by Jason Mott
“I don’t know. She’s asking for me,” he said in a low voice. “Evelyn says that when she showed up again, when she returned, I was the first thing she asked about.”
“What did they tell her?”
He shrugged. “They told her that I moved. But then she asked them where I’d moved and they wouldn’t tell her. They kept their answers vague, I guess. But she knows that they’re hiding me and she can’t understand why. There’s lots of fighting from what I hear.”
“I don’t want you to see her,” Samantha replied. Her stomach continued its quiet turmoil. Her throat clenched and she swallowed again. She closed her eyes and breathed slowly. “That’s not your life anymore. She’s not your life anymore.”
“You don’t mean that,” Peter replied. “Hell, you still get together for lunch with Daniel.”
“That’s different and you know it.”
“Is it?”
Samantha did not reply.
“You know what I mean,” Peter continued. “She’s a part of me. That time of my life when she was a part of my world—that’s a part of me, too. All those moments, they’re just kind of stacked up inside me, like sediment. They’re always there. That’s how it is for everyone, I think.”
“Do you still love her?”
Peter paused. A half-dozen possible replies swam through his head. This was the question he knew was coming even before Samantha had called him out to the garage. It was a question that, in a sense, was always coming. Samantha had always been respectful of his feelings for Tracy: his tragic first love. She never pressed him when he talked about her—which was rare. She had always been easy with him, willing to let him carry as much of it inside as he wanted, share only what he needed to share.
“Yes,” he said finally, refusing all the other possible answers he could have given, all the lies and avoidances. “I do still love her. I’ll always love her.”
“Then I want to meet her,” Samantha said.
* * *
The arguing between Samantha and Peter carried on for another week. And things were no easier for Evelyn and Nathaniel, who were running out of ways not to tell their returned daughter about the boy she’d once loved.
On more than one occasion Evelyn called Peter, speaking of one thing but seemingly desperate to talk of something else—some large and important topic that she couldn’t quite bring herself to broach. Sometimes when she called, she whispered, as if hiding in a closet, desperate not to be found out. Peter could imagine Tracy—still a seventeen-year-old—somewhere in the house, trying to eavesdrop on her mother’s conversations. Peter imagined how much of being a parent Evelyn had forgotten over the years. Tracy had been their only child, their one shot at parenthood, and it had been truncated in a way that gave Peter nightmares. Sometimes he dreamed that Lisa did not come home from school. It was always a strange dream, a dream full of waiting. An experience marked not by great terror but by a persistent, inexhaustible foreboding. And that was worse than abject terror. Terror vanished with the dawn. This particular feeling—that things would not be okay—never left.
Maybe that’s what life was like when a child went missing. Maybe that was how the time since Tracy’s disappearance had been for Evelyn and Nathaniel. He tried not to think about it.
Then one night Evelyn called, crying.
“Please,” she sobbed, “something has to be done. I hate to put you in this position, but I can’t keep doing this. It can’t go on like this.” Evelyn was pleading. “I haven’t been a mother for so long. I just don’t have the strength to hold out like I used to.” She cleared her throat. “I’m going to tell her where you live soon. I just know I am. I don’t want to, but I can’t keep looking into her eyes. I can’t keep telling her no. I love her too much. You can understand that, can’t you, Peter? You can forgive me, can’t you?”
It was then that Peter made the decision to meet with Tracy.
* * *
The night before they were supposed to leave for Evelyn’s, Peter and Samantha found themselves sitting in the car in the garage once more. This time Samantha sat in the driver’s seat. “My mom will be here in the morning to babysit,” she said.
“Good,” Peter replied. “It shouldn’t be too long of a trip.”
“Did you book the hotel?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what you’re going to say to her?”
“I haven’t got a clue,” Peter replied. He tilted his seat back and looked out the window: more reminders of his marriage, his family, his life as it now was.
“You should tell her you love her,” Samantha said. It was her turn to squeeze the steering wheel and stare out through the windshield. For once, her stomach was completely settled. “She deserves the truth.”
Peter wiped his face. “There’s a time and place for the truth,” he said. “And there’s a time and place for holding on to something other than the truth. I’m not exactly sure which one relates to Tracy just yet.”
A silence settled in the car between them. On the far side of the garage the deep freezer kicked on with a rattle.
“When I think about all the people I loved before I met you,” Samantha said, “I realize that I never stopped loving them. Not really. But it’s a different kind of love. Or maybe it’s got something to do with timing. The time for me to love them has passed, and the time for me loving you is now.”
“That’s poetic,” Peter said.
“Heard it on an episode of CSI.”
They laughed together. Then the silence returned. When it became too uncomfortable to bear, Samantha finally spoke. “I’ve been seeing Daniel,” she said.
“I know,” Peter replied. He said it so quickly that his words fell atop hers.
Samantha nodded. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel until her knuckles were white and her fingers hurt. She had promised herself that she would not cry during this, and she was determined to hold on to that promise.
“How long have you known?”
“A few months,” Peter replied. He looked down at his feet. “I don’t want to know how long it’s been going on. Please.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Do you love him?”
“Yes,” Samantha said. “And no. It just happened by accident. We were getting coffee, just the same way we had been doing for years. It was perfectly innocent. And then, at some point, it wasn’t perfectly innocent anymore. At some point I was excited and ashamed when I sat across from him. I’m not sure why. I don’t really know what was happening or not happening between us to make me feel like there was something with him that I couldn’t find with you.” She waved her hand dismissively. “But maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe it wasn’t anything like that. I think, on a certain level, it was just the excitement of a different type of love. Something I thought I’d let go of but never really did.”
Peter cleared his throat. “Aren’t you wondering why I never said anything to you about it? Even though I knew?”
Samantha nodded.
“I didn’t say anything because, on a certain level, I think maybe I’ve been cheating on you for a lot longer.” He made an awkward motion with his hands, as if wanting to scratch his head but then forgetting it just as quickly. “I just think that I never really let her go. She was always there, always in the back of my mind. Maybe if something definite had happened to her, if a body had been found, maybe it would have been different.
“But there was never any resolution. She just disappeared, was taken away. And somewhere along the way she died, and even though we all knew it, none of us really, truly wanted to believe it. To believe it meant giving up on her, and none of us was willing to do that. So throughout our marriage, while I won’t say I’ve exactly cheated, there’s always been someone else.”
Samantha exhaled. A part of her had always known this, but she had never heard it put to words before.
“The truth is I don’t know what’s going to happen once I get there,” Peter said. “Once
I see her, I guess that’s when I’ll know how I feel about everything.” He shook his head. “But maybe not even then. Who knows?”
“I just want you to know that, whatever happens, it’s over between me and Daniel.”
“Okay,” Peter replied, committing nothing in his tone. “But I have to ask,” he continued. “Why do you want to see her?”
“Because she’s a part of our life.”
Peter went to speak, then stopped himself. Instead, he simply nodded and, somehow, his wife believed he truly understood what she felt.
* * *
When they reached the Whitlands’ farm, it was as if time had been standing still since he was last here. The farm was in upstate New York, at the end of a long, winding road traveled by few. Mountains rose up out of the earth around it, as if protecting it, and at the end of the road the Whitland home perched in the center of an open, rolling field. There were oak trees planted along the driveway, their shadows stretching over the road.
“It’s beautiful,” Samantha said.
“It’s exactly the same as I remember it,” Peter replied.
Peter turned off the car and he and Samantha sat silently and watched the house. Both of them half expected Tracy to come racing out of the front door, her arms wide open, her eyes full of tears, screaming for joy the way teenagers often did.
But the house remained still, as if giving them one final chance to change their minds.
“Let’s get this over with,” Samantha said.
“Okay,” Peter replied.
And then it was as if the magic that had been holding this place in quiet pause was broken. The front door of the house opened and, just as Peter and Samantha had imagined it, Tracy came bursting out—still seventeen, still looking just the way she had all those years ago.
“It’s really her,” Peter said, stepping out of the car. His voice sounded detached and faraway, as if it were someone else speaking for him. “Dear God…it’s really her.”
The girl was tall and lithe, with long blond hair and deep blue eyes. Her face beamed. She looked just the way Samantha had imagined her.
She ran over the yard at a full sprint, a wide smile on her face, her arms pumping ferociously as she ran. When she was near enough, Tracy leaped into Peter’s arms and knocked him against the car. She clung to his neck, weeping and laughing all at once, calling his name over and over again.
Peter held his breath, still trying to process it all, still trying to believe what his senses were telling him: that, after all these years, she was real again…and here with him. “Tracy,” he said finally. Then, at last, he put his arms around her and hugged her.
Samantha only watched, her stomach churning, her heart racing. She watched and waited to see how it would all unfold.
“Oh, Peter,” Tracy said, over and over again. Her parents emerged from the front door, looking old and withered against the teenager’s youth and vibrancy. Nathaniel had his arm around Evelyn, who stood wringing her hands with an expression on her face that settled somewhere between nervousness and joy.
Samantha looked from Nathaniel and Evelyn to Tracy and Peter. She felt like an invader. “I’ll be inside,” she said, and started off toward the house. Peter looked at her, he began to speak, but Samantha held up a hand to stop him. “Not yet,” she said. “I’ll leave the two of you alone.”
Then she went and stood on the porch with the Whitlands as Peter and Tracy walked off down the road, lost in time, lost in one another.
“What do you think will happen?” Evelyn asked. Samantha and Nathaniel looked at one another, not sure exactly who she was asking.
* * *
For a very long time they did nothing but walk. She clutched his hand in hers, squeezing and pawing at him, with her head on his shoulder, their steps in unison, just as they used to be. When they had walked for a very long time, they came to a tall oak tree near the base of a large hill. They sat and looked back in the direction they had come. Far off in the distance, they could just see the house, anchored in the landscape.
“I’ve missed you,” Peter said, finally.
He had a thousand other things he wanted to say. Questions he wanted to ask. He longed to know what had happened to her all those years ago. He wanted to ask how she had returned. How long she would be here. What it all meant.
But, in the end, he did not ask anything of her. He only rested beneath the shadow of the oak tree with the girl he’d grown up loving and he tried not to think of anything. He tried to exist only in this one moment.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Tracy said to him.
“Me, too,” he replied sheepishly.
“They didn’t want to tell me where you’d gone. I thought I might never see you again.”
“I know the feeling.” He tried to laugh, but it failed him.
She began talking then. Telling him about the last couple of weeks with her parents. The arguing, the fighting. She was everything she had been all those years ago. Still beautiful, still curious, still uncertain about her place in the world. Peter replied, but his answers were hollow. Mostly, he just said whatever he felt he needed to say to keep her talking. The more she talked, the more her voice churned around inside him, the more everything he thought and felt about this situation—this decision between his family and the girl he used to love—seemed to sort itself out.
And so he listened as she talked, until the sun went low and the shadows stretched long and evening was not far off. Then, just as the sun was setting, Peter happened to look down at his hand. His thumb shimmered a strange, bright green in the dimness of the approaching night.
“What’s that?” Tracy asked, motioning toward his thumb.
Peter looked at his hand and thought. Then a smile spread across his face. “It’s nail polish.”
“What?”
“Lisa put it there. My daughter.”
“Your daughter?”
And that was the moment when the decision became clear for Peter. In spite of everything that Tracy was, in spite of everything she represented, in spite of the life that was never allowed to happen, that was not who he was anymore. Time, in fact, had not stood still. It had been racing by. An unstoppable river.
And although Tracy had come back to him—through whatever means had brought it about—he was not seventeen anymore. He was not who he had once been.
“I’ve got a daughter,” he told Tracy. He never took his eyes off his one painted finger.
Explanations would follow. He would tell her about the past eighteen years without her. Whether or not she understood it all, he could not be sure. But, in the end, it did not matter. Time had changed him. It had transformed his love for her into something greater: love for his wife and daughter. Love for who he was rather than for what had been—which was the only way things could ever truly be.
So for the rest of the evening they talked. And, sometimes, Peter wondered how things might have happened differently if he had not met Samantha, had not married, had not moved on, if he had spent his life waiting for Tracy, longing for the life he’d had before she disappeared. For some people in this world, that was what the Returned were, a longing for life as it was. For others, the Returned were simply a manifestation of a life that was never intended.
Death was different for everyone, but of all the rules in the universe, one had always held true: the dead were meant to stay dead. The return of those long gone was unsettling, and, whether it was a miracle or an omen of the end, something had to be done. Things like this were happening all over, and there were choices for everyone to make.
But, for Peter, the choice was clear.
Eventually, they went back to the Whitlands’ home. And when he came through the door, Peter walked over to Samantha and took her in his arms and kissed her and said simply: “Let’s go home.”
* * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from The Returned by Jason Mott.
One
HAROLD OPENED THE door that day to find a dar
k-skinned man in a well-cut suit smiling at him. At first he thought of reaching for his shotgun, but then he remembered that Lucille had made him sell it years ago on account of an incident involving a traveling preacher and an argument having to do with hunting dogs.
“Can I help you?” Harold said, squinting in the sunlight—light which only made the dark-skinned man in the suit look darker.
“Mr. Hargrave?” the man said.
“I suppose,” Harold replied.
“Who is it, Harold?” Lucille called. She was in the living room being vexed by the television. The news announcer was talking about Edmund Blithe, the first of the Returned, and how his life had changed now that he was alive again.
“Better the second time around?” the announcer on the television asked, speaking directly into the camera, laying the burden of answering squarely on the shoulders of his viewers.
The wind rustled through the oak tree in the yard near the house, but the sun was low enough that it drove horizontally beneath the branches and into Harold’s eyes. He held a hand over his eyes like a visor, but still, the dark-skinned man and the boy were little more than silhouettes plastered against a green-and-blue backdrop of pine trees beyond the open yard and cloudless sky out past the trees. The man was thin, but square-framed in his manicured suit. The boy was small for what Harold estimated to be about the age of eight or nine.
Harold blinked. His eyes adjusted more.
“Who is it, Harold?” Lucille called a second time, after realizing that no reply had come to her first inquiry.
Harold only stood in the doorway, blinking like a hazard light, looking down at the boy, who consumed more and more of his attention. Synapses kicked on in the recesses of his brain. They crackled to life and told him who the boy was standing next to the dark-skinned stranger. But Harold was sure his brain was wrong. He made his mind to do the math again, but it still came up with the same answer.
In the living room the television camera cut away to a cluster of waving fists and yelling mouths, people holding signs and shouting, then soldiers with guns standing statuesque as only men laden with authority and ammunition can. In the center was the small semidetached house of Edmund Blithe, the curtains drawn. That he was somewhere inside was all that was known.
