Many Happy Returns

I think I love him, Daddy, is what she’d said. This was what Cal was thinking about when he heard that the van had gone off the road.

There were five young people in the van, but that number had not been easy for the initial officers at the site to determine. Not at first. Some of the bodies had been thrown from the vehicle, probably when it caromed off the red oak, but possibly after, when it slid careening down the culvert and tipped over onto the passenger side. But even before there was an accurate count, many members of the Sanders volunteer fire department were crying. Cal Wilson was the Sanders town constable, and he was trying his best to keep from coming unglued, but it was difficult. He knew at least two of the teens who had been traveling in the van. He knew they’d been in there because he’d waved good-bye to them as the van had pulled out of his driveway.

It would be Christmas in two weeks.

They had to cut the van open. They peeled the roof back like the lid of a can of pudding. There were two teens still in the vehicle. Two more by the tree, one in the culvert. Everyone on scene was thinking alcohol was involved, but no one wanted to say it. The emergency personnel were gentle, as though they were lifting babies from cribs rather than bodies from a wreck.

The living wouldn’t look at each other, and as soon as vitals were checked, and found to be defunct, they would not look at the dead, either.

“Donny,” Mike Smolenski, the newest volunteer, was not much older than the kids who died in the wreck. “I think I saw this one move.”

Donny glanced over at “this one,” a girl he knew. Not well, but enough to feel and predict all the resonance her death would have. He knew many of these kids, by sight if not by name, and he knew that no matter what happened in the next couple days, this would be the accident that they would be talking about fifty years from now, the crash that would be etched into the town consciousness permanently, as though with a rusty nail. This would be like the day, twenty-seven years back, when the O’Briens’ horse barn caught fire and five horses burned to death. The only thing people talked about when they talked about that fire was the sound of the horses screaming.

There wasn’t any screaming now, on this night. Not yet.

“She’s moving, Donny. I really saw her move.” Mike sounded terrified.

“Too early,” Donny said. He had heard of some coming back that fast, but more typically, it would be anywhere from six hours to a day. There was the one time that a kid, a drowning victim, had sat up in the back of the ambulance, unable to talk because water had filled his lungs. But all the others, that Donny knew of personally, took their time about it.

He’d just never heard of one coming back that fast. They weren’t sure how long the bodies had been there, but the trucker who called it in said that the snow hadn’t filled in the tire tracks yet, the treads like a long black snake uncoiling off the road. Donny’d arrived seven minutes later, and Cal rolled up three minutes after that.

“She’s moving. Her eyelids are moving.”

Donny went to her. He felt for a pulse, and it wasn’t there and then it was. Faint. An echo of life.

Donny swore. “We’ve got one still alive!” he said. “Alive!”

He yelled orders, people moved. Cal Wilson was running. Mike moved. Other than she-of-the-fluttering-eyelids, none of the other bodies on the ground had moved.

Cal Wilson ran over too. The girl on the ground was bruised and bleeding, but she wasn’t his. Hope, like love, can be a dagger in the heart.

Not his. Not Mandy.

She was still in the front seat of the van.

They made Sanders High School the center for grief counseling. There were those in the area who thought that was an idiotic idea, seeing the school as a large brick-and-chalk-dust reminder of those very kids they’d just lost, but there were others who understood. Sanders High School, for many, was the last remaining edifice that held some sense of the community that Sanders once was. It was where Mayor Marshland had town meetings. It was where the rotary club met. It was where the spaghetti suppers and the fundraisers and the socials were held. It was where Alma Gustavson held adult ed classes in macramé and needlepoint.

It was where the dead kids had gone to school.

No one could fault Mr. Stockton, the school’s guidance counselor, for his breakdown early in the day. He was qualified to help the graduating seniors, all twenty-nine of them, to locate and apply to college, or to help them find placement with one of the few local businesses within city limits or in Wells, the larger town that the van had been returning from. He’d known these kids well, and one of them especially well, having guided her through a troubling situation at home. Four kids D.O.S. in one accident, with a fifth comatose and most likely crippled for life in a bed at Wells hospital. Who could provide guidance or counseling for that?

A “grief specialist” from Boston was brought in. Again, there was talk, and grumbling, but at the end of the discussion most agreed that it was necessary. This way the town could pour all of their grief—and their resentment, and their hatred—into this person and then send her back to Beantown with her check and never have to see her again.

Cal Wilson took a seat toward the back of the room at a respectful distance from the other grieving parents. A few seats ahead of him, Bill Trafton lifted his hand in a curt wave of acknowledgment. Bill owned Sanders Hardware downtown. He was also a volunteer fireman who was fortunate enough to have missed the call the previous night. Cal was glad it was he, and not Bill, that had found his son Curtis lying in the snow.

Chuck Barnes looked back at him but didn’t acknowledge him at all. Chuck’s wife didn’t even turn around.

They started the meeting with introductions—of the parents, the counselor, and various town functionaries who wished to bear witness to their grief. After a brief shuffling of feet and staring at the floor, the woman from Boston started the session.

“Good evening,” she said. “Let’s talk about why we are all here.”

She pronounced the “ r ”. She was wearing a sharp suit that set her apart from the grief stricken, who were mostly in sweatshirts and jeans. Mayor Marshland was worried that she wasn’t a Bostonian at all, but a New Yorker in disguise.

“We don’t know for certain why they come back sometimes, or even if they will come back.” She stopped, and smiled. She was a small woman, young, with glasses and long chestnut hair.

“But we know that the possibility exists, and we should talk about what will happen if they do return.”

The parents of the children were silent. It was difficult to tell what they were thinking—whether or not they felt as though they were being counseled or if they were only a moment away from dragging the lady from Boston out into the street. But the woman thought she knew.

“I know what you are thinking. I’d be thinking the same thing if I were in your position. All the things going through your head. Is my child coming back? Is he not coming back? Do I want her or him to come back? Will he or she be different? The same? What will I do?”

She paused and looked at each of the parents in turn.

“You are wondering: what will happen if my child comes back from the dead?”

Cal nodded along with the others, but that isn’t what he’d been wondering at all.

He wished he’d stayed with Laura Davis at the hospital. Laura’s son Stevie had been in the far back seat, the only boy without a date. Cal had offered Laura a ride—he supposed they were friends, at least their kids had been friends for a few years—but Laura said that she wanted to be there when Stevie “woke up.” That’s how she’d put it. Woke up. As though her son’s death was just a bad dream they were sharing, one that would vanish the moment he opened his eyes.

The doctor said that it was too early for any of them to start coming back, that she should go talk to the trauma specialist, but Laura wasn’t having any of it.

“Doctors don’t know jackrabbit about it,” is what she’d said. Jackrabbit. She’d be sitting in the hospital with a mystery novel and the largest cup of coffee she could get from Dunkin’ Donuts, while Cal and the other parents were listening to the woman in the expensive red suit tell them how they felt.

“I’ll call you,” Laura had told Cal, her eyes clear as she looked up at him from her blue vinyl seat. He wanted to hold her hand, to hug her, but in the end he stood there like a statue. Laura lost her husband in a fishing accident a few years ago, and Cal had spent the last few months wondering if enough time had passed for him to ask her out.

“Call me?” he said.

“You’ll be the first to know,” she replied. Ice clicked in her giant plastic cup. She drank her coffee iced, even in January. “If anyone wakes up.”

“Oh,” Cal said. “I’ll ... I’ll take notes for us.”

It was the sort of stupid platitude that he regretted immediately upon speaking, but Laura’s eyes softened for the briefest of moments, making him glad that he’d at least said something.

Wake up, he thought. Please, Mandy, please wake up.

Cal realized that the trauma counselor was still speaking, was ticking off all the different things that you could expect if your child returned from the dead.

“They will be slower. They won’t be able to move the same way that they could move in life. Some of them will not be able to speak, and most will not sound anything like they used to.”

Something unraveled in Cal’s chest. He loved many things about his daughter, but the sound of her voice was very high on his list. Her always-reliable “Hi, Daddy!” when he got home from work was quite often the highlight of a hard day. Those two simple words washed away his wounds.

But “I think I love him, Daddy,” had a different effect on him at the time, he recalled. His initial reaction was one of shock, as though Mandy had dropped an obscenity. His second reaction was one of concerned amusement. He liked Jake but doubted sincerely that the boy could sustain his daughter’s interest over the long haul.

Love? he thought. You don’t know jackrabbit about love.

Cal saw Jake’s father Chuck Barnes scowling beneath his trucker’s cap. His wife sat cowering beside him like a plump beige mouse taking shelter under a cabinet. Mandy and Jake started dating last March, nearly a year ago, but it wasn’t until last week that Mandy had informed Cal that she was in love with him.

Jake had been driving the van when it left the road. Mandy had been sitting next to him in a new sweater she’d bought just for the party. He was her first real boyfriend.

The woman from Boston cleared her throat, as though she’d noticed that Cal’s attention had been drifting.

“Their lack of mobility and their inability to communicate immediately can be very difficult to deal with,” she said. “In most cases you can expect them to make incremental improvements in both of these areas. Some differently biotic people have shown marked improvements over time, to the point where many of them can move and talk nearly as well as they did in life.”

Sandy Trafton raised her hand, Bill’s arm tightening across her shoulders. The grief counselor gave her an encouraging nod.

“Why do some differently biotic people make improvements?” she said, her voice raw from crying. “How can we help them?”

That, Cal noted, earned a pale smile from Mayor Marshland.

“I’m afraid that we don’t understand the why of almost anything that concerns the differently biotic,” the counselor said. “Some studies indicate that db people respond favorably to encouragement and support.” Here she paused, her eyes flitting across the room as though to gauge who would and would not be providing encouragement and support. She stopped upon Chuck Barnes, who had crossed his thick arms, resting them upon his belly.

“Love,” she continued. “They seem to respond to love, just like any teenaged child.”

Cal saw Chuck make a comment that only his mouse-brown wife could hear. Chuck did not seem to notice his wife recoil from the comment as though from a blow, nor did he seem to notice the tears that were coursing down her pale cheeks.

“So we know a little about the how, but not the why. Since teens began returning from the dead—and new research indicates that the phenomenon may have begun as many as five years ago, much before the Dallas Jones incident—we have tried our best to study the phenomenon, but various...” She trailed off, again settling her eyes on Chuck. “...social forces have made a serious scientific inquiry difficult.”

Cal didn’t really care about a serious scientific inquiry. He just wanted his daughter back.

He wondered how he would have felt had something happened to her prior to the whole db phenomenon, back in the days when there was absolutely no hope of her returning. Would he have just let the massive tide of grief roll over him in one annihilating wave?

Mandy was dead. No matter what happened, Mandy was dead. But it hadn’t hit him yet, not in the way it should have, because he could still allow himself to believe that she was coming back. He could still deny what had happened to her because he could still hold hope that she would open her eyes and return to him.

But not everyone came back.

The grief counselor was still talking about other changes that could occur when she said something that snapped him out of his thoughts. “But perhaps the most traumatic aspect of a return that a parent can deal with is the lack of expression.”

Cal watched Bill’s hand moving in slow circles on his wife’s back and tried to swallow back the lump forming in his throat.

“Your child, if he or she returns, will not express emotions in the same way that they used to. Their facial muscles simply won’t work properly, and so much of the communication that used to pass between the two of you will be gone. You mustn’t confuse their inability to express these emotions with their not having them. I assure you, your child will be just as sensitive as they were in life, they just will not be able to show it. Do not get discouraged when your child doesn’t seem to be responding to your efforts to reacclimate them to ‘life.’”

She paused, her smile and voice softening.

“Don’t stop showing them affection and love. Your child most likely will not be able to smile, or frown, and will not be able to communicate the thousand little things that we can communicate with our eyes and mouths. It may not sound like much now, in light of what just happened, but dealing with the lack of emotional responsiveness and expression will be one of the most difficult things you will face as the parent of a differently biotic child. If you have ever tried to talk to your child when they were playing a video game or engaged in the Internet, you can imagine what I’m talking about. You will be able to see your child’s face, you will be able to see them move, but when you speak to them or hug them you will get the sense that they aren’t really there.”

“That’s because they aren’t really there,” Barnes said, his gravel voice rumbling around the room like the cough of an old pickup truck.

“I’m sorry?” the counselor from Boston said, her face going blank much like the db children she’d just been describing. Cal had been expecting this from Chuck. He was more interested in the reactions of the other parents than in Chuck’s predictable meltdown.

Chuck stood up, a sight Cal had gotten used to in town meetings when Barnes felt a school budget needed to be voted down. “They aren’t really there. They’re dead. And they aren’t ‘coming back’ or ‘returning’ or any of the above. What ‘comes back’ isn’t our children, and the sooner everyone in this room is aware of that, the better.”

“Mr. Barnes...”

Barnes leveled a squat, calloused finger at her. “Don’t interrupt me, missy. You’ve said your piece, and now I’m going to say mine. I think it is a disgrace the way that you are playing upon these poor people’s grief and loss to get them to subscribe to your warped worldview. My wife is sick—just sick—over this and you aren’t helping. Our children are dead. Dead. There’s no such thing as a return from death. What inhabits their bodies after they pass on is not of this world.”

“You are upsetting my wife,” Trafton said, quietly, but loudly enough for Cal to hear the tremor in his voice. “If you don’t want to discuss this, why don’t you just leave.”

Chuck laughed, leaning forward against the table that was too small for him. “But I do want to discuss this. I want to discuss what we should do if demons infest our children,” he said. “We should burn them. We should burn the corpses right now before they even start to come back.”

Sandy burst into a loud wailing that filled the room with her pain. Trafton came up out of his chair, and Cal could see his arms shaking with rage and frustration. Chuck Barnes, hardened from years of physical labor, and outweighing Trafton by a good forty pounds, simply looked at him and shook his head. He got to his feet after a moment’s deliberation, and Cal saw that he was smiling. Certain men took an enjoyment out of casual violence.

Cal wasn’t one of them, but sitting there, he decided that he would beat Chuck Barnes within an inch of the life their children had just lost if he did anything more than smile at Bill Trafton.

“Mr. Barnes,” the grief counselor was saying, as though she could talk the men back into their seats. “It is now illegal in the state of Maine to harm the differently biotic. It is also illegal to...”

“Laws! Laws!” Barnes said, his eyes, full of contempt, still fixed on Bill Trafton. “You think passing a human law makes something all right?”

“...interfere with the body of a deceased young adult before the requisite seven days have passed.”

Chuck, as though satisfied that all Trafton could do was stand there and shake, cast a quick glance at Cal.

“You people can wait around for your dead children to come back to you, but it is never going to happen. And if I was a younger man who didn’t have four mouths— living mouths—left to feed, I’d be taking it upon myself to make sure that the dead remained uncorrupted by whatever creatures of hell are planning to take them over.”

He grabbed his wife’s hand and pulled her toward the door. The mayor and the grief counselor called for them to stay, but Barnes’ progress was swift and inexorable.

Cal watched them leave but the scene had ceased to register upon him. Instead, he focused on the memory of his daughter’s voice.

I think I’m in love with him.

When Cal returned home, the first thing he looked at was the answering machine in the kitchen because just about the only person that ever called him was Mandy.

The red light was winking at him.

Without taking the time to take off his coat and hat, or even to let go of his keys, he punched the button with a shaking finger.

“Hello? Hello, Cal?” A female voice, but not Mandy’s. It was Laura. She sounded like she was crying, but there was warmth in her voice, a ray of sunlight piercing clouds.

“Cal, he came back. My boy came back.”

A dull pressure formed against the backs of his eyes...

He was happy for Laura—jealous of course, but happy as well. She’d been the smart one, the one to ignore the “counseling” and the stupid group-hug (or hate, in the case of Barnes) session, to do the only thing that really mattered—stay and wait for her child. He dropped his keys on the kitchen counter where they landed with a jangling clunk.

Maybe Laura’s presence helped her son find his way back, Cal thought. Maybe, from whatever pocket of space that Stevie existed in, he’d been able to hear his mother’s coffee-fueled heart beating, and he followed the sound back into his bruised and lifeless body.

Laura didn’t say anything else, but there was a long pause at the end of the message before she hung up.

Cal picked up his keys and drove back to the hospital.

He woke up, blinking and disoriented. Someone had covered him with a blanket during the night, and he realized that he had clutched it to his chin with curling fingers. His mouth tasted of the gum of a thousand envelopes.

“Hey, Cal,” a voice said. Cal patted his breast pocket for his glasses, but even sightless he knew who the voice belonged to. It was Bill Trafton. “I’ve got a coffee for you here if you want it.”

“Bill,” Cal said, sitting up and pulling on his glasses, which were spotted and dusty. “Thank you.”

“I hate the waiting,” Bill said, holding out a large coffee. “I’m sorry if it’s too cold; I thought you’d have woken up awhile ago.”

“I’m awake,” Cal said. He accepted the cup and took a long sip. Silence stretched out between the two fathers.

“I guess we’ll know in the next seven days, right?”

Cal took another sip. “I guess so.”

“Stevie Davis came back,” Bill said. Cal thought he was trying, and failing, to sound cheery and optimistic. “There’s an article in the paper about it and Laura called Sandy last night.”

“I heard. That’s great.”

“Yeah, isn’t it? I went upstairs and talked to the Franks,” Trafton said. “Amber still hasn’t ... she’s still comatose. Both her legs...”

He stopped when he saw a nurse running toward them, the slap of her sneakers against the burnished floor of the corridor rising in volume. She was young, and not one of the medical staff Cal had spoken to when he’d first arrived. He and Trafton rose from their seats.

“One woke up,” the nurse said, breathless. “You should come. One of the boys woke up.”

One of the boys, Cal thought. But he followed Trafton down the hall anyway. They were running by the time they reached the boy—a large, stumbling figure in a pale blue hospital gown. He was with a nurse who was encouraging him to walk, but the look on her face said that she didn’t really want to touch him. The boy weaved like a drunk. When he turned his face to them, they saw that it was Jake Barnes.

Trafton slumped against the wall, shuddering with the failed effort of holding his emotions in check.

I wanted to see her, but they wouldn’t let me see her. There were still two bodies beneath sheets in the cold room but they were vague, almost shapeless. They could have been anybody at all but I wanted to know. I knew that I was dead and I wanted to see who else was and I hoped it wasn’t Mandy. I tried to approach the bodies but the nurse’s hand was firm on my shoulder as she steered me towards the door. I couldn’t tell that the bodies under the sheets were Curtis’s and Mandy’s but when I saw their parents outside the door of the cold room I knew. I knew and I tried to go back.

When I saw Mandy’s father I tried to return to the cold room and find her and help her come back. I don’t know how I could help her come back but I thought if I held her or if I kissed her she would awaken like Snow White like Sleeping Beauty like any of the fairy tale princesses who’d fallen into a magic slumber.

But what I’d returned from didn’t feel like slumber. There was pain, there was raw ache when I moved, each muscle felt twisted and dry, like overcooked bacon.

But they wouldn’t let me return. “It isn’t permitted,” the nurse said. As though saying so made it real, as though all manner of permissions hadn’t been revoked or granted. I could have forced her but then what? That’s what I thought. I wasn’t thinking about being dead—that would come later—I was just thinking about seeing Mandy again. That’s all.

I tried to speak but I couldn’t make any sound at all. My tongue was like a mouthful of cold meat; I could feel it lying there, pressing against my teeth, but I couldn’t move it at all.

When I fell, it was Mandy’s father that lifted me up. There was something in his eyes, some message, but it wasn’t one of fear like with the nurse.

“Come on,” her father said. “I’ll take you home.”

I followed. But I knew there was no home to return to.

Cal sat in the truck with the engine running as Jake got out of the cab. Cal had started to get out himself, but Jake’s hand—surprisingly gentle—fell upon his arm, and the boy shook his head. Jake didn’t say anything, but Cal didn’t think there was really anything to say at that moment.

I think I love him, Daddy.

Cal watched him make slow, shuffling progress through the snow toward his front door. He was about halfway across the front lawn when the door opened, and his father strode out onto the steps. Chuck was wearing a tattered sweatshirt and paint-splattered jeans tucked into the tops of work boots he’d not had time to lace up. He was holding a shotgun.

“Get out of here!” he yelled. Like he was shooing an animal. He waved the shotgun in a tight arc. Behind him, Cal could see his wife holding back one of Jake’s younger brothers—Andy, he thought—and trying to cover his eyes with her hands, as though she was afraid that he’d turn to salt.

“Go on! You aren’t welcome here!” Cal could see the heat rising from Chuck’s head and shoulders even across the yard, as though there were a tiny furnace being stoked within him. Jake stood rooted in his tracks, motionless. Chuck brought the shotgun up.

“Don’t do it, Barnes!” Cal called out, opening his car door.

“Do not move, Cal Wilson,” Barnes said. “I have a right to defend my property. I have every right.”

Cal watched the man’s eyes and the barrel of the gun. They were both steady and insane, the eyes of a fanatic who’d found his purpose. Cal had left his own gun at home.

“He’s your son, Chuck.”

“My son is dead,” Barnes replied. “Whatever this thing is, it isn’t my son.” He cocked the hammer on the shotgun and spoke to the boy. “This will be the last time I tell you. You aren’t welcome here.”

Jake took a step backward, as though he wanted to be certain that his father knew he was going. Then he turned away.

Cal remained by the truck, wondering if he should call to Jake. But before he could, the boy shuffled away—away from his family, from the road, from Cal and his waiting truck—and into the woods across the street.

When he was no longer visible through the trees, Cal turned back to see Barnes squinting off into the distance. Cal watched him spit into the snow and return to his house, his voice audible through the closed door as he shouted at his wife and remaining children.

Cal returned to the warm cab of his truck and drove back to the hospital.

“The Franks would like it if you visited them sometime today, Cal,” Sandy Trafton was telling him. “Amber regained consciousness a few hours ago. It’s almost like a miracle.”

He could hear the anxiety in her voice, and he watched her involuntary glance toward the room where their dead children were waiting.

“Maybe I’ll do that,” Cal said, rising to his feet. The joints of his knees popped like a sheet of bubble wrap. “Can I get you something from the cafeteria on my way back? Coffee, or a sandwich?”

“No, thank you, Cal.” She gave him directions to Amber’s room, and he walked away.

You should have stopped the boy, he thought, passing doctors and people he knew from town, all of whom gave him a wide berth, as though it were he that had returned from the dead. You should have stopped him and you didn’t. What would Mandy think of you?

He knew what she’d think. And she’d be right to think it.

He’d been angry when he’d waved them good-bye. Angry and jealous. Because from the moment that his daughter—in her soft, cautious way—said that what she felt for Jake might actually be Love, capital L, Jake had ceased to be the boyfriend and had instead had become the boy that would take his little girl away from him. He knew it was wrong, but as he stood there, grinning through gritted teeth and waving like an idiot as they pulled away, that was what he’d been thinking.

And, in the end, he’d been right. Jake Barnes had taken his little girl away from him. Forever.

No. No, she’ll come back. She has to come back.

He’d arrived at Amber Frank’s room on autopilot. Her father—Cal couldn’t recall his name—saw him and rushed over to shake his hand, at once thanking him for coming and offering condolences for his loss. Cal imagined that he was so numb that he couldn’t feel either the kindness of his words or the pressure of the other man’s hand.

“Amber wanted to talk to you, Officer Wilson,” Mr. Frank was saying. “I realize this is a very, very difficult time, but once she started to get a sense of where she was and what happened to her, it became very important that we contact you.”

Cal nodded without really comprehending what the man was trying to say. He allowed Mr. Frank to guide him into his room where Mrs. Frank was sitting by her daughter’s bedside. Cal looked down at the girl in the bed. Her face was mottled and bruised, her cheeks puffed and swollen. Cal closed his eyes, remembering how her legs had been twisted when they’d found her in the snow.

“I can come back later,” Cal whispered to Mrs. Frank, who shook her head as Amber tried to speak. Her eyes were so swollen Cal hadn’t been able to tell that she was awake.

“You might have to lean close,” Mrs. Frank—Helen, he remembered—said to him. He lowered his head toward Amber.

“Jake,” she whispered. “Jake.”

Cal closed his eyes and opened them again when the vision inside his head was of Jake and his daughter, driving away.

“Jake ... wasn’t ... drinking,” she said. “Mandy ... neither.”

Cal looked at her, and then at Helen, who was smiling at her daughter and patting her hand. He straightened up and cleared his throat.

“Thank you, Amber,” he said. “Thank you for telling me. You get better, okay?”

Mr. Frank stopped him in the hallway.

“Thank you,” he said. “It was really important for Amber to tell you that. From what I gather, she and the other boys had had a few beers, but Jake refused because he was driving.”

“And Mandy doesn’t drink,” Cal said. His own throat was dry.

Mr. Frank nodded. “That’s right. That’s what Amber said. ‘Mandy doesn’t drink.’”

Cal turned to go, but before he could escape, Mr. Frank’s hand was on his arm.

“I hope ... I hope she comes back,” Mr. Frank said, faltering as Cal’s eyes met his own. “If that’s what you want.”

Cal didn’t know if he should thank him or punch his lights out, so instead he just nodded and moved away.

It is what I want, he thought.

But three days later, she still hadn’t come back.

Chuck Barnes found out about the milk and the peanut butter on toast on the third day.

The first few times, Andy had gotten away with it because Chuck was up earlier than everyone and out the door by the time they all came down for breakfast, so he never saw Andy leaving it out on the deck. Nor did he see his wife Molly, once the children had all been packed off onto the morning bus, go out onto the deck in her housecoat and slippers to retrieve the milk and toss the peanut butter toast out into the backyard for the birds and the squirrels to eat. And he was never there in time to hear Andy’s first words upon arriving home from school, which were: “Did Jake come and get his breakfast?” And he wasn’t there to see him run to the sliding door and look out onto the deck for any sign or trace that his brother had been there. Nor did he hear Molly’s assurances that Jake had, in fact, come home to have his breakfast. Andy was nine, but he still believed in both Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny; it wasn’t such a stretch for his imagination to picture the arrival of his deceased brother coming to collect his breakfast, whom he had actually seen with his own eyes.

Andy was up early again on Saturday to fix Jake his breakfast. He was excited about it because he thought that if he sat really quietly just inside the door and behind the curtain, he might actually get to see Jake. If Jake didn’t get scared, then maybe he could even talk to him. He really missed his older brother. If he saw Jake, he’d talk to him about school and TV and stuff, but Andy didn’t think he’d mention that last night he’d cried a little at bedtime thinking about him. Jake had enough to worry about without knowing his brother was a crybaby.

Andy was proud of himself when he went downstairs into the kitchen and poured Jake a big glass of milk. So proud and so elated at the thought of helping Jake that he didn’t hear his father flush the toilet down the hall and walk into the kitchen. Andy’d unlocked the sliding door and was just about to set the glass of milk down in a nice little pile of snow when his father’s voice startled him so badly he spilled half the milk onto the deck.

“What the hell do you think you are doing?”

Andy didn’t want to turn around. He wanted to keep facing toward the backyard, where at any moment Jake could be walking out of the woods, ready to take Andy away with him. Andy rose to his feet and blinked against the chill air, wishing it to happen.

“Turn around!” his father yelled. “Answer me!”

Andy turned, aware that the remaining milk was in danger of spilling because his hands were shaking. His father was glowering at him, the gray black tufts of his hair still wild from sleep. “I ... I...”

“Out with it!”

“I ... I was getting Jake his breakfast,” Andy said.

His father struck him hard enough to send him to the floor. The glass broke beneath his hand, and he felt a hot bright pain as his palm was sliced open.

“He’s dead, do you understand me? Dead!”

Andy tasted blood from a cut inside his cheek. Red drops rolled off his wrist and swirled into the pool of spilled milk spreading around the broken glass. It was in this way that Andy realized that some things, once broken, could never be repaired again.

There was a place in the woods where we used to go in the summertime, Mandy and me. A place that was near the lake but that you couldn’t see from the lake and we used to like going there on the days where it was too hot for anything else. We must have gone there five times—no, I know, we went there exactly five times and each time we went it was better than the time before and when we walked back Mandy would hold her sandals in her left hand and my hand in her right and most times we didn’t say anything at all the entire walk back to my father’s van. But on the fifth and last time, the best time of all, she said “Summer’s almost over.” She said it like she was sad but then I looked at her and I said that it didn’t matter, because summer is just a season, and that the only thing that was over was a season. That made her laugh a little and thinking back on it that might have been one of the smartest things I’ve ever said.

I tried to find that place in the woods and I walked and walked and walked and you’d think I’d be able to find it okay because I’d spent the best times of my life there. Literally, the best times of my life, now that my life was over. But I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t have imagined how differently everything looked with just a change of seasons.

I don’t know what I was expecting to find there, even if I could have found it. Mandy wouldn’t have been there. If Mandy had come back she would have been with her father. The only way that Mandy would have been there was if she didn’t come back. Ever. This is what I was thinking but my thinking was so confused it was no wonder I couldn’t find our place in the woods.

Eventually I stopped looking. I stopped looking and decided to go to the place where I thought that Mandy would be, not where she had been.

Bill Trafton’s boy Curtis rose on the sixth day. His parents embraced him, and Cal could hear Sandy Trafton telling Curtis that “everything was going to be all right, everything will be all right.” He watched their embrace from the couch outside the morgue. Curtis’s eyes, unfocused and milky, found Cal’s. Cal had to look away.

Mandy—beautiful Mandy—lifted herself up off of her hospital gurney. She walked down the hallway, one bare foot dragging on the burnished hospital floors. She left the hospital and then fell to her hands and knees at the bottom of the hospital steps, crawling along the snow covered streets until her left arm gave out and she had to push herself forward on her belly like a snake, with intermittent help from her legs. Hours and hours she crept along in this manner until she reached her home. But then it wasn’t her home at all. It was the home of Jake Barnes, and when she lifted her still pretty face from the cement front steps, it wasn’t to a gentle kiss and a warm embrace but to the cocking of a loaded shotgun.

Cal cried out as he fell from his chair upon waking, hitting his head and bruising his hip as he landed. He was aware of other people in the hallway, some rushing toward him. But he was too tired and heartsick to feel any embarrassment. He remained where he’d fallen, his cheek cool against the hospital floor.

“Cal,” he heard a woman’s voice saying. Her hand was on his forehead, warm where all the rest of him was so cold. “Cal, are you all right?”

He opened one eye and saw Dr. Newcomb peering down at him with concern.

“I’m fine,” he said, his voice unfamiliar to his own ears. “Fine.”

She made as though to help him back to his chair, but he shook her off and seated himself again under his own volition.

She waited until he was settled and looking back at her. He could feel his throat constricting even before she spoke.

“Cal,” she said. And then she spoke the words he had been dreading to hear.

“It’s been seven days.”

He buried his daughter on the sunniest day of the month, just a few days before Christmas. He buried her next to her mother and wished that he could tell them to just open up his plot as well so he could crawl in.

There was a large turnout at the service, and just as many, if not more, at the gravesite. His friends, her friends, the dutiful, and the curious. He shook many hands and thanked many people but registered so few.

“We, uh, left Curtis at home,” Bill said to him as he and Sandy stood shivering at the edge of the cemetery road. “We weren’t sure it was, um, appropriate for him to come.”

“Appropriate,” Cal said. They were lowering his daughter into the ground, and Bill was worried about what was appropriate. Cal couldn’t remember ever feeling this tired.

“Curtis doesn’t know what happened,” Bill said. “He remembers that the radio was on and he remembers that he’d had a good time at the party, but he doesn’t really remember what he did. Thank God he doesn’t remember anything about the crash. He doesn’t remember any of it.”

“Thank God,” Cal said.

“If you need anything...,” Sandy Trafton was saying. Cal thanked her before she could finish. He walked back toward his daughter’s grave.

Laura was there with Stevie. She didn’t say anything as she put her arms around Cal and pulled him into a tight embrace. She was crying when she let him go.

Her dead son extended his hand, and Cal took it, unable to feel its temperature through his leather gloves.

“Mister ...Wilson,” Stevie said. “I’m so ... sorry. Mandy ... was a ... good ... friend of ... mine.”

“Thank you,” Cal said. The boy’s eyes were blank and glassy and his expression was flat, just as the well-dressed woman from Boston had mentioned they would be. He was pale, bloodless-looking even in the light of the sun. Cal wished he could talk to the boy, ask him if he’d seen Mandy in those moments when he was on the other side.

“Cal, maybe you shouldn’t be alone tonight. You could stay with me and Stevie, or...”

“Thanks, Laura,” he said, her touch on his arm making him aware that he’d been staring at her son, searching for something in his eyes. “I’ll be fine,” he told her as he forced himself to look away.

“I’m going to call you, Cal,” Laura said. Her thoughts were completely open to him. He could read them as easily as he could the words and names carved into the headstones surrounding them.

Lost his wife, lost his daughter, no real friends to speak of, carries a gun...

He didn’t want her to worry, but he didn’t know how he could convince her not to.

“I’m going to be watching out for you,” she continued.

“I’d like that,” he said, meaning it.

“Why don’t you come to the car now?”

“In a minute.”

He looked out over the cemetery, expecting to see someone who wasn’t there.

She was gone. Watching the cars file out of the cemetery in a long, laborious procession, he knew that she was gone. They’d said many things to each other and he’d meant it all, but in the end he didn’t say the words that mattered most.

And now he couldn’t say anything at all because that part of him wasn’t working anymore. He sat down in the snow, leaned against a wide, flat headstone and concentrated on saying her name. And once he could say her name, he thought, he would say it over and over again.

That night Cal stopped at the threshold of his daughter’s room with the bag of presents that she would have been unwrapping in just a few days’ time. He lightly tossed the bag in the center of the room, switched off the light, and closed the door.

The phone rang that night, and he answered it, thinking that it was Laura. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even her, but he didn’t want her up all night worrying about him, either.

But it wasn’t Laura.

“You should be glad, Wilson. You’re the lucky one.”

“What?” The words didn’t register at first, only their tone. He didn’t recognize the voice at first, either. He’d never heard it over the phone before.

“You’re the lucky one. Your girl had a nice, clean death. End of story. She didn’t come back as one of those filthy monsters. Those abominations. Better she die than come back as one of them, or end up a paraplegic like the other one.”

Cal knew that he should hang up on him but, in a way, the fury that he was feeling now was better than what he had been feeling, which was nothing at all. All he’d had was an emptiness, a void where feeling should have been.

“So count your blessings, Wilson. She’s better off dead.”

“Barnes,” he said. “If you were here right now, I would kill you. Without any hesitation.”

The man on the other end of the line gave a low, throaty chuckle. “I feel the same way about the thing living in my boy’s corpse,” he said, and then he hung up.

Cal listened to the dial tone for a while. He listened long enough to imagine that he could hear voices, crying for help, buried far beneath the drone. Barnes only lived ten minutes away.

Cal got into his car, but he didn’t drive to Barnes’s house. The moon was full, and the streets were empty. He took his time and was careful. Snow was falling.

Mandy had said she’d loved Jake, and Cal had just watched him walk away, off into the forest, lost and alone. His shame made him burn even more than the words from Barnes.

The cemetery was locked, but the stone wall near the gate was only waist high. Cal climbed it easily. The stones of the cemetery seemed to catch and store the moonlight among the spectral blue white snow. The only sound was Cal’s crunching footfalls as he made deliberate progress toward his daughter’s grave. Once there, he saw that it was covered by a blanket of new fallen snow. It made it look as though she’d been buried for years and not for only a few hours.

He also saw the footprints.

A dark figure moved nearer, weaving among the stones. Cal watched as the figure seemed to coalesce out of the moonlight, its hospital gown glowing as it slouched against a mourning angel.

Cal had to swallow twice before he could get the words out.

“I’ve come for you,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home.”

Cal couldn’t see what effect his words had, if any; the other’s face was hidden in the shadow of the angel’s wing. But then they were both walking forward, toward each other. Neither could say who took the first step.