Lighthouse.”
James sat forward and stared into the flames.
“The Choice is wrong,” he said. “I know that, and I know other things are wrong too, but…” James stopped, struggling for the words. “Even now, I close my eyes and I pray and I can feel my path. It hasn’t gone away. I wish it would, but it hasn’t. And I know it doesn’t end here. Maybe if I’m there… maybe I can try to help make things better.”
“They’ll kill you if they find out who you are.”
“I know,” he said.
I took another branch and fed it to the fire.
“I keep thinking about the day they took us,” I said. “Maybe if I hadn’t been so afraid, we could have escaped, or if I had stood up to the beacon—”
“They would have killed us,” James said. “You were trying to keep your little brother safe, Cal. Just like you’ve been trying to do for the last six years.”
James moved off the stone border and sat down next to me.
“You put us on a path,” he said. “I know you don’t believe it, but I do, and I think it’s the one we were meant to be on. I don’t regret it.”
“Not even Hill?”
The wind blew through the trees, sending sparks across the yard like a swarm of bees. James turned to me, his eyes warm in the firelight.
“Not even Hill.”
We sat there in silence until the fire died down to a few orange coals. We kicked dirt over them and then we made our way inside. I paused at the porch door, looking at the tattered remains of our hammocks swinging in the breeze. I closed the door, and James and I drifted toward our old bedroom without a word.
The wood floor between our now too-small beds was hard and cold, but it felt right to be there, him on one side and me on the other. We brought in a couple dusty blankets and pulled the shades back from the window. Outside, moonlit trees swayed against the black.
“James?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know what to do now.”
James thought a moment. “Well, last time we were here, you said you wanted to be Batman. Maybe you could get started on that.”
I found a loose Lego and tossed it at his head.
“Ow.”
“Maybe it was stupid to come here.”
“It wasn’t stupid,” he said. “It just isn’t the end of the line.”
James had propped himself up on one elbow and was looking across the room at me.
“It’s been more than a year since they left,” I said. “And even they didn’t know where they were going.”
“Where they are doesn’t matter,” he said. “Wanting to find them does.”
I said nothing more and eventually James lay back down. I sat up and looked out at the stars hanging above the trees across the street, restlessness buzzing through me. I found my shoes and my jacket and headed for the door.
“Where you going?” James asked sleepily.
“Just for a walk.”
“Want me to—”
“No,” I said. “I’m okay.”
Outside, the night was full of the rhythmic call of insects and the wind in the trees. The front gate opened with a squeak and I stepped through and out into the street. I didn’t remember the names of roads, so I followed a kind of muscle memory. I’d reach the end of one road and wait to feel a tug one way or another, following what felt like a compass that had been buried inside of me years ago. Most of the houses I passed looked empty but a few were lit, spilling their yellow glow out into their yards. In a few the bluish lights of TVs shone and voices came out onto the street.
The roads wound through trees and hedges, like the turnings of a knot. More than once I felt sure that I had become hopelessly lost, but every time I was about to turn back and go home I’d feel that tug and I’d press on. I followed a meandering lane through the yellow pools of streetlights until it came to a chain-link fence. I could hear cars passing on the other side.
There was a strange scent on the wind, something clean and mineral. It was like two hands had grabbed me by the shoulders and were pulling me along. I hopped the fence and crossed a string of two-lane roads. On the other side, there was a curtain of trees with a sign among them that said no trespassing after dark. I passed it by with a laugh, remembering all the times James and I ignored it when we were kids.
I ran across a parking lot and then more grass and I was there. I stripped off my shoes and socks and my feet sunk into sand and wind-smoothed pebbles. The air was full of the salty smell of decay and the breeze blowing across the top of rippling water. I dropped onto the sand and looked out across the face of Cayuga Lake.
The shores on either side of me, rolling hills against the dark sky, stretched into the distance, embracing water that was like a black mirror reflecting the moon and the stars. The red and white running lights of a few distant boats bobbed on its surface. The only sounds were the small waves crashing at my feet and the night murmurings of insects and frogs. I picked up a handful of pebbles and threw some out into the water, where they landed with a gentle plunk.
How many times had James and I come here after school? How many times had I stood in this exact spot, looking at this exact view? I almost expected I could turn and see another me standing there. A little boy with his brother by his side, their parents laughing on a park bench just up the hill.
As familiar as it all was, though, the restlessness that had forced me out of the house hadn’t faded. It was like a ragged edge running straight through me, keeping the contentment I had expected to feel to be back in this place, the
I wondered where Mom and Dad were right then. Were they lying awake and thinking of us? Did some part of them think we would appear at any moment as they turned a corner or walked down an unfamiliar street? Or had they moved on, forcing themselves to accept the fact that their only sons were never coming back?
A cold weight settled in my stomach. James and I had been gone for more than six years without a word. Was it possible that Mom and Dad thought we were dead?
And worse, did they blame themselves, sure that if only they hadn’t sent us west, it never would have happened? I sat there on the shore, trying to imagine the torture of believing that day after day, but it was too big, too awful.
I let the rest of the stones in my hand spill out by my side. When I looked across the lake again, its waters seemed flat and gray. The distant shores nothing but black swells in the land. It was like a painting of another time, perfectly made and impossible to touch. I hadn’t come all this way for these things. James was right; the path I was on stretched far beyond this place.
I stepped into my shoes and walked away from the shore, striding into the dark without another look back.
28
“Careful. You’re going to cut my arm off.”
“Not if you stop squirming.”
My arm was laid out on the kitchen table. James jockeyed for position until he found the best angle and then slipped the teeth of the garden shears beneath the dirty plaster of the cast.
“You sure about this? Maybe the hacksaw would be better.”
