Penpal by Dathan Auerbach
She had moved us into a new house to protect my life, and she had kept all of these things a secret so that life might be a normal one. She had talked to the police; she knew now that she should have talked to Josh’s parents, but there was nothing to say anymore. As she sat there resting her back against Josh’s father’s, he spoke.
“I can’t tell my wife. I can’t tell her that our … that our little boy—” his speech staggered in fits as he pressed his wet face into his dirt-caked hands. “She couldn’t bear it …”
After a moment, he stood up, still shuddering, and lumbered toward the grave. With a final sob, he stepped down into the coffin and positioned himself over the dead man’s body. Josh’s dad was a big man, but not as big as the man in the box was; however, he seemed unable to grasp this fact. He grabbed the back of the man’s collar and pulled hard – it was as if he intended to throw the man out of the grave in a singular motion. But the collar ripped, and the body fell back down on top of his son. As this happened, what air remained in Josh’s lungs was violently forced out through his mouth, and the father shrieked as he both watched and heard his son’s last, empty breath.
“You mother fucker!”
He grabbed the man by the shoulders and heaved him back until he was off Josh completely. With one final, straining motion, he shoved the man until the body sat awkwardly but upright against the wall of the grave. Josh’s father rested his hands on his knees and breathed heavily and painfully as he looked down at his only son. He grunted with anger and turned his attention to the man, and my mother could see the rage disappear from his eyes as something else replaced it. He staggered back a step. And then another.
“Oh God … Oh God. No. No, please God. Please God no! No! No!”
In a struggling but powerful movement, he lifted and pushed the corpse of the man completely out of the ground, and as he did this, there was the distinct sound of glass first hitting and then rolling against wood. It was a bottle. He picked it up and absently handed it to my mother.
It was ether.
“Oh, Josh.” He sobbed as he cradled his son. “My boy …my baby boy. Why is there so much blood? What did he do to you?!”
As my mother looked at the man who now lay facing upwards, a chill came over her as she realized that she was facing, for the first time, the person who had haunted our lives for over a decade. Everything about our lives had changed since this person had entered it, and she had lost so much sleep thinking about this man. When she pictured him, whether in waking life or a dream, he was always evil and always terrifying; the cries of Josh’s father seemed to confirm her worst fears. But as she stared at his face, she thought that this didn’t look like who she imagined at all – this was just … a man.
As she looked upon his frozen expression, it actually looked serene. The corners of his lips were turned up only slightly; she saw that he was smiling. This wasn’t the expected smile of a maniac from a film or horror story; it wasn’t the smile of a demon, or the smile of a fiend. This was the smile of contentment or satisfaction. It was a smile of bliss.
It was a smile of love.
When she looked down from his face, she saw a tremendous wound on his neck from where the skin had been ripped out; she realized that this wound must have been the source of the blood that stained Josh’s face and the wood upon which his head rested. Initially, she was relieved by the realization that the blood had not been Josh’s. Perhaps he had suffered less, and in a strange way, this small comfort amidst the madness set her slightly at ease. She looked to Josh’s father who sat in the coffin, still holding his son to his chest, and wondered if she should tell him; she wondered if this tiny consolation was worth distracting him from his own thoughts, whatever they might be.
She drew her eyes away for a moment to think, and they lingered on the scraps of wood that lay scattered to one side of the hole – many of them still connected to a large, brown blanket. She recognized that these pieces of wood must have been the top of the box that Josh’s father had torn away before calling her. Her drifting eyes and wandering thoughts both suddenly focused on what she saw in the debris, and she realized that she had been wrong to hope for any comfort now, in this place. Her mind raced to make excuses for this object’s existence, but she was too tired to listen to anything but the truth anymore. She stared at the metal handle that was screwed into one of the boards of wood. She brought a hand up to her mouth and whispered, almost as if she was afraid to remind the world of what had happened.
“They were alive.”
Josh must have bitten the man’s neck in a desperate attempt to get free, and although the man had died, Josh wasn’t strong enough to move him. When my mother realized this, she began to cry at the thought of how long he might have laid there and how he must have felt. She shuddered at the thought that he wouldn’t have even been able to see in that dark place.
She crouched down beside the man and looked through his pockets for some kind of identification, but she only found a piece of paper. On it was a stick figure drawing of a man holding hands with a small boy, and next to the boy were initials.
She told me that the initials were mine. She asked me if I understood what it might mean, and I lied to her and said that I did not.
As Josh’s father carried his son out of the grave, my mom slid the piece of paper into her pocket and stood up. He was muttering that his son’s hair had been dyed, but he wasn’t talking to my mother; it seemed almost as if he had forgotten that she was there. When she looked at Josh, she understood what his father was saying – Josh’s hair was now dark brown, though it looked almost black as it clung to itself, cemented by blood.
Josh’s dad delicately laid his boy on the soft dirt and began gently pressing his hands against his son’s pants to feel his pockets. My mother noticed that Josh was oddly dressed; his clothes were all far too small for a boy his size. As the father applied pressure to his son’s left pocket, there was a crinkle. Carefully, he retrieved a folded piece of paper from Josh’s pocket and slowly unfolded it, not knowing what it might be. As he was returning the paper to its original shape, a small key fell from its folds and onto the dirt. He picked it up and looked at it as if he expected it to say something to him. After a moment, he pushed it into his front pocket before returning his attention to the paper.
He studied it but was vexed. With no immediately meaningful information to be gained from it, he handed the piece of paper to my mother. She nervously accepted it, but she didn’t recognize it either.
When I asked her what it was, she told me that it was a map, and I felt my heart shatter. Josh was finishing the map – that must have been his idea for my birthday present. He had resumed the expedition on his own. That was our first great adventure, and he had decided to finish it, for me …for us. Tears began streaming out of my eyes as I learned this, and I found myself desperately hoping that he hadn’t been taken while working on it. Despite everything that had happened, he had kept the map in his pocket for almost three years.
She heard Josh’s father grunt angrily and looked to see him pushing the man’s body back into the ground. As he walked back toward the machine that had found this spot for him, he put his hand on a canister of gasoline and paused with his back toward my mother.
“You should go.”
“I’m so sorry … Is there anything I can do?”
“It’s not your fault … It was me … I did this.”
“You can’t think like that. There was nothi—”
“I did this!” he roared.
There was silence for a long time. He seemed to be searching for the right words, or maybe he was just searching for a decision about whether he wanted to say them at all. Finally, he continued, his voice flat with almost no emotion at all.
“About a month ago, I was cleaning up the site on the new development, a block over, when a guy approached me. He asked if I wanted to make some extra money. Well, with my wife not working, I’d take just about any job, so I asked him about
“I thought this guy was a sucker since I knew clearing that lot was coming up for the crew I was on, so someone would’ve had to do it anyway; I actually felt bad for taking his money. It didn’t even look like he’d have $100, but he put the bill in my hand, and I did the job the next night. I’ve been so exhausted that I didn’t even think about it after it was done. I didn’t think about it …”
There was a long pause as he seemed to lose control of his voice.
“I didn’t think about it until today, when I pulled that same guy off of my son.”
He pointed at the grave, and his emotions finally broke free again as tears fell from his eyes and mucus from his nose.
“He paid me $100 so that I would bury him with my boy …”
It was as if saying it aloud forced him to accept what had happened, and he collapsed onto the ground in tears. My mother could think of nothing to say, so she stood there in silence for what felt like a lifetime as she tried to comprehend what he had just told her. She knew that he wouldn’t tell his wife about any of this. My mother knew that this would be the only time when he could reach out for any comfort at all. She knelt down and held him while he cried for his son.
Finally, she asked what he would do about Josh – where he would take him. But all he said was, “His final resting place won’t be here with this monster.” He rose and stepped delicately around his boy while he walked toward the grave with the canister of gasoline in his hand.
My mother left what used to be my old woods, but what was now just a mausoleum with no walls. As she looked back when she reached her car, she could see black smoke billowing and diffusing against the amber sky, and she hoped against all hope that Josh’s parents would be okay.
When my mother had finished her story, we sat in silence for a long time. I wanted to feel anger or agony, but I felt nothing but a hollow emptiness inside. As we sat there, I realized that Josh’s parents had called my mother when Josh went missing; she must have lied to them in the same way that she lied to me. Josh’s parents must still believe to this day that their son really ran away.
I stood up to leave. There was only one question that I had for my mother – only one thing I wanted to know from her, but she couldn’t answer it; I don’t know why I expected that she could. I left my mom’s house without saying much else. I told her that I loved her and that I would talk to her soon, but I don’t know what “soon” means for us now. I got into my car and left.
As I drove, that stupid riddle about going into the woods came back into my mind, and that was enough to make me feel again; I remembered Josh and me talking about it in those woods nearly half my lifetime ago. I cried so hard that I had to pull my car over, and I again asked the question that my mother had been unable to answer. I asked it aloud even though no one was around to answer it but me.
“Why Josh?”
It was supposed to be me. It had always been me. So why wasn’t it when it mattered the most? Why did I wake up in the winter woods when I was a child instead of being entombed in them? Why couldn’t it have stopped then, with me? But I’ll never know the answer to this question. I’ll never know why he just left me there. There’s no one I can ask now. Maybe he just couldn’t do it. He tried, but in the end, he was just too weak to take me.
As I sat there in my car on the side of the road, I struggled to breathe between my exhausted sobs. I collapsed on the steering wheel and whimpered that I wished that he had been stronger.
I understood now. As the story became clearer with each detail revealed through the conversations with my mother, I had watched the pieces all fall into place, but I still couldn’t understand why it had all stopped so long ago. Why it had all simply ended. Sitting in my car that night, I saw it all clearly for the first time. As an adult, I could see the connections that were lost on a child who tends to see the world in snapshots rather than as a sequence. The picture was complete, but I wished I had never seen it at all. I left the gas station and drove the rest of the way home, and thought – which is all that’s left for me to do anymore.
I think about Josh. I loved him then, and I love him even still. I miss him more now that I know I’ll never see him again, and I find myself wishing that I had hugged him the last time I saw him. I wish that he could have stayed at my birthday party longer that day – even if we didn’t say another word to one another, we could have just sat there. That would have been nice.
I think about Josh’s parents – how much they had lost and how quickly that loss had come. They were good people, kind people. The father had called my mother that terrible day so that she could keep me safe, but no one had called him to help him protect Josh. His parents don’t know about my connection to any of this, but I could never look them in the eyes now. We still live in the same town, and I worry every day that I’ll run into them somewhere. I find myself hoping that I don’t see them, and I feel sick when I have that thought.
I think about Veronica. I had only really come to know her later in my life, but for those brief few weeks, I think I had really loved her.
I think about my mother. She had tried so hard to protect me; she had done everything she could possibly do to keep me safe. She was stronger than I will ever be.
I think about what our lives might be like now if I had just let my balloon go with Chris’, or even a single second sooner or later than I did. Maybe someone else would have found it and everyone would be okay. Maybe I’d still have my friend and his parents would still have a son. Josh had been missing for almost three years – almost a fifth of his life. I try to pretend that I don’t know what the man might have done with Josh for all that time, just like I try to pretend that maybe Josh wasn’t in the passenger’s seat the night Veronica was hit. I find myself pretending a lot now.
But mostly, I just think about Josh. Sometimes I wish that he never sat across from me that day in kindergarten; that I’d never known what it was like to have a real friend. Sometimes I like to dream that he’s in a better place now, but that’s only a dream, and I know that. The world is a cruel place made crueler still by man. There would be no justice for my friend, no final confrontation, no vengeance; it’s been over for almost a decade now for everyone but me.
I miss you, Josh. I’m sorry that you chose me, but I’ll always cherish my memories of you.
We were explorers.
We were adventurers.
We were friends.
…the end will take care of itself.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Publishers Page
Acknowledgements
Kickstarter Supporters
Dedication
Intro Page
Memories
Quote
Footsteps
Balloons
Boxes
Maps
Screens
Friends
Closing
End
Dathan Auerbach, Penpal