He leaned his head back on the plush couch and he tried not to fall apart. He used all his self-control and all his learned avoidance to keep breathing and keep his synapses firing when he felt very seriously that he might stop living altogether. He felt disbelief at first, cold and unsteady, like the ice over a lake he hadn’t admitted was about to crack. Next was the despair, unyielding and incapable of transforming itself into a more tolerable emotion. This kind of despair could not become anger or self-loathing, it was just all-encompassing and inescapable sadness. The last thing his exhausted and stripped emotions could experience was fear. What would he do now? What could he possibly do other than look for her? He’d spent so long wandering and searching and convincing himself he’d keep looking if he couldn’t find her here. He knew he had to keep trying, but for the first time in any time he could remember he admitted something that mortified him to his core.
He didn’t want to.
He didn’t want to keep looking for her. He yearned and fought and ached more nights than not for her to just be there. He needed her there so much he physically couldn’t stop finding her, couldn’t stop following her, but good god he didn’t want to do it anymore. He wanted to lie facedown in the dirt until he became it. He wanted to throw himself into the waterfall and wash away forever, just so he wouldn’t be trapped between his need to keep going and his need to finally stop. It was killing him.
This endless search was killing him.
Finally, he felt nothing.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” He said softly, he couldn’t comfort the woman, he couldn’t even comfort himself outside accepting the unacceptable. Obviously, he was grateful she was alive, for her own sake, but an ugly part of him almost thought it was worse. It was almost worse than her just being dead, at least then he could fail without facing the unthinkable inevitability of actively giving up. He never wanted to give up on her, never thought he could, but he didn’t know how much farther he’d make it.
“It’s not a big deal…” Raven lamented. It was clearly a big deal. “I’m sure she’s fine.”
“I hope so.” Albert agreed, a new kind of fear spiking for the moment as he considered it. “I traveled half the country to come back here and…It’s not safe out there.” He voiced quietly. Raven looked up from the empty second can still in her hand at the sentiment.
“Half the country?” She asked. Albert thought it through, retracing his steps, and redoing his math. It was from Nevada to Pennsylvania…It was more than half actually.
“More than that.” He responded accordingly. Raven gave him a look that housed pity, a look he got often in Elsewhere where people knew him and wanted to help. A look he’d learned to hate.
“You really wanted her to be here.” She said knowingly. Albert didn’t argue, he had no reason to, and no shame in it.
“I did.”
“I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.” She said sincerely, and Albert felt a little silly. She’d lost her relationship with her daughter and she was apologizing to him? Over something he never even had? He wondered what Locust thought after he’d left, he wondered if she’d missed him at all.
“You can tell me…if she ever talked about me.” He said cautiously, not sure if he wanted the answer. “Did she miss me?”
“Oh of course,” Raven waved her hand at him. “She talked about you a lot, she used to write you letters.” She revealed. Albert blinked in interest.
“Letters?”
“Yeah, weird little poems of things she wanted to say, stuff she wanted to send, it was cute.”
“She..?” Albert tried to wrap his head around this unexpected yet incredibly wholesome addition to his reality. She’d thought about him, more than that.
She talked to him, even though he wasn’t there.
“She sent me letters? I never got any letters.” He said in confusion. He’d never had a fixed address, but his mother had gotten SNAP from somewhere. Maybe she had a PO box?
“Oh no, she never sent them, she buried them,” Raven replied, lighting a cigarette and offering one to Albert. This offer he accepted.
“Of course she did." He felt the oldest fondness he had at the information that fit her so well, “Why?”
Raven hesitated for a suspicious amount of time. She looked like she wanted to change the subject, or maybe even lie, but she just sighed.
“You left so suddenly, and she kept asking me difficult questions when kids she liked would leave the commune,” Raven said evasively. “She wanted to know why and I’d say their parents took them away. She wanted to know if we could call the police on the parents, or kill them…and I? What do I??” She asked the air. She took a thoughtful drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke out in a huff.
“So…what did you tell her?” He asked, trepidation lacing the question.
“About you?” She laughed. “She was a weird kid, she’d always hated the ‘ran away to a farm’ thing with pets.” She once again didn’t directly answer the question. Albert’s heart started beating faster with another worry he’d never considered. He was encountering so many of those.
“You told her where I went, right?”
“I just told her you died.” Raven sighed finally, unwilling to beat around the bush anymore. “Trust me, she took that better than she would’ve taken the truth.”
Albert stared at Raven. Not at the floor or the wall or his knees, but right at the woman. A stare of disbelief. A stare of betrayal.
All that time he’d had hope of seeing her again, she’d never had that.
“What’s wrong with you?” It was an involuntary whisper, he didn’t know if he meant it, he’d said it without thought.
“Don’t give me that.” She defended herself tiredly as if she’d done it many times before. “Who knows what she would’ve done if she’d known you just up and left?” She asked rhetorically. Albert didn’t know what she would’ve done, after so many years he could hardly picture her. He couldn’t picture what someone so strange and independent and unafraid would’ve done if she’d known he was out there.
Run away, come looking for him, things crazy kids did.
“I hope she’s ok.” He repeated the sentiment from earlier, still worried, still wondering.
“So what now?” Raven asked, and he was pulled from his thought spiral. Albert had asked himself that question a hundred times. What would he do now that this happened? He’d had the answer ready for so long, but he couldn’t say it. He hadn’t expected he’d be so lost and beaten when the time to make this decision came.
“I don’t know.” It was the most honest thing he could say. “I can’t…I can’t not go find her. That's all I know how to do.” He said shakily, well aware Raven didn’t have the context to understand everything behind the sentiment. She hummed, putting a foot on the coffee table.
“You could wait for her to come back.” She suggested.
Albert’s eyes went very wide.
The endless grinding and scraping of discordant thoughts and reasonings came to a halt in his head and slotted seamlessly into place. They fit next to each other, frictionless, like they’d been made to sit together.
Maybe if he waited in Elsewhere…
He wanted her to wait, even though he’d known her wish that night was to see the world, he wanted her to be here waiting for him to come back for her. Maybe that role in the story was never hers, maybe it was his turn to rest, his turn to wait. He didn’t know where she was, or how long she’d be gone out there in the big world, but Raven was here. If any part of Locust wanted to see her mother again, she’d come back. If any part of Locust wanted to see Elsewhere again after she saw everything else there was to see, she’d come back. Albert would die if he went back out looking for her, he was almost dead already, but he could wait.
For his Locust, he could wait forever.
“I…could…wait here,” He repeated back to Raven as the idea settled in his mind. The elegant excuse, the perfect reason to rest his weary self where he had a safe place to sleep and assurance that he was doing the best thing he could do to see her again.
It was…peaceful. Peace wasn’t something Albert had ever known, but he knew it now as he felt the relief wash over him. He didn’t realize how much he needed to give up, to find a way to justify not forcing himself to suffer for her. He put palms to his eyes as he rested his head in his hands, and with relief and mild mortification, he realized his face was wet.
The crying was completely silent, and he hadn’t felt it happen over the expression of everything else in his chest. He turned away from the couch, unwilling to let someone see him crying against his will for the second time ever in his adult life. He stood suddenly, still not facing Raven, and asked as steadily as he could.
“Can I use your bathroom?”
“Uh…” Raven sounded concerned by his behavior, but he couldn’t see her. “Sure, just off the hallway by the water heater.” She instructed. He nodded politely and hustled away before he could become any more obvious.
After Albert got ahold of himself in the bathroom, he left Raven his information and told her to let him know when she heard from Locust again, and with that, he left. He was grateful for her council, but he didn’t want her to start asking him questions, the ones that kept ruining people's lives. He’d spent the last few days establishing himself in the town of Elsewhere, and with that came the routine sacking of his woods by the local kids. When Jim and Eleanor had told him about the vandalism, he’d thought it was something infrequent. Something kids did once before learning better and staying away. Albert found as the nights grew in number that that was not the case. He learned that the kids treated his tentative home like a sort of ‘place to be’. Albert would hear them as he collected cans from behind buildings and inside storm drains, discussing the hangout spot of choice for the evening. Should they bother the 7/11 that was open all night? Maybe deface the water tower? Or should they wander into the woods of the old commune? Apparently, his woods were the go-to place if you wanted to spend time somewhere outside GEPD jurisdiction. You went there to prove your gumption, or to impress girls. They said it was haunted.
Albert didn’t know where they got that, he only knew the woods to be peaceful. Perhaps it was more common than he thought to be afraid of the dark.
He spent his days counting the kids he heard planning to brave the woods and he spent his nights making them never want to do so again. It was interesting how little it took to scare those who already expected to be scared. Frightening teenagers with wicker balls he’d learned to weave as a child, filled with walnuts so they made rattling sounds in the wind and suspended ominously from branches like blair-witch symbols. Filling their shoes with cicada shells when they weren’t looking and shocking them with homemade traps and homemade cunning. It was fun. Something he’d largely learned to live with throughout his life of endless traveling and working to travel more was how boring it was. He had no books to read, no people to spend time with, no projects to complete, or studies to pursue. He was dreadfully bored and he found his tormenting of the local kids to be wildly entertaining.
It was something to do while he waited.
He never lost sight of that, he was waiting. He couldn’t possibly lose sight of waiting for her when he still, persistently, mercilessly, saw her everywhere. Her posture was there as he stared down at the children he messed with from the roof of his lean-to, like a bird ready to strike at the water. Her pride in victory was there when he saw a trap succeed, dropping several days worth of gathered cobwebs from the trees and making the girls scream and run for the trails. He felt her friendship in his laughter as he watched them the next day, regaling their friends with the harrowing story of evil spirits and wicked woodlands that was caused by some ghost of a commune that no longer stood. Albert didn’t understand how a commune could be a ghost, but if it kept kids from sneaking onto private land and setting fire to the tails of innocent raccoons, then he was happy.
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