Now
EVERYONE IN HARROD’S Reach had a piece of the old railroad.
Gideon had always kept a rusted railway spike next to his bed. He’d found it when he was twelve. Archie, after he’d put on his glasses to analyze it through puffs of pipe smoke, told his oldest son it was a cut spike, or crampon. Said he could keep it, but to watch out for the rust.
Gideon knew it wasn’t rust. His mom, Maxine, said it was too dangerous next to his bed, inches from his pillow, but relented when Gideon told her it was for good luck. The truth was, the railway spike reminded him of Beth.
Sheriff Beth now. Deputy sheriff, rather, as she’d been so quick to correct him back at the gym, eternally modest. Scared of nothing but attention. Pretty as anyone in town, but genuinely pissed off when anyone told her so; she went out of her way to do the beautification equivalent of dumbing herself down. No makeup. No dresses. Hair always up in a tousled bun or ponytail.
As Gideon followed the herd out the gym doors and down the moonlit street, many words crossed his mind—insane, stupid, asinine—that no one would have a car in case of emergency. He settled on surreal. The sound of so many footfalls heading in the same place with no one saying a word. The crowd streamlined like a silent mob toward what they all—even the Duprees, who’d lived there for over two decades—called the Smite House, the old home of the town’s first mayor, Lucius Smite.
Jane Bigsby passing out in the middle of the gym floor had excited the citizens of Harrod’s Reach; but since the phone call from Jax moments ago, everybody was numb. Walking that mile down Guthrie like zombies.
If Jax wasn’t lying to Archie—and why would he about something so serious?—Gideon’s younger brother, Sully, had woken up from his coma for the first time in the more than three years since the accident. And on the very day Gideon returned home from overseas. With the way the crowd stole glances at Gideon as they walked toward the Dupree’s family home, they all realized that too.
Footfalls whisked in rhythm.
Streetlamps buzzed as if their marching column was adding charge to the current. Most moved down the middle of the road, although now their column was starting to fray toward the sidewalks, as if some of the younger and more mobile couldn’t wait to get there.
Gideon was right there with them, limping as quickly as he could.
Heroes don’t limp, Gideon.
Two blocks, three blocks, and then four.
And then, after five blocks of walking, as if some unheard signal had suddenly given them permission, Archie started running. Maxine removed her high heels and followed in her husband’s wake, her bare feet clapping almost comically off the cold pavement and eerily still, quiet air, high-heeled pumps dangling from her right hand as she ran. She gave Gideon a glance over her right shoulder, as if to encourage him.
Giddy-up, Gideon.
Jax’s voice from the past. Of all people, what was he doing watching Sully?
Gideon hustled along with the throng, those who could running and jogging now, quickly gaining ground down Mallard Street toward the Smite House, the tree-canopied driveway visible a hundred yards in the distance. From the 120-year-old refurbished Victorian, two porch lights glowed among the trees and foliage like a pair of illuminated eyes.
Thoughts of Sully quickened his pace. He caught up to his parents.
At the high end of the street, the old Beehive Hotel loomed like an abandoned castle overlooking the town, except the hotel didn’t appear to be abandoned any longer. Despite the night’s festivities, work was being done to that century-old hotel. Scaffolding covered part of the stone and brick façade. Hammering sounded in the distance. An electric saw churned.
Archie was out of breath while Maxine seemed like this brisk walk was a warm-up for something else.
As they neared their driveway, Gideon asked, “Somebody buy the hotel?”
“Ask your mother,” said Archie.
Maxine scoffed, rolled her eyes, but didn’t answer.
He left it at that. He fought the stabbing pain in his leg, now real as the bullet in his bag that had caused it. As much as he claimed he didn’t care fuck-all what the people around him thought, he did.
Always had. And at this moment, he couldn’t appear slow or hobbled.
Because the Army had changed him. He charged. His limp-run turned into a sprint, past his parents, thinking Where was Beth? What had happened down by the tunnel?
Beth had been with him when he’d found that railway spike a decade ago, that offset head of metal staring at him like a dirty eyeball from the clod of mud on the far side of the tunnel she and Jax had dared him to run through, knowing good and well how terrified he was of it. And how he ran like a lopsided goof. He’d done it, of course. For Beth. Only to find them cracking up after he’d passed through that cold, dank dark, hand on his chest and pale as a sheet, the two of them following right behind his every panicked step, Jax shouting Giddy-up, Gideon so loud it echoed off the tunnel’s arched, stone ceiling like a nightmare. Heart hammering so fast his chest hurt. Him seeing his breath in there while it was still summer in the Reach, humid as all get out. Sunlight so bright on each end of that weird tunnel that he’d been struck dizzy by the sudden exit. So yeah, he’d taken that glare shining off the dull head of that railway spike as a sign. But digging it from the weeds and dirt and holding it up to Jax’s throat while he was still in mid-guffaw, Jax freezing the way he’d done—in mid “Giddy-up, Gideon”—was enough of a payback for him. Nicking his neck skin with that rusted spike and watching Jax frantically swipe at the blood trickling toward the neckline of his favorite white cotton T-shirt, the one with the hooked bass as big as a football helmet—Gone fish’n!—was just icing on the cake. And although that part had been an accident, it was the first time in all the years Gideon had known Beth that she’d looked at him with admiration. That flash of a smile she’d given him right before Jax regained his focus, when she’d warned him with her eyes, You better run, all of it had warmed Gideon’s heart and boosted him for weeks thereafter. In the days that followed, that smile—his one burst of bravery he could still vividly remember—in one of many futile attempts to become who he wasn’t because of Beth Gardner, he’d shed his glasses in favor of contacts, cut his hair short, and even begun to rip off push-ups every morning before breakfast. Three weeks passed before Beth, one day at lunch, said something about him looking different, never saying anything about his glasses, or lack thereof. On some days he not only blended into the wall, he might as well have been the wall. Despite the fact that those contact lenses cost money they didn’t have—all their money went into the never-ending renovation of the Smite House—his father had found a way to fork it over, hoping they’d make his older son look just a little less nerdy and maybe even more put-together, like his little brother Sully, who, even by the age of four, had already firmly established himself in town as someone with whom to reckon. Someone who mattered. To his father’s chagrin, Gideon returned to wearing glasses the next day, and what little bit of sand he’d gained on the afternoon he’d drawn Jax’s blood with that railway spike quickly hid itself again in the pages of his books and comics and board games he sometimes played against himself.
Heroes don’t blend in. They don’t crawl into hidey-holes to disappear.
Gideon continued toward home, the pain from his wound burning like molten lava down his leg. Faster, soldier. Faster. They’d blacktopped over the gravel driveway while he’d been gone. Smooth pavement now instead of the loose pebbles Sully used to terrorize with his bike. The three-story brick and stone Victorian loomed large as he neared it, the fancy ornamentation and large windows, the rounded turrets and gabled rooftops. A ladder stood slanted against the house’s façade, stretching up toward a second-story window Archie must have been working on until the party stopped him.
Some things never changed.
The rest of Harrod’s Reach had the decency to stop at the wrought-iron fence surrounding their yard to await any news, allowing Gideon and his parents to navigate the final forty yards to the wrap-around veranda alone, as a family. At the end of the driveway, parked in the shadows of their carport, was a white SUV marked with the lettering of the Harrod’s Reach Fire Department.
While Gideon still had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, Jax and Beth had settled on theirs by third grade, and when asked each year at school, their answers never wavered. Beth would be sheriff one day, and Jax would be a fireman. And here they were, not only having already accomplished their goals, but apparently married in the process, with a kid.
At the veranda, Gideon stepped over a toolbox, wood scraps, and a handsaw his father had left on the sidewalk, and bounded up the second set of porch steps. He flung open the screen door, hurried through the foyer, past the curved central stairwell, into the front parlor, the kitchen, and entered another hallway, where it appeared the bathroom was being reconstructed. Gideon passed his father’s study, rounded the curve past his mother’s sunroom, and then heard crying coming from the back parlor, where they’d set up Sully’s bed after he’d been moved from the hospital after the accident.
“Solomon,” Archie shouted, right on Gideon’s heels, nudging him aside. Archie had never called his younger son by his nickname, Sully.
Gideon let his mother and father pass, and then followed toward the back parlor. During his childhood the back parlor had been a second dining room for large gatherings, but by the time he’d gone to war it had been turned into Sully’s glorified hospital room, complete with a fancy mechanical bed and computer monitors and constantly beeping machines. The sucking, hissing sounds of the oxygen and feeding tubes keeping him alive. Gideon heard it, the sensory overload of memory mixing with the here and now, and stopped at the door.
The sound of those beeping machines made him nauseous. For three and a half years now, his little brother had been virtually unresponsive. Doctors had thrown out words like coma and vegetative state. But what Gideon had not been able to take was the sight and sound of the nasogastric tube delivering that eight hundred calories of liquid to his brother’s stomach day in and day out. Watching his little brother get thinner. Hearing his parents fret over how they were going to afford to keep him alive. Watching that picture of perfect health turn into something unrecognizable, so skeletal and weak, when Sully had always been the strong one. Watching his parents clip his fingernails, change his diapers, and brush his teeth. The catheters filling up with fluid. The trickling water from sponge baths chased Gideon all over the house, no matter what room he went into to hide, no matter how many pillows he squashed to his ears to blot out the squeezed drips from that saturated sponge into the bedside bucket. Watching them wash and cut his hair, turn him this way and that to stave off the bedsores, the therapy to keep his muscles from total atrophy. They encouraged Gideon to help, his father’s accusing eyes sometimes demanded it, but he couldn’t.
So he’d run, literally and figuratively.
Quit stalling, soldier! Enter the goddamn premises!
His mother was screaming.
His father shouted, “Nooooo!”
Gideon stepped into the parlor.
Jax, all six foot muscled four of him, stood in his fireman uniform, cradling Sully’s limp, emaciated body in his arms like a baby. What was Sully doing out of bed? Tears wet Jax’s cheeks. He’s not moving.
The tall window behind them was open. Breeze ruffled the thin curtains.
Jax faced the three of them, and with a deadpan look in his eyes—a look of fear Gideon had never seen from him before—said, “I went to the bathroom. There … there was … someone in the room. He woke up. I swear to God, Mr. Dupree. He woke up.”
Then why did he look so dead now?