Diane Cook - Man V. Nature - Stories

It’s not your fault, Gail said, smoothing out the wrinkles in Linda’s sheets, which was her way of saying that it was.

The women of the block association met in Linda’s living room. She distributed coffee in cups, and they passed around a small pitcher of cream and bowl of sugar.

When all their coffee was white and sweet, Helen tapped a spoon against her cup lip. Linda? You called this meeting. So. The women resentfully stopped chatting.

Linda cleared her throat.

I’m going to find the man. I’m going to get my children and any other children who are there.

The women waited for more, like a punch line.

If, she added, the children are still with him.

Finally someone shrieked, To his house ?

You can’t just go there.

You can’t just get them.

The women all talked at once.

It’s not done this way, Helen insisted.

What if you go, and, like you said, there are none? And it’s just him? said Lorrie, her voice arcing toward panic. I think I would die.

And what if they’re all there? asked Nell, who had four children at home, and was one of the few who’d had three taken by the man. What if you get me my children back? She looked around at the women. Am I supposed to want them? Because I don’t. I don’t want them anymore. As she spoke, she shook her cup carelessly and coffee sloshed onto the carpet.

Nell’s right, Gail said. Children grow up so fast. You won’t know them anymore. I’m worried you’ll be disappointed with what you find.

Linda thought she saw some women blanch when Gail spoke, and was it her imagination, or had several rolled their eyes? She detected a new chill in the air. There was so much she didn’t know about these women.

Linda cleared her throat, said shakily, I’ll take that risk.

Everyone deflated in her chair. Were the women having the same thoughts she’d had? Could they handle knowing for certain where their children had been? Could they handle having them back? Or were they thinking something else entirely? Perhaps that Linda was a fool.

The women left, one by one. None gave her blessing.

Linda prepared a snack to take with her. She placed it in her purse with her biggest kitchen knife, wrapped in a tea towel so she wouldn’t cut herself if she reached for anything.

Like in a fable, the man’s house was easy to find. It was the kind of place children told each other about at sleepovers, crowded under blankets, their faces lit by flashlights.

Linda followed the man’s well-worn trail, which ran like a scar through her neighbors’ yards and into the dense, dark woods. The man lived behind them. Had anyone ever ventured this way before? Or had it seemed too dangerous, too unknown? Linda gasped with each breath, not from exertion but from fear of what she would find.

At the end of the trail sat a clearing, and in the clearing sat a house. An original wooden shack situated itself humbly in the center, but a maze of crudely built additions snaked out from all sides and corners, with additions attached to those additions. It stretched out awkwardly, like a foldable ruler. Linda was so close to her own house that she could hear the hammering of a neighbor who was putting in a deck. The trees were the same. If she let her yard go wild, these same types of trees would grow. The maple in his yard was the same size as the maple in hers. On both, leaves had turned poinsettia red.

She entered the house, followed the drone of a television down a zigzag hallway, and entered a living room. Several broken-skinned couches sat facing a small television. The walls were a raw wood, as was the floor under a mosaic of small mismatched rugs flung together to form a larger one.

On the rug was a child’s car seat, and in it lay Lewis, asleep. He looked so different from how she remembered him. He was a few months older now, and had already grown too big for the seat. Linda recognized it as hers and was amazed she’d never noticed it was gone. She wondered how many other things the man had taken from her that day besides Lewis.

In an easy chair next to Lewis sat the man, his arm outstretched to rock the car seat. Several children of various ages splayed on the floor, playing a game. They squinted at her, then returned to their game. On the far corner of a sad blue couch, a small girl was curled in a ball, asleep. Her dirty hair was a nest of knots, with some small twigs and mosses tied in.

Linda whimpered.

The man scowled at her. What did you think? he sneered in a voice hollowed by illness. I ate them? Is that what you thought you’d find?

He stood, shaky. I’m not an animal.

The man gathered items into a plastic grocery sack.

I can’t fight you, he mumbled. I’m too sick. In went a brown teddy bear, a painted rattle with many spots worn through to wood.

In a way I’m glad you came. I can’t care for them anymore. It’s a lot of work.

The girl on the couch unfolded as if on cue and stretched like a dog, arching so far she slid off the cushion and onto her head. As Linda watched this, her stomach twisted.

She’s yours, the man said. He peered at Linda’s face, then at the girl. Clear as day.

The girl sat up, rubbed the spot she’d bruised.

Linda counted backward in her head. Beatrice was six.

She likes to walk, he said, as if explaining her hair. He thrust the bag into the girl’s arms and nodded to the child seat. Grab that handle and hold tight. You’re gonna help your mom get your brother home. She doesn’t look like she can walk too steady.

Beatrice and the man stared at Linda, as if waiting for her to speak, or maybe just to leave.

Linda had expected something more dramatic. A struggle, maybe. She tightened her grip on her purse where the knife lay cozy in a rag. Something more than this. This, she imagined, was what it would feel like if she had to pick her kids up from a sitter she hated leaving them with. Aren’t you going to apologize? she finally asked.

The man laughed, but not meanly. For what? It’s just how I am. And I did right by them. He placed a hand on Beatrice’s head and smiled down at her. What does an owl say, girl?

Beatrice cocked her head. Hoo hoo. Hoo hoo, she called, slow and serious.

Correct, the man said, and hobbled past Linda. She followed him into a dining room stuffed with tables made from plywood across sawhorses, a few appliances lining the walls. The tables stretched in rows, benches flanking each. It looked like a cafeteria, and easily could seat a hundred.

Photos of the man with different children covered the plywood walls. In one he was a young man helping a small boy hold up a fish almost as long as the boy was tall. The boy showed hugely gapped teeth, and the man himself was caught midlaugh. In another, the man, older, stood in front of the house, before all the serpentine additions. Gathered around him, in one big hug, were children of all ages, maybe forty in all. Everyone smiled. Between the poster boards were tacked wrinkled, aged letters. Dear Dad , they all began. Taped to some were pictures of other families, and Linda understood that these children had become adults and wrote home to the man as any child would write home to a father. But did the pictures show their own families, or ones they had stolen from whatever neighborhood they now lived behind? Had they grown up to be like the man? Or were they just regular people?

She watched the man stoop into one of the refrigerators and fill a tote bag with apples. He was mostly bald, with drooping ears and gnarled elbows. He looked so much older than he had in her yard, though that was only a few months ago. He creaked back upright and walked the bag of apples over to her.

And of course you’ll take the others, he said. Then, already lost in his own nostalgia, he murmured, My children.