Jason Mott - The Returned

“No, sir. It’s okay.”

“I’m going to ask you one last question, then. And I need you to really think about it for me, okay?”

Jacob finished his lollipop. He sat up straight, his small, pale face becoming very serious. He looked like a little, well-dressed politician—in his dark pants and white, collared shirt.

“You’re a good boy, Jacob. I know you’ll do your best.”

“Yes, you are,” Lucille added, stroking the boy’s head.

“Do you remember anything before China?”

Silence.

Lucille wrapped her arm around Jacob and pulled him close and squeezed him. “Mr. Martin Bellamy isn’t trying to make anything difficult and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. He’s just curious, is all. And so is your old mama. But I’m less curious and more just plain ol’ nosy, I suppose.”

She smiled and poked a tickling finger into his armpit.

Jacob giggled.

Lucille and Agent Bellamy waited.

Lucille rubbed Jacob’s back, as if her hand against his body might conjure whatever spirits of memory were contained within him. She wished Harold were there. Somehow, she thought this moment could be helped if Jacob had his father rubbing his back and showing his support, as well. But Harold had launched into one of his rants about “the damn fool government” and was being generally disagreeable today—he behaved the way he did when Lucille tried to drag him to church during the holidays—and it was decided he should just stay in the truck while Lucille and Jacob spoke with the man from the Bureau.

Agent Bellamy placed his notepad on the table beside his stool to show the boy that this wasn’t simply about the government’s need to know. He wanted to show that he was genuinely interested in what the boy had experienced. He liked Jacob, from the first time they’d met, and he felt that Jacob liked him, too.

After the silence had gone on so long as to become uncomfortable, Agent Bellamy spoke. “That’s okay, Jacob. You don’t have to—”

“I do as I’m told,” Jacob said. “I try to do as I’m told.”

“I’m sure you do,” Agent Bellamy said.

“I wasn’t trying to get into trouble. That day at the river.”

“In China? Where they found you?”

“No,” Jacob said after a pause. He pulled his legs into his chest.

“What do you remember about that day?”

“I wasn’t trying to misbehave.”

“I know you weren’t.”

“I really wasn’t,” Jacob said.

Lucille was weeping now, silently. Her body trembled, expanding and contracting like a willow in March wind. She fumbled in her pocket and found tissues with which she dabbed her eyes. “Go on,” she said, her voice choked.

“I remember the water,” Jacob said. “There was just water. First it was the river at home, and then it wasn’t. Only I didn’t know it. It just happened.”

“There was nothing in between?”

Jacob shrugged.

Lucille dabbed her eyes again. Something heavy had fallen against her heart, though she did not know what. It was all she could manage not to collapse right there in the too-small chair beneath her. She felt that would be painfully rude, though—for Martin Bellamy to have to help a collapsed old woman. So, as a matter of etiquette, she held herself together, even when she asked the question upon which all of her life seemed to hang. “Wasn’t there anything before you woke up, honey? In the time between when you...went to sleep, and when you woke up? Was there a bright, warm light? A voice? Wasn’t there anything?”

“What’s an owl’s favorite subject?” Jacob asked.

In reply to this there was only silence. Silence and a small boy torn between what was he incapable of saying and what he felt his mother wanted.

“Owlgebra,” he said when no one answered.

* * *

“That’s some boy you’ve got there,” Agent Bellamy said. Jacob was gone now—in the adjoining room being kept company by a young soldier from somewhere in the Midwest. Lucille and Agent Bellamy could see them through the window in the door that linked the two rooms together. It was important to Lucille that she didn’t lose sight of him.

“He’s a blessing,” she said after a pause. Her gaze shifted from Jacob to Agent Bellamy to the small, thin hands that sat in her lap.

“I’m glad to hear that everything has been going so well.”

“It has,” Lucille said. She smiled, still looking down at her hands. Then, as if some small riddle had finally been sorted out in her head, she sat erect and her smile grew so wide and proud that it was only then that Agent Bellamy noticed how thin and frail it had been. “This your first time down this way, Agent Martin Bellamy? Down south, I mean.”

“Do airports count?” He sat forward and folded his hands on the grand desk in front of him. He felt a story coming.

“I suppose they wouldn’t.”

“Are you sure? Because I’ve been in and out of the Atlanta airport more times than I can count. It’s odd, but somehow it feels like every flight I’ve ever been on has had to go through Atlanta for some reason. I swear I took a flight from New York to Boston once that had a three-hour layover in Atlanta. Not quite sure how that happened.”

Lucille barked a little laugh. “How come you aren’t married, Agent Martin Bellamy? How come you don’t have a family to call your own?”

He shrugged. “Just never really fit in, I suppose.”

“You should see about making it fit,” Lucille said. She made a motion to stand, then immediately changed her mind. “You seem like a good person. And the world needs more good people. You should find a young woman that makes you happy and the two of you should have children,” Lucille said, still smiling, though Agent Bellamy couldn’t help but notice that her smile was a little dimmer now.

Then she stood with a groan and walked over to the door and saw that Jacob was still there. “I believe we just missed the Strawberry Festival, Martin Bellamy,” she said. Her voice was low and even. “Happens about this time every year over in Whiteville. Been going on as far back as I can remember. Probably wouldn’t be all that impressive to a big-city man like yourself, but it’s something folks like us like to be a part of.

“Just like it sounds, it’s all about strawberries. Most people don’t think about it, but there was a time back when a person could have a farm and grow crops and make a living off it. Doesn’t happen much nowadays—almost all the farms I knew of as a child been gone for years. Only one or two still around. I think that Skidmore farm up near Lumberton is still running...but I can’t say to a certainty.”

She came from the door and stood behind her chair and looked down at Agent Bellamy as she spoke. He’d gotten up from his position when she hadn’t been looking and that seemed to throw her off. He had looked almost like a child at the desk before, the way he had been sitting. Now he was a grown man again. A grown man from a big, faraway city. A grown man that had not been a child for a great many years.

“It goes on all weekend,” she continued. “And it’s gotten bigger and bigger over the years, but even back then it was a big event. Jacob was as excited as any child ought to have the right to be. You’d think we’d never taken him anywhere! And Harold, well, even he was excited to be there. He tried to hide it—he hadn’t really learned how to be an obstinate old fool just yet, you understand. You could just see how happy he was! And why wouldn’t he be? He was a father at the Columbus County Strawberry Festival with his one and only son.

“It was something! Both of them behaving like children. There was a dog show. And there wasn’t anything Jacob and Harold liked more than dogs. Now, this wasn’t any dog show like you see on the TV these days. This was a good old country dog show. Nothing but working dogs. Blue ticks, walkers, beagles. But Lord, were they beautiful! And Harold and Jacob just ran from one pen to the other. Saying this and saying that about what dog was better than the other and why. This one looked like he might be good for hunting in such and such place in such and such weather on such and such kind of animal.”