The Tent: A Novella (4 page)

The canopy drips fat, cold drops of rainwater down upon them. Steam from hot earth cooled by the storm rises in a
lazy mist around their legs. Emma screams for Cody again, keeps her back to her husband, her shoulders tensing through her slicker at the sound of his approach. She folds her arms tightly.
Of course she does
, thinks Mike,
in keeping with frigid tradition
.

“Were you?” he asks again, drawing to a halt a few feet behind her.

“Just…just stop, Mike. Please,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Let’s just focus on what’s important. I just want to find Cody and get out of here.”

As she cup
s her mouth again, preparing another summons for their wayward son, he grabs her by the shoulders, perhaps not hard enough to hurt, but harder than she is used to, at least. The surprise on her face is a wonderful thing. He relishes it, thinks that maybe he could get used to having her look at him that way again, because he’s pretty sure the last time she looked at him with any respect, was on the day he first opened the door to her all those many years ago. But of course, she didn’t know him then.

Sir, are you a registe
red voter in the state of Ohio? Good, then if I might have a couple of minutes of your time…?

He’d been willing to give her the rest of his life. But now, rather
abruptly and terrifyingly, he is no longer sure that’s still the case. Because he was not altogether surprised to hear that she has accumulated her share of misgivings over the course of their marriage, even if hearing them hurt. Such things stand to reason. But she might be surprised to learn that he has misgivings of his own, chief among them one she threw back in his own face: trust, or more specifically, the lack of it.

“Where was all of this during counseling?” he asks. “Counseling that
you
suggested and
I
paid for. Where was all of this when it might have done some good, huh?”

She will not meet his gaze.

“If you hate me, I’ve probably earned it,” he tells her, even as she jerks free of his grip and glares at him. “But you’ve never had cause to question my loyalty. Answer me that, at least: have you?”

“I’m not doing this right now,”
she says, and turns away from him again. It punches a hot steel rod of anger through his belly and he has to struggle to resist the urge to grab her and
force
her back around to look at him. But he knows that’ll bring him dangerously close to a dark, forbidden place, one from which he will never be able to return.

“You had no problem giving me a rundown of my failures, babe,”
he says. “So you can at least admit to one of yours.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

That small voice again, pleading for reason:
Don’t say it. Don’t open this door. Not here, not now.

He ignores
it, taking no small measure of glee in not merely opening but kicking off the hinges a door which has long been locked to him, the contents of the room beyond a maddening mystery.

“Wednesday nights. Where do you go?”

And now she does turn to face him, whips down her own hood, her features twisted into a look of confusion. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Are you seriously asking me this? Now?”

“Yes. Where do you go on Wednesday nights? It’s a simple question.”

“I go to the book club. You know that.”

“What book club?”

“What book…? You’re losing it, Mike. Big time. And I’m not playing this game, whatever it is.”

“Yes you are.”

Her eyes flash anger again, and this time despite the confidence lent him by his own resentment and certainty of betrayal, it gives him pause, tells him that perhaps his suspicions are indeed wrong. Even if they’re not, he is not sure he will ever be able to get her to admit that to him. Her constitution has always been the stronger one.

“Let me ask you where
you
think I go, Mike, since you’re the one who doubts me.”

Last chance, Mike. Last chance to keep your mouth shut and spare yourself the last shovel of grave dirt.

But the words are too far up his throat, too tantalizing on his tongue for him to swallow them now. “That book club stopped meeting at the library eight weeks ago. I checked.”

She hesitates, then starts to answer, and he kno
ws by the ugly mask her face has become that he is not going to like whatever she has to say, but then her head whips around and she gasps, backs away from him, her arm extending to point at the rank of trees, or something between them. “Mike.”

His anger had not been easy to generate.
His whole life he has avoided confrontation because he has never been adept at it. It did in fact require his wife’s near-admission of her hatred of him for him to even know he was capable of such ire, and even then it came from fear of rejection, of abandonment, of being forced to be alone yet again. But he finds now that it drains quickly in the face of whatever it is she may have seen. And with the reminder of where they are and what they are doing, shame burns his cheeks.
Jesus Christ, Mike
, he thinks
. Your son…

“What is it?”
he asks, and steps close, follows her gaze.

“There,”
she tells him, pointing at something between the trees, her own anger gone, replaced by fragile hope. “Do you see it?”

For a moment he does
n’t, and feels his heart sinking, but then…there it is, a soft amber glow winking at them through the phalanx of trees from somewhere in the distance. It calls to mind the light of a ship or a buoy on a dark sea.

“Is it him?”
Emma asks, though of course there is no way to know.

“Let’s find out,”
he says, and offers her his hand. She looks at it for a moment, then brings her gaze to meet his, both of their faces chalk-white in the moonlight. There is no apology in her eyes, but no anger either, only the acceptance, however temporary, of a truce for the greater good. Then she takes his hand, her skin cold, and they aim their flashlights ahead of them and plunge into the woods.

In the thick of the trees, the ground begins to rise again, which is not good. It tells Mike they are moving even further off track (wherever the hell the track
is
), ascending the moon-shadow hill instead of descending to the valley where the chance of finding the campground is greater. But that’s all right for now, because there is a light, the first one they’ve seen since losing their way. Best case scenario, it
is
Cody, demonstrating better sense than his parents did and waiting instead of roaming aimlessly through the enormous woods in search of them. If it’s not, then Mike knows his heart is going to shatter and Emma will be inconsolable, but it might be a cabin, and from there they might be able to summon help and end this nightmare. And though he does not want to think about rescue choppers and search teams, and the horrifying possibility of never finding their son (especially considering what he and Emma will forever remember doing when they should have been looking for him), he wants even less to wander these woods indefinitely waiting to freeze or starve to death. His wife’s words come back to him:
I still can’t believe it’s even possible to get lost in this day and age.
And while of course such a thing is possible—it happens all the time—he didn’t think it possible
here
, not in a stretch of woods less than an hour from their home. Abroad, maybe, where everything would seem alien, but not here, not somewhere he could probably see the Columbus skyline if he climbed high enough.

But all he has seen for the past three hours, and all he fears he will ever see again, are more and more trees.

“You all right?” he asks his wife, and she looks at him, her face barely lit by the glow from her flashlight.

“No,” she replies.

They’re cold and miserable and out of their depth, the tension between them far from eradicated, only on hold for the time being. The argument both incensed and demoralized him, like ice water thrown on a burning man, leaving him numb, and now he finds himself investing everything he has left in that little light. It might be a lantern, his son’s or a hunter’s flashlight, a candle in the window of a welcoming home or a manned outpost…it is not yet possible to tell. But what it represents is a promise of sanctuary, however temporary, and so they skid and strain their way against the rocky, slippery slope, heartened by its unwavering glow.

It takes them the better part of
forty minutes before the slope levels out and they find themselves in a clearing. There they stop, exhausted. Mike doubles over, hands on his knees, his heart hammering so hard it must surely be digging its way out of his chest, while Emma surveys the area.

“Cory?” she says, her voice low, as i
f afraid of disturbing someone.

Ringed by gnarled and ancient oak trees, the clearing is roughly
forty, no more than fifty feet in diameter, the floor carpeted with the same woodland detritus they’ve been battling their way through all night: twisted scrub, broken branches, twigs, and dead leaves, though here and there are bare patches of earth and what appear to be a scattering of small dark boulders. It is an unremarkable place, otherwise disappointing to Mike but for the tent that squats upon one of those patches. Once he has caught his breath, he straightens, knees, back, and feet aching, but does not move. Emma stands a few feet away from him, staring at the tent and similarly immobile, and though she doesn’t say a word, he knows what has given her pause, can see it just as clearly as she can.

The tent is unlike any he has ever seen before, and yet somehow
it reminds him of his own. Perhaps it is the dark yellow hue, or the dome-like shape, but there the similarities to his ill-advised purchase end. The longer he looks at it, the better it makes him feel about his own dubious skill as an outdoorsman, because clearly whoever erected this tent didn’t even know that the tent poles or rods or whatever the heck they’re called, usually go on the inside. Then again, the rods themselves don’t look like the traditional kind either. Dark brown, ropy and knuckled, and curving down from an arched and similarly knuckled spine-like ridge along the top of the tent, they appear to be made from flexible sticks or branches, so Mike wonders if perhaps, rather than looking at the work of an amateur, he’s observing the work of a
true
frontiersman, someone who perhaps, in losing their own tent in the inclement weather, had the resourcefulness to fashion a crude one from the materials at hand. The roof and sides of the tent appear to have been fashioned using vellum, or similar material, thin enough to allow the small orb of light within to be seen from without. There are no pegs or guy lines, and odder still, no entrance that he can see, though it’s possible they’re looking at the back of it.

Emma turns to look at him.
“Do you think he might be in there?”

He doesn’t, because the soft amber light inside the tent is unobstructed
and casts no shadows against its walls, but he takes a moment to weigh up the wisdom of sharing this opinion. He settles for a noncommittal “Not sure,” and takes a few steps further into the clearing and looks around even though there is little to be seen. “But if nothing else, it could be a place to stop and regroup.” As soon as he uses the word, he regrets it, because the terrible truth is that their
group
is one short, and he knows that they were counting on finding Cody behind that light, beckoning them toward him with his flashlight. More than once, Mike even imagined he saw the boy’s fuzzy silhouette waiting for them in the darkness behind that glow. But now they’re here, and Cody isn’t, and the implications of that fact are enough to suck the life from him, to hammer ingots of despair and hopelessness into his brain.

Please God, let him be all right.
Whatever the price I need to pay, I’ll gladly pay it. Just please, please, let my boy be okay.

But he refuses to
give up, at least not yet. He has to hold it together for Emma’s sake, for Cody’s sake. Whatever happens, they need to stay alert and vigilant, need to focus on reclaiming their son from the cold, dark woods. Because if anything has happened to their boy, it will alter for them both the definition of lost. There will, quite simply, be no more reason for them to go on. They may have their differences, may even have to go their separate ways and concede defeat when all of this is over, but the boy is an innocent and should not be made to pay for his unflagging faith in his guardians, in the people sworn to protect him. If such faith ends up costing the boy his life, then Mike and Emma will be guilty of the ultimate failure, and it will kill them, and the punishment will fit the crime.