Jeff Hirsch - The Darkest Path

Everyone fell to their food. My body, used to canned tuna and desert reeds, was desperate to take in as much as it could. My stomach seemed to be bottomless.

“So are you from Wyoming too?” Diane asked, once most everyone had cleared their plates.

“New York,” I said. “I’m on my way back.”

“Alec!” Diane called. “Did you hear? Cal’s from New York.”

“That’s great!” he said. “I love the Plaza. Do you go to the Plaza?”

“God, you are such a ridiculous snob,” Kate said. “You’re like a New Yorker cartoon.”

“What? It’s a nice place.”

“Yes, it is, but I think what Diane was saying is that Cal here is from—”

Alec slapped the table, rattling the plates. “Hey! I just had an idea. It’s going to be a beautiful night and I think it’s time we got this party moving! Who’s up for a swim?”

“Yes!” Reese agreed, leaping up from the table.

“Aren’t we supposed to wait a half hour or something?” Diane asked.

Alec lifted a scholarly finger into the air. “Society,” he declared, “has convinced us that the universe is a place of rules and regulations when, in fact, it is a… what?”

Alec leaned over Diane, palms planted on the tabletop, a ravenous look in his eye.

“Don’t leave me hanging here, D.”

Diane sighed. “Life is a cabaret.”

“Yes!” Alec shot a fist into the air and led Reese and Christos from the table and down a hill leading away from the house. His voice rose up into the night, loud and off-key.

“Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!”

Kate and Diane rolled their eyes as one and pushed back from the table.

“Come on, Cal,” Kate said. “It’s time to join the cabaret, ol’ chum. You want to get your guitar, Diane? You might be able to drown out Alec’s singing.”

“Maybe we should just drown Alec.”

Diane went back into the house as Kate gathered up some of the trays from the table. She stacked a loaf of bread and the board of cheese awkwardly in my arms and we left the porch, moving across a patch of lush grass that surrounded the house.

“Sorry about Alec,” she said. “I mean, he’s always been a handful, but he’s been unusually intense ever since we got here. I think he flipped out when Daddy Dearest sent him away. Probably thought he was indispensible to the empire or something.”

“What empire?”

“La-La Land? Hollyweird?” Kate laughed when she saw my confusion. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll take this one step at a time.”

As Kate led me down the hill, I felt like I was moving through a dream. Below the house, there was a shallow valley with a small lake fixed in its center like a jewel. The sun was slipping below the treetops, spreading a rich orange light across the grass and the peaks of ripples out on the water.

Kate led me down to a wood-plank dock that reached out halfway across the water. We set our things down and took a spot at the edge. Kate slipped her sandals off and dangled her feet in the water. At the end of the dock, Alec and Reese were stripping their shirts off and getting ready to dive. Christos was lying stretched out on the deck, his skin almost bronze in the twilight sun.

“One! Two! Three! CANNONBALL!”

Alec and Reese leapt up into the air, tucking their legs in and slamming into the lake. A fountain of water exploded over the dock, soaking us all in icy water.

“Hey!” Kate yelled, laughing. I found myself laughing too, shocked by the water’s chill. Christos didn’t even move; he just closed his eyes and smiled up into the sky. Alec and Reese raced across the lake, their arms slicing into the steely water.

I looked back over my shoulder at the house. From the dock I could see how sprawling it really was. It stretched from one end of the hilltop to the other, a rustic brown expanse, more like a resort or a hotel than a house. The entire property was surrounded by towering pines that blocked out any trace of the world outside. I searched for bomb craters or scorch marks, anything that might suggest that this place existed in the same world I came from, but found nothing. A dreamy vertigo washed over me. For a second it was easy to believe there was nothing in the world but this.

“Camembert?”

“What?”

Kate was holding out a crust of bread with a slice of cheese on it.

“Oh. Thanks. Sure.” I took the bread and sat with it in my hand, too thrown to even eat. “How long have you all been here?”

“Uh… about six weeks now, I think. I don’t know. The days are kinda running together.”

“You haven’t had any problems with the Path?”

Kate bumped her shoulder into mine. “Forget about the Path. Life’s a cabaret, remember?”

“Right. Sorry.”

Kate smiled. “I was just kidding. We haven’t had any problems. We’re pretty well hidden, and besides, Alec’s dad was nice enough to hire a small army to look after us.”

Kate tossed a bit of potato chip into the water, and a duck paddled over to nibble at it. The pier wobbled as Diane returned from the house, her guitar in hand. She sat cross-legged between us and began to tune it. When she was done, she played a song I didn’t recognize. Her British accent disappeared within a lilting melody.

We listened as Diane moved from song to song and the sun fell. Once it was low enough, strings of white lights that lined the dock winked on automatically, surrounding us in a crystalline glow. Fairy lights. I remembered how Mom would hang them all through our back garden. Suspended within the flower patches and the vines, they filled the nighttime yard with a ghostly twinkle.

Kate gathered the remains of dinner into neat piles at the end of the pier. When she returned, she sat down beside me, the tip of her knee touching my arm. They looked strange so close, her leg smooth and white, my arm covered in old bruises and partially healed cuts just like the rest of me was. Kate lightly traced the boundaries of one of the bruises with her fingertip.

“Some of these are old,” she said quietly, her voice slipping in beneath Diane’s strumming. “You didn’t get all of them in the crash.”

I shook my head.

“You were taken,” Kate said. “Weren’t you? By the Path.”

I turned to her, her violet-colored eyes shyly searching.

“How did you know?”

“A guess,” she said with a shrug. “You said you were from New York but you were running from the West, which is mostly Path. How long were you with them?”

“Six years.”

“Six years,” she breathed, looking out at the water. “Since I was in… fifth grade.”

“Does everyone know?”

“No,” she said. “Not that they’d care, really.” She thought for a moment, tossed another chip into the water. “After a while, everything outside of here starts to seem sort of… unreal. You know?” She looked back at me with a smile. “I think you’re the most real thing that’s come along in weeks.”

Applause erupted as Diane finished one song and then launched into another, this one faster, punctuated by Christos stomping in time against the deck. Kate clapped along, moving closer to me as she did it, her shoulder warm against mine. The notes suddenly felt strident and jangling. Overloud. I thought of Nat and Bear lying alone in the dark.

“I should go,” I said. “Check on Nat and Bear. Bring them something to eat.”

“I’m sure they’re fine.”

“But—”

“It won’t kill you to rest for a second,” Kate said, a surprising command coming into her voice. “I promise.”

“I…”

Kate took my hand as the song played on. Across the lake I saw Alec and Reese pulling back toward us. They planted their palms on the pier and slid out of the water, slick as seals. Alec stood at the edge of the pier, his pale belly hanging out, and began a lurching dance in time to Diane’s playing. Reese and Kate cried with laughter and clapped along. Soon everyone was laughing, making a sound as crisp and bright as the fairy lights around us.