These Nameless Things

  Books by Shawn Smucker

  The Day the Angels Fell

  The Edge of Over There

  Light from Distant Stars

  These Nameless Things

  Once We Were Strangers

  © 2020 by Shawn Smucker

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-2313-2

  Scripture used in this book, whether quoted or paraphrased by the characters, is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  To Priscilla

  Contents

  Cover

  Half Title Page

  Books by Shawn Smucker

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1. The Lie

  2. Through Me, the Way

  3. The Storm

  4. The Woman

  5. Remembering

  6. More Secrets

  7. Another Arrival

  8. Someone Is Coming

  9. Po’s Theory

  10. You Never Told Me Your Name

  11. A Real Shame

  12. The Daughter

  13. Po’s Story

  14. When the Plane Fell from the Sky

  15. The Fire

  PART TWO

  16. The House

  17. The River

  18. Into the Abyss

  19. Voices

  20. Dad

  21. Crossing Over

  22. Adam’s Rock

  23. How Far We Have Fallen

  24. Broken Things

  25. Leaving

  26. Up

  27. Forgiveness

  28. The Crossing

  29. The Other Mountain

  30. And We Begin Our Descent

  Author Note

  Another Captivating Story from Shawn Smucker

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

  No traveler returns, puzzles the will.”

  Shakespeare, Hamlet

  “Why do we let our guilt consume us so?”

  Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

  “Be grateful for whoever comes,

  because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”

  Rumi

  Prologue

  A Confession

  WE MOVE IN a loose group, winding through the trees. We are more people than you can even imagine, yet there is hardly a word spoken. We smell like exhaustion, like miles piled on top of miles, like time when it has already run out. Yet somehow we also sound like hope, like fresh water washing through the reeds. We discreetly share food with each other, nearly all of us strangers, nodding politely, and in spite of our condition, we cannot keep the inexplicable hope from showing in our eyes.

  This is our first day out from under the shadow of the mountain. Which sounds exactly like something he would have said in that deep, rich voice of his, if he was here with us. And he would have smiled—how happy he would have been, saying those words!

  Then he would have laughed, and the thought of him laughing is too much for me right now. It brings up an ache that makes it hard to breathe. I shake my head and try to laugh it off, but my grin falters, and any kind of sound I might make lodges somewhere in my throat.

  It’s my fault he’s not with us. There’s no way around it.

  How could I let him go back on his own?

  It’s more an accusation than a question, and now the aching wells up behind my eyes. I squeeze them shut. I stop walking and think about turning around. It’s the guilt that threatens to consume me.

  The path goes up and up and up, and everyone is so tired, but the old fears are fresh enough to keep us walking, to keep us moving through this heavy weariness. I reluctantly rejoin the movement up the mountain. Nearly everyone stares at the ground in front of their feet. Maybe that’s all that matters right now. One step after the other. Moving farther up. Moving farther in, away from her. Hoping she won’t find us, won’t convince us to go back.

  Up ahead and to the left, I notice that the trees clear along the edge of the cliff, and I find myself walking faster, faster, stumbling over my own feet, pushing between this person and that person, mumbling my apologies, my voice strange in the voiceless woods. I get to the clearing and it is what I hoped it would be: an overlook. A cold wind blows up from the valley, rushes through that open space, agitating the leaves behind me into the wild rustling sound of secrets. I climb a kind of stone platform, and the rock is gritty under my fingers. There’s no snow up here, but the rock is cold. Everything feels present and real.

  Have you ever, for a flash of time, understood the significance of being? The miracle of existing? That’s what I feel now, climbing up onto the ledge: the particular roughness of the rocks under my knees, the chill of the wind on my face. The unique expression of my existence, here, as I stand.

  I look out over that huge expanse of miles that all of us walked through, and I scan the valley. I hold one hand up, shield my eyes from the glare of those bright clouds, and hope to see nothing out there except empty plains.

  At first I’m relieved and my shoulders relax because all I see is the undulating ground stretching to the west, as far as the horizon. The wind continues to whip up around me, and I draw my arms closer to my chest, duck my chin down, and try to find warmth in my body. It is there somewhere inside of me, that warmth, that fire. I can sense the rustling of all the people hiking, moving up the mountain behind me. I can feel them glancing at my back as they pass, taking in my silhouette on the overlook, probably wondering why I would stop, why I would look back. This makes me angry. I want to turn and answer them, answer all of their unasked questions.

  I knew him.

  I loved him.

  Do you have any idea what our freedom cost?

  But I keep looking out over the plains, and finally I see something like two ants wandering along a dusty pile. I sigh. All the way down there in the valley, where we began the climb up this mountain, through the trees, those two small specks walk away, walk west. Their progress is barely visible, but there is nothing to stop them, not as far as the eye can see. We will soon be separated by this great chasm. Everything has fallen into a stark, dazzling white, the light glaring off endless miles of glittering frost. I can smell snow, but none is falling.

  He is going with her.

  I hoped that he might be among the last of the crowd, that he could possibly be tagging along at the back, that he would come up and surprise me. We would hug and I would laugh out loud—my first real laugh in a long time
—and he would explain how he got out of going back and that all the wrong I had done was magically undone.

  But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t reverse my mistakes, couldn’t easily untie my deceptions, and the only option was for someone to go back. He is doing it. I strain my eyes toward the horizon, but even from that height, I can’t see the mountain we came from, the one whose shadow we have finally escaped. I don’t think I’d want to see it, but I search that far-off horizon anyway.

  “Do you see him?” she asks, walking up behind me. Not long ago, she would have wrapped her arms around my body, moved in close and held me. I would have felt her warmth against my back. But not now. Not after everything that has happened.

  I close my eyes, imagining. I shiver and nod. “I can’t believe he has to go back.” Unspoken are the words, It’s my fault.

  We stand there in those words, the wind whipping them around us, catching on them, sailing away with them. She doesn’t offer any kind of consolation.

  “It was here all along,” she says, a lining of amazement in her voice. “This mountain was here, waiting for us.”

  “Are you . . .” I begin, then start over. My voice is hoarse, and I clear it against the dry, cold air. “Do you . . . remember?”

  “Everything. It’s all coming back to me.”

  “Even before?”

  “Even before.”

  “Me too,” I whisper.

  How is it that a mind can contain so many memories? Where does it all fit? Into what nooks and crannies do we place these recollections of love and sadness, horror and joy? Into what tiny space of our minds do we put a person we met long ago, or a disappointment, or a lie? And where do memories go when we forget, and how is it that they can come rushing back, unbidden?

  I am embarrassed by what I did, the choices I made. There are things I would rather forget, but because I can think of nothing else to say, a confession emerges: “I’m such a liar. You know that by now, right? How many things I said that weren’t true?”

  She is still as a fence post. It almost seems like she’s holding her breath.

  “You know, I would lie for the fun of it,” I whisper, “even when there was nothing in it. Just because. I don’t even know why. What’s wrong with a person who lies for no reason?”

  I don’t realize she is crying until I hear her try to stifle a sob, like a hiccup. She moves closer but we’re still not touching, and we remain there for a time, watching the two people down on the plain. We cry together. She sighs a trembling sigh, and when she speaks I can tell she is trying to lift our spirits.

  “The rumor coming back from the front is that the higher you go, the warmer it gets.”

  “Then we should keep walking,” I say, but I don’t move. A great silence falls on us as the last people pass by behind us. He is not among them. I knew he wouldn’t be, was positive of this after seeing the two far-off figures walking away, but I had still allowed myself to hope.

  “There they go.” She steps away, as if she can’t stay too close or she’ll give in to old impulses like hugging me or pulling me close. “He saved all of us,” she says, and I can hear the tears in her voice. “And now he’s going back.”

  I nod again, the tears flowing. I wipe them away hastily with the back of my hand. They’re embarrassing, those tears. They make me feel small.

  “Dan,” she says. “It’s time. He’ll find her, and he’ll follow us over.”

  I look over at her for the first time since she came up behind me. “Will he? Will he find her? Will he find us?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Will he find me?” I ask, my voice tiny and quivering.

  Wordlessly, we climb down the rock and turn toward the top of this new mountain, this fresh start, this beginning. We can see the tail end of the procession of people moving up the trail. We will soon be back among them, or maybe we’ll stay back a bit, find our own pace.

  “I wonder,” I say quietly.

  “Wonder?” she asks, falling into step beside me. I want to take her hand again, but those days are long gone. “Wonder what?”

  My response is a whisper. I can’t imagine she even hears me. “Can he really cross from there to us? Or is he lost? Forever?”

  The breeze snatches my words and throws them out into the void, but she hears them. And she smiles. “He’ll find us.”

  So childlike. So trusting. I want to question her. I want to raise my flag of doubt, but before I can, she says it again.

  “He’ll find us.”

  PART ONE

  1 The Lie

  MONTHS BEFORE I stood on that overlook and searched for any sight of him, on the opposite side of the endless plains and under the shadow of the western mountain, the three of us laughed together—Miho and Abe and me. Miho was nearly crying, she was laughing so hard, shaking her head and trying to stop but then starting right up again, her body bobbing up and down. She waved a weak hand at us: Stop it! Abe and I grinned at each other, huge, sappy grins. We didn’t know what to do in the face of such laughter. When she did that, when she leaned back and laughed like that, I could sit and watch her for days. I felt lighter in that moment than I had in a long time, released, like a balloon untied and rising.

  Miho caught her breath and sighed, and I was filled with something close to pure joy. What were we laughing about? I don’t know. I can’t remember, because there was a pause, and Abe said those three words, and everything we were laughing about melted away. They stared at me to see how I would handle the news, Abe with his steady gaze trained on my face, and Miho, her eyes dancing nervously from me to the sky to the plains and back to me again. I realized that’s why they had come up to my house: to share this news, to see how I would take it, and to talk me off the ledge if needed.

  Mary is leaving.

  We ended up sitting against the back wall of my house. I went from joyful to exhausted. We looked out over the plains, absorbing the gentle breeze, not saying a word. There was the smell of fresh green grass and wet earth coming toward us from off in the distance, and rain on the way. The breeze was cool and weightless, but I felt the heaviness of nameless things.

  The horizon seemed impossibly far off, the clouds low, and I experienced a kind of dizziness, a spinning, an inability to determine what was up and what was down, and then a low-grade panic. Air was suddenly in short supply, and I wondered if this was what it was like to hyperventilate. I rested my head against the wall and stared into the slits of blue sky peeking through. But that didn’t help, so I closed my eyes completely.

  “Are you sure, Abe?” I asked, and even though my question was aimed at him, I hoped Miho would chime in and tell me it wasn’t true, it was all just a joke. I watched a small speck drift across the red horizon inside my eyelids.

  Please, Miho, I thought. Tell me it’s not true.

  “She’d like to leave tonight,” Abe admitted. The deep, quiet sound of his voice stayed with me even when he stopped talking. His voice was like the earth, solid beneath the long, soft grass. If Mary left, would everyone else leave too? Even Miho? Even Abe? The thought of living there in town alone made me sick. I couldn’t keep waiting, not by myself.

  “We haven’t lost anyone for years,” I said. “Why is she leaving now?”

  “We’re not losing her, Dan,” Miho said, the tiniest exasperation in her voice. “Everyone will leave sooner or later. You know that. There’s nothing lost. Everyone will leave, eventually.”

  She paused, and I could tell she was trying to decide if she should keep talking.

  “Even you,” she added.

  I opened my eyes and looked at her, took in her short, black-rooted, dyed-blonde hair rustling in the wind. Her eyes softened when our gazes met, and she surrendered a small smile that showed only at the corners of her mouth and the slopes of her temples. It was an expression as far removed from the minutes-ago mirth as I could imagine, but it was full of compassion. She had a triangle tattoo below the corner of one eye, like a tear. Another, much
larger swirling tattoo filled with lines and shapes and blocks made its way up her neck, touched her jaw below her ear, extended up along her temple, and edged her hairline like a kind of border.

  I remembered when she had received those tattoos, and why—she had been so sad, trying to cover up the marks of what had happened to her in the mountain. We had all tried to cover up our scars, most of us through distraction or busyness or work or fun. Some of us used tattoos. Some of us, eventually, tried to escape the horror by simply leaving, walking east. I had held her hand while Lou filled in the dark lines. How tightly she had squeezed my fingers, until the tattoo was hurting both of us. Lou had left town soon after that, headed east over the plains. No more tattoos, not after he was gone.

  That was long ago.

  “It’s only Mary St. Clair,” she said quietly. “It’s only Mary.” As if to say, It’s not me. I’m not leaving you.

  Abe gave her a sideways glance, a kind of reproach, but he didn’t say a word.

  Maybe today it’s “only” Mary, but who will it be tomorrow? There are only nine of us left in town. Eight after Mary goes. What will I do when everyone is gone?

  But I didn’t have to say anything. They knew what I was thinking. They knew my concerns.

  “Maybe we should leave with her?” Miho suggested, her voice timid as the breeze, her long, slender fingers finding mine in the depths of the cool grass. “Maybe now is the time?”

  “You can go anytime you want,” I said, and the words escaped without emotion. She didn’t remove her hand from mine, but I felt her stiffen. Why was I always pushing her away?

  “Dan,” Abe said, and he could have gone a thousand different ways.

  That wasn’t a nice thing to say.

  You will have to go sometime too.

  Your brother is never coming over that mountain.

  But he said none of those things. He was the kindest man I knew, the kindest I had ever known.

  “Dan,” he started again, “I am not leaving without you. Do you hear me? Miho is not leaving without you. You know that. We’ll wait. We’re in no hurry. Mary’s leaving doesn’t change any of that.”