Andrew Klavan - The long way home

"Yeah," said Rick. "Only keep your underwear on, all right? I have a weak stomach."

I stepped up to him. We gripped hands, slapped each other's shoulders. I did the same with Miler. The same with Josh.

"You did great today," I told Josh. "You were monster."

"Yeah," he said. "I was monster. Thank you, Charlie."

I watched them file out of the room. I heard their footsteps on the stairs. I heard the front door opening and closing. I knew what they meant about a piece of them being out on the road with me, because I felt like pieces of myself were leaving with them.

Then the house was quiet, and I was there alone in the parlor with Beth.

We talked for a while. We talked about how we would see each other on Josh's webcams. We talked about how Beth would tell me the rest of our story. We talked about how I'd eventually remember everything and how we would get back together and everything would be all right. It was all kind of awkward, though. Kind of halting and strange. I knew we had been in love with each other and I could feel that love coming back to me. But I couldn't remember and she could. She was still further down that road than I was. She had to go slow so that I could catch up.

"I guess in a way I'm lucky," I told her. "I get to fall in love with you twice."

"Charlie…" she said, her voice breaking.

"Don't," I said. "Don't, Beth. God has a plan to bring us back together. I'm sure of it."

"I'm sure too. I just hope it's one of his really short-term plans…"

Finally, she had to leave.

I stood at the top of the stairs as she walked down them. She was just a shadowy figure in the deeper shadows of the house. Then, when she opened the front door, the golden light of the dying afternoon poured in over her. She paused there and looked back over her shoulder, lifting her face to me where I stood on the landing above her. The gold light glistened on her cheeks where the tears were. My heart ached and I knew even then that she would be part of me forever.

Then the door shut with a thump and she was gone.

I walked back into the empty parlor. I returned to the window. I looked down at the graveyard below. For one more moment, the sunlight held that tinge of gold, making even the cemetery kind of beautiful in some strange, sad way. Then the gold leaked out of the light. The scene became dull and somber. An aura of blue crept into it- the first hint of evening.

I stood there a long time, waiting for night to fall. Waiting until I could go out into the darkness and begin searching for some answers.

Sensei Mike There was a time, when I was little, when I first started to learn karate, when Sensei Mike's karate studio seemed to me a very impressive place. More than that: it was almost awe-inspiring. There were ceremonial swords hanging on one wall and a large American flag hanging on another. There were rank belts hung in their order, white to black, above the room-length mirror on the third wall. There was a plaster divider that marked the dojo off from the foyer, and on top of the divider there were these little wooden statues of Chinese monks in cool karate postures or wielding cool weapons like battle-axes and maces. Back when I was a kid, all these things struck me as sort of solemn and important, as if they were images of some great ideal I had to live up to, some mighty tradition I was becoming part of. The place seemed almost like a church to me.

Over time, as I grew older, bigger, I began to see the karate school more the way it really was. It was really just a little storefront place in a local mall. Kind of cramped and ill-equipped and even shabby in a way. But by then, I understood that what was big and important and mysterious about the place didn't come from the building. It came from the ideas and from the teachers-from Sensei Mike especially. It came from what he understood karate to be and what it meant to him. He carried those meanings inside him and, by teaching his students, he planted them inside us. If we had just learned to fight, just learned to punch and kick and so on, then the place would've been as small and shabby as it looked. But what we really learned was how to discipline ourselves, how to keep our minds and bodies under our own control, how to win with grace and lose with courage and keep fighting no matter what.

And we learned how to pay attention-that was maybe the most important thing of all.

So I guess what I'm saying is that the karate school really was as big and impressive and awe-inspiring as I thought it was when I was a little kid, only in a different way, a deeper way that I had to learn to understand. I guess there's a lot of stuff that's like that when you come to think about it.

That night, around nine o'clock, I sat in the Eastfield Mall parking lot and watched the dojo. Through the storefront window, I could see the last students of the day going through their motions.

I was in Rick's car, a sleek, red Civic. He'd left it for me at the Lake Center Mall-the one near the Ghost Mansion-and driven home with Josh. That way I would have something to drive for the rest of the night.

I sat in the car, parked not far from the dojo. I peered out through the windshield at the storefront. There were two kids having a lesson in there, both about my age, both brown belts. Mike had them doing maneuvers on each other-sort of programmed defense techniques that teach certain classic moves you can adapt and use later for real fighting. One student would throw a punch at the other and the other would block it or dodge it and then go through the motions that would bring the attacker down to the floor. Then they'd change sides and the other student would throw the punch while the first one did the defense.

About a million thoughts went through my mind as I watched them. I don't know how many times I'd been in the dojo going through the same motions they were going through now. It was a lot. I wished I was in there with them, using karate as a way to get exercise and learn discipline, instead of having to use it to defend myself. When I was in training at the dojo, I used to have daydreams about getting in fights and beating up bad guys and rescuing girls who were in trouble-you know, the usual daydreams guys have. But now that I'd actually had to fight for real, I wished I was back in the dojo having daydreams. I wished I'd never have to be in a real fight ever again.

And I was thinking about Mike. I was watching him as he sort of skipped around the two brown-belt students, as he followed their moves and talked to them, correcting their techniques, demonstrating how to do it right. I was too far away to hear his voice for real, but I could hear him in my imagination, saying, "Come on, you chuckleheads, focus, take charge of your own minds. "

Had Paul Hunt been telling Josh the truth? I wondered. Had Alex really been coming to see Sensei Mike the night he was killed? Why? Why would they be meeting in secret like that? Hunt had said that Alex was doing some kind of business with adults, people in town who seemed decent and respectable but were really running some kind of criminal enterprise. Was he lying? Was he just making stuff up to sound important? Or was it possible Mike wasn't who I thought he was? Was it possible the best, smartest, wisest teacher I ever had was not who I thought he was at all?

I guess it came down once again to the question that had been buzzing around in my mind all this time: How can you tell who the bad guys and good guys are? How can you even tell whether you're a bad guy or a good guy? I mean, Mike told me the good guys were the people who were moving toward the light. But how did you know if you were moving in the right direction? So many people say so many different things, believe so many different things. How can you tell whether you're on the right side or not?