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“Jacob was time out of sync, time more perfect than it had been. He was life the way it was supposed to be all those years ago. That’s what all the Returned were.”
Harold and Lucille Hargrave’s lives have been both joyful and sorrowful in the decades since their only son, Jacob, died tragically at his eighth birthday party in 1966. In their old age they’ve settled comfortably into life without him, their wounds tempered through the grace of time.... Until one day Jacob mysteriously appears on their doorstep—flesh and blood, their sweet, precocious child, still eight years old.
All over the world people’s loved ones are returning from beyond. No one knows how or why this is happening, whether it’s a miracle or a sign of the end. Not even Harold and Lucille can agree on whether the boy is real or a wondrous imitation, but one thing they know for sure: he’s their son. As chaos erupts around the globe, the newly reunited Hargrave family finds itself at the center of a community on the brink of collapse, forced to navigate a mysterious new reality and a conflict that threatens to unravel the very meaning of what it is to be human.
With spare, elegant prose and searing emotional depth, award-winning poet Jason Mott explores timeless questions of faith and morality, love and responsibility. A spellbinding and stunning debut, The Returned is an unforgettable story that marks the arrival of an important new voice in contemporary fiction.
The Returned
Jason Mott
For my mother and father
Contents
Chapter One
Kamui Yamamoto
Chapter Two
Lewis and Suzanne Holt
Chapter Three
Angela Johnson
Chapter Four
Jean Rideau
Chapter Five
Elizabeth Pinch
Chapter Six
Gou Jun Pei
Chapter Seven
Nico Sutil. Erik Bellof. Timo Heidfeld.
Chapter Eight
Jeff Edgeson
Chapter Nine
Tatiana Rusesa
Chapter Ten
Alicia Hulme
Chapter Eleven
Bobby Wiles
Chapter Twelve
Samuel Daniels
Chapter Thirteen
John Hamilton
Chapter Fourteen
Jim Wilson
Chapter Fifteen
Nathaniel Schumacher
Chapter Sixteen
Connie Wilson
Chapter Seventeen
Chris Davis
Chapter Eighteen
Patricia Bellamy
Chapter Nineteen
Jacob Hargrave
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Extract
Endpage
Copyright
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.
* * *
Just days before the man from the Bureau showed up at their door Harold and Lucille had been discussing what they might do if Jacob “turned up Returned.”
“They’re not people,” Lucille said, wringing her hands. They were on the porch. All important happenings occurred on the porch.
“We couldn’t just turn him away,” Harold told his wife. He stamped his foot. The argument had turned very loud very quickly.
“They’re just not people,” she repeated.
“Well, if they’re not people, then what are they? Vegetable? Mineral?” Harold’s lips itched for a cigarette. Smoking always helped him get the upper hand in an argument with his wife which, he suspected, was the real reason she made such a fuss about the habit.
“Don’t be flippant with me, Harold Nathaniel Hargrave. This is serious.”
“Flippant?”
“Yes, flippant! You’re always flippant! Always prone to flippancy!”
“I swear. Yesterday it was, what, ‘loquacious’? So today it’s ‘flippant,’ huh?”
“Don’t mock me for trying to better myself. My mind is still as sharp as it always was, maybe even sharper. And don’t you go trying to get off subject.”
“Flippant.” Harold smacked the word, hammering the final t at the end so hard a glistening bead of spittle cleared the porch railing. “Hmph.”
Lucille let it pass. “I don’t know what they are,” she continued. She stood. Then sat again. “All I know is they’re not like you and me. They’re...they’re...” She paused. She prepared the word in her mouth, putting it together carefully, brick by brick. “They’re devils,” she finally said. Then she recoiled, as if the word might turn and bite her. “They’ve just come here to kill us. Or tempt us! These are the end days. ‘When the dead shall walk the earth.’ It’s in the Bible!”
Harold snorted, still hung up on “flippant.” His hand went to his pocket. “Devils?” he said, his mind finding its train of thought as his hand found his cigarette lighter. “Devils are superstitions. Products of small minds and even smaller imaginations. There’s one word that should be banned from the dictionary— devils. Ha! Now there’s a flippant word. It’s got nothing to do with the way things really are, nothing to do with these ‘Returned’ folks—and make no mistake about it, Lucille Abigail Daniels Hargrave, they are people. They can walk over and kiss you. I ain’t never met a devil that could do that...although, before we were married, there was this one blonde girl over in Tulsa one Saturday night. Yeah, now she might have been the devil, or a devil at least.”
“Hush up!” Lucille barked, so loudly she seemed to surprise herself. “I won’t sit here and listen to you talk that way.”
“Talk what way?”
“It wouldn’t be our boy,” she said, her words slowing as the seriousness of things came drifting back to her, like the memory of a lost son, perhaps. “Jacob’s gone on to God,” she said. Her hands had become thin, white fists in her lap.
A silence came.
Then it passed.
“Where is it?” Harold asked.
“What?”
“In the Bible, where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“Where does it say ‘the dead will walk the earth’?”
“Revelations!” Lucille opened her arms as she said the word, as if the question could not be any more addle-brained, as if she’d been asked about the flight patterns of pine trees. “It’s right there in Revelations! ‘The dead shall walk the earth’!” She was glad to see that her hands were still fists. She waved them at no one, the way people in movies sometimes did.
Harold laughed. “What part of Revelations? What chapter? What verse?”
“You hush up,” she said. “That it’s in there is all that matters. Now hush!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Harold said. “Wouldn’t want to be flippant.”
* * *
But when the devil actually showed up at the front door—their own particular devil—small and wondrous as he had been all those years ago, his brown eyes slick with tears, joy and the sudden relief of a child who has been too long away from his parents, too long of a time spent in the company of strangers...well...Lucille, after she recovered from her fainting episode, melted like candle wax right there in front of the clean-cut, well-suited man from the Bureau. For his part, the Bureau man took it well enough. He smiled a practiced smile, no doubt having witnessed this exact scene more than a few times in recent weeks.
“There are support groups,” the Bureau man said. “Support groups for the Returned. And support groups for the families of the Returned.” He smiled.
“He was found,” the man continued—he’d given them his name but both Harold and Lucille were already terrible at remembering people’s names and having been reunited with their dead son didn’t do much to help now, so they thought of him simply as the Man from the Bureau “—in a small fishing village outside Beijing, China. He was kneeling at the edge of a river, trying to catch fish or some such from what I’ve been told. The local people, none of whom spoke English well enough for him to understand, asked him his name in Mandarin, how he’d gotten there, where he was from, all those questions you ask when coming upon a lost child.
“When it was clear that language was something of a barrier, a group of women were able to calm him. He’d started crying—and why wouldn’t he?” The man smiled again. “After all, he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. But they settled him down. Then they found an English-speaking official and, well...” He shrugged his shoulders beneath his dark suit, indicating the insignificance of the rest of the story. Then he added, “It’s happening like this all over.”
He paused again. He watched with a smile that was not disingenuous as Lucille fawned over the son who was suddenly no longer dead. She clutched him to her chest and kissed the crown of his head, then cupped his face in her hands and showered it with kisses and laughter and tears.
Jacob replied in kind, giggling and laughing, but not wiping away his mother’s kisses even though he was at that particular point in youth when wiping away a mother’s kisses was what seemed most appropriate to him.
“It’s a unique time for everyone,” the man from the Bureau said.
Kamui Yamamoto
The brass bell chimed lightly as he entered the convenience store. Outside someone was just pulling away from the gas pump and did not see him. Behind the counter a plump, red-faced man halted his conversation with a tall, lanky man and the two of them stared. The only sound was the low hum of the freezers. Kamui bowed low, the brass bell chiming a second time as the door closed behind him.
The men behind the counter still did not speak.
He bowed a second time, smiling. “Forgive me,” he said, and the men jumped. “I surrender.” He held his hands in the air.
The red-faced man said something that Kamui could not understand. He looked at the lanky man and the two of them spoke at length, glancing sideways as they did. Then the red-faced man pointed at the door. Kamui turned, but saw only the empty street and the rising sun behind him. “I surrender,” he said a second time.
He’d left his pistol buried next to a tree at the edge of the woods in which he’d found himself only a few hours ago, just as the other men had. He had even removed the jacket of his uniform and his hat and left them, as well, so that, now, he stood in the small gas station at the break of day in his undershirt, pants and well-shined boots. All this to avoid being killed by the Americans. “Yamamoto desu,” he said. Then: “I surrender.”
The red-faced man spoke again, louder this time. Then the second man joined him, both of them yelling and motioning in the direction of the door. “I surrender,” Kamui said yet again, fearing the way their voices were rising. The lanky man grabbed a soda can from the counter and threw it at him. It missed, and the man yelled again and pointed toward the door again and began searching for something else to throw.
“Thank you,” Kamui managed, though he knew it was not what he wanted to say. His English vocabulary was limited to very few words. He backed toward the door. The red-faced man reached beneath the counter and found a can of something. He threw it with a grunt. The can struck Kamui above the left temple. He fell back against the door. The brass bell rang.
The red-faced man threw more cans while the lanky man yelled and searched for objects of his own to throw until, stumbling, Kamui fled the gas station, his hands above him, proving that he was not armed and meant to do nothing other than turn himself in. His heart beat in his ears.
Outside, the sun had risen and the city was cast a soft orange. It looked peaceful.
With a trickle of blood running down the side of his head, he raised his hands into the air and walked down the street. “I surrender!” he yelled, waking the town, hoping the people he found would let him live.
Two
OF COURSE, EVEN for people returning from the dead, there was paperwork. The International Bureau of the Returned was receiving funding faster than it could spend it. And there wasn’t a single country on the planet that wasn’t willing to dig into treasury reserves or go into debt to try and secure whatever “in” they could with the Bureau due to the fact that it was the only organization on the planet that was able to coordinate everything and everyone.
The irony was that no one within the Bureau knew more than anyone else. All they were really doing were counting people and giving them directions home. That was it.
* * *
When the emotion had died down and the hugging and all stopped in the doorway of the Hargraves’ little house—nearly a half hour later—Jacob was moved into the kitchen where he could sit at the table and catch up on all the eating he’d missed in his absence. The Bureau man sat in the living room with Harold and Lucille, took his stacks of paperwork from a brown, leather briefcase and got down to business.
“When did the returning individual originally die?” asked the Bureau man, who—for a second time—revealed his name as Agent Martin Bellamy.
“Do we have to say that?” Lucille asked. She inhaled and sat straighter in her seat, suddenly looking very regal and discriminating, having finally straightened her long, silver hair that had come undone while fawning over her son.
“Say what?” Harold replied.
“She means ‘die,’” Agent Bellamy said.
Lucille nodded.
“What’s wrong with saying he died?” Harold asked, his voice louder than he’d planned. Jacob was still within eyesight, if mostly out of earshot.
“Shush!”
“He died,” Harold said. “No sense in pretending he didn’t.” He didn’t notice, but his voice was lower now.
“Martin Bellamy knows what I mean,” Lucille said. She wrung her hands in her lap, looking for Jacob every few seconds, as if he were a candle in a house of drafts.
Agent Bellamy smiled. “It’s okay,” he said. “This is pretty common, actually. I should have been more considerate. Let’s start again, shall we?” He looked down at his questionnaire. “When did the returning individual—”
“Where are you from?”
“Sir?”
“Where are you from?” Harold was standing by the window looking out at the blue sky.
“You sound like a New Yorker,” Harold said.
“Is that good or bad?” Agent Bellamy asked, pretending he had not been asked about his accent a dozen times since being assigned to the Returned of southern North Carolina.
“It’s horrible,” Harold said. “But I’m a forgiving man.”
“Jacob,” Lucille interrupted. “Call him Jacob, please. His name is Jacob.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Agent Bellamy said. “I’m sorry. I should know better by now.”
“Thank you, Martin Bellamy,” Lucille said. Again, somehow, her hands were fists in her lap. She breathed deeply and, with concentration, unfolded them. “Thank you, Martin Bellamy,” she said again.
“When did Jacob leave?” Agent Bellamy asked again softly.
“August 15, 1966,” Harold said. He moved into the doorway, looking unsettled. He licked his lips. His hands took turns moving from the pockets of his worn, old pants up to his worn, old lips, finding no peace—or cigarette—on either side of the journey.
Agent Bellamy made notes.
“How did it happen?”
* * *
The word Jacob became an incantation that day as the searchers looked for the boy. At regular intervals the call went up. “Jacob! Jacob Hargrave!” And then another voice lifted the name and passed it down the line. “Jacob! Jacob!”
In the beginning their voices trampled upon one another in a cacophony of fear and desperation. But then the boy was not quickly found and, to save their throats, the men and women of the search party took turns shouting out as the sun turned gold and dripped down the horizon and was swallowed first by the tall trees and then by the low brush.
Then they were all trudging drunkenly—exhausted from high-stepping through the dense bramble, wrung out from worry. Fred Green was there with Harold. “We’ll find him,” Fred said again and again. “Did you see that look in his eyes when he unwrapped that BB gun I gave him? You ever seen a boy so excited?” Fred huffed, his legs burning from fatigue. “We’ll find him.” He nodded. “We’ll find him.”
Then it was full-on night and the bushy, pine-laden landscape of Arcadia sparkled with the glow of flashlights.
When they neared the river Harold was glad he’d talked Lucille into staying back at the house—“He might come back,” he had said, “and he’ll want his mama”—because he knew, by whatever means such things are known, that he would find his son in the river.
Harold sloshed knee-deep in the shallows—slowly, taking a step, calling the boy’s name, pausing to listen out in case he should be somewhere nearby, calling back, taking another step, calling the boy’s name again, and on and on.
When he finally came upon the body, the moonlight and the water had shone the boy to a haunting and beautiful silver, the same color as the glimmering water.
“Dear God,” Harold said. And that was the last time he would ever say it.
* * *
Harold told the story, hearing suddenly all the years in his voice. He sounded like an old man, hardened and rough. Now and again as he spoke, he would reach a thick, wrinkled hand to run over the few thin, gray strands still clinging to his scalp. His hands were decorated with liver spots and his knuckles were swollen from the arthritis that sometimes bothered him. It didn’t bother him as badly as it did some other people his age, but it did just enough to remind him of the wealth of youth that was not his anymore. Even as he spoke, his lower back jolted with a small twinge of pain.
Hardly any hair. Mottled skin. His large, round head. His wrinkled, wide ears. Clothes that seemed to swallow him up no matter how hard Lucille tried to find something that fit him better. No doubt about it: he was an old man now.
Something about having Jacob back—still young and vibrant—made Harold Hargrave realize his age.
Lucille, just as old and gray as her husband, only looked away as he spoke, only watched her eight-year-old son sit at the kitchen table eating a slice of pecan pie as if, just now, it were 1966 again and nothing was wrong and nothing would ever be wrong again. Sometimes she would clear a silver strand of hair from her face, but if she caught sight of her thin, liver-spotted hands, they did not seem to bother her.
They were a pair of thin, wiry birds, Harold and Lucille. She outgrew him in these later years. Or, rather, he shrank faster than she so that, now, he had to look up at her when they argued. And Lucille also had the benefit of not wasting away quite as much as he had—something she blamed upon his years of cigarette smoking. Her dresses still fit her. Her thin, long arms were nimble and articulate where his, hidden beneath the puffiness of shirts that fit him too loosely, made him look a bit more vulnerable than he used to. Which was giving her an edge these days.
Lucille took pride in that, and did not feel quite so guilty about it, even though she sometimes thought she should.
Agent Bellamy wrote until his hand cramped and then he wrote more. He’d had the forethought to record the interview, but he still found it good policy to write things down, as well. People seemed offended if they met with a government man and nothing was written down. This worked for Agent Bellamy. His brain was the type that preferred to see things rather than hear them. If he didn’t write it all down now he’d just be stuck doing it later.
Bellamy wrote from the time the birthday party began that day in 1966. He wrote through the recounting of Lucille’s weeping and guilt—she’d been the last one to see Jacob alive; she only remembered a brief image of one of his pale arms as he darted around a corner, chasing one of the other children. Bellamy wrote that there were almost more people at the funeral than the church could hold.
But there were parts of the interview that he did not write. Details that, out of respect, he committed only to memory rather than to bureaucratic documentation.
Harold and Lucille had survived the boy’s death, but only just. The next fifty-odd years became infected with a peculiar type of loneliness, a tactless loneliness that showed up unbidden and began inappropriate conversations over Sunday dinner. It was a loneliness they never named and seldom talked about. They only shuffled around it with their breaths held, day in and day out, as if it were an atom smasher—reduced in scale but not in complexity or splendor—suddenly shown up in the center of the living room and dead set on affirming all the most ominous and far-fetched speculations of the harsh way the universe genuinely worked.
In its own way, that was a truth of sorts.
Over the years they not only became accustomed to hiding from their loneliness, they became skilled at it. It was a game, almost: don’t talk about the Strawberry Festival, because he had loved it; don’t stare too long at buildings you admire because they will remind you of the time you said he would grow into an architect one day; ignore the children in whose face you see him.
When Jacob’s birthday came around each year they would spend the day being somber and having difficulty making conversation. Lucille might take to weeping with no explanation, or Harold might smoke a little more that day than he had the day before.
But that was only in the beginning. Only in those first, sad years.
They grew older.
Doors closed.
Harold and Lucille had become so far removed from the tragedy of Jacob’s death that when the boy reappeared at their front door—smiling, still perfectly assembled and unaged, still their blessed son, still only eight years old—all of it was so far away that Harold had forgotten the boy’s name.
* * *
Then Harold and Lucille were done talking and there was silence. But despite its solemnity, it was short-lived. Because there was the sound of Jacob sitting at the kitchen table raking his fork across his plate, gulping down his lemonade and burping with great satisfaction. “Excuse me,” the boy yelled to his parents.
Lucille smiled.
“Forgive me for asking this,” Agent Bellamy began. “And please, don’t take this as any type of accusation. It’s simply something we have to ask in order to better understand these...unique circumstances.”
“Here it comes,” Harold said. His hands had finally stopped foraging for phantom cigarettes and settled into his pockets. Lucille waved her hand dismissively.
“What were things like between you and Jacob before?” Agent Bellamy asked.
Harold snorted. His body finally decided his right leg would better hold his weight than his left. He looked at Lucille. “This is the part where we’re supposed to say we drove him off or something. Like they do on TV. We’re supposed to say that we’d had a fight with him, denied him supper, or some kind of abuse like you see on TV. Something like that.” Harold walked over to a small table that stood in the hallway facing the front door. In the top drawer was a fresh pack of cigarettes.
Before he’d even made his way back to the living room Lucille opened fire. “You will not!”
Harold opened the wrapper with mechanical precision, as if his hands were not his own. He placed a cigarette, unlit, between his lips and scratched his wrinkled face and exhaled, long and slow. “That’s all I needed,” he said. “That’s all.”
Agent Bellamy spoke softly. “I’m not trying to say that you or anyone else caused your son’s...well, I’m running out of euphemisms.” He smiled. “I’m only asking. The Bureau is trying hard to make heads or tails of this, just like everyone else. We might be in charge of helping to connect people up with one another, but that doesn’t mean we have any inside knowledge into how any of this is working. Or why it’s happening.” He shrugged his shoulders. “The big questions are still big, still untouchable. But our hope is that by finding out everything we can, by asking the questions that everyone might not necessarily be comfortable answering, we can touch some of these big questions. Get a handle on them, before they get out of hand.”
