The Returned

by Jason Mott

  When the coughing passed and Harold had composed himself, Bellamy finally spoke. “How are you feeling?”

  “Just happens more often.”

  “But you won’t let us run any tests.”

  “No, thank you, Agent Man. I’m old, that’s all that’s wrong with me. But I’m too much of a bastard to have an aneurism like that boy. And I’m not so stupid as to believe in this ‘sickness’ your soldiers keep whispering to one another about.”

  “You’re a smart man.”

  Harold took another drag.

  “I’ve got my suspicions about the cause of your coughing,” Bellamy said.

  Harold blew out a long, even line of smoke. “You and my wife both.”

  Harold outed his cigarette and pushed the bowl of peanut hulls to the side. He put his hands together on the table and looked down at them, recognizing then just how old and wrinkled they were—thinner and more frail-looking than he ever remembered seeing them before. “Can we talk, Martin Bellamy?”

  Agent Bellamy shifted in his chair. He straightened his back, as if preparing for a great endeavor. “What do you want to know? You frame the questions and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability. That’s all I can do. That’s all you can ask.”

  “Fair enough, Agent Man. Question number one—are the Returned really people?”

  Bellamy paused. His attention seemed to shift, as if some image had sprung up in his mind. Then he answered, as confidently as he could, “They seem to be. They eat—they eat a lot, actually. They sleep—sporadically, but they do sleep. They walk. They talk. They have memories. All the things that people do, they do.”

  “Oddly, though.”

  “Yes. They are a bit odd.”

  Harold popped a laugh. “A bit,” he said, nodding his head up and down. “And how long has it been just ‘odd’ for people to come back from the dead, Agent Man?”

  “A few months now,” Bellamy said evenly.

  “Question two, Agent Man…or is it three?”

  “It’s three, I believe.”

  Harold laughed dryly. “You’re awake. That’s good.”

  “I try.”

  “So, question three… People, since as far back as anybody can remember, have never been in the habit of coming back from the dead. Since these individuals are doing just that, can you still call them people?”

  “Can we get to the point of this?” Bellamy asked curtly.

  “Yankees,” Harold grumbled. He shifted in his seat. His leg twitched. All manner of energy seemed to be coursing through his body.

  “It’s the two of us here,” Bellamy said. He leaned forward at the table, as if he might reach out and take Harold’s old hands into his own. And, if that had been needed just then, perhaps he would have. But Harold was ready now.

  “He shouldn’t be here,” Harold said finally. “He died. My son died—1966. Drowned in a river. And you know what?”

  “What’s that?”

  “We buried him, that’s what. We found his body—because God is cruel—and I scooped him up out of that river myself. He was cold as ice, even if it was the middle of summer. I’ve felt fish that were warmer than him. He was bloated. Colored all wrong.” Harold’s eyes shone. “But I carried him out of that water with everybody standing around crying, telling me I didn’t have to be the one to pick him up. Everybody offering to take him out of my arms.

  “But they didn’t understand. I did have to be the one to take him out of that river. I had to be the one to feel how cold and unnatural he was. I had to be the one to know—to be genuinely and truly sure—that he was dead. And that he wasn’t ever coming back. We buried him. Because that’s what you do to people when they die. You bury them. You dig a place in the earth and you put them there and that’s supposed to be it.”

  “No belief in the afterlife?”

  “No, no, no,” Harold said. “That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean it’s an ending for this!” Harold reached across the table and grabbed Bellamy’s hands. He squeezed with enough force that it began to hurt the government agent, who tried to pull away when he realized Harold was stronger than he looked. But it was no good by then, Harold’s grip was nonnegotiable. “All this is supposed to stop and never start again,” Harold said. His eyes were wide and sharp. “This is supposed to be over with!” Harold yelled.

  “I understand,” Bellamy said in his smooth, fast New York voice, disentangling his hands from Harold’s. “It’s a hard and confusing thing. I know.”

  “It all stopped,” Harold said after a moment. “The feeling. The memories. Everything.” He paused. “Now I wake up thinking about the way things used to be. I think about birthdays and Christmases.” He chortled and looked at Bellamy with a light in his eyes. “You ever chased a cow, Agent Bellamy?” he asked, smiling.

  Bellamy laughed. “No. Can’t say that I have.”

  “There was this muddy Christmas back when Jacob was six. Rained for three days beforehand. By the time Christmas came the roads were so bad almost nobody could get out and go visiting the way they planned, so everybody kind of just kept to themselves and said ‘Merry Christmas’ over the phone.” He sat back in his chair and gesticulated as he spoke. “There used to be this farm out by where I live now. Belonged to Old Man Robinson. I bought the land off his son when he died, but back then, on this Christmas, he had this cow pasture out there. Didn’t have much in the way of cows. Just a handful. Maybe once every couple of years he’d take one to slaughter. But, for the most part, he just kept the cows. Not for any particular reason, I don’t think. His daddy always kept cows, from what I hear and, honestly, I believe he just didn’t know how else to live.”

  Bellamy nodded. He wasn’t sure where the story was going, but he didn’t mind riding along.

  “So then this muddy Christmas comes along,” Harold continued. “Rain was falling like God was angry about something. Coming straight down in buckets. So right there in the middle of the worst of it comes this knock on the door and who is it? None other than Old Man Robinson himself. He was a big bastard. Bald as a newborn and built like a lumberjack. Chest like an oil drum. And he’s standing in the doorway covered in mud. ‘What’s the issue?’ I asked him. ‘Cows on the run,’ he said, and pointed off toward a stretch of fence. I could see where the cows had torn up the ground getting out.

  “Before I could say anything, before I could even offer to help, something shot past me. Shot right out the front door and off the porch and out into all that damned rain and mud.” Harold smiled wide.

  “Jacob?” Bellamy asked.

  “I thought about yelling at him. Calling him back to the house. But then I thought, ‘What the hell?’ And before I could even make it out the front door Lucille was shooting past me nearly as fast as Jacob had—still wearing one of her best dresses. It was covered in mud before she got ten feet off the porch…and all any of us—Old Man Robinson included—did was laugh about it.” Harold’s hands were finally still. “Maybe everybody was just tired of being cooped up in the house,” Harold said finally.

  “So?” Bellamy asked.

  “So what?”

  “Did you get the cows back?”

  Harold chuckled. “We did,” he said. Then his smile faded and his voice became heavy and serious and conflicted again. “And then all that was over. And, eventually, it went away. But now…now here I am straddling the chasm.” Harold stared down at his hands. When he spoke, there was a tinge of delirium in his voice. “What am I supposed to do? My brain tells me he’s not my son. My mind says that Jacob died—drowned to damn death—on a balmy day in August back in 1966.

  “But when he speaks, my ears tell me he’s mine. My eyes tell me he’s mine, just the same as he was all those years ago.” Harold slammed a fist on the table. “And what do I do with that? Some nights, when everything is dark and quiet over there, when everyone’s bedded down, sometimes he’ll get up and come over and lie on the cot beside me—just like he used to do—like he’s been having a n
ightmare or something. Or, worse yet, sometimes it seems like he’s just doing it because he misses me.

  “He’ll come over and curl up beside me and…God damn me…I can’t help but put my arm around him just like I used to. And you know what, Bellamy?”

  “What, Harold?”

  “I feel better than I have in years. I feel whole. Complete. Like everything in my life is the way it’s supposed to be.” Harold coughed. “What do I do with that?”

  “Some people cling to it,” Bellamy said.

  Harold paused, genuinely surprised by the reply. “He’s changing me,” Harold said after a moment. “Goddammit, he’s changing me.”

  Bobby Wiles

  Bobby had always been good at getting into places he wasn’t supposed to. His father had forecast that he would grow up to be a magician because of all the ways the boy could disappear when he wanted to. Now Bobby was hidden in the colonel’s office, just inside the school’s air vent, peering out through the slats at the colonel.

  There was never anything to do here. Nothing to do but sit and wait and not go anywhere. But sneaking into places made things more interesting. The school had lots of places to investigate. He’d already found his way into what used to be the kitchen. He thought he would find a knife there to play with, but they were all gone. He’d snuck into the boiler room by way of the air duct that came in from outside the building. Everything in there was rusty and hard and fun.

  The colonel sat at his desk, staring at a large bank of computer screens. He was tired of Arcadia. He was tired of the Returned. He was tired of this whole unusual condition which had come and settled over the world. He could see where it was all going better than anyone else. The hysteria, the riots, whatever else. People had a hard enough time just getting through the day when the world spun normally and people died and stayed buried in their graves.

  This situation with the Returned, the colonel knew, was a state of being that could never contain itself peacefully. So he did what he was told because that was the only way to help people—to maintain order and trust in the way things were supposed to be.

  Unlike so many other people these days, the colonel had no fear of the Returned. Rather, he was afraid of everyone else and how they could react to seeing their loved ones—whether they truly believed them alive or not—standing next to them, breathing air, asking to be remembered.

  The colonel had been fortunate. When his father was discovered as one of the Returned, the colonel was informed of it and given the choice of seeing him. He chose not to, but only because it was the best for everyone. It simply wouldn’t do for him to get biased, to become swayed by memory and presumptions on a future with someone whose future ended years ago.

  The situation with the Returned wasn’t the way the world was meant to be, and people would soon enough realize that. Until then, it took men like him to hold the reins as best they could.

  So he let the Bureau know that he did not want contact with his father. But he did make sure his father was transferred to one of the better centers. That part of himself, that small action on behalf of this person that might be his father, he could not deny.

  In spite of how hard he had to be, in spite of what needed to be done, this one action he could not help. It might have been his father, after all.

  On every computer screen in front of the colonel was the same image: an old, large-framed black woman sitting at a desk across from a clean-cut agent with a square head named Jenkins. Bobby had been interviewed once by Jenkins. But the colonel was something else.

  Bobby breathed slowly, making as little sound as possible as he shifted his weight from one hip to the other. The walls of the air duct were thin and covered in filth.

  The colonel sipped coffee from a mug and watched Jenkins and the old black woman talk. There was sound, but Bobby was too far away to hear much of what they were saying on the screen. He repeatedly caught the name “Charles” from the black woman’s mouth, and that seemed to frustrate Jenkins.

  Probably her husband, Bobby thought.

  The colonel continued watching the monitors. Occasionally he would change one of them to a picture of a dark-skinned black man in a well-cut suit. The man sat at his desk, working. The colonel watched him and then looked back at the screen with the old woman.

  Soon Agent Jenkins stood and knocked on the door of the interview room. A soldier came in and gently helped the old woman out of the room. Jenkins looked into the camera, as if he knew the colonel had been watching, and shook his head to show his frustration. “Nothing,” Bobby heard him say.

  The colonel did not speak. He only pushed a button and suddenly all the screens were filled with the dark-skinned agent in the well-cut suit working at his desk. The colonel watched in silence with his face looking very hard and serious until Bobby fell asleep from want of something different.

  He awoke to soldiers dragging him from the air duct, shouting questions and handling him roughly. The last he saw of the colonel was the image of him pointing his finger at a young soldier as they locked him in a room with no windows.

  “C’mon, kid,” one of the soldiers said.

  “I’m sorry,” Bobby said. “I won’t do it again.”

  “Just come on,” the soldier said. He was young and blond-haired and acne-scarred and, in spite of the colonel’s obvious anger, he was grinning as he took Bobby from the room. “You remind me of my brother,” he said under his breath when they were out of the office.

  “What’s his name?” Bobby asked after a moment. Curiosity was always his strong suit.

  “His name was Randy,” the young soldier said. And then: “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

  And Bobby was not as afraid as he had been.

  Twelve

  IN ANOTHER LIFE Lucille would have been a line cook. She would have gone to work every day with a smile on her face. She would have come home every night smelling of grease and all manner of spices and seasonings. Her feet would have been sore. Her legs would have been tired. But she would have loved it. Through and through, she would have loved it.

  She stood in a cluttered—but clean—kitchen with the second batch of fried chicken hissing like the ocean on sharp rocks. In the living room the Wilson family was talking and laughing, trying not to turn on the television as they went about their lunch. They sat in a circle on the floor—though why they sat on the floor when there was a perfectly good dinner table not ten feet away, Lucille had no idea—with their plates in their laps, shoveling heaps of rice and gravy, corn, green beans, fried chicken and biscuits into their mouths. Now and again there would be some roar of laughter followed by a long silence of eating.

  * * *

  It went this way until the entire family was full and only a few straggling pieces of chicken remained uneaten on a small plate next to the stove. Lucille placed these in the oven in case someone should get hungry later, then she took stock of the kitchen.

  Everything seemed to be getting low, and Lucille liked that.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Jim Wilson said as he came in from the living room. Somewhere upstairs his wife chased behind their children, laughing.

  “No, thank you,” Lucille said, her head halfway in one of the kitchen cabinets. She scratched notes blindly on a shopping list. “I’ve got everything well in hand,” she said.

  Jim came over, looked at a pile of dishes and rolled up his sleeves.

  “And what are you doing?” Lucille asked, her head finally out of the cabinet.

  “I’m helping.”

  “You leave those right where they are. That’s what the children are for.” She swatted his hand.

  “They’re playing,” Jim said.

  “Well, they can’t play all day, can they? You’ve got to teach them responsibility.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jim said.

  Lucille buzzed back and forth about the kitchen, stepping around the man who had anchored himself before the sink. In spite of agreeing with her on the proper u
pbringing of the children, he washed and rinsed and placed the dishes in the rack, doing so one at a time.

  One by one.

  Wash. Rinse. Rack.

  “Honey,” Lucille began, “why don’t you just put them all in the sink at once? Never seen anybody do dishes one at a time like that.”

  Jim said nothing, he only carried on.

  One by one.

  Wash. Rinse. Rack.

  “All right, then,” Lucille said.

  She tried not to blame Jim’s strangeness on whatever it was that had brought him back from the grave. Even though they were cousins—as far as she knew—she had never spent as much time with him and his family as she should have. That was a great point of woe for Lucille.

  She mostly just remembered Jim as hardworking, which was what most people in Arcadia knew him for up until he and his family was murdered.

  It was a terrible thing, that murder. Sometimes Lucille could almost forget that it had happened. Almost. Other times it was all she saw when she looked at any of them. And that was the reason the town had reacted to them the way they had. Nobody likes to be reminded of where they failed, where they went wrong and were never able to make it right. And that’s what the Wilsons were.

  It was sometime back in the winter of ’63, if Lucille’s memory served. She remembered it the way a person remembers all tragic news: in scene.

  She was in the kitchen grappling with the dishes. It was bone-cold outside. She stared out through the window and watched the oak tree—naked as the day it was born—shudder back and forth when the wind picked up. “Dear Lord,” she said.

  Harold was out there somewhere, in all that cold, in all that dark, gone for groceries this late in the evening—which didn’t make a lick of sense, Lucille thought. Then, as if he’d heard her thought, she suddenly saw his headlights bouncing down the dirt road toward home.

  “You’ll want to sit down,” he said when he’d come in.