Jeff Hirsch: The Darkest Path

The living room was a dim cave with thick brown-and-gold carpet. A TV sat at one end and at the other was the lumpy brown couch where Mom and Grandma Betty would drink wine while Dad played guitar. The kitchen glowed in shades of pink and yellow, with dishes sitting unwashed in the sink and stacks of mail teetering by the coffee machine.

“Mom! Dad!”

I threw myself at the door to our bedroom and there was our red shelf full of books and our stacks of games. Loose Legos were scattered across the floor between our beds in piles of red and yellow and green, like raw jewels. I bent over laughing, out of breath, wanting to throw them all into the air. I felt James in the doorway behind me.

“Can you believe it?” I said as I turned. “Mom and Dad are probably just out. They’ll be here any—”

James was holding a yellowing piece of paper. On the front it said JAMES AND CALLUM.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Read it.”

I paused, thinking of that crumbling ship, but then James pressed it into my hands. I unfolded a single sheet of paper covered in our mother’s neat hand.

Boys,

It’s been five years now and we haven’t heard a word about either of you. I can only pray that you found some way to stay safe until all of this is over.

The war seems to be going badly now and the last few years have been very hard on your grandmother. The rationing has made getting her medicine increasingly difficult, so your father and I finally decided that we had no choice but to try to get into Canada before they close the border for good. We’re leaving first thing tomorrow morning.

We never thought we’d have to leave the house you both grew up in. It’s sad how so many things that would have seemed unthinkable only a few years ago are now so commonplace. Maybe in times like these, all we can do is survive and hope for the day when we’ll be able to live.

We plan to head northeast toward Wellesley Island, where they say there are still people who can get us across. Where we’ll go after, if we even succeed, we have no way of knowing. The refugee camps near Ottawa are full and we hear that they’re pushing people farther and farther west. We’ll do all we can to leave word for you wherever we go.

We love you both and pray for the day when we’ll all be together again.

The letter slipped from my hands and fell to the floor.

“Cal…”

I found myself running back through the house and toward the front door. This time I saw the layers of dust and the empty shelves I had missed before and smelled the musty air of a place abandoned.

“Cal! Wait!”

I collapsed onto the front porch, my head in my hands, breathing in the cloying smell of the roses that had grown unchecked all around the house. The floorboards creaked behind me.

“It’s been six years,” James said.

I nodded but couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think. James hovered a while and then he drifted inside. I looked up at the empty houses tucked in among the oaks and the grass-lined streets.

I remembered how the school bus would let James and me off at the top of the hill and we would race each other down the sidewalk, kicking at the russet piles of fallen leaves, before bursting inside and yelling for Mom. I remembered lying in the front yard in the summertime, the warm air around me full with the hum of Dad’s lawn mower and the smell of cut grass. I remembered our neighbors and our friends and how I ran thoughtlessly through the streets to the shores of the lake.

I tried to remember the bad things too, the unhappy things, hoping they would drive away the ache of the loss, but it was no use. As hard as I tried, all I could remember were the times I had been so happy.

It was after nightfall when I made my way through the dark house and slid open the door to the back porch. James had built a small fire in the middle of the garden and he sat reading by its orange light.

The grass in the garden was overgrown and the flowers had gone wild and weed-strangled. Our hammocks still hung between the twin oaks though they were threadbare, the white ropes frayed and gray with mildew. James sat on the crumbling stone border that surrounded the small pond.

“Where’ve you been?” he asked, setting his book down beside him.

“Walking,” I said. I drifted across the yard and sat down a few feet from James, staring into the flames at his feet. “Most of the houses in the neighborhood are abandoned. The Guttermans. The Bells.”

James pushed a tin plate my way. “Warmed up some of the rations we brought with us.”

It was spaghetti with red sauce and bits of sawdusty meat. I pushed at it with the plastic fork James gave me. “Guess we can go out tomorrow and spend some of Captain Assad’s money on real food.”

James said nothing. He cracked a branch in two and tossed half into the flames. It flared and crackled. Sitting on the cracked stone next to him was his copy of The Glorious Path . The cover was battered and stained. I took it and rifled through the dog-eared pages. Almost every one was worn glossy. The margins were filled with James’s careful handwriting. I set the book back down and stared into the fire.

“You’re going back, aren’t you?”

James poked at the campfire with a stick, arranging the coals. The fire surged and brightened.

“I was studying to be a beacon,” he said quietly. “I never said anything because I knew you wouldn’t like it. Beacon Quan told me he knew a place in Oklahoma that he thought would be good for my apprenticeship. It’s this town called Foley. It grows wheat and corn. Just a few hundred people living on farms with a small Lighthouse.”

James sat forward and stared into the flames.

“The Choice is wrong,” he said. “I know that, and I know other things are wrong too, but…” James stopped, struggling for the words. “Even now, I close my eyes and I pray and I can feel my path. It hasn’t gone away. I wish it would, but it hasn’t. And I know it doesn’t end here. Maybe if I’m there… maybe I can try to help make things better.”

“They’ll kill you if they find out who you are.”

“I know,” he said.

I took another branch and fed it to the fire.

“I keep thinking about the day they took us,” I said. “Maybe if I hadn’t been so afraid, we could have escaped, or if I had stood up to the beacon—”

“They would have killed us,” James said. “You were trying to keep your little brother safe, Cal. Just like you’ve been trying to do for the last six years.”

James moved off the stone border and sat down next to me.

“You put us on a path,” he said. “I know you don’t believe it, but I do, and I think it’s the one we were meant to be on. I don’t regret it.”

“Not even Hill?”

The wind blew through the trees, sending sparks across the yard like a swarm of bees. James turned to me, his eyes warm in the firelight.

“Not even Hill.”

We sat there in silence until the fire died down to a few orange coals. We kicked dirt over them and then we made our way inside. I paused at the porch door, looking at the tattered remains of our hammocks swinging in the breeze. I closed the door, and James and I drifted toward our old bedroom without a word.

The wood floor between our now too-small beds was hard and cold, but it felt right to be there, him on one side and me on the other. We brought in a couple dusty blankets and pulled the shades back from the window. Outside, moonlit trees swayed against the black.

“James?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know what to do now.”

James thought a moment. “Well, last time we were here, you said you wanted to be Batman. Maybe you could get started on that.”