Coming Home

Walt gave him forty-one dollars.

He did it at the bus depot in Council Bluffs, on a gray Monday morning, with the logging truck idling at the curb. He drew it from a worn leather wallet, a ten and three fives and sixteen ones, counted out slowly on the hood of the cab, and pressed the little pile into Cassian's hand and closed his fingers over it.

"I can't take this."

"Sure you can."

"I'll pay you back. I'll send it. Give me your address."

"Don't have one that stays put." Walt grinned, showing a gold tooth. "Don't you worry, son. Somebody did the same for me once. I figure it goes round." He looked a moment at the boy's face, at the bruises, the cracked lips, the eyes that had not closed in thirty hours. "Whatever it is you ran from. Don't go back."

"I won't."

"Good."

He climbed into the cab. The truck coughed and pulled away, its taillights smearing red in the drizzle, and Cassian stood alone on the curb with the money in his fist and the cracked glasses in his pocket, and watched it go.

…

The bus took six hours.

He sat at the back with his head against the window and his coat bundled around him, and the fields went by under a low sky: black dirt, stubble, silos, a water tower with a town's name painted on it in blue. He slept in snatches, jerking awake each time with his heart pounding. Once he woke and heard the hymn, soft, sweet, close, as if it were playing on a radio somewhere in the bus. He sat up. The bus was empty except for an old woman asleep in the front seat. The sound was in his own head.

He put his fingers in his ears and sang a nursery rhyme under his breath until it stopped.

At four in the afternoon, the bus pulled into Ottley.

The town had not changed. The grain elevator, the courthouse, the Dairy Queen with its sign blinking in the rain. A pickup went by with a dog in the bed. A woman in a plastic rain bonnet walked out of the pharmacy, and the world was so enormously, stupidly ordinary that he stood on the sidewalk with his bag in his hand and shook.

He walked to Mercy Hospital.

…

It was a low brick building on the hill above the river, with a flag out front and a bed of dying marigolds. He pushed through the double doors into a smell of floor wax and boiled vegetables, and the fluorescent lights hummed overhead. He walked the length of the lobby. He took the stairs, because the elevator frightened him. At the end of the second floor corridor he stopped.

A woman was standing at the nurses' station with a clipboard in her hand and her back to him.

"Dana?" he said.

She turned.

She had changed her hair. It was pulled back hard, with strands coming loose, and she looked ten years older than she had in September. For a moment she stared at him as though at a ghost. The clipboard slipped out of her fingers and clattered on the tile.

"Cassian."

"Hi."

"Oh, Cassian."

She crossed the floor in three steps and had her arms round him. She was crying. She was holding him so tightly that his ribs hurt, and she was saying something into his shoulder over and over, oh my God, oh my God, they said you were sick, they wouldn't let me see you, I called and called, and he stood stiff as a post, and then he wasn't stiff at all. He put his head down on her shoulder and let it come.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"Hush. Hush now. You're here."

"I left. I wasn't supposed to leave."

"I don't care." She pulled back and took his face in her hands, and her eyes were wet and fierce and loving. "I don't care what you were supposed to do. Do you hear me? You're home."

…

His mother was sitting up in bed.

She had been put by the window. The curtains were open. The rain on the glass made a soft gray light, and in it her face looked thinner than he remembered and very clear, as if all the pain had been washed out of it, leaving only the bones and the large dark eyes. A crossword lay face down on the coverlet. On the chair beside her sat Daniel, in his work jacket, with his cap in his hands.

Cassian stood in the doorway.

She looked at him. For a moment neither of them moved.

"Mom," he said.

"Come here."

He did not remember crossing the room. He remembered only the bed under his knees, and the smell of her, that faint lavender smell, and her arms coming round him, thin, strong, absurdly strong, pulling his head down against her collarbone. Her hand went into his hair. It stroked it, back from the forehead, over and over, as she had done when he was small and sick.

"Where did you go?" she said. Very low. "You went away so long."

"I'm sorry."

"Where did you go?"

"I'll tell you. I'll tell you everything. I just..." His voice broke. "I just want to stay here a minute."

"Stay as long as you like," said his mother.

Daniel, behind them, got up from his chair. He went to the window and stood with his back turned, looking at the rain, and his shoulders were not quite steady.

…

He told it that night, in the visitors' lounge, to a sheriff's deputy and a woman from the county.

He had not meant to tell all of it. He had meant to leave out the Hearth and the Guest and the name that wasn't said. But once he had begun he could not stop. It came out of him in the wrong order, in pieces, in a flat dazed voice: the school on the hill, the cloaks, the hymn at the seventh bell, the chapel, the knife, the forty-nine. A boy in white. A boy with a handprint on a door.

They wrote it down.

They were very polite. The deputy, a heavy tired man in his fifties, nodded and tapped his pen. The woman from the county said "I see" at intervals in a gentle voice. When he stopped, they exchanged a look. It was the look of two people who have seen a great many children come in after a great many terrors and have learned to be kind.

"Blackthorne Academy," said the deputy. "Out in the hills."

"Yes."

"That's a private school. Church-run, I think. Very respectable. Got a lot of friends in the state house." He turned the pen over. "Son, I'm not saying you didn't have a rough time. But you've been through a lot. A hard autumn. Your mother, your father. People under that sort of strain can, ah..."

"I'm not making it up."

"Nobody's saying that."

"You are."

"We'll look into it," said the woman, in the voice of a person who will not.

In the corner of the room, by the window, a man stood with his arms folded. He had been there since the start, and had not spoken. He was tall, in a tan uniform, with a flat gray face and eyes like pebbles. Deputy Burnell. He leaned against the wall, quite still, and watched Cassian with an expression of cold and total disinterest, as a man watches a tap drip.

Cassian looked away.

"There's another matter," said Dana.

She had come in unnoticed and stood in the doorway with her purse clasped in both hands. Her chin was up. She was pale, but her voice was steady.

"I want to make a statement."

"About what, ma'am?"

"About Marianne Hale's injuries." She stepped into the room. "I'm a nurse. I've seen that woman on my unit more times than I can count. I've dressed those bruises. I've seen the breaks, the old ones, the new ones, the burns on her forearm. I put it in writing every time, and every time somebody told me to let it go." She drew a breath. "I'm done letting it go."

Nobody spoke.

Burnell's face did not change. But a muscle moved in his jaw.

"Take a seat, ma'am," said the woman from the county, and reached for her notebook.

…

They arrested Edward Hale two days later, at the plant, in the middle of a shift.

Cassian heard about it from Daniel, in the hospital cafeteria, over a plate of cold eggs. The deputies had come in a cruiser and a van. His father had put down his knife and wiped his hands on his apron, and walked out between them with his big head lowered, without a word. A few of the men had watched. One of them had spat.

"They've got the medical records," said Daniel. "They've got Dana. They've got a doctor from Des Moines who's willing to testify." He rubbed his face. "It'll stick, I think. Assault, aggravated. He'll go away a good while."

"Okay."

"Is that okay?"

"I don't know," said Cassian.

He looked at the eggs. He thought of a voice on a telephone. They wanted you. Everybody ate. It was strange. He had waited sixteen years to hear that Edward Hale was in handcuffs, and now he had heard it, and it felt like nothing, like a coin dropped down a well. There was no splash.

He pushed back his chair and walked out into the parking lot to breathe.

The rain had stopped. The sky was low and yellow and flat. Cars sat in rows, glinting wet. A janitor wheeled a bin across the tarmac.

At the far end of the lot, beside a black pickup truck, a man was standing.

He was large, heavy-shouldered, in a canvas coat. His hands hung loose at his sides. A cap was pulled down over his eyes, and below it, the lower part of a broad, pale, pleasant face, smiling a little. He wasn't doing anything. He stood by the truck as men stand outside churches, waiting for someone to come out.

He raised one hand, lazily, and touched his cap.

Hank Dobbs.

Cassian stood on the asphalt, absolutely still, with the cold coming up through his boots.

The man did not approach. He did not call out. He simply held Cassian's eye a moment longer, with that small unhurried smile. Then he opened the door of the truck, and got in, and drove away.