Penpal (24 page)

My mom received a call at six o’clock in the evening. She knew who it was, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. However, what she did comprehend made her leave immediately.

“Down here … now … son … please God!”

When she arrived, she found Josh’s dad sitting perfectly still with his back to the hole. He was holding the shovel so tightly it seemed that it might snap, and he was staring straight ahead with eyes that had no life or light in them. My mother approached him slowly and tried several times to get his attention, but he wouldn’t respond to any of her words. He only reacted when she tried, with delicate and hesitant hands, to take the shovel from him.

When she touched the shovel, his vice-like grip on the handle tightened, forcing all the blood out of his fingers to the point that they were as white as bone. He dragged his eyes slowly to hers and just said, “I don’t understand.” He repeated this as if he had forgotten all other words, and my mother could hear him still muttering it as she walked past both him and scraps of broken wood to look in the hole.

My mother told me that she wished that she had gouged her eyes out before she faced downward into that crater, and I told her that I knew what she was about to say and that she need not continue. I looked at her face; it was expressing a look of such intense despair that it caused my stomach to turn. It struck me that she had known of this for almost ten years and was hoping that she’d never have to tell me. I imagine that she made a firm decision all those years ago to never share this information, and as we sat there at the same weathered table that had forever been the meeting spot for our talks, I felt a twinge of guilt for forcing her to break the promise that she made to herself. Because she never intended to tell me, she never came up with the proper arrangement of words to describe what she saw. As I sit here now, I’m met with the same difficulty of articulation, but for different reasons.

Josh was dead. His face was sunken in and contorted in such a way that it was as if the misery and hopelessness of all the world had been transferred to it. The assaulting smell of decay rose from the crypt, and my mother had to cover her nose and mouth to keep from vomiting. His skin was cracked, almost crocodilian, and a stream of blood followed these lines and dried on his face while pooling and staining the wood around his head. My mother wanted to look away. She wanted to move her eyes, even if just a little bit, so that she could see something else, anything else. But she couldn’t. Her eyes had locked with Josh’s, which lay open and facing up out of the tomb, and although he couldn’t return her gaze, it felt as if he were looking directly at her.

She said by the look of him he had not been long-dead, but she couldn’t hazard a guess because she simply had no referent. Selfishly, and horribly, she wished that more time had passed before that day, so that time and nature could have brought the mercy of degradation to erase the pain and terror that was now etched into his face. She said that it felt as if he knew she’d be right there – that he had been waiting for her to enter his line of sight; his open mouth offering an all-too-late plea for help to ears that could do nothing for him. She forcefully covered her eyes to break the stare and attempted to confront the scene as a whole, but the rest of his body wasn’t visible.

Someone else was covering it.

He was large and lay facedown on top of Josh. As my mother’s mind stretched itself to take in what her eyes were attempting to tell her, she became aware of the significance of the way in which he laid.

He was
holding
Josh.

Their legs lay frozen by death, but entangled like vines in some lush, tropical forest. One arm rested under Josh’s neck only to wrap around his body so that they might lay closer still, while the other arm lay limp with a bent elbow against the wood, his fingers entangled in Josh’s hair. The man’s back was covered in dirt, and as she looked back to the area near Josh’s head – ashamedly avoiding his gaze – she could see that some of this scattered earth had mixed with the blood and formed mud that lay still wet in the damp casket.

As the sun passed through the trees, its light reflected off something pinned to Josh’s shirt. My mother stooped to one knee and raised the collar of her shirt over her nose so that she might block out the smell while she attempted to train her vision on the object rather than Josh’s face. When she saw what had caught the sunlight, her legs abandoned her, and she nearly fell into the tomb.

It was a picture …

It was a picture of me as a child.

Gasping and trembling, she staggered backwards and collided with Josh’s father, who still sat facing away from the hole. She understood why he had called her now, but she could not bring herself to tell him what she had kept from everyone for all these years, not that the information could do any good now anyway. Josh’s family never knew about the night I had woken up in the woods. They never knew about the Polaroids; they never knew about the note she had found on my pillow. They never knew the real reason we had moved out of our old home with such haste.

She had moved us into a new house to protect my life, and she had kept all of these things a secret so that life might be a normal one. She had talked to the police; she knew now that she should have talked to Josh’s parents, but there was nothing to say anymore. As she sat there resting her back against Josh’s father’s, he spoke.

“I can’t tell my wife. I can’t tell her that our … that our little boy—” his speech staggered in fits as he pressed his wet face into his dirt-caked hands. “She couldn’t bear it …”

After a moment, he stood up, still shuddering, and lumbered toward the grave. With a final sob, he stepped down into the coffin and positioned himself over the dead man’s body. Josh’s dad was a big man, but not as big as the man in the box was; however, he seemed unable to grasp this fact. He grabbed the back of the man’s collar and pulled hard – it was as if he intended to throw the man out of the grave in a singular motion. But the collar ripped, and the body fell back down on top of his son. As this happened, what air remained in Josh’s lungs was violently forced out through his mouth, and the father shrieked as he both watched and heard his son’s last, empty breath.

“You mother fucker!”

He grabbed the man by the shoulders and heaved him back until he was off Josh completely. With one final, straining motion, he shoved the man until the body sat awkwardly but upright against the wall of the grave. Josh’s father rested his hands on his knees and breathed heavily and painfully as he looked down at his only son. He grunted with anger and turned his attention to the man, and my mother could see the rage disappear from his eyes as something else replaced it. He staggered back a step. And then another.

“Oh God … Oh God. No. No, please God. Please God no! No! No!”

In a struggling but powerful movement, he lifted and pushed the corpse of the man completely out of the ground, and as he did this, there was the distinct sound of glass first hitting and then rolling against wood. It was a bottle. He picked it up and absently handed it to my mother.

It was ether.

“Oh, Josh.” He sobbed as he cradled his son. “My boy …my baby boy. Why is there so much blood? What did he do
to you?!”

As my mother looked at the man who now lay facing upwards, a chill came over her as she realized that she was facing, for the first time, the person who had haunted our lives for over a decade. Everything about our lives had changed since this person had entered it, and she had lost so much sleep thinking about this man. When she pictured him, whether in waking life or a dream, he was always evil and always terrifying; the cries of Josh’s father seemed to confirm her worst fears. But as she stared at his face, she thought that this didn’t look like who she imagined at all – this was just … a man.

As she looked upon his frozen expression, it actually looked serene. The corners of his lips were turned up only slightly; she saw that he was smiling. This wasn’t the expected smile of a maniac from a film or horror story; it wasn’t the smile of a demon, or the smile of a fiend. This was the smile of contentment or satisfaction. It was a smile of bliss.

It was a smile of love.

When she looked down from his face, she saw a tremendous wound on his neck from where the skin had been ripped out; she realized that this wound must have been the source of the blood that stained Josh’s face and the wood upon which his head rested. Initially, she was relieved by the realization that the blood had not been Josh’s. Perhaps he had suffered less, and in a strange way, this small comfort amidst the madness set her slightly at ease. She looked to Josh’s father who sat in the coffin, still holding his son to his chest, and wondered if she should tell him; she wondered if this tiny consolation was worth distracting him from his own thoughts, whatever they might be.

She drew her eyes away for a moment to think, and they lingered on the scraps of wood that lay scattered to one side of the hole – many of them still connected to a large, brown blanket. She recognized that these pieces of wood must have been the top of the box that Josh’s father had torn away before calling her. Her drifting eyes and wandering thoughts both suddenly focused on what she saw in the debris, and she realized that she had been wrong to hope for any comfort now, in this place. Her mind raced to make excuses for this object’s existence, but she was too tired to listen to anything but the truth anymore. She stared at the metal handle that was screwed into one of the boards of wood. She brought a hand up to her mouth and whispered, almost as if she was afraid to remind the world of what had happened.

“They were alive.”

Josh must have bitten the man’s neck in a desperate attempt to get free, and although the man had died, Josh wasn’t strong enough to move him. When my mother realized this, she began to cry at the thought of how long he might have laid there and how he must have felt. She shuddered at the thought that he wouldn’t have even been able to see in that dark place.

She crouched down beside the man and looked through his pockets for some kind of identification, but she only found a piece of paper. On it was a stick figure drawing of a man holding hands with a small boy, and next to the boy were initials.

She told me that the initials were mine. She asked me if I understood what it might mean, and I lied to her and said that I did not.

As Josh’s father carried his son out of the grave, my mom slid the piece of paper into her pocket and stood up. He was muttering that his son’s hair had been dyed, but he wasn’t talking to my mother; it seemed almost as if he had forgotten that she was there. When she looked at Josh, she understood what his father was saying – Josh’s hair was now dark brown, though it looked almost black as it clung to itself, cemented by blood.

Josh’s dad delicately laid his boy on the soft dirt and began gently pressing his hands against his son’s pants to feel his pockets. My mother noticed that Josh was oddly dressed; his clothes were all far too small for a boy his size. As the father applied pressure to his son’s left pocket, there was a crinkle. Carefully, he retrieved a folded piece of paper from Josh’s pocket and slowly unfolded it, not knowing what it might be. As he was returning the paper to its original shape, a small key fell from its folds and onto the dirt. He picked it up and looked at it as if he expected it to say something to him. After a moment, he pushed it into his front pocket before returning his attention to the paper.

He studied it but was vexed. With no immediately meaningful information to be gained from it, he handed the piece of paper to my mother. She nervously accepted it, but she didn’t recognize it either.

When I asked her what it was, she told me that it was a map, and I felt my heart shatter. Josh was finishing the map – that must have been his idea for my birthday
present. He had resumed the expedition on his own. That was our first great adventure, and he had decided to finish it, for me …for us. Tears began streaming out of my eyes as I learned this, and I found myself desperately hoping that he hadn’t been taken while working on it. Despite everything that had happened, he had kept the map in his pocket for almost
three years.

She heard Josh’s father grunt angrily and looked to see him pushing the man’s body back into the ground. As he walked back toward the machine that had found this spot for him, he put his hand on a canister of gasoline and paused with his back toward my mother.

“You should go.”

“I’m so sorry … Is there anything I can do?”

“It’s not your fault … It was me … I did this.”

“You can’t think like that. There was nothi—”

“I did this!” he roared.

There was silence for a long time. He seemed to be searching for the right words, or maybe he was just searching for a decision about whether he wanted to say them at all. Finally, he continued, his voice flat with almost no emotion at all.

“About a month ago, I was cleaning up the site on the new development, a block over, when a guy approached me. He asked if I wanted to make some extra money. Well, with my wife not working, I’d take just about any job, so I asked him about it. He said that some kids had dug a bunch of holes on his property, and he offered me $100 to fill them in. I told him that was no problem; just tell me where and when. He said that he wanted to take some pictures for the insurance company first, but if I came back after 8:00 P.M. the next day, that would be fine; he said I’d have no problem finding the holes.