“Daniel, you must love your brother. He loves you. I love you. Trust him. He won’t hurt you. I won’t let you come to any harm. I love you, son.”
Alan felt Danny tremble in his arms, and he was trembling, too, from the icy cold of the lake and from the voice and the words and the love that echoed from every surface.
“Adam, my son. Keep your brother safe. You need each other. Don’t be impatient or angry with him. Give him love.”
“I will,” Alan said, and he relaxed his arms so that he was holding Danny in a hug and not a pinion. Danny relaxed back into him. “I love you, Dad,” he said, and they trudged out of the water, out into the last warmth of the day’s sun, to dry out on the slope of the mountainside, green grass under their bodies and wispy clouds in the sky that they watched until the sun went out.
Marci followed him home a week before Christmas break. He didn’t notice her at first. She was cunning, and followed his boot prints in the snow. A blizzard had blown up halfway through the school day, and by the time class let out, there was fresh knee-deep powder and he had to lift each foot high to hike through it, the shush of his snow pants and the huff of his breath the only sounds in the icy winter evening.
She followed the deep prints of his boots on the fresh snow, stalking him like he stalked rabbits in the woods. When he happened to turn around at the cave mouth, he spotted her in her yellow snow-suit, struggling up the mountainside, barely visible in the twilight.
He’d never seen an intruder on the mountain. The dirt trail that led up to the cave branched off a side road on the edge of town, and it was too rocky even for the dirt-bike kids. He stood at the cave-mouth, torn by indecision. He wanted to keep walking, head away farther uphill, away from the family’s den, but now she’d seen him, had waved to him. His cold-numb face drained of blood and his bladder hammered insistently at him. He hiked down the mountain and met her.
“Why are you here?” he said, once he was close enough to see her pale, freckled face.
“Why do you think?” she said. “I followed you home. Where do you live, Alan? Why can’t I even see where you live?”