Seth
Chapter 17: Return

“There. Now, that’s better, isn’t it?”

Jennifer stood back to admire her handiwork. The boy, who was still seated at the kitchen table, gazed back at her with large blue eyes. The overlong curls of hair had been neatly trimmed back from his forehead and he was dressed in clean clothes and shoes. Another plate of cookies sat before him but he was full again for the moment and contented himself with simply watching her and Tom as they moved about the kitchen making preparations.

Tom held up his phone and scrolled through the photographs he had just taken. There were six in all, and they showed various stages of Jennifer tenderly and lovingly trimming the boy’s hair so that it no longer hung in his eyes. He had watched her approach him with the scissors in hand, completely trusting in what she was about to do. Her hands had made quick work of the process, and Tom, for reasons he couldn’t quite explain, had felt compelled to capture the moment on film.

Jennifer didn’t even notice that he had done this, so intent on what she was doing. When she finished, she stepped back to ensure that the hair had been trimmed equally on all sides. A towel had been draped around the boy’s shoulders while she went about her work, and now the shorn locks lay upon it like silken threads. The hair was soft and fine like a baby’s, and given that he had only inhabited this form for a couple of days, that was unsurprising.

The boy smiled up at her and Tom marveled—perhaps for the hundredth time that morning—just what an extraordinary woman Jennifer was.

She smiled back and carefully folded the towel so that none of the hair fell onto his clothes. He was wearing an overly-big gray sweatshirt, too-long jeans with the cuffs rolled up, and sturdy hiking shoes with at least two pairs of thick socks underneath. She had added a green and black flannel shirt on top of the sweatshirt for added warmth, and the only jacket that would have come close to fitting him lay on the back of one of the kitchen chairs.

It was the jacket Seth had worn on that final afternoon when he had gone off exploring on his own, when he hadn’t come home and Jennifer’s world had changed forever. It had been his favorite, and when Tom had found him he had been wearing it still, his pockets empty save for a single rock specimen that he had collected that day.

Jennifer knew she should have donated it by now along with the rest of Seth’s other belongings, but now she couldn’t help but feel that there had been a deeper reason other than sentiment or mourning which had compelled her to keep it.

“The um, the Polaris is out front and ready to go. I’ve already loaded the cooler with the sandwiches, and the rolling magnet is in the back.” Tom put his phone in his pocket, glancing briefly at the time on the front display.

It was 12:43 p.m.

If they left now, they would have a good five hours or so before dark began to set in. That would be plenty of time to replace the missing components of the strange spherical object, and now that they’d had a breakthrough of sorts, this timeline was more than feasible.

When Jennifer had abruptly disconnected her call with him, Tom had suspected that something more was going on despite her insistence that she was simply feeling “under the weather.” There was something in her tone and of the almost distracted way she had answered his questions that set him on edge, and after finishing his shopping in record time, he had texted her to inform her that he was on his way.

There had been no response, and after waiting a few minutes, he texted her again.

When she failed to respond he tried calling her but had received nothing but a strange dial tone in return. Her phone was dead, not simply due to a low battery, but something that had rendered it completely useless.

He had immediately floored it to her home, running several red lights and blowing by the speed limit signs, completely oblivious to the obvious danger he posed to passing motorists.

Something had happened to her, and he, her only real contact with the outside world, felt as if her life was being held in his hands.

He couldn’t explain the gnawing sense of urgency in the pit of stomach, or the dull ache he felt in his chest when he imagined her, alone in her house, unable to call for help.

When he’d barreled up the driveway, the first thing he noticed was the thick sheen of condensation that had built up in all of the windows. His first thought was that a fire had somehow broken out in her house, and seeing as how she was nowhere to be seen, was still inside, trapped.

He had kicked the door open in his rush to enter the house, and what he saw upon entering stopped him dead in his tracks, every instinct screaming at him to run despite what his head and heart were telling him.

Jennifer knelt on the floor clutching a child to her breast, a child who looked for all the world like a younger version of her son Seth, who had died months before.

Reason and logic had immediately abandoned him and he was paralyzed with fear and amazement as she cried and begged the boy to wake up, to not leave her. He appeared lifeless and pale, and when she had begun CPR it seemed then that the past and present collided in a horrid caricature of reality.

When he had discovered Seth’s lifeless body lying at the bottom of the dry riverbed, he knew that the boy was dead from the moment he first saw him. There was something so final and definitive about the way his limbs lay sprawled around him, the utter boneless abandon that only the dead have that made it clear he was gone.

That hadn’t stopped him from performing CPR on the boy, who was now cold and shockingly pale.

Seeing Jennifer like that with the boy clutched tightly in her arms had made one of the most helpless and horrible moments of his life come alive once more, and he was powerless to protect her from the hurt and pain he knew she must be experiencing.

Afterwards when the seemingly impossible miracle had occurred and the boy began to breathe, did he replace himself slowly moving through this new reality with more and more acceptance. He no longer felt crippled by paralysis, but invigorated by a sense of wonder that he couldn’t begin to put into words, and when she had looked up at him with tears in her eyes and told him that the boy was not a ghost or a monster, but someone who needed their help, he had accepted this without reservation.

“Thank you, Tom.” She gave the boy a lingering glance and then she set the scissors down on the kitchen table. The spherical object was still emitting the same rhythmic humming sound, and the blue glow continued to shine forth from it as before. Only this time when she set the scissors down they didn’t remain where she put them. Instead, as if pulled forward on invisible strings, they shot towards the object and became solidly affixed to its side.

Jennifer scoffed and shook her head. “If I’d only noticed that earlier that may have simplified things.” She reached over and gently pried the scissors loose from the object’s side and set them on the counter. Her phone lay there with the screen still dark, its inner workings rendered useless by the magnetic force the spherical object was emitting. She hadn’t noticed this when it had sat humming away on the counter near the sink, but this morning when she had sat with the boy in the early morning light trying to keep him alive and coherent, he had asked for it to be brought to the table.

He had been fading in and out of consciousness by that point and had become restless as he fought to get free of the comforters she had wrapped securely around him. No amount of shushing or rocking had gotten him to stop, and finally near to exhaustion, she had removed enough of the comforter to allow him more freedom of movement. He had turned those enormous blue eyes of his towards the windowsill where the strange spherical object sat. It had remained dark and inactive since the previous afternoon when he had first demonstrated what it was and—more or less—what it could do. Now, as she watched him slowly raise his arm with what remaining strength he had left, he pointed a thin pale finger at it. It began to wobble and rock from side to side to the point where she feared that it would fall from the window ledge. The boy kept his finger trained on it, and with a slow exhalation of air he curled his hand tightly into a fist. The object began to glow from within, casting a bluish illumination around the window and walls. A pleasant humming, more like a rhythmic throbbing began emanating from within it, and she could almost feel it vibrating through blood, muscle, and bone.

With a pained gasp the boy dropped his arm and lay limp against her, his head lolling to the side. He whimpered twice in that heartrending way of his, and as she shushed him and began to rock him from side to side, she had heard his voice speaking clearly in her head:

Manteylio. Home.

“I know. I know, sweetheart.” She had somehow managed to get to her feet and still rocking him gently, padded over to the windowsill. The object was rotating slowly on its axis, revealing the missing section in stark relief. The crystalline structures winked and twinkled within the glowing inner structure as if lit by a cold fire. The boy repeated the phrase again, and without really knowing why she did it, she carefully scooped up the object in her left hand.

It was surprisingly cool to the touch, and now this close to it, the rhythmic throbbing ebbed through her body seemingly in time with the beating of her heart.

The boy snuggled closer to her, his small body alarmingly cool. He had begun to shiver minutes earlier but now they had edged into full-blown trembles. The thermostat was still reading eighty-eight degrees, and if she raised it anymore she risked passing out from the heat herself. Despite the sweat rolling off of her and soaking into her wrinkled blouse, she wrapped the comforter around both of them more securely and made her way back to the kitchen table. She placed the sphere in the center of the table and it cast a soothing, calming light around the small space. The boy continued to speak, though now his words were jumbled and the meaning was not clear. No calls or texts came through on her phone to inform her of Tom’s progress, and as the minutes ticked by she became increasingly nervous.

She hadn’t been aware that the sphere had been emitting a magnetic force of some kind, and her phone, being right near it on the table, had its inner workings essentially fried by this force.

That would explain why she hadn’t been aware of how close Tom was to her house, and why he had panicked, fearing the worst for her.

But, as the old saying goes, there was a silver lining to all of this.

It was now clear that the object not only emitted some sort of magnetic force that rendered electronics useless, but it also attracted metal objects to it with amazing ease. Jennifer had immediately seized on this and instructed Tom where to replace the large rolling magnet she kept in the garage. She had bought this nearly four years ago when the roof on the main house had been replaced and the roofers had left behind numerous nails, bits of metal, and other things that had caused flat tires in her and Gerald’s vehicles. It was a simple thing, basically a long rectangular magnet about the length of a ruler with a small wheel on each end. A handle very much like a broom or a mop was attached to the magnet, and you simply rolled it in front of you as you walked, rather like a push broom. Any metal item, no matter how small, became attracted to the magnet and remained fixed on it, which could then be removed with a gentle tug.

She and Tom could use this to hopefully replace the missing pieces to the sphere, given she more or less knew where they had landed after she’d flung them into the brush. As for how they were going to get out to the site by Wilson’s Pass with the boy in tow—for he was still not strong enough to walk—Tom provided the answer for that. He regularly used a Polaris around his ranch in order to get to areas that his pickup truck otherwise could not navigate, and there was plenty of room in it for three passengers. It was fully equipped with all terrain tires and four-wheel drive, and the oftentimes rugged and rocky landscape that wound its way through the woods would be no match for it.

It’s all coming together, she thought as Tom set about turning down the thermostat and turning off the lights. The only thing left to do now is to say goodbye.

The boy turned to look at her with those enormous blue eyes of his and she felt her resolve waver. I can’t go back to being lonely again, but I know that you can’t stay here any longer.

She could feel the tears threatening so she hurriedly turned her back and pretended to busy herself with opening the kitchen window a few inches. The house was sweltering and needed to be aired out. If things all went according to plan and the missing pieces of the sphere were recovered, the boy could return home before nightfall. There would no longer be a need to keep the house at its current temperature.

“I uh, I brought these.” She could sense Tom just off to the side as he maintained a polite distance. She turned just enough to see what he had in his hands, but not enough that he could see she had nearly been crying.

He extended two small, palm-sized packages towards her. She recognized them as temporary hand warmers that hunters and other outdoorsmen utilized in winter, and she took them gratefully. “Thank you, Tom. I’ll put them in his mittens so his hands won’t be so cold.”

They locked eyes as he placed them in her hands and she could tell from his expression that he knew what she was feeling. Once the initial shock had worn off, he had watched her and the boy with a wistful, almost soulful look in his eye. No doubt he had conflicting feelings as to the boy’s resemblance to her dead son, but there was no denying that he felt sympathetic towards his current predicament. At one point he had offered to watch the boy while she showered and changed her clothes, and had even cut the edges off the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches he made him.

The boy ate the sandwiches regardless if the crust had been removed or not, but it struck her as oddly endearing that Tom would take such care to do this, as if the boy were nothing more than a child and not what he truly was.

“Hey.” She knelt down in front of the boy who had been dressed for the cold weather as best she could manage. She held out the hand warmers and indicated his own gloved hands. “These will help keep your hands warm during the ride out to the riverbed so you won’t feel so cold.” She carefully removed the glove from the hand that was still swollen from the scratches he had received the day before. The fingers were slightly pink and not bluish like they had been this morning, and when she placed the packet in his hand he smiled, clearly pleased with the warming sensation. After replacing the glove, she repeated the procedure with the other hand, and when she was finished, she sat back on her heels to look at him.

He was dressed in Seth’s clothing, boots, scarf, and knitted hat. The jacket he had been wearing on his last day was the final layer of outer clothing he wore, and she saw that the buttons had been done up wrong, one side all askew.

She shook her head playfully. “We can’t have you return home looking like this, now can we?” She reached out and began to undo the buttons one at a time.

The boy watched all of this with large, solemn eyes.

“There.” She smiled, hoping that it seemed convincing. Seeing him sitting there, wearing Seth’s clothing, especially his favorite jacket, had nearly been the tipping point for her. Remembering Seth as he had been on that final morning dressed like this was torture enough, but to see the boy wearing the exact same thing on the last morning they would ever share together? Agony.

“Ready to go home?”

He looked from her to the room around them, and then back to her again. For an instant he had glanced over at Tom, who still stood at a respectful distance away. Something unspoken seemed to pass between them but it was gone almost as soon as she noticed it.

He nodded slowly, his face and eyes unobscured by his newer, shorter haircut. You’re sad that I’m going.

“Yes, but I know that it has to be done.” She reached out and picked him up, securing him firmly in her arms. He snuggled close to her as she wrapped the comforter around the two of them, and gathering all her strength, she stood up. The sphere had been nestled into a wooden carton for easier transport yet it still continued to glow and hum. She turned towards Tom and he immediately stepped forward and took up the carton in his arms. She gave him a grateful look and he returned it with a small nod.

The boy was looking at Tom, and once again she had the sense that some silent communication had passed between the two.

She hugged the boy close to her, unwilling for the moment to let him go. “Alright then, darling. Let’s get you home.”