Her gift was in a small box wrapped in gold foil, and when I opened it, I found a silver necklace with a charm of winged running shoes on it, and a note as well.
Dear Adam,
No matter what, remember you’re a runner. No one can take that away from you.
Love,
Aunt Beth
I know it was a good gift and all, but I wanted to tell Aunt Beth she was a little idealistic and perhaps not as clued in to the situation I found myself in at that moment as she thought. My mother couldn’t run. My mother couldn’t even walk anymore. I had no guarantee no one could take my ability to run away from me either. Still I put the necklace on and showed it to everyone. “That’s beautiful,” said my mother, holding it in the palm of her hand while I leaned toward her. “Oh, Beth always knows just the right thing to get.”
My father grunted and said my aunt Beth was a hippie freak and my mother said, “I don’t care what you think, John. My sister is better than ten of you stacked up together.”
Lucy sat next to my father on the couch and laughed.
“Oh, not you too, Lucy!” said my mother.
“I’m sorry, Linda. But really. Your sister should have never left Ohio. I tell you, the West Coast is different. All sorts of crazy people. It’ll change a person. It will definitely change a person.”
“They’re no different from us,” I said, fondling the shoes on my necklace.
“And how would you know?” said my father. “You don’t know nothing about nothing. You’re just a smart-ass kid.”
My mother said, “John, it’s Christmas.”
“Not for another three hours,” said Andy.
I said, “You know what she means, idiot.”
“Fuck off, fag,” said Andy.
“Fuck you,” I said back.
“Don’t even start,” said my father.
Andy and I stared each other down for a while, but we eventually got over it. By the end of the night, I even gave him his lighter back, it being Christmas and all.
“I wondered where that had gone!” he said. “Little thief.” He lightly punched my shoulder. “You don’t even smoke.”
“I used it to burn down Fuck You Frances’s house.”
He said, “Who?”
I said, “Fuck You Frances.”
“You mean Grandpa?”
“No idiot,” I said. “Fuck You Frances. Frances Wilkinson? The Wilkinson farm?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, grinning as if he were proud of me. “The Wilkinson farm. Everyone figured that was you.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but don’t tell anyone. I told the social worker it wasn’t me.”
“No problem,” said Andy, which gave me this really odd family feeling. Andy would keep his mouth shut for me? Maybe things could be different. With the way things were going, with how everyone was on their best behavior to make things work, I kind of hoped the past month was just me having gone temporarily insane, and that everyone would understand like Andy and forget about it.
Then Andy said, “Give me the gun and we’ll call it even.”
Of course there had to be a catch. What was I thinking?
I didn’t know why my brother could treat me like I was just some stranger, but I didn’t understand lots of things. I was beginning to get comfortable with not knowing, though. When something happens often enough, you kind of get numb to it, and then you don’t feel it anymore. Like my father’s hands.
I stayed the night on the couch again, watching the Christmas tree twinkle. Usually my mother made us turn the lights off before bed, but on Christmas she let them stay on all night. I was watching the blinking patterns of lights when I felt his breath cold on my shoulder. And when I turned, I found him kneeling by the arm of the couch where I rested my head.
When I looked up, he brushed hair out of my eyes.
“Welcome home,” I said.
“Are you all right?”
“I guess so,” I said, shrugging a little. “But Gracie—”
“She doesn’t understand,” he said, coming around to sit by me. “She’s selfish, that’s all. Don’t worry. I love you.”
He slid down and pressed the length of his body against mine, but what he said reminded me of something else. “Hold on,” I said, and ran down to the basement, and searched the laundry basket until I found the pair of jeans that held Gracie’s heart-shaped rose quartz.
“What are you looking for?” Jamie asked.
I slipped my hand into the pocket and found the heart where I’d left it. Only it wasn’t the same as the last time I’d checked. It didn’t beat. It didn’t feel soft or warm. It was cold still stone again, and when I brought it out, I found a crack running down the center.
A moment later, while I held the heart in the palm of my hand, it split in two.
I tried not to look at it. It wasn’t a real heart, I told myself. It was just a stone. It must have gotten busted when I was sleeping in the woods, or when we accidentally wandered into dead space. Somehow. When you live rough, things get broken. I slipped the pieces into my pocket and went back upstairs.
“That was hers, wasn’t it?” Jamie said.
I nodded.
“She gave it to you, didn’t she?”
“I took it,” I said. “Then she gave it to me.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “You can go without one of those anyway.”
“I know.”
“I know you know,” he said, and that grin slid up one side of his face. Still that lopsided smile. It made me not so sad, and I smiled back.
“That’s better. I hate to see you sad,” he said. “You deserve better. You deserve to be loved.”
I said, “That’s what she said.”
“She was selfish, that’s all.”
“I miss her.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Where we’re going, you won’t have to think about it. I’ve got a plan. They think they’ve got us, but they haven’t.”
“They’ll just catch us again.”
“No way,” he said. “This time it’s just us. Just listen to me and we’ll be fine.”
“But I’ve caused enough problems.”
“Things won’t get better if we stay here,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “I trust you.” I needed someone to trust really bad.
“Then it’s settled.” He sat next to me on the couch. He put his arms around me and pushed me down so that I lay on my back with him on top of me. The lights from the Christmas tree played over his waxy skin. He studied my face while I touched the gash near his temple, touched the jellyish blob of blood filling it. It was just another part of him, this damage. It didn’t make me shudder.
“Merry Christmas, Adam,” he whispered, placing his cheek against mine, the tree lights twinkling over the crown of his head.
“Merry Christmas, Jamie,” I said.
IN THE VALLEY
DEAD SPACE. WE NEEDED SOME. BUT LUCY WAS in my bedroom and my parents were in theirs and my brother in his, so it was the hall closet we’d have to go through. No one ever went in the hall closet. It’s where we put all the things we no longer wanted. My father’s old hunting jackets and my mother’s old coats with fake fur collars, Andy’s high school jacket with the school symbol on it—a rocket shooting into the night sky—boots with holes in them and my old baseball glove and bat from when I was a little kid and thought playing baseball would make my dad happy. If you put something in the hall closet, it never ever came out. Closets are where dead things go. The things we use every day have shelf lives, just like people.
Jamie opened the door and we pushed through the coats, hangers clacking together as we squeezed in. “Shh,” I said. “Be quiet or they’ll hear.” But Jamie only made a face and shrugged.
“Even if they heard,” he said, “by the time they got here, we’d be gone.”
He took my hand and pulled me in deeper. Then the clothes were behind us and the dark of dead space before us. I reached back to close th
e door and take one last look at the tree lights twinkling on their timer, off and on, off and on, in a sort of chorus of colors. I almost said goodbye to everything like I did when I’d tried leaving before, but since I’d been found and brought back again, I figured goodbye might not be the word I needed this time either.
I shut the door and turned to Jamie. “Don’t worry, Adam,” he said, like he could read my mind. “It’s me and you this time. Things will be different. Trust me.”
A cold wind swirled around us then. I could smell the moonlight on the snow as it fell over the frostbitten field we stood in. Silhouettes of trees were stitched along the purple horizon and, beyond that wall of shadow, wolves were howling. Their voices gathered above the trees like sheaves of wheat bound together. I couldn’t see any wolves, but I could feel them watching as we ran toward their woods, waiting for us to enter.
Which we did, the branches of trees smacking our arms and faces as we rushed through, taking the pathless way that Jamie knew. It was best, he said, to stay off the path in this place. Not as many chances to run across one of the ladies who kneeled under trees, combing chunks of hair out of their own heads with their fingers, moaning. Not as many chances to stumble across men with no skin, their muscles bunched and bleeding, walking around like biology models of the human body. The first time Jamie brought me here, I wasn’t able to see anything, but now I could. Now I saw everything.
Even so, Jamie held on to my hand to guide me to where we were going. I followed, looking down at my feet as they moved through the dead leaves that littered the forest floor, powdered with snowflake patterns that had frozen along the webs of their veins. I was thinking I was far along on my way to dying because of being able to see in dead space finally, but then I realized I’d smelled the moonlight on the snow and felt the cold seep through my clothes as we ran, making me shiver. “Jamie,” I said, whispering so I didn’t call attention to us. “Something’s wrong. I’m feeling.”
He didn’t stop running, though. He just nodded and then—whoosh—we left the woods, the branches of trees whipping back together behind us. Then we were climbing a steep hill to where the railroad tracks rested above us on the hilltop.
As we climbed, the grass slowly vanished and a blanket of gravel crunched beneath us. I glanced down at my shoes again. They were cracked, worn-out; they should have been tossed out already. But they’d brought me this far. I couldn’t abandon them. I’d keep them till they fell right off my feet. I’d keep them till they had no life left in them.
At the top of the hill, we stopped and I bent at my waist, bracing my hands against my thighs like I did after running a race, feeling the air cut down my throat like a razor. It hurt but it felt good too, to feel a little human. And that’s when I saw the steam leaving Jamie’s mouth for the first time. He’s alive, I thought.
“Are we out now?” I asked.
Jamie shook his head. “Still in.” He pointed a little ways down the tracks and said, “Over there’s where I was born.”
I stood up again and looked to where he was pointing. I saw the yellow police banners flapping in the wind first, then the hole they surrounded. The hole they’d buried him in. The hole we’d gotten into together.
The wind broke through my jean jacket, and I wrapped my arms around myself, teeth chattering. “That’s where I was born too,” I said. But Jamie shook his head.
“You haven’t been born yet,” he said. His face was sad, his mouth turned down in a grimace. “I came out on this side. You haven’t.”
“Then what am I?”
He put his hands on my shoulders and said, “I’m glad you came, Adam. You don’t know what this means to me.” He made it sound like we were going to war together, or into outer space to destroy a meteor before it crashed into earth. When I didn’t say anything, he smiled that lopsided smile and I saw that, even though he seemed more alive here, he was changing. Brown rot grew between his teeth, and his eyes were sinking deeper into their sockets. His skin had a waxy sheen to it, as if someone had filled him with embalming fluid, and there was something in his eyes too. A distance grew in him like a far horizon.
He turned and started walking in the direction opposite the hole and I followed behind, still holding my arms over my chest. I asked where we were going, but he only said, “You’ll see,” and kept walking. I started to watch my feet move beneath me again. Pebbles and slats, pebbles and slats. Ice, rock, air, breathe, I thought. No entry.
As we walked I kept thinking about Gracie, about how things had ended between us without any discussion. Without any words. The way she just looked at me and left with her father. No turn of her head, no see you later. It was like all of a sudden she didn’t know me. When I thought about her, it felt like broken glass was piled in my stomach, cutting me. Sometimes, though, it felt more like a wolf clawing at my insides, trying to get out. At any moment it would push through my throat, pry my jaws open and come through my mouth howling, ready to destroy everything in its path.
At one point the tracks split in two directions, curving away from each other. One line led to the old covered bridge over Sugar Creek, the other continued into the dark before us. Some shadows were going inside the entrance to the bridge, like bees slipping into a honeycomb. Others lingered outside still. “What is this place?” I asked as we passed, but it wasn’t until we were well beyond it that Jamie answered.
“The crossing.”
“To where?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I just know it’s where you’re supposed to go. You know. Afterward.”
“Why don’t you?” I asked.
“Why don’t you go to school?” was his answer.
“Okay.” I nodded. “Fair enough. But why here?”
“I don’t know. A lot of the others come here too. It’s where I brought Frances.”
“Frances?”
He nodded. “After you burned down her house, she had nowhere to live in the world. So she needed to come here and cross.”
“But she’s dead,” I said. “She didn’t need a place to live anyway.”
“Come on, Adam,” he said. “Death isn’t just a body thing. You know that.”
“How was she?” I asked, even though I’d watched him bring her to the place. I wanted to hear what he’d say, to see if he’d try to spare me the details of what I’d done to her.
“She was furious,” he said.
“But she went through?”
He nodded.
“Do you think she’s okay now?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes shifting down to look at the railroad ties we were walking. “I hope so.”
We didn’t talk much after that, just kept making our way down the tracks. We seemed to be moving without direction, but Jamie insisted he knew where we were going, so eventually I stopped asking and eventually we stopped talking altogether.
It was hard to keep track of time here. Night never faded, the stars never brightened or darkened, day never came. There was a short period where the color of the sky lightened to a lighter shade of purple, but other than that, years could pass and I’d never be able to tell the difference.
But then suddenly, after we’d walked for what seemed no more than an hour, banks and corporate buildings began to rise out of the darkness in the distance, blinking their names in bright red letters. And as we got closer, I recognized a few. “Hey,” I said, “this is Youngstown, isn’t it?”
Jamie nodded.
“But we’ve barely been walking an hour. It took Gracie that long to get here by car.”
“Time is different here,” he said. “You know that, Adam.”
He pointed to one of the taller buildings in the distance with red letters spelling out Home Savings on one of its walls. That was where we were headed. I said the word home to myself a few times, but I still didn’t trust it, so I left it behind in the tracks I’d walked while saying it.
Youngstown. It didn’t seem big enough or far enough aw
ay to make me feel safe, but I reminded myself it was better than where I was leaving.
The tracks led into the downtown through a valley that was full of rusty old mills and factories and we followed them until we came out of dead space. Under the cover of real night, we entered the city and lights began to spread in all directions like a sea of strange, glowing pearls.
The valley itself was a wasteland. Vacant factories with smashed-up windows. Black scars on the ground where steel mills had been demolished by their owners years ago. Yellow-brown weeds and thorny bushes. Leftover machine parts. Rotting car frames and engines. Rusty metal workings. Toilets covered in strange stains. Broken forty ounce beer bottles. Couches with springs curling out of the stuffing. And far too many stones to look at and be reminded of Gracie.
The dead were here too, trudging through the thin layer of snow that had fallen. They wandered the rubble of the mills, leaving no footprints as they went. They lingered in doorways, smoking cigarettes, nodding as we passed. Most were men wearing grease-stained jumpsuits; others were young women wearing long tweed skirts, carrying folders pressed to their chests.
A whistle shrieked once, twice, a third time, and the dead lifted their heads in its direction. A moment later they poured from the abandoned factories, and others materialized to take their places and begin their shift. The mills had closed years and years ago, but the dead still came here, even though it was clear that what they wanted didn’t want them.
“My grandpa used to work in these mills,” I told Jamie. And then I started wondering if my grandpa was here among the others. I didn’t know him like I knew my grandma. He was rough around the edges with not much good to say about people, so when he was alive I’d kept my distance. When he was in the hospital with cancer the year before my grandma came to live with us and you could hear his moans in the hallway, I only went in once to say I loved him before it was too late, like my mom had said I should do. Whenever my grandma talked about him, she’d say, “The mills broke his back when they were open, and when they closed they broke his spirit.” He seemed so heartless when I knew him that I often wished I’d known him before the mills had closed, when it was just his back they’d broken.