The Year of the Storm (19 page)

But I was free.

The door was still open, and I saw Anna there, just inside, and that was all I needed. I pulled myself to my feet and lunged inside. I hit the floor again and heard the door slam shut behind me.

Sykes began to bang on the door, shaking the entire cabin. He rattled the handle and must have thrown his body into it because it sounded like something big hit the door. None of it helped. I heard his footsteps clomping across the porch and back down the steps.

Then a silence, followed by the sweetest words I'd ever heard.

“Danny? Say ‘Brady.'”

“Brady,” I said, still lying on the floor, facedown.

Anna giggled. “Say ‘Brady
Bunch
.'”

“Brady
Bun-ch
,” I said, hitting the last
ch
hard like Anna liked. For the first time in nine months, I smiled the kind of smile that I felt deep inside, the kind of smile that a person can forget if he's not careful.

W
here's Mom?” I asked, standing up, brushing the mud off my jeans. If this was a dream, it didn't feel like any dream I'd ever had.

“Say ‘Mama.'”

“Mama. Where is she, Anna?”

She giggled.

I wanted to embrace Anna, to squeeze her tightly and nuzzle her neck, but those weren't things you did with Anna. Another thing you didn't really do with Anna: ask her questions. Well, you could ask all the questions you wanted, as long as you didn't expect an answer.

I looked around. It was mostly bare here: a single half-finished wooden table, two chairs, a worn-out dirty couch.

I stepped past the table. There was a short hallway and then a back room. A rug lay in the hallway. It was red and green, and the image of a deer gazed back at me. I tried to remember if there had been a rug in Pike's cabin, and I couldn't. Didn't matter. Two sides of the same page. Isn't that how Walter said Seth explained it?

“Mom?” I said, stepping over the rug. I knocked lightly on the door.

I pushed the door open. The room was empty except for a single bed. A window on the other side of the room framed a cluster of shadowy trees, and through their weblike branches, the full moon.

I sat down on the bed.

Confused, I tried to think of some possible explanation. How could Anna be here without Mom? I don't know how long I sat there just thinking. I hadn't panicked yet, but I think it might have happened soon if Anna hadn't walked in.

“Danny?” She stood in the doorway, on top of the rug.

“Hey, Anna.”

“Say ‘dark.'”

“Dark.”

“Say ‘in the dark.'”

“In the dark. Jesus, Anna, where's Mom?”

“Dan-dan, say ‘dark.'”

There was no stopping her sometimes. For this I both admired and hated her.

“Dark,” I said with a sigh. I could sigh all I wanted. It wouldn't bother her in the least.

“Say ‘in.'”

I stood up, planning on forcing her from the room. I used to do it all the time when we were younger. There was only so much a person could take.

“Say it, Dan-dan. Say ‘in.'”

I swear if she hadn't been like she was, I would have socked her right in the arm. Hell, maybe I still should've. Maybe then she'd shut up and give me some peace.

“Say it, Dan-dan.”

I yelled at her. “Shut up.” Right in her face. She didn't even flinch. I wanted to keep yelling, but why? The message would be worthless, incomprehensible to her, and I'd only be inflicting my anger on her to no purpose. I shook my head and lay back on the bed, resigned to just play along until something else struck her fancy.

“Say it, Dan-dan.”

“Say what?” I'd already forgotten.

“In. Say ‘in.'”

I'd never heard that one. “In.”

“Say ‘the.'”

“The.”
Brady Bunch
, my mind added automatically.

“Say ‘dark.'”

“Huh?”

“Say ‘dark,' Dan-dan.”

“Dark.”

The word was already out of my mouth when something clicked into place. It was more physical than mental. A leap in my gut. I sat up, not fully aware of why. Then it hit me. “Did you say ‘in the dark'? As in Mom is in the dark?”

She giggled.

I stood up and walked quickly back out to the hallway. Kicking the rug away, I saw what I should have thought of before, another hatch.

I knelt down and tried to twist the little steel nub that held the door to the cellar shut. It was stuck. I twisted it harder. It barely budged. I bore down, nearly cutting my fingers as I worked the nub, until I finally made it move and the door popped loose.

I turned to tell Anna I was going down, but she was already gone.

—

T
hat was something I thought about a lot later. Anna. Her ability to come and go as she wanted. I think in the end that may have been the most important thing of all. More important than my belief, my hope; more important than Pike's brokenness that made him seek me out, more important even than Seth finding the place to begin with. In many ways, Anna is the bravest person I know. Or maybe she doesn't even understand what it means to be brave. Either way, she's a miracle.

Dwight asked me once why I thought she was a miracle. Why I believed she saved my mother.

I asked him if he had a better explanation. He paused for what seemed like a long time. His head was down, and he seemed to be studying the little pad where he wrote God only knows what about me. When he looked up, his face was solemn, like it hurt him to say the next part.

“Go on,” I said. “I can take it.”

“A better explanation? I'm not sure if it's better, as much as it's the only explanation. What happened to you was a kind of prolonged delirium, Dan. I've been hoping you'd come to this conclusion on your own, but I can see that's not happening.”

I think what I said next surprised him. “I've thought about that. A lot.”

“And?”

“I reject it.”

Dwight shifted in his seat. Nodded. Picked up his pen to write something and then put it back down.

“I think it may be time to go back on the meds, Dan. I think—”

“No. No more meds.”

For a brief moment, I thought Dwight might lose it. He looked genuinely frustrated with me. I can understand that. I don't expect anyone to believe me. Some days I don't even believe it myself. Those are the days I open up my cabinet and stare at the pills Dwight insisted I take. I stare at them and wonder if it might be easier just to give in, just to . . . slip back into a fog. I'd been there before. The first few months that I saw Dwight, I took the meds. I have to hand it to him. He knew exactly what to prescribe. Under the spell of the medication, I barely thought about anything except the day-to-day. I slept well, and felt good, but I didn't remember, and that ate at me like a cancer.

See, remembering is everything. A small miracle every time.

—

I
went down the ladder. It wasn't unlike climbing into the storm shelter. Somehow, there was more light than there had been in the shelter, but other than that, I might have been climbing into that concrete bunker again. I was halfway down when I saw them.

Like an old film, I saw the girls, images against the dark wall, gauzy lace against a rust-blood wall. They burned and flickered and screamed silent, eternal screams, and I knew absolutely that this was why they hadn't left. This was why they were trapped. I watched, unable to tear my eyes away from their agony, mesmerized by their hurt, the sadness that seeped off them like blood from a deep cut.

I wanted to call out to them, to help them, to free them from the shackles where they hung, but when I took a step closer to them, they began to fade. Have you ever seen an old television? The kind that has to fade out when you turn it off? That was what it was like. They shrunk until there was only a single pinprick of light in the center of the wall. And then even that vanished.

The girls had just been afterimages, a kind of psychic residue. I was alone. Completely alone.

Or so I thought.

Gradually, I became aware of a presence behind me. A slow heaving, so slow it was barely detectable. I turned around and saw a dark shape in the corner.

I stepped over to her and knelt down. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they did, I saw her face.

I touched her hair. I kissed her forehead. It was as if she were in a coma. She didn't respond to my touch. She was asleep. She was in the dark.

Shaking her harder, I saw her eyes flutter. She looked at me. “Mom? It's Danny. I've come to take you home.”

She shook her head. “No.”

I shook her harder. Maybe she was still asleep. This didn't make any sense because I was here now and she was supposed to be happy to see me, and together along with Anna, we'd get out of here.

—

L
ater, Dwight would suggest that my mother's unwillingness to wake up was metaphorical, indicative of the fact that she didn't really want to come home.

I couldn't disagree. I mean, it wasn't something I thought about a lot. Mostly, I spent my time trying to get my head around the reality of it all. The swamp, the girls, and Sykes. Mom not wanting to come home was there, but it was hidden like a piece of glass that had been buried deep inside my heart, an aching part that I stayed away from once I realized how much it hurt to touch.

“She did,” I told him. “She just didn't know it yet.”

Dwight wasn't buying this. “So she wasn't ready?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“So, how did this make you feel, Dan? To come all this way, to want her back so much and then to realize maybe she didn't want to come at all?”

“Like a million bucks. Happy as a jaybird. Shit, how do you think it made me feel?”

He held up his hands. “Dan, I mean no offense. This is all obviously very real to you. I want to respect that. It's just a question.”

“It's more than real to me, okay? It's my life. What happened when I was fourteen—it defined me. It changed me, and for you to sit there and imply that none of it was real, that it was some psychotic episode brought on by hitting my head in the storm shelter—”

“Dan, I never said anything about a psychotic episode. What I'm trying to get you to understand is that your story is rife with meaning, with truths, even if it's not completely, literally true. Your mother, for instance. Wouldn't it be fair to say that her ‘slipping' into the ‘darkness' could be understood as metaphorical rather than literal?”

Of course it was fair. I hardly need a shrink to alert me to the metaphorical dimensions of what happened to me. It's easy for him to sit across from me and talk about metaphors. I have memories. Images that are vivid in my mind's eye. Still, there's a part of me that's reasonable enough to consider that people don't slip into literal darkness. That understands people slip all the time, and what a great metaphor my story is, but I refuse to see it as only that.

I refuse.

So what? What else is there?

The story. That's all I have in the end. Just the story. Pike's story. My story.

That's where the truth resides.

I
didn't know what to do about Mom. Not being able to make her wake up stumped me. I climbed out of the cellar to look for Anna. The house was empty. Wherever Anna had gone, she was there now, and Mom and I were alone.

Outside the window over the table, I saw the girls hovering near the trees. Pressing my face up against the window, I looked around for Sykes. Not seeing him, I decided to take a chance. I didn't know if it would help me with Mom or not, but I had a feeling it would help the girls.

I pushed open the front door carefully, just in case he was waiting outside. The swamp appeared deserted, silent save for the buzz of cicadas, the distant thrum of bullfrogs.

Walking quickly, I slogged through the swamp to where the girls floated.

Tina—she was the older one, right, the one Pike had had a crush on—moved to meet me. Again, I was struck by how present she was while at the same time it was like she was barely there at all.

“Why are you here?” she asked me.

“I came to help my mother and sister. I came to help you.”

“You're a fool.”

I stepped back as if slapped. I hadn't been expecting this.

“Why . . . ?”

“There's no leaving this place. You can come in, but look around you. Do you see a way out?”

“Maybe,” I said. “If you'll trust me.”

“Why should I trust you?” Tina asked.

“I know Walter. Walter Pike. He told me about Seth.”

She said nothing. A wind blew, and the image of her wavered. There was the light tinkling sound of bells.

“Seth couldn't help us either,” she said.

“What happened to him?”

“He's gone.”

“Where?”

“He's dead.” She said this as if there could be no question.

“Did he die here, in the swamp?”

She nodded. “He believed the quicksand near the creek was a way home. He believed a lot of things.”

“Are you telling me Seth killed himself?”

“He was a good person. He brought us here to help us. He didn't know what would happen.”

“What did happen?”

“We got stuck. He hated himself for it. He went to the quicksand.”

“To kill himself?”

“What do you think?”

“I think he left. I just don't know why,” I said.

“Why would he leave?” Tina said. “He had nothing to go back for.”

“That's not true. He had Walter.” It came to me then. I saw it all, and didn't even consider the possibility that I was wrong: Seth returning during the war, unable to even ask anyone where Walter was, but maybe guessing just the same. Seth going home and collecting the photos and the painting, putting them in the metal box and then burning the place to the ground. Where he might have gone after that was anyone's guess.

“You remind me of him,” Tina said.

“Who, Seth?”

She nodded. “You believe things. You believed you could come here and save your mother and sister.”

“I can save them. I think . . .” I hesitated, knowing I was heading toward rocky ground. “I think I can save you and Rachel too.”

“You're a fool.”

“Maybe so. But I have something I want you to see.”

She said nothing, waiting.

“I think it could help us both out. It's something you may have forgotten.”

—

T
ina followed me inside. Rachel, whom I had not heard speak yet, stayed near the trees, the outline of her dress a gauzy shimmer among the leaves.

Tina began to shake as we neared the hall. By the time I'd pulled back the rug to reveal the trapdoor, she was like an old film hitting a bad spot, a shuddering image stuck on the screen.

“No,” she said, and her voice was barely a whisper. “No, no, no, no. Why are you doing this to me?”

“Seth brought you here to make things right, but this is not where you belong. You have to go down. Go down and face it. And . . .” I chose my words carefully now. “Understand that he doesn't keep you here. Not anymore. You can move on.”

For a long time, she didn't move. Her shaking stopped, and she seemed to be pulling her energy inward, causing the light that burned across her countenance to blaze brighter. I thought I had lost her, that she might implode from the misery of it all. It was as if her body had been frozen and no outward movement or expression was allowed. She pulled everything in, though, internalizing all of her anger and fear and despair. It was Anna who finally broke the spell. She must have come in behind us while I had all my attention focused on Tina.

“Tina,” she said. “I came to the cabin just like you said. I came, Tina. Say ‘We'll have fun in the cabin, Anna.' Say ‘There's a place where it never thunders.' Say it, Tina.”

The burning stopped and Tina looked me in the eye. “Okay,” she said.

—

T
hat has been one of the hard things. When I'm awake in the wee hours of the morning and the trees outside my window begin to take on shapes and I wonder if I'm insane or just blessed because of what I remember, this is one of the memories that I come back to, time and time again.

They had called to her. Bored, scared, alone, confused after Seth left, the girls promised Anna a place where it would never thunder. They invited her here. Somehow, Anna heard their voices. Somehow, Anna came.

Somehow. That seems to be the word I come back to a lot. Somehow.

There are nights I go to sleep with it on my tongue, repeating it like a prayer.

—

T
ina reached for the trapdoor. Her hand flashed and then went dull, almost ashen, and she clutched the handle and pulled up. It had stuck for me, and I'd had to jiggle it, work it loose before it popped open. For her, there was no resistance, and I wondered if any place existed—in this world, or the next—that these girls couldn't access.

What surprised me was the thing she did next.

She turned to me and whispered that she was sorry. Then without so much as touching the ladder or the ground, she sank. Straight down into the gap, as if her physical being—once so light—were now a lead weight.

She was there for a long time. Anna stood behind me. She said nothing, as if waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. Until we heard the sobs rising like wisps of dusky smoke from below. I knew that she'd seen what she needed to see—the same image that had greeted me: Rachel and herself, chained in Sykes's cellar. She'd seen the very thing she'd been trying to forget, the very thing—I hoped—that would set her free. Going back to that cellar had caused her to remember, and remembering was what she had to do.