Half the Truth

He lived with his mother and Daniel in the little white house in Illinois.

It had a fence, as Dana had said, and a garden that was mostly dead in the winter and green by April, and a spare room at the back with a sloping ceiling and a window that looked out on a stand of maples. Daniel painted it blue. Cassian had said it did not matter. Daniel had said, gruffly, that it mattered to him.

He went to a public high school.

It was a big, loud, ugly brick building, with a pep rally every Friday and a cafeteria that smelled of tater tots. He was the new kid. He kept to himself. He sat at the back, in the last row, with his arms folded and his eyes lowered, and the teachers sighed and wrote on his report card that he was quiet, and capable, and could be more engaged. He didn't care. Nobody there was afraid of him. Nobody there knew what his hands could do.

He slept better.

That was the surprise. After the first weeks, when he had lain every night with the lamp on and a chair propped against the door, the nights grew softer. He fell asleep at eleven. He woke at seven. His mother, who now cooked for him again, standing at the stove in her slippers with one hand on the counter, would put a plate before him and look at him sidelong and say, "You're getting color."

And yet.

Sometimes, in the small hours, he woke with a start. The house lay silent. The furnace ticked. And somewhere inside his skull, faint and sweet and slow, as if sung in another room, the hymn went on.

Venite, hospes.

He would lie rigid in the dark until it stopped.

He did not tell his mother. She had enough to carry.

…

The postcard came in March.

It lay on the mat among the bills and the seed catalogs, a small glossy oblong, face down. He turned it over.

A photograph. Old, sepia-toned, a little blurred. A stone chapel with a square tower and narrow windows, standing on a hill against a pale sky, with a ring of pines about it. Someone had drawn on it in red ink. Two thick strokes, hard and angry, in a cross from corner to corner, so that the pen had gone through the paper and scored the card beneath.

He turned it over.

The back was blank.

No message. No name. No stamp, no postmark, no address, though it lay with the mail. It had not come through any post office. It had been put through the slot, by a hand.

He stood in the hall with the card in his fingers. The clock ticked on the wall. In the kitchen, his mother was humming to the radio.

He looked at the chapel, and at the red cross, for a very long time.

I know this, he thought.

He did not.

He knew only that there was something behind his eyes, a door standing a little open, and that something stood on the other side of it, a shape, a weight, a smell of iron and straw. He knew that his hands remembered something his mind did not. He knew that once, on a cold night, he had been chosen for a thing, and had refused, or had been refused, and that the shape of the thing had gone out of him like a tide going out and left a long gray beach.

He knew that he had been somewhere. That was all.

He opened the drawer of the hall table. He laid the postcard in it, on top of the batteries and the takeout menus and a pair of steel-rimmed glasses with one cracked lens, which he did not remember buying.

He closed the drawer.

In the kitchen, the radio played a song about a train.

He went in and sat down and ate his breakfast. He did well in school that spring. He grew a few inches. He learned to drive, and got a summer job at a hardware store. He made a friend, almost, a boy called Jamie who liked comic books. In time, he stopped hearing the hymn.

It was a good life, in its way. It was quiet, and warm, and ordinary. But on certain nights, in certain weathers, when the first frost whitened the garden and the wind turned east, he would stand at the window with his hand pressed to the cold glass and look out over the maples toward the dark.

And he would think that a place does not stop being a place because you have stopped looking at it.

You got away. But it is still there.

THE END. If you want to face what you left behind, turn back to Chapter 51 and choose again.