The Returned. Jason Mott

      “There was nothing in between?”

      Jacob shrugged.

      Lucille dabbed her eyes again. Something heavy had fallen against her heart, though she did not know what. It was all she could manage not to collapse right there in the too-small chair beneath her. She felt that would be painfully rude, though—for Martin Bellamy to have to help a collapsed old woman. So, as a matter of etiquette, she held herself together, even when she asked the question upon which all of her life seemed to hang. “Wasn’t there anything before you woke up, honey? In the time between when you...went to sleep, and when you woke up? Was there a bright, warm light? A voice? Wasn’t there anything?”

      “What’s an owl’s favorite subject?” Jacob asked.

      In reply to this there was only silence. Silence and a small boy torn between what was he incapable of saying and what he felt his mother wanted.

      “Owlgebra,” he said when no one answered.

      * * *

      “That’s some boy you’ve got there,” Agent Bellamy said. Jacob was gone now—in the adjoining room being kept company by a young soldier from somewhere in the Midwest. Lucille and Agent Bellamy could see them through the window in the door that linked the two rooms together. It was important to Lucille that she didn’t lose sight of him.

      “He’s a blessing,” she said after a pause. Her gaze shifted from Jacob to Agent Bellamy to the small, thin hands that sat in her lap.

      “I’m glad to hear that everything has been going so well.”

      “It has,” Lucille said. She smiled, still looking down at her hands. Then, as if some small riddle had finally been sorted out in her head, she sat erect and her smile grew so wide and proud that it was only then that Agent Bellamy noticed how thin and frail it had been. “This your first time down this way, Agent Martin Bellamy? Down south, I mean.”

      “Do airports count?” He sat forward and folded his hands on the grand desk in front of him. He felt a story coming.

      “I suppose they wouldn’t.”

      “Are you sure? Because I’ve been in and out of the Atlanta airport more times than I can count. It’s odd, but somehow it feels like every flight I’ve ever been on has had to go through Atlanta for some reason. I swear I took a flight from New York to Boston once that had a three-hour layover in Atlanta. Not quite sure how that happened.”

      Lucille barked a little laugh. “How come you aren’t married, Agent Martin Bellamy? How come you don’t have a family to call your own?”

      He shrugged. “Just never really fit in, I suppose.”

      “You should see about making it fit,” Lucille said. She made a motion to stand, then immediately changed her mind. “You seem like a good person. And the world needs more good people. You should find a young woman that makes you happy and the two of you should have children,” Lucille said, still smiling, though Agent Bellamy couldn’t help but notice that her smile was a little dimmer now.

      Then she stood with a groan and walked over to the door and saw that Jacob was still there. “I believe we just missed the Strawberry Festival, Martin Bellamy,” she said. Her voice was low and even. “Happens about this time every year over in Whiteville. Been going on as far back as I can remember. Probably wouldn’t be all that impressive to a big-city man like yourself, but it’s something folks like us like to be a part of.

      “Just like it sounds, it’s all about strawberries. Most people don’t think about it, but there was a time back when a person could have a farm and grow crops and make a living off it. Doesn’t happen much nowadays—almost all the farms I knew of as a child been gone for years. Only one or two still around. I think that Skidmore farm up near Lumberton is still running...but I can’t say to a certainty.”

      She came from the door and stood behind her chair and looked down at Agent Bellamy as she spoke. He’d gotten up from his position when she hadn’t been looking and that seemed to throw her off. He had looked almost like a child at the desk before, the way he had been sitting. Now he was a grown man again. A grown man from a big, faraway city. A grown man that had not been a child for a great many years.

      “It goes on all weekend,” she continued. “And it’s gotten bigger and bigger over the years, but even back then it was a big event. Jacob was as excited as any child ought to have the right to be. You’d think we’d never taken him anywhere! And Harold, well, even he was excited to be there. He tried to hide it—he hadn’t really learned how to be an obstinate old fool just yet, you understand. You could just see how happy he was! And why wouldn’t he be? He was a father at the Columbus County Strawberry Festival with his one and only son.

      “It was something! Both of them behaving like children. There was a dog show. And there wasn’t anything Jacob and Harold liked more than dogs. Now, this wasn’t any dog show like you see on the TV these days. This was a good old country dog show. Nothing but working dogs. Blue ticks, walkers, beagles. But Lord, were they beautiful! And Harold and Jacob just ran from one pen to the other. Saying this and saying that about what dog was better than the other and why. This one looked like he might be good for hunting in such and such place in such and such weather on such and such kind of animal.”

      Lucille was beaming again. She was onstage, proud and wonderfully rooted in 1966.

      “Sunlight everywhere,” she said. “A sky so bright and blue you could hardly believe it or imagine it these days.” She shook her head. “Too much pollution now, I suppose. Can’t think of a single thing that’s the way it used to be.”

      Then, quite suddenly, she stopped.

      She turned and looked through the window in the door. Her son was still there. Jacob was still alive. Still eight years old. Still beautiful. “Things change,” she said after a moment. “But you should have been there, Martin Bellamy. They were so happy—Jacob and his daddy. Harold carried that boy on his back for half the day. I thought he was gonna pass out. All that walking we did that day. Walking and walking and more walking. And there was Harold carrying that boy slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes for most of it.

      “The two of them made a game of it. They’d get to some booth or other, take it all in, say whatever they wanted to say about things. Then Jacob would cut off at a run and there was Harold right after him. Running through folks, almost knocking people over. And there I was yelling after them, ‘Cut it out, you two! Stop acting like animals!’”

      She gazed at Jacob. Her face seemed unsure what stance to take, so it became neutral and waiting. “It really is a blessing from God, Agent Martin Bellamy,” she said slowly. “And just because a person don’t quite understand the purpose and meaning of a blessing, that doesn’t make it any less of a blessing...does it?”

      Elizabeth Pinch

      She knew he would come. All she had to do was wait and believe. He had always been better than he gave himself credit for, more disciplined, smarter. He was all the things he never told himself he was.

      She had come close to finding him. She’d made it as far east as Colorado before they caught her. A local police sheriff saw her at a highway rest stop. She’d been riding with a trucker who was fascinated by the Returned and kept asking her questions about death. And when she didn’t answer his questions, he left her at the rest stop where everyone that saw her treated her with uncertainty.

      She was transferred first to Texas, where she asked the interviewers from the Bureau, “Can you help me find Robert Peters?” over and over again. After holding her for a while in Texas, they sent her to Mississippi, where she’d lived originally, and placed her in a building with others like her and placed men with guns around them.

      “I need to find Robert Peters,” she told them at every opportunity.

      “He’s not here” is the closest thing she ever got to an answer, and that was given with derision.