When they came under the cover of a passing cloud Pike judged they were ready and they ventured downstream in the inky night with hands held out like blind men. They stopped to rest in a nest formed of fallen trees and Pike and Hammond peered out through the cage of boughs around them. They saw nothing and went from one person to the next, silently touching them to tell them they were ready to continue on.
In this fashion they walked for nearly three miles, injured and starving in the blind night. Connelly wondered if it was possible to fall asleep in one world and wake up in another. He had slept on the train so perhaps this was some feverish nightmare, a dream-place where men killed and died for no reason he could see and each minute was spent in a starved, sightless silence, like animals far under the earth. Perhaps the moment of change had happened before then. Some other occasion when he fell asleep. Waking to the crimson sky of the drought. Waking to his new, hellish Memphis, ruined and gutted by a grief caused in the space of a day, an hour, a second. It seemed then that the world was a terrible, wounded place whose revolutions were driven by panic and madness more than love or reason. A directionless freefall toward something, maybe toward nothing. He no longer knew.
That night as Connelly lay on the damp ground he wondered for the first time if there could ever be any return from this. He had considered the futility of it. Had considered wandering out and searching and never finding. And he had considered the law, the chance that his future might be confined to cement walls and damp stone floors and colorless monotony, should his quest succeed. Neither of those seemed very different than any alternative. To live with such a violation was the same in many ways.
But there was always a chance he could succeed, and go back. That things might return to what they were before, at least a little. Before his daughter was taken. He could go home, and though it would be a home without Molly it would be one he could live with. One that made sense.
Now a sliver of doubt worked its way into his mind. That life seemed very far away now. The farther he traveled the less he could recall what he hoped to return to.
He remembered what his wife had said before he left. Remembered sitting on the front porch, looking through the fog of the screen windows and watching tree limbs dance in the night wind, the streetlamps turning them into wicked fingers on the grass below. The warmth of a cup of coffee clutched to his belly. The gentle sigh of a placid evening in a city that was content. His mind was already slowed with whisky, his thoughts turgid and wordless. He did not know how long he had been sitting there.
He heard her walk down behind him but did not turn. Neither of them did anything for a long while.
Then, “I’m going to my mother’s.”
He turned to her. She was dressed nice. A yellow dress with white trim, full of springtime. Hair brushed and neat. But in her eyes there was a place where a fire had long gone out, and when she looked at him he felt the emptiness behind them. The empty place where yesterday had been.
“All right,” he said.
“I’ll be staying for a while.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Long enough. Maybe longer.”
He nodded and turned back to the street.
“Don’t you want to know why?” she asked
“Why what?”
“Why I’m leaving.”
“All right. Why are you leaving?”
“Jesus, Marcus,” she said, and leaned her head up against the glass of the front door.
“What?”
She shook her head. Grinding the veins of her forehead up against the door. “Do you know this is the first time we’ve talked in four days?”
“Four days?”
“Yes.”
“That can’t be right.”
“It is.”
“I’ve said things. I’ve said good night.”
“No. You’re always asleep before me. You’ve slept in the chair downstairs. Or out here. After drinking. I’ve slept in our bed, sometimes. But not usually. I sleep in the tub mostly.”
“Why?”
“The smell. Of the bed. I can’t stand it. I don’t know why.” She turned to face him, her back now up against the jamb. Her eyes trailed up to look into the ceiling. “It’s all right.”
“What is?”
“This. Mrs. Echols said they usually don’t last.”
“What don’t last?”
“Marriages that lose a child.”
Connelly stood up. He put down the coffee and walked to the screen door and crossed his arms and stood there.
“She didn’t say it to me,” she said. “I overheard. Overheard her at church.”
“She’s full of shit.”
“Marcus.”
“We’ll be all right.”
“Marcus. Marcus, we’re not all right now. I don’t see why we would get better anytime soon.”
They were both quiet then. A truck came up the road and puttered by, its one-eyed headlight roving through the brush. They watched it leave and as the mutter of its tires died away the silence became more unbearable.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” she asked. “I can tell. You want to go out. To go after that man.”
Connelly nodded.
“I know. I can see it. I can see it in you. It’s eating you alive. That part. That part he took away from you, that part that was her. That empty part is just getting bigger. Eating you up.”
“It isn’t right,” he said.
She shook her head. She moved to wipe away her tears but there were none.
“I can make it right,” he said.
“How? By going out and killing him?”
“Yes.”
“How will that make it right?”
“It’ll make things make sense. I have to make them make sense. That shouldn’t happen. If I fix that then I can come home again.”
“You’re home right now.”
“No. I’m not. You know that.” He turned to look at her. “Would you take me back?”
“What?”
“If I went out there and killed that man and came back, would you take me back?”
“Marcus…”
“I have to do it. I have to. I just want to know if there’ll be anything left for me once it’s done. If it ever gets done.”
“I don’t know. You can’t make things right. This will never be right. Not really.”
“It’ll make things quiet. Make them bearable, then. Would you take me back then?”
“I don’t know. I might. But, Marcus, if you go out there, if you leave your home and this place and me and take to the road like God knows many others have done now, I don’t know who’ll come back.”
“I will.”
“No. The man who goes out there and the man who comes back won’t be the same. I don’t think so. It depends on who comes back, Marcus.”
“I will. The way I was before.”
“You won’t ever be the man from before. And I won’t ever be the same, either. But I do know that there isn’t anything here for us anymore, either. Every day we’re here we bleed a little more. On the inside, in places we can’t
