The Year of the Storm (23 page)

I
have said that I believed storms are a kind of magic. There are other kinds too. There's the magic of being young, of believing in things that only a young person can fathom. There's the magic of the unexpected, of returning to a full house, a family reunited despite all the evidence that suggested it would never happen. And finally, there's the magic of memory.

Dwight suggested to me once that what had happened to me was really no more than a series of coincidences from which (“rather nobly,” he added) I'd tried to assemble meaning. He would have me see it like this: My mother leaves with Anna. A delusional Walter Pike returns to town and learns that they are missing. This feeds his delusion and his guilt. He contacts me and tells me his story. The timing was perfect, Dwight would say. I was fourteen, an emotional wreck, susceptible to anything. I needed to believe. Add to this the storm, me hitting my head on the ladder, the three missing days in the shelter. My mother and Anna coming back.

“You piece it all together and make something bigger. It's human nature, Dan. It's how religion began at the dawn of time. It's the root of superstitions, fears, any number of things. We take the random and give it meaning. Hear what I'm saying.
We
give it meaning. It doesn't inherently have meaning.”

Dwight's a smart man, but he doesn't have any imagination. He forgets about storms. The way they change things, the way they wipe out what came before and make room for what will come later. And what is a storm if not a series of unlikely coincidences? The temperature, humidity, dew point, any number of other factors must be just right in order to produce a big one. Yet they happen all the time. Should we dismiss them, pretend they don't matter?

Maybe we should, but I can't. I'm not one of these people who believes that every storm is a message from God, a deluge of Judeo-Christian reckoning spilled out over a world of sinners. No, storms are nothing like that. Instead, they're puzzles, cryptic labyrinths through which we can glimpse power and transformation, and yes, even meaning. Maybe they mirror the human experience after a fashion, the way lives are shaken free in the wind, the way years pass in torrents, leaving us lightning flashes of memory, fleeting images, seared to the brain for further consideration, electric treasures that wait for us, buzzing dimly. The way (much like the trees) some people fall and others remain standing, at least for a little while longer.

—

I
saw Walter Pike only one more time after that day in the shelter, but he told me something that I'll try to hold on to for the rest of my life.

This was after all the long sessions with police, after the frustration of Mom not wanting to talk about where she'd been, after all the hugs and kisses, and after the moments of stillness when I wanted to pinch myself because a miracle had happened. Not a coincidence. A miracle.

Pike was easy to find. I just walked to the storm shelter. I stood there, looking at the landscape, trying to remember what the swamp had been like, trying to imagine how it had been right here in this very spot, ushered in perhaps by that terrible storm.

Magic. It's there. We just don't look closely enough.

“I hear you had a surprise waiting for you when you got home?”

I turned and saw Pike standing behind me. He still wore the same dirty T-shirt he'd been wearing the day I pulled him through the mud. His oxygen tank lay at his feet, the tubing twisted into a knot, and he was smoking a cigarette. I ran to him. When I got close enough, he dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. He reached out for me. We embraced for a long time, his hand patting my back as I cried.

When we separated at last, I saw that his face was wet too. His one good eye looked at me closely, lovingly, and I knew this would be the very last time I ever saw him.

“Listen to me, Danny. Listen real good.”

I nodded.

“You brought your mother and sister back. Never for a second think otherwise. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you believe me?”

I hesitated. I wasn't sure what I believed.

He shook his head and squeezed my shoulder hard. “You gotta believe.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Say it.”

“I believe.”

“Good. It's going to be hard. I can tell it already is. I was like you. Hell, I am still like you, but seeing this . . . this is confirmation. I just hope I die before I begin to doubt again.”

“Don't say that—”

He shook his head violently. “It's the way I feel. Believing in something . . . something more . . . it changes everything. You understand that, right?”

I told him I did.

“What happened to you inside that storm shelter . . . you're going to have grief over that. You think it's hard now? It'll get harder, the older you get, and you'll want to take it and bury it somewhere, like I did those photos. Except it'll be more of a symbolic kind of burial. Do you know the kind I mean? Where something just hurts too much to think about and you push it aside and pretend it never happened?”

I almost laughed. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“Good. Don't do it with this. That doesn't work.” He leaned in, his face almost touching mine now, his good eye locked on mine. I'll always remember him like this. “Here's the key. Remember. Don't forget. No matter what, don't forget.”

He let go of me then and stepped back. For a second longer he held my gaze, and then he looked away. He reached for his oxygen tank and tucked it under his arm. He was crying, but he refused to look at me again. He turned and walked back into the trees, and for a moment I entertained the notion that he'd been a ghost all along, just as I had originally thought, but the moment was over. I knelt down and picked up his discarded cigarette butt. It was real. I held it for a long time, and when I stood up, I slipped it into my pocket. I might need it one day.

No matter what
, he'd said,
don't forget
.

—

A
nd that is why I'm writing this down. I took some liberties with Pike's story, but I think I got the important stuff right. His voice—that was what had to be there. The details matter least in the end. But I'll never forget his voice in that dark cabin. It swept me along to 1960, until I felt like I knew Seth as intimately as a best friend. Sometimes, I still dream about them both. Though these dreams are simply fleeting images at best, there is always a strong sense of joy in them. I awake from one with a feeling of euphoria that can sometimes last me throughout the day.

There is a flip side to these dreams. A dark one that comes less frequently, but with a startling urgency. In it I am trying to explain to everyone I know about the other world, the world of the shadows that lay just on the other side of . . . what? Words always fail me in the dream, and they fail me now. Upon waking, I realize how ludicrous it all is, and sometimes I find myself bellied up to a bar before four in the afternoon, drinking whiskey with beer chasers and trying to reinvent my past.

There are only a few more things to tell. The first is something I did the day after talking to Pike for the last time. I took a walk deep into the woods, to where the ruins were. I found the remains of Pike's cabin and poked around for a while. For some reason, Tina and Rachel were on my mind. I felt like they were free now, moved on to wherever we move on to, but something nagged me. It was like a sentence without a period. Complete, but not quite. I shrugged it off and continued walking out to Big Creek, where the quicksand was. I took a solid stick I found on the ground and poked at the quicksand. I tried to move the stick around some, but it was too thick. The sand had lost some of its moistness and felt almost like dried mud. Finally, I let go of the stick. It didn't sink. I found a heavy stone from the creek and tossed it into the sand. It too didn't sink.

I'm not sure how, but suddenly I knew what that period was. I knew how I could put it on the end of the sentence.

I was back an hour later with a shovel. It was easy digging because of the softness, but I had to dig for a very long time before I found what I was looking for—the gleaming white of a bone.

I paused long enough to let the adrenaline rush subside before I began to dig again.

—

S
heriff Martin and Deputy Sims were the first to come out. They parked the squad car out near the cabin and hoofed it over to the creek and the hole I'd dug in what used to be quicksand.

I was waiting for them with Dad. We'd made the call a couple of hours earlier, and the first few people Dad spoke with seemed as if they didn't want to believe that his fourteen-year-old son had managed to dig up two skeletons. Honestly, I suspected they were a little weary of our family, which is something that makes me smile a little when I think about it now. If nothing else, we sure did make Martin earn his salary for a few months. Eventually, Dad talked to the right person and was told somebody would be out when they had a chance. We'd never expected Sheriff Martin himself. His arm was still in a sling from being tossed around by the tornado. It seemed clear he was in no mood to be here.

“Frank,” Martin said, and I thought I heard disdain in his voice.

“Sorry to bother you, Sheriff.”

Martin grunted.

Sims stood back, not saying a word, just glaring at me and Dad like we were pieces of shit he couldn't wait to scrape off his boot heels. I stood still, right beside the little pit I'd carved out of the ground, wondering how they'd react once they looked inside.

“What you got?” Martin said.

I pointed to the pit, and Martin stepped forward so he could see inside. For a long time, he just stood there.

“Well?” Dad said.

Martin whistled, low, almost to himself. Sims stepped forward. “Well, I'll be damned.”

I
t took a year or so of forensic work that I don't understand to determine that the bones belonged to Tina and Rachel, though most of the town was like Sheriff Martin—they knew instantly. A year or so later, a man from Nashville, Tennessee, wrote a book piecing it all together, and most of it was pretty damn close to being right. The only stuff he didn't nail were all the parts that happened with the slip. He surmised that the girls had been abducted by Sykes and tortured in the cellar below the cabin, and when he'd killed them, he tossed their remains in the quicksand. He even interviewed me and asked me a lot of questions about Walter Pike. I answered them as honestly as I could without going into the stuff about the slip. He tried to get me to talk about that, but I'd learned from my mother how not to talk about something. Silence. A cold, slightly confused stare. Worked every time.

—

T
here's something about turning thirty that makes a person reevaluate. Eleven months ago, I sat down to decide the things I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt. The list was short, but I did come up with a few things.

I believe there is an afterlife. I believe this world is only as real as you make it. I believe that in certain places, it can always be twilight and that you can make the world whatever you want it to be as long as you are foolish and hopeful. I believe if you love someone enough, you can pull them through a lot of mud, but ultimately, only that person can choose to walk away from it and not come back. I believe in all of this, yet each day I feel these beliefs slipping away from me. Each day I feel my time in the swamp becoming more shadowy, more like a dream than a reality. Then I remind myself that dreams are just a different form of reality, and I feel better.

Mom remembers what happened. I know she does. It's in her eyes, the pregnant pauses she can't fill when I mention something about the time she and Anna went away. The way she always turns the channel when one of the documentaries about the missing girls comes on cable. It must have been a kind of mystery to her, but trying to solve it was something she was not willing to do.

I wish I could tell you that we lived happily ever after, that she finally made the effort to stay out of the muck, to stop slipping, but I can't. We had some good times, and my memories of the days after her return are mostly positive, but I won't suppress the negatives. Not anymore. Pike said not to forget.

I'm trying.

Still, as each year passes, I blame her less.

Dad? He never spoke of Walter Pike again. He even asked Sheriff Martin to stop pursuing him. “Maybe he's harmless. Danny seems fine. There's no evidence that he did anything to him.” I overheard this one afternoon when Dad believed me to be asleep on the couch.

Anna kept being Anna. Of all of us, she was the least affected. Her world never changed. Her world never will, at least not in this lifetime. There is a comfort in that too, something I envy, because even as I type these words, I am plagued with doubts, pressed down by a feeling that I am wasting my time writing this, or worse, recording the rantings of a lunatic. Thanks to Dwight, I know all the psychological terms, but in the end I don't think they're very helpful.

Last week I canceled my session with him. This week, I'll do the same. I can hear him anytime I need to. I know what he believes and what he'll say. Besides, I'll be on the road for at least the next week. I'm going to Oregon. A little town called Sodaville. It sounds like a happy place.

It's a spur-of-the-moment kind of trip, one that I decided to take after doing some Internet searches a few nights ago. Despite Dwight's admonitions that I leave well enough alone, I Googled “Seth Sykes” and was surprised that only a few relevant hits came back. There was a man in California, a teenager in Ohio, and a poet in Oregon. I did a little more research and found that the poet had written a poem called “Slip.” I searched frantically for a copy to read online, but couldn't find one. Coincidence? Maybe. Still, it's enough for me. I leave tomorrow.

Maybe I'll find nothing at all, or maybe it'll be him. That's almost more frightening because then there is a chance he'll tell me how Walter got it all wrong, how none of it really happened like he claimed, and all the things I believe might finally fall down. A house of cards all along.

But when I think like this, I try hard to remember fourteen, to remember faith and a man named Walter Pike and the strange places we're capable of visiting when we're foolish enough to believe.