* * *
The lights went off. The halos were gone. The angels disappeared and were replaced by mere mortal men and women. The crew started moving their gear, and the world went back to its dull colors, the facade of life. The pretty-but-not-too-pretty Sonya hugged her, but Mary could barely bring her arms around for an embrace before the reporter said a few hollow words and walked off into the darkness of the studio. Crewmen stripped Mary of the recording gear and led her out to the front offices and the glass doors that opened to the parking lot in front of the network branch office.
Detective Rick Gerrano met her at the doors and walked her to her car.
“How did it go?”
“Hard.”
“I know,” he said. “It’ll air tonight, and we’ll see what kind of response we get. This kind of publicity can bring people out of the woodwork. Get people talking. We just need to find a thread to follow.”
“Like finding your way out of a labyrinth,” she said.
“Kind of like that, yeah.”
But the labyrinth was a trap; it was stalked by a monster.
Detective Gerrano shook her hand. His hands were cold from standing outside, and his grip was viselike, practiced with condemning the guilty. “We’ll see what comes of it, and I’ll be in touch,” he said and then left.
Mary was alone again. She could hear the sound of the highway droning in the distance, beneath the gray, wintering sky, and in that moment she felt she was stuck in some kind of eternity, condemned to this lifelessness forever.
It was a forty-five-minute drive back to her house. She didn’t want to go there. She dreaded it, in fact. But for now there was nowhere else to be, and she was told she should stay there on the off chance that Jacob returned or a phone call was placed by a witness or the person who took him.
The silence of being alone was awful, and she played the radio as she drove, occasional news reports buffering songs of love, life and loss that musicians tend to capture with two-line rhymes.
She stopped at the intersection where the bus had let Jacob off. She could see her house and driveway just through the small copse of trees, which were bare and gray in the cold. She wondered if this was all just some kind of dream from which she would wake, that it was an alternate reality to which she’d been transported in that moment when she stared into the woods behind her home and saw into the eyes of a stranger. If one thing – just one second – had been different that day, her life would be different; Jacob would be home. It wasn’t fair that such horrid weight should hinge on one split second, one coincidence, one decision. That was an unfair burden of life, and it made her think that life was not what it seemed, that it was, in fact, some kind of false light, a holograph meant to tease, test and eventually destroy. But for what purpose, she did not know. This can’t be it. This can’t be reality. She wanted to tear through it as if it were a movie screen, but that was impossible. Everything was just too real – empty, hollow and real.
She was trapped here in this world, in this ungodly version of reality, this tragedy played out on a stage she could not leave.
She opened the door to the house, the culmination of her and Jonathan’s life together, a place they had worked and saved for to raise a family and live a quiet life tucked into an average neighborhood. The scratches were still on the door, the five-finger grooves that sliced across the barrier between the outside world and what they had created inside. She stared at them for a minute. Something had tried to get inside, to get at her and Jacob. What was it? No one had an answer.
The silence overwhelmed her. Mary went inside, put her bag down and looked around the empty living room, the kitchen, the stairway to Jacob’s bedroom. The afternoon seemed to stretch out long and terrible before her, and she realized she had nothing to do – nothing she could do – but sit in the awful silence.
The guilt and rage and regret built up inside – a ball in her gut that seemed to expand with every moment, with every second, in which her child was gone and her husband locked up and her life no longer her own. She didn’t know what to do, and perhaps that was the worst thing of all.
Mary walked to the kitchen sink and peered out through the small window that looked on the sloping backyard and the trees beyond, the place where she had seen that stranger on the day Jacob disappeared.
She stared into those dead trees with their branches intersecting at angles, forming fractal patterns, one on top of the other, mesmerizing her as they reached farther and farther into the depths, beyond what she could see with her eyes. What was out there? Beyond what anyone could see? What hid just out of sight, behind the trees and in all the unknown dark spaces?
The woods seemed to rush up to her. The yard disappeared beneath it, until it swallowed the whole house. The neighborhood disappeared. The world grew dark, and she found herself alone in a cabin in the woods at night – the trees innumerable, the possibilities endless, the horror overwhelming. It was a dreamscape, as if she had suddenly plunged into a dream within a dream, or, perhaps, a nightmare. She wondered if in that moment she understood what Jonathan had seen on that trip, if the madness she saw out there had found its way inside, into their lives. She wondered if that was where Jacob was hidden, in that dark maze of forest and frozen ground and silence.
She thought she could see, at the edge of
