Hugo & Rose (35 page)

Hugo's drawings fluttered down to the pink drift sand floor of Castle City. Pooling at the bases of the towers like windblown trash.

And the towers?

Rose pushed into the streets, reaching out to touch the wall of the nearest building.

It was flat. Painted plywood and two-by-fours. Like a stage flat in a high school play, it wobbled under her touch.

Rose's heart hurt.

There was never anyone in this city. Never anyone for them to rescue. It was a prop. A painted backdrop, cheaply made. Empty.

Hugo's drawings made flup-flup sounds as they freed themselves from one pile and flew to the next. Shuffling and unshuffling themselves by some unknown system of categories.

Rose walked through the city's pretend streets, her feet sifting through that ubiquitous pink sand. It threaded hotly through her toes, breaking small rivers across the tops of her feet. The same sand that could send her bounding into the air. The sand that had spewed in a nightmare from the mouth of her son. The sand that had claimed Hugo … or a part of Hugo.

She stared up at the backs of the towers, making out the joins and the couplings of MDF. The supports and the struts on their unpainted sides, reaching impossibly high.

Hugo's drawings went flup-flup. Flup-flup.

What the hell had it all been for? All these years. A lifetime of slumber spent trying to get to this ugly, vacant place.

Then she saw it. A brief flash of orange in the shadow of a tower.

The Orange Tastee.

Its fiberglass arms frozen midwave, dumping out into four-fingered white gloves. Jaunty blossom hat. Friendly leering wink. Battered screen in place of its teeth.

The speaker from the drive-through. First contact. The place where Hugo had first spoken to Rose in their waking lives.
What had he said?

“Are you okay?”

And she had thought,
No. I am not okay. Nothing about me is okay.

Rose felt like crying.

The Orange spoke. Hugo's voice. It was fuzzy, distorted by the speaker. She couldn't tell which Hugo was talking to her, young or old. But whoever it was, he was frightened. Pleading.

“Please, Rose. Please come out. I don't want to go in there.”

“There's nothing here, Hugo. There's never been anything here.”

“Please come out.”

“What is it that you don't want me to see?”

It was then that Rose saw it. The flat towers and sand of Castle City replaced in an instant, like a slide show moving on to the next frame.

Before her stood a little yellow house with gray shutters like eyelashes on its second-story windows. White trim eaves and a round shutter vent like an eye in the temple of its roof.

It sat on the bend of a flat river, brown, fast, and cold. The kind of place her father would call a trout river. A place for throwing rocks and icing beer in the elbow crook of a narrow valley. Gray-and-pink granite crags and pine reaches on either side. Just enough of both to keep the eye from lumping it all in one as “trees” or “rock,” but to keep it jumping, contrasting the softness of one with the hardness of the other. The air was rich with constellations of dandelion fluff. The seeds hovered, dancing above water, tumbling in the air before some unseen current swept them away.

The house was smartly distant from the banks of the river. Separated by an expanse of close-cut wild grass and a quartz rock drive. Everything covered in a dewy gloss of a summer rain, ceased momentarily. Though the sky above was still covered with a layer of tawny clouds, the sun was kneading its way through in spots … setting the white quartz pebbles and the scrub grass to sparkle for an instant whenever an insurgent beam touched the ground.

A pretty house. A pretty place. A pretty day.

This is what he didn't want me to see?
Rose took a step closer.

A small boat sat by the side of the house. A sportsman's boat. Modest battered aluminum, small outboard on its rear. Too tiny to merit a name. Next to it a faded yellow station wagon. Fake wooden paneling on its sides.

And farther out … closer to the river, on a patch made muddy by the rain, sat a boy.

A circumference of action figures around his hunched form. Some small towers of mud and rocks in a ring in front of him. A playground for his toys. Somewhere not too far off, someone had made a tent of weathered sheets and chairs, pinning the faded hems under the chair legs so that they would not blow away.

Rose recognized the place, though her view now was different.

She had seen this river and this driveway from one of those second-story windows. Seen Hugo's wife spin her tires, grinding away from him on this flat of land.

But now she was standing on the grass below. Standing above a child folded into a position she knew well … the pose of deep, concentrated play.

In the boy's hand was a Han Solo action figure. Loose white shirt, black vest. The toy was clearly well loved. Battle-scarred and bitten. Han Solo, the rogue hero. Rose smiled and took a step closer.

The boy looked up at her through a pair of Coke-bottle glasses, widening his eyes, the color of chocolate. And her heart stopped.

A screen door slammed and the boy looked away from Rose to the house. A man and a woman stood on the poured-concrete steps, relaxed smiles in the direction of the boy.

Ghosts from the water.

She in her marigold apron, stretched and tied above a high, pregnant belly. Brown hair swept into a shiny ponytail. Pretty and young.

And he with a mustache and easy smile. Sideburns and short shorts.

Hugo's parents.

And the boy … Hugo as a boy … as he really was. Not the version of him she knew in the dream. Not the one who had been chasing her across the landscape of the island, sending her nightmares. The real Hugo. As she had never seen him.

“Rose. Please. We need to leave.”

Rose pulled her eyes from the family toward the sound of his voice, and there he was … the other
real Hugo.
Waking Hugo. “David” Hugo. Overweight, wrinkled, graying Hugo. He of the face that had stopped her heart in the drive-through.

“What happened here?” Rose's voice was small.

He didn't answer her. He seemed lost in watching his father lift the lid of the charcoal grill, checking the heat. Rose could see the resemblance. Father and son … though Hugo was older by a decade than the man blowing air onto the coals.

His eyes tripped to his mother as she brought a thick slice of watermelon to the boy on the ground. “Only one piece now, to hold you until the burgers are ready. Okay, sweetie?” The boy nodded. He held out his action figure in exchange for the treat. An everyday exchange. The woman slipped the toy into the pocket of her apron and gave him the fruit. Kissed him on the forehead.

“Hugo, tell me.”

Hugo's eyes were fixed on the boy on the ground.

“It had been raining. For more than a week. It was summer. It finally stopped. I remember I was so happy. I was so tired of being stuck inside.”

Hugo's mother, headed back toward the house, slowed suddenly in her motion. She stopped, turning toward the river. There was an alertness about her, a slight shift in her demeanor. Lips pursed. Eyes searching.

Rose followed her line of sight.

The river was
changing
. Its level was swiftly starting to rise. Brown bubbles rolling, picking up speed, swelling the banks.

“I don't want to be here, Rose.” Grown Hugo watched as his mother walked out past the lawn, angling for a better view upriver.

And then they heard it.

A resounding crack echoing its way down the valley. An ugly snap.

On the ground, young Hugo jerked his head up. His father stepped away from the barbecue, his eyes on his wife.

“All the rain filled the reservoir too quickly.” Rose could hear the fear in Hugo's voice.

There was another crack.

And then a boom.

Rose felt the sound in her bones. The sound of the world ending. The sound of a planet torn apart.

Upriver, a wall of brown, churning water was racing, rising, toward them.

“A dam break.” Rose whispered it aloud even as she realized the truth of what was happening … what had happened.

Hugo's mother pivoted, falling back onto her heel and breaking into a run toward the house. Behind her the river was transforming into a rapid, suddenly loud, overboiling. She yanked the boy to his feet, roughly by the wrist, and the watermelon slice flew from his other hand and tumbled to the dirt.

The boy stumbled as she dragged him toward the steps of the house. Transfixed by the water.

Hugo was gone. Rose's eyes swept the ground for him, but he had disappeared. Gone and abandoned her to this viper of a memory. What would happen if she simply stood here on the banks of the river while the water overtook them? Would she wake up? Be swept to the shore of the island?

Rose didn't think so.

She beat a path to the house.

Hugo's father was holding the screen door for his young family. Yelling over the onslaught. Rose could just make out his words.

“I'm going to get the boat.”

She looked back at the tiny dinghy perched in a hauler at the side of the house.

No.

But then Hugo's mother was nodding and pushing her way into the house, her hand still wrapped around her son's wrist. Hugo's father turned, headed away from them. Away from the safety of the house.

Gray-brown water was fanning out from the banks of the river. An inch every three seconds. A rapid rise.

Rose tore herself away from the flood into the recesses of Hugo's childhood home. She saw Hugo and his young mother's feet at the top of a sensible wood staircase, thump, thump, thumping their way to the second floor. Rose threw herself up the steps, three at time, cresting the landing just behind them.

Through an open door, she saw where he had gone.

Waking Hugo. A grown man. More than grown, huddled on the
Star Wars
sheets of his childhood bed. Rocking himself for comfort. “We need to get out of here. We need to get out of here. We need to get out of here.” A mumbled whisper.

But he was a ghost to his mother, the pregnant beauty in the ponytail, who in two quick steps was at the window looking down.

Rose looked over her shoulder.

“Oh, my God.”

Below, Hugo's father was trying to lasso the dinghy's rope to the chimney of the house. The water already waist deep. He was bracing himself against the railing of their small porch. The cord fell short. Skittering off the bricks.

Hugo's mother turned from the window and ran into the hallway. Rose felt the boy step into her place at her side. Behind his glasses his eyes were angled upriver—

Where an impossible swell of water was cresting the bend. It looked unnatural. An ocean wave set loose in a little mountain valley.

“Hugo!”

The little boy turned away from the horror and ran toward his mother's voice in the dark hallway. Rose watched as the woman crouched so she could look at him eye to eye.

“Honey, I need you to reach it for me.”

It?
thought Rose. But then the woman was grabbing the little boy by the waist, bracing him against the baby in her belly. Lifting him. The boy reached toward the ceiling for—

The chain from the Plank Orb.
The thought jumped into Rose's mind unbidden.
Is it?

It was an attic access panel. A square door in the ceiling. A length of chain threading out of a small, circular bracket opening. The boy wrapped both hands around it (“Here we go!”) and pulled.

The door swung up.

“Now pull down the ladder, Hugo, my love.” Rose recognized the tone in the pregnant woman's voice. The mother tone. The “keep the child calm even though the world is coming apart” tone.

The ladder slid smoothly down past the boy's blank face.

“Up we go,” said his mother, forced cheer.

The house shuddered suddenly. A moaning complaint.

But the boy was climbing and his mother after him. Rose moved from the doorway to the top of the stairwell.

Below, the first floor was submerged beneath four feet of torpid water. Rose could make out the woven rug at the base of the stairs, like a manta on the ocean floor.

The only way to go was up.

The bed in Hugo's bedroom was empty. Had Hugo disappeared again? Or followed his mother and his other self into the attic?

Rose pulled herself up into the small space. The ceiling was low, maybe six feet at its peak. Errant rusty nails from the roof poked through at odd angles. It smelled of hot dust and spiderwebs.

A shuffling from the other side of the space drew her eye. Hugo's mother leading the little boy by the hand across a fluffy bank of pink insulation batting. They crouched as they made their way past the dark shapes of boxes and stored furniture. Toward the fractured light of the round shutter vent at the far end of the space.

“Now you stay here.”

Hugo's mother settled him against the wall. She pulled something from the pocket of her apron and handed it to him. His Han Solo.

“Now I'm going to go get Daddy and I'll be right back. Everything is going to be okay. You stay right here. Promise me?”

The little boy nodded. “I promise.”

“No!” a broken scream came from behind Rose. Real-life Hugo suddenly at her side, his face a mask of terror. “No!”

Hugo's mother kissed the boy's forehead. One last time.

“I love you forever.”

And then she was moving. Quickly, she covered the space between the boy who was her son and the man he would become.

She twisted her awkward body onto the stairs and stepped down into the water that had gathered on the second-story landing. She gasped as its coldness claimed her ankles. For a brief moment, she turned, facing the window visible through the door to Hugo's room. Her eyes full of whatever horror the water had washed up there. A hollow banging resounded, sending shivers through the walls of their home.