The Returned

by Jason Mott

  He couldn’t remember, just then, why he’d begun building it, or why he’d stopped. But there it was, in the corner of his project room, buried under boxes and quilts stored until winter.

  Why had he started building something so foolish?

  He made his way through the clutter and dust to where the thing sat. He rubbed a hand over the rough wood. It was unsanded and rough but, somehow, pleasing to the touch. The years of neglect had softened its edges.

  While it wasn’t the best thing he’d ever started working on, Fred didn’t think it was hideous. Amateurish maybe. The mouth was wrong—something about the size of the horse’s teeth was wrong—but he liked the look of the animal’s ears. He remembered, suddenly, how much attention he had given them when working on them. They were the only part of the creature he thought he might actually have a chance of getting right. They had been difficult and had left his hands sore and full of cramps for days. But, looking at them now, the effort seemed worth it.

  It was just behind the ears, above where the mane began, where only the rider—as small as they would have to be to ride the animal—could see, that Fred noticed the letters carved into the wood.

  H-E-A-T-H-E-R.

  Wasn’t that the name he and Mary had picked out for their child?

  “Mary,” Fred called one last time.

  When no one answered, it was as if the universe had, with finality, confirmed everything that he was planning to do, everything that he knew had to happen. He had given the universe a chance to change his mind, and it had given him only silence and an empty house in return.

  Nathaniel Schumacher

  It was two months now since he returned and his family loved him no less than they had in the long, shining days of his life. His wife, though she was older now, welcomed him by throwing her arms around him and weeping and clinging tightly to him. His children, though they were no longer children, huddled around him as they had all the days of his life. They were still the type of siblings that fought each other for their parents’ attention and none of that had changed in the twenty years of time between when their father had died and when he had become one of the Returned.

  Bill, his oldest, even though he had a family of his own now, still trailed his father and called his sister, Helen, “foolish” and “impossible” the way he had for the entirety of their childhood.

  Both of them moved home, as if sensing that time would be frail and fleeting, and they spent their days orbiting him and all that he represented to them. They were drawn in by the gravity of him. They sat up late into the night sometimes, explaining to him all of the threads of life that had frayed outward since his leaving. He smiled at their news and there were arguments now and again, when he did not approve, but even those were greeted with a sense of appropriateness, a type of reassurance that, indeed, he was who he appeared to be.

  He was their father, and he was Returned.

  And then one day he was gone again.

  No one could say just when he disappeared, only that he was not there. They searched for him, but with great uncertainty, as they were forced to admit to themselves that his returning from the grave had been an uncertain and unexpected thing to begin with, so why would his disappearance be anything else?

  For a brief while they lamented. They wept and made a great fuss and Bill and Helen argued with each other, each saying the other had done such and such to cause his leaving, and their mother would have to intercede on behalf of decency. Then they would apologize without meaning it and grumble to each other about what needed to be done. They went and filed a missing person’s report. They even went to the soldiers from the Bureau and told them that their father was gone. “He just disappeared,” they said.

  The soldiers only took notes and seemed unsurprised.

  In the end there was nothing to be done. He simply was not there anymore. They thought of visiting his grave, digging the coffin up from its hallowed vault, only to assure themselves that everything had been returned to the way it was supposed to be and that he was not simply somewhere in the world without them.

  But their mother did not approve, saying only, “We had our time.”

  Sixteen

  SHE WAS THINNER. Apart from that, she had not changed at all. “How are you?” he said. She stroked his hand and nuzzled against his shoulder.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Have you been eating? Are they feeding you, I mean?”

  She nodded and raked her nails gently along his forearm. “I’ve missed you.”

  The detention center of Meridian, Mississippi, allowed some mingling between the True Living and the Returned. Things were bad here, but not quite as bad as Arcadia. The living and the Returned met in a fenced-in patio area between the larger holding facility and the security zone where the living were checked for weapons and bad intentions in general.

  “I’ve missed you, too,” he finally said.

  “I tried to find you,” she said.

  “They sent me a letter.”

  “What kind of letter?”

  “It just said that you were looking for me.”

  She nodded.

  “This was before they started locking everyone up,” he said.

  “How’s your mother?”

  “Dead,” he said, more flatly than he had planned. “Or maybe she isn’t. It’s hard to be sure these days.”

  She was still rubbing his hand in that slow, hypnotic way a familiar love sometimes does. Sitting this close to her—smelling her, feeling her hand, hearing the sound of life moving in and out of her lungs—Pastor Robert Peters forgot all the years, all the mistakes, all the failures, all the grief, all the loneliness.

  She leaned in across the table. “We can leave,” she said, quietly.

  “No, we can’t.”

  “Yes, we can. We’ll leave together just like we did last time.”

  He patted her hand with an almost fatherly tenderness. “That was a mistake,” he said. “We should have just waited.”

  “Waited for what?”

  “I don’t know. We should have just waited. Time has a way of fixing things. I’ve learned that. I’m an old man now.” He thought for a moment, then corrected himself. “Well, maybe I’m not an old man, but I’m definitely not a young man. And one thing I’ve learned is that nothing is unbearable with enough time.”

  But wasn’t that his greatest lie? Wasn’t the unbearableness of not being with her every day the very thing that drove him here? He had never gotten over her, had never forgiven himself for what he had done to her. He had married and lived and turned his life to God and done everything else that a person is supposed to, and still he had not gotten over her. He had loved her more than he loved his father, more than he loved his mother, more than he had loved God. But still he had left her. And then she had gone off. Gone ahead and did what she promised she would do. Left on her own and gotten herself killed.

  And every day he remembered that.

  The marriage to his wife had only been a concession of his soul. It was the thing that seemed logical. So he had done it, with all the enthusiasm and levelheadedness of buying a house or investing in a 401(k). And the fact that, later, he and his wife would come to find out that children would not be a part of their lives, even that had seemed apropos.

  Truth was, he had never imagined having children with her. Truth was, as much as he believed in the institution of marriage, as many sermons as he had preached on it over the years, as many marriages as he had personally helped repair, as many times as he had told sullen-eyed couples in his office, “God and divorce just don’t get along,” as much as he had done all these things, he had always been looking for a way out.

  It had only taken the dead to begin returning from the grave to give him the motivation he needed.

  Now he was with her and, while everything did not seem perfect, he felt better than he had in years. Her hand was in his. He could feel her. He could touch her. He could smell the familiar scent of her—a sc
ent that had not changed in all these years. Yes, this was the way things were intended to be.

  Here and there across the visiting area, the guards were separating the dead from the living. Visiting time was over.

  “They can’t keep you here like this. It’s not humane.” He gripped her hand.

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  “No. You’re not.”

  He wrapped his arm around her and took a deep breath and the smell of her filled him up inside. “Do they come to visit you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “They love you.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re still their daughter. They know that. They have to know that.”

  She nodded.

  The guards were making their rounds. When they had to, they were pulling people apart. “Time to go” was all they said.

  “I’ll get you out of here,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “But if you don’t, that’s okay, too. I understand.”

  Then the guards came and put their time to an end.

  * * *

  It was fitful sleep for the pastor that night, the same dream over and over again.

  He was sixteen and sitting alone in his bedroom. Somewhere in the house his father and mother were asleep. The silence of the house was filled with heaviness. The heat of their arguing still hung about the eaves like a dark-fallen snow.

  He stood and dressed as quietly and secretly as he could manage. He crept barefoot over the hardwood floor of the house. It was summer and the humid night was full of the songs of crickets.

  He had expected a very dramatic departure. He had expected that his father or mother would awaken as he made his way from the house and there would be some sort of confrontation, but none came. Perhaps he’d read too many bad novels or seen too many movies. In the movies, leavings were always full of spectacle. Someone was always yelling. Sometimes there was violence. There was always some foreboding final statement made in the exit—“I hope I never see you again!” or some such—which eventually sealed the fate of all characters involved.

  But in his own life, he had left while everyone slept, and all that would happen is that they would awaken and find him not there and that would be the end of it. They would know where he went and why. They would not come after him because that was not his father’s way. His father’s love was an open door. It would never close—neither to keep you out nor to keep you in.

  It was almost an hour of walking before he met her. The moonlight turned her face pale and gaunt-looking. She had always been a skinny girl, but just now, in this light, she looked dying.

  “I hope he dies,” she said.

  The pastor—who was not a pastor yet, but just a boy—stared at her face. Her eye was swollen and a dark line of blood was smeared in the gap between her lip and nose. It was hard to tell which was bleeding.

  She had lived the dramatic leaving that Robert had imagined for himself.

  “Don’t say things like that,” he said.

  “Fuck him! I hope he gets hit by a fucking bus! I hope a dog rips out his throat! I hope he gets some disease that takes weeks to kill him and every day is more fucked than the last.” She spoke through clenched teeth and her hands were fists swinging at the ends of her arms.

  “Lizzy,” he said.

  She screamed. Anger and pain and fear.

  “Liz, please!”

  More screaming.

  More of the things Robert Peters, in the years of memory that had settled between who Elizabeth Pinch really was and who he remembered her being, had forgotten.

  * * *

  Pastor Peters woke to the sound of a large truck rumbling along the highway outside. The motel had thin walls and always there were trucks moving back and forth to and from the detention center. Large, dark trucks that looked like some exaggerated, prehistoric beetles. Sometimes they were so full that soldiers dangled from the sides.

  The pastor wondered if they’d traveled along the length of the highway like that, hanging from the side. It was a dangerous way to travel. But, then again, with Death being a bit ambivalent these days, perhaps it was not as dangerous as it had once been.

  On the way back from the detention center, the radio said that a group of Returned had been killed outside Atlanta. They were hiding in a small house in a small town—all of the bad things seemed to be happening in the small towns first—when a group of supporters of the True Living Movement found out and showed up demanding the Returned surrender and go peacefully.

  Some sympathizers had been caught up in the middle of things, as well—caught hiding the Returned. The Rochester Incident seemed far away now.

  And when the True Living fanatics showed up at the front door, things went very bad very quickly. In the end, the house caught fire, and everyone inside, living and Returned alike, was killed.

  The radio said that arrests were made, but no official charges had been pressed just yet.

  Pastor Peters stood for a long time in that motel window, watching things happen around him and thinking of Elizabeth. He called her “Elizabeth” in his mind.

  “Liz” is what he once called her.

  Tomorrow he would go see her again—provided the soldiers didn’t cause any trouble. He’d talk to whomever he needed to talk to about having her released into his custody. He could throw his spiritual weight around when he needed to. Apply a little emotional guilt, as all men of the cloth are trained to do.

  It would be difficult, but it would all work out. He would have her back, finally.

  By God’s grace, it would all work out. All Pastor Robert Peters had to do was commit to it.

  * * *

  “By God’s grace,” Robert said, “it will all work out. All we have to do is commit to it.”

  She laughed. “When did you get all religious, Bertie?”

  He squeezed her hand. No one had called him by that name in years. No one had ever called him “Bertie” but her.

  Her head was leaning against his shoulder again, as if they were sitting in that old oak tree on her father’s farm all those years ago, and not sitting in the visitor’s room of the Meridian Detention Center. He stroked her hair—he had forgotten how honey-colored it was and how it slid through his fingers like water. Every day with her was a rediscovery. “They just need a little more convincing,” he said.

  “You’ll do your best,” she said.

  “I will.”

  “It’ll all work out,” she said.

  He kissed her brow—something which earned him disapproving glances from some of those around them. After all, she was only sixteen. Sixteen and small for her age. And he was so large and so much older than sixteen. Even if she was Returned, she was still a child.

  “When did you become so patient?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your temper’s gone.”

  She shrugged. “What’s the point? Rage against the world and the world remains.”

  He looked at her with wide eyes. “That’s very profound,” he said.

  She laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You! You’re so serious!”

  “I suppose I am,” he said. “I’ve gotten old.”

  She returned her head to his shoulder. “Where are we going to go?” she asked. “Once we’re out of here, I mean.”

  “I’ve gotten old,” he repeated.

  “We could go to New York,” she said. “Broadway. I’ve always wanted to see Broadway.”

  He nodded and looked down at the young, small hand that he held in his own. Time had done nothing to that hand. It was still as small and smooth as it always had been. This should not have surprised Robert Peters. After all, this is what the Returned had always been: a refusal of nature’s laws. So why should her hand, as clean and smooth as it was, unsettle him so?

  “Do you think I’m old?” he asked.

  “Or ma
ybe we could go to New Orleans,” she said. She sat up with excitement. “Oh, yes! New Orleans!”

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  She stood and looked down at him, the corners of her eyes turned up happily. “Can’t you just imagine it?” she said. “You and me on Bourbon Street. Jazz music everywhere. And the food! Don’t get me started on the food!”

  “That sounds nice,” he said.

  She took his hands and pulled his large mass to its feet. “Dance with me,” she said.

  He obliged her, in spite of the stares and whispers it drew. They turned slowly. Her head barely reached his chest, and she was so small—almost as small as the pastor’s wife.

  “It’s all going to work out,” she said, her head lying against his wide chest.

  “But what if they refuse to let you go?”

  “It’ll work out,” she repeated.

  They swayed in silence. The soldiers watched. This is the way it will be from now on, Pastor Peters thought.

  “Do you remember that I left you?” he asked.

  “I can hear your heart beating,” she said in reply.

  “Okay,” he said. Then, after a moment: “Okay.”

  This was not the conversation he had imagined having with her. The Elizabeth Pinch of his memories—the one who had hung above the altar of his marriage all these years—was not one to sidestep any argument. No. She was a fighter, even in the places and times that neither warranted nor accepted a fight. She cursed, she swore, she threw things. She was like her father: a creature of anger. And that was why he had loved her so much.

  “I’ll get you out of here somehow,” Pastor Peters said—even as, in his mind, he had already left her dancing alone in this prison.

  * * *

  Robert Peters knew what he would do: he would leave her and not come back in the same way he had done before. This was not his Elizabeth. That would make this time easier.