The Distant Dead Read online

  Dedication

  For my brother, Matthew Lewis Young

  1971–2002

  Epigraph

  Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.

  —George Eliot

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Long Ago

  Yesterday

  Nora

  Jake

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Nora

  Jake

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Jake

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Untitled

  Nora

  Sal

  Jake

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Jake

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Nora

  Sal

  Untitled

  Sal

  After

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Heather Young

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Long Ago

  The boy shouldn’t have been in the cave. He knew this. He was a good boy, the sort of boy who cared about shoulds and shouldn’ts, but the thrill of this particular shouldn’t made him feel like a different sort of boy, the sort of boy he wished he were. It was why he was there. The air outside the cave was wavy with late-summer heat, but the air inside was cool, and on his tongue it tasted of dust and daring. He was twelve years old, and he was alone for the first time in his life.

  The cave was some distance from where his people made their camp by the great lake, but they could see it, a black eye in a cliff that surveyed the wide, flat basin. They came to this shore every few seasons, following rabbits and other small game through the wetlands. In their stories the cave was a place that drove men so mad that they returned from it unable to speak, even the seers, who lived mostly in dreams. There was a seer among them now, a bent old man who had visited the cave the summer the boy was born. The boy kept his distance from him, as all the boys did, but he watched as the old man spent long, wordless hours drawing circles in the dirt. Sometimes the seer looked up from his tracings, and in his bottomless black eyes the boy thought he saw not madness or terror but something like awe.

  As he stood at the mouth of the cave, the boy marveled at the earth stretched wide below him. The grasses close to the lake gave way to low brush at the feet of the rocky bluffs that rose above the basin floor like blisters. The lake itself was vast, a blue sheet vanishing into the shimmering sky to the north and east. His people called it Allelu, which in their language meant “water of life.” Ten thousand years later a different people, half the world away, would make allelu a song of praise. By then the great lake would be gone, leaving a flattened desert in its wake. Above the boy’s head an eagle soared, black against the sky, a beautiful, wild thing that would be dead before the season was done.

  The boy was beautiful, too, with a face as delicate as a girl’s, and long-lashed brown eyes. He was his mother’s only child to live past the suckling years. Like her other babies he had been sickly and small, and even now he was slight, but unlike his brothers and sisters he had latched his translucent lips fast to her breast and would not let go. Now he was a singer of songs and a teller of stories, with a voice even the elders hushed to hear around the fire.

  Tonight the elders would anoint the boy a man, together with two other boys born in the same season, but the boy didn’t feel like a man. He saw the arcing muscles of the other boys’ arms and the proud bones hardening in their faces, and believed himself to be a child. He heard them talk about the hunts they would join and knew himself to be afraid of the wild boar and the charging mastodon. He didn’t see how the elders listened when he read the stars, or how the other boys looked at him when they spoke, to see what he thought. He saw only how far short of the other boys’ his stone fell when he threw it in the lake, and how far behind them he ran.

  He had come to the cave because, in the last hours of his boyhood, he wanted to do something brave. So in the lazy part of the afternoon, while his mother slept on the dirt floor of their shelter, he ran through the grass to the foot of the cliff and climbed until the eye in the rocks became a mouth. Now he took one last look at the bright curve of the world and walked inside.

  The air was suddenly cold. The ceiling was low, the walls barely visible in the dark. A fine dust, bat guano mixed with sand the wind blew in, sifted over the boy’s rough tule sandals. He moved slowly, braced for the visitation that had struck the old seer dumb, but found only silence. After twenty halting steps he had reached the back of the cave. Still nothing disturbed the cool, dead air. He put his hands on the stone and waited for it to speak to him, but it said nothing.

  Then, in the ghost-edge of daylight, the boy saw a narrow opening, the width of his arm and half as high, where the wall met the floor. He looked back to the cave’s mouth and the bright blue disk of sky. He knew he should leave now. His mother would be awake soon and calling for him. But the cave, after the trouble he’d taken to get here, was a disappointment. He turned from the sky and crawled into the crevice.

  It was narrow, but there was enough room for him. He shimmied forward on his elbows, the rock cold and sharp against his skin, his nerves tingling with the thrill of exploration. He’d gone the length of his body when the thrill gave way to panic. The dull weight of the cliff pressed down and the tunnel felt like a noose about to tighten. He was a child of open space and unbroken sky, and his mind screamed at him to go back to the air and the light. He closed his eyes and breathed slowly, in and out. Then he forced himself to push on, a few inches at a time. At last, after he’d crawled three times his length, he felt the tunnel expand around him. He opened his eyes and rose to his feet, his arms outstretched, feeling for purchase and finding none. Then he froze, stunned into stillness.

  The darkness was absolute, and the silence was deeper still. The boy had never experienced such an utter absence of light and sound. He could not see his hand in front of him, and he could not hear his own heart beating.

  Without warning, he lost his body. His mind flooded beyond his skull, his spirit came untethered from his bones, and he was floating among eons he’d never imagined, ages beyond number. The lives of men and women winked past by the billions, bright sparks flaring and gone. The seasons of his own life vanished, unremembered. He saw the entire chasm of time: the births of planets and suns, the surging of mountains and seas, and the rise and fall of civilizations like heartbeats in a darkness that was the beginning and ending of everything, the womb and crypt of the world. His terror was beyond measure.

  He reached out his hands, grasping at the dark, and invisible, sharp-edged crystals scraped his palms. The pain snapped him back into his body. He was a twelve-year-old boy again, breathing ragged breaths in the dry air of a cave. He touched his face, his trembling fingers tracing the bones of his nose, the soft skin of his cheeks. He thought of the old seer, and the circles he drew in the dirt. Had he, too, stood here, in the cave within the cave, while his spirit rose up to meet the universe? The eternity the boy had glimpsed brushed his arm with fingers of cold gossamer, and he shivered.

  He drew in a long, slow breath and called his voice forth. It came in a whimper, but it came, and it brought wit
h it a hot surge of triumph. He, alone of all the seers who had come before him, would return to his people to tell them the secrets of the cave. He imagined himself at the campfire that night, the blood of the eagle still wet on his forehead, describing the vastness of time while the other boys watched in awe and the old seer squatted on his haunches, the memory of it lighting his eyes.

  He shouted, a crow of joy. The sound echoed through a dozen unseen caverns as though hundreds of boys were calling to one another. This made him laugh, and the laughter, too, bounced back to him a hundredfold. When the reverberations faded he turned toward the tunnel. It was time to return to his mother; to the hearth and the cooked rabbit that awaited him, and the ceremony that would mark him a man.

  He heard a stirring in the dark.

  Restless. Gathering. Alive.

  The boy listened, one hand on the wall above the tunnel. The stirring became a mutter, then a high whine, rising from somewhere deep in the cave. The smell of cold stone yielded to the stench of something else, something ancient and feral. The boy groped for the tunnel, but it was too late. A swarm erupted around him. Thousands of small, dense bodies beat against his upraised arms, pummeling him with hair and teeth and leathery wings as they circled the tunnel. The boy screamed for his mother, but his voice vanished in the shrilling. He stumbled backward, one blind step, then another, until the earth disappeared beneath him.

  The bats took no notice of him. They poured through the tunnel, out of the cave, and into the day, their eyes stabbed by light and their brains aflame with fear. In the harrowing radiance of afternoon they crashed into one another, as unmoored by light as the boy had been by darkness. From the shore of the lake their terror was invisible; they seemed to float upon the sky, as graceful as birds.

  That night, by the lake Allelu, two boys became men. Before the ceremony, the old seer spoke for the first time in twelve summers. The missing boy had been taken by the bird gods, he said. It was a great honor. The people rejoiced, but the boy’s mother wept.

  In the autumn the boy’s people moved on, tracking their prey south. Years passed. The boy’s mother died. The boys who became men died. Within a dozen generations the boy’s people were replaced by another people, born of the same distant land but with different gods and other names for the places the boy had known. More years passed, and another people replaced them, then another, and another. Allelu, allelu. Through it all the cave’s round, blank eye watched from the bluff, its darkness clenched like a fist around the boy who once sang songs and told stories and read the stars and who, one afternoon while his mother slept, climbed a cliff and touched the fabric of time.

  His name meant nothing in the language of his people. But to his mother, it meant “beloved.”

  Yesterday

  There was no moon, only stars. Below them lay the flat land. Lights shone there, too, in scattered handfuls: streetlamps and headlights and the small square windows of houses. High above them, in the hills that once rimmed the lake, a fire burned. It leaped and played among the acacias, golden, laced with orange, and black at its heart. It danced for a long time, this fire did, singing its fevered song to the night.

  It takes longer than you might think, for a man to burn.

  Nora

  The day they found the math teacher’s body, Nora was late to work. It was her father’s fault.

  The morning started like any other. After she ate breakfast she carried her father’s tray across the backyard to his camper, stepping around the sandbox he’d built for her brother when Jeremy was five. After thirty-two years in the desert sun the sandbox’s wooden frame was rotten and the sand where Jeremy once drove his Tonka trucks was crusted with bird shit. Nora knew she should take it out, but she also knew she wouldn’t. Most days she didn’t even see it.

  Her father’s camper was a 1990 Fleetwood Prowler, white with faded teal-and-brown trim, that he’d bought used when Nora was ten and Jeremy was thirteen. He’d been proud of it in the good-humored way he’d been proud of everything then, from his barbecue grill to his athletic son to his pretty auburn-haired wife. He’d never been farther from home than Elko, where his brother lived, but now that he had the camper he was going to drive his family all over the country, maybe as far as Florida. Nora’s mother’s smile was as dreamy as a child’s. Florida, she’d said. Just imagine.

  That summer he drove them to Yellowstone. The park itself was a blur of neon-colored pools, but Nora never forgot how it felt to leave Nevada for the first time. Idaho hadn’t looked any different—scrubby desert, rolling hills—but when she saw the welcome to idaho sign something inside her opened. She loved that they would go somewhere else the next summer, and the summer after that, every trip widening the world a little bit more.

  But that fall Nora’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, and they never took the camper anywhere again. After she died, during Nora’s freshman year of high school, Nora assumed her father would sell it, but he didn’t, and while Nora was away at college it had migrated here, to the back fence. Since the accident it was where he lived, even though he still had his bedroom in the house. Nora had never questioned this arrangement, figuring it was part of some complicated penance only he understood.

  She walked up the makeshift plywood ramp and opened the camper door to find him sitting at the banquette table in his undershirt and pajama bottoms. He hadn’t shaved, and when Nora saw this a thin band tightened around her forehead. The days he didn’t get dressed were bad. The ones he didn’t shave were worse.

  She set the tray on the table—Wheaties, toast, and coffee—and put her hands on her hips. She had a tall, angular body, with long limbs and sharp elbows. She’d been a frilly girl, all tutus and spangles, then a teenaged beauty in Daisy Dukes and halter tops, but now she was a woman who didn’t make a fuss: crisp khaki pants and a plain blouse, hair in a ponytail, no makeup.

  Her father stared at his breakfast, and Nora knew he wouldn’t eat it. She told herself she didn’t care. She had to be at the school in fifteen minutes; she didn’t have time for this. But when she reached the door she stopped. Through the worn screen she saw the back of their small ranch house, its white siding gone a ruddy gray. Her father’s rusted Weber and the empty planters where her mother used to grow tomatoes sat on the cracked cement patio, and the fenced yard was bald except for clutches of weeds in the corners. It all looked the same as it had yesterday, and the day before that, but for a moment Nora saw it the way it had been when she was a girl, with pansies along the fence, tomatoes in the boxes, the siding a crisp white. Even a few years ago there had been grass. She couldn’t think when the last blade had died.

  Her father coughed a sodden, weepy cough. Nora took a steadying breath, then turned around. In the light from the window his blue eyes were watery. She sat on the vinyl seat and put her arm around him. “How about I come home for lunch today?”

  “You don’t have to,” he said, but of course he wanted her to. Nora didn’t know what had set him off. A dream, maybe, or a memory. What was the date? March 14. It sounded familiar. It wasn’t the anniversary of anything she could think of, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t the anniversary of something.

  “It’s no trouble. I’ll heat up the pot roast.”

  Usually Nora’s father defrosted a Stouffer’s in the camper’s microwave for lunch. He brightened at the thought of the pot roast, and she promised to be home at twelve fifteen. Then she had to reheat his coffee, because it had gotten cold, promise twice more to come home for lunch, and take the pot roast out of the freezer. When she grabbed her car keys it was five to eight. She drove too fast down Franklin, but it was still four minutes past the bell when she ran through the double doors of the middle school, feeling like her seventh grade self, dashing late into this same building, her face hot with the same shame she’d felt then.

  When the math teacher didn’t show up, nobody thought much about it at first. Dee Pratzer, the office secretary and emergency substitute teacher, covered his first period class w
ith her usual aggrieved competence. Between first and second period Mary Barnes, the science teacher, stopped by Nora’s social studies classroom and said, with a hint of malice, “Adam’s late. I wouldn’t want to be him when Dee gets hold of him.”

  Adam Merkel had never been late before, but he’d only been teaching at the middle school for seven months, the replacement for old Jim Pfeiffer, who’d finally retired. He was new to the town, too, which was unusual in itself. Lovelock was a sand-blasted hamlet of ranch houses, prefabs, and mobile homes strung along a mile of Interstate 80 a hundred miles east of Reno and seventy-five miles west of Winnemucca, surrounded by a desert so vast it ran into three neighboring states. Nobody moved there except divorced second cousins from Sparks with no place else to go and the occasional mine supervisor doing hard time on his way up the corporate ladder. When Adam applied for the job it had created a buzz: a professor from the University of Nevada wants to teach here! Think what that will do for the school’s test scores! But when he turned out to be a curled-up middle-aged man whom the students promptly named Merkel the Turtle, the buzz died away.

  “Has anyone called him?” Nora asked. She didn’t like Mary. Mary was a divorced, faded beauty who, thirty years and thirty pounds past her prom queen heyday, still acted like a bitchy high school girl. She’d circled around Adam when he first arrived, but Adam had been unmoved by her pushup bras and red-glossed lips no matter how many times she brought him coffee from the staff room. Now she lifted her shoulder in a who-cares shrug.

  “I imagine. Isn’t he throwing that party today?”

  That was when Nora started to worry about Adam, because that was when she remembered March 14 was Pi Day. 3.14, Adam had explained at last week’s staff meeting, was a national math holiday, and he was going to bring pies for all thirty-six eighth graders. The other teachers were surprised. They didn’t expect parties from Mr. Merkel. Or pie baking. Good for you, Nora had thought. In the hallway afterward, she told him it was a great idea.