I SAW THE sunlight glaring off the windshield and felt the warm summer air gusting through my passenger-side window. My arm rested on the window ledge and my chin was propped on my forearm. I stared out at the passing fields and it gave me an empty feeling. The wind blew my hair around as we drove through a cloud of dust, the specks rising up and stinging my face and eyes.
I could feel the resentment of my father, who was boiling in the driver’s seat of the car. I was old enough to drive, but if he was in the car, he was driving. On that particular trip, he was a tornado of pent-up energy, twitching and biting his fingernails and muttering the beginnings of sentences that never came to fruition. I was sixteen, and he was afraid I was about to let him down.
Finally, he managed to actually say something, real words, and he had to shout to be heard above the wind rushing through the open windows. “I don’t care what happened. He’s your brother.” His words simmered there in the air, spitting hot, before being swept out of the car. We left them behind, or at least I wanted to leave them behind. But words have a way of keeping up.
The car carried us around bends and over bridges, and for a moment I was a child again and pretended we were launching into space. I closed my eyes and felt the darkness around me, the earth moving away faster and faster, the encroaching stillness of space and the pinpricks of stars all around. I felt like I was floating, and I had to catch my breath when I looked down and saw nothingness for all eternity. The earth became a tiny blue dot, remote, and I felt a great sense of freedom.
But my imagination could only take me a certain distance from reality, and when the car stopped abruptly and my father shut it off, I had to open my eyes. We were at my high school. He pulled violently on the parking brake, even though the car had come to rest on flat ground. I wondered if you could break the parking brake by pulling on it too hard. He might pull the handle right out of the car and carry it with him into the principal’s office.
“C’mon,” he growled.
As we crawled from the car, I knew a couple of things.
I knew my father believed you should never rat out your brother—never, never, not for any reason.
I knew we were going inside so I could tell a lie.
We crossed the baking pavement. My father treated the handle of the front door much the same as he had treated the parking brake. We entered the air-conditioned lobby, and the cold air clung to the sweat on my forehead, under my arms, on the small of my back. I followed my father as he plunged through door after door, never knocking, never waiting.
Then, the door to Principal Stevens’s office.
“How can I—” his assistant began, but my father ignored her and pushed through the door.
I followed, my shoulders hunched over apologetically. I stared at the floor tiles.
“Gentlemen,” Principal Stevens said, unfazed by my father’s entrance. “Have a seat.”
My father paused, as if he was considering the most brazen way to reject any seat ever offered to him by this no-good principal, but he scowled and sat. I sat beside him. In the remaining seat sat a police officer.
Principal Stevens looked across the desk at us. “As you know, Jo Sayers has accused your son of . . .” He hesitated, weighing his words. “Of violating her at a party three months ago.”
“Why’d she wait so long?” my father hissed.
“I’m sure we can sort all this out,” Principal Stevens said, somehow managing to remain completely removed from my father’s spite.
My dad glared over at the officer. “What’s he doing here?”
“He’s here to collect your son’s statement and make sure there are no . . . inconsistencies.”
We lived in a small town, one that didn’t give too much standing to things like Miranda rights or the right to have an attorney present.
“Boy?” the police officer said, staring at me.
“I was with my brother all night,” I said quietly.
“Which night?” the officer asked.
“The night Jo claims he . . . was with her.”
“That’s right,” my father muttered. It was the closest thing to encouraging me that I had ever heard slip from his mouth.
“A few kids say they saw him at the party,” the officer said. His voice was neither skeptical nor believing.
I glanced at the principal. I had the sense that this was a performance they had all created, and all I had to do was play my part.
“I heard there was a lot of alcohol there.” I shrugged, staring back at the floor. “Easy mistake to make.”
“This isn’t just any violation,” the officer said, a sternness entering his voice. “This is rape, boy.”
I didn’t reply.
“Where were you boys, if not at the party?” Principal Stevens asked in a completely unconcerned voice, but he did lean over his desk toward me.
“Camping. Sir. Up at the state park. We left right after school and didn’t come back for two nights. I was with him the whole time.”
“You sure?” the police officer asked.
I swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.”
The principal leaned back, and it was clear he was immensely relieved. “We don’t need a good boy to be kept from graduating, not over something like this,” he said. “Thank you, Dan. Officer?”
The police officer shrugged. “This clears it up pretty good.”
We all stood at the same time. I was amazed at how easy it had been, not only the process but also the telling of the lie. A shiver ran through me, as if I’d swallowed something raw, something not meant to be consumed.
“Why’d that little swine wait to come forward until now?” my father asked as we all shuffled toward the office door.
Principal Stevens shrugged. “No one knows for sure,” he said. “Maybe because she’s pregnant.”
The officer shook his head. “It’s a real shame,” he said, and the other two men grunted their assent.
I couldn’t tell what it was he referred to as being “a real shame”—the fact that she had come forward, the baby, the rape, or the lie we had all agreed on.
IT WAS A quiet morning, and I knew they were probably waiting for me at the stone patio, waiting for me to come down so that all of us could decide what was next. What would we do in the face of so many unexpected things?
But the new memory gave me so much more to think about, and I needed to sit with it a bit. I wondered how I could do that, how I could lie for my brother, but then I remembered the look on my father’s face while we drove. The images swirled in my mind—the wind in the window, the anger of my father, the baking pavement as we got out and walked toward the school. The sense that I had to fix what my brother had broken. Anxiety at the impending lie.
I stalled. I woke slowly and rose even slower, weighed down by what I remembered. The day was already there, and it was bright. The grass was still and the air had warmed, now that the storm was two days gone. The horizon formed a line where the deep blue of the sky rested on the rich green of the grass, barely moving. I stood in the doorway, shading my eyes with one hand, staring out into the emptiness.
There was something about the light of a warm day that scattered the fear from the night before. Po’s theory, that those who had held us captive were returning for us, had felt so true in the flickering shadows beside the fire, but here? In the daylight? It seemed ludicrous. The valley was too peaceful to imagine some kind of impending invasion.
I heard rustling from my bedroom, a sound that caused nervousness and other feelings to flutter in my gut. The woman. I walked to the door and stood there listening before raising my hand and knocking lightly with two knuckles. “Hello?” I said in a hushed voice no one could possibly hear from the other side of a door.
But she must have heard my tender knock, because her voice called out to me. “Come in.”
I pushed the door open. She sat in bed, her back against the headboard. She had combed her long black hair and it was straight and shining. Her dark eyes searched mine. She pulled the covers up around her and sighed.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice rich and purring.
“For what?”
“For taking me in. For helping me. For letting me stay here without telling anyone else. I needed this rest. I’m still not ready to be interrogated.”
She was a vision sitting there. Stunning.
“Have you found my key?” she asked in a distracted voice, as if it was the last thing on her mind.
“No,” I managed to get out, even though the key was right there in my pocket where it always was.
“Have you decided?” she asked me, her eyes wide with curiosity.
“Decided what?”
“Decided what you’re going to do.”
“About what?”
She smiled, and it was the closest she had come to condescending. It was a smile that said, You silly boy. What would you do without me?
“Your brother,” she said, and the blanket lowered so that I could see her bare shoulders. “What are you going to do about your brother? You can’t leave him there.”
“I should probably go find him,” I said, looking away from her. My voice was noncommittal, not convincing in the least. In fact, the words surprised me—I could never go back into the mountain and look for him. Where had that come from? Still, it was embarrassing that I hadn’t gone for him as soon as she told me where he was.
“To be honest, I don’t know if I can do it,” I muttered.
“Of course you can! But you can’t go alone,” she replied, and there was an urgency not quite hidden in her voice. “You need to take them with you. You will need help.”
“Them?”
“Your friends. All of your friends who live here with you. They should all go with you.”
I nodded, but my words went in a different direction. “I can’t ask them to do that. It’s too terrible. I can’t.”
She looked at me as if I had said something very noble, and she nodded at the truth of it—the deep, aching truth. “But you can’t go alone,” she repeated.
“I know.” I wanted to tell her I didn’t think I could go back there at all, on my own or with an entire crowd of people, because what was over there was simply too awful.
“It wasn’t as bad as you remember it,” she said in a soothing voice, looking down and to the side as if she was afraid to make eye contact.
“What?” I asked, confusion all over my face. “Are you kidding?”
There was a sincerity in her face that I couldn’t argue with. “I know you have terrible memories of it, but you’ve made it much worse than it really was.”
“You just crawled out of the canyon a couple days ago,” I said. My voice sounded like someone else’s, someone far away, someone rather silly. “You were bleeding. You could barely stand.” Why did I sound silly to myself? I made a resolution not to say anything else.
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “I’m completely fine. Look at me. You found me in the plains and brought me here. Don’t you remember?”
She was right. Her skin was like white soap, clear and soft. Her face was untainted by anything. Her eyes were sharp and black, and her hair glowed. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, trying to loosen this grip of confusion. I was getting mixed up between finding her and seeing the girl out by the third tree. How long had this woman been in my house? Where exactly had I found her?
“Dan,” she whispered. “It’s okay. Look at me.” She paused. “Dan, look at me.”
I opened my eyes. Her gaze was a deep pool. Her hand moved up my arm until it stopped behind my shoulder. She pulled me down toward her and kissed my cheek, my forehead, and then my mouth. Softly. So softly. I closed my eyes and fell into visions of other times, other places.
But always, at the heart of everything I saw, was my brother, alone.
MY HEART POUNDED when I locked the house and walked down the greenway toward the cluster of houses. I felt all emptied out, turned around, and disheveled. It was like someone had taken my mind, with everything it knew and believed and felt, and shaken it, so that all the papers mixed up, all the files opened, all the pieces jumbled.
The day couldn’t have been more beautiful. The air was the perfect temperature, cool on my skin. The sky was blue and clear, and the grass on the plains rippled in gentle waves. I wanted to go lie in it, stare up into the blue, feel the blades of grass against my arms and ears and fingers. I took in a deep breath and let it out, another deep breath, another letting out. Yes, this was it. No matter what else was happening, this was the village I loved.
I walked through the houses. No one was there, and this went beyond the normal quiet of our near-empty town. Even the places where people usually moved around were empty. No one peeked out to say hello, no one invited me in for a chat, no one offered me a drink. The doors were closed and the alleys were empty and the blinds were all drawn. Even Miss B’s. Even the women’s.
By the time I approached Miho’s house, I could hear them. I looked up the small hill to the stone patio, and they all were sitting in a circle, talking in murmurs and whispers, their voices mingling with the breeze that moved through town, stirring the long grass, sounding Circe’s wind chime. I felt like a kid late to class.
I walked toward the patio and everyone stopped talking. Now I felt like a defendant entering the courtroom. Their eyes were on me. When I returned John’s gaze, he looked down at the ground nervously. Po didn’t look away, though. Neither did Circe. Misha swallowed hard. I kept walking toward them and took in each person in the circle. Finally, Miho pulled her mouth up at one side in a kind of apology and started crying softly. Then she pulled her knees to her chest, her feet coming up onto the seat.
“Hey,” I said, the one word a question. I stopped walking and stood at the edge of the small circle. The charred remains of the previous night’s fire sat black and lifeless.
“Dan,” Abe said, standing and motioning to an empty spot right beside him, “where have you been all morning?”
I shook my head slowly, not answering.
I noticed that the girl sat on the other side of Abe. Someone—Miho, I guessed—had brushed her hair and braided it. Her skin was clean. Her eyes seemed cooler in the daylight. She was biting her fingernails, and her eyes kept flitting up, looking at my face, and then looking elsewhere quickly. She didn’t say anything.
I walked across the patio, and I had never felt so self-conscious of each step. I was sure I’d catch an edge and trip. But I made it to my seat and sat down.
Abe walked to the other side of the small circle so he could face everyone. But he spoke mostly to me. “Dan, we’ve all had memories in the last two days that need to be shared.”
“I thought we were going to talk about her,” I said, motioning toward the girl. “And try to figure out what’s going on around here.”
“I think it’s important that we take some time today and share our memories because, well, as it turns out, they all pertain to you.” He paused. “Or your brother.”
I couldn’t have been more confused. But I thought about Miss B’s memory and how I’d had a feeling it was connected to me somehow. And I thought of overhearing Mary’s memory. Miho’s drawing of my brother. I looked at the rest of them: Circe, John, Po, Misha.
Now what?
“Dan, if you don’t mind, we’re going to have everyone take turns sharing their new memories.”
I was relieved and terrified. Relieved because I would finally know what everyone was thinking about, what everyone else had remembered. Terrified because . . . well, I wasn’t sure. What was it about these memories that had anything to do with me?
I had a sense that their stories might change me, make me into something entirely other than what I was. Could stories do that?