The Sparrow (The Returned) (3 page)

The child paused then, as if poring over some memory, and Heather could see the joy in her eyes as she spoke of her father. How could she not long to see the two of them united?

* * *

When Tatiana awoke the next morning, the time she had spent with her father the night before felt like it had all been a dream. Her father was gone, and from the way her mother was acting, he obviously had not visited her.

The day was cold and foreboding. Halfway through preparing breakfast, Tatiana’s mother burned her hand on a skillet, and she crumpled to the floor, sobbing into her forearm. Tatiana crouched next to her mother and put her arms around her.

“It will all be all right,” Tatiana said, trying to console her mother.

“We need to leave,” her mother said.

“But what about Father?” Tatiana asked, but her mother did not reply.

Tatiana sat for a moment, processing what was happening, and then she quietly wept. She wanted to tell her mother that they could not leave, but she knew better. The news coming from the television was getting worse by the minute. There were more and more men with guns, and the sounds of the gunfire were getting closer every day.

It was too late, and both Tatiana and her mother knew it.

Tatiana’s mother placed her arm around the girl. She switched off the television and kissed Tatiana’s forehead. “Now,” she said, “I think it’s time we started a new story. Something different from anything either of us has ever created before.” She held her daughter to her chest. “Once,” she began, “when the world was very young...”

Her mother’s words ran together in a stream the child only half heard and would not remember. Still, her voice was a comfort to Tatiana. It lessened the horrible sounds coming from the street in front of their house. It made Tatiana think of her father’s tale, and, briefly, she could believe that, somewhere in this world, there really was once a woman raised by sparrows, a woman who could fly away from all the things that might hurt her.

It was then that Tatiana fell into a daydream of the two of them flying away, of escaping, of soaring over the earth to the place where her father was waiting. And then the three of them would hold one another and laugh and no harm would ever come to them.

It was in the midst of this daydream that the door of the house opened and the men with the guns stormed in and squeezed their triggers.

* * *

Letting go of the girl was harder than she had imagined it would be. She had gotten used to having another pair of feet thumping around the house in the long hours of the evening. She’d gone out and stocked the refrigerator to capacity with healthy snack foods for children and with whatever treats of the unhealthy sort she thought Tatiana might like.

But now, several weeks after the girl had come to live with them, Tatiana’s father had been found. He was a citizen of Canada, having fled there in 1994 after the death of his wife and daughter. He was a priest, operating a small church in Montreal. When Heather spoke with him on the phone, he had fallen into a fit of crying and apologizing, though she did not understand what he was sorry for. “Do not let her go,” he said at one point. “Please. Hold on to her until I can hold her myself.”

Heather promised him she would, and she loved Tatiana all the more from that moment on, even though she knew the child would soon be leaving.

When they arrived at the hotel on that final day, Heather felt a knot form in the center of her stomach. She was doing the right thing; that much was certain. But she couldn’t help worrying for Tatiana. What if her father had changed his mind? she wondered. What if he no longer wanted her? The Returned were still a question mark as far as the world was concerned. There was nothing natural about what was happening, and all a person had to do was turn on the television to see just how afraid everyone was.

But now it was too late to do anything other than follow through.

As they waited in the car in front of the hotel, Heather thought back on how her life had changed since Tatiana had arrived. Matt had been gone for a week now, their relationship irrevocably damaged. “I wish you could have believed,” was the last thing Heather told had him as he’d left. But since then it had been just her and the girl, and they had become something akin to family, she felt. Perhaps this was a taste of the family she had hoped to one day build with Matt. But that feeling of family had happened without him. In fact, it had only truly come after he had left. Perhaps Tatiana’s arrival had shown Heather something that she otherwise would have been forced to learn after years of unhappy marriage to a man that she shouldn’t have married.

The child had saved her, in a way.

The sky was gray and overcast. Heather turned in her seat and looked back at Tatiana. “Are you ready to do this?” she asked.

Tatiana nodded. “He will still love me, won’t he?” she asked.

Heather responded by climbing into the backseat and wrapping her arms around the girl. “You’re his daughter,” she said, smiling as she spoke. “Of course he will. But I want you to know that if he acts, well,
funny
when you see him, it’s not your fault, okay? You have to promise me that you won’t be upset.”

Tatiana nodded. “He won’t be mad at me?” she asked.

“Of course not,” she said.

She held the child close. “You’re a piece of magic, Tatiana. And I’m sure your father will recognize that. Any parent would. But if you’re ever afraid, I want you to know that I love you. I always want you to know that you’re loved, Tatiana.”

Tatiana threw her arms around Heather’s neck. “It’s okay,” Heather said, and, for a moment, she wished the child were her own.

Heather held Tatiana’s hand as they entered the room, and when her father laid eyes on his daughter, Heather saw a swell of relief and joy consume the man. He was small and slim with dark skin and a crown of gray hair. He had deep-set wrinkles in his face, as if placed there by a lifetime of worry and regret, years of carrying the burden that he had been away when his wife and child were killed. Heather could only imagine what that must have done to him.

Without hesitation, Heather let the child go.

Tatiana and her father fell into a pile of weeping and laughing in the center of the room. He called her name over and over again as he clutched her in his arms. He stroked her hair with trembling hands. He tried not to take his eyes off her, tried not to blink, as though whatever magic had brought her back to him might suddenly take her away.

“I cannot thank you enough,” Tatiana’s father told Heather, once he was finally able to speak. His voice was shaky, and he sniffled like a child with a cold.

“It’s okay,” Heather replied, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I was glad to do it. She’s an angel.”

“Yes,” the man said, keeping his eyes on his daughter. “Yes, she is.”

Heather hesitated. She had another question she wanted to ask, a question that was lingering in her heart. She cleared her throat, preparing to speak, but said nothing.

Tatiana’s father was still sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth, his daughter in his arms. She clung to him, as though he were the one who had returned from the dead.

“You want to ask me something,” the man said to Heather.

“It’s nothing,” Heather said, her voice cracking, her face flushed with tears.

“The most important words are always the ones that are never spoken,” he said as he rose from the floor. He was older and more tired than he once was, and he strained as he lifted his daughter and held her the way he had done all those years ago. “There were things I never said to my wife. Things I never said to my daughter. Things that I did not even think I was keeping in. And then one day they were gone, and all the things I wanted to tell them, all the stories I wanted to create with them, they were gone, as well.”

“I can’t imagine,” Heather said, and she instantly regretted her words.

“Imagine all the loneliness in the world,” the man said, “and that is what it is like for a father to lose his family.” He kissed Tatiana’s brow. “In the end, all that matters is this moment. This feeling. I have my daughter again.”

He turned to his daughter and smiled. “Now, child, tell your tired, old father a story. His heart has missed the magic of his daughter’s voice.”

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from
The Returned
by Jason Mott.

Excerpt from The Returned

One

HAROLD OPENED THE door that day to find a dark-skinned man in a well-cut suit smiling at him. At first he thought of reaching for his shotgun, but then he remembered that Lucille had made him sell it years ago on account of an incident involving a traveling preacher and an argument having to do with hunting dogs.

“Can I help you?” Harold said, squinting in the sunlight—light which only made the dark-skinned man in the suit look darker.

“Mr. Hargrave?” the man said.

“I suppose,” Harold replied.

“Who is it, Harold?” Lucille called. She was in the living room being vexed by the television. The news announcer was talking about Edmund Blithe, the first of the Returned, and how his life had changed now that he was alive again.

“Better the second time around?” the announcer on the television asked, speaking directly into the camera, laying the burden of answering squarely on the shoulders of his viewers.

The wind rustled through the oak tree in the yard near the house, but the sun was low enough that it drove horizontally beneath the branches and into Harold’s eyes. He held a hand over his eyes like a visor, but still, the dark-skinned man and the boy were little more than silhouettes plastered against a green-and-blue backdrop of pine trees beyond the open yard and cloudless sky out past the trees. The man was thin, but square-framed in his manicured suit. The boy was small for what Harold estimated to be about the age of eight or nine.

Harold blinked. His eyes adjusted more.

“Who is it, Harold?” Lucille called a second time, after realizing that no reply had come to her first inquiry.

Harold only stood in the doorway, blinking like a hazard light, looking down at the boy, who consumed more and more of his attention. Synapses kicked on in the recesses of his brain. They crackled to life and told him who the boy was standing next to the dark-skinned stranger. But Harold was sure his brain was wrong. He made his mind to do the math again, but it still came up with the same answer.

In the living room the television camera cut away to a cluster of waving fists and yelling mouths, people holding signs and shouting, then soldiers with guns standing statuesque as only men laden with authority and ammunition can. In the center was the small semidetached house of Edmund Blithe, the curtains drawn. That he was somewhere inside was all that was known.

Lucille shook her head. “Can you imagine it?” she said. Then: “Who is it at the door, Harold?”

Harold stood in the doorway taking in the sight of the boy: short, pale, freckled, with a shaggy mop of brown hair. He wore an old-style T-shirt, a pair of jeans and a great look of relief in his eyes—eyes that were not still and frozen, but trembling with life and rimmed with tears.

“What has four legs and goes ‘Boooo’?” the boy asked in a shaky voice.

Harold cleared his throat—not certain just then of even that. “I don’t know,” he said.

“A cow with a cold!”

Then the child had the old man by the waist, sobbing, “Daddy! Daddy!” before Harold could confirm or deny. Harold fell against the door frame—very nearly bowled over—and patted the child’s head out of some long-dormant paternal instinct. “Shush,” he whispered. “Shush.”

“Harold?” Lucille called, finally looking away from the television, certain that some terror had darkened her door. “Harold, what’s going on? Who is it?”

Harold licked his lips. “It’s...it’s...”

He wanted to say “Joseph.”

“It’s Jacob,” he said, finally.

Thankfully for Lucille, the couch was there to catch her when she fainted.

* * *

Jacob William Hargrave died on August 15, 1966. On his eighth birthday, in fact. In the years that followed, townsfolk would talk about his death in the late hours of the night when they could not sleep. They would roll over to wake their spouses and begin whispered conversations about the uncertainty of the world and how blessings needed to be counted. Sometimes they would rise together from the bed to stand in the doorway of their children’s bedroom to watch them sleep and to ponder silently on the nature of a God that would take a child so soon from this world. They were Southerners in a small town, after all: How could such a tragedy not lead them to God?

After Jacob’s death, his mother, Lucille, would say that she’d known something terrible was going to happen that day on account of what had happened just the night before.

That night Lucille dreamed of her teeth falling out. Something her mother had told her long ago was an omen of death.

All throughout Jacob’s birthday party Lucille had made a point to keep an eye on not only her son and the other children, but on all the other guests, as well. She flitted about like a nervous sparrow, asking how everyone was doing and if they’d had enough to eat and commenting on how much they’d slimmed down since last time she’d seen them or on how tall their children had gotten and, now and again, how beautiful the weather was. The sun was everywhere and everything was green that day.

Her unease made her a wonderful hostess. No child went unfed. No guest found themselves lacking conversation. She’d even managed to talk Mary Green into singing for them later in the evening. The woman had a voice silkier than sugar, and Jacob, if he was old enough to have a crush on someone, had a thing for her, something that Mary’s husband, Fred, often ribbed the boy about. It was a good day, that day. A good day, until Jacob disappeared.

He slipped away unnoticed the way only children and other small mysteries can. It was sometime between three and three-thirty—as Harold and Lucille would later tell the police—when, for reasons only the boy and the earth itself knew, Jacob made his way over the south side of the yard, down past the pines, through the forest and on down to the river, where, without permission or apology, he drowned.