Here After

chapter fourteen

WHEN HIS TUMMY SETTLED, THE woman showed Graham the rest of the house, telling him it had been built by his great  grandparents more than a hundred years ago and had been in the family ever since. She said it hadn’t been a working farm since his grandparents, her parents, retired in the eighties, when she was still just a girl. She said his grandparents were both dead now, telling him, “Your Grandpa went first. The cancer got him. Grandma died a year later of a broken heart.”

She showed him the summer kitchen first, telling him that in the winter they used to close off this part of the house and not heat it. There was an old wood stove out here, a table with four chairs, and a steel door with a big padlock on it, the door facing the back of the house. On the other side of the room a screen door led outside to the long front porch.

She took him into the main part of the house next, the dining room and winter kitchen in one big space with a small room next to the fridge she called ‘the pantry’, and a family room at the back of the house with a TV and windows that looked out over acres of open field. “You got lost in the corn out there once when you were four and had nightmares for weeks after. Remember that?”

Graham said no and she told him not to worry, it would all come back in time. There was a window on the far side of the kitchen-dining room, and she picked him up to show him a home-made swing outside, the swing an old single bedspring with rusty legs, the metal frame nestled next to a bush with tiny red berries. She said, “There’s a vegetable garden behind the ’suckle—cabbage, potatoes, cucumbers and such—and a raspberry patch, your favorite berries.”

Graham’s favorite was blueberries, and yet this woman had confused him with her pictures and her stories and he felt himself going numb inside, like the time he bumped his head in the music store and the world got all fuzzy for a while. She led him around by the hand, talking away, and Graham let her, hearing only half of what she was telling him now, thinking only about finding his way home. The stuff about brainwashing frightened him, because this woman really believed it and she had all those pictures of him, doing all those things he couldn’t remember, some of them things he could remember doing but with his real mommy and daddy, and it made him afraid that maybe she was right, maybe he really had been stolen from her and he just couldn’t remember.

She walked him through the summer kitchen again, across the hilly linoleum to a door that opened onto a narrow porch with no railing. There was a clothes line out here, the double line drooping through space to a small building made of rough gray boards Graham could tell had never been painted. She told him the building was the woodshed, saying, “When us girls were bad Pa’d take us out here to paddle our behinds, winter or summer, didn’t matter, you crossed the line, it was out to the woodshed with you.” This memory seemed to please her and she smiled, saying, “Come on,” leading him down the creaky steps now to a path that sloped downhill through the weeds to a pair of big apple trees. “Macs,” the woman said, stooping to pick one up off the ground. The trees were laden with them, the ground littered with the bright red fruit. She polished the apple in a fold of her dress and handed it to him. “Go ahead, Clay, honey,” she said, “they’re sweet and good as gold for you.” Graham took a bite and his mouth filled with spit, the taste bitter at first, then turning sweet. He chewed hungrily and took another bite, his empty tummy wanting more.

The woman said, “Your Aunt Marie and I used to—” and a voice rang out behind them. Graham turned to see Aaron with his head out the door, his glasses crooked on his face, Aaron shouting, “Ma. Car.”

Then Graham was in the woman’s arms and she was running like she did in the park, running up the hill to the house, and Graham’s apple fell in the weeds and his heart started racing in his chest. Aaron met them at the door and the woman handed Graham to him, saying, “In the root cellar now,” her spit speckling Aaron’s glasses, making him blink his magnified eyes. The woman kept running, turning left through the screen door to the front porch, and now Aaron was running too, his wiry arms wrapped too tight around Graham’s chest, making it hard for him to breathe. As they ran past the door to the porch Graham saw a car roll into the yard out there, the woman walking now, moving across the dead grass to meet the car, smoothing the front of her dress with her hands.