by Clay Chapman
Am I gonna have to take him down?
Mr. Stitch? Tamara laughed. Oh, hon, I love you and all but nobody can take Stitch.
We kissed on the carousel, practically in front of the whole town, thereby announcing our relationship to the rest of Danvers. Sure, there had been whispers, but rumors are just rumors that can always been denied. We shot them down all through the previous school year. But here we were, finally making it public. Coming out of hiding. Follow me, I remember her saying, taking me by both hands and dragging me into the maze. The outside world washed away. There was nothing to hear but the winding channels of cornstalks bristling in the breeze.
Better block out an hour before braving the maze. An hour, at least. Ol’ Hal prided himself on crafting an expansive labyrinth full of twists and turns. This wasn’t a simple in-and-out affair. I learned that the hard way, losing myself alongside Tamara in its meandering corridors. Losing ourselves. But we held each other’s hands the whole time. I sensed everyone’s eyes on us, neighbors and coworkers processing this new bit of information: They’re a couple.
Tamara wanted to flaunt it. Be loud and be proud, she insisted. Kissing me at every corner, electric with this revelation. She pulled me further into the maze, until I felt completely discombobulated, losing my sense of space. Of time. How far had we gone? Tamara kept leading the way, as if she knew exactly where she was going. The spider luring in the fly.
When we reached Mr. Stitch, I remember feeling the tug in my arms as Tamara pulled me up to his post, until we were standing directly before him. His burlap sack of a head slumped over his right shoulder. Tamara grinned, still out of breath, and asked, What if we tied the knot?
I laughed, unsure if she was kidding or not. You mean like, right here? With him?
I’m sure Mr. Stitch has officiated plenty of weddings. She leaned into my ear and whispered, Dare you to say his name three times.
For real?
Everyone in Danvers does it. It’s the rules. Now it’s your turn.
Okay, I said, playing along. Mr. Stitch.
Tamara grinned.
Mr. Stitch…Just as I was about to say his name a third time, my throat caught. I couldn’t say it. Not two breaths before, I would have laughed at myself for feeling afraid, but now, out here, in the cornfield, sensing Mr. Stitch’s button eyes pressing down on me…I couldn’t do it.
That was last year.
Tonight, Elijah tags along. He’s insisting he’s ready to finally brave the maze, demanding from the back seat that we take him. Tamara is indecisive, but Elijah begs for the entire ride. When begging doesn’t work, he moves to whining. And when whining doesn’t do the trick, he shifts to shouting. “I wanna go in the maze! I wanna go in the maze! I wanna go in the—”
“Funny,” Tamara says from behind the wheel. “I didn’t hear a magic word, did you?”
“Please! Please! Pleeeeeeeease!”
Opening night is always the most crowded. That’s when the high schoolers take over the fair for the night. All the seniors, out on their dates, making out in the maze.
I campaigned for opening night.
You sure we shouldn’t wait till Sunday? Tamara asked. It’ll be hormone central.
That’s exactly the point…We might as well be eighteen. Sixteen! I’ll take feeling any other age again before the oppressive weight of adulthood starts to weigh me down…
I didn’t know you were feeling so weighed down, Tamara said.
That’s not what I meant…
She didn’t say anything for a while, lost in thought. Know how they used to kill witches?
Uh, burning them at the stake?
Pressing, she says. They were made to lie on their backs. A wooden board was place on their chests and weighed down with one rock after another. Their chests eventually collapsed…Is that what parenthood feels like to you?
Clearly I had said the wrong thing. Putting my foot in my mouth is nothing new, but Tamara has a rather novel way of making me twist in the wind whenever I do this.
She turns into the lot, letting the air-traffic-control kids guide her Cherokee toward the designated lane.
“Please, Mom?” Elijah whimpers. “Can we? I really wanna go.”
“I already said no, hon. Not tonight. It’s too spooky in the dark.”
“What’s it gonna hurt?” I ask. “Maybe he’s ready.”
“Whose side are you on again?” Tamara side-eyes me. “Don’t you dare team up on me.”
“If Dad says I’m ready, then can’t I go?” The name rolls right off his tongue.
“I’m sold,” I say.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” she says to Eli through the rearview mirror. She’s always making deals with him. “We’ll come back on Sunday. You and I can do the maze then, okay?”
“Nooo! Sunday’s boring!”
Sunday afternoon is “family day,” which is to say the church-going crowd, of which the surrounding county still has its fair share. Opening night might be when all the teens come out, sneaking flasks topped off with peach schnapps pilfered from their parents’ liquor cabinets, but Sunday is a much more, well, chaste affair, for the stroller crowd. The maze will be full of families guiding their tykes through in full daylight.
Not like tonight. Not in the dark.
“Please, Dad? Pleeease?”
This kid is good, I’ll give him that. I glance at Tamara before answering to see if she caught it. I almost miss the look in her eye that very clearly states: Don’t you fucking dare, pal.
“Sorry, bud,” I say, defeated by Look #34. “We’ll come back first thing on Sunday before church gets out. We’ll have the corn all to ourselves, I swear.”
“It’s not fair,” Elijah mutters under his breath. Cursing us. The silent treatment is new. Something he’s testing out on us. Only time will tell if he keeps this one in the tool kit.
It’s not that the Fall Harvest Fair feels exactly like a flashback to better times. It’s more like waltzing into some idealized version of the past we all want to believe in. Imagine a whitewashed rendition of yesteryear, filtered through an Instagram lens of yellowing leaves crackling under our feet, the wistful scent of autumn in the air. A real Bradbury throwback.
The Friends of Danvers who specialize in face painting offer up a trio of prefab faces: Pumpkin. Skull. And to honor our signature seasonal mascot, the scarecrow himself—Mr. Stitch.
Eli chooses scarecrow. Painted centipedes skitter across his cheeks, twisting stitches winding over his smooth skin. I don’t like it. Something about it—I don’t know—unnerves me. He looks like a doll. A Cabbage Patch Kid. Can’t he pick pumpkin, like all the other kids?
I notice a mother in a burgundy sweater walking with her own family. She’s staring at me. When we make eye contact, she smiles. I can’t help but turn as she passes, just to see if she keeps looking. Why is she looking at me like that?
“You’re looking pretty proud of yourself,” Tamara says, snapping me back.
“How’s that?” Truth is, as a matter of fact, yes, I am feeling rather proud of myself. I can’t help but replay what Elijah said back in the Jeep: Please, Dad…?
“You two are going to conspire against me, aren’t you? Boys against girl?”
“You set down the ground rules and I’ll enforce them, I promise. I got your back.”
Eli quickly fills up on funnel cake, dusting his chin and cheeks until he looks like the ghost of a scarecrow.
“He’s beginning to trust you,” Tamara says. “Open up.”
“You okay with that?” I ask. Have to ask. It doesn’t take a mind reader to sense she’s thinking back to the years when it was just the two of them. She single-handedly raised Elijah—and now here I am, infiltrating their family dynamic and insinuating myself into their routine.
She swears she doesn’t miss the single-parent period of her life.
The struggle to make ends meet. The pity from other parents. Poor you, the married mothers all coo. She doesn’t miss the coffee-shop gossip at all. But after carrying the weight of her family on her shoulders for years, it’s been dizzying to suddenly have somebody else help. I have to keep reminding her that she doesn’t have to do this alone anymore. This is about us, I always say. We’re in this together.
A chill seeps into the air. I’m wearing a red-and-black flannel jacket, which I zip up to keep the encroaching cold away.
Tamara slows her pace, staring at my chest. “Where’d you get that?”
“Get what?”
“The jacket.”
“This? I found it.”
“In the garage?” She won’t stop staring—not at me, but the flannel.
“Yeah.” I spin around, arms out, modeling it for her. “What do you think?”
“It looks nice on you,” Tamara manages to say.
Someone else is staring at me. A silver fox of a father volunteering at the cotton candy machine weaves a pink web around a paper cone for a group of kids. He grins as we pass. The salt-and-pepper bristles across his chin glisten with pink sugar crystals. Why is he looking at me?
“Richard?”
Do I know him? I’ve seen him before…But where? Why does he look so familiar?
“Richard.”
That’s when it dawns on me. It’s Eli’s biological father. Hank. But it can’t be. Can it? I’m just imagining it. I’ve seen pictures of him buried in shoeboxes in my studio, so I know what he looks like. But as far as Tamara and I know, he lives in Richmond, two hours away.
“Rich.”
I snap back. “What?” Tamara hasn’t noticed Hank yet—it’s him, isn’t it—and I’m not sure I want her to. I’m suddenly second-guessing myself. Of course it’s not him. Why would he be here?
Tamara’s face has dropped. Oh no, she saw him, too. She spins around once, twice, three times. “Wait…where’s Elijah?”
I scan the crowd around us. He was just behind us, eyeing the goldfish game not two seconds ago. I swear I saw him leaning over the railing of the game, peering into the dozen glass bowls holding their foregone fish, each one swirling in their own foggy body of water. Where did he go?
“Elijah?” A question desperate for an answer. Then it becomes a demand. “Elijah!”
The contours of his name sound strange to me. There’s uncertainty in her voice. Fear. It only grows worse the louder she shouts.
Until it becomes an absolute scream. “ELIJAH!”
Other carnival-goers slow down, loosely gathering around us. I sense their awkwardness, and I know they’re wondering if they should ask us if we need help. I smile gratefully but shake my head to ward them off. It’ll be faster if we just start looking for him.
We agree to separate. She’ll find a volunteer and I’ll backtrack. Surely somebody has seen him. He couldn’t have gone far. That’s what people say in these moments, right?
He couldn’t have gone far.
He was right here a second ago. That’s what they always say. He was right here. A kid doesn’t just disappear into thin air.
What if…? The gnawing thought creeps into my mind. I shake it off, but it refuses to quiet itself. What if somebody took him?
That doesn’t happen. Not here. Not in our town. Not where everybody knows everybody else. Impossible. That’s why people move to a place like Danvers in the first place.
To be safe.
These swirling thoughts have already occurred to Tamara. It was probably the first thought that popped into her head: Somebody’s taken my baby. Moms always imagine the worst. Somebody’s taken my baby boy. My parental instincts haven’t fully kicked in yet. I mitigate. I try to assess with a calm, cool head. What’s the more likely scenario? That Elijah simply got distracted and wandered off on his own, when he should’ve been keeping up with the rest of us?
Even as I reason with myself, I feel like I’m failing him by not fearing the worst. That’s what parents do. What real parents do. They fear everything. Everything. Until life proves otherwise, life itself is a threat.
I push through the crowd at a brisk walk that turns into a full sprint once I realize that I’m not seeing him anywhere.
I stop before the mouth of the maze. An archway of jack-o’-lanterns curves over my head. Each carved pumpkin has a battery-powered LED light flickering within, mimicking a candle.
“Elijah!” I call out. “Eli.” There’s no peering over the towering stalks. Hal’s made sure of that. I have to plunge into the labyrinth, make my way through its rows like everyone else, navigate each twisting lane, suffer every dead end. But there’s no time. I know that every slipping second is sending Tamara deeper into a catatonic state, the panic consuming her.
I’m going to find him. I have to find him. There isn’t any other option. The second I saw the maze, I knew he was in there because that’s exactly what I would’ve done if I were in his shoes. This is where I would’ve gone. Where every boy goes.
I run through the maze. I rush past all the other parents still with their kids, forcing my way through the clusters of teenagers.
“Watch it, asshole,” some dipshit in a varsity jacket shouts as I pry apart his crew.
I spot a flash of blue through the stalks and think it looks like Elijah’s T-shirt. Isn’t he wearing a blue T-shirt? I can’t remember anymore. The only thing to do is plow through the cornstalks and make my way into the neighboring lane.
“Elijah!” When I burst through the maze’s wall, I stumble upon an unsuspecting family. Their son lets out a shout, startled by my abrupt entrance. I try to play it off, pretending I’m a part of the festivities, a volunteer minotaur that pops out and says boo. “Sorry…Sorry.”
I swore I’ve already come this way. I’m so turned around. Now I have to backtrack. The maze is making me dizzy. The cornstalks seem to turn as I pass, like they’re watching me.
Where am I? Where’s Elijah? My pulse hammers against my temples. I feel my heartbeat full-on throbbing in my head, pressing against the inside of my skull. I need to think. Need to—
Pray.
I need to stop and get my whereabouts and just—
Pray.
I’m willing to do anything. Do whatever it takes to get him back. Do I need to get down on my knees? Clasp my hands and say the words out loud? What do I need to do, what do I have to say, to make this all go away? Make it stop? Please, I beg, please, just bring Elijah back.
I halt before the body suspended from its post. Its arms are slung out at its shoulders. Its head is slumped to one side.
Mr. Stitch’s bloated chest is disproportioned. The hay stuffed into his shirt settles into misshapen muscles. One arm is bulkier than the other. His head is a burlap sack, the faded letters sugar cane printed across his forehead. But most unnerving is Mr. Stitch’s new addition to his annual getup, something that’ll surely cause a stir with the churchgoing crowd on Sunday…
A pentagram.
Red rivulets dribble down his flannel shirt onto the flattened cornstalks below. Purely on reflex, I reach out and brush my finger along a wet tendril. Did I really think it was—what, blood? I recognize the bright crimson tincture right away. Red tempera paint. I use the same brand at school. The paint is still fresh against his chest, from the looks of it.
Do I want Mr. Stitch’s help? Somehow, the spirit of this dead Confederate will know where to look? Isn’t that what kids do here? Come to Mr. Stitch? Let him whisper his stories?
Anything. I am willing to try anything. What do they all say? How does the story go?
Watch out for Mr. Stitch. Don’t get too close…
“Mr. Stitch.” I can’t recognize the sound of my own voice.
And whatever you do, don’t ever, ever say his name three times…
“Mr. Stitch.” This doesn’t
sound like me.
You’ll wake him up.
“Mr. Stitch—”
Just the faintest release of air spills out from his hay-stuffed chest. It’s wet. Ragged, like damp burlap ripping. I take a step closer. To listen.
“Is this who you’re looking for?” The voice comes from behind me, but in the vertigo of the moment, I swear, I believe Mr. Stitch says it.
I spin around and find Elijah. His eyes hide beneath his flop of hair. He can’t stand still, shifting his weight from one foot to the next, as if he needs to pee.
I rush to him and kneel before him. “Oh God,” I say. “You’re okay, you’re okay.”
The ground is soft, the stalks pressing down into the mud, leaving me unsteady. I have to clasp Elijah’s shoulders to balance myself. My grip is tighter than it should be, but I need to hold on to him, not just for balance, but to make sure I don’t lose him again.
Then the slightest spike of anger wedges itself in. “You can’t run off like that! We were looking everywhere for you! Your mom is scared to death.” Funny how you can be so afraid one second, and then the next, something just switches. The current of emotion reverses course and some self-righteous sense of indignation takes over. How dare you make me feel this afraid, this roller coaster of emotion seems to say, as if this were all Elijah’s fault. Am I blaming him? I don’t think I had shaken him that hard, but he’s crying now. “Don’t you ever do that again.”
In the blinding heat of the moment, I hadn’t acknowledged—hadn’t noticed—the woman standing next to him. I had launched directly into my parental tirade.
It was Mr. Stitch, right? I called him, conjured him, and he brought him back. Right?
Then who is this woman?
She looks familiar. She doesn’t go for brand-name catalogue clothing like the other Danvers moms. I notice her gray-blonde hair. There’s something all-natural about her. I spy a girl hiding behind her hip. Sandy. This must be Sandy’s mother. I’d met her at the open house at school. I have a vague memory of her but can’t remember if she’s a Mrs. or a Miss. All I know is that she bombarded me with quickfire questions, grilling me about my lesson plan. Art is never high on any parent’s list of priorities, but Miss Levin was thorough. “Is this your son?”
