by Jeff Hirsch
“James…”
“I can walk on my own.”
He planted his hands on the wheelchair’s armrests and pushed, his face white with strain. He wavered once but he closed his eyes for a moment and it passed. I led him around the infirmary and pulled open the door of a rust-and-blue hatchback. James dropped into the backseat and I shut the door.
“Nice of them to give you a new cast.”
Nat was standing on the other side of the car in a swirl of dust. I had only seen her a few times since we’d arrived at Kestrel. Each time was from a distance, as she tried to talk her way into companies of Marines heading south to pursue the Path.
“Yeah,” I said, holding up the clean white plaster. “The old one had seen better days, I guess. They say I still have a few weeks with this one, though.”
I came around the front of the car and saw the backpack on the ground next to her. Behind her a group of soldiers were loading supplies into a trio of Humvees.
“They finally let you sign up?”
Nat shook her head. “They’re dropping me off at home on their way to California. Figured I could help with the rebuilding for a couple years until I can enlist.”
“President Burke says it’ll all be over by then.”
“Yeah,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “I heard that too. If he thinks this guy who took Hill’s place is going to fold, he’s crazy or stupid.”
“I’m betting on stupid.”
I threw my pack into the front passenger seat and shut the door. Nat peered into the car where James sat staring out the back window at the base.
“How is he?”
“Fine,” I said quickly. “It’ll take some time, I guess.”
“They should give him a medal.”
“Captain Assad tried,” I said, spreading my arms wide to present the rattletrap hatchback. “But I said we wanted this instead.”
Nat’s laugh was small and reluctant, but it was good to hear. “So you’re headed home too.”
I nodded. “Assad slipped us enough cash to get there and not eat MREs for a while too. We should be okay.”
There was a clap behind her as the soldiers closed the Humvee’s hatch.
“Nat.”
She looked back at one of the men and nodded.
“Well, I guess I better…”
“Yeah.”
Nat started to go but then she jumped forward and threw her arms around me. She pulled me close and her head fell to my shoulder. Everything seemed to go very still around us. I lifted my arms to her back and held her, breathing in the dusty heat that clung to us. I closed my eyes.
“Thank you,” she breathed into my ear.
“Whitacker!” one of the soldiers called. “Let’s move!”
Nat stepped back, her amber eyes shining, the sun lightening her brown hair. She slipped a piece of paper into my hand and then ran to catch her ride. I stood by the car, watching as she slung her pack over her shoulder and jumped into a Humvee. Her door slammed and they pulled out, joining the long line of vehicles waiting at the main gate.
The car door opened with a rusty squeak. I got in and unfolded the piece of paper. On it was a phone number and an address in Wyoming. I stared at it a moment before putting it into my pocket and checking the rearview.
James was watching the line of departing Fed transports as they pulled through the gate and then vanished in a cloud of dust. Sitting closed on his lap was a small green book, stained with faded blood. His hands lay on it as if he was warming them over a fire. The gold leaf of the title, torn and dull, said The Glorious Path.
Time, I thought, pushing past the sick feeling in my gut. That’s all he needs. All any of us need.
I cranked the ignition and guided us away.
• • •
We spent the morning driving through a landscape struggling to return to normal. A steady stream of refugee traffic surrounded us, moving north past bombed-out restaurants that sat next to gas stations that were open and lit in neon.
A detour brought us directly through DC, where we saw the worst of it. Even though the government had moved out years before, the Path had hit it with a vengeance. The roads were rubble-strewn and pitted, and most of the gleaming white government buildings we could see were covered in black scorch marks. The White House and the Capitol were ruins of white marble.
Only the ivory needle of the Washington Monument stood nearly pristine. A tent city had sprung up on the mall around it and along the edge of the reflecting pool. Refugees milled about in tattered clothes beneath a ring of American flags.
The signs of war became less frequent as we moved up into Maryland. For miles at a time it was possible to forget the last six years except for the occasional checkpoints staffed by bored-looking privates in lightly armored Humvees.
Once we crossed the border into Pennsylvania, I sat up straighter and gripped the steering wheel. I counted the miles, sure I could feel the bright line of the next border in the distance. One hundred. Fifty. Twenty.
My pulse raced. Even James was sitting up now, peering out the windshield, The Glorious Path on the seat next to him.
“Look!”
A sign appeared at the side of the road, green and white, just beyond the line of trees. The car’s engine gave a wheezy complaint when I stood on the gas, but I didn’t care. The sign grew larger by the second and then we were on it.
WELCOME TO NEW YORK. THE EMPIRE STATE.
I held my breath as we blew past it, and New York surrounded us. And this wasn’t the ugly glass and steel of New York City, this was trees and grass and the rolling hills. This was small towns and snaking rivers and crumbling barns. We passed Binghamton and then Whitney Point, turning west onto 79 for the final stretch that brought us through the dense green of state parks. The side of the road teemed with ferns and white oak and maple trees. I rolled the window down and let the wind blow around us. It smelled of damp leaves and grass warmed by the sun.
I could feel home sitting out beyond the trees, sending tremors through the air and the ground, until my heart pulsed along in time. I knew James felt it too when his hand, thin and weak, clasped my shoulder. I heard myself laugh as the little car struggled on.
We rode the last miles in a silence greater than the inside of any Lighthouse. Even the engine settled into a quiet thrum. James leaned forward between the seats and, as I urged the car faster, everything around us faded into a blur of motion. Only the road remained, a bright seam cutting through the forest. At first it was pockmarked and rough and then, as we grew closer, there was the slick whisper of fresh asphalt that made me feel like we were flying.
I could see Mom’s face and Dad’s and Grandma Betty’s. It was like we had just left only days ago.
We came around a bend in the road, and the trees parted and shops appeared with hanging signs and shining windows. We went over a bridge above a seething falls and the Cornell campus rose and fell away. We were flying again, alone on the road beneath a bower of branches, winding through the bright day. We crested a hill and houses emerged from the woods, one or two at a time and then clusters of them, paneled in wood and brick and surrounded by runs of hedges and sun-dappled lawns. We came to a hill leading to a cul-de-sac and there it was, down at the end of the lane. Cobalt-blue walls surrounded in roses.
“James,” I said, my voice thick with wonder. “James, look…”
27
I parked at the top of the hill and cut the engine.
Down the street, brightly colored mailboxes peeked out from ranks of lilac and honeysuckle. Gutterman. Royce. Egan. Bell. And then, at the edge of the cul-de-sac, surrounded by rosebushes — Roe. The simple black letters seemed to pulse against the white of the mailbox.
I felt rooted to my seat, unable to move. The back door creaked open and I watched James step onto the sidewalk, dazed. He took a few tentative steps before turning to me and waiting. I pushed my door open and tumbled out of the car and onto the sun-warmed road.
We d
escended the hill without a word, each of us holding our breath. Most of the houses we passed had signs of wartime neglect — curtainless windows, overgrown yards, peeling paint.
And then the hill flattened and we were there. I stared down at the base of our front gate, the white paint dry and chipped, exposing the graying wood beneath. Crabgrass and dandelions grew in untidy clumps. The gate squeaked as James opened it and stepped through to the other side.
“Look,” James said.
The grass at his feet was brilliantly green and the rosebushes that ran the length of the fence were voluminous and dotted with red and pink and white flowers. He climbed the front steps and stood framed in the front door.
I tried to call out to James as he reached out for the doorknob, but my voice was strangled in my throat. The door was locked, so he reached down into the bushes by the porch and, after searching a few moments, retrieved a small stone. He slid open its compartment and exposed a single brass key. Laughing to himself, he fit the key into the lock.
I thought of an ancient ship locked inside a glass bottle. What would happen if you broke the seal? Would all those accumulated years rush in at once, turning it to dust?
I called out to James as he turned the doorknob, but it was too late. The door swung open. He looked back at me and then stepped inside. I closed my eyes as his footsteps clicked across the wood floor.
“Cal, come on!”
The stones of the front walk passed slowly beneath my feet, giving way to brick stairs and then slats of blond wood stretching out before me, gleaming in the sun. I ran into the house, following the sound of James’s voice as he called for Mom and Dad. I moved from room to room, a giddy energy bubbling through me as I saw how little had changed.
The living room was a dim cave with thick brown-and-gold carpet. A TV sat at one end and at the other was the lumpy brown couch where Mom and Grandma Betty would drink wine while Dad played guitar. The kitchen glowed in shades of pink and yellow, with dishes sitting unwashed in the sink and stacks of mail teetering by the coffee machine.
“Mom! Dad!”
I threw myself at the door to our bedroom and there was our red shelf full of books and our stacks of games. Loose Legos were scattered across the floor between our beds in piles of red and yellow and green, like raw jewels. I bent over laughing, out of breath, wanting to throw them all into the air. I felt James in the doorway behind me.
“Can you believe it?” I said as I turned. “Mom and Dad are probably just out. They’ll be here any—”
James was holding a yellowing piece of paper. On the front it said JAMES AND CALLUM.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Read it.”
I paused, thinking of that crumbling ship, but then James pressed it into my hands. I unfolded a single sheet of paper covered in our mother’s neat hand.
Boys,
It’s been five years now and we haven’t heard a word about either of you. I can only pray that you found some way to stay safe until all of this is over.
The war seems to be going badly now and the last few years have been very hard on your grandmother. The rationing has made getting her medicine increasingly difficult, so your father and I finally decided that we had no choice but to try to get into Canada before they close the border for good. We’re leaving first thing tomorrow morning.
We never thought we’d have to leave the house you both grew up in. It’s sad how so many things that would have seemed unthinkable only a few years ago are now so commonplace. Maybe in times like these, all we can do is survive and hope for the day when we’ll be able to live.
We plan to head northeast toward Wellesley Island, where they say there are still people who can get us across. Where we’ll go after, if we even succeed, we have no way of knowing. The refugee camps near Ottawa are full and we hear that they’re pushing people farther and farther west. We’ll do all we can to leave word for you wherever we go.
We love you both and pray for the day when we’ll all be together again.
Mom and Dad
The letter slipped from my hands and fell to the floor.
“Cal…”
I found myself running back through the house and toward the front door. This time I saw the layers of dust and the empty shelves I had missed before and smelled the musty air of a place abandoned.
“Cal! Wait!”
I collapsed onto the front porch, my head in my hands, breathing in the cloying smell of the roses that had grown unchecked all around the house. The floorboards creaked behind me.
“It’s been six years,” James said.
I nodded but couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think. James hovered a while and then he drifted inside. I looked up at the empty houses tucked in among the oaks and the grass-lined streets.
I remembered how the school bus would let James and me off at the top of the hill and we would race each other down the sidewalk, kicking at the russet piles of fallen leaves, before bursting inside and yelling for Mom. I remembered lying in the front yard in the summertime, the warm air around me full with the hum of Dad’s lawn mower and the smell of cut grass. I remembered our neighbors and our friends and how I ran thoughtlessly through the streets to the shores of the lake.
I tried to remember the bad things too, the unhappy things, hoping they would drive away the ache of the loss, but it was no use. As hard as I tried, all I could remember were the times I had been so happy.
• • •
It was after nightfall when I made my way through the dark house and slid open the door to the back porch. James had built a small fire in the middle of the garden and he sat reading by its orange light.
The grass in the garden was overgrown and the flowers had gone wild and weed-strangled. Our hammocks still hung between the twin oaks though they were threadbare, the white ropes frayed and gray with mildew. James sat on the crumbling stone border that surrounded the small pond.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked, setting his book down beside him.
“Walking,” I said. I drifted across the yard and sat down a few feet from James, staring into the flames at his feet. “Most of the houses in the neighborhood are abandoned. The Guttermans. The Bells.”
James pushed a tin plate my way. “Warmed up some of the rations we brought with us.”
It was spaghetti with red sauce and bits of sawdusty meat. I pushed at it with the plastic fork James gave me. “Guess we can go out tomorrow and spend some of Captain Assad’s money on real food.”
James said nothing. He cracked a branch in two and tossed half into the flames. It flared and crackled. Sitting on the cracked stone next to him was his copy of The Glorious Path. The cover was battered and stained. I took it and rifled through the dog-eared pages. Almost every one was worn glossy. The margins were filled with James’s careful handwriting. I set the book back down and stared into the fire.
“You’re going back, aren’t you?”
James poked at the campfire with a stick, arranging the coals. The fire surged and brightened.
“I was studying to be a beacon,” he said quietly. “I never said anything because I knew you wouldn’t like it. Beacon Quan told me he knew a place in Oklahoma that he thought would be good for my apprenticeship. It’s this town called Foley. It grows wheat and corn. Just a few hundred people living on farms with a small Lighthouse.”
James sat forward and stared into the flames.
“The Choice is wrong,” he said. “I know that, and I know other things are wrong too, but…” James stopped, struggling for the words. “Even now, I close my eyes and I pray and I can feel my path. It hasn’t gone away. I wish it would, but it hasn’t. And I know it doesn’t end here. Maybe if I’m there… maybe I can try to help make things better.”
“They’ll kill you if they find out who you are.”
“I know,” he said.
I took another branch and fed it to the fire.
“I keep thinking about the day they took us,” I said. “Maybe if I hadn’t been so afra
id, we could have escaped, or if I had stood up to the beacon—”
“They would have killed us,” James said. “You were trying to keep your little brother safe, Cal. Just like you’ve been trying to do for the last six years.”
James moved off the stone border and sat down next to me.
“You put us on a path,” he said. “I know you don’t believe it, but I do, and I think it’s the one we were meant to be on. I don’t regret it.”
“Not even Hill?”
The wind blew through the trees, sending sparks across the yard like a swarm of bees. James turned to me, his eyes warm in the firelight.
“Not even Hill.”
We sat there in silence until the fire died down to a few orange coals. We kicked dirt over them and then we made our way inside. I paused at the porch door, looking at the tattered remains of our hammocks swinging in the breeze. I closed the door, and James and I drifted toward our old bedroom without a word.
The wood floor between our now too-small beds was hard and cold, but it felt right to be there, him on one side and me on the other. We brought in a couple dusty blankets and pulled the shades back from the window. Outside, moonlit trees swayed against the black.
“James?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know what to do now.”
James thought a moment. “Well, last time we were here, you said you wanted to be Batman. Maybe you could get started on that.”
I found a loose Lego and tossed it at his head.
“Ow.”
“Maybe it was stupid to come here.”
“It wasn’t stupid,” he said. “It just isn’t the end of the line.”
James had propped himself up on one elbow and was looking across the room at me.
“It’s been more than a year since they left,” I said. “And even they didn’t know where they were going.”
“Where they are doesn’t matter,” he said. “Wanting to find them does.”
I said nothing more and eventually James lay back down. I sat up and looked out at the stars hanging above the trees across the street, restlessness buzzing through me. I found my shoes and my jacket and headed for the door.
