The house of tongues, p.9
The House of Tongues, page 9
I was shaking my head before she’d finished talking. “Mom, there’s no way I’m going over there. We gotta use this last bit of daylight to search…” I hesitated, having no idea what came next. I pointed in a random direction, toward a farm with a huge barn, one of those new fancy ones with actual paint, no holes in the roof. “Maybe he tripped and fell in someone’s ditch. You know who owns that place over there?”
My mom leaned even closer and put a hand on my arm. “Son.”
“Mom, you never know—”
She squeezed, hard. “Son.”
Caught by her tone, I looked into her eyes, and they were hard. Probably as hard as mine.
“We’re going to have a nice meal,” she said. “Your kids need it. I need it. You sure as shit need it.”
My mom never swore, and I found myself on the edge of tears again. My chest hitched.
“Come here.” She pulled me into a hug and I let it out again, just as I had with Hazel. I sobbed, letting the tears drop on her shoulder. Then she whispered in that loving Mom-voice I had always under-appreciated. “You’ve exhausted yourself, David. We all have. We’ve worked ourselves to the bone and others will keep doing it. You have three kids that need to see something normal, like us sitting down for dinner. Not to mention that we all need a good dose of food in our bellies. We can take an hour or so, okay? Let’s go over to the Compass and do the seafood buffet. Jenny probably won’t even let us pay for it. Come on, now.”
“But Wesley,” I said. “How can we just sit there and eat good food when he’s out there somewhere? Hurt or…” I couldn’t finish, and wouldn’t have allowed myself even if I could. “How can we do that to him?”
“Because he’d want us to,” she replied. “Because he loves us and he would want us to.”
She pulled away and took my hand, smiled as best she could through her own tears. I know she felt the worry and pain as much as I did, and she was being strong when I couldn’t. After wiping my eyes, I nodded.
“Okay. One hour. But then we gotta keep looking.”
With a heavy sigh, she agreed to my terms.
4
It turned out to be true that Jenny wouldn’t even hear of us paying for our meal. As soon as we walked in, the matronly, ageless woman hemmed and hawed over us, with hugs and sweet words aplenty. She settled us down at a big table in the back and insisted that everything was on the house tonight. Her Ed was out working with a search party even as we spoke, she said.
After going through the buffet, feeling a pang of guilt with every greasy, fried item I put on my plate—Wesley loved this place, and we went at least twice every time we came to visit Grandma—I sat down at the table with my parents and the kids. I kept thinking about how I’d blanked out or sleepwalked and ended up in the woods the night Wesley disappeared. I’d yet to tell anyone, thinking it would only confuse things, even as I kept telling myself that the two events were completely unrelated. Lying to myself, although I honestly didn’t know the truth. All I had was a faint feeling that something similar had happened to me in my youth.
“This is the best shrimp in the world,” Hazel announced to the table, “and I don’t even like shrimp.” She popped a nice juicy one, slathered in cocktail sauce, into her mouth and chewed with relish.
“Then how do you know it’s the best in the world?” Mason asked, seeming pretty genuine with his enquiry.
“What do you mean?”
“If you don’t like shrimp, you probably don’t eat it very much. So how do you know this shrimp is the best in the world?”
“Silly boy,” Hazel responded with perfect confidence. “It’s just an expression. It means I like it a lot.”
“I think it’s the best in the world,” my mom contributed. “And I’ve been as far as Florida.”
That one went right over Mason’s head, but Hazel giggled even as she stuffed two shrimps at once into her mouth. Although it hurt, just a little, to see everyone act like nothing was wrong, I also knew that I’d hate the alternative. If my kids had been as big a mess as me, I’m not sure I could’ve handled it. And I knew my parents were trying on their behalf, although my dad couldn’t hide his despair, looking as gaunt and miserable as I’d ever seen him. Which was exactly how I felt. But I did eat, and I tried to smile, and I did my very best not to cry again.
“What’s a shrimp?” Logan asked. That kid wouldn’t eat a single thing that hadn’t been lopped off a chicken. Right then he had two halves of a fried chicken strip gripped in both hands, his fingers already greasy. Chewing with his mouth open.
“It’s kinda like a fish,” Mason responded.
“A fish?” Hazel repeated. “It’s nothing like a fish.”
“Now, now,” my mom input. “They both live in the ocean. Give him a break.”
Hazel was not to be thrown off track. “Well, Grandma, a Tiger and a snake both live in the jungle, but they’re nothing alike.”
My mom’s mouth dropped open at this ingenious statement, and then let out a little laugh. “You got me there.”
Hazel turned toward Mason. “A shrimp is a crustacean, meaning it’s a shellfish…” She immediately trailed off, realizing she should’ve stopped at the word crustacean.
“Ha!” Mason shouted. “So it is a fish!”
Hazel shook her head adamantly. “No, they’re completely different!”
“How is a shellfish not a fish?” Mason held his hand up, fingers pressed together, and made a swimming motion. “It says fish right in its name!”
I saw a light flash in Hazel’s eyes as she came up with the perfect comeback. “Oh, I guess you’re going to tell me that a seahorse is the same as a regular horse now? You can take rides on both of them around the farm?”
Surprised, I realized that I had leaned back in my chair, enjoying this banter more than I would’ve thought possible two minutes prior. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I had a smile on my face, but I certainly wasn’t frowning.
“What about a tiger shark?” I asked, just to keep it going. “Do those have stripes on ’em? I can’t quite remember. And are they fish or cats?”
“I think those are actually in the whale family, so they’d be mammals,” my mom responded, a statement so unexpected that I laughed, purely from instinct. Everyone looked at me as if I’d just started singing old jazz tunes.
“Sorry, Grandma,” Hazel said after gazing at me with something like relief. “Tiger sharks are sharks and all sharks have gills and therefore it’s a fish. Doesn’t really seem like a normal fish but it’s fish.”
“Thank you, sweetie,” Grandma responded, forking a shrimp into her mouth just to sum things up. “I wasn’t completely sure.”
My appetite had come back a little. I leaned forward, feeling slightly better, and scooped up some of my own food, shoveling it down now like a switch had been flipped inside me. The shrimp and cod and hush puppies and mashed potatoes all melded together into one salty taste, but it satisfied the hunger that had been unleashed. I ate voraciously, as if I tried hard enough to act normal then things would go back to that. Soon I’d stuffed myself silly.
“Eat much, Dad?” Mason asked, rolling his eyes in exaggerated fashion.
“Not lately,” I mumbled.
My mom smiled. “It’s good to see you eat, son. You need the energy.”
I faked my own smile and speared another piece of shrimp. Just before it got to my mouth, my cell phone buzzed. Dropping the fork, I hurried to get the thing out of my pocket, something that seemed impossible for about three seconds, my hands getting snagged on the tablecloth, the napkin, the lining of my jeans pocket. Finally I was able to pull it out and take a look at the screen.
Sheriff Taylor. (Like father, like son, he’d become the sheriff just a few years after his dad had died of a heart attack.)
You can imagine the horror that seeped through my bones in the moment it took me to answer the call. He could’ve been calling for any number of reasons, but my mind jumped to all the worst conclusions. Dead, murdered, cut up, a litany of evil things.
“Hello.” The word snapped out of my mouth.
“David, he’s okay. We found him.”
5
How to convey the range of emotions I experienced as I drove to the address Sheriff Taylor had provided. As soon as our phone conversation ended, I told my parents and my kids that he was okay, that he’d been found, that I needed to get over there right away. After giving the address to my dad—they could come over at their own pace; I planned to break all land speed records, myself—I sprinted to my van, got in, started it, practically shaved the tires bald peeling out of the restaurant parking lot.
And then the news hit me, even as I put my motor skills on automatic, hyped up to a 10 on the adrenaline scale. The news hit me hard and fast. My boy was alive. Even okay, by the sounds of it. Nothing else mattered. I could tell over the phone that there were some weird details, about to be discovered, some shock still to come. But he was alive and well. Maybe not well, per se, but okay. The Sheriff had said that he was okay. So he had to be.
A sob exploded out of my chest, hurt my throat on its way out. Tears streamed down my face. And then I laughed, a series of wet coughs that would’ve terrified anyone within earshot. More tears, more laughs. I was hysterical, and on some level I knew it. But who cared? A whole realm of dark possibilities had been eliminated with one phone call, death not even being the worst of them. The unbearable stoppage of time, the looming potential for horrific news, the heavy, heavy weight of the unknown—we’d all been saved from it at last.
Only a few more minutes and Wesley would be in my arms. I didn’t care that he was about as big as me now—I planned to lift him from the ground and cradle him in my arms and rock him back and forth for at least three weeks straight. I thought maybe I’d even feed him from a bottle and burp him afterward, have him wear diapers so I could take care of his every need, just like when he’d been a baby. I laughed again, so violently that snot sprayed from my nose.
As I said, hysterical. I’d gone completely, temporarily insane.
The GPS mapping app on my phone lead me to a dirt road, barely visible now that night had fully come upon the world. I saw nothing more than a hole on the side of a forest, trees and branches forming a small gateway into darkness. A cave in the woods, into which a poorly maintained road of gravel looked fit to be swallowed. On any other given night, I would’ve shrunk from this entrance into the unknown wilderness, wondering what terrors awaited me in that abyss of blackness. But now I drove recklessly, the tires spinning dirt and rocks as I turned off the paved road and gunned the engine to bullet down the unpaved one.
My van bounced and jostled and made crunching sounds that I knew couldn’t be good. The headlights bobbed up and down, revealing a thick canopy above and water-filled potholes beneath. The road was straight as a cornrow, but so far nothing revealed itself within the range of my lights. The surreal glow against the bordering trees and branches was a spooky sight. Still, I drove on, yearning for any sign of people, cop cars, Sheriff Taylor. Any sign of my boy.
Then I saw something.
An image flashed from the right side of the road, a man, erupting out of the woods and directly into the path of my car. Even as I slammed on the brakes, the man stopped and turned toward me, his face illuminated brightly by the headlights. A pale face, shining with moisture, eyes burning with some kind of emotion I’m not sure I understood. Something alien to this world. It made me shiver where I sat. And then I realized who it was, although he was barely recognizable, fear and sweat staining his features.
Dicky Gaskins.
He took a step toward me, a look of utter uncertainty now filling his features, replacing the fear-inducing glare from before. But then he seemed to recover, realized that I could be nothing but bad news for him, and he turned and ran. He disappeared into the brush on the other side of the road from which he’d come. Not more than three seconds later, a fully dressed officer of the law appeared out of the woods, obviously chasing Dicky. With barely a glance in my direction, he pursued him further, entering the trees in the exact spot Dicky had. At least he was on the right track.
A generous portion of my elation had vanished, just like Dicky in the forest. They had found my son, somewhere up ahead, and yet the spawn of my lifetime haunt was on the lam, being chased by the police like an old bank robber in a 70s flick. Things were obviously not in order, and my heart shriveled a little, suddenly scared again for what might lay in my immediate future. I didn’t know what to do but call Sheriff Taylor.
He answered on the second ring.
“David? Where are you? On your way I hope.”
His tone put me a little at ease. He didn’t sound overly worried or panicked.
“Yeah I’m on my way, on the dirt road somewhere. Dicky Gaskins just ran out in front of my car, chased by one of your deputies. What’s going on?”
The Sheriff sighed, a sound so loud I might’ve heard it even if we hadn’t been on the phone. “You must be close, then. Don’t worry about that—we’ll catch him. Just come and see your boy. He needs his daddy.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s okay, David. I promise. Come on, down.”
I ended the call without saying goodbye, even felt guilty about it for an absurd second. Then, recovering a little from the shock of what had just happened with Dicky, I pushed the gas pedal to the floor and continued my way down the long, bumpy road.
6
A few cop cars—their blue-and-reds spinning and flashing like psychedelic disco balls—lit the way for the last half mile or so, the pot holes now roughly the size of Lake Marion. I had to maneuver my way around the last two or three, my heart thumping so hard that I could feel its vibration through my arms, all the way down to the steering wheel, where my fingers gripped the rubber so tightly they shone white.
I saw Wesley before I saw anyone else, as if my eyes had some familial magic power that sensed him out. He had a blanket draped over his shoulders as he sat on the rear bumper of an ambulance, its doors wide open and spilling light. Thus my boy’s face was in complete shadow. The scene reminded me of the end of every action movie ever to grace the silver screen, the hero or heroine only safe once they had that blanket and that ambulance.
I noticed no other details of the location or cared much, not until later. I stopped the car and I swear it took me a full minute to loosen my seat belt if it took a second. Stumbling out of the car, I felt half foolish and half giddy, but recovered myself and sprinted forward until I reached Wesley, then I pulled him into the fiercest hug one human has ever given another. Tears streamed from my face and I shook with joy and sadness both. Wesley returned the hug but barely, and didn’t say a single word. What had Dicky Gaskins done to my eldest child? Oh, the horrors that sprung from that question.
“Are you okay?” I asked. Looking back, it seems the most unoriginal thing to say, without much feeling, but no other words came to me. I’ll always wish I had just said, “I love you,” instead. How could those words not have been my first proclamation, the only thing that mattered?
“No, I’m not,” was his reply, as lifeless a voice as I’d ever heard.
“I’m so sorry.” Empty words. I sat down next to him, my arms still wrapped around his shoulders, and pulled his head to my neck. He resisted a little, and his entire body trembled like a frightened puppy. At some point Sheriff Taylor had come to stand beside us, and he looked down at me with all the compassion in the world. He was a father. He knew.
I thought finding my boy would take away the pain, make everything better. But it was only increasing by the second. A different kind of pain, no doubt about it, but no less hurtful. My mind ran with all the damage that might’ve been done to him. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, didn’t want to upset him any further. So, for the moment, I just held onto him and finally looked around at this place that would terrorize my dreams for the rest of my life.
The dirt road had ended in a clearing, maybe an acre in size, bordered on all sides by a wall of trees, their branches seeming to dance in the flashing lights of the cop cars. In the middle of that clearing stood a large wooden shed, leaning to the right as if a strong wind blew from the west. It was a dilapidated thing, looking much like you’d expect here in the woods, a long throw from any kind of civilization. Built with scraps, built in stages, with never a care for aesthetics or longevity, the wood warped and splintered, not a lick of paint to be found. I saw two broken windows, the remaining shards looking sharp and deadly. There was one door, and it hung open and askew, the doorknob busted and lying on the ground.
“What is this place?” I asked the Sheriff, but then remembered Wesley and shook my head. This wasn’t the time to talk about what had happened.
Sheriff Taylor seemed to agree, just giving me a nod and one of those smiles one gives at a time like this, really nothing more than pinched lips and cheeks pulled back a little.
The clearing around the shed looked as trashy and uncared for a place as I’d ever seen. Everything from milk bottles to beer bottles, every kind of paper product, even garbage bags that had been ripped open, their contents scattered—all of this was strewn about the entire area. I saw an old bike without its wheels, a couple of random car seats that had been ripped from their home, an abandoned fridge that hadn’t been used in at least a decade. The dump was like the world gone ill, having caught a disease that could never be cured.
Man, I thought. Does Dicky actually live here? At first I had assumed it was just the remnant of a home that had once thrived and Dicky had come here to hide, but now I wasn’t so sure. Nothing in sight necessarily pointed to the shack being currently lived-in, but it suddenly seemed the type of place where a Gaskins would take up residence.
I wish I could use the power of words to tell you how much my heart hurt in that moment. But I find none to do it justice. It was simply a bottomless, indescribable pain.
