My father’s death.
My mother’s sight.
Me.
Maybe Mother was right. They saw the bruises and burns on my limbs. They watched my pants become too loose and too short, the fronts cut out of my shoes to keep from rubbing sores on the tops of my toes. They explained away the time Ms. Nichols caught me with her cat tucked inside my jacket in the dead heat of summer, limp and foaming red spittle. This town had taken enough from me and my mother, they’d decided, so they would not take my future, too.
All this time, Ama thought she’d won, when really she was never going to lose.
A card catalog slams shut, and my mind returns to the library, my eyes to my reflection on my computer screen, my face parallel to the image of my teenage self. Even side by side, I wouldn’t consider these two faces one in the same. Similar… a relative familiarity, maybe. But in coming home, I have been born anew. I will have to claw out from neither Mother’s shadow nor her thumb. I am not of her any longer. I am born of Lady Fate, and she has named me Jonathon Walks.
I leave the library and drive to my old street. My childhood home comes into view, a brick corner peeking out from behind a magnolia tree. The squat house seems even smaller now, quieter. The windows are dark, but I can see the same checkered curtains on the other side of the bay window off to the right side of the front door, so chances are my mother still owns it.
I should’ve searched for her obituary. In retrospect, her health had been in a tailspin since before my baby sister was born. It just didn’t become obvious until her sight failed and her hair grayed and began falling out by the handful. Even then, though, I didn’t think she was sick, just that she was poisoned with regret of me.
I spy a potted flower on the stoop, and my toe pushes down on the brake pedal. I idle in the road, staring. Pink blossoms are visible even from this distance. The plant is thriving under my mother’s care. This is perhaps a larger surprise than finding out this town thinks I’m dead.
I let off the brake and roll past my house. If everyone thinks I’m dead, I can’t very well walk up the three steps to Janie Walton’s house and knock on the door. There is only one place I can go, one place I can stay out of sight until I figure out how Fate means for me to complete our song.
I have to think about how to drive to the factory; I have only ever walked there. I pull down the dirt road and leave the Jeep in a cluster of trees. The factory looms ahead. I imagined it would be covered in kudzu or moss, nature slowly slaying the concrete beast. But it is just as stark as the day I last saw it. The wind picks up and sends dust spinning in the empty lot. Even though I am alone, I swear I hear boots on gravel, the laughter of men grateful for a break in the day. I turn, feeling like a child, too small in my clothes, the air too big in my lungs, but no one is there.
I raise my shoulders around my face, turn from the factory, and stride for the entrance to my father’s underground shelter. The grass grows taller and thicker the farther back I walk, and I have to trace several circles before I find the metal cap, which I do with my toe—it’s a sudden rise in the ground, a change in tone underfoot.
Kneeling, I wipe away the dust and dirt, and the cap appears. More dirt and small pebbles have filled the gap between the cap and the frame, and I have to scrape it out with my pinkie finger. At last I pry the cap loose and set it aside. The tunnel down is shallower than I remember. I don’t even need the ladder. I just hop down. With my feet flat on the dirt floor, I can reach back out and touch the grass. I don’t remember my father’s head being quite so near the surface. Am I now taller than he was then? I can’t imagine the possibility.
The hatch door to the shelter is located ninety degrees from the ladder. Indirect light spills down the hole and across the door in a diagonal slice. I turn the dial, pull the door open, and step through.
I let my eyes adjust in what dim light filters in from the hatch door. The square table is still in the middle of the room, one chair pulled out like someone got up for a glass of water and hasn’t come back yet. I struggle to remember the last time I was here. Had I left a chair out? I can’t imagine being so careless, but my head was spinning, my hands trembling at the idea of leaving my home, my song, behind. I had only just discovered my instrument. I had nearly bolted up the ladder, my father’s stick knocking against the rungs as I ascended.
The cabinet doors are all closed. I open the closest one. Cans of beans and bags of rice, years expired, are stacked in rows. I will need to throw these out. I make a note to add trash bags to my shopping list, the black kind that stretch no matter what you put in them. I’ll need to do my shopping elsewhere, somewhere bigger; box stores, younger employees, higher turnover. Somewhere that I am but a face among thousands.
I bypass the next few doors and open the next-to-last one. It’s shallower than the others, but the back wall is false, a place my father once hid a handgun and where now my first bone carvings are stored. I remember Timmy’s radius breaking when I cut down too hard and deep. His ribs were better for me to learn on, flatter and denser. I carved a conductor’s wand out of one. I pick it up now, noting the rough, uneven surface. I smile, remembering my pride, my wonder. Now, I see a rudimentary effort, a beginner’s work.
I crouch to open the lower cabinet. Timmy’s lungs and throat are still pinned to a board. More mess, jagged edges and places the tissue tore. Everything is shriveled now, brown, dry, and cracking. I’d sprayed them with a sealant I’d found in my father’s tools. Considering the chemicals I’d used and the time that had elapsed, I’m surprised there’s anything left at all. Perhaps it’s a gift from Fate, a reminder of how far we’ve come.
One day my compositions will be worth millions. I could put them on eBay and watch the price skyrocket. I won’t have to hide my work anymore. People will understand. The masterpiece will be reason enough. People will line up. Take me, they’ll cry. I want to be part of your song. I want to be remembered for all of time.
The vision fades and the bunker returns, dark and quiet. In the back corner, a generator sits under a blue tarp. My father showed me how to start it, made sure I committed every step to memory, and as I walk to it and pull off the tarp, I wonder if he hadn’t made this shelter for himself… if all along he had made it for me. Why would he have shown me how everything worked, how to connect each appliance to the generator, made me memorize a list of priority uses for the limited electricity supply, revealed where every tunnel led to, where his weapons were stowed, if he had planned on being here, too?
Father must have made this for me.
MARTIN Chapter 42 | 2:00 AM, December 3, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
GO HOME, MARTIN.
Captain’s orders chased Martin out of the office and into the night. The same three words followed him down the two-lane roads between the station and his street, up the porch stairs, and through his front door. He slammed it shut, and the sudden disturbance in the stale air made the stack of paper he’d left on the ground light a few inches above the carpet. He tossed Ama’s file into the room ahead of him, feeling brief satisfaction as her picture and his notes scattered across the floor.
How could Captain send him home with Eddie sleeping on a damn couch in an office, with six faces staring out from their investigation board and absolutely zero in terms of leads?