He gasped at first. “Jacob?” It came out as nothing more than a question, as if he were hearing the name for the very first time and not comprehending it. No answer came back. No explanation. The universe heard, but held back. Then he said it louder and louder still, but there was no reply. Jonathan ran through the house, checking the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the basement until there was no other logical place his son could be except outside. He ran to the front yard, to the street, and looked up and down the road. There was nothing – no cars, no neighbors, nobody about their business, no Jacob. Then he was screaming like a lunatic in the daylight, trying his best to keep his footing, still under the alcoholic haze, the caged tiger disappeared, replaced with something weak and helpless against the world – a gut-shot fawn, a chick fallen from its nest, a child alone in the woods.
Even then, his skin was being peeled back, his center cut from stem to stern, his arms and legs tied upon the rack. He was opened to the world. His true reality stumbled through the daylight, broken and dumb, lost and guilty – a drunk who’d lost his only child.
Then came a shout – a voice at once familiar and with a tone of assurance and salvation, something he envied. He heard the voice call his name again, and Jonathan looked around dumbly, turning his head, his floating eyes trailing behind. He walked around the house to the backyard, and he saw his son, hand in hand with his neighbor, Rachael. Jacob ran to his father and Jonathan picked him up. Rachael stood back, arms crossed, staring at him. Her children were older, already well beyond the wandering-off phase of their childhood.
“He was in the woods behind our house,” she said. Her voice was flat, harsh. “It was lucky I saw him.”
“He went out the sliding glass door,” Jonathan said. “I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. Thank you.”
“It happens, I suppose,” she said and stared at Jonathan a little longer. “Are you okay? Do you want me to watch him for a couple hours until Mary gets home?”
Jonathan’s stomach tightened. She knew. Everyone knew. He turned his eyes downward. “No. No. Everything is fine. He just got away while I wasn’t looking.” He tried his best, but she could see straight through him, all his protections against the world gone. She said nothing, turned, and walked back through the woods toward her house. Jonathan kept Jacob in his arms and brought him inside.
That night he felt a change in Mary. She came home so angry there were tears in her eyes. Rachael had called her – they were friends – and Jonathan expected as much. But she wasn’t just angry. She had been angry before, but this was something deeper, more primal. “You could have lost him,” she said, trying not to cry. “Something awful could have happened to him, and where were you? What were you doing? You’re a fucking mess.”
Everything changed after that day – the day Jacob wandered into the woods while Jonathan was lost in drink and guilt. The rest of their marriage unraveled and stagnated and then unraveled some more. They didn’t leave each other. He hung on to the idea of family, even though being home with Mary now was like being alone. She grew so distant and cold it was as if she were a million miles away while sitting in the room. Jacob grew up in a chill between his mother and father that would probably hang like a cloud over his adult relationships.
Yes, that had been a turning point in Jonathan’s memory. That was when the true descent began, when he couldn’t hide the fact there was something wrong anymore – not from his wife, not from the neighbors, not from anyone. From there his desperation, sadness and isolation grew, leading him inexorably back to Coombs’ Gulch, to the start of it all.
The Gulch had claimed another of his oldest friends, the second person who knew the truth. Now there was only Michael.
He lay in the silent darkness, in this small cocoon with the night world turning endlessly around him, and wondered why Jacob had wandered into the woods that day. What had prompted his young boy to open the sliding glass door and walk alone into trees dark with shade, instead of staying in the yard with his toys or wandering toward the road, the way so many children seem drawn to the flat, asphalt strips of civilization? The same awful scream echoed across the mountains in the night.
He listened to the scream die off in the trees, and then he heard something else. The water in the lake was moving, sloshing against the rocky shore as if something large disturbed its black surface. The small waves broke on the rocky beach. Then came the sound of dripping, something rising up from water.
Jonathan stayed silent and waited. He could see his breath inside the tent. The disturbance in the water grew closer to shore. In the silent darkness, the sound was like a waterfall, but it was distinctly familiar – the sound of something emerging from the lake. The dripping and sloshing continued, grew closer and louder and faster. He recognized the sound of legs pulling themselves up and then stepping back down, of a living body struggling to walk to
