Follow Me
By Evander Lang
They’d heard footsteps in the kitchen, and the husband had gone downstairs in his sock feet with a ballpoint pen in his fist, and Adair might have caught that pen with his cornea if the husband hadn’t gotten a good look at him first - how skittish and flushed he was, how he flinched at the smallest sound. ‘He seemed confused,’ the wife told Fionnuala, ‘think he thought this was his house, he was upset we’d moved all his things around.’ Where he went after they saw him out they couldn’t say. It was dark by the time Fionnuala learned her brother had gone into the forest.
The trailhead was an unmarked hollow in the switchgrass. She parked beneath a weeping willow and tried to love him enough to keep going.
Coils of mist silvered the dark and halved her flashlight’s range. Rain was coming. She clambered over slickened rocks and roots. Beyond, the path arced upward to a high narrow ridge above a scree slope. That much she’d seen in daylight years before: kids in her day used to huddle in the shadows of that ridge to drink. A rabbity freshman too deep in his cups once mounted the ridge on a dare. From its apex he misjudged its edge in the dark; when he woke up he told the nurses he’d been distracted by a floating ball of fire.
Fionnuala was sober and soaked to the skin as she shuffled along the ridge. She waved the flashlight down the slope and dully hoped to find her brother broken down below. She could call 911; she could go home, eat dinner, answer emails. She sneered inward. If she could feign indifference she’d have done it by now. She peered ahead: further on, the ridge plunged beneath tree cover.
Midnight saw her under black spruce and tamarack. Rain glittered on their needles like starlight. In the gloom the figure hid its torch and watched.
Her flashlight dimmed. When she stepped into the shallows of a stream she learned the path was gone. She scanned the sky: she’d lost the ridge. She shivered in her sopping clothes. You won’t last like this much longer, she’d told him on the drive home from the clinic. You live this way and you’ll die young and unimpressive. She looked around. Every direction was as dark as every other.
Her shoes squelched as she traced the stream. What led him here she could not guess. This dark was total. It would have frightened him. She looked around for what she knew could not be there: Adair would have needed a light source.
As her flashlight died she reached the lake the stream fed into. She could go no further. The cold had reached bone. Now you know, she’d murmured to him as the Narcan took effect. Now you’ve come as close as someone can. Someday when you’re as old as you’ll become you will feel this way again. This is what it will feel like, just before.
She wondered now what he’d been feeling as she said it. She felt herself collapsing at her edges; she was afraid to look, but up above her, she could feel the stars go out, one at a time. I lived your whole life for you, she thought. I did everything. I did everything.
In the corner of her eye a flame appeared.
She turned. She watched it dance. It seemed impervious to rain. By its light she saw a torch, a hand, the suggestion of a torso, of shoulders. They rippled softly like flags in a low breeze and she had the impression the body itself was only there for her benefit, the flame making itself legible to her.
Her head swam. The chill had grown so sharp it felt like heat. She drowsed; her knees buckled. The fire grew and receded, grew and receded.
‘You look like him,’ Fionnuala heard. She startled. The fire spoke in her own voice.
‘He came this way?’ Her voice was weak: it sounded like the shadow of the fire’s.
‘He isn’t far.’
‘Is he hurt?’
‘Not in the way you mean.’
‘Explain that.’
‘Not by us.’
‘What are you?’
'How’s that help you?’
‘Can you take me to him?’
‘Follow me.’
The fire led her deep into the woods. The trees grew sparse, the soil hard. They were long past anything she knew. Fionnuala thought how far she’d come to find him, on what little warning. It hadn’t felt like a choice; it never did. Adair’s life had been gouged out of her own, over and over, like a lien of the spirit.
When the last tree was behind them the fire led her through a sweeping plain of smog. The ground was stone and ash. Where it was cracked, smoke hissed up from beneath. Her eyes stung. Within seconds she could only see in watercolors. She nearly lost the flame in the miasma. She tried to will her eyes to clarity and failed. I don’t know how to tell you what it feels like, he’d mumbled to her once, lucid at dawn. I don’t know how to say it so you won’t think less of me.
The smoke thickened. She cut off the memory and focused. Hours passed.
When she could see again, what she saw was cobalt sky broken up by leaves. She wiped her eyes. It was sunrise. The leaves hung low from the branches of a weeping willow.
Before her stood her car.
The fire was wisps now, fading out.
‘You said you’d take me to him.’
‘I took you where you wanted to go. He’s safe, he’s warm; we’re kind to him, and patient. Go back to your life. You don’t belong here.’
The first true sunlight broke. The fire vanished. She looked a minute for the path they’d taken there, but found none. She got in the car and turned on the heat. She wondered how long it’d be before she let herself go home.
THE END