Hugo & Rose

by Bridget Foley

  Rose followed her line of sight.

  The river was changing. Its level was swiftly starting to rise. Brown bubbles rolling, picking up speed, swelling the banks.

  “I don’t want to be here, Rose.” Grown Hugo watched as his mother walked out past the lawn, angling for a better view upriver.

  And then they heard it.

  A resounding crack echoing its way down the valley. An ugly snap.

  On the ground, young Hugo jerked his head up. His father stepped away from the barbecue, his eyes on his wife.

  “All the rain filled the reservoir too quickly.” Rose could hear the fear in Hugo’s voice.

  There was another crack.

  And then a boom.

  Rose felt the sound in her bones. The sound of the world ending. The sound of a planet torn apart.

  Upriver, a wall of brown, churning water was racing, rising, toward them.

  “A dam break.” Rose whispered it aloud even as she realized the truth of what was happening … what had happened.

  Hugo’s mother pivoted, falling back onto her heel and breaking into a run toward the house. Behind her the river was transforming into a rapid, suddenly loud, overboiling. She yanked the boy to his feet, roughly by the wrist, and the watermelon slice flew from his other hand and tumbled to the dirt.

  The boy stumbled as she dragged him toward the steps of the house. Transfixed by the water.

  Hugo was gone. Rose’s eyes swept the ground for him, but he had disappeared. Gone and abandoned her to this viper of a memory. What would happen if she simply stood here on the banks of the river while the water overtook them? Would she wake up? Be swept to the shore of the island?

  Rose didn’t think so.

  She beat a path to the house.

  Hugo’s father was holding the screen door for his young family. Yelling over the onslaught. Rose could just make out his words.

  “I’m going to get the boat.”

  She looked back at the tiny dinghy perched in a hauler at the side of the house.

  No.

  But then Hugo’s mother was nodding and pushing her way into the house, her hand still wrapped around her son’s wrist. Hugo’s father turned, headed away from them. Away from the safety of the house.

  Gray-brown water was fanning out from the banks of the river. An inch every three seconds. A rapid rise.

  Rose tore herself away from the flood into the recesses of Hugo’s childhood home. She saw Hugo and his young mother’s feet at the top of a sensible wood staircase, thump, thump, thumping their way to the second floor. Rose threw herself up the steps, three at time, cresting the landing just behind them.

  Through an open door, she saw where he had gone.

  Waking Hugo. A grown man. More than grown, huddled on the Star Wars sheets of his childhood bed. Rocking himself for comfort. “We need to get out of here. We need to get out of here. We need to get out of here.” A mumbled whisper.

  But he was a ghost to his mother, the pregnant beauty in the ponytail, who in two quick steps was at the window looking down.

  Rose looked over her shoulder.

  “Oh, my God.”

  Below, Hugo’s father was trying to lasso the dinghy’s rope to the chimney of the house. The water already waist deep. He was bracing himself against the railing of their small porch. The cord fell short. Skittering off the bricks.

  Hugo’s mother turned from the window and ran into the hallway. Rose felt the boy step into her place at her side. Behind his glasses his eyes were angled upriver—

  Where an impossible swell of water was cresting the bend. It looked unnatural. An ocean wave set loose in a little mountain valley.

  “Hugo!”

  The little boy turned away from the horror and ran toward his mother’s voice in the dark hallway. Rose watched as the woman crouched so she could look at him eye to eye.

  “Honey, I need you to reach it for me.”

  It? thought Rose. But then the woman was grabbing the little boy by the waist, bracing him against the baby in her belly. Lifting him. The boy reached toward the ceiling for—

  The chain from the Plank Orb. The thought jumped into Rose’s mind unbidden. Is it?

  It was an attic access panel. A square door in the ceiling. A length of chain threading out of a small, circular bracket opening. The boy wrapped both hands around it (“Here we go!”) and pulled.

  The door swung up.

  “Now pull down the ladder, Hugo, my love.” Rose recognized the tone in the pregnant woman’s voice. The mother tone. The “keep the child calm even though the world is coming apart” tone.

  The ladder slid smoothly down past the boy’s blank face.

  “Up we go,” said his mother, forced cheer.

  The house shuddered suddenly. A moaning complaint.

  But the boy was climbing and his mother after him. Rose moved from the doorway to the top of the stairwell.

  Below, the first floor was submerged beneath four feet of torpid water. Rose could make out the woven rug at the base of the stairs, like a manta on the ocean floor.

  The only way to go was up.

  The bed in Hugo’s bedroom was empty. Had Hugo disappeared again? Or followed his mother and his other self into the attic?

  Rose pulled herself up into the small space. The ceiling was low, maybe six feet at its peak. Errant rusty nails from the roof poked through at odd angles. It smelled of hot dust and spiderwebs.

  A shuffling from the other side of the space drew her eye. Hugo’s mother leading the little boy by the hand across a fluffy bank of pink insulation batting. They crouched as they made their way past the dark shapes of boxes and stored furniture. Toward the fractured light of the round shutter vent at the far end of the space.

  “Now you stay here.”

  Hugo’s mother settled him against the wall. She pulled something from the pocket of her apron and handed it to him. His Han Solo.

  “Now I’m going to go get Daddy and I’ll be right back. Everything is going to be okay. You stay right here. Promise me?”

  The little boy nodded. “I promise.”

  “No!” a broken scream came from behind Rose. Real-life Hugo suddenly at her side, his face a mask of terror. “No!”

  Hugo’s mother kissed the boy’s forehead. One last time.

  “I love you forever.”

  And then she was moving. Quickly, she covered the space between the boy who was her son and the man he would become.

  She twisted her awkward body onto the stairs and stepped down into the water that had gathered on the second-story landing. She gasped as its coldness claimed her ankles. For a brief moment, she turned, facing the window visible through the door to Hugo’s room. Her eyes full of whatever horror the water had washed up there. A hollow banging resounded, sending shivers through the walls of their home.

  She looked back up into the trapdoor …

  And pushed it closed.

  twenty-five

  It was dark.

  The house moaned again. Wood straining against water.

  Next to her, Rose heard Hugo collapse on the floor of the attic. She felt his warm shape there, pressed against her legs.

  Who was he now? There on the dusty floorboards next to her? The man from the drive-through? The dreamy hero dissolved into sand? The beautiful, sneering boy? There were so many Hugos, weren’t there?

  But in the darkness she couldn’t tell which one had taken refuge next to her. Muffled sobs under mortified hands.

  The house groaned again.

  Such a familiar sound. Water and wood.

  Rose felt a faint wetness lick the bottom of her foot. In the dim light that reached them from the attic vent, she could make out the faint outline of the trapdoor in the floor. Water lapped up from the seams … but it didn’t rise.

  “She said she’d come back.”

  Rose looked instinctively toward the ground, but Hugo—whichever Hugo he was now—wasn’t there anymore.

  “She said.”
<
br />   The voice was coming from the far end of the room. Toward the light. Rose put a searching hand out toward the floor. The ceiling was too low. Better to crawl. Her hands sank into the pink batting of the insulation.

  Fiberglass. If this weren’t a dream, my skin would be burning.

  Hands and knees, Rose made her way to the edge of the attic and there she found Hugo.

  Or rather, both Hugos.

  Or rather … all Hugos.

  Because while the little boy was still situated by the round shuttered attic vent, the man who sat hunched across from him, leaning on some discarded furniture, was flickering from one version of himself to another. His features were hard to get a fix on as they kept melting from one instant to the next. His hair graying and then brown, belly round then taut.

  Rose felt strangely intrusive. Like walking in on lovers in the act or reading someone’s diary. But somehow, looking at Hugo as his body fluttered and shuffled through all forms of himself was even more invasive than that. As though she were witness to some private phenomenon, meant only for the workings of one’s own mind, more personal than desire.

  She turned her eyes from him and looked at the little boy.

  His face was unreadable. Passive.

  Rose thought about her boys. Isaac and Adam. What if it had been them in this attic? What if they had seen the things this boy had witnessed?

  Would they be as calm as he?

  Maybe. If their mommy had told them everything was going to be all right.

  But Rose could tell, by the whiteness of the hand that clutched his Han Solo doll, that he was scared. Frightened almost to death.

  “How long were you up here, Hugo?”

  The voice that answered her was neither young nor old. But it was Hugo’s. “They told me … they told me six days.”

  “Your parents?”

  “They never found them.”

  Rose felt a bubble of pain break from her heart to her throat.

  Next to the shuttered vent window, the little boy pulled his legs up into his body. Behind the glasses, his chocolate eyes swept the contents of the attic.

  “What did you do up here for six days?”

  His eyes fixed on something in the darkness, and then he was crawling past her on the padding. Retrieving two objects from the floor, quickly so as to lessen the infraction against his mother’s orders (“You stay right here”).

  One of the objects made a clinking, shuffling noise as he carried it back.

  A jar of seashells, in a bank of white sand.

  As he settled himself back into the hollow in the wall, Rose moved closer to get a better look at the rectangular shape he held.

  A paint-by-numbers of the city of Oz. A flat corona of yellow surrounding its green-tinted towers.

  Castle City.

  “You made this place your dreamland.”

  Rose looked around and saw the attic the way this small, traumatized boy had seen it. Everything was there. A mounted Buck’s head leaning against the old bureau. A broken ceiling fan, its blades and motor ascribing the shape of the island’s Spiders. A coil of broken Christmas lights, the broken bulbs the shape of Blindhead’s mouth. The pink of the dusty insulation the exact shade of the beaches of their dreams. The flat, amateur rendition of Oz. Han Solo and his costume … the vest, the shirt …

  “Everything from our dreams … it was from this place, wasn’t it. The beach. The city. The water. You went to sleep.”

  The house moaned again. The wet, lapping sounds and dark close, as familiar to Rose as the confines of the Plank Orb.

  The little boy gingerly took off his glasses. He folded the tines and laid them on the floor next to him … before curling up. His arm held his Han Solo action figure at a blurry distance, twisting its plastic body in his fingertips.

  Rose’s eyes caught a small movement above him. A dandelion seed. She squinted. No, there were two. They hovered in the half-light, blown in through the vent. Their gossamer skeletons twirled as they fell, branches caught up in one another. They danced through the air over Hugo, the draft driving their waltz upward. Tumbling. Tumbling.

  Rose felt a tugging somewhere within her. A slippery pull within herself, like wrinkly fingers held before an open drain at the end of a bath.

  And then suddenly she was in two places.

  Here in the attic of this drowned house with Hugo in the distant past.

  And on the floor of another house with Hugo in a rapidly narrowing future.

  Her mouth an open well of vomit … one breath away from her lungs.

  They were dying.

  Hugo and Rose.

  Dying the deaths they didn’t that day when they first dreamed of each other. Little Rosie and her bike-battered brain and little Hugo, locked in a waterlogged attic, orphaned and insecure.

  How did these two tendrils twist in such a way?

  Of what consequence are dreams …

  Two dreaming minds, lost in fear, foundered on the shore of a made-up land. The dreams of frightened children seeking solace.

  The boy on the floor in the attic closed his eyes and sang to pass the time. Something he often did. And as he began, Rose remembered running through the high saw grass for the first time, following the same boy singing the same words at the top of his lungs:

  “And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you…”

  His voice was sweet and soft in the dusty stillness of the attic.

  He was alone … but not while he slept. If he closed his eyes and slowed his heart, he was joined by a little long-haired girl whose heart-shaped face housed a hard mouth. For days they made the island their playground … longer than it ever should have been. Longer than they ever should have been allowed, and somehow they became locked there.

  Their paradise a prison.

  On the floor of a cheap house in the dry reaches of Colorado, the same hearts, older now, beat slower and slower. Sluggish.

  The melting, morphing thing that was what was left of Hugo whispered: “When I’m asleep I’m not alone. Rosie is with me.”

  “Hugo.” Rose pulled against the tug-tug-tug inside her. “Hugo, you left this place. You are not this little boy anymore. You left this attic.”

  “I don’t remember leaving.”

  “But you did. You were rescued, and even though you lost your mother and father, you found a family. You had a wife and a daughter. But they’re not in this place.”

  “You were with me. You rescued me.”

  “I didn’t. I was a thousand miles away in a hospital. We did need each other, when this happened. I did help you. And you helped me. This was the reason. This is why.”

  Rose had the distinct sensation of being rolled … and felt the faint wash of warmth across her cheek. The draining sensation slowed.

  A familiar warmth bloomed inside her chest. A presence that had a name and a scent and flesh.

  Josh.

  Somehow Josh was with her.

  Rose cried.

  Next to her the thing that was Hugo … all the Hugos … stutter-stopped and diminished into a small, flickering light … a single bright star that flashed and died.

  The little boy on the floor was all that was left of him.

  Her Hugo.

  Rose caressed his face. He could have been Adam or Isaac. Awakened from a nightmare.

  “Maybe … maybe that’s what dreams are. Maybe the people we see in our dreams are real people who have something to teach us, some way to help us.… But we’re supposed to wake up from our dreams. Our dreams are supposed to help us live our lives … not keep us from living them.” A tear broke from behind the closed lids of the little boy that was all that was left of Hugo. His eyes opened and locked on Rose’s.

  Rose wrapped him in her arms. This was something she knew how to do. She knew how to comfort little boys after they had nightmares. She smoothed his hair. Rocked their bodies back and forth.

  “Hugo, we’ve been locked in this dream—because part of you nev
er left this place.… You need to let us leave.”

  The house shook with a thundering crash. The sound of wood ripping. Nails screeching against their bonds. Protests of destruction.

  In her arms, the boy that was all that was left of Hugo said with the last part of his soul, “I love you, Rosie.”

  And Rose felt herself dwindle. Her arms grew shorter around him, her body small. She felt a press of soft cotton on her forehead. A bandage. Rose felt a hot wetness beneath it. A wound.

  She was a little girl. The one who had awakened on the shore of the island.

  Two children hugging each other for comfort.

  She said, “I love you, Hugo,” in a tiny child’s voice.

  Somewhere above them, a hole was rendered in the roof over the attic. The darkness peeled away, pouring sunshine on the dusty pink fluff of the attic floor. A pool of light, iridescent.

  The last bit of Hugo stood and walked into that sparkling air. He angled his neck so he could look up into a hot, bare sky. Stepped upon it. And then he bounded into the heavens, ascending upward like they had all those times upon the beach.

  He was gone.

  She couldn’t feel him anymore. As though someone had closed a door in her mind, shuttering a draft. The very air was different.

  Little Rose had a blink of a breath and then the attic was gone … banished from her view, replaced by something else.

  The terrified face of her father. Looking down at her.

  And then he was gone, too.

  epilogue

  Later, when she was home from the hospital and sometime after the police interviews had ceased, Rose found that she often forgot that anything had happened at all. The business of the children’s lives seemed to subsume any other concern. Isaac needed new shoes. Adam was the lead in the first-grade play. Penny had figured out how to unlatch everything in the house that had been baby-proofed.

  It was only when Rose would catch that look in a neighbor’s eye or from a parent on the soccer field or at school drop-off that she would remember.

  The look was always the same. A curiosity overlaid with pity, played off with a too-ready smile and a certain rising tone to their voice when they greeted her, “Hi, Ro-oooh-se.”