THE
WORLD
MORE
FULL OF
WEEPING
ROBERT J. WIERSEMA
ChiZine Publications
Copyright
The World More Full of Weeping © 2009 by Robert J. Wiersema
Cover artwork © 2009 by Erik Mohr
All rights reserved.
Published by ChiZine Publications
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EPub Edition MARCH 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92685-177-8
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CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
[email protected]
Edited by Brett Alexander Savory
Copyedited and proofread by Sandra Kasturi
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
For Xander,
who may not have a forest,
but is walking a path of his own.
And for Cori,
because the principles of magic remain.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The World More Full of Weeping
Notes
Places and Names
Acknowledgements
About the Author
For breakfast on the morning of the day he disappeared, Brian Page ate most of two scrambled eggs, three pieces of bacon, and almost two slices of multigrain toast. After he was gone, his father, Jeff Page, kept remembering the remaining triangle of hardening bread on its plate on the kitchen counter, the outline of Brian’s bite sharp, a bright curve against the right angle.
It wasn’t just the food that Jeff remembered from that morning: it was the conversation. It was what his eleven-year-old son had said the last time they had spoken.
“Your mom called last night,” Jeff had said. “After you were asleep.” He was standing at the stove, cracking four eggs into a skillet glazed slick with bacon grease.
Brian was at the table, munching at a strip of bacon from the platter. He didn’t say anything.
“She said she’d be here at four to pick you up.” He scrambled the eggs in the pan, breaking the yolks with the edge of the flipper, then turning the mass over, folding it in on itself, the yolk first marbling the white then dissipating entirely.
“Bring me over your plate,” he said, lifting the pan off the heat. He scraped about half the four eggs onto his son’s plate, then dumped the remainder onto his own and sat down at the table across from him.
“Do I have to go?” Brian asked quietly.
Jeff swallowed a mouthful. “What?”
“I just . . . Do I really have to go to Mom’s this week?”
“We’ve talked about this. Your mom’s really . . . what’s up, bud?”
Brian shrugged and looked down at his plate.
“Is there a problem? Did something happen at your mom’s place?” It was stupid, he knew, but his mind went immediately to Bill, Diane’s new boyfriend. It was the way parents were wired to think, now.
Brian shook his head. “No, it’s nothing like that. I’d just really like to stay here this week.”
More than anything, Jeff wanted to give Brian his way. He wasn’t looking forward to the week on his own, and to what it portended, and if Brian wanted to stay with him more than he wanted to visit his mother, wasn’t that the important thing?
Instead, he said, “We’ve talked about this, bud. There’s a lot of stuff to plan, and this is how it works out best.”
“Doesn’t work out best for me,” he said, with the glum petulance only an eleven-year-old can muster.
“What’s this about?” Jeff asked, leaning toward his son.
“Nothing.” He pushed his eggs around his plate.
“Your mom’s got a big week planned. I think she wants to take you to Science World and the aquarium, and maybe to the movies as well as showing you the school. . . . It sounds like she’s really looking forward to hanging out with you. Doesn’t that sound good?”
Brian took a mouthful of eggs.
“Brian, what’s going on? Did you and your mom have a fight?” He was surprised he hadn’t heard anything about this before. Diane was usually good at monitoring and reporting any problems. “Is there something you want to talk to me about?”
“You wouldn’t get it,” he said into his plate. “Why can’t I just stay here?”
Jeff wanted to lean forward and touch his son, ruffle his hair or pull him close, but he knew better. “I know it’s tough, bud. It’s not easy for any of us.”
“I knew you wouldn’t understand.” He picked up a forkful of eggs, muttering, “Carly said you wouldn’t understand.”
“Understand what?” Jeff asked. “Tell me. Tell me and I’ll try. I really will.”
Brian shook his head, and took a bite out of a piece of bacon he held between his thumb and forefinger as an uneasy silence settled over the kitchen.
Carly said you wouldn’t understand.
Were those really the last words his son had spoken to him?
Over the next few days of men in hip waders and pick-up trucks, of CB radios and low-flying helicopters, Jeff would struggle to remember something else — anything else — Brian might have said. Did he really not say anything for the remainder of breakfast? Or while he was getting ready to go out to the woods? He was mad; it was possible he was giving his father the silent treatment. Likely, in fact.
Had he even acknowledged that he had heard Jeff tell him to be home by 3:30 for his mom? Jeff remembered him turning and looking back at him as he went upstairs, but did that mean he had heard? Or was he just looking back: defiant, unhappy, misunderstood?
Carly said you wouldn’t understand.
Jeff was in his shop when he heard the sound of gravel crunching in the driveway and the familiar engine. He stepped to the open door in time to see Diane’s Explorer pull to a stop between the shop and the back porch. He raised a hand in greeting, then grabbed a rag to clean up.
“Working pretty hard for a Sunday,” Diane said as she crossed the yard toward him.
He shrugged. “The work’s always there. Figured I might as well.”
“And what are you elbow-deep in today?” she asked, coming to a stop less than an arm’s length from him.
He had to think for a moment: she had a knack for disarming him with nothing more than her presence. It had always been that way between them, but it had gotten worse since she had moved out. Times like this, with her looking so pretty and well-scrubbed, practically shining in the afternoon light, made it diffic
ult for him to even think. “A re-build for Frank Kelly.”
“Nothing too challenging, then.” She smiled at him, and it felt for a moment like they were flirting.
“Could do it with my eyes closed,” he said, without a hint of bragging. “How was the drive?”
She shrugged. “Two hours on the freeway. Could do it with my eyes closed.”
He smiled.
The argument that had ended their marriage had, in fact, grown out of their very first disagreement. It had started as a conversation seventeen years before, and had played through the intervening time like background music to every disagreement between them.
Seventeen years before, she had said it as if there had been no question: “You don’t really want to stay here.”
They had been sitting at the table in his father’s kitchen — this kitchen — drinking the day’s first cup of coffee after their first night together in the house where he had grown up. The house where he now lived with their son, though not for much longer.
“What do you mean?”
She had looked at him as if she didn’t understand the question. He knew the feeling.
It wasn’t the first time they had seemed to be coming from different worlds.
They had both been going to school, BCIT in Vancouver. Jeff was qualifying for his apprenticeship, and Diane had been taking some introductory broadcasting classes. They had met at a party; Jeff didn’t even know how he had ended up there, standing alone in the corner with a warm beer.
She had rescued him by swooping in and dancing him away. That was the way she saw it, at least.
It had been three months before he brought her home for the weekend, to meet and be met.
“Why would I go anywhere else?” he had asked in response to her question.
She had shaken her head. “There’s a whole world to see out there. So much more than this.” She had gestured around her, at the kitchen, the house, the town. His world.
If she had been at all mean, at all disparaging, it would have been over right then. But there had been no trace of haughtiness, no condescension. She was trying to rescue him again, he understood.
It hadn’t worked.
“You made good time,” he said, tossing his rag onto his workbench. “You’re early.”
She glanced at her watch and shook her head.
He turned sharply to glance at the shop clock. 4:20.
“I even tried calling to say I was going to be a little late.”
Four-twenty. Later, he would wonder where the time had gone. How he had gotten so involved in a simple engine rebuild that he had lost track of the hours? Had lost track of Brian?
“He’s probably in the house,” he said, gesturing toward the back porch. “I told him to be back by 3:30 to get cleaned up for you.”
But Brian wasn’t in the house.
Brian had first met Carly several weeks before, early on a Saturday morning.
His dad had still been asleep when Brian had gotten up. He had moved around the house as quietly as he could, dressing, going to the bathroom, loading his knapsack. At a time when most of the kids from school would be settling in front of the TV for a morning of cartoons, Brian poured a large measure of Cheerios into a plastic sandwich bag and crammed it into his jacket pocket. Pulling on his boots, he let himself out the back door and set out across the field for the woods.
Just behind the old barn, the spaces between the trees were pretty clear: it was easy to walk through, easy to find a place to sit and munch on a handful of cereal. The air was bright and clear, filled with the sound of birds. From where he sat, Brian could look out at the back of his father’s shop, the backyard, the house, and the road beyond it. The whole time he was sitting there, he didn’t see a single car pass.
Farther back into the woods, it grew darker and quieter. He zipped up his coat against the chill. After he crossed the old fence-line, Brian stayed close to the few beaten trails. Off the paths, the undergrowth was thick and tough. It changed, too, depending on where he was in the woods. Sometimes he would be in the midst of a swollen, twisted stand of blackberry vines. Other times he’d pull his arms in to avoid the trunks and branches of a patch of devil’s club, the spines of which would pierce you right through your clothes, bury themselves deep in your skin and keep working their way in.
Deeper in the woods, it was almost silent. What birds there were flew quietly and alone. The loudest sounds were Brian’s breath, the scrunch of his boots on the earth, and the rustle of leaves or branches that he pushed out of his way with a stick.
Sometimes he heard a scrambling in the underbrush as an animal dodged away. When this happened, he would stop, stand stock-still and listen, his eyes following his ears as he tried to find the animal, to see what kind it was.
He was never scared, only curious, and he could wait, motionless, for an eternity, just for a glimpse of something wild. He wasn’t disappointed if it turned out to be a squirrel — he loved squirrels — but he treasured the memory of the day he saw the yellow eyes of the coyote looking at him through the bramble, the time he had come upon the family of raccoons at play in the dimming of the late afternoon, the day he thought he had seen a bear, the crashing in the underbrush too long and too loud to have been caused by anything smaller.
He hadn’t told his father about the bear.
He didn’t tell his father much about his days in the woods. It wasn’t that his father wouldn’t understand: he knew some of the trails he walked had been cut by his father and his uncles when they were boys. And it wasn’t that he was afraid he would be reined in, that the revelation he had seen a bear — maybe — would result in him being kept to the yard or the open early woods where the cows used to graze. That thought hadn’t even occurred to him.
No, he didn’t talk about the woods because to talk about them would have meant sharing them.
The woods were something that belonged to Brian, a rare thing he didn’t have to share, a rare place where he could truly be himself, where he could watch the slow progress of bugs along a branch, or study the skeletal webbing on the underside of a leaf. A place where he didn’t have to explain himself to anyone, where he didn’t have to pretend to be anyone else.
The woods were his world, and his alone.
Until the moment Carly stepped out of the brush by the creek and raised her hand in greeting.
“Hello?”
Jeff struggled to keep the worry out of his voice, speaking loudly to be sure the old man on the other end of the phone line would be able to hear. “John? It’s Jeff from up the road.” He looked at Diane as he said the words, but she was staring out the kitchen window, out at the woods, and she hadn’t even heard. “I was just wondering — have you seen Brian at all today? He went out into the woods a few hours ago and I was expecting him back.”
He and Diane had come into the house together, expecting to see Brian at the table with a sandwich, or to hear him crashing around in his room, belatedly packing for his week away. As soon as they stepped through the door, though, they knew he wasn’t there: the house felt empty, cold, and silent.
When they called out his name, it was more to puncture the quiet around them than in any hope that he might answer.
“I haven’t seen him, Jeff. Not today. Sometimes he comes out back of the house here and Claire’ll give him a hot chocolate and some cookies before he heads for home, but I haven’t seen him today.”
Jeff felt a door closing within himself. “Thanks, John. I’ll — ”
“How long’s he been gone for?” John’s voice was thin and brittle, but still strong. John Joseph had the voice of a man who was used to being listened to, who never needed to shout to be heard.
Diane stepped away from the window and looked at him.
“I’m not entirely sure,” he confessed. “I got caught up in some work and I didn’t notice the time.”
“That’s probably exactly what happened with your boy, too. Got caught up in what he was doin’.”
“Like father like son,” Jeff muttered.
John chuckled drily. “Not the first time that’s been said. At any rate, it’s probably too early to be worried. I’ll take a wander out the back and see if I can spot him.”
“Thanks, John.” Just talking with the older man had helped blunt the knife-edge of panic in his stomach.
“And you tell that ex-wife of yours we say hello, all right?”
Jeff smiled. Not much escaped his neighbours’ notice. John and Claire Joseph mostly kept to themselves, but they seemed to have the blood of the whole town running in their veins. “Will do, John. You take care.” He was about to say goodbye when he remembered. “Hey, actually, John, do you know of anyone in the area, any of the kids, named Carly?”
“Carly?”
“Yeah. I didn’t recognize the name but I thought you might know if her family had just moved here. Brian’s mentioned her a couple of times over the last few weeks.”
“Carly,” the old man repeated, as if leafing through his memory.
“Probably about Brian’s age. Ten or eleven maybe. I think he’s been playing with her in the woods.”
“Jeff.” This time there was no thinness to the voice, not even a hint of age. “I think it might be best if you call Chuck Minette at the Search and Rescue. I think it might be best that you call him right now.”
The day they first met, Brian didn’t hear Carly so much as sense her presence behind him.
He was hunched over the still backwater of Russell Creek, leaning forward with one of his tools to take a sample of the green slime that clung to the edges of the pond. The rock he was leaning on was rough and cold, and he huffed as he stretched himself as far as he could, but he got the sample.
When he straightened up, rubbing the rock indentations on his palm with his other hand, he felt a wave of cold run through him, a nervous certainty that he was not alone.
“Hello?” he called, his voice barely raised, as he glanced around the clearing. There was no one there.
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