The Year of the Storm (2 page)

—

W
e went for a walk in the woods.

It doesn't make sense, I know. Nine months earlier, your mother and little sister disappear into these woods, and when your father and you need some time together, some time to get away, to decompress, to try to leave behind the sadness that has overwhelmed your lives, you choose to go for a walk in the very same woods.

What can I say other than it's complicated? Both my relationship with my father and the woods. They're tied together, the woods and my father. From the time I could walk, I followed him through the trees, wondering at the solitude and dark quietness that no other place I'd been could match. In the winter, we hunted the woods, and in the spring, summer, and early fall, we walked a well-worn path to our special place to fish. We called it Big Creek because that's exactly what it was. There was a swift current and at its widest point, I could barely throw a rock to the other side. We never caught much more than wild creek fish, which are pretty small, but they make a good meal if you serve them with slaw and hush puppies and don't mind picking through the tiny bones.

It was where we went when we were happy. And more than anything, we wanted to be happy again.

The woods were bigger than us, massive and untamed, and they seemed like a great mystery. Each time we walked into them, dragging fishing gear or hunting rifles or skipping along the path, weighed down by nothing other than ambition, there was some hope—unspoken or otherwise—that we'd return at the end of the day with something life-changing.

Before we left that afternoon, Dad asked if I wanted to fish. “Had some rain,” he said. “Creek will be high. Might be a river gar that's got lost from the Black Warrior.”

I smiled. This was an old joke. He used to tell it to me when I was very little when I actually believed we'd catch one. I shook my head. “Why don't we just walk? I got a feeling that the river gar will probably stay in the river.”

He nodded his assent and we started off, trudging along the same path Anna and Mom had taken the day they disappeared.

In reality, I didn't enjoy fishing as much as I used to, although I still treasured any time that Dad and I had together in the woods. I wanted to go to Big Creek for a different reason. Along the banks were drifts of sand that collapsed under the weight of small animals, sucking them in. I'd seen a baby deer struggle for hours in the sand, before finally extracting his thin body and hopping feebly away. Everybody called it quicksand. It was the first thing I thought of when Mom and Anna went missing. In my mind, I saw Anna stepping into the muck, one tentative foot. I saw her thinking better of it, changing her mind, trying to pull it out, losing her balance and falling face forward. I heard Mom screaming and saw her diving in to save her daughter. Then they were both sinking, eyes upturned, struggling to glimpse the sky through the tops of the swaying trees.

According to my best friend, Cliff, quicksand was mostly a Hollywood invention and actually sinking to your death was next to impossible. Something to do with the density of the human body—I never could follow it all—but the authorities must have agreed because they made little effort to search the area, focusing most of their attention on the little cabin a couple of miles away. Whenever I tried to ask Dad about the cabin, he always shook his head and said the same thing. “Dead end.”

At Big Creek, we stood and watched the current jumping the smooth rocks, saying nothing, probably thinking the same thoughts. The day was cloudy and standing under the trees near the water made it seem much later, almost dusk. Somewhere overhead, a bird began a song and another joined in, dueling the first. Dad picked up a rock and skipped it across the creek. He was a tall man, but he seemed hunched now, weak in the shoulders, bending in the slight breeze.

“What do you know about the two girls?” I said. My voice sounded louder than I had expected, and I tried to pull it back, ashamed suddenly of breaking the silence.

Dad picked up another rock and weighed it in his hand.

I wasn't sure if he heard me, and I was all set to let it go when he began to speak.

“It happened in the early sixties, when I was just a little kid. I don't remember any of it really, but I grew up with the stories, same as you. They wandered off or were kidnapped or killed. Hell, nobody knows. Law enforcement in this town.” He spat into the creek. “‘Frank, we're doing the best we can,'” he said, imitating Sheriff Martin's slow drawl. “‘It ain't like they left a trail of crumbs.'”

“But wasn't there something about the old cabin?”

He shrugged. “That was a separate incident. Maybe they're related, but nobody knows that either.”

“What happened?”

He threw the rock. It landed heavy, breaking the surface of the water and sinking. He turned and fixed me with a hard look. “I thought we were going to do something fun today.”

I didn't know what to say. I looked away, not wanting to meet his eyes.

“This kind of talk is for shit,” he said.

He stepped closer to the water and knelt down. He studied the stream as if reading some message in it and I took the hint. He wanted to be alone.

The quicksand was a few hundred yards upstream and I wandered that way, noticing the change in the bank as I drew closer. Gradually, it went from solid to damp to squishy. The quicksand didn't look like anything dangerous. If anything, it just looked like any other area right near the creek. The difference could not be discerned by the eye, at least not by mine. When I felt like I was getting close, I picked up a stick and poked around at the ground until I felt it give way. I tossed the stick in and it lay on the surface, too light to sink. Looking around, I found a large stone. I tossed it up in the air and it hit the quicksand with a gurgling sound and started sinking. Within seconds it was gone, disappeared from this world, as if it had never been here at all.

T
hat night I lay on the couch long after Dad had fallen asleep in the guest room (he kept both Anna's room and the old room he shared with Mom shut at all times, as if opening them up might somehow cause him to spontaneously remember). I lay in a kind of half sleep, a comic book folded on my chest. The blinds were open, and I saw the rain as it began to pelt the house. I put down my comic book and walked over to the window, flipping off all the lights in the den so I could see outside.

This one was just going to be a good soaking, the weatherman had said. No high winds or cloud-to-ground lightning. As I surveyed the front yard and saw nothing out of the ordinary, I wondered if the storm had brought the old man. Maybe he was some traveler from a different world who'd been caught in a thunderstorm and was whisked away from there to here until he ended up in our front yard.

I went back to the couch. An hour later, the rain had stopped and I was sound asleep.

—

A
round three thirty, a noise from the back of the house woke me. I sat upright, rubbing sleep from my eyes, trying to get my bearings. There was always a moment upon first waking when Mom and Anna were still here. It usually lasted only an instant, and when that instant was gone, I felt as if someone had torn a piece of my heart away. I wondered when it would stop,
if
it would stop.

The noise had come from the back porch. I waited, very still, on the couch for it to come again. Outside, heat lightning flashed, making the den glow pale and cold and throwing shadows against the walls.

Moving slowly and deliberately in the dark, I slipped into the kitchen, opened the silverware drawer, and grabbed a knife. Creeping around the dining room table, I had the knife raised, ready to strike, ready to go for blood if the sneaky old bastard with the oxygen tank had broken into the house. I made it to the back door that led out onto our makeshift deck, where Anna used to like to stand and sing her songs, the ones that always caused me and Dad to laugh no matter how bad our moods were. Pausing near the door, I waited until the sound came again—a shuffling of feet, a slight creaking out on the porch.

Keeping my back to the wall and the knife raised, I took a deep breath, turned on the light, and flung open the door. The porch was empty.

Almost.

Muddy tracks led down the back steps and out into the yard.

I stepped outside, shutting the door behind me gently to keep from waking Dad. With the knife in my hand I felt braver perhaps than I had any right to. Following the tracks to the edge of the porch, I paused at the steps, wishing for a flashlight. The wind chimes hanging from the eaves clinked together musically and then fell quiet. The backyard was silent, thrown out of proportion from the shadows of the looming forest.

I might have gone back in for a flashlight if I hadn't caught a sudden twist of movement near the entrance to the woods.

At first, I didn't believe my eyes.

Anna or her ghost—or maybe just a figment of Anna born out of my imagination—stood near a dense cluster of trees, her arms wrapped tightly across her chest, bobbing back and forth the way she did when she was in recovery mode. That was the term Mom had coined when Anna slowly started to bring herself back from an episode.

I stepped off the porch. One step onto the muddy grass and then two, keeping my eyes on her. Something—a fallen branch or vine—caught my foot, and I stumbled forward. I had to look away—just for an instant—and when I looked back up, she was gone.

I didn't think. I just reacted, sprinting across the yard, splashing mud as I went. I made it to the very edge of the woods, what Mom had always called “the gateway to the wild,” before pulling up and peering hard into an interlocking darkness, a tightly coiled mystery that I could not penetrate without light.

She was gone. Just like before. Just like Mom.

I wandered around the woods then, the knife still clutched tightly in my hand, looking for her, some sign or hint that she was still near.

It was too dark. I was set to give up and go back inside when I heard a sound nearby. It sounded like her laugh.

I walked slowly, purposefully, toward the laughing. I heard it again, now a little farther away, a little more to my left. I corrected my path and continued to walk. All around me I saw creatures twisting, writhing, reaching from the shadows. In my rational mind, I knew these were only trees and shadows and tangled kudzu vines, but my rational mind had been relegated to some nether region of my brain out here. I could hear it calling to me, but its voice was tiny, insignificant, easy to ignore.

What I couldn't ignore were the noises. Anna laughing. Anna saying one of her nonsense words. Sometimes only the slightest crack of a twig. I followed each sound, pulling myself deeper into the woods, my woods, the ones I'd grown up playing in, the ones that now seemed dangerous and unrecognizable.

I followed the sounds for a long time.

Just when I believed I'd heard the last of them, another one always came.

At some point, I looked around and realized I was near Big Creek, just a few paces from the quicksand I had visited earlier that same day. I stopped, suddenly afraid I was being lured into some kind of trap.

Then I saw her again.

This time there was no doubt. She stood just a few yards away, almost glowing in a sudden beam of moonlight, poised on the bank of the creek near what had to be the quicksand.

“Anna?” My voice came out barely a whisper.

She turned and cocked her head to the side, her eyes locking on mine. She seemed mildly surprised to see me. She waved her shy little-girl wave, the hand barely coming above her waist, her fingers wriggling.

“Hey,” I said, and stepped forward. Even as I took my first step, I felt the air around me changing, losing its charge, growing cold. Anna stepped back, a look of confusion on her face. “No, don't get upset, please, Anna.” With Anna it was always the same: confusion, followed by tears, followed by withdrawal. Once the process was begun, there was no stopping it. Still, I tried. I ran for her, hoping to grab her before she got away this time. I wanted very badly to touch her, to confirm that she was real.

She backed away, taking the first step, but I was fast. I reached for her arm and for a brief second, I held it in my hand. Then the wind blew or the light changed or I woke up—I couldn't be sure which—and she was gone, leaving me teetering precariously over the quicksand. I managed to keep my balance and stepped back just as another round of thunder shook the trees and the rain began to fall.

—

W
hen I finally went back to sleep that same night, I dreamed of Mom. To be fair, my fourteen-year-old perception of my mother and the one I hold now are quite different. At fourteen, I still had a kid's view of her. She was my mother, the person who held me when I fell down, the woman who tucked me in at night and kissed me on the forehead. She was the alpha parent who met all my basic needs as a boy, and I loved her with an unquestioning, desperate kind of love.

In my dream that night, I saw her as I liked to remember her best: sitting with her legs crossed in the backyard at sunset, smiling as I entertained her with stories of superheroes and their secret origins. What I did not see then but had to face later was the drink she inevitably held in her hand.

In the dream, we chatted as if she had never been gone. In the dream, I was content. Then it changed. She began to speak of things I did not understand: the cabin in the swamp, the way it was always dusk, the man who crept through the trees and frightened her more than she could explain.

“He won't let us out.” Now she was gone, and I only heard her voice, but it sounded far away.

“Who? Who won't let you out?”

My only answer was a bitter and abiding silence. She was gone.

I tried to linger in the dream. I tried to draw her back to me. I thought I might have heard her voice again, but the sound grew louder until it exploded in my eardrums, jarring me awake. I sat up, thinking for an instant that the whole world must be on fire.

—

D
ad was standing at the front door, the shotgun at his shoulder, a trail of smoke drifting toward the sky. The rain had come back, a gentle brush in the trees, on the roof.

“Dad?”

“Get upstairs, Danny.”

I ignored him and went over to the window and pulled back the curtains. The front yard was illuminated by the floodlights on either side of the house. It was empty, absolutely still except for the rain and the lazy smoke from the shotgun.

“What's going on?”

“Upstairs, now.”

I didn't argue. Dad's tone had sharpened. I knew better than to ignore him when he sounded like that.

Upstairs, I turned off the light, parted the blinds to my room, and looked out over the yard. Beyond the big oak, I saw the road and then the glossy wet blooms of cotton shifting in the wind. Just before I let the curtain fall back into place, I saw one more thing: the tiny orange flare of a cigarette burning hot in the dark night.