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Jim Wilson was a young man, barely past thirty-five, blond hair, broad shoulders, a stiff, square chin. He looked like the kind of man who was always building something. Always engaged in some manner of productivity. Always furthering the slow crawl of humanity’s progress against the perpetual hunger of entropy. This was why the town had loved him so in life. He had been what the people of Arcadia were supposed to be: polite, hardworking, well mannered, Southern. But now, as one of the Returned, he reminded them all of what they had not known they could be.
“You’re all walking up to the big question,” Jim said in a low voice, “the one you asked earlier on tonight and left hanging out there. The question about what’s to be done with us.”
Pastor Peters interrupted. “Now, now. There’s nothing ‘to be done with you.’ You’re people. You need a place to live. We’ve got room for you.”
“They can’t stay here forever,” someone said. Voices in the crowd grumbled in agreement. “Something’s got to be done with them.”
“I just wanted to say thank you,” Jim Wilson said. He had planned to say so much more, but it was all gone now—now that the entirety of Arcadia was staring at him. Some of them staring a bit less friendly than others. “I just...I just wanted to say thank you,” Jim Wilson repeated. Then he turned and, taking his family with him, exited the same way he had come.
After that, everyone seemed to have trouble finding what to ask or what to say or what to argue about. Folks milled about for a while, grumbling and whispering now and again, but to no real consequence. Everyone felt suddenly tired and burdened.
Agent Bellamy gave everyone a final round of reassurances as they began trickling out of the church. He shook their hands and smiled as they passed and, when they asked him, he would say that he would do everything he could to understand why all of this was happening. He told them he would stay “until things are sorted out.”
The sorting out of things was what people expected from the government, so they put their fears and suspicions away for now.
Eventually there was only the pastor, his wife and the Wilson family, who, not wishing to cause any more problems than they already had, stayed quietly in their room in the back of the church—away from everyone’s sight and remembrance—as if they had never returned at all.
* * *
“I imagine Fred had a fair amount of things to say,” Harold said as Lucille settled into the truck. She wrestled with Jacob’s seat belt, huffing and making hard movements with her hands.
“They’re just all so...so...irregular!” The click of Jacob’s seat belt punctuated her sentence. She turned the knob at the window. After a few hard tugs, it broke free and opened. Lucille folded her arms over her chest.
Harold turned the truck’s ignition. It started with a roar. “Your mama’s been biting her tongue again, I see, Jacob. Probably sat there that whole meeting not saying nothing, didn’t she?”
“Yes, sir,” Jacob said, looking up at his father with a smile.
“Don’t you do that,” Lucille said. “Just don’t you two do that!”
“She didn’t get a chance to use any of her fancy words, and you know what that does to her, don’t you? You remember?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not playing with you two,” Lucille said, fighting laughter in spite of herself. “I’ll get out right now and you’ll never see me again.”
“Did somebody else get to use a really fancy word?”
“Doomsday.”
“Oh...that. It’s a fancy way word for sure. ‘Doomsday’ is what happens when you spend too much time in church. That’s why I don’t go.”
“Harold Hargrave!”
“How’s the pastor? He’s a good Mississippi boy, in spite of his religion.”
“He gave me candy,” Jacob said.
“That was nice of him, wasn’t it?” Harold asked, wrestling the truck up the dark road toward home. “He’s a good man, ain’t he?”
* * *
The church was quiet now. Pastor Peters came into his small office and settled at the dark, wooden table. In the distance, a truck was gurgling down the street. Everything was simple, and that was a good thing.
The letter lay in the drawer of his desk, beneath stacks of books, assorted papers needing his signature, sermons in various stages of completion and all the general clutter that slowly marches over an office. In the far corner, an old lamp stood throwing a dim, amber glow over the room. Lining the walls of the office were Pastor Peters’s bookcases, all of them stacked beyond capacity. His books gave him little comfort these days. A single letter had undone all their work, stripped away all the comfort that words can offer.
The letter read:
Dear Mr. Robert Peters,
The International Bureau of the Returned would like to inform you that you are being actively sought after by one of the Returned by the name of Elizabeth Pinch. As is our policy in this situation, no information outside the family of the Returned is ever given. In most cases, these individuals seek out their families first, but Miss Pinch has expressed a desire to locate you. Per Code 17, Article 21, of Returned Regulations Policy, you are hereby notified.
Pastor Peters stared down at the letter and was, just as he had been upon first reading it, uncertain of everything in his life.
Jean Rideau
“You should be with a young woman,” she told Jean. “She would be able to keep up with you during all of this.” She settled onto the small, iron-framed bed, huffing. “You’re famous now. I’m just an old woman in the way.”
The young artist crossed the room and knelt beside her. He rested his head in her lap and kissed the inside of her hand, which only made her aware of the wrinkles and liver spots that had begun showing upon that hand in recent years. “It’s all because of you,” he said.
He had been a part of her life for over thirty years—since she was fumbling her way through college so long ago and had come across the work of an overlooked artist who died by running into traffic one balmy summer’s night in 1921 Paris—and now she had him, had not only his love, but his flesh, as well, completely. And that frightened her.
Outside, the street had finally quieted. The crowd had been scattered by the policemen.
“If I had only been this famous years past,” he said. “Perhaps my life would have been different.”
“Artists are only ever appreciated posthumously.” She smiled, stroking his hair. “Nobody ever expected one would return to redeem his accolades.”
She spent years studying his work, his life, never imagining that she would be here with him, like this, smelling the scent of him, feeling the wiry texture of a beard he desperately wanted but had always had poor luck growing. They sat up nights, talking about everything but his art. The press was doing enough of that. Jean Rideau: Return of the Artists, one of the more popular headlines had proclaimed.
He was the first of the artistic deluge, the article declared. “A genius sculptor returns! Not long before the masters are back with us!”
So he was famous now. Work he’d made nearly a hundred years ago, work that never sold for more than a few hundred francs, now went for millions. And then there were the fans.
But all Jean wanted was Marissa.
“You kept me alive,” he said, nuzzling his head into her lap like a cat. “You kept my work alive when no one else knew me.”
“I’m your steward, then,” she said. With her wrist, she pushed loose strands of her hair from her face—hair that was a bit more gray and a bit more thin each day. “Is that what I am?”
He looked up at her with calm, blue eyes—even in the grainy, black-and-white photos of him that she had studied for years, she had known they were this particular, beautiful blue. “I do not care about our ages,” he said. “I was only an average artist. I know now that my art was meant to lead me to you.”
Then he kissed her.
Five
IT HAD BEGUN small, as most large things do, with just one government-issue Crown Victoria containing only one government man and a pair of too-young soldiers and a cell phone. But all it had taken was that one phone call and a few days of things being moved around and now Bellamy was entrenched in the school but there were no students, no classes, nothing but the ever-growing numbers of cars and trucks and men and women from the Bureau who had been setting up shop here for the past several days.
The Bureau had developed a plan for Arcadia. The same isolation that had kept the town’s economy stifled for all the years of its existence was exactly what the Bureau was looking for. Sure, there were hotels and restaurants and facilities and resources in Whiteville that the Bureau could use for what they were planning, but there were also people. Close to fifteen thousand of them, not to mention the highway and all the various roads that they might have to secure sometime soon.
No. Arcadia was as close to a nonexistent town as they could want, with only a handful of people, none of whom were anyone of note. Just farmers and millworkers, mechanics and laborers and machinists and various other denizens of hardscrabble existences. “No one anybody would miss.”
At least, that was how the colonel had put it.
Colonel Willis. The thought of him made Bellamy’s stomach tighten. He knew little about the colonel, and that made him uneasy. In an age of information, never trust a person who can’t be found on Google. But that was something Bellamy only had time to ponder in the late hours of the night back at the hotel before he nodded off. The day-to-day business of his duties, the interviews in particular, took his full attention.
The schoolroom was small. It smelled of mildew, lead-based paint and time.
“First of all,” Bellamy said, leaning back in his chair, his notepad resting on his thigh, “is there anything unusual that either of you would like to talk about?”
“No,” Lucille said. “Nothing that I can think of.” Jacob nodded in agreement, most of his attention resting squarely on his lollipop. “But I figure,” Lucille continued, “you’ll be able to ask whatever questions you’re supposed to ask that’ll help me realize if there maybe was something strange going on. I imagine you’re quite the interrogator.”
“A bit of a harsh word choice, I think.”
“Maybe,” Lucille said. “I apologize.” She licked the pad of her thumb and wiped a candy smudge from Jacob’s face. She’d dressed him handsomely for his interview. New black dress pants. A bright new white, collared shirt. New shoes. Even new socks. And he was doing his part to keep everything clean, like the good boy that he was.
“I just like words, is all,” Lucille said. “And, sometimes, they can come across a bit harsh, even if all you’re trying to do is add some variety.” Lucille finished cleaning Jacob’s face, then turned her attention on herself. She straightened her long, silver hair. She checked her pale hands for dirt and found none. She adjusted her dress, shifting her weight in her seat so that she could nudge her hemline farther down—which is not to say that the hem of her cream-colored dress had been high, gracious, no, but only to say that any respectable woman, Lucille felt, made it a point, when in mixed company, to show that she was going through all manner of effort to conduct herself with modesty and propriety.
Propriety was yet another word not used nearly enough in conversation for Lucille.
“Propriety,” she muttered. Then she straightened the collar of her dress.
* * *
“One of the things that people have been reporting,” Bellamy said, “is trouble sleeping.” He took the notepad from his thigh and placed it on the desk. He hadn’t expected that a schoolteacher in such a small town would have such a large desk, but such things made sense when you thought about them long enough.
Bellamy sat forward and checked to be sure that the recorder was running. He scribbled in his notebook, waiting for Lucille to respond to his statement, but soon began to realize that no response would be coming without elaboration. He wrote eggs on his notepad to look busy.
“It’s not that the Returned have trouble sleeping,” Bellamy began, once again trying to speak in a slow and non-Yankee tongue. “It’s just that they tend to sleep very little. They don’t complain of fatigue or exhaustion, but there have been accounts of some of them going for days without sleep, only to rest for a couple of hours and be completely unaffected.” He sat back, appreciating the quality of the wooden chair beneath him in the same way he had appreciated the quality of the desk. “But maybe we’re just grabbing at straws,” he said. “That’s the reason we’re having all these interviews, to try and see what’s an anomaly and what’s nothing at all. We want to know as much as we can about the Returned as we do about the non-Returned.”
“So is your question about me or Jacob?” Lucille said, looking around the classroom.
“Eventually, both of you. But, for now, just tell me about you, Mrs. Hargrave. Have you been having any trouble sleeping? Any disturbing dreams? Insomnia?”
Lucille shifted in her seat. She glanced toward the window. Bright out today. Everything shiny and smelling of springtime, with the scent of a humid summer not far off. She sighed and rubbed her hands together. Then she folded them and placed them in her lap. But they weren’t content there, so she brushed her lap and placed an arm around her son, the type of thing a mother should do, she felt.
“No,” she said, finally. “For fifty years I’ve been awake. Each and every night I’ve sat up, awake. Each and every day I walked around, awake. It was like I couldn’t do anything else but be awake. I was sick with being awake.” She smiled. “Now I sleep every night. Peacefully. Deeper and more soundly than I hardly imagined or hardly remembered was possible.”
Lucille placed her hands in her lap again. This time they stayed. “Now I sleep the way a person is supposed to sleep,” she said. “I close my eyes, and then they open again all on their own and the sun is there. Which, I imagine, is the way it should be.”
“And what about Harold? How is he sleeping?”
“Just fine. Sleeps like the dead. Always has and probably always will.”
Bellamy made notes on his notepad. Orange juice. Beef (steak, perhaps). Then he scratched out the bit about the steak and wrote ground beef. He turned to Jacob. “And how are you feeling about all this?”
“Fine, sir. I’m fine.”
“This is all pretty weird, isn’t it? All these questions, all these tests, all these people fussing about with you.”
Jacob shrugged.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
Jacob shrugged again, his shoulders coming up almost to his ears, framing his small, soft face. He looked, briefly, like someone’s painting, something created from old oils and technique. His shirt bunched perfectly about his ears. His brown hair seemed to grow down over his eyes. Then, as if anticipating the prod from his mother, he spoke. “I’m okay, sir.”
“Can I ask you another question, then? A harder question?”
“Can you or may you? Mama taught me that.” He looked up at his mother; her face was caught somewhere between surprise and approval.
Bellamy grinned. “Indeed,” he said. “Okay, may I ask you a harder question?”
“I suppose,” Jacob said. Then: “Do you want to hear a joke?” A sudden focus and clarity came to his eyes. “I know a lot of good jokes,” he said.
Agent Bellamy folded his arms beneath him and sat forward. “Okay, let’s hear it.”
Again Lucille prayed silently—Please, Lord, not the one about the beaver.
“What do you call a chicken crossing the road?”
Lucille held her breath. Any joke involving a chicken had the potential to turn very vulgar very quickly.
“Poultry in motion!” Jacob answered before Bellamy had much time to consider the question. Then he slapped his thigh and laughed like an old man.
“That’s funny,” Bellamy said. “Did your father teach you that one?”
“You said you had a hard question for me,” Jacob said, looking away. He watched the window as if expecting someone.
“Okay. I know you’ve been asked this before. I know that you’ve probably been asked this more times than you care to answer. I’ve even asked you myself, but I have to ask again. What’s the first thing you remember?”
Jacob was silent.
“Do you remember being in China?”
Jacob nodded and, somehow, his mother did not reprimand him. She was as interested as everyone else in the memories of the Returned. Out of habit, her hand moved to gently nudge him into talking, but she checked herself. Her hand returned to her lap.
“I remember waking up,” he began. “By the water. By the river. I knew I’d get in trouble.”
“Why would you get in trouble?”
“Because I knew Mama and Daddy didn’t know where I was. When I couldn’t find them, I got scared some more. Not scared of getting in trouble anymore, but just scared because they weren’t there. I thought Daddy was somewhere around. But he wasn’t.”
“What happened then?”
“Some people came. Some Chinese people. They spoke Chinese.”
“And then?”
“And then these two women came over talking funny, but talking nice. I didn’t know what they were saying, but I could tell they were nice.”
