Friday, 3:50 p.m.
Rob carried him the last hundred steps.
Jo had come down the path at a dead run with the phone in her fist, screaming Rob's name before she was halfway, and by the time she reached the cedar he was already coming up it with Toby behind him, and when Toby stopped at a tree for the third time in thirty yards Rob turned around and crouched and said, "Get on," and Toby got on. He rode up the last of the path on his father's back with his arms around Rob's neck and his cheek against Rob's shoulder and his eyes shut, and his boots, Rob's boots, knocking against Rob's thighs at every step.
Now the truck was doing sixty on FR 46, and the washboard was coming up through the frame so hard that the Folgers can jumped off the dash and emptied itself into the footwell, and nobody picked it up.
Jo was in the front. She had Rob's phone because Rob's had a better carrier, and she had her own in her other hand, and she was watching both of them for bars.
"Anything?"
"No."
In the back seat Toby had wedged himself into the corner behind her with one boot braced on the milk crate. His breathing came to her over the road noise, in short and out long, with a catch in it.
Rob's phone found a bar at the top of the last grade before the highway, and it rang in her hand before she could dial.
"Where are you." Dee. She was in a car. Jo could hear the blinker. "Jo. Where are you."
"FR 46. We're coming. Where is she."
"I don't know where she is." Dee's voice was flat and fast, the voice she used on the phone with regional. "I'm twenty minutes out of Bend. The school called me at ten after three because they couldn't get you. She walked out through the bus loop at three-oh-five. By herself. The aide thought she was a bus kid. She told the aide her mom was at the house."
Jo had said it. Last night, tucking her in, the covers pulled up over the rain boots. I'll be at the house. She'd meant nothing by it. She'd meant good night.
"It's six blocks," Dee said. "She knows the way, she's walked it with Marcus. The office called Larch Street and got nobody. Marcus drove over. Jo, there's two vans on Larch and the podcast woman and half the town with their phones out, and one of the neighbors says she saw Pip come around the corner at Sixth and they all went at her, Pip, Pip, where's your mom, where's your brother, and she ran. Into the park. Crying. And nobody—"
The bar went.
Jo looked at the phone. She looked at it until the screen dimmed, and pressed it, and it lit, and said Call Failed.
"Rob."
"I'm going."
He was going. The truck came off the gravel onto the highway at the stop sign without stopping, and slewed, and caught, and he put his foot down. The pines went by and then the pines were gone and they were out on the dry side, in the sage, and the needle went up past seventy and past eighty, and the rack began to howl in the wind.
"Sessa," Toby said from the back seat.
"Don't."
He didn't say it again.
◆
The long straight past the reservoir. Ninety. The truck shook at ninety as if it wanted to come apart along its seams. Jo sat with a phone in each hand and read the mileposts. Thirty-one. Thirty. Twenty-nine.
Rob's phone got two bars and then three and began to vibrate with things coming in, and she opened it with her thumb, and it was on Tall Timber, because that was what was open. Rob had been watching it. Of course he had.
LIVE. A red dot. Eleven hundred watching.
Brynn Kessler's face, then not her face, the camera turning away from it, and Larch Street. Jo's own street, jumping in the frame. The juniper. The porch chair with the mail under the rock. The swings in the park, and the bench under the big cottonwood.
"—which is the park directly across from the Voss home, where we're now hearing from neighbors that five-year-old Pip Voss, who was, I want to be careful, reportedly not picked up from her first week of kindergarten this afternoon—"
The camera went in, shaking. The bench. A small figure on it in something dark and too big, like a kid in a grown-up's raincoat, sitting very straight. Beside her, down on his heels in the dirt in front of the bench, was a man.
"—unconfirmed reports that a man has been with her for some time. We don't know who he is. We're keeping our distance, we don't want to—"
"Rob."
He looked. He looked for too long, at ninety, and looked back at the road.
The man in the dirt was young. Black hair. He had his back half to the camera, and he was drawing something on the ground with a stick, and Pip was watching the stick. She wasn't crying. She had something in her hand and she was holding it up close to her face.
It was 4:17 by the clock on the dash.
Rob's phone rang over the video. Dee. "They found her. She's in the park, she's on the bench, somebody's with her, Marcus is going over, the deputies are—" and it was gone again.
In the back seat Toby had sat up. He was leaning forward between the seats with one hand on the back of Jo's headrest, and he was looking at the little screen in her hand, at the young man in the dirt drawing with a stick, and his face had gone a color she hadn't seen it go yet. Not gray. The other way. As if something had been lit behind it.
She didn't ask him. She couldn't. She held the phone where he could see it.
Twenty-two. Twenty-one. Brynn said deputies arriving now at 4:28 by the dash, and the picture filled with a Tamarack County cruiser pulling up on the grass, and a second one, and the young man standing up slowly from the dirt with his hands open and out from his sides, and then the stream froze on a smear of green and said Reconnecting, and stayed that way all the way into town.
◆
Larch Street was full. Rob left the truck in the middle of it with the door open.
There were two vans and a line of cars on the far curb, and people in the road, and people in the park in a loose ring with their phones held up at their chests like candles at the vigil. Somebody said that's the mother and somebody said that's him, that's the old man, and the ring opened and Jo went through it.
Pip was on the bench.
She was sitting up straight in a coat that came down past her rain boots, an oilcloth coat, stiff and dark and cracked pale at the elbows, with the sleeves turned back four times. The butterfly clip had come half out and was hanging by a few hairs. There was a deputy crouched in front of her, a woman Jo didn't know, and Pip was telling her something, holding up a small dark wrinkled thing between her thumb and finger to show her.
"—and it's a cherry but it's dried," Pip was saying. "You can eat it. It's sour. He said sessa. That's Toby's word. Toby taught me it, it means hush. So I knew." She saw Jo and didn't stop. "He drew me his house. They're waiting for him. There's a lamp."
Jo went down on her knees in the dirt and got hold of her.
She got hold of her too hard. She knew it and couldn't stop it. The coat was between them, stiff, smelling of smoke and something green and bitter and under that a smell like the eel sheds at the coast, and Pip was small inside it, smaller than she'd been this morning, and Jo held on with both arms and her face in Pip's neck and Pip let her for a count of about four.
"You're squishing," Pip said.
Jo didn't let go.
"You said you'd be at the house," Pip said, into her shoulder. Not crying. Stating it. "I went to the house. There was people. They kept saying my name. I didn't have my key. I don't have a key."
"I know, baby."
"So I sat on the bench. For a long time. And then he came." Pip pushed back and looked at her. "Where were you?"
Jo didn't answer. Pip waited, and when nothing came she looked away from her, at the ground in front of the bench, and pointed with the cherry.
Somebody had drawn in the dirt with a stick. A house, square, with a pointed roof and a smaller square in the side of it for a window, and in the window a round thing with lines coming out of it all the way around, a sun, or a lamp. People beside the house. Stick people, a row of them, big and small. One of them had a round belly drawn on the front of her, carefully, gone over twice.
"That's his house," Pip said. "That's the lamp. That's his people. They're waiting."
The deputy had stood up. Behind her, on the grass by the swings, there was a patrol car with its back door shut and its lights going around without a siren, and in the back seat, behind the glass, was the young man.
He was sitting forward because his hands were behind him. He had black curly hair that needed cutting and a face too thin for itself, and he was in a linen shirt with no coat, and he was looking through the window at Pip. Only at Pip. When he saw Jo holding her, he looked at Jo.
"Mrs. Voss."
Treadwell. Jo hadn't seen her come. She was standing at the end of the bench with her readers on their cord and her radio on her shoulder, and she was breathing as if she'd come across the park fast and was hiding it.
"Is she hurt," Jo said.
"She's not hurt. She says he gave her a cherry and his coat and stayed with her. The neighbors say the same. He sat in the dirt in front of her for twenty-five minutes with his hands where everybody could see them and drew pictures." Treadwell glanced at the drawing in the dirt and away from it. "Walt Ober drove a kid in a raincoat down from the lake at eleven this morning. Walt called it in twenty minutes ago, when he saw the stream. Said the kid came out of the Whistler trail soaking wet with a nosebleed and didn't have ten words of English, and he kept saying one one four seven Larch. One one four seven Larch. Walt dropped him at the Dutch Bros because he didn't know what else to do." She looked at Jo over the readers. "No ID. No English. Found with your daughter across the street from your house. You want to tell me who he is?"
Jo couldn't. She didn't know. She held Pip.
Toby was coming across the grass.
He came slowly, in Rob's boots, with Rob a step behind him and to the side, not touching him, ready to. The ring of people and phones turned with him the way sunflowers turn. He didn't look at them. He didn't look at Jo or Pip or Treadwell. He walked straight to the patrol car and stopped beside it, at the back window, a foot from the glass.
The young man inside turned his head and saw him.
Jo watched it happen through two layers of glass and thirty feet of grass: the young man's face, which had been careful, stopped being careful. It went open all at once like a door. He leaned toward the window until his forehead touched it and said a few short words against the glass.
Toby laughed. It came out of him the boy's way, and then it broke in the middle, and he put his hand flat on the glass.
Treadwell said, "Hey—" and then didn't do anything, and the deputy by the car looked at Treadwell and didn't do anything either.
They talked through the window. Jo couldn't hear it. Toby's mouth moved close to the glass and the young man's moved on the other side, and she could tell it was Varran by the shape of it, long runs and low sounds and the stresses all falling in places English didn't put them. The young man was talking fast. Toby was listening with his whole face. Once he shut his eyes. Once he asked something, sharp, and the young man looked down, and answered, and Toby took his hand off the glass and put it over his own mouth and held it there.
All around the park the phones were up. Somebody had climbed on the slide for a better angle. Brynn Kessler was at the edge of the grass with her phone out on a stick in front of her, whispering into it, and nobody was stopping her.
Treadwell wasn't watching the car. She was watching Jo.
Jo held on to Pip. Pip had turned around in her arms to see, the too-big coat twisting, and she was watching the patrol car with the cherry held up by her mouth.
"That's Toby's friend," Pip said. "He knows Toby's word."
◆
When Toby came back he sat down on the bench before he did anything else. He sat down hard at the end of it, beside Pip, and put both hands on his knees, and Rob stood behind the bench with his hands on the back of it.
Pip held the cherry out to him. He took it and held it in his palm.
"Is he your friend?" Pip said.
"He's my daughter's boy." Toby turned the cherry over with his thumb. "His name's Aurel. He came through this morning."
Treadwell had moved closer. Jo didn't care.
"He's my grandson, Mom." His eyes were wet and he didn't do anything about it. "Pell's boy. Pell's my oldest. He was twenty when I left. He was tall already. He came through the door this morning, and he walked down, and a man in a truck brought him to Larch Street because it's the only thing he knew to say in English." He put the cherry in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap over it. "You know what he said to me? Through the window. First thing."
Jo shook her head.
"'Grandfather, you're late.'" His beard moved. "That's all. 'You're late.'"
He looked down at his hands.
"The thaw came nine times before he left," he said. "He counted them. Everybody counted them. Two days, Mom." He said it as if the words were a load he had to set down square. "Ten years."
The swings moved in the wind with nobody in them.
"Senna's seventy-two," he said. "He says she's working on dying but slowly. That's what she tells people. She built a house up at the door. At the Mouth, where I came in. A little stone house. She made them build it the second winter after I left, when I didn't come back for the thaw, and they've moved it after the door, stone by stone, twice already. She keeps a lamp in the window. Every winter night, somebody sits up there with it lit." He nodded at the drawing in the dirt, at the square window and the round thing in it with lines all around. "Ten years. Somebody's always up there."
"There's a lamp," Pip said. "I told you."
"You told me," Toby said.
Jo found her voice somewhere and it came out wrong. "She sent him. To get you."
"No. She told them nobody goes in. Nobody. She said she wasn't going to lose anybody else in the Mother." He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and held them there. "He came anyway. He thought she was dying of it. The waiting." He tipped his head at the car. "He's the thinnest. That's why it was him."
In the back of the patrol car Aurel had put his forehead back against the glass. He was looking at them on the bench. At Toby. At Pip in his coat.
"Mom," Toby said. "There's a thing I didn't tell you."
She waited. She had been waiting for it, she found, since the doorstep.
"The door's going to close. Not walk. Close." He held his hands apart and brought them together slowly, not quite touching. "It walks down the mountain. It's been walking down the mountain for nine hundred years, a minute's walk a winter, too slow for anyone to see it move. And at the bottom there's the river, the Oss, where it goes down into the gorge. And when the door gets to the river the river goes in. Water and gravel. And then there isn't any door. Not there and not here." He put his hands back on his knees. "Maris worked it out before I came. About thirty winters, she said. Then the river takes it."
"You knew."
"I knew before I came."
"You didn't tell me."
"I didn't want you counting." He looked at her with Rob's eyes. "You count everything, Mom. You'd have sat outside my door and counted it."
She had sat outside his door and counted. He knew she had.
"Aurel brought her new numbers. She kept measuring, after I left. Ten more years of measuring. The twenty-ninth winter or the thirtieth. Not later. She says she's sure." He closed his eyes for a moment, and opened them, and did the thing he'd done at the dinette on Wednesday with the date off her phone, the sum, fast, behind his face.
"Tuesday," he said. "Late morning. Maybe the afternoon. After that nobody comes home."
Rob's hands tightened on the back of the bench. The slats creaked.
"He's got a wife," Toby said. "Mira. That's her." He pointed at the stick figure with the belly, gone over twice. "She had the baby in her tummy when he came through. Four months. He doesn't know if it's a boy or a girl." He was quiet. "He asked me if I thought it was walking yet."
Pip looked down at the drawing. She put the toe of her rain boot next to the round belly, carefully, not on it.
"Everybody's waiting," Toby said. "All of them. Pell. Ilse. The grandkids. My son Davit went to the Mouth with him the night he left and stood there, and Aurel said, Uncle, come with me, and Davit said no." He stopped. "Aurel says Uncle Davit won't speak of the other time."
"What other time?" Jo said.
Toby didn't answer. He looked at the patrol car.
Treadwell was standing at the end of the bench. She had taken her readers off. She had been standing there the whole time with her radio turned down on her shoulder, listening, and Jo didn't know how much she'd understood, and could see that Treadwell didn't either.
"I've got a man in my car I can't talk to," Treadwell said. "Found with a five-year-old who isn't his. And I've got you." She looked at Toby. "Somebody tell me what language that is."
Nobody told her. The deputy opened the patrol car's front door and got in, and started it, and in the back seat Aurel turned in his seat as it began to roll, twisting against the cuffs to keep them in sight through the rear window, his face against the glass.
Toby watched it go all the way to the corner. When it turned onto Sixth he put his hand on Jo's arm, on the Ducks hoodie, and held it. His hand was cold.
"I have to go now, Mom," he said. "And I can't go without him."