The Retreat

by David Bergen

  Lizzy’s chest felt scooped out. She swallowed and tried to rid herself of the hollow feeling, but it wouldn’t go away and she knew it was because Fish might be dead. When she told Hart this, in the corner of the Hall, he looked at her and said, “Why would you say that?” He said that many people survived the bush. Even a child could survive. He had to be found quickly though. The thing to be worried about was the insects. They could make a person go mad. Then he asked if Raymond Seymour was her friend.

  Lizzy nodded.

  “Boyfriend?”

  She shook her head. She asked what that had to do with her missing brother.

  Hart didn’t answer. He nodded and wrote something down. He asked what Raymond was doing here at the Retreat.

  Lizzy looked about. Over by the map the fat man was marking something down on the map. The Doctor was leaning close to him and they were talking. Everyone else was out searching. She turned back to Hart and said, “He comes here a lot. He brings us food. What are you saying?”

  “Not saying anything.” He patted Lizzy’s knee with his left hand. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find your brother.”

  Raymond refused to be interviewed by Hart. He said that he would talk to anybody else, but not Hart. He told the officer named Vernon this and Vernon went over to Hart. They conferred for a time in the corner. When Vernon came back he said, “Fine, let’s talk.”

  Lizzy had been in the kitchen with William, and when she came out she saw Vernon and Raymond talking. Later, outside, she went to Raymond and said that she wanted to search with him. They were supposed to go in pairs and would he go with her. He ran his hand over his head and looked around and he said that sure he would go with her, no problem.

  They carried flares and flashlights and radios and water and whistles. The grids were small and had been marked off with yellow tape and Lizzy could hear other searchers in the bush calling out. There were shouts of hello and there were shouts of Fish’s name. The only one not searching was Harris, who stayed in the Hall, drinking coffee, shaking his head, waiting for news.

  They scoured the bush. This had been the instruction. If you see a clump of shrubs or a fallen log, approach it, lift it up, look inside, underneath. Fish might have fallen, he might have lain down and be sleeping, he might have broken something. Don’t leave anything unturned.

  Raymond walked carefully, his gaze swinging from side to side, and Lizzy walked behind him and called out Fish’s name again and again, and Raymond never told her to stop. She was aware of Raymond’s boots, and of his back and the blue-checked shirt he wore, of his long hair. If only he had come earlier to meet her, and if she had not gone to town with her father, Fish would not be lost. This was all so illogical that she thought it might be true. She said, “You were late.” He turned and studied her and then turned back and continued on through the bush. She said, “I waited and waited.”

  He said, without turning back to her, that he had come. Maybe not when she’d planned for him to come, but he’d come. And she wasn’t there. Then he said that he was sorry that she hadn’t been there. He stopped walking and she stood beside him. A swamp lay before them. Mosquitoes lifted and swarmed them. Lizzy panicked and windmilled her arms, but Raymond seemed not to notice the insects. He looked at the swamp, and past the edges of the swamp, and Lizzy felt helpless and she began to cry. Raymond said that Fish would be absolutely safe. “This happens all the time. Marcel, Nelson, me, when we were young we all got lost in the bush sometime. And look at us. We survived. He’ll come back smarter.”

  “Really?” Lizzy said, and then she went, “Oh,” and her voice broke.

  As darkness fell, the search was called off for the day, and the group gathered in the Hall. Her father stood and spoke. He thanked everyone for helping. He said that with so many people out in the bush they were bound to find Fish. “Fish is okay,” he said. “He’s curious about things. He’ll see this as an adventure. It’ll be something to talk about. We’ll call it ‘The Day Fish Got Lost.’ ” He paused. Her mother was crying quietly, Everett at her side. Her father looked at them and at his other children. Then he turned to Constable Hart and he said that trying to figure out who was responsible wouldn’t help get Fish back. No one would be made a scapegoat. Despair and finger pointing weren’t helpful at this point. His shoulders were bowed and he appeared tired and angry. He took in a breath and exhaled slowly and he said that a bonfire would be built in the clearing. This would be a beacon for Fish. The fire would need tending through the night; two people working in two-hour shifts until dawn. Then he asked for volunteers and Lizzy said that she and Raymond would go first. She turned to Raymond, who nodded.

  They sat beside each other on stools by the fire. The sparks lifted into the dark and then faded and went out. Above them the sky was clear and if you moved away from the fire and looked upwards, you could see the stars, bright and plentiful. Lizzy wondered what Fish was thinking, or if he would be capable of thinking, or if he was just terrified.

  “He’ll be scared,” Raymond said. “But he’ll sleep too.”

  Lizzy saw the outline of Raymond’s face in the firelight, the slant of his shoulders. He was different from the city boys. His hands were rough, his fingernails dirty. And his slight limp, his small ears, the mole on his neck, and his mouth with the scar on the upper lip. She knew what he tasted like. She wondered if he’d thought about their time together at the golf course; if he had kissed and touched her because he wanted to, or out of some sense of obligation, because she had come to find him. His elbows rested on his knees. He was drinking coffee from a tin cup. He smoked and studied the fire, occasionally looking up when a sound came from the bush.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  When he finally answered, after a long silence, he said, “What you’re really asking is am I thinking about you. Right? Well, I was. About how kind you are with your brothers. And how lucky they are. And I was thinking about how young you are. And then I wondered, What is Raymond Seymour doing?”

  “I’m seventeen,” she said, with clarity and force. She felt insulted by his comment, and she said that she wasn’t a vulnerable child.

  “That’s not what I said. And I know you’re not a child. You certainly don’t kiss like one. Ha.” He pushed his elbow against her shoulder and looked at her face. She saw that he covered up his discomfort by being physical.

  The fire crackled, a log popped. He said that Hart scared him. Not just a little bit, but a lot. “I wouldn’t talk to him, you know. That’s why you saw me talking to the other cop.”

  She said, “When my dad was talking about a scapegoat, it sounded like someone was being blamed.”

  “Don’t know that word.”

  “Like Fish disappearing. Whose fault is it? Who’s to blame?”

  Raymond made a clicking sound with his mouth and spread his hands towards the fire. “Hart’s an asshole, okay? I know.”

  She asked Raymond why Vernon had been talking to him. “He looked so serious.”

  “He wanted to know how much time I’d spent with Fish. When. Where. Stupid questions. What he was really asking was if I liked little boys.”

  “Fuck. What a jerk,” Lizzy said. “Can I?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer she put her arms around Raymond’s neck and laid her head against his shoulder. His wool jacket was rough against her skin, but she didn’t move. They sat for a long time in silence. Lizzy thought, what if something did happen to Fish, Raymond would be blamed. She said, “Don’t worry about Vernon. I know what’s true and what isn’t.”

  A door banged and in a few moments her father appeared. He squatted by the fire alongside her. “Your mother’s going mad. So are we all.” He looked up at the sky, checked his watch, and said Lizzy should go to bed. He thanked Raymond for his help and said that he could go home. “I’ll keep watch until Ian and Jill get here. I finally got your mother to lie down and rest. Go.” He waved them off.

  Lizzy walked Raymond up the path to h
is pickup. Their shoulders touched and she placed a hand on his waist. “Little me,” she said. In the dark, she thought she saw him smile. Raymond got in and rolled down the window and looked out at her as he started the engine. Lizzy asked if he would come back, in the morning. He hesitated and then said that he didn’t know if people wanted him here.

  “I do,” Lizzy said. “I want you here.” She stepped away from the pickup and lifted a hand into the air and then let it fall down by her side. And then he was gone.

  She found her father in the Hall, drinking coffee. He said, “What he should do is burrow under some leaves and bushes and pull his T-shirt over his head so the bugs can’t get him.” He reached out and pulled Lizzy close. “Jesus, Lizzy,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

  In the warmth of her father’s body, she felt sleep approaching. She nodded and jumped and her father told her to go to the cabin to sleep, or lie down on the old couch by the fireplace. She sat straight and said she was fine.

  Her father said that Raymond came from a completely different place.

  “Yeah?” Lizzy said. “What if I like that place?”

  “You don’t know it, Lizzy. You don’t know him. You get told over and over that you’re this and you’re that and you start to think maybe you are this or that. Just be careful is all I’m saying.”

  Her father stood, pulled her up, and guided her to the couch. She fell asleep instantly. When she woke the sky was growing lighter and she was alone. She went outside and found her father standing by a tree, tying the chainsaw to a rope that hung from a tree branch.

  “This is it,” he said. “This is the answer. Fish loves the sound of the chainsaw. Fire it up and run it and when he hears it he’ll come home.” And he took the cord in his right hand and he made solid the chainsaw with his left and he pulled the cord. The saw sputtered and cut out. Another pull and the motor cracked and started and the racket lifted into the air and echoed around the clearing.

  Others emerged from their cabins. William and Everett and Franz, and then Emma appeared, looked about, and then went back inside her cabin. The Doctor and his wife came out, Margaret wearing her housecoat and slippers. The chainsaw clattered through breakfast, a background buzz that alarmed William, who had not eaten anything since Fish had disappeared, and on that morning only nibbled at a piece of toast. The Doctor thought it impossible that Fish would be able to follow the sound of the saw. The sound would seem to be coming from all directions. Fish would be running in circles.

  “Nonsense,” Lewis said. “He’ll come.”

  He was lying in a hole. Not a deep hole like in the hothouse where a man lived with long arms, but a hole shaped like a plate with space for his bum and his back. In the hole at the hothouse there was a man who kept flies and the flies always banged against Fish’s bare bum. “Hi, flies,” he would say. And the eye of one fly was bright and black, dark like the hole. The fly lifted and dropped and banged against his leg and then his bum. Then there was another fly, and another, a whole family like his with brothers and a sister, big and little, and a mother and a father. A baby fly landed on his finger. “Where is your mother?” Fish asked.

  The first time he read words, his mother was very happy. She called the family around and he read for them and everybody clapped and said, “Wow, listen to Fish read. A four-year-old! What a genius!” But at night, in the cabin when he was tired, his sister Lizzy read to him. He put his ear against her chest, against the soft cloth of her shirt, and her voice was inside her and outside her and he saw the words at the edges of her hands that held the book, and his ear was against her chest, like the Doctor’s ear against his mother’s chest that afternoon in the nail place, where Lewis kept his hammers and saws. The Doctor tipping forward. His mother’s fingers in the sunlight. Knuckles and wrists. Knuckles and wrists. The sunlight. The wind behind him. The Doctor listening to his mother’s chest. She had her eyes closed and was whispering and then the Doctor licked her, one lick, two licks, and his mother pulled the Doctor’s ears and said, “Oh.” And Fish asked if she was sick.

  His mother’s eyes, like the sky in the morning. She had said his name, Fish, like a dog’s sharp bark, and she pushed the Doctor away and picked her shirt up off the floor. It was next to the chainsaw. Her chest went away and she buttoned her shirt and kneeled and held him and he smelled the gasoline in the shed and felt the heat of her cheek and she said that she was fine. “Okay? The Doctor says I’m all better.”

  The Doctor going down the dark path into the woods. Gone. His mother holding his hand. They walked up the path. She said that Doctor Amos wasn’t always a doctor-doctor, but today he was and now she was better. Did he understand? Her knuckles in his hand. Her wrist there. She broke it. The step on their cabin broke and she fell and snap went her wrist and she went to the hospital and came home with a cast, heavy and white. The fucking wood was rotten. Dad said that. He had built new steps, with the nails from the nail place. Dad fixed things. That was his job. Maybe Dad could fix Mother’s chest. And later, in the evening, Lizzy reading to him, her voice inside her chest, and he asked if Dad could fix Mother’s chest. Lizzy’s voice went up and down. He was inside a tunnel. She asked what he was talking about. He saw the bottom of her chin. He was going to marry his sister. The skin on the backs of her legs was soft. And under her arms. He liked to smell her arms and her neck. She snuck him candies from the kitchen. Ate the peas off his plate. Before bedtime she whispered that the dish ran away with the spoon and then took him in her arms and ran with him. He slept with her and in the morning her breath smelled hot. Again, Lizzy had asked what he was talking about, and he didn’t answer.

  The sound of the wind. And then nothing. The bottom of the plate was wet and cold. He stood and he looked down at the hole. He bent and scooped more leaves into the hole. And then he settled back in. He slept. And woke. He stood and peed off to the side of the hole. The hole was his safe place. Nothing could get him if he stayed in the hole. He closed his eyes and then opened them. The leaves were moving. The sky was moving. He thought about his father. He would be worried. And his mother would be worried. And Lizzy. He liked Lizzy best. Then Lewis. And William. He liked him too. Though he never let Fish play with him because he was too young. So, Fish followed his father. They built things. Bunk beds for Everett and William. A pump with a black pipe that came from the pond and under the kitchen and up into the sink where Doctor Amos’s wife washed her hair and other women with white legs sticking out from under their dresses cleaned potatoes for supper. And an outdoor shower with a rain catcher where he showered with Lizzy and Lizzy spilled warm water from the hose onto his hair and onto her hair and then she put soap on her body and told him to clean himself and he did.

  Just before he was lost, he’d been sitting on the cabin stairs and a frog had hopped under the cabin. He’d followed it, sticking his head into the darkness, then he’d come back out into the light. He climbed the stairs where his mother fell and snapped her wrist. Snap. And then Doctor Amos had come and taken her to the hospital and Doctor Amos had hair on his face and hair in his ears and in his nose and Doctor Amos kneeled and looked him in the eyes. The Doctor’s lips were pink but not special, no different than his mother’s lips or Dad’s. Lizzy had big lips. Sometimes Lizzy said “Fish” really softly and put her lips on his cheeks and mouth and ears. Lizzy had soft lips. He sat down on the stairs and looked for William or Everett or his mother, but there was only the light and a butterfly in the clearing. He stood and went to the kitchen and looked in the fridge. Margaret was there. She was making her nails pink. She asked him what he was doing and he said he was going on a trip and she said, “You betcha. Have fun.”

  He took a carrot. A piece of chocolate. Closed the fridge door and went outside and up the path. There was a loud wind and it moved trees and on the path the shadows of the leaves were dancing. He tried not to step on the leaves. It was hard. The path went sideways, but always it came back, and then he was on a big rock that went up and the path was gone,
but the path would be over there, and so he went up the rock and found blueberries, lots of them. His mother loved blueberries. She was always walking up into the rocks and trees to look for patches. This was a big patch.

  He took out the chocolate and sucked on it. Then he ate the carrot. He climbed over the big rock and looked for the path. It was gone. He sat down. He looked up at the sky and he looked at the trees and he heard the wind and he heard voices in the wind. Then he began to walk. He went up and down hills and through bushes and sometimes he stopped and listened and then he kept walking. At some point he sat down and began to cry, and when he was finished crying, he dug his hole.

  The wind was in the trees and something was calling Fish … Fish … Fish. He stood and ran through the trees towards the place where Lizzy was calling him. Then he fell and hurt his knee. His pants were torn and there was blood, but Lizzy was still calling so he got up again and ran. He found Lizzy. She was in the tree. She was a big blackbird calling Fish … Fish … Fish. He sat down. He was thirsty. He lay back against the rock and watched the bird. The sky was grey now and the bird was blacker and the wind still blew through the trees. Then Lizzy was in the shower and pouring warm water on his legs. He opened his eyes. It was dark and his pants were wet and warm. He had wet himself, which is what William sometimes did in the morning. He took off his pants and his underwear. Put them in a pile. The sky was dark. The forest was dark. There was no more wind and Lizzy was gone. He cried. He cried for a long time and then he stopped. He opened his eyes and saw an animal beside him. The animal was very still. It was curled up and it didn’t move and when he talked to the animal it just sat there and when he poked it the animal became his pants and underwear. He stood and walked out into the darkness. He walked until he fell and where he fell was very soft so he lay there. There were bugs and the bugs were biting his bum and legs and neck and arms. He touched his forehead to his knees and waited for Lizzy to find him.