Jason Mott - The Returned

Lucille was beaming again. She was onstage, proud and wonderfully rooted in 1966.

“Sunlight everywhere,” she said. “A sky so bright and blue you could hardly believe it or imagine it these days.” She shook her head. “Too much pollution now, I suppose. Can’t think of a single thing that’s the way it used to be.”

Then, quite suddenly, she stopped.

She turned and looked through the window in the door. Her son was still there. Jacob was still alive. Still eight years old. Still beautiful. “Things change,” she said after a moment. “But you should have been there, Martin Bellamy. They were so happy—Jacob and his daddy. Harold carried that boy on his back for half the day. I thought he was gonna pass out. All that walking we did that day. Walking and walking and more walking. And there was Harold carrying that boy slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes for most of it.

“The two of them made a game of it. They’d get to some booth or other, take it all in, say whatever they wanted to say about things. Then Jacob would cut off at a run and there was Harold right after him. Running through folks, almost knocking people over. And there I was yelling after them, ‘Cut it out, you two! Stop acting like animals!’”

She gazed at Jacob. Her face seemed unsure what stance to take, so it became neutral and waiting. “It really is a blessing from God, Agent Martin Bellamy,” she said slowly. “And just because a person don’t quite understand the purpose and meaning of a blessing, that doesn’t make it any less of a blessing...does it?”

Elizabeth Pinch

She knew he would come. All she had to do was wait and believe. He had always been better than he gave himself credit for, more disciplined, smarter. He was all the things he never told himself he was.

She had come close to finding him. She’d made it as far east as Colorado before they caught her. A local police sheriff saw her at a highway rest stop. She’d been riding with a trucker who was fascinated by the Returned and kept asking her questions about death. And when she didn’t answer his questions, he left her at the rest stop where everyone that saw her treated her with uncertainty.

She was transferred first to Texas, where she asked the interviewers from the Bureau, “Can you help me find Robert Peters?” over and over again. After holding her for a while in Texas, they sent her to Mississippi, where she’d lived originally, and placed her in a building with others like her and placed men with guns around them.

“I need to find Robert Peters,” she told them at every opportunity.

“He’s not here” is the closest thing she ever got to an answer, and that was given with derision.

But he would come for her. She knew that, somehow.

He would find her and everything would be the way it was always meant to be.

Six

PASTOR PETERS GRUMBLED in concert with the keystrokes. Only God knew how bitterly he hated typing.

In spite of still being a young man, just forty-three—youngish, at least—he’d never been any good at typing. He had the bad luck of being born into that ill-timed generation of people for whom the epoch of computers was just far enough away that they were never given any reason to learn to type and, yet, the rise of the machines was just close enough that they would be forced to always suffer for their lack of understanding in regard to QWERTY and its arrangement of home keys. He could only wield two fingers at the keyboard, like some huge, computer-dependent mantis.

Peck. Peck-peck. Peck, peck, peck, peck-peck, peck.

He’d begun the letter four times now. And he had deleted it five times—he counted the time he’d deleted everything and turned off the entire computer out of frustration.

The problem with being a poor, mantis-fingered typist was that the words in Pastor Peters’s head always ran far, far in front of the words his index fingers took entire eras to construct. If he didn’t know any better, he would have sworn on any stack of consecrated tomes that the letters on the keyboard shifted position every few minutes or so, just enough to keep a person guessing. Yes, he could have simply written the letter longhand and then taken the time to type it through only once, but that wouldn’t make him any better a typist.

His wife had come into his office once or twice, offering to type the letter for him, as she oftentimes did, and he had politely declined, as he oftentimes did not.

“I’ll never improve if I keep letting you do it for me,” he told her.

“A wise man knows his limitations,” she replied, not meaning it as an insult, only hoping to start a dialogue, a powwow, as he himself had said to the Arcadia townspeople not long ago. He was distant in the past few weeks, more so in the past few days. And she did not know why.

“I prefer to think of it more as a ‘loose boundary’ than a limitation,” he replied. “If I can ever get the rest of my fingers to play along...well...just you wait and see. I’ll be a phenomenon! A miracle unto myself.”

When she began walking around the desk, politely asking to see what he was working on, he quickly deleted the few precious words that had taken him so long to assemble. “It’s just something I need to get out of my head,” he told her. “Nothing important.”

“So you don’t want to tell me what it is?”

“It’s nothing. Really.”

“Okay,” she said, holding up her hands in submission. She smiled to let him know that she was not angry just yet. “Keep your secrets. I trust you,” she said, and left the room.

The pastor’s typing was even worse now that his wife had said that she trusted him, thereby implying that there might be something in his writing of the letter that required not only her trust but, even worse, a reminder of that trust.

She was a very skilled spouse.

To Whom It May Concern,

That was how far back he’d gone. All the way to the beginning. He huffed and wiped his furrowed brow with the back of his hand and continued.

Peck. Peck. Peck. Peck-peck. Peck...

I am writing to inquire

Pastor Peters sat and thought, realizing now that he knew very little about exactly what he wanted to ask.

Peck-peck-peck...

I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch. I received your letter stating that Miss Pinch was trying to find me.

Delete, delete, delete. Then:

I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.

That was closer to the truth of it. He thought, then and there, about simply signing his name and dropping the envelope in the mail. He thought so hard about it that he even printed the page. Then he sat back in his chair and looked at the words.

I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.

He placed the paper on his desk and picked up a pen and marked a few things out.

I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.

Even if his mind was unsure, his hand knew what he was trying to say. It lifted the pen and launched it at the letter again. Scratching and drawing through until, finally, the truth of everything was there, staring back at the pastor.

I am writing about Elizabeth.

What else could he do then but crumple the paper and toss it into the trash?

The pastor logged on to the internet and pecked Elizabeth Pinch’s name into the search bar. All that came back were dozens of other people named Elizabeth Pinch; none of them were the fifteen-year-old girl from Mississippi who had, once upon a time, owned his heart.

He refined the search to display only images.

Pictures of women populated the screen, one after the other. Some smiling, facing the camera. Others not even aware that the camera was there. Some of the images weren’t pictures of people at all. Some of them were images from movies or television. (Apparently there was an Elizabeth Pinch in Hollywood who wrote for a very highly rated television crime drama. Images of the crime drama appeared on page after page of the search results.)