In the Shadows of Children (4 page)

“Kinda the big little tattoo, isn’t it?” Bobby said.

“I guess so.”

“Right over your heart and all. Very touching.”

Something sharpened and thickened Bobby’s tone in a contradictory way. It contained equal measures of sarcasm and sincerity. For a moment it made no sense, and then Aaron recognized it for what it was.

“Are you jealous?”

Bobby glared at him through lank hair, the smile dropping from his face. “Of course I’m fucking jealous. Are you serious?” He shook his head in disbelief. “I’ll never grow up. Never have a family, a son.” He snorted. “You ask me if I’m jealous?”

That was some of it, a lot of it, but Bobby was holding something back. Aaron decided not to press him about it. Not yet, at least.

“I’m sorry I freaked out earlier,” Bobby said, his face going softer. “Please don’t run out like that again. You can go if you need to, but don’t just run out.”

Aaron felt that familiar crush of guilt again, so constant he thought he might float away if it ever let him go. He nodded. “You have to understand how hard this is for me. How strange.”

Bobby barked out something resembling a laugh. “Oh, trust me, I understand how strange this is. Shit, it’s stranger than you know. But I guess I’ve had a lot longer to get accustomed to it.”

“So you know what’s going on then?”

From within the perfect darkness of the closet, Bobby nodded.

Aaron hesitated. Each step forward was one into that darkness, and one he couldn’t take back. Before he could decide how to proceed, Bobby decided for him.

“Tell me about your life, man. I kind of know what’s going on now. You still live in Cali. Wife and kid. You work with computers. But what happened in between?”

Aaron told Bobby everything, remembering as best he could. It surprised him, some of the things he had trouble recalling, and some of the things he’d totally forgotten that were uncovered in the logical progression of his story. He’d always been focused on the present and future, never the past. It was Sarah’s job to remember things, to take photos and organize them, to decide what was keepsake and what was clutter. If it were left to him, there’d be no clue to their history.

Aaron had never really thought about that until he tried to put his past into a narrative. And he knew it showed, the way the story stuttered, moving along, then grinding to a halt, then suddenly lurching forward again, like a truck with a tricky clutch being driven by someone with a learner’s permit. But Bobby listened patiently.

“Sorry, I’m not used to talking about myself so much. This is probably really boring.”

“Are you kidding? You’ve got no idea how much time I’ve spent imagining what you were doing. What’s that word, when you don’t have a life of your own so you try to live through someone else’s?”

“Vicariously.”

“Yeah, I tried to live vicariously through what I imagined you were doing.”

“You couldn’t have been imagining anything so boring.”

“Boring is nice, man. Boring is so nice.”

Bobby laughed. Aaron smiled, but it was forced. His brother might have found his story interesting, but Aaron didn’t want to think about himself. He knew it was stupid to ask, that this Bobby couldn’t know anything about the real Bobby, but maybe this was how he’d get to the root of why he was so messed up.

“I told you my story. Your turn.”

“You really don’t remember.”

“Remember what? I wasn’t here.”

Bobby shook his head. “I mean, I know how this works, but still… You forgot all this. You forgot the biggest part of our lives. You forgot what sent you running halfway across the country—”

“I didn’t run. I went to college.”

“You’ve forgotten a lot, but I think you know that’s not true.”

Aaron held his forehead in his hands. He was overwhelmed, he was exhausted, and it felt like something was trying to bore its way into his skull. No, out. From the middle of his brain. And it was pulping any gray matter that got in the way.

“So what reason did I have to run away?”

“The same one I had for disappearing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Aaron shouted, slamming his fists down on the soft mattress, which made him feel petulant.

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

“That’s exactly what someone would say if they had a line of bullshit to feed a person too smart to fall for it.”

“That’s why I’m not going to feed you any lines. You’ll believe, but you need to find out for yourself.”

Aaron shook his head slowly, huffed out a long breath, closed his eyes. “And how do I do that?”

“First of all, you need to understand that I’m real. Nothing I say will matter if you write me off as a hallucination.”

Aaron snorted out a short laugh. “Okay, fine, you’re real.”

“I mean it!” Bobby’s voice contained some of that freight-train power that had nearly knocked Aaron down the stairs the last time he’d shouted. Aaron looked up, the smile dropping from his face. “I’ve been waiting to talk to you,” Bobby said, “waiting for years. In darkness. In pain. You will not dismiss me.”

“Okay, man. Okay. But how can you possibly prove you’re real if you can’t leave that closet?”

“This is the only place where I can appear in my old form, but I can see other places. Your world is like a huge old house that looks solid, that looks neatly laid out, but behind the walls are tunnels connecting this point and that, and things live in those tunnels. Maybe ‘live’ isn’t the right word.” Bobby dropped his head for a moment, then looked back up, his eyes showing his exhaustion. “I can see other places in your world. I’ll describe something to you that you couldn’t know about. You’ll go and see that it’s true. That would be proof that I have existence outside of your demented noggin, right?”

“I guess that would do it, if it were really something I couldn’t have known about.”

“There’s a little boy. His name is Hudson. His bedroom is on the first floor. Straight out of his window you can see the River Park slide. Beneath his mattress you’ll find a slingshot and a steak knife.”

“Beneath his mattress? How am I supposed to confirm that? How would I even find his room?” Aaron said, shaking his head, wanting to laugh this all off but afraid of how Bobby would react.

“If I can see the slide from his window, you can see his window from the slide. The kid is obsessed with Spider-Man. His entire room is covered in Spider-Man stuff.”

“I can’t go peeking in little kids’ windows and breaking into their rooms to check beneath mattresses. That’s insane.”

Bobby stood up and shouldered his backpack. “You can, and you will. I came back after all this time to warn you, Aaron.” He took a step back into darkness, then another. It clung to him, swallowing him up. “What happened to me is going to happen to Elijah, unless you stop it.”

Aaron jumped from the bed. “What do you mean? Don’t fuck around about that.”

Bobby didn’t reply. The darkness had taken every part of him and then began to fade, or rather to swirl away, tendrils of pure black coiling back into the corners, the darkness returning to normal shadow, exposing Bobby’s old clothes. Aaron charged forward, clawed through the veil of fabric and hangers until he hit the back wall.

“Bobby! Bobby!”

But Bobby was gone. Aaron stumbled from the closet and sat back on the bed.

He hadn’t really seen his brother. Something in his brain had broken. He’d gone crazy.

But he didn’t feel like he’d gone crazy. And delusional people argued
for
their delusions, not against them.

Aaron didn’t believe in the supernatural. When you died, that was it. And even if he had become religious, it wouldn’t have been to a system where a person disappeared only to reappear in a closet fifteen years later. That was ridiculous.

But something strange had happened to Bobby all those years ago. Deep down, Aaron knew it. Something had chased Aaron away, and whatever it was had gotten Bobby. And it wasn’t something ordinary. It wasn’t something that could be understood in the calm light of day. It was a fate only to be considered after the sun had gone down and the dark corners deepened and spread, until whatever lived on the other side had a dominion at least as vast as man’s. Something had happened to Bobby, and something had kept Aaron away from his home for so long.

If he knew what, maybe he could turn away, consider this all a stress-induced break from reality. It was the not knowing that made it impossible for him to turn his back on all this craziness and just drive home. Fuck the house. Fuck the mementos. But he had to find out the truth, for Elijah.

Once he’d proved to himself that he was just nuts, he could drive back to California and leave all the bullshit behind for good.

* * *

As the sun rose, Aaron sat in his car in the River Park parking lot, staring out through binoculars at the dark windows of the homes across the street as they flashed on one by one.

He’d found the binoculars in his father’s closet, between a bird-watching book and a stamp-collecting book. Teenage Aaron had thought the man had the world’s most boring hobbies, but adult Aaron had almost gotten weepy when he opened the book to a page of the stamps of England, and had to shut it and vacate the closet quickly. The memories and the smell of his father’s clothing had almost undone him.

Though Aaron sat watching the residents of that block awaken and, one by one, get started on their days, his mind was far away, reexamining his hazy past as the light of recent events burned away the fog. At that moment, his mind was excavating his final phone conversation with his brother, the one from the night of his disappearance when he’d called him so agitated. Later, after the required days had passed that qualified Bobby as a missing person, the police had asked Aaron what they’d talked about during that phone call. Already, he’d mostly forgotten. It was like his brain wasn’t made to hold the information.

Now, bits came back to him.

“I thought you’d want to know that I’m going to end this. I’m facing it down.”

“Hold up, Bobby. What are you talking about?”

“You never had to go through this alone. You don’t know what it’s like. It has to end. I’m done with this bullshit. I’m done being terrified every night I spend at home. I’m going in there, and I’m not coming back until he’s dead.”

The closet. There was a nexus to the fear. Aaron had thought it was the town, or the house, but it was smaller. For all those years, he’d been avoiding that closet.

Working the binoculars back and forth, Aaron stopped whenever he found a new window illuminated, then moved on. Now he snapped back, over white siding and black faux storm shutters.

Spider-Man. Posters, toys, a kite, a life-size cardboard cutout. Aaron looked over his shoulder at the park, looked back to the window, saw that the room was indeed in a direct line with the slide.

A little boy stepped into view, clumsily removing a red and blue pajama top, nearly falling over in the process. Aaron put the binoculars down with a jerk, already feeling like a disgusting pervert without watching the kid undress.

A woman let a small black dog out the back door. It looped the yard, did its business, then stared out at the world beyond the cyclone fence that delineated its territory, checking for invaders.

Kids walked past on their way to school, carrying big backpacks. The effect on Aaron was twofold. First, it made him paranoid, as they turned to stare at the only car in the River Park parking lot. But it also made him miss Elijah, with his ever-present
Power Rangers
backpack.

Aaron moved his car farther back into the lot, closer to the park and away from the sidewalk. Soon after, the woman let the dog back in. She was no longer wearing a robe, but yoga pants and a sweatshirt. Aaron moved his car again, this time around the block, parking two houses down and on the opposite side of the street from the white house with black shutters. It was a quiet neighborhood, with lots of trees lining the street, though they were all bare of their foliage. The crispness of such mornings always sent a spike of adrenaline through Aaron’s veins, but it was dwarfed by the surge sent through him when the garage door opened and an SUV backed out.

He reached for his keys, nearly turning them, nearly starting his car and driving away. This was stupid. This was beyond stupid.

Then the door handle was in his hand instead, and he pulled it and was walking along the sidewalk before he had time to think about what he was doing.

No one moved on the quiet street. Aaron could feel them all sitting at their windows, peering out at him, waiting with thumbs hovered over dial pads for the moment when he did something they could call the police about.

Aaron reminded himself to breathe. Every several seconds he reminded himself again. He got parallel to the house. With slight movements he hoped didn’t draw attention, he looked about. No one was around. He walked around the side of the house, opened the gate and stepped into the back yard.

Even thieves weren’t this dumb. They did this at night, not in daylight.

Aaron wrapped his fist in his leather coat sleeve, pressed it to the glass, pulled it back, then hesitated.