Harmless (14 page)

He closed his eyes again. The trick was to get past the feeling that every blind step would drop him on his face. He could do this. The powers he was tapping into could not perform under the bright lights of rational analysis, but there were historical precedents. The mother who “miraculously” lifted a city bus off her child’s pinned body. The cop who calmly stepped out of the way of a bullet after time slowed to millisecond increments. He had Love working on his side, and Love moves mountains, makes the broken man whole. Finding Franny should be a minute’s work for Love.

He should have sensed the rock—it was the size of an ottoman. His scraped shin made its own inner noise as he came down hard on his hands. He got up and moved down the path, eyes still shut, sensing some obstacles before contact but missing too many others. He just had to open up and
feel
for Franny’s presence. When his hand scraped against a ragged tree trunk he stopped, desperate to sense any vibrations in the air. There was nothing. No vibrations. No sound-shapes. No magic.

How could he not know where his daughter was? A father should know—
always
. How terrible to learn that his love for Franny was confined to the limits of his five senses.
Shouldn’t some higher function be kicking in here, sixth and seventh senses that pierced the limits of time and space? Why endow humans with such a deep capacity to love their children when it was so easy to lose them? How did this serve God or Nature’s plan?

“Who caught her when she fell?” he shouted.

He
had. She was three years old, climbing the ladder to the top of the tube slide for the first time, and when she fell he was there.

“Franny!”

The forest muffled his voice to a polite, dinner-party level. He tried to project his voice further down the path, but it was like shouting into a tunnel lined with cinder blocks. He walked with his eyes open. No more magic. He had to catch up to Alex. They had a plan. Follow Tyler, who was on to Rebecca’s scent. Watch out for any strange men. Preserve the batteries.

“Alex and I went into the woods to look for the girls.” He was talking out loud to an imaginary companion, a forty-something professional in a beige jacket and expensive jeans, face tilted forward in concern. “I was starting to panic a little.”

The man understood—he was a father, he would have felt
exactly
the same way.

“It was terrifying, actually.”

“Of course,” the man said. “But did you
know
, deep in your heart, that you weren’t going to find her?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Franny: did you know she was gone, forever? You must have—a father
knows
.”

“Shut up!”

The man vanished. Joseph ran deeper into the forest.

How had he lost Alex so quickly? Joseph was pinned in place by this impenetrable bush. He tried to squint the dark into recognizable shapes but it was like trying to mould water with his hands. He passed his hand before his face, and when it did not stir the liquid blackness he had to assure himself that his hand had not disappeared. He was sunk in a darkness without surfaces, or a darkness
made
of surfaces—all depth or depthless, he didn’t know which.

It wouldn’t have been this bad for the girls. Guided by the fading sunlight to the big path, they’d be walking between the trees now, the moonlight showing them the way forward. What did Alex say earlier? Head east, north, or south and you’ll hit a road eventually. Rebecca would know that.

Joseph just had to find his way back to the path, but he felt trapped inside a giant pair of dry lungs holding in a stale breath—he didn’t want to be around when they exhaled. How could anything survive in here? Even mosquitoes must need wider flight paths. He lashed out at the nearest branches, scratching his hands as the blackness settled back into place.

Stupid—he was
so
stupid. He’d been given a simple task: take Franny to the country for the long weekend. Feed and house her. Do not send her weeping into the wilderness, where she could die of exposure. Martha had pulled it off dozens of times, but he couldn’t make it to Day Two.

He had to calm down. The path couldn’t be far away. He chose a direction and pushed through the foliage, the close humid air parting and closing behind him like a tent flap, the lump behind his ear throbbing again. He called Alex’s name but the bush swallowed his words. Of course it did—nothing yielded to him in this place. He stepped wildly from left to right, flailing at the leaves and branches, his uselessness on display in an entirely new environment. What was the point of this goddamned
bush
, crusting the land like non-aquatic coral? Franny could pass twenty feet from him and he wouldn’t hear her cries for help.

He should turn on the flashlight, but if he drained the batteries this early Alex might send him back to the house in disgrace. Typical—kicked off his daughter’s rescue team after twenty minutes.

He had it: Mike’s iPhone! It would make do as a flashlight. There wasn’t much battery time left, but they’d be out of range soon anyway. He took the phone from his pocket, punched in the passcode, and tried to choose the app that would throw off the most light. There were several video games—no surprise there—but his eyes were drawn to the phone icon. He brought up the dial pad, illuminating in black and white an area the size of a phone booth, the digital light making the swaths of vegetation look like blurry security footage. No direction appeared more promising than any other, though he was standing on a mild slope. Sweeping the phone around, he saw that he’d walked into a furrow even more overgrown than the woods, his feet typically having followed the path of least resistance downward. As he brought the light closer to the ground, he caught the
flash from the twin reflective stripes on his un-scuffed hiking shoes, which he’d bought from an outdoor-equipment store equipped with a rock-climbing wall. God only knew what attempt at self-improvement had driven him there. He vowed to burn the shoes after he found Franny.

Joseph walked up the incline, the bubble of light leading him back to the narrow path, where he turned right and started jogging to make up lost time, to prove to himself that he could solve a problem without panicking. He heard Tyler’s distant barking and followed the sound until he came up against a wall of branches, which he pushed through, stepping out onto the big path Alex had promised. It cut through the forest like a road, wide enough for four people to walk abreast. Above him, patches of sky were powdered with stars, and as his eyes adjusted to a light with no visible source he distinguished the outlines of trees, boulders, and bushes bunched on either side of the path like stone border-fences. Tufts of grass mottled the path, but the sandy surface drew the moonlight to the forest floor like a mist, illuminating the way between tracts of unimaginably dense wilderness.

Franny must have passed this same way less than two hours ago, the forest pressing in on her from both sides, as if she were skirting the base of two cliffs.

He’d fucked up again, worse than ever this time, but even a condemned man was entitled to a last call. Mike’s iPhone informed him he was still within call range. A good man would phone Martha and apologize for everything he’d done wrong, but he didn’t have the heart for that. He wanted to hear the voice of an infatuated lover, a woman
who still believed in him enough to tell him not to blame himself too much, to stay on the path and keep his head up until he found Franny, which he would—of course he would! She couldn’t have gone far.

But there was no one to call. No lover or lifelong friend to ease his journey. What could anyone he knew back in the city understand about his plight? He’d passed beyond the range of their experience hours ago, and he might have so much further to go.

The phone rang, the rock anthem’s tinny synth chords so incongruent against his surroundings that he experienced them as a supernatural visitation, like a Paleolithic hunter confronted by a freight train. Then awe gave way to a desire to punch Mike for downloading such an irony-drenched song riff as a ringtone. The phone sounded again. Someone might be calling to say they’d found the girls.

He finally found the right icon and said hello.

“What’s with the whisper, Mike? You doing lines on the back of the toilet again?
Hey, Liz!
” The caller made an extended snorting noise. “
Just having a pee
.” More snuffling. “
Be out in a minute
.”

It was a man of their demographic—eager for a laugh.

“Who is this?”

“Who is
this
?”

Joseph held the phone away as if it were a leech he’d peeled from his cheek.

“Dude, what’s up?”

“
Dude
?” Joseph slapped the phone back in place. “How old are you?”

“Mike?”

“Seriously!” A vital truth was at stake here. “How fucking old are you?”

“Old enough to kick your ass.”

“I’ll cut your foot off!”

The guy was laughing. “You a buddy of Mike’s? Hand him the phone, man.”

“You’re going to die one day! Think about it.” He had nothing worse to say. He was about to throw the iPhone into the bush when he noticed the message icon was illuminated. Would Mike really update them by text? Did he bear that deep a grudge against him and Alex for all the teasing and put-downs over the years? Theirs was a passive-aggressive generation—you never knew how deep a grudge a friend bore you.

The first text was from
dingleberry71
, probably the same handle the sender used for his Gmail and Twitter accounts. Not “Jacob, son of Zacharia” or “Ulrick the Manslayer” but the seventy-first grown man to stake his claim in the digital world as “dingleberry.” It said he’d be at Derek’s place for the rehearsal next week. He wrote in lower case and called Mike “bro.”

There was a second message—a text—from Derek, sent at 2:37 that afternoon, about an hour before he’d visited the farmhouse:
Swinging by soon. Will get info tonite on yr piece. The PieMan
. Piece of what? Joseph stared at the screen, awaiting the Magic 8 Ball message to swim up from the depths. Why had Derek come by Alex’s that afternoon, knowing he’d piss him off by making a dope deal on his property? Mike could have just as easily picked up from Derek’s place. Had Derek wanted to talk to Mike, or to
Alex? Joseph returned to the phone’s app menu. The bright, ergonomic boxes were useless to him here, and for the first time in years he was about to step out of call range.

He started to walk. The path’s faintly glowing surface revealed a slight curve that veered deeper into the wilderness. Soon a shadow moved up ahead and stopped. Joseph had lost his glasses over a year ago but hadn’t bothered to replace them—who needed long-distance vision when the important things in the city happened within three feet of your face? He called Alex’s name and got a sharp
shush
in return. Alex was a pale smudge against the trees ten feet away, crouched low to the ground. Joseph walked as quietly as he could and stood beside Alex, following his sight line into the dark woods. The forest emitted a faint rustling of restless life stirred by the breeze. Alex stood up, the rifle held across his chest, his dim face pondering Joseph’s.

“Where were you?” he said.

Joseph flushed with shame before he understood what Alex was asking. “I got lost in the bush. Wandered off the path.”

Tyler barked from inside the bush, and they heard him running toward the path.

“Did he find something?” Joseph asked.

“I doubt it.”

The dog stepped out from the trees, stopping long enough for Alex to pat him on the head before he rushed down the path. They were catching up to him just as he shot back into the woods, his barks growing more frantic as he hurtled through the undergrowth. Alex turned on the big flashlight, a canopy of brightly lit branches spreading over
their heads like the ceiling of a suddenly inflated pup tent, the light stabbing at Joseph’s eyes. Alex pointed the flashlight into the forest, sending shadows cartwheeling across the illuminated trees, the illusion of movement drawing Joseph off the path. They heard branches snapping beyond the light’s range, and deep, aggressive barking that sounded like a warning.

“What is it? Has he found the girls?”

Alex shushed him and turned off the flashlight, pulling the night back over them. Bright yellow after-images danced against the flat darkness, but slowly the outlines of trees and rocks appeared, then the path itself, materializing beneath them like a school of tiny fish drawn to the surface by the moonlight. They heard rustling and high-pitched dog noises. Tyler was closer now. Alex stepped into the forest, leaving one foot on the path. Joseph could barely see anything. Why didn’t Alex switch on the light? A low, threatening snarl moved toward them, slowly at first, then Tyler was crashing through the woods at desperate speed, a train of high canine yelps in pursuit.

“The coyotes!” Alex shouted. He handed Joseph the big flashlight. “Point it into the forest.”

Joseph gripped it with sweaty hands as Alex pumped a shell into the rifle’s chamber.
The gun
—already the gun, loaded and cocked.

“Stand back!” Alex swept Joseph behind him with an arm as firm as a closing door.

Joseph took another step back, pointing the swerving light beam at the trees to the left of Alex’s back. A wave of yelping shrieks rushed at them, the sound pitching him
onto his ass and sending the flashlight flying into a rut in the path—the light slanting up into the air like the search beam of a half-sunk boat. The ancient instinct to run rippled up his legs, commanding him to leave this place.

“Point the flashlight!”

Joseph couldn’t do it—he
wouldn’t
do it. He was safe on the ground, his fingers digging into the sandy path—he’d dig his way to China if that was the only way out.

“Point the fucking flashlight!”

He rolled over, grabbed the light, and aimed it at Alex.

“Joseph, get up!”

Alex raised the rifle, his body poised for a kill shot into the forest’s massive, impersonal depths, the black barrel merging with the shadows beyond the path—he could have been a shaman raising a staff against intruders from the spirit world. A desperate shriek sounded in the woods. Tyler and the pack swerved to the left, thrashing through the undergrowth, the dog’s phlegmy growling answered by jibbering barks like laughter. Alex waved the rifle at the trees as if he could flush out a target, then looked down at Joseph as though he were an obscene stain on the ground. He was about to speak, but instead he picked up the flashlight and ran into the forest, a mini-lightning storm marking his course between the trees.