Chapter 2: What the Storm Brought Back

He woke with gravel under his cheek and rain running into his ear.

For a while he lay still and let it happen. Moving would mean finding out what hurt. The rain was loud enough to cover anything he did not want to hear yet, and under it the water in the ditch beside him was running one way, fast. A chain-link fence took the wind and complained about it. The thunder had gone east and come back as a weight in the air.

He pushed himself up and stood until the ground stopped moving.

He checked himself the way he would check a set before the house opened. Hands. Arms. Ribs. Knees. Everything answered. His jacket was soaked through to the lining and there was nothing in his pockets — no keys, no money, no paper with a name on it.

He turned his hands over twice. The scar across the back of the left one was old and pale, and he had never had it. The nails were bitten flat. The knuckles belonged to somebody younger.

He had been twenty-eight years old. He remembered six years of a theater and a run sheet pinned to a board and a coffee cup with his name on it in marker. He remembered all of that, and then there was a stretch with nothing in it that he could reach, and after the nothing there was gravel and rain.

He got up and went looking for a window.

The window belonged to a gas station that had been shut for a long time. The pumps were gone and the plate steel bolted over the holes had rusted brown around the bolts. He wiped the glass with his sleeve, leaned in, and looked at a face that was not his. Eighteen, maybe. Wet hair flat to the forehead. A mouth he had never used.

He said his own name out loud. The mouth got it right.

He found two ways out of the lot, both dark. He found the gap in the fence and the deep place under the trees where a car could sit unseen from the road. Six years of walking into rooms he had never been in had done that much for him. Then he started walking, and he did not pick the direction. His legs had already picked it.

He took the shoulder, where the water ran off and the walking was better.

Four houses in, the road became a street, and the first thing on it that had stopped working was a sedan up on blocks with the hood standing open. The engine was out of it, sitting on a pallet and wrapped in a sheet of plastic like something being saved for later. The tarp over the roof had come loose at one corner and nobody had come out to fix it.

Past the corner there was a building that had stopped being built. Plywood sheeting over the frames, gone soft at the edges. A crane stood over the lot with its engine pulled and set down on the deck and wrapped up the same way, and the cables hung slack out of the boom.

On the next block a laundromat had its lights off and its radio on. A man sat behind the counter with his chin in his hand, listening. The song ended, and the station played another one that was older. The man did not move.

None of it was his business. He kept it anyway and kept walking.

The road bent, and after the bend the walking got easier the way it gets easier when a person is nearly home. He did not know any of the houses.

There was a house with a light on behind the curtains and no porch light, and the number was painted on the mailbox post with a name under it: VANCE.

He stood at the gate with his hand on the wet wood. The name fit. Nothing came with it.

He went up the walk and knocked.

The porch roof was narrow and the rain came off the edge of it in a line. Behind the curtains something moved. Then the light behind them went out, and he stood in the dark with the rain hitting the tin a foot over his head.

The door opened as far as the chain allowed.

A boy looked out at him. Fifteen, close to it, sweatshirt sleeves pushed up past the wrists, a pair of small scissors held down along his leg. He did not step back.

“Elliot’s dead,” he said.

Elliot stood in the rain with it.

“I’m back,” he said. It came out thin. He tried to put something behind it and had nothing better, so he added, “I’ve been walking a while.”

The boy pushed the door shut.

“Don’t.” Elliot put his hand flat on the frame and left it there. “There’s a light on across the street. Whatever this is, it isn’t going to get settled on the porch.”

“It can get settled on the porch.” He didn’t close it. He held the door where it was, chain taut, and watched.

“Say something,” the boy said.

“Like what?”

“Something he’d know.”

Rain ran down the gutter at the end of the porch and off the roof. Elliot did not answer, and the not answering took longer than he meant it to.

“I don’t have anything,” he said.

“Something from before.”

“I don’t remember the way here. I walked three miles and I couldn’t tell you the name of one street.”

The boy’s jaw worked. He didn’t shut the door.

“Who else knows you’re here?”

“Nobody.”

“Why here?”

“Because this is where I ended up.”

The boy looked past him, down the walk, at the street. “Mrs. Rourke sits in her front room till two,” he said. “She looks out that window about every ten minutes.”

He unhooked the chain.

“Get in. Don’t drip on the runner.”

Elliot got in. The boy shut the door, put the chain back on, and then set his palm on the door and pressed, twice, to feel it hold.

“Shoes,” he said.

Elliot got them off and left them on the mat. He was inside, in a hallway, with his shoes off and no next thing to do.

The boy went past him into the front room and turned the lamp on low, then checked that the curtains were shut across the window. A couch. A table with a sewing machine on it. A sideboard, and a wall of photographs. The hall runner went back past the stairs into the dark.

He was halfway across the room before he noticed he was moving. Then he was sitting down in the chair at the end of the table, the one with the cushion, and the boy was still in the doorway with his hand on the frame.

“Get up.”

“What?”

“Get up out of that chair.”

He got up. The boy came around the table, took the towel off the back of the chair, and set it down in front of a different one.

“There,” he said. “Sit there.”

Elliot sat there. He dried his hair and his face and his hands, and then he just held the towel, because the shakes had started and the towel was heavy enough to hide them.

The boy came back to the table and swept the sewing into the drawer with the side of his arm: a sleeve, a pincushion, a spool of black thread, the scissors last. The sleeve was half basted. The stitches were long and uneven, and done fast.

Elliot said nothing about it.

On the sideboard, one photograph lay face down in a house where every other one was standing up. He turned it over. Four people on the front walk — a man, a woman, two boys, the older one with his arm slung around the younger one’s neck. The older one had the face from the gas station window. Elliot put it back the way he had found it.

“That’s not yours,” the boy said.

“No.”

The boy waited. “Where are they?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“They didn’t say.”

The towel went around in Elliot’s hands.

“You don’t know,” the boy said.

“No.”

“When do they come back?” Elliot said.

The boy looked at him. “They come back.”

“What do I call you?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

The boy was quiet for a while. Then, flatly, the way a person says a thing to see how it sounds on the other side of the room: “Milo.”

Elliot said it back. Milo watched him say it.

“You don’t remember anything.”

“I remember some things.” That was true, and it was not an answer to the question. “Not the things you’re asking for.”

He wanted to ask how it had happened. He didn’t ask.

“You can’t be here when they get back,” Milo said.

“I know.”

Neither of them said anything for a while. It was possible to hear the house now: the fridge, the clock, water going down a downspout.

“Where will you go?” Milo said.

Elliot looked at the towel. “I haven’t gotten that far.”

Milo opened his mouth to say something and did not get to it.

Shoes on wet concrete, out on the walk. Two sets of them, coming without hurrying.

Milo crossed the room in three steps and switched the lamp off. The room went dark.

“Don’t,” he said, in the dark, with barely any voice at all.

A key went into the lock. It turned. The chain pulled tight, and the door stopped against it, and stayed stopped.