Down a Lost Road Read Free

was going, and before he disappeared from the porch
light he turned to say something to me. I never got to ask him
what. Only the rumble of his mellow voice cut through the
shattering rain, his dark eyes sad and regretful, and then he was
gone.
    I’ve never stopped waiting for him to
return. It didn’t matter what the cops said, or how they called a
halt to everything, all at once, as if on cue. I remember the day
Officer Jankins took my mom aside. The apologies, the tears. The
reporters with bulky cameras trying to invade the sadness of our
house, the neighbors sending cookies, the university’s condolences.
No one whispered, no one spread rumors – none at least that I
heard. They just gave up. Everyone did, except Damian and me. We’d
made a pledge never to give up hope, and we never did, even though
the years had blunted the pain. Sometimes I think my mom didn’t
either, though she wore the mask of acceptance for the rest of the
world to see.
    My heart ached and the room blurred, but I
blinked away the tears and pulled the coin out of my pocket. I kept
staring at my father’s picture. Part of me didn’t really want to
look at the coin. I just had this feeling that it wouldn’t be
anything special. Maybe Mr. Dansy had given me an old arcade token
or something equally chintzy as a joke, even though Mr. Dansy had
never done anything like that before. And my whole morning of
mindless terror would turn out to be just that – mindless. All
worked up over nothing.
    I desperately wanted it to be something more
exciting. If I’d been a bit younger, it wouldn’t have mattered if
the thing were just a bit of junk. I still would have
pretended it had strange magical properties – something that
hypnotized viewers, probably, and evoked strange whispers from dark
corners in the room. I’d always had too active an imagination. But
here I was, sixteen, too old for make-believe and too young to be
bored with the tedious sameness of life, day after day.
    I dreaded disappointment.
    Finally I sighed and uncurled my fingers,
holding the palm of my hand under the pool of warm golden light.
For a solid minute I sat and stared. The object was a small circle,
about the size of a silver dollar, cast from some heavy,
dull-sheened metal that looked like bronze. In the center the metal
twisted in a complicated knot, kind of like the Celtic necklace
Maggie always wore. All along the knot were the tiniest, strangest
letters I had ever seen, but the endless knot made it impossible to
tell where the words began and where they ended. Or maybe they
weren’t normal words meant to be read in the normal way at all.
Maybe you could just grasp the meaning, the way you sometimes
suddenly just know something.
    I pressed my fingers over it and thought I
felt the metal pulsing between my fingers, like the ground does
under my bare feet before a thunderstorm. I half expected to see it
glowing when I opened my hand. It only went on glinting coldly, the
soft lamplight shining a bit on the bumps, but swallowed in flat
shadow in the crevices. It seemed so unspectacular, but it was the
most curious, wonderful, terrifying thing I had ever held.
    And suddenly I remembered that I had seen it
before.
     

     

Chapter 2 – Discovery
     
    I stared at the coin, racking my brain for
some hint of a memory. I had this strange certainty that I’d seen
it in my mom’s room. First I checked her jewelry boxes, then the
bookshelf and the tidy drawers of her nightstand. No luck. Maybe I
was just imagining things. Maybe I was going crazy. I sighed
and turned to the wall photos, making my usual pilgrimage around
the room before leaving. I could never go into Mom’s bedroom
without visiting all the different pictures. It always hurt, and
sometimes I avoided her room for just that reason.
    My first stop was the photo of Dad bending
over me just after my birth. I always loved the look on his face,
so caring. The same picture was in my baby album, but there Dad