by S. M. Hulse
I don’t want to talk about the government with Samuel. “I thought they sealed up those old shafts.”
“They did. This one’s so old they sealed it with wood, not concrete. About rotted away.” He shrugs. “Dad told me about it when he took me up there. Ain’t even that deep. Never found the vein they sank it for, abandoned it pretty quick.”
I try not to think too hard about the shaft. When I was in high school there were some weekend parties at one of the adits that had been busted open a long time ago. I was always relieved to have my wheelchair as an excuse not to go. Wasn’t the parties or what went on at them that bothered me, but the dark. Lanterns and flashlights are nothing against the black of a mine, the consuming depth, the sense that such a descent might not be reversed.
“When I was down that shaft I started thinking about what if none of it happened. Not just Archer and Mom, but Dad, the mine collapse, all of it. What if none of it ever happened. Great, right? But I realized if we took it back that far, if Eden and Gethsemane never closed, I’d probably have grown up and spent my whole life down shafts like that.”
“You would’ve still had the baseball scholarship. Or the Army.” If you hadn’t given them up for me.
“Maybe. Or maybe it would’ve been, ‘Oh, just one summer. Just one year.’ The mines aren’t so easy to avoid in a town like this. I know you were too young, Jo, but I wish you could remember when Dad used to come home after his shift. He’d already showered at the locker rooms, washed the tunnels off him, but he’d come home and smile at us and try so hard to be happy, but you looked in his eyes and it was like all that dark was still clinging to him, like there was no relief in it because he knew he’d have to go right back down tomorrow.” He looks at me. “I got plenty of complaints about the sawmill, Jo, but at least I can see the sun.”
I watch him, but as usual can’t make any sense of his solid expression, his guarded eyes. It’s not like him to ruminate this way, and I’m not sure what he wants me to say. “The mines closed,” I remind him. “You never had to go down them. You never will.”
“I know. And I never wanted anything to happen to Dad, or Mom, or you. Never wanted to see this town die. I’m not saying I’m glad those things happened; I’m not. But if you think about changing the past, where do you stop? How far back do you go? Let’s say Dad hadn’t died but instead the mines wore him down and turned him mean. Or I joined up with Kev after all and was on that Humvee with him.” Samuel isn’t looking at me as he talks. His gaze roves across the empty kitchen, lingers over the uncovered hole he punched in the wall all those years ago, pauses at the back door Archer kicked in. “I’ve spent a long time thinking that everything that happened to our family was pure curse, that our lives would’ve been so much different—better—if all those things hadn’t happened. But these last few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about how we get where we are, how we become who we are. About how things lead to other things, and how they change a life.”
I recognize this tone, its earnestness and urgency, its hint of mania. And I recognize the logic, too, such as it is, with its holes Samuel ignores and the connections only he sees. The particular forcefulness behind the words I hear only when he’s still trying to banish doubts. This is the way he talks when he’s trying on a new conspiracy theory. A new philosophy he’s decided explains the world, his world. A new justification for beliefs and actions others condemn.
“Maybe it’s just because I was down in that dark alone—you know how the dark is, Jo, how it twists your thoughts—but that day in the shaft I started thinking about whether I really should have spent so long wishing for a changed past. Whether I might’ve been wrong. Whether it really would have been better if all those things never happened.”
It would have been better for Emily.
I think I’ve kept the words in my head, silent. But then I look at Samuel and see that he’s gone pale, that I might as well have slapped him across the face with all the force I could muster, and I realize I’ve spoken aloud.
He passes a hand over his face, closes his eyes. The bead of blood smears across his jaw. Cadmium red. Stain on skin.
* * *
I have no idea what time it is. The clock packed away in the storage unit. The microwave with its glowing display, too. It’s late, or, more likely, very early. I am tired, both in body and mind, and I yearn for sleep but resist. Go to sleep and it will be morning. And I do not know what morning will bring.
Samuel sits on the floor below the kitchen sink, his back against the cupboards. He turns his plastic cup of water in place on the floor beside him, like a bar patron nursing a beer he has no intention of finishing. An excuse for his presence. An excuse to stay. “How’s your face?”
I look at him, confused, and he puts a hand to his cheekbone. I touch my own cheek, feel the scab forming over the scrape I got falling from Lockjaw. “Oh,” I say. “It’s fine.”
He looks toward the dark hallway, so suddenly I think he must have heard something, and I feel my pulse accelerate. “You know Hawkins didn’t kill Archer, right?”
Have Samuel and I really never spoken of it? “Of course I know,” I say. “I was there.”
“I know, but with the shock and all … I’ve never been sure how much you remember about that night.”
“Everything.” Still he stares toward the hall. “I’ve always known it was you, Samuel.”
“Were you afraid of me?”
My brother turns toward me, and for once I can see what’s in his eyes, what he’s hidden from me for twelve years: the horror of what he did, and how its weight has bent and burdened him. “No,” I say. “Samuel, no. I was never afraid of you. You saved me. I felt safe because of what you did. I knew you would always protect me.”
He looks at me several seconds longer, as though searching my face for any betrayal of a kindhearted lie. Finally he nods. “I’m glad.”
It’s never occurred to me Samuel might think I was afraid of him. Surely he remembers all those nights afterward, when I couldn’t fall asleep unless he guarded the entrance to my bedroom. Surely he understands that my own fears were never about him, that I managed them—even conquered them, mostly, in time—only because of him. “I know Hawkins meant well,” I say, “but I wish he’d never come up with the idea of taking the”—I almost say blame, reject the word just in time—“credit for Archer’s death. It’s made you think it was shameful.”
Samuel looks at me, something almost like a wistful smile crossing his lips for the briefest moment. “That wasn’t Hawkins’s idea,” he says. “It was mine.”
I almost ask why, but before I can form the question, I know the answer. Me. Samuel wasn’t concerned for himself. Wasn’t concerned with what people might think of him. He worried they would think it meant he couldn’t care for me, that he was too damaged, maybe even too dangerous. Suddenly I’m angry with Hawkins. I can picture my brother making the proposal, maybe that night, maybe sometime the next day. Samuel could have done that, could have ordered his thoughts even in those moments, seen the coming days and weeks and months, anticipated the thoughts and judgments of the counselors and social workers: trauma, damage, responsibility, anger, rage. It would have been framed as being for our own good. Hell, maybe it would have been for our own good—I cringe at the thought, but force myself to acknowledge it—maybe Samuel and I would have been better off if we had been separated. Samuel, at least, might have been better off if he had been allowed to process what he had done, grieve, recover. Leave my care and problems to someone professional, someone more equipped to deal with them. Move on with his life. And if I can see all that now, why wasn’t Hawkins able to see it then? Why did he allow himself to be talked into a cover-up by a traumatized teenager? And I know the answer to that, too: guilt that he didn’t get there in time to stop Archer, to save Samuel from having to do it himself.
“Don’t be angry with Hawkins,” Samuel says. I scowl at him. Unfair that he can read me so easily, when I so rarely know what
thoughts pass through his head.
“It wasn’t necessary,” I say. “It was self-defense.”
“The first hit knocked him down,” Samuel says. “The second knocked him out. The third killed him. I hit him twelve times after that.”
More than a dozen times, Devin said.
“People would have understood,” I insist. Hear the doubt in my own words.
Lightning again, bright enough to wash the room white, the thunder coming while the memory of the flash still burns my eyes. The kitchen lights flicker, die. I feel my breath catch, force it back to its regular rhythm. Only the dark.
Samuel turns on his flashlight, sets it upturned on the floor beside him. It casts a distorted circle on the ceiling, reflects enough light into the room to bring us both out of the shadows. “Thank you,” I say, and Samuel nods.
“Battery won’t last,” he warns.
More thunder. I look at Samuel, to see if the sound still troubles him the way the dark troubles me. But he doesn’t move, his face still as a portrait, and if the thunder makes him feel anything at all, it doesn’t show.
He is not like Archer. Archer was evil.
“Jo?”
“What is it, Samuel?” Already the light in the kitchen has begun to dim.
“Are you afraid of me now?”
I watch the filament as the light fades, see the glowing wire soften from a hot yellow to a brilliant orange to something closer to the color of cooling embers. The darkness encroaches again.
I let the silence stretch until it has lasted so long no answer I could give would matter.
* * *
I don’t remember nodding off, but then Samuel is waking me, and I’m slumped in my chair. Still dark. “Go to bed,” Samuel says. “I’ll still be here in the morning.”
I stifle the urge to ask him to promise. If he says it, he means it. I was able to trust that before the bombing. Now I won’t be able to trust him whether he promises or not.
“Does the flashlight have anything left?”
Samuel switches it on; it glows weakly. Off again. “Might get a minute or two out of it.” He hands it to me.
I move down the dark hallway to the bedroom. The cloud cover heavily veils any moonlight there might be, and with the security lights out along with the rest of the electricity, I see nothing through the uncovered windows. Too dark even for shadows. I close the curtains anyway, then transfer to the bed. Don’t bother undressing, just stretch out atop the quilt. My eyelids already dropping. “Samuel?”
I hear his footsteps in the hall, and then he’s in the doorway. His gaze lands on the painting of the house, propped on an easel near the window. He crosses the room, bends to look closely at it, though it’s so dark I doubt he can make out much. “Is this blood?”
It’s such a startling question I gasp, try to cover it with a scoff. “Of course not.”
“Looks like it.”
“It’s earth,” I insist. “Soil from the meadow. Ore from the mines. Water from the creek. Ash and earth. Ash and Eden.”
Samuel continues to stare at the canvas, raises two fingers as though to touch it, skims them through the air a millimeter or two over the painting. “You think about all that’s happened in this place,” he says, “and you realize maybe blood and earth aren’t so different.”
I don’t particularly want to consider the possibility. It sounds thoughtful, to some extent, but also a bit unhinged. “Just dirt, really.”
He straightens, starts toward the door.
“Samuel,” I say again. He stops, and I remind myself that I vowed not to ask. That it won’t matter if I do.
“I’ll be here,” he says softly. “I promise.”
He goes upstairs. I take the flashlight off the table, clutch it in my fist. I’m tempted to turn it back on, let it provide enough dying glow that I might fall asleep—if I can sleep until the sun comes up, who cares if the flashlight burns itself out for good in the night?—but I don’t trust myself not to wake in the dark, so I hold it tightly, hold tightly to its promise, and let exhaustion do its work.
* * *
The usual nightmare wakes me: sounds in the darkness, shots, footsteps, strikes. I open my eyes to the blackness of night, fumble for the flashlight, hear it clatter to the floor. I try to catch my breath. No way to know how much time has passed, but it can’t have been long. The previous day seems like a dream itself: the mountain lion in the woods, Samuel finding me, talking in the kitchen. I scan the floor, trying to make out the flashlight, but there is nothing.
I am trying to decide whether to call for Samuel when I hear his step on the floorboards. I almost don’t believe he’s really here—a dream after all—until I see his form in the doorway. There is something both comforting and unsettling in his knowing to come before I called. He doesn’t ask what woke me—I never told him about my dreams, even as a child, though of course he must have guessed what they contained—just says, “Upstairs?”
He wraps me in my quilt, carries me easily up the stairs, sets me gently on the bed in my old room. “I’ll get your chair.” It doesn’t seem to have surprised him that I’ve had a nightmare this night, and I wonder if he thought about it while he was at the cabin, if he knew I would have nightmares and be left to weather them alone.
Samuel comes back upstairs, sets my chair beside the bed. “Found this,” he says, and presses the flashlight into my hands. “Careful if you use it. I know it’s dim, but anyone sees it is gonna wonder how you got up here by yourself.”
I look out the window. There’s the barest hint of dawn in the southeast, a thin band of gray encroaching on the black. “I’ll be okay.” I put a hand to my cheek, feel the dried tears there. “I need to wash my face.”
I move to my chair, go down the short hall to the upstairs bathroom, mindful of the open top of the staircase. I close the door behind me—there are no windows in this bathroom, so the darkness seems more ordinary here, less threatening—and turn on the tap. The water is cool, and I feel my head clearing as I splash it on my face. I turn my chair back toward the door, feel the tire catch on something.
Samuel’s clothes on the floor. I pick them up automatically—he the slob, I the neatnik, a dynamic unchanged since childhood—and as I fold his jeans, my cell phone falls from one of the pockets into my lap. I pick it up, glance involuntarily toward the door. Part of me thinks it might be a trap, a test, though that isn’t like him. And besides, Samuel didn’t expect me to be upstairs. Did he? I should be relieved to have the phone back, but realize instead that I’ve been relieved to have it out of my possession, to have a reprieve from the responsibility it brings. I cup a hand over the screen to minimize the glow, touch the power button, not sure whether to hope for the battery to be drained or not. The screen lights up.
Seconds to decide. Though that’s not really true, is it? I’ve had more than a month. Every day I let pass I didn’t ride over the ridge was a decision. Every time I didn’t tell Hawkins about the cabin was a decision. And I know I could put the clothes back on the floor. I could pretend I didn’t find the phone. But I can’t pretend that wouldn’t be a decision, too.
Hawkins keeps his cell off at night—Dispatch knows how to reach me at home, he says—turns it on at 9:00 a.m. and not a minute before. I type quickly. When I’m done I let my thumb hover over the delete button, but I made this final decision when I rode into the mountains, didn’t I? I made this final decision the minute Asa told me Emily was gone. I give myself a moment more to change my mind, then press send.
He is here.
* * *
I wake to knocking on the front door. Glance at the bedroom doorway: empty. Samuel was there when I fell asleep, propped against the hallway wall, eyes closed, breathing even, one hand cradled in his lap, the other resting on the rifle beside him. I thought he was asleep but couldn’t be sure. For the first time, the familiar sight made me uneasy, and I hadn’t meant to let myself sleep.
I hear the knocking again, and I remember the
text message I sent in the night, and I see that it’s morning, and I hadn’t meant to sleep and it’s too soon and I’m not ready. “Samuel,” I call, but the name comes out more quietly than I intend and instead of calling again I transfer to my chair. I make it to the landing in time to see Samuel crossing the living room on the first floor, rifle still in his hand. “Samuel, no,” I say, and I know he hears this time but he ignores me. Hawkins will know he’ll have the rifle, right? Hawkins knows him well enough to expect that. But suppose it isn’t Hawkins, suppose it’s Devin or some faceless, anonymous SWAT-type people, but they wouldn’t knock, would they, so it has to be Hawkins.
Samuel pulls open the front door without even a pause to peer through the peephole—is he so eager for confrontation?—the rifle at a forty-five-degree angle, aimed toward neither the floor nor the person at the door. And Asa stands there on the porch. My impulse is to go to him, but I stop myself with my tires inches shy of the top step, feel the frustration build to something like a growl deep in my throat. I watch Asa blink, stare at my brother. He is very still, like a mouse frozen beneath the gaze of a cat, or perhaps like a cat that has spotted a mouse; he seems poised between retreat and attack, fear and fury equally plain on his face. I can’t see Samuel’s features, but I see the tension sharpen his shoulders, and before Asa can make his decision, Samuel lunges forward and grabs him by the collar, pulls him into the house, kicks the door shut, raises the rifle.
“No!” I am startled to hear the word come out not as plea but command. Startled again to see my brother obey me. The rifle lowers only a couple inches at first, and then he lets its muzzle drop toward the floor.
I try another command. “Let him go,” I say. “Just let him go, Samuel.”
