looked behind, and then stood and strained his eyes ahead. The path was empty in both directions.
“I lost him,” he said.
He backtracked down the path taking careful steps. He was afraid that Dylan had curled up somewhere and that he’d step on him or kick him accidentally. But the path was an uninterrupted gray line in the darkness.
“Dylan,” he whispered. “Come on, pal.”
He backtracked for longer than Dylan could have walked. Then he held on to the rail and vomited on the asphalt of the highway. It was only a trickle of spit, but he gasped and clung to the metal and cursed himself.
When he opened his eyes, the gray of the horizon was a lighter gray. He looked for Laura, but then he tried to keep himself from looking—from fooling himself. The world without Laura was lead-heavy around him. She was gone, and he’d been weak to let himself imagine anything else. He had to be strong. The path was still empty and the highway was empty going forward. He could see ahead where the woods on either side came to a point at the end of his vision.
He rested there on his knees to build his strength. Once he was standing, he could use his legs again.
If Dylan wasn’t curled up on the highway, then maybe he was in the woods. Eddie looked back and forth as the day began to brighten. He tried to jog, but the wind in his ears was painful. If he spent time searching the woods, he’d never make it to the bridge, but the woods would be cooler and he could hide himself in the leaves in the daylight.
He walked as the highway sloped gradually upward. To his right, on the other side of the guardrail, the land dropped off, and he stopped to peer down into the depression between where he stood and where the woods started up again. Someone was sitting in a chair there. He could see the top of her head—the gray hair of an old woman. As she lifted her face to look at him, he thought he knew her, but didn’t know from where.
Her shirt billowed out around her waist, and something moved in her lap. Dylan was curled up there.
Then he recognized her. It was Ruth Blackmon. His neighbor. Mrs. Blackmon. Just across the street.
Eddie stepped over the guardrail and put his foot on the edge of the slope, but before he could step to test its firmness, he slid on his heels and fell on his back and rolled. As the world turned over, he squeezed the plastic bottle tightly in his hand.
“You all right?” Mrs. Blackmon said.
Eddie stood up. The hill was soft and hadn’t hurt him. He brushed the dirt off his face. Mrs. Blackmon was sitting in a folding chair, and Dylan’s head was nuzzled against her chest. Mrs. Blackmon was in her sixties. She was retired, and Eddie’s mother sometimes sent him over with a bowl to pick her grape tomatoes, or to help her net the blueberry bushes that the birds enjoyed assaulting.
But no.
That was when he was a child. When he looked again, he saw that it wasn’t Mrs. Blackmon. It was Mrs. Kasolos.
“Where’d you get him?” Eddie said.
“He came to me,” Mrs. Kasolos said. “You need to keep track of your son.”
“It was dark.” He examined her carefully. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “You’re dead.”
“I’m waiting. My daughter went off to look for people. She’ll be back. We found this chair on the side of the road. Perfectly good.”
“Dylan,” Eddie said.
Dylan pulled his head from out of the folds of Mrs. Kasolos’s shirt like a bird from beneath a wing.
“Why’d you run off like that?”
He looked at Eddie with dreary eyes.
“Well, I’m glad he found me,” she said. “Because now you’re here. I don’t know when I’ve been this thirsty.”
“You and your daughter don’t have water?” Eddie looked at the bottle in his hand. There were, perhaps, three sips left.
“Not anymore.”
“This is all we have,” Eddie said. “We need it to get to the bridge. I’ve got family over there.”
“And I have nothing. So who’s ahead in the game?”
“Your daughter’s coming back for you.”
“This one’s nice,” Mrs. Kasolos said. She put her hand on top of Dylan’s head. “Not too whiny.”
“He needs to come with me,” Eddie said.
“Of course,” she said. “And I need a drink.”
“He’s my son,” Eddie said, hearing himself say it.
Dylan looked up the hill at the highway above their heads.
“Come on,” Eddie said. He took Dylan by the wrist and pulled him off Mrs. Kasolos’s lap.
“Give me your hand,” he ordered, and Dylan reached up.
“Let’s go. Keep up. We have to go.”
He began to run, and when Dylan turned his head to look back, Eddie jerked his arm like a leash.
It was slow going up the hill, and he struggled to keep his breath from blocking up his throat. When it leveled off at the path next to the highway, he stopped and squeezed Dylan’s hand in his own. It was rubbery and loose. Ahead, the horizon was blank, but it could have been an illusion from the pitch of the land. The bridge could have been just beyond his sight.
He started jogging again, but something caught him, flexing thinly across his shins. He pitched forward and fell headlong, his palms hitting the dirt again. Dust spun into his mouth. Dylan stood above him and Eddie could see the tight white rope that had toppled him.
A woman stepped out from behind a tree. She held a stick with both hands, and thrust the sharpened end at Eddie’s face. Eddie squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them, the tip was an inch above his forehead. The tip had been blackened in a fire.
“That was my mom back there!” the woman shouted. Her face was red and dirt had caked along the tendons in her neck. A wound on her forehead had dried as dark and crusty as a caterpillar. “It was a test! You failed it!”
A man and a boy about thirteen emerged from the woods. Each had his own sharpened stick.
“Give us what you got,” the woman said. The man wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It was unbuttoned halfway down the front, exposing red flesh beneath a puff of black hair.
“Why didn’t you come for her before?” Eddie asked.
“Shut up,” the woman said. “Hand it over.”
Eddie turned to look at Dylan, but the woman touched his cheek with the side of the stick, straightening him out again.
“I need it for the boy,” he said.
He rolled over onto the bottle and put his hand into his pocket. He felt the shards of plastic there.
Dylan sat down on the guardrail. His face was a doll’s face with half-shut lids.
The woman planted her front foot next to Eddie’s chest. The muscles in her calf twitched in fierce debate. Those muscles would decide the fate of her pointed stick—if it was going to withdraw or proceed directly into his face—and Eddie pulled his fist from his pocket and slammed the longest plastic shard into the soft spot behind her knee.
It stuck there, deep, and she howled and fell to the ground as the other two ran to help her. He stood up, scooped Dylan to his chest, and ran, the boy’s
legs overflowing from the basket of his arms. The road was flat as a runway, and when the weight of Dylan’s body began to burn his shoulders and neck, he kept on running. He held the bottle in the vise of his hands beneath him as the plastic twisted his fingers until he thought that they would snap.
The sun was overhead, and they were alone. The white stripes on the highway were ten feet long, at least. Too long. His vision wasn’t right. The green highway signs across the divide were huge and sparkling.
As he lowered Dylan to the ground, the boy began to scramble. It was an animal’s recognition of a proximity to freedom. Eddie let him fall. He hit the ground and then stood and organized his shoulders.
“You’re not what you said,” Dylan said.
Eddie sat down in the dirt.
The boy began to walk back in the direction that they’d come.
Eddie stood.
“Dylan,” he called. “Get back here!”
He walked quickly to him, and tried to grab his arm, but Dylan shook away. Eddie pressed down on his shoulders, and his little-boy body collapsed like a cardboard box. Eddie was on top of him, pinning him to the ground. Dylan squirmed, but Eddie leaned hard into his chest, and finally he was still.
“You have to come with me,” Eddie said. “Sometimes you have to do things you don’t like.” He planted his shredded palms in the dirt on either side of Dylan’s body and pushed himself up, but Dylan stayed flattened where he was.
“Come on,” Eddie said, but the boy didn’t move. “Take a sip of this,” he said. “Come on,” but Dylan lay frozen on the ground.
Eddie took a sip and then another, and when he looked up from the bottle, Dylan was sitting.
Something had resigned in him, and Eddie led him to the woods. The leaves were thick on the ground, and he piled them up again. When Dylan sat, Eddie stooped to cover him up, but the boy tossed and kicked himself free of the leaves and began to whimper. It was too hot to be buried.
Eddie sat on the ground. It was soft, and he leaned back against a tree.
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