THE ROCKS ROSE up in front of us, a kind of jetty that held back the bog waters. We made our way up, exhaustion stiffening my fingers, but after the cold of the forest and the canyon, the rocks felt almost warm. We got to the top and spotted the boat and the extra-long oar, and we wound our way down among the boulders. It took both of us to lift the boat and slide it into the water, and I’d imagine we both looked pitiful in our pain and weariness.
Adam climbed in gingerly, and I followed, dragging the oar with me. It took one easy push and we were back in the water. Again I searched behind us for Lucia. I willed her to appear. How could she ever cross this water without a boat? How could she ever leave this place on her own? I took heart in knowing that anyone who had ever escaped from this part of the abyss before had done so on their own, perhaps even without a boat. But it all felt so unlikely.
We drifted silently across the still water, and after a while the bank we had come from disappeared behind us. It wasn’t until this moment that I realized there was no fog, no haze. The clouds were so high that they looked like a flat sheet, stretched, without any breaks in them.
Adam sat in the front, his back to me, leaning forward with his arms out and his hands gripping the bow. He could have been in prayer. He could have been asleep. He could have been plotting some escape. I wondered how his clothes still clung to him after all that time, torn and shredded as they were. His hair had dried in coarse clumps like wet straw, and between the strands I could see long, deep scratches on the back of his neck. Were they the marks his abusers had left, or were they gouges of guilt, self-inflicted? This place was even stranger than I had imagined, and what had happened to all of us seemed less and less clear.
He whispered something in his hoarse voice.
“What?” I asked, not even sure if he was talking to me or to himself.
“The water.” He pushed the words out. “The water. Do you remember? The lake. Do you remember the lake?”
I was about to say no, but an image came into my mind. Adam and I in a lake house that one of my father’s trucker friends had said we could stay in. It was a rough hunting cabin, and there was no running water inside, although there was a pump out front and an outhouse. Thirty yards down the hill from the house, the lake lapped up against a stony beach, and a long, narrow pier jutted out into the cold blue water.
Adam and I were roughhousing one afternoon, and in a series of events that happened too fast to replay in my mind, our wrestling caused a large pair of elk antlers to fall off the wall, strike the floor, and break. The two of us sat suspended in time, me on the bottom, nearly pinned. We craned our necks to find the source of the loud snapping sound.
We could fix it, I told myself. We could glue it, or hang it back up and pretend nothing happened, or throw the entire thing into the lake. But neither of us could move, because we heard the creaking of the bedroom door, and our father emerged without saying a word. He didn’t even look at us—we still hadn’t moved from the floor. He stared long at that broken set of antlers, his friend’s fractured trophy.
“Come on,” he mumbled in a voice that terrified me more than any shout could have.
We disentangled ourselves from each other, and I felt alone, afraid, and somehow naked. With Adam, even when he was pinning me to the ground, I felt part of something, something strong. But standing and following my father, walking wordlessly behind Adam, I felt even less than what I was, which at the time was a frightened twelve-year-old boy.
Still not looking at us, our father walked outside and down to the pier. It swayed under our weight, and I nearly fell in a couple of times. I considered turning around and running, once even looking over my shoulder into those wooded hills. I imagined the feeling of safety I would have, running through the shadows of the trees, building a shelter in the wilderness where I could stay. Escape.
But I didn’t run. And neither did Adam. We trailed behind our father, all the way to the end of the pier, by which point my legs were trembling. He climbed into the motorboat, also owned by his friend, and motioned for us to get in with him.
“The rope,” he said, and I knew he meant for me to untie the boat from the dock.
I tentatively untied the rope, and the boat bobbed for a moment in the water, independent of the pier, independent of me. Again I considered running. I could be halfway back to the dock by the time he climbed out of the boat. I could be in the woods before he could catch me. Would he even chase me? Probably not. Maybe that’s the real reason I didn’t run—I couldn’t face such a tangible sign of his indifference.
I jumped in and the boat shook. Adam and I moved to the front, gripping the sides, and the motor roared to life, easing the three of us out into that flat, beautiful lake. Soon we skimmed the water, and there were no waves to slap the bottom, no waves to skip us up into the air. It was a droning, constant propulsion to the deepest section, where the far banks were barely visible in all directions. A cold mist blew into our faces. I looked at Adam. He couldn’t help but grin.
Our father cut off the engine unexpectedly, and the boat limped to a stop, pitching this way and that ever so subtly. There was no wind. The sky was huge, a beautiful blue dome that held everything, the entire universe. There was even happiness in that moment of quiet, that moment of peace, and I could nearly forget that Adam and I had broken something important.
“Get in the water,” our father murmured. Had he been drinking? I couldn’t tell. Adam reached for one of the life jackets, but our father stuck out his foot and stamped it down in the bottom of the boat, where an inch or so of water had gathered. “You won’t need that.”
We looked at each other. We had on normal clothes—khaki shorts and T-shirts. We had planned on going out for dinner. I reached into my pockets to make sure they were empty, taking out only a few small pieces of lint, a penny I had found on the dirt road that led to the cabin, and a movie stub. I moved to take off my shirt, but a hand ripped it back down.
“Get. In. The. Water,” he said again, each word existing entirely on its own. When Adam and I paused at the side of the boat, he shouted so that his voice broke the dome and brought the universe caving in around us. “Get in the water!”
We jumped in, our splashes nearly synchronized. The water was clear and cool but not cold, a perfect day for swimming. I could feel the colder currents moving around my legs like fingers reaching up for me. We both hovered there, treading water, waiting to see what we were supposed to do next. But our father sat in the boat, staring off at the distant horizon.
Adam and I drifted closer, but as soon as one of us came within arm’s reach, our father cleared his throat and said in a light voice, as if he was wishing us a good afternoon, “Don’t touch the boat.”
“It was an accident,” Adam said, sputtering as a small swell rose up over his mouth.
“You two. You just go through life thinking you can have or take or break whatever you want. You’re like two little animals. It’s pathetic.”
“We didn’t try to do it,” I chimed in. “We’re sorry.”
“You’re right, you’re sorry,” he said, staring down at me.
My arms and legs ached, and the water was cooling. I hadn’t noticed when we first set out, but the end of the afternoon was near. I wondered if he was going to make us swim home. The shore was nearly invisible from where I was, down in the water. I put my head back and floated, eyes closed. The water drowned out all other sounds, and I was gone, far from there, in a bathtub or a swimming pool or hunched under an umbrella after the rain has stopped. It was quiet there. Peaceful.
I stayed that way for a few minutes, and when I looked up, I found it hard to believe how far I had drifted away from the boat. Adam was still there, still treading, although the look on his face was strained. His skin had gone pale. He floundered, coughed, righted himself.
“Adam!” I shouted. “Float on your back. Get some rest.”
But he wouldn’t. His dark hair was wet. His breathing was hoarse. His arms splashed. Then he was under.
“Dad!” I screamed. “Adam!”
Our father eased his way over to the edge of the boat and stared into the depths. He plunged his hand in and grabbed Adam first by the hair, then by the scruff of his T-shirt, pulling up on it so that it came up under his chin, a noose. He dragged Adam into the boat and dumped him like a marlin. I heard Adam coughing over and over again until he threw up. Our father sat at the front of the boat as if nothing had happened. He wasn’t smiling or frowning. He was sitting. Waiting.
I floated on my back, trying to preserve my strength. I knew in that moment what he wanted—he wanted me to feel that gentle slipping under, the panic of no air, the sense of him saving me from death, literally pulling me up into life. And I would not give him that satisfaction. I floated on my back, the water plugging and unplugging my ears, the sky cool and far above me. I treaded water for a few minutes. Then I floated again.
The boat coughed to life. I straightened up, kicked in the water, moved my arms around. I felt instantly suspicious because my father never gave up, never at anything and especially not when it came to waiting. He showed Adam the motor, how to steer, and sat in the front of the boat again.
He had never let either of us drive the boat, no matter how many times we begged.
As they trolled past me, he spoke one last time, and again he did not look at me but sent his words out to some other place. “You little cheat. Floating isn’t allowed.”
The boat powered past me, leaving me in the middle of the lake. I caught Adam’s glance and could tell he was worried for me. He looked nervously over his shoulder to see if our father was watching, then he pushed a life vest over the side. It bobbed in the water, pushed aside by the wake. Our father turned toward Adam again, and at first I thought he had seen the life preserver, but he only instructed Adam on how to give the boat more throttle. It stood up out of the water, a higher pitch, before sitting and speeding away.
I swam, exhausted, to the life vest and tangled myself up in it. It held me, and I could finally catch my breath. I started kicking slowly, asking myself if it was even possible for me to swim all the way back to the shore in front of the cabin.
There is a particular feeling that comes in the night as you float on your back, when the deep water is still and the sky is reflected back to you. I moved slowly, sometimes using my arms to paddle, sometimes my legs, and I made it through the dark, all the way back.
The boat thumped against the pier in a gentle rhythm. There were waves, tiny ones, enough to lift and lower the craft. A hand reached down and helped me up, and once on the pier, sitting on that solid thing, I felt like jelly, like my entire body might melt. I was so tired.
“You okay?” Adam asked.
I nodded. We sat there for a long time, saying nothing. Then we stood and walked back inside. Our father never said a word about it. He used glue to reattach the antler. No one ever noticed the difference.
“I SHOULD HAVE come back for you,” Adam said as we approached the muddy banks of the bog. “I should have brought the boat back out and found you.”
“It was dark,” I said. “It was a big lake. You wouldn’t have found me, not at night.”
“That’s not the point. You came back here for me.”
Back here. For a moment, in that memory, my mind had escaped to a place where the sky was bright blue and the water clear, where the trees that lined the distant banks were green and full and the cabin’s red metal roof was like a siren’s call. Back here, though, the muddy water was thick. The only bank that was visible was the one coming into view, loaded with those sharp reeds growing up out of the mud. The sky was dull, a kind of brown-gray, and while the cold had dimmed, the warmer air smelled of rotten mud.
“If you are real,” Adam said, staring straight ahead, leaning into the bow of the boat, “if you are real . . . where did you come from?”
“Outside of the mountain.”
“And what is it like there? Outside?”
“It’s very green,” I said. “It’s quiet, and the air smells of living things. From there, the mountain looks like something beautiful. I live in a small stone house at the edge of a village.” I paused and decided not to tell him about going east, not yet. “There are a few others there.”
I wondered if they were still there, if all of the houses had burned or if any had been saved. Was Abe still waiting for me, as he always said he would?
“You can choose a house. There are some empty ones. But we still have a long way to go to get there. You were at the very bottom.”
Adam turned around and faced me, leaned back, and wedged himself into the bow. I could tell he was on the edge of passing out.
“You know what I miss the most?” he said, his voice weak and see-through.
“What?”
“The birds,” he whispered. “The swallows swooping down over our heads like bats, the pigeons in the barn, the doves in the eaves, the robins hopping along, eating worms.”
“I never knew you liked birds.”
He nodded. “I stared into the sky for years here, or decades, I don’t know, just looking for the birds.”
“Mother loved birds,” I said quietly.
He nodded. He leaned his head back on the point of the bow and spoke toward the flat clouds above us. “You know, I remember how Mom used to stand beside the window and watch the birds.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
“One day I saw her standing there, and there was such love in her eyes. She held a cup of coffee close to her face, and the steam moved around her mouth, cheeks, and ears. I had never seen such love before. I wondered if she was looking out the window at Dad, but we both know that wasn’t what it was.” He gave a wry chuckle. “I walked over to stand beside her and see what she could possibly be looking at with such love, such fondness.” He laughed as he said “fondness,” as if he knew it wasn’t a word he usually used. “Do you know what she was looking at?”
I shook my head.
“She was looking at you, Dan.”
The oar stopped in the water, and our forward motion slowed. For a moment we were adrift, and the boat, because of the distribution of weight, an underwater current, or something else, slowly spun, pointing us back toward the far bank, the path through the gate, the frozen river, and Adam’s rock.
She had loved me. And yet, I had only ever been concerned about my father’s love.
I gripped the oar and braced my weight against it, sending us in the correct direction, back toward the muddy side of the shallow brown lake. When we weren’t speaking, there was nothing but the sound of the boat in the heavy water, the oar dipping in and drops falling from it when I lifted it out.
I did not want to tell him that there were no birds in the plains.
“Have you seen Father in any of your travels?” Adam asked me.
I shook my head. “No.”
“So, he found his way out.”
This was something I could not contemplate. If he had left the mountain, if he had been in this place and fled, it must have happened before I had found my way to the village, because I had seen many hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people come through, but never him.
“I guess.”
“I thought I saw him here, once,” Adam said. “But it was from a distance, and it was when there were still a lot of us. I don’t know. Probably my imagination.”
Now Adam was looking right into my eyes. He scared me, because I couldn’t tell if he was sane or not, if all this time in the abyss had unhinged his mind or if this was the brother from my childhood. If it was him, I didn’t recognize him.
“I hated him,” Adam said, his words reluctant to come out. “I don’t remember much about this place. I’ve been here for so very, very long. But I do remember that I wasn’t always so deep inside the mountain. It was my hatred for him that drove me down here, looking, searching. I wanted to find him. I planned on killing him. But this place . . .” He motioned all around us. “This place was so full of people moaning, screaming, pulling on me, needing, needing, needing.”
He ran his hand through his long, tangled hair and winced, gritting his teeth. He was getting himself worked up. I wanted to say something that would calm him.
“I wish you would have come out. I wish you would have joined me.”
He shook his head, put his face in his hands, and sat there like that for so long I thought he might have fallen asleep. But then he spoke.
“I do too. When I heard your voice, and the voice of that imaginary girl, it was like all of that hate broke up inside of me. The fog lifted. I don’t hate him anymore.” He paused. “Do you, brother? Do you hate our father?”
I didn’t know what to say. I had barely thought of him, except perhaps when my memories came back to me. I was so focused on Adam that my history with our father slid easily through my fingers, but here, deep in the abyss, I could feel that hatred rising. It threatened to pull me down.
I shook my head uneasily. “No,” I said, frowning. “I don’t know.”
I didn’t want to talk about our father anymore.
“What else do you remember? What else do you miss?” I asked.
He looked at me, squinted, and I knew I had been found out, that he could tell this was me grasping for a change of subject. But he went along with it.
“I miss the sunrise. Remember when we had that airplane business and I’d go on an early morning run? The plane lifted easily off the runway, barely clearing the trees, and there it was—the sunrise. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to keep flying, all the way into it.”
I was amazed at how many memories he had. I was amazed at how quickly he seemed to be recovering, transforming from that torn man kneeling on the rock, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him. This place we were going to had no sunrises—only the soft dimming of light in the evening, which was beautiful and peaceful but was no sunset, and the dark of night, and the early morning brightening, which was gentle and quiet, but it was no sunrise.
Would we ever get out of this place? Would I ever see the green grass of the plains stretching out in front of me?
I felt a nagging sense of fear that something was coming for us, that I should have locked the gate no matter what that might have meant for Lucia. The desire became so strong that I nearly turned the boat around. Again I scanned the horizon for any sign of our tormentors. I dug in the oar, and now it was a struggle to pull it out, because it sank into the muddy bottom. Bubbles rose in the water every time I lifted it. I scanned the bank for Miho. Nothing.
We got the boat as close as we could. I told Adam to avoid the reeds and the flowers. After we had struggled to push the boat farther through the mud, we lay in the bottom, exhausted, panting. I arranged the oar the same way Lucia had placed it, on top of the mud, stretching out to the bank.
“You have to walk along it or you’ll sink,” I said. I took off my shirt and threw it to the bank. “In case you need an extra step.”
Adam scurried along the wooden oar, his feet slipping, and he did not have to step on the shirt. I followed him, and the oar sank in. My last few steps were in knee-deep mud, so tight, resisting each step with such powerful suction, I thought I might lose the skin on my legs. But soon we were resting on the bank, the bog and the gate and the icy hollow behind us. Now there was only the long, steep ledge, the climb to the top, and the river Acheron.
But . . . Miho. Where was Miho?
Maybe we didn’t see her coming because we were exhausted. Maybe we didn’t sense her approach because she was still covered in mud, blending in with that whole place. Maybe I didn’t want to see her, frightened of what her presence might mean. But she was there, and she came out of nowhere. Before I knew what was happening, she had leaped onto Adam, pulled him backward onto the ground, and had her arms tight around his neck, choking him. Adam’s eyes bulged out of their sunken sockets. He held tight to her forearm, the one that was choking him, but he didn’t have the strength to pull it away.