His voice was small and hollow. It echoed off the walls of the cistern.
“You grew up all right,” I said.
He made a sound that echoed against the walls of the cistern and seemed to come not from him but from the earth itself.
He toed some pebbles into the black pit, and they made no sound at all.
“At the beginning,” he said, “I wanted to break you. I really did. But I couldn’t. Then, later, I didn’t want to break you anymore. I wanted…the opposite. But something about me—my hands don’t work that way. And I broke you instead. It was an accident.”
“Roy,” I said. “Roy.”
“I hated you for such a long time,” he said, looking up at me. He rubbed a hand across his face, and his cheek smeared with ash. That’s when I noticed he was covered in it—ashy dust—as though whatever burned in him was smoldering out, leaving his skin desiccated. He smiled a smile that had no smile in it. “At least that I was good at. Hate’s simple. It makes sense. You know it, too.”
“Roy,” I said. “Don’t.”
He cried now, and his bare frame shivered with his tears.
“You read all those books,” he said, shaking his head. “All those fucking books.”
I wanted to tell him it meant nothing. I wanted to explain that it was all I knew how to do—that I read books instead of doing real things. I wanted to say to him that I was different now, that I had lost who I was and that I would never get that Lumen back again, that something had gone deranged inside me. I used to think that some people are born so good they are illiterate to the languages of desolation. But we all speak the same tongue.
I wanted to tell him these things, but my heart was going too fast. I was deafened by it, muted by it. I was peaceful in my brain, viewing myself as if from above, wondering at this little monkey of a creature who stood staring.
He gazed into the pit and then back at me, and there was an awful, imploring truth in his eyes.
“Lumen,” he said. “Lumen, I did something bad. Really bad. I went to your house tonight. No one was there. I tried to read the book you gave me. But I couldn’t. So I wanted to bring it back to you.”
He shook his head.
Something was fouled in him, and something was fouled in me, and I watched myself with him, and I could feel my own tears on my cheeks, because I knew what was coming, and I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t know how to stop things.
“Roy,” was all I could say. “Don’t. Please don’t.”
“Then help me, Lumen,” he said. “Help me.” And he put his arms out, palms up, for me to come to him.
It was a moment. I could have become one thing, but I became another. The creatures we truly are are exposed in tiny moments. This was one.
I could have saved him.
I did not save him.
“Help me,” he said again.
And I said, “I can’t.” I said, “I don’t know how.”
“Lumen,” he said.
I said, “Don’t be afraid.”
But he was. I could see that. He whimpered a little, his wild animal eyes gone all soft.
That’s when I turned my back on him. I turned and closed my eyes. I could not bear witness.
I heard a brief shuffle of dirt from beneath his feet. I breathed in the dusty air. I paid attention to my heart, the stubborn beating of my dreadful heart.
When I opened my eyes again and turned around, he’d fallen. Blackhat Roy Ruggle was gone.
*
I waited for a while, and the earth was quite still. The only sound was my own breathing, and I listened to it. I persisted.
I didn’t know what else to do.
I put my prom dress back on, the rustle of the crinoline echoing gaudily in that grim sanctuary. I wiped my face with my gritty hands, and I made my way outside. Walking unhurriedly back through the woods, I was aware of all the voices of the crickets and the tree toads and the owls around me. The air was cold in my lungs, the stars reflected in the still water of the lake as I passed by. I was no part of the things I saw. I was just a traveler across these fields of night, and I was alone.
I smelled the smoke when I was still a great distance from the edge of the woods. What’s carried on the air can be carried a long way. I didn’t see it until I was almost home, that black plume that rose behind the trees, almost invisible except for the way it blocked out the stars and gave a halo to the gibbous moon. At the same time, I became aware of the flashing lights, blue, white, and red.
I must have looked like an apparition emerging from those trees, my prom dress torn and covered with burrs. But no one noticed. No one was paying any attention, because everyone was looking at the place where my house used to be—where now blackened timbers stood upright and smoked and crackled and released every now and then a dust of ash and ember.
I looked for my father, but I couldn’t see him among the neighbors who stood on the street in their nightclothes, shaking their heads and leaning together against tragedy.
When somebody finally saw me, I was seized by a team of uniformed men. Police confirmed that my name was Lumen Fowler, that Marcus Fowler was my father. They wanted to know where I had been.
“Where’s my dad?” I said.
They wanted to know if I knew who set the fire.
“Where’s my dad?” I said.
Then two paramedics led me to the back of an ambulance, where they put a blanket over my shoulders and performed tests on my pliant body. They told me to stay put there in the ambulance, but when they were gone I found myself wandering away among the vehicles and lights and moving figures. I was a meager ghost. No one saw me—I was nothing to see. I heard their voices. I heard everything. How the firemen had tried to stop him from going inside, how they had told him they’d cleared the house. But he had gone in anyway, saying he knew where I’d be hidden. The coal hole. Saying he was sure I was in there because I’d promised to be home by midnight. I’d promised.