David Morrell - Long lost

We threw him toward the fire. His corpse burst into flames. Only then did we stumble back down to the stream. At the bottom, Kate fell, but she wouldn't let me touch her to help her get up. Keeping a wary distance from me, she and Jason ran.

The three of us were in a hospital for quite a while. The police and the district attorney questioned me, demanding to know why I hadn't let the authorities go after Petey. I did my best to tell them that events had overtaken me. How could I explain that I was afraid the police would have gotten Kate and Jason killed instead of saving them? Despite my repeated denials, they insisted that my motive had been rage, that I'd been determined to get even with Petey. So I had to appear before a grand jury, and the way my attorney explained it to me, I could have been charged with what amounted to taking the law into my own hands. But I doubt there was a person on the jury who, after looking at my broken arm in a sling and the burns on my face, didn't think that I'd gone through enough. Certainly Kate and Jason had gone through plenty. Their eyes had the haunted expression of war refugees.

It took three weeks before we were allowed to leave. I paid someone to drive the Volvo back to Denver while Kate, Jason, and I flew home from Columbus. Our friends welcomed us back. They phoned. They visited. They had a party for us. We thanked them.

But the truth was, we were too traumatized to be sociable. Smiles and small talk were difficult to manage, and as for "large talk," when we were asked details about what had happened, we weren't ready to discuss it yet. After a while, the newness of our return wore off. The phone calls, visits, and invitations declined. Finally, we were left to ourselves.

Jason remained so silent that the parents of his friends didn't feel comfortable having him around their children. For her part, Kate got nervous whenever she had to leave the house. She finally gave up trying to do so. The only good thing was, as soon as I shaved my beard, as soon as the drugs wore off and Kate and Jason distinguished me from Petey, they no longer considered me a threat, although I'm always careful to let them see when I'm going to touch them.

I've tried to be honest with myself. I've done my best to understand what happened, hoping to adjust to it. But sometimes I wonder if it's possible to adjust to what Petey… Lester… did to us. Odd how I struggled so hard to deny that Petey was Lester and now I accept that the two were the same. My brother died a long time ago. Because of me.

Sometimes when Kate and Jason aren't aware of it, I study them, trying to decide if they're getting better. Without being obvious, I try to see beyond their eyes. I look in the mirror and try to see beyond my own. Do we carry darkness in us?

Payne came over the other day, a welcome visitor.

I asked him about his wife. "Is she well? What was the result of the biopsy?"

"The lump on her breast turned out to be a cyst, thank God."

Only then did I realize that I'd been holding my breath. "I'm glad to hear good things can happen," I said.

In the backyard, Payne eased his weight onto the chaise lounge where Petey had sat the previous year, peering up at our bedroom window.

Kate brought us two glasses of iced tea.

We pretended not to notice that her hands shook and the ice rattled.

"Thanks," I said.

When I touched her shoulder, she actually smiled.

Payne watched her return to the house. "Has she been seeing anyone?"

"A psychiatrist? Yes," I said. "All three of us have."

"Is it doing any good?"

"My own guy has me writing a journal, describing what happened and how I feel about it. I talk to him about it once a week. Is it doing any good?" I shrugged. "He claims that it is but says that I don't have the objectivity to know it yet. He also says that because the trauma we went through lasted a long time, it isn't reasonable to expect to get over it quickly."

"Makes sense."

"Kate went into the supermarket all by herself today."

Payne looked puzzled.

"It's a big step," I explained. "She has trouble being near crowds and strangers."

"What about you? Do you plan to go back to work?"

"I'm going to have to soon," I answered. "Our insurance doesn't cover all the medical expenses. Certainly not the legal expenses."

"But how are you feeling? Are you ready to go back to work?"

I sipped my iced tea and didn't answer.

"When I was with the Bureau, I had to shoot somebody," Payne said.

"Kill him?"

He concentrated on his glass. "I got shot in the process. Three months medical leave. A lot of counseling. I think I told you that's when I put on all this weight and left the Bureau. It took me a long time to feel normal again."

"Normal's a complicated word. I wonder if I can feel normal again. In my previous life, it's like I was blundering around in a world of hurt but was too stupid to realize it."

"And now?"

"I think Kate's right to be careful of what's going on around her. Anything can happen. One moment, I was standing on a ridge, admiring the scenery. The next moment, my brother shoved me into a gorge."

"Caution's a virtue."

"So I've learned. You asked me if I planned to go back to work. I am at work."

"Oh?" Payne studied me.

"Taking care of my family. It's my job to love Kate and Jason as hard as I can, to thank God for every moment I have with them, to hold them and cherish them and do my damnedest to keep them safe."

Payne's concentration was powerful. "You know what, Mr. Denning?"

"Please call me Brad."

"The more I get to know you, the better I like you."

My father was killed during World War II, shortly after I was born in 1943. My mother had difficulty raising me and at the same time holding a job, so she put me in an orphanage and later in a series of boarding homes. I grew up unsure of who I was, desperately in need of a father figure. Books and movies were my escape. Eventually I decided to be a writer and sought help from two men who became metaphorical fathers to me: Stirling Silliphant, the head writer for the classic TV series "Route 66" about two young men in a Corvette who travel America in search of themselves, and Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), a novelist who taught at the Pennsylvania State University where I went to graduate school from 1966 to 1970. The result of their influence is my 1972 novel, First Blood, which introduced Rambo. The search for a father is prominent in that book, as it is in later ones, most notably The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), a thriller about orphans and spies. During this period, I was a professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. With two professions, I worked seven days a week until exhaustion forced me to make a painful choice and resign from the university in 1986. One year later, my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from bone cancer, and thereafter my fiction tended to depict the search for a son, particularly in Fireflies (1988) and Desperate Measures (1994). To make a new start, my wife and I moved to the mountains and mystical light of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where my work changed yet again, exploring the passionate relationships between men and women, highlighting them against a background of action as in the newest, Burnt Sienna. To give his stories a realistic edge, he has been trained in wilderness survival, hostage negotiation, executive protection, antiterrorist driving, assuming identities, electronic surveillance, and weapons. A former professor of American literature at the University of Iowa, Morrell now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.