Page 29 of The Midnight Hour
Not this family, he thinks. He can just about handle the strangers—even the pale faces he saw strapped into stretchers, as God-awful as that was—but these good people, who helped him, who only wanted to live a good, simple life? No. Not them.Not them, his mind cries out, a prayer, a rant.Not them, God.
“Dad?” Sam asks uncertainly, and Daniel’s gaze moves slowly around the kitchen. A broken jar of applesauce on the floor, oozing out. A cupboard door nearly wrenched off its hinges. A pot in the sink, maybe the same from which he’d been served stew. A baby’s spoon, left on the highchair. He picks it up, wrapping his roughened fingers around it, and then drops it again, with a clatter.
“Dad,” Sam says again.
“I’m going to look upstairs,” Daniel says. He hesitates and then adds, a command, “Stay here.”
Sam, looking troubled and more than a little scared, nods. “Okay.”
Slowly, his footsteps now heavy, Daniel mounts the stairs. He’s afraid of what he might find, but he knows he needs to look. He steels himself for the worst, but the bedrooms—small and spare—are empty. In the master bedroom, the covers are half-pulled off the bed, the drawers left open, although still with some clothes in them, neatly folded and smelling of soap. Noah and Hannah’s rooms are the same—a mess, drawers yanked out, covers off the bed.
Were they pulled from bed? Daniel wonders. He can almost picture it—their rumpled hair, the look of sleepy confusion on the children’s faces. Were they made to dress, marched out to a truck? Why? In God’s name,why? And when—yesterday? The day before? One or the other, because before that Daniel was here and it had been safe.
In the baby’s room, the mobile that would have once hung over the crib is on the floor, broken in brightly colored pieces. He sees a rocking chair by the window, an old-fashioned one with a hand-crocheted blanket draped over the back. Daniel can almost imagine Abby there, a sleepy Isaac draped over one shoulder. He didn’t even know these people, not really, but they’d felt like family. They’d reminded him, briefly, that he was human, that he was good. Or at least, trying to be good. Wanting to.
He feels so far from that man now.
He takes a step into the room, and that’s when he sees it. The grubby blue blanket baby Isaac had held just two days ago,with a bunny’s head fashioned out of one corner. It’s under the crib, and, when Daniel stoops to pick it up, running the worn fleece between his fingers, he sees it is spattered with blood.
A sound escapes him, more of a sigh than a sob—an understanding, an acceptance. They didn’t leave willingly. He sinks into the rocking chair, still holding that little piece of beloved blue fabric in his hands. He stares down at it, bowing his head as if in prayer, but his mind is blank. He can’t think anymore. He can’t let himself think. He rubs the fabric between his fingers like it’s a talisman, the last thing anchoring him to who he was, who he wanted to be.
It isn’t until he feels the wetness dripping onto his shirt that he realizes he has been weeping, tears sliding slowly down the seams in his weathered face. He’s weeping for Tom and his family, wherever they are, dead or alive—and part of him hopes they’re dead rather than suffering—but he knows he is also weeping for himself. He’s lost some precious part of himself somewhere between Watertown and Clarkson, and he doesn’t think he will ever get it back. And maybe that loss was necessary, so he could make this journey. So he could bring back Sam. He had to close his eyes and his mind to the suffering of others, to the suffering hewould inflict, so he could keep his son safe. And the worst part is, he’s almost certain that that trade-off has barely begun. They still have over two hundred miles to go, and Daniel has no idea how they’re going to manage it, not without making more than a few Faustian bargains along the way.
“Dad?”
He looks up to see Sam standing in the doorway of the nursery. “Nobody’s here…are youcrying?” He sounds horrified.
“I’m just tired.” Daniel wipes his face as he feels a familiar hardness settle inside of himself. “It’s been a long couple of weeks, and I haven’t slept in a while.”
“Yeah.” Sam hesitates. “There’s some food in the pantry.Not much, but some. And there’s a truck outside. I found the keys. It looks pretty beat-up, but we could take it maybe? That is, if no one’s here…if they’re not coming back…” He trails off uncertainly, clearly unsure how to gauge Daniel’s mood.
He can still feel the dampness of tears on his cheeks. Take Tom’s truck, eat his food. It feels painfully wrong, and yet also weirdly right. This can be Tom’s gift to them. His saving grace. Daniel nods slowly. “That could be good.”
“Do you think it’s safe to stay here?”
Is it safe anywhere? “I think we need to stay here for a little while,” Daniel says in a tone of finality. He needs to rest, eat, make a plan. He’s too tired now, too weary in both body and spirit, to keep forging ahead. If he does, he’ll make mistakes, and those could be costly. Costlier than he even wants to imagine. “We’ll rest for a day or two,” he continues. “Figure out what to do.”
Sam stands in the doorway and eyes him uncertainly; Daniel feels as if he can’t move from this chair. Slowly, everything in him aching, he rises. “Let’s have a look at that food in the pantry.”
Downstairs, he moves around the kitchen, opening cupboards, finding various cans and jars. He pauses, a jar of raspberry jam in his hand, a woman’s neat writing on the front, telling him it was bottled last summer. He imagines the moment—Abby and the children picking fat, red raspberries in the garden, their laughter carrying on the breeze. He can see her standing by the stove, just as she had been when he’d come here two days ago, stirring a pot, the heat flushing her face. He grieves for this family in a way that is unnatural yet still a deep-seated instinct; he is afraid he has already lost his own.
To his amazement, there’s enough food in the pantry for at least a few days’ meals, as well as propane for the stove. With the truck out back and the clothes upstairs, they should, Daniel realizes, be okay, at least in terms of supplies. He wants to begrateful to Tom, but he feels too sad; it’s like a dragging weight, turning every action, every little movement, laborious.
And yet, they eat, and that is a small miracle. After nearly twenty-four hours without food, they’re both starving, and he and Sam both wolf down plates of rice and canned beans as if it’s a gourmet meal. After doing the dishes—somehow, even in the midst of the empty devastation of the house, this feels important—Daniel decides to do a deeper explore, even though it feels invasive somehow, as if he’s violating the family’s privacy. He doesn’t want to be, and yet he knows he needs to…for Sam’s sake.
And so he goes through the house methodically; he opens drawers and riffles through cupboards, finds a flashlight beneath the sink and braves the cobwebby depths of the basement. Sam follows him around at first, but then he gets bored when all Daniel finds is the detritus of a once-normal life—bills to be filed, folded laundry, Scotch tape and a stapler, sixty empty Mason jars in a cardboard box.
While Daniel continues his methodical exploration, Sam retreats to a sofa in the living room, flipping through someOld Farmer’s Almanacs by the dim beam of a flashlight. Outside the night is still and silent under a cold, wintry moon.
Daniel is looking for guns, but he doesn’t find any, and that makes him nervous. It seems that whoever came and took Tom and his family away was more interested in weaponry than food. It’s a disquieting thought, and surely the only conclusion he can draw, because he’s pretty sure that a man like Tom—he doesn’t even know his last name—would own at least one rifle. He was—is—a farmer in upstate New York. He had to have hadsomething.
Still, Daniel finds other things that are helpful—matches, a flashlight, dried beef jerky, warm sweaters, two decent pairs of boots. They will be vulnerable without a gun, but at least theywon’t be entirely unprepared. He stacks all the provisions in the kitchen, and then goes to find Sam.
His son is sitting on the sofa in the living room, the flashlight turned off, the room dark, so Daniel can barely make out his face. He comes in and sits opposite him, in an armchair that lets out a creaky little sigh as he lowers himself into it.
“I was thinking,” Sam says after a moment, his voice far away. “How we went camping, once.”
Daniel blinks at him in the gloom; he can’t actually remember when they went camping.
