Outside was silence. The snow was gentle, light through the trees. The evening wind died down and the whole world seemed still. There was only the sound of Michael beside him.
He thought of the night he screamed at Jacob for urinating in the closet during one of his trancelike night terrors. Jonathan held back tears thinking of it, wishing he had done something different, wishing that moment was not burned into eternity. The poor boy; he woke from a nightmare to the reality of Jonathan looming large over him, furious and angry about something the boy could not comprehend. It was like a monster from the boy’s dream made real. Perhaps it was not that different from the creature that loomed over Thomas Terrywile, the thing that followed the boy as he wandered unknown forests, the thing that stole him away into that dark and cold void.
A child in pain – lost, cold and alone with no one in the world searching for him; it pained Jonathan to think about it. It seemed there could be nothing more tragic and awful.
He remembered when Jacob was three years old. It was a weekend and Jonathan was home from work. Mary had gone for the day; he couldn’t remember where she had gone or why. Perhaps it was some kind of social event, those things that normal people do, people adjusted properly to life. But it was just Jonathan and Jacob. The boy played by himself, and Jonathan sat on the couch, a sensation creeping in on him, the feeling of a tiger in a cage. Something wormed in his soul, something trying to break free. The prospect of a long day set in, the sad banality of his quiet little house on this quiet little street in a small town with only one traffic light and a seemingly endless amount of daylight. It stretched over him, oppressed him. He waited for as long as he could. He watched cartoons with Jacob. He fed him peanut butter and jelly like any other normal, cookie-cutter parent. But it was all a lie and a farce. At times, he tried to distract himself by staring into the computer, scrolling through other people’s lives – happy, well-adjusted, beautiful lives – and it all melted away until he couldn’t stand it anymore.
Jonathan made it until noon that day before he pulled a bottle of vodka down from above the refrigerator and poured his first drink. He drank fast; he always did. It always took too long to set in, and by the time he felt the first effects it was too late. One, two, three…it was never enough to quiet that lonely, aching thing. It was never enough to tamp down the feeling that none of it was right.
He poured his drinks. The sun was bright that day. It was a mild seventy degrees. A day when normal people – the parents who populated this normal town – would have their children outside, playing with them, doing the things magazines and social media posts said you should do. He let things blur and numb. He waited and watched and wondered at what was wrong with him. He sunk, lost in it.
The boy was somewhere. The last he remembered, Jacob had been playing with his toys in the living room. A television program was on, the screen filled with bright, puffy colors and rounded shapes. Jonathan was writing something on his computer. He was unsure now what it had been, but it was something, some effort to reach out and find that other life, the other self, that had escaped so long ago. Escape. He thought of that feeling – the tiger in its cage. The hunter held back, trapped, but always pacing, always watching for that moment when your back is turned. All was hunting, he thought. All was dealing some kind of death, small as a beetle, large as the world. In this life, he played a role. He worked his job, he paid the bills, he came home every night to the same thing, but it was not his. It never was. It belonged to someone or something else. That night in the Gulch took it from him, led him down a path not of his own making. He was carried along by death and brought somewhere deep inside the forests of his soul to be sacrificed.
Even now, the memory of that day came in pieces of a half-remembered dream through the haze. He was suddenly in his home again, suddenly aware of the kitchen table where he sat with his laptop opened, suddenly aware the television no longer played that program with the shiny colors and singsong voices, suddenly aware that something priceless was missing.
The sliding glass door that led to the back porch, the backyard and the woods was half open. Outside air poured through, touched the back of his neck. He turned and looked for Jacob, but he was gone.
Jonathan stumbled to the door that day. The sun was bright. He looked in the yard, but Jacob was not there. He looked toward the darkened trees extending out behind the house, but saw nothing. He saw nothing and heard nothing. It was empty space, a void made of grass and trees and sun and air.
