The Returned

by Jason Mott

  Each morning at 10:00 a.m. the man would come and take her to the room with no windows and he would speak to her—slowly and evenly, as if he was not sure she understood English; but she had done very well in school and English was clean and simple to her. His accent was strange and something told her that, to him, her accent was possibly equally as strange. So she responded to his questions as slowly and evenly as they were asked, which seemed to please him.

  She thought it important to please him. If she did not please him (or them), perhaps he would tell them to send her home.

  So every day for many days now he came for her and brought her here to this room and asked his questions, and she tried, as best she could, to answer them. She had been afraid of him at first. He was large and his eyes were hard and cold, like the ground in winter, but he was always very polite to her, even though—she knew—she was not being very helpful.

  She had actually begun to think that he was handsome. In spite of the hardness of his eyes, they were a very pleasing color of blue and his hair was the color of fields of tall, dry grass at sunset and he seemed very, very strong. And strength, she knew, was something that handsome people were supposed to have.

  Today when he came for her he seemed more distant than usual. Sometimes he brought her candy, which the two of them would eat on their way to the room with no windows. He did not bring any candy today, and though that had happened before, it felt different now.

  He did not make conversation on the way to the room as he often did. He only walked in silence and she stepped quickly to keep pace, which made her feel that things would be different today. More serious than they had been, perhaps.

  When they were inside the room, he closed the door as he always did. He paused briefly and looked into the camera that hung in the corner above the door. He had not done that before. Then he began his questions, speaking slowly and evenly as always.

  “Before you were found in Michigan, what is the last thing you remember?”

  “Soldiers,” she said. “And my home—Sierra Leone.”

  “What were the soldiers doing?”

  “Killing.”

  “Did they kill you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “No.”

  Even though it had been several days since he asked these particular questions, she knew her answers by heart. She knew them as well as he knew his questions. In the beginning he had asked these same questions every day. Then he stopped and began asking her to tell him stories, and she enjoyed that. She told him how each evening her mother would tell her stories of gods and monsters. “People and events of wonder and magic are the lifeblood of the world,” her mother would say.

  For almost an hour he asked the questions they both knew by heart. At the end of the hour, which is how long they usually spoke, he asked her a new question.

  “What do you think happens when we die?” he asked.

  She thought for a moment, feeling unsettled all of a sudden—and slightly afraid. But he was a white—and he was American—so she knew he would not hurt her.

  “I do not know,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  She thought then of what her mother had told her once about death. “Death is only the beginning of the reunion you did not know you wanted,” she had said. She was about to tell Colonel Willis this when he pulled his pistol and shot her.

  Then he sat and watched her and waited to see what would happen next.

  Uncertain of what he expected, suddenly he found himself alone with a lifeless, bleeding body that, only a moment before, had been a young girl who had liked him and thought him a decent man.

  The air in the room seemed stale to the colonel. He stood and left, pretending all the while that he did not still hear Tatiana’s voice—all the conversations the two of them had—replaying in his memory, audible over the sound of the gunshot still ringing in his ears.

  Ten

  “THAT POOR, POOR boy,” Lucille said, squeezing Jacob to her chest. “That poor, poor boy.” It was all she had managed to say about Max’s death, but she said it often and she said it with woe.

  What was it about the world, she wondered, that let these kinds of things happen? What was it that made it possible for a child—any child—to be alive and healthy one minute, then gone on to Glory the next? “That poor, poor boy,” she said once more.

  It was early morning and the visiting room the Bureau established at the Arcadia school was all but empty. Here and there a guard milled about, half nodding or talking with someone about something unimportant. They didn’t seem to care very much about the goings-on of the old man who had been arrested with his little Returned son and wouldn’t leave him, nor did they care about the old, silver-haired woman who came to visit them.

  Nor did they seem to care very much about the Returned boy that died just the other day, and that distressed Lucille. She couldn’t say exactly what she thought they should be doing to signify that a life had been lost, that there was mourning to be done and sadness to be reflected upon. Wear a black armband or some such. That seemed appropriate. But that idea had seemed foolish as soon as it came to her. People died. Even children. That was just the way of things.

  The visiting room was made of corrugated steel fastened to metal posts with large, groaning fans at the entry and exit points trying to make the humid air more manageable. Here and there tables and benches had been set up.

  Jacob sat quietly in his mother’s lap, suffering that guilt children suffer at the sight of their mother in tears. Harold sat on the bench next to her with his arm around her. “Come on, now, my old nemesis,” he said. His voice was soft, filled with grace and somberness, a tone he’d forgotten himself capable of achieving after all these years of being…well, disagreeable wasn’t the word he would have chosen but… “It was just, just one of those things,” he said. “Doctors said it was an aneurysm.”

  “Children don’t have aneurysms,” Lucille replied.

  “They do. Sometimes. And maybe that was how it happened the first time with him. Maybe it’s just the way it always was.”

  “They say there’s some kind of sickness. I don’t believe it, but that’s what they say.”

  “Ain’t no sickness other than stupidity,” Harold said.

  Lucille dabbed her eyes. She adjusted the collar on her dress.

  Jacob eased out of his mother’s arms. He was wearing the new clothes his mother had brought him. They were clean and soft in that special way that only new clothes ever are.

  “Can I tell you a joke, Mama?”

  She nodded. “But nothing dirty, right?”

  “No problem there,” Harold said. “I only ever taught him Christian jokes….”

  “I’m just about done with both of you!”

  “Don’t worry about Max,” Harold said. He looked around the room. “Max went on to, well, wherever it is folks go on to, a long time ago. That was just a shadow that—”

  “Stop it,” Lucille said softly. “Max was a good boy. You know that.”

  “Yes,” Harold agreed. “Max was a good boy.”

  “Was he different?” Jacob asked, his face tight with confusion.

  “What do you mean?” Harold asked. This was the closest Jacob had come to talking about what everybody on the planet wanted the Returned to talk about: themselves.

  “Was he different than he used to be?” Jacob asked.

  “I don’t know, sweetie,” Lucille said. She took her son’s hand—the way she’d seen people do in the movies, she couldn’t help but think. She’d been watching far too much television lately. “I didn’t know Max very well,” she said. “You and your father spent more time with him than I did.”

  “And we hardly knew him,” Harold said with only a small amount of unkindness in his voice.

  Jacob turned and looked up at the wrinkled face of his father. “But do you think he was different?”

&n
bsp; “Different from what? From when?”

  Harold let the question hang between them like a fog. He wanted to hear the boy say it. Wanted to hear the boy admit that Max was something that had once been dead. Wanted to hear the boy say that there was something exceptional happening in the world, something strange and frightening and, most of all, unnatural. He wanted to hear Jacob admit that he was not the young boy who had died on August 15, 1966.

  Harold needed those words.

  “I don’t know,” Jacob said

  “Of course you don’t,” Lucille interrupted. “Because I’m sure there was nothing different about him. Just like I know there’s nothing different about you. There’s nothing different about anyone, except that they’re a part of a great and beautiful miracle. That’s all. It’s God’s blessing, not His wrath the way some people are saying.” Lucille pulled him close and kissed his brow. “You’re my beloved boy,” she said, her silver hair falling in her face. “The good Lord, God, will take care of you and bring you home again. Or I will.”

  * * *

  She drove home in a haze of frustrations and the world seemed full of blurs, as if she were crying. In fact, she was, though she did not realize it until she pulled into the yard and the loud growling of the truck fell silent and there was only the tall, wooden house rising out of the ground, empty and waiting to swallow her. She wiped her eyes and quietly cursed herself for crying.

  She crossed the yard with her hands full of the empty plastic containers she used to bring Jacob, Harold and Agent Bellamy food. She kept her focus on the food, on the idea of feeding those three men. She thought about how food softened people and made them stronger at the same time.

  If folks only cooked and ate more, the world might not be quite so brusque, she thought.

  * * *

  Lucille Abigail Daniels Hargrave never liked being alone. Even in her childhood, the thing she’d loved most was a houseful of people. Lucille had been raised as the youngest in a family of ten. All of them crammed together in little more than a gray shanty that stood at the outskirts of the small town of Lumberton, North Carolina. Her father worked for the logging company and her mother was a maid for one of the more opulent families and, when the opportunities came about, she was a seamstress to anyone with an out-of-place stitch.

  Her father never spoke ill of her mother and her mother never spoke ill of her father. From what Lucille had learned in her marriage to Harold, not speaking badly of each other was the surest sign that a long-term relationship was working. All the kissing and flower-buying and gift-giving didn’t mean spit if a husband talked down to his wife or a wife spread gossip about her husband.

  Like many people, she had spent most of her adult life trying to recreate her childhood, trying to grow back into it, as if time were not all-powerful. But Jacob had been her one shot at motherhood on account of complications with his birth, a fact about which she did not weep. Not even on the day when the doctors came to deliver the news. She only nodded—because she had known; somehow, she had known—and said that Jacob would be enough.

  And for eight years she was a mother with a son. And then for fifty years she was a wife, a Baptist, a lover of words, but not a mother. Too much time passed between her two lives.

  But now, Jacob was time beaten into defeat. He was time out of sync, time more perfect than it had been. He was life the way it was supposed to be all those years ago. That’s what all the Returned were, she realized just then. And for the rest of the evening she did not cry and her heart was not as heavy and when sleep came for her it found her easily.

  * * *

  That night she dreamed of children. And when morning came she had the urge to cook.

  Lucille ran her hands under the faucet. On the stove there was bacon and eggs frying. A pot of grits simmered on one of the back burners. She looked out through the window at the backyard, fighting the nagging sense that she was being watched. Of course, no one was there. She returned her attention to the stove and the too-much food she was preparing.

  The most frustrating thing about Harold not being here was that she just didn’t know how to cook for one person. It wasn’t that she didn’t miss him—she missed him terribly—but it was a downright shame that she was always throwing food away these days. Even after wrapping up food to take over to the school, the refrigerator was still full to brimming with leftovers, but leftovers never tasted right to her. Her palate had always been a sensitive one, and something about food that had rested too long in the coolness of a refrigerator made everything taste of copper.

  Every day she took food to the school/god-awful-prison-camp-for-the-ornery-and/or-Returned. Even if they were prisoners, Jacob and Harold Hargrave would be very well-fed prisoners. But she couldn’t get down there to take them breakfast. For the past twenty years or more Harold had been the one to do all the driving, and now Lucille was rusty behind the wheel and she didn’t trust herself to drive up and down the road to deliver three hot meals. So breakfast she ate alone, with only the empty house to sit and watch her. Only the sound of her own voice to speak back to her.

  “What’s the world coming to?” she asked the empty house. Her voice moved over the hardwood floor, past the front door and small desk where Harold kept his cigarettes, on into the kitchen with its refrigerator full of food and a table where no one was sitting. Her voice reverberated through the other rooms, up the stairs, into the bedrooms where there was no one sleeping.

  She cleared her throat, as if to draw someone’s attention, but only silence answered her back.

  The television might help, she thought. At least with the television on she could pretend. There would be laughter and conversation and words that she could imagine were coming from some grand holiday party being held in the next room—the kind that used to be held all those years ago before Jacob went down to that river and everything in her and Harold’s life turned cold.

  A part of Lucille wanted to turn on the news to hear if there was any word on that missing French artist—Jean Something-or-Other. The newspeople couldn’t stop talking about how he’d come back from the dead, took up his sculpting again, made all the money he’d never even dreamed he would make the first time he was alive and then up and disappeared with the fiftysomething woman who’d helped “rediscover” him.

  Lucille had never thought that people would riot over an artist going missing, but there had been riots. It took weeks for the French government to get a handle on things.

  But the famous Returned French artist was still nowhere to be found. Some said the fame had gotten to be too much for him. Someone had said that a successful artist is no longer an artist, and that was what had driven Jean away. He wanted to be starving and hungry again, so that he could really find his art.

  Lucille laughed at that, too. The sheer notion that a person could want to be starving was plumb foolish.

  “Maybe he just wanted to be left alone,” she said heavily.

  Lucille thought on that for a while but then the silence of the house pressed down on her again like a heavy boot. So she walked into the living room and turned on the news and let the world in.

  “Things just seem to be getting worse all over,” the newscaster said. It was a Spanish man with dark features and a light-colored suit. Lucille had a brief impression that he was talking about something to do with finances or the global economy or gas prices or any of the other things that seemed to be getting perpetually worse year on year on year. But no, he was commenting on the state of the Returned.

  “What’s this all about?” Lucille said softly, standing in front of the television with her hands folded in front of her.

  “In case you’re just joining us,” the man on the television said, “lots of debate today about the role and authority of the still new—yet ever-growing—International Bureau of the Returned. At last reports, the Bureau has just secured financial backing from NATO nations as well as several other countries not affiliated with NATO. The exact nature of the funding,
or indeed its exact amount, has yet to be disclosed.”

  Just above the newscaster’s shoulder appeared a small emblem—a simple gold standard with the words International Bureau of the Returned placed in the center. Then the logo went away and the television screen was consumed by images of soldiers riding in trucks and men with guns running from one side of an airport tarmac into the belly of large, gray airplanes that looked like a whole church could fit inside without the slightest inconvenience to the steeple.

  “Lord,” Lucille said. She switched off the television, shook her head. “Lord, Lord, Lord. This can’t be real.”

  She wondered then just how much the world knew about what was happening in Arcadia. About whether or not they knew how the school had been taken over, how the Bureau had already become a powerful and terrifying thing.

  In her mind she put together an image of the current state of Arcadia. The Returned were everywhere, she realized. There were hundreds of them now, as if they were being drawn to this place, to this town. Even though the president had ordered the Returned confined to their homes, there were just too many of them whose homes were half a world away. Sometimes Lucille would see the soldiers arresting them. History’s most ominous reassurance.

  Other times Lucille would catch sight of them in hiding. They had enough sense to stay away from the soldiers and keep out of the center of town where the school-cum-camp sat behind its fencing as best they could. But a little bit down the road, just right on Main Street, you could see them peeking out from old buildings and houses nobody was supposed to be living in. Lucille would wave to them as she passed, because that’s what she was bred to do, and they would wave back, as if they all knew her and were intrinsically bound to her. As if she were a magnet destined to pull them in, to succor them.

  But she was just an old woman who lived alone in a house built for three. There was supposed to be someone else who would come along and put an end to all this. That was how the world worked. Situations this big always hinged upon the actions of big people. People like those in the movies. People who were young and athletic and well-spoken. Not people who lived in a town no one had heard of.