The Darkest Path

by Jeff Hirsch

  • • •

  Everyone fell silent when I slid open the screen door that led to the porch.

  Kate was sitting on the opposite side of a large wrought-iron table with a magazine in her lap. Beside her, an Asian girl with a tattoo peeking out of her collar was drawing in a black leather-bound sketch pad. Reese sat across from them, slumped in his chair. The sun was just starting to fall, spreading golden light over all of them.

  “Well, hello there!”

  A stocky guy with exuberantly mussed blond hair stood at the head of the table, a bottle dangling from his fingers.

  “Before you come any closer,” he said, moving behind Reese and planting his hands on his shoulders, “I have to ask: Do you intend to follow through on stabbing this young man in the face?”

  “Alec!” Kate said.

  “Keep in mind that none of us are against this,” he said. “I myself have always despised him because he’s so much better looking than me. A good facial scar might take him down a peg.”

  The girl next to Kate spoke up, surprising me with a British accent. “Sorry, Alec, a good facial scar would just make Reese look tough as well as handsome.”

  “Thank you, Diane,” Reese said.

  Alec balled up his napkin and threw it at Diane’s head. “We have to stick together, D!” Alec mock whispered. “He’s prettier than you too!”

  Diane laughed, then went back to drawing in her sketch pad.

  “Over here, Cal,” Kate said, patting the chair beside her. “Me and D will be like insulation between you and our obnoxious host.”

  “Obnoxious! Did you hear that, Reese? She called me obnoxious!”

  “It’s almost hard to believe.”

  I moved self-consciously around the porch as Reese and Alec argued playfully. The table was littered with food wrappers and green glass bottles covered in French writing.

  “How’s Nat?” Kate asked as I took a seat beside her.

  “She’s okay, I think. Tired.”

  “Right,” Diane said with a gentle laugh. “If I’d been in a helicopter crash, I think I’d be pretty tired too.”

  “Yes!” Alec said, dropping back into his seat. “The helicopter crash. They tell me you were fleeing the Path!”

  “Alec,” Kate said. “Seriously?”

  “What? Expressing curiosity about your guests is a virtue, Kate.” Alec turned to me. “Now, what was it like? They were shooting at you and stuff?”

  Alec was leaning across the table, his green eyes wide, almost hungry. I looked down at the silverware by my plate. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “That is. So. Awesome.”

  “Uh, I don’t think it was for their pilot, Alec.” Diane said.

  “Yes!” Alec said. “Sorry. Thoughtless.”

  “Obnoxious,” Reese chimed in.

  “Ha! Yes, that’s true too. Sorry, Cal. Humble apologies. But that happens in war, right? Noble sacrifices? Dulce et decorum est and all that? The valiant private throws himself in front of a bullet to save the life of the general who will go forth and turn the tide of battle.”

  “He wasn’t Army,” I said quietly, pushing at the heavy silver knife. “He was just a pilot.”

  “Dinner has arrived!”

  Christos came out from the house, bearing a massive plate that was overflowing with slabs of meat. Everyone pushed the debris on the table away so he could set it down. The array of food was mesmerizing — hamburgers and sausages and two-inch-thick steaks that were charred and dripping blood. Reese dashed inside and brought out bowls filled with potato chips, cut fruit, and a green salad studded with garnet-colored berries. A silver tray held a teetering pile of butter-slick corn.

  “Gruyère?”

  Christos had materialized beside me with a wooden board in his hands. It was covered with six overlapping piles of cheese.

  Dumbfounded, I sat there with my mouth hanging open.

  “On your burger?” He counted down the piles on the plate. “We have Gruyère, white cheddar, Brie, Havarti, a Danish blue, and… Diane, what is this one?”

  Diane looked up from her sketch pad. “Gouda.”

  “Gouda! Any preference?”

  “Go with the Gruyère!” Alec said. “When in doubt always go with Gruyère!”

  “Gruyère it is!” Christos loaded a thick slice onto a bun, along with lettuce and tomato and a half-inch burger. He paused, thought again, and added another slab of meat and three mahogany-colored strips of bacon. “You look like you could stand to put on a little weight.”

  Everyone fell to their food. My body, used to canned tuna and desert reeds, was desperate to take in as much as it could. My stomach seemed to be bottomless.

  “So are you from Wyoming too?” Diane asked, once most everyone had cleared their plates.

  “New York,” I said. “I’m on my way back.”

  “Alec!” Diane called. “Did you hear? Cal’s from New York.”

  “That’s great!” he said. “I love the Plaza. Do you go to the Plaza?”

  “God, you are such a ridiculous snob,” Kate said. “You’re like a New Yorker cartoon.”

  “What? It’s a nice place.”

  “Yes, it is, but I think what Diane was saying is that Cal here is from—”

  Alec slapped the table, rattling the plates. “Hey! I just had an idea. It’s going to be a beautiful night and I think it’s time we got this party moving! Who’s up for a swim?”

  “Yes!” Reese agreed, leaping up from the table.

  “Aren’t we supposed to wait a half hour or something?” Diane asked.

  Alec lifted a scholarly finger into the air. “Society,” he declared, “has convinced us that the universe is a place of rules and regulations when, in fact, it is a… what?”

  Alec leaned over Diane, palms planted on the tabletop, a ravenous look in his eye.

  “Don’t leave me hanging here, D.”

  Diane sighed. “Life is a cabaret.”

  “Yes!” Alec shot a fist into the air and led Reese and Christos from the table and down a hill leading away from the house. His voice rose up into the night, loud and off-key.

  “Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!”

  Kate and Diane rolled their eyes as one and pushed back from the table.

  “Come on, Cal,” Kate said. “It’s time to join the cabaret, ol’ chum. You want to get your guitar, Diane? You might be able to drown out Alec’s singing.”

  “Maybe we should just drown Alec.”

  Diane went back into the house as Kate gathered up some of the trays from the table. She stacked a loaf of bread and the board of cheese awkwardly in my arms and we left the porch, moving across a patch of lush grass that surrounded the house.

  “Sorry about Alec,” she said. “I mean, he’s always been a handful, but he’s been unusually intense ever since we got here. I think he flipped out when Daddy Dearest sent him away. Probably thought he was indispensible to the empire or something.”

  “What empire?”

  “La-La Land? Hollyweird?” Kate laughed when she saw my confusion. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll take this one step at a time.”

  As Kate led me down the hill, I felt like I was moving through a dream. Below the house, there was a shallow valley with a small lake fixed in its center like a jewel. The sun was slipping below the treetops, spreading a rich orange light across the grass and the peaks of ripples out on the water.

  Kate led me down to a wood-plank dock that reached out halfway across the water. We set our things down and took a spot at the edge. Kate slipped her sandals off and dangled her feet in the water. At the end of the dock, Alec and Reese were stripping their shirts off and getting ready to dive. Christos was lying stretched out on the deck, his skin almost bronze in the twilight sun.

  “One! Two! Three! CANNONBALL!”

  Alec and Reese leapt up into the air, tucking their legs in and slamming into the lake. A fountain of water exploded over the dock, soaking us all in icy water.

  �
�Hey!” Kate yelled, laughing. I found myself laughing too, shocked by the water’s chill. Christos didn’t even move; he just closed his eyes and smiled up into the sky. Alec and Reese raced across the lake, their arms slicing into the steely water.

  I looked back over my shoulder at the house. From the dock I could see how sprawling it really was. It stretched from one end of the hilltop to the other, a rustic brown expanse, more like a resort or a hotel than a house. The entire property was surrounded by towering pines that blocked out any trace of the world outside. I searched for bomb craters or scorch marks, anything that might suggest that this place existed in the same world I came from, but found nothing. A dreamy vertigo washed over me. For a second it was easy to believe there was nothing in the world but this.

  “Camembert?”

  “What?”

  Kate was holding out a crust of bread with a slice of cheese on it.

  “Oh. Thanks. Sure.” I took the bread and sat with it in my hand, too thrown to even eat. “How long have you all been here?”

  “Uh… about six weeks now, I think. I don’t know. The days are kinda running together.”

  “You haven’t had any problems with the Path?”

  Kate bumped her shoulder into mine. “Forget about the Path. Life’s a cabaret, remember?”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  Kate smiled. “I was just kidding. We haven’t had any problems. We’re pretty well hidden, and besides, Alec’s dad was nice enough to hire a small army to look after us.”

  Kate tossed a bit of potato chip into the water, and a duck paddled over to nibble at it. The pier wobbled as Diane returned from the house, her guitar in hand. She sat cross-legged between us and began to tune it. When she was done, she played a song I didn’t recognize. Her British accent disappeared within a lilting melody.

  We listened as Diane moved from song to song and the sun fell. Once it was low enough, strings of white lights that lined the dock winked on automatically, surrounding us in a crystalline glow. Fairy lights. I remembered how Mom would hang them all through our back garden. Suspended within the flower patches and the vines, they filled the nighttime yard with a ghostly twinkle.

  Kate gathered the remains of dinner into neat piles at the end of the pier. When she returned, she sat down beside me, the tip of her knee touching my arm. They looked strange so close, her leg smooth and white, my arm covered in old bruises and partially healed cuts just like the rest of me was. Kate lightly traced the boundaries of one of the bruises with her fingertip.

  “Some of these are old,” she said quietly, her voice slipping in beneath Diane’s strumming. “You didn’t get all of them in the crash.”

  I shook my head.

  “You were taken,” Kate said. “Weren’t you? By the Path.”

  I turned to her, her violet-colored eyes shyly searching.

  “How did you know?”

  “A guess,” she said with a shrug. “You said you were from New York but you were running from the West, which is mostly Path. How long were you with them?”

  “Six years.”

  “Six years,” she breathed, looking out at the water. “Since I was in… fifth grade.”

  “Does everyone know?”

  “No,” she said. “Not that they’d care, really.” She thought for a moment, tossed another chip into the water. “After a while, everything outside of here starts to seem sort of… unreal. You know?” She looked back at me with a smile. “I think you’re the most real thing that’s come along in weeks.”

  Applause erupted as Diane finished one song and then launched into another, this one faster, punctuated by Christos stomping in time against the deck. Kate clapped along, moving closer to me as she did it, her shoulder warm against mine. The notes suddenly felt strident and jangling. Overloud. I thought of Nat and Bear lying alone in the dark.

  “I should go,” I said. “Check on Nat and Bear. Bring them something to eat.”

  “I’m sure they’re fine.”

  “But—”

  “It won’t kill you to rest for a second,” Kate said, a surprising command coming into her voice. “I promise.”

  “I…”

  Kate took my hand as the song played on. Across the lake I saw Alec and Reese pulling back toward us. They planted their palms on the pier and slid out of the water, slick as seals. Alec stood at the edge of the pier, his pale belly hanging out, and began a lurching dance in time to Diane’s playing. Reese and Kate cried with laughter and clapped along. Soon everyone was laughing, making a sound as crisp and bright as the fairy lights around us.

  I felt Kate’s hand take my shoulders and turn me around. I flinched away but she was firm, lowering my head down into her lap. Diane stopped singing and her guitar rang out alone. The sound of it was so familiar and so sweet.

  I breathed easy for the first time in what felt like weeks. I closed my eyes, feeling like we were locked away in a bubble lit by fairy lights and so still. And even as the world revolved, we remained.

  • • •

  I glided up to the house with the moon’s broad face above me. Diane and Kate were just behind me, talking quietly. The rest were strung along behind them down the hill, singing as they walked.

  The glass door slid open and I stepped into the den. A second later, Reese and Alec came around behind me, heading into a hall at the dark end of the house. Alec brushed my shoulder as he passed.

  “Night, buddy.”

  He drifted away, humming quietly to himself. Diane and Christos followed them off.

  “Night, Cal.”

  “Sleep good, Cal.”

  Kate led me back to my room, where the light from my open door made her pale skin and her violet eyes glow. An anxious buzz started in my head and moved through my body.

  “I’m the third door down,” she said. “On the other side of the house. If you need anything.”

  “Thanks,” I said, surprised to find my voice hoarse.

  I expected Kate to go, but she looked at me intently for a moment and then down at the floor, her eyebrows drawn tight together. “I shouldn’t…”

  “What?”

  “It’s not my place,” she said, seemingly to herself. “But… you noticed that Alec changed the subject when I brought up New York earlier?”

  “Did something happen? Is New York—”

  Kate placed her hand on my chest. “No, it’s fine. It’s just… a few days ago Alec and Christos decided they were getting bored, so they talked their parents into sending a plane to pick us all up. It’ll be at a small airport not far from here in a couple days.”

  There was a wooden creak as someone moved through the house. A door opened and closed.

  “I don’t under—”

  “Cal, we’re going to take the plane and go to New York.”

  My heart pounded once, sending a tremor through my chest, and then everything seemed to go perfectly still, like the world was balanced on the edge of a cliff.

  “I can’t promise that Alec will agree, but Diane and I talked about it. We’re going to tell him that if he doesn’t take the three of you with us, then we’re not going to go either.”

  “I don’t know what to—”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything. And we should probably be prepared for the possibility that Alec prizes Diane’s guitar playing and my sparkling wit a little less than we’d hope. In which case the five of us might be stuck here for a while. Anyway…”

  Kate dipped in and kissed my cheek. Her face lingered alongside mine afterward. The scent of lavender clung to her as it did to me. I closed my eyes, breathing in the flowery scent. When I opened them she was gone. The house was shadowy and still, quiet except for the phantom strains of Diane’s guitar that replayed in my mind.

  Something brushed against my calf and then Bear jumped up and planted his paws on my knee. He looked at me, his stump of a tail twitching frantically.

  “You need to go out?”

  Bear exploded out
the porch door as soon as I opened it, disappearing into the trees. Even he seemed to be feeling better, his limping run a thing of the past. I went to the kitchen and filled one bowl with water and another with crumbled hamburger and leftover chunks of steak I found in the fridge. I carried the bowls outside and sat down at the end of the table. The sky was clear, so I found the North Star and used it to turn my chair due east.

  I could feel Ithaca, sitting out there like a fire in the dark, tendrils of its warmth brushing my skin. I saw myself climbing onto a plane and rocketing toward it, a thrill in my chest so great it was almost an ache. I imagined finding Mom and Dad and even Grandma Betty out in the garden. Mom would have a glass of wine in her hand, listening as Dad played. Once dawn cracked the sky, we’d all drift toward the house and settle down to sleep. No one would ask about the last six years, no one would ask about James; we’d all slip into the future without a word.

  Bear trotted out of the woods and threw himself into his food, snuffling and slurping as he ate. I looked across the table and saw that Diane had left her guitar behind. I popped the clasps of the case and pulled the guitar out and into my lap, leaning over its body.

  “Want some dinner music?”

  The Path didn’t allow music outside of Lighthouse, so it had been a long time since I had played. My fingers moved across the steel strings, stretching against the restraint of my cast to press into the frets. I played slow and mechanically at first, chord to chord, but then it started to come back to me. I meandered for a while until a song settled in.

  Moonlight road,

  Why don’t you light my way home?

  My fingers tripped, sending the tune flat. I backed up and started again.

  Moonlight road,

  Why don’t you turn me on around?

  Moonlight road…

  “Hey.”

  Nat was standing in the open doorway behind me, barefoot in her filthy clothes. Bear left his empty bowl and ran to her, butting her shins with his forehead.