“Tommy?”
She didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to see. It wasn’t Tommy up there. She knew it wasn’t Tommy. She heard and didn’t hear. Tommy was dead and this was another boy.
But she grabbed hold anyway of the wooden steps nailed into the tree trunk and she climbed her way up through the hole, scraped her long body through.
The boy didn’t look like her son. He was a small white child, his hair golden even at nighttime like a picture in a JCPenney catalog. Not like her sweet boy with his light brown skin that seemed lit from within and his grin that split your heart in two. Nothing like her boy that was lost.
This was a different child sitting there with Charlie’s hand on his back.
The child looked up at her. He was all scratched up, his cheeks smeared with dirt and blood and tears, as if he’d crawled right up from the bowels of hell itself.
“Oh, baby.” She held out her arms to him and he scrambled over and threw himself at her, pressing his small body against hers so tightly it made her draw in her breath and lean back against the bark, so real and rough and hard against her spine.
She didn’t know if it was Tommy in there somewhere. She didn’t know how it could be. She thought that probably in her confusion she was making an honest mistake by wishing so hard that it was so. But she had known him by the look in his eyes that matched the look in her own eyes; he was one of the lost, one of her own.
Thirty-Four
Paul woke up. It was dark. He felt cleaned out. Clean. He must’ve passed out. He lay flat on the pine needles, looking through the trees at the night sky. A clear night. He could see stars looking back at him. There were so many. He always liked the stars. They weren’t coming down on him or judging him. They were just looking. None of it matters, that’s what the stars said. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.
He didn’t want to move. If he moved his eyes from the sky, he didn’t know what would happen to him.
Men were coming. He could hear them rustling. He could sense the flashlights invading the dark. They were moving through the woods. It was like a movie, only in the movie there’d be dogs. He’d be running in the movie, breathing hard. But he wasn’t. He was lying calmly, facing the sky.
“What’s that?”
“I thought I saw something!” He heard the real voices and the high, toy voices crackling from their walkie-talkies.
“Something’s here!”
Not something. He thought. Someone.
He thought he should run. He should be running. The boy had known somehow and he had told them and they had come for him. But he felt his body settling in deeper into the pine needles and the dirt.
He was remembering that day, now. June 14. He realized he had never really left it, he had always been there, in that day, hearing the boy crying out from the bottom of the well.
*
It had started with the cat.
He had been aware of the cat for at least a couple of months, its skinny body and black and white spots as much a part of the scenery as the shitbrown grass or the cornfield behind it or the gray fence that separated their property from the McClures’ and that the cat walked across every day. He watched it without thinking while he got ready for school, the way it walked down their fence one foot carefully after the other like it had a master plan it was following step by step, and he’d envied that mangy cat, that it could go wherever it wanted to go.
Then one day he was standing outside throwing a tennis ball against the shed and the cat was walking by on the fence and it looked at him. He felt it through his whole body, the cat looking right at him. Nobody looked at him like that lately. Not right in the eyes like that. The invisible man, that’s what he felt like sometimes. The high school was three times as big as his middle school had been and nobody paid much attention to freshmen anyway and he had no friends there since they had sold their good house and moved across town to this crappy rental. All his friends were at the other high school. He wasn’t picked on, but he found himself alone in the afternoons more often than not, doing his homework and playing his video games and throwing the ball over and over against the shed.
The next day he went out there to throw the ball again and the cat was there on the fence, and he brought it a bowl of milk and the cat came right over and lapped it up.
So he did it the next day and then the day after that, until the cat showed up when it saw him coming through the back door, like the cat was his. One time he was standing there and it rubbed right by him. He could feel its body pressing against his leg. Its coat was matted and he was nervous about touching it. It might have fleas or something. It was making a little noise. Purring. The feeling went right up his calf through his whole body. It made his whole body hum.
Then that Saturday he woke up late and saw the cat out there and when he poured the milk in the bowl he heard a shout.