you touch the rock, you won’t be lost anymore,” Tobin said. “You won’t ever be lost again. You’ll be redeemed. Isn’t that nice?” He absentmindedly removed the black feather that had been stuck to the corner of his mouth.
“No,” Cal said. “I don’t think it is. I’d rather stay lost.” Maybe it was just his imagination, but the buzzing seemed to be getting louder.
“No one would rather stay lost,” the boy said amiably. “Becky doesn’t want to stay lost. She miscarried. If you can’t find her, I think she’ll probably die.”
“You’re lying,” he said, without any conviction.
He might’ve inched a half step closer. A soft, fascinating light had begun to rise in the center of the rock, behind those floating stick figures—as if that buzzing tungsten he could hear was embedded about two feet beneath the surface of the stone and someone was slowly dialing it up.
“I’m not,” the boy said. “Look close and you can see her.”
Down in the smoked-quartz interior of the rock, he saw the dim lines of a human face. He thought at first he was looking at his own reflection. But although it was similar, it wasn’t his. It was Becky, her lips peeled back in a doglike grimace of pain. Clots of filth smeared one side of her face. Tendons strained in her throat.
“Beck?” he said, as if she might be able to hear him.
He took another step forward—he couldn’t help himself—leaning in to see. His palms were raised before him, in a kind of go-no-further gesture, but he could not feel them beginning to blister from whatever was radiating from the stone.
No, too close, he thought, and tried to fling himself backward but couldn’t get traction. Instead his heels slid, as if he stood at the top of a mound of soft earth giving way beneath him. Only the ground was flat; he slid forward because the stone had him, it had its own gravity, and it drew him as a magnet draws iron scrap.
Deep in the vast, jagged crystal ball of the great rock, Becky opened her eyes and seemed to stare at him in wonder and terror.
The buzzing rose in his head.
The wind rose with it. The grass flung itself from side to side, ecstatically.
In the last instant, he became aware that his flesh was burning, that his skin was boiling in the unnatural climate that existed in the immediate space right around the rock. He knew when he touched the stone that it would be like setting his palms on a heated frying pan, and he began to scream—
—then stopped, the sound catching in his suddenly constricted throat.
The stone wasn’t hot at all. It was cool. It was blessedly cool, and he laid his face upon it, a weary pilgrim who has finally arrived at his destination and can rest at last.
⟵ ⟶
When Becky lifted her head, the sun was either coming up or going down, and her stomach hurt, as if she were recovering from a week of stomach flu. She swiped the sweat off her face with the back of one arm, pushed herself to her feet, and walked out of the grass, straight to the car. She was relieved to discover that the keys were still hanging from the ignition. Becky pulled out of the lot and eased on up the road, driving at a leisurely pace.
At first she didn’t know where she was going. It was hard to think past the pain in her abdomen, which came in waves. Sometimes it was a dull throb, the soreness of overworked muscles; other times it would intensify without warning into a sharp, somehow watery pain that lanced her through the bowels and burned in her crotch. Her face was hot and feverish, and even driving with the windows down didn’t cool her off.
Now it was coming on for night, and the dying day smelled of fresh-mown lawns and backyard barbecues and girls getting ready to go out on dates and baseball under the lights. She rolled through the streets of Durham, in the dull red glow, the sun a bloated drop of blood on the horizon. She sailed past Stratham Park, where she had run with her track team in high school. She took a turn around the baseball field. An aluminum bat clinked. Boys shouted. A dark figure sprinted for first base with his head down.
Becky drove distracted, chanting one of her limericks to herself, only half aware she was doing it. She whisper-sang the oldest one