CHAPTER EIGHT

Tab’s eyes drifted closed. The smooth roll along a deserted stretch of highway home and the warm hug of the afternoon sun against his skin made him sleepy. That, and the dumping of the entire past week of his history and each associated emotion and sensation to two total strangers. He loved the heat of the oncoming summer against his eyelids. The light through the thin skin created a red filter over his retinas.

His mom had convinced Jeremy to sit in the front seat, distracting him from incessant picking on his younger brother. Without the chronic threat, Tab could relax, allow his mind to drift. To calm. To sleep. Imagination took over consciousness.

His Strathmore sketchbook slid off his lap. The page to which it was open contained an image of his dad, clad in denim overalls and his green John Deere cap. The figure was seated on a tractor among a field of tall fescue. Tab imagined it green, although he’d drawn the field in No. 2 pencil, so it was really only soft, thin strokes of gray. His dad had carried him from the bed to the cellar the night of the storm. His dad had slept on the floor of his bedroom to protect him. Resentfully, yes, but he had done those things. What was so important to his dad that he couldn’t come along to doctor appointments?

Land. Always wanting to sell the land. Tab loved his mom, but it was his dad who protected him from the external world: a world full of men and women who held themselves at a distance from others, who spoke in flat and emotionless voices, and who sometimes judged him for being himself. His dad’s refusal to tag along felt like a betrayal.

Before he drifted into unconsciousness, Tab had added another character to the image. A wider man stood in front and to the viewer’s left of the tractor as his dad closed in on the frame. This man also wore a cap but was otherwise clad in coveralls. His back was to Tab, because he did not want to draw the man’s gory eye sockets. This was Tab’s new protector, or helper. So he claimed.

In his sleep, an enormous field of green spread out before Tab. Shoulder-height grass and weeds obscured much of the view. A pleasant breeze pulled them apart, caressing his face and allowing brief glimpses further afield. The sweet aroma of fresh-cut straw rode on the air. The scene reminded him of an old episode of his mom’s favorite TV show, Unexplained Phenomena. She and Jeremy usually watched it together, although Jeremy preferred Ghost Adventures.

Unexplained Phenomena had once aired an episode about people who had died and returned to talk about it. He hadn’t paid much attention to the show because thoughts of death and dying filled him with dread that was difficult to stuff at bedtime. He’d glanced up from a Peanuts coloring book long enough to catch a woman who described flying over a beautiful field of flowers and grass after she had supposedly died.

Was he dead now? He didn’t think so. From somewhere in the back of his head, he heard a buzzing sound. Not a bee buzz. More like someone running a chainsaw in the distance. As he concentrated on the sound, it grew louder. In his dream, he spun on the balls of his feet to see his father’s John Deere tractor. His grinning dad sat atop it, bearing straight down on him at high speed. The shadow of the bill of his cap obscured his eyes, forcing Tab to wonder whether his dad still had eyes in his head. He tried to scream, Dad! I’m here, Dad! Stop!

Nothing came out.

He glanced to his left and his right, seeking a path to run. In both directions, the overgrowth obscured escape. He chose to go right because it was his “strong side,” but his feet refused to obey the command to move. He couldn’t bend at his knees, either. He couldn’t swivel his hips, seemingly frozen from the waist down. No, not just from the waist down. When his eyes locked again on the approaching tractor, he could neither move his head nor shut his eyelids. His arms stuck to his torso as if bound by rope.

What’s happening to me?

The tractor closed in enough for him to smell its belches of diesel fumes, loud enough to drown his thoughts. Without warning, the grille of the beast lurched into the air at a slant. Tab could see half the tractor’s right front tire over the tops of the weeds growing in the shrinking expanse between him and the machine. Dad, whose cap had blown off his head, was in midair on the tractor’s left. His eyes bulged from their sockets, engorged with terror. His jaw spread open in a scream Tab could not hear.

Dad!

The flailing body dipped below the tops of the weeds and scrub, after which the earth finally turned loose of Tab’s feet. His knees wobbled, but he was able to remain upright. He broke into a run through the green wilderness, toward the spot he saw his father fall. The tractor completed its roll, landing on its right side. Two tires flattened horizontally on the ground. The others slowed to a stop while suspended in the air on their axles. A choking, sputtering death silenced the engine.

From the emptiness, a guttural wail emerged. It sounded like his dad did in the mornings when he gargled the green stuff that burns your mouth and tongue, except louder and more terrible.

“DAD!”

He dashed forward, stretching his arms into a wedge to deflect the overgrowth. Just as he began to fear that he was lost, a clearing opened. There he found the shattered body of his father. The man’s right leg was broken, bent in a nine o’clock right angle at the knee. His left forearm rested above his head. His right lay at his side, the forefinger extended as if pointing at his injured leg.

His eyes were open, blank, staring at the sky. Thick, brownish-red blood drooled from his right nostril and the right side of his mouth. The latter gaped, but his teeth and tongue were invisible behind the pool of blood and bile filling the cavity. An enormous crimson welt arose on the right side of his face. Beside him, a jagged gray stone coated in a thin film of blood protruded from the earth.

Tab knelt beside his father, tried to talk to him, reached out to shake him. The welt on his dad’s face reminded him bitterly of the thing on the side of his own head. His bump began to itch and burn, as if someone had squeezed lemon juice into it, sending thousands of mites living inside into panicky flights. The world around him went fuzzy. Gritty laughter echoed from a distance. Something jarred him.

Then he was awake in the back seat of his mom’s car, staring at the back of his brother’s head.

“Oh, I’m sorry, hon,” his mom cooed from the driver’s seat. She eyed him in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t see the pothole in time to miss it. Are you okay?”

Her words buzzed in his ears, part dream and part reality. The remaining tendrils of the other dimension from which he’d been extracted had not yet shaken free. Reality still felt somehow less real than his dream. “Okay,” he said. He rubbed at his eyes and fingered his bump. It throbbed, hot to his touch. “Where’s Dad?” he asked.

“Still at home, I suppose. We’re on our way from our doctor visits. Remember?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, mocking the grogginess in his younger brother’s voice.

“Jeremy!” their mom scolded.

The boy grumbled a reply under his breath and returned to the dopamine provided by the screen of his iPod Touch. He was probably still playing Angry Birds, a game he’d been obsessed with since Christmas.

“Is Dad okay?” Tab asked. “Can we call him?”

His mom glanced at him again from the rearview, her forehead creased. “I don’t see why he wouldn’t be? I don’t like to use the phone while I’m driving. Why?”

Tab squirmed. “I don’t know. I had a dream—”

“Aww, poor widdle baby had a bad dream!” Jeremy heckled.

Their mother sighed. “Jeremy, I swear. If there’s one more peep out of you for the rest of this ride, I’m taking away your iPod and your computer privileges for the rest of the week. Do you understand me?”

Jeremy glared at his mother, gauging her seriousness. She did not falter. He nodded, reluctant but willing to obey in order to protect his leisure time. And almost all his time was leisure time.

“Now, what were you saying, Tab?”

“I had a dream that Dad’s...hurt,” he said. He almost said “dead,” but changed his mind as the words came out of his mouth. It wasn’t that he thought he’d scare his mom by saying he’d dreamed about his dad dying. It was more fear that saying it out loud would somehow make the nightmare a reality.

Mom smiled at him. “Oh, honey, we all have bad dreams sometimes. They don’t mean anything. Except you’re worried about your dad and me. But, listen, everything’s going to be fine. I used to have bad dreams all the time when I was a kid. I mean, they were scary. Sometimes I’d wake up not knowing if they’d happened or if it was all in my head. But I’ve been walking the earth for thirty-five years now, and not one time have any of my bad dreams come true.”

“Never?”

“Nope. Never.”

His tummy loosened under the elastic waistband of his jeans. The muscles in his neck and shoulders relaxed as well. Mom sounded certain, and that was a comfort. “Good,” he said.

“Yep. If I know your dad, he’s been on the phone all day trying to get somebody to buy his Aunt Kathy’s old place. More power to him. You saw it when we drove by on the way to Hollow River. It’s almost nothing but mush after those floods. They’d have to deal with knocking down the broken-down old store, too. Seems like a lot of work for something that’s just going to turn into a swamp every time it rains.”

“It’ll sell,” Jeremy said. There was a hint of defensiveness in his voice. “Dad said so.” He cringed then, having apparently forgotten about their mom’s threat to take away his iPod and computer time. Mom only nodded, not taking her eyes off the road.

“Yeah. That’s what he says, alright.”

The rest of their drive was in silence. When they passed the dilapidated old building that was Beard’s General store perched on its tiny Hollow Creek peninsula on the outskirts of Lost Hollow, neither Tab’s mom nor his brother gave it a second glance.

Tab, however, took note of the height of the weeds and dense scrub populating the surrounding field. It triggered a feeling in him he couldn’t place, a recent memory he couldn’t quite retrieve. He bore down on it, struggling to recall. But it was as if a veil had been draped in front of it he could neither part nor tear down.