The Returned. Jason Mott

took a step back. “What is it?”

      “It’s a sensitive question.”

      “I can tell. But it can’t be as bad as all that, now can it?”

      Harold gave her his back and puffed silently on his cigarette with his head hung.

      “For everyone,” Agent Bellamy began, “this is a question that can seem simple at first but, believe me, it is a very complex and serious matter. And I hope that you would take a moment to consider it thoroughly before you answer. Which isn’t to say that you only have one chance to answer. But only to say that I just want you to be sure that you’ve given the question its proper consideration before you make a decision. It’ll be difficult but, if possible, try not to let your emotions get the better of you.”

      Lucille went red. “Why, Mr. Martin Bellamy! I never would have figured you for one of those sexist types. Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I’m going to go all to pieces.”

      “Dammit, Lucille,” Harold barked, though his voice seemed to have trouble finding its legs. “Just listen to the man.” He coughed then. Or perhaps he sobbed.

      Lucille sat.

      Martin Bellamy sat, as well. He brushed some invisible something from the front of his pants and examined his hands for a moment.

      “Well,” Lucille said, “get on with it. All this buildup is killing me.”

      “This is the last question I’ll be asking you this evening. And it’s not necessarily a question you have to answer just now, but the sooner you answer it, the better. It just makes things less complicated when the answer comes quickly.”

      “What is it?” Lucille pleaded.

      Martin Bellamy inhaled. “Do you want to keep Jacob?”

      * * *

      That was two weeks ago.

      Jacob was home now. Irrevocably. The spare room had been converted back into his bedroom and the boy had settled into his life as if it had never ended to begin with. He was young. He had a mother. He had a father. His universe ended there.

      * * *

      Harold, for reasons he could not quite put together in his head, had been painfully unsettled since the boy’s return. He’d taken to smoking like a chimney. So much so that he spent most of his time outside on the porch, hiding from Lucille’s lectures about his dirty habit.

      Everything had changed so quickly. How could he not take up a bad habit or two?

      “They’re devils!” Harold heard Lucille’s voice repeat inside his head.

      The rain was spilling down. The day was old. Just behind the trees, darkness was coming on. The house had quieted. Just above the sound of the rain was the light huffing of an old woman who’d spent too much time chasing a child. She came through the screen door, dabbing sweat from her brow, and crumpled into her rocking chair.

      “Lord!” Lucille said. “That child’s gonna run me to death.”

      Harold put out his cigarette and cleared his throat—which he always did before trying to get Lucille’s goat. “You mean that devil?”

      She waved her hand at him. “Shush!” she said. “Don’t you call him that!”

      “You called him that. You said that’s what they all were, remember?”

      She was still short of breath from chasing the boy. Her words came staggered. “That was before,” she huffed. “I was wrong. I see that now.” She smiled and leaned back in exhaustion. “They’re a blessing. A blessing from the Lord. That’s what they are. A second chance!”

      They sat for a while in silence, listening to Lucille’s breath find itself. She was an old woman now, in spite of being a mother of an eight-year-old. She tired easily.

      “And you should spend more time with him,” Lucille said. “He knows you’re keeping your distance. He can tell it. He knows you’re treating him differently than you used to. When he was here before.” She smiled, liking that description.

      Harold shook his head. “And what will you do when he leaves?”

      Lucille’s face tightened. “Hush up!” she said. “‘Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking lies.’ Psalm 34:13.”

      “Don’t you Psalm at me. You know what they’ve been saying, Lucille. You know just as well as I do. How sometimes they just up and leave and nobody ever hears from them again, like the other side finally called them back.”

      Lucille shook her head. “I don’t have time for such nonsense,” she said, standing in spite of the heaviness of fatigue that hung in her limbs like sacks of flour. “Just rumors and nonsense. I’m going to start dinner. Don’t you sit out here and catch pneumonia. This rain will kill you.”

      “I’ll just come back,” Harold said.

      “Psalm 34:13!”

      She closed and locked the screen door behind her.

      * * *

      From the kitchen came the clattering of pots and pans. Cabinet doors opening, closing. The scent of meat, flour, spices, all of it drenched in the perfume of May and rain. Harold was almost asleep when he heard the boy’s voice. “Can I come outside, Daddy?” Harold shook off the drowsiness. “What?” He had heard the question perfectly well.

      “Can I come outside? Please?”

      For all the gaps in Harold’s old memory, he remembered how defenseless he’d always been when “Please” was laid out just so before him.

      “Your mama’ll have a fit,” he said.

      “Just a little one, though.”

      Harold swallowed to keep from laughing.

      He fumbled for a cigarette and failed—he’d sworn he’d had at least one more. He groped his pockets. In his pocket, where there was no cigarette, he found a small, silver cross—a gift from someone, though the place in his mind where the details of that particular memory should have been stored was empty. He hardly even remembered carrying it, but couldn’t help looking down at it as if it were a murder weapon.

      The words God Loves You, once, had been etched in the place where Christ belonged. But now the words were all but gone. Only an O and half a Y remained. He stared at the cross, then, as if his hand belonged to someone else, his thumb began rubbing back and forth at the crux.

      Jacob stood in the kitchen behind the screen door. He leaned against the door frame with his hands behind his back and his legs crossed, looking contemplative. His eyes scanned back and forth over the horizon, watching the rain and the wind and, then, his father. He exhaled heavily. Then he cleared his throat. “Sure would be nice to come outside,” he said with flourish and drama.

      Harold chuckled.

      In the kitchen something was frying. Lucille was humming.

      “Come on out,” Harold said.

      Jacob came and sat at Harold’s feet and, as if in reply, the rain became angry. Rather than falling from the sky, it leaped to the earth. It whipped over the porch railing, splashing them both, not that they paid it any heed. For a very long time the old man and the once-dead boy sat looking at each other. The boy was sandy-haired and freckled, his face as round and smooth as it always had been. His arms were unusually long, just as they had been, as his body was beginning its shift into an adolescence denied him fifty years ago. He looked healthy, Harold suddenly thought.

      Harold licked his lips compulsively, his thumb working the center of the cross. The boy did not move at all. If he hadn’t blinked now and again, he might as well have been dead.

      * * *

      “Do you want to keep him?”

      It