Chapter 5: The Walk Back
I have relived that walk back a thousand times since, and I still don't fully trust my own memory of it, because fear does something strange to time — it stretches some seconds out impossibly long and compresses whole minutes into a blur, so that even now I can't tell you with certainty whether that walk took me three minutes or fifteen.
What I can tell you is what it felt like in my body, because that part hasn't faded at all.
The weight grew. Not violently, not all at once — it grew the way water rises in a filling bucket, steadily, patiently, with a kind of terrible confidence that told me, somewhere underneath the panic, that whatever this was had done this many, many times before and knew exactly how this was supposed to go. I did not turn around. I want to be honest and say that this wasn't bravery — I simply could not make myself do it, the way you sometimes can't make yourself look under the bed as a small child even though every instinct is screaming that you need to know. Some part of me, some old animal part, understood without being told that turning around and seeing it would be worse, somehow, than not seeing it, and so I kept my eyes fixed on the path ahead, on the lights of the houses in the distance, and I walked.
I remember the whistling most clearly of all. It wasn't a tune I recognized, not a folk song or a film song, nothing with a shape I could hold onto — it was more like the sound wind makes moving through a gap in a wall, except it rose and fell with a kind of intention, almost a rhythm, and every time it paused, I would hear, underneath it, that same wet, rattling breathing my mesho had described, close enough to my ear that I could have sworn, more than once, that I felt actual moisture against my skin, cold and faintly smelling of river mud and something else beneath it, something organic and slightly rotten that I still can't fully describe except to say that it smelled the way the inside of an old fishing basket smells at the end of a long, hot day.
By the time I was perhaps two hundred feet from Mesho's gate, I was walking the way he had described — bent forward, both hands reaching back over my own shoulders in an instinctive, useless attempt to push the weight off, my legs feeling like they were moving through wet cement, every step a genuine, exhausting effort. I remember starting to cry, not loudly, just a helpless, silent leaking of tears that I couldn't stop and was too frightened to try to control, because some part of me had understood, in that flat, matter-of-fact way children sometimes understand terrible things, that I might not make it to the gate at all.
And then I remembered — I don't know from where, whether it was something Rotan Kaka had said to me during that afternoon conversation about his brother, or something I'd simply absorbed without noticing, the way children absorb the shape of prayers they've heard recited a hundred times without ever learning the words on purpose — I remembered that he had said something about a name, an accounting. I remembered him leaning close to my mesho's ear that first terrible night, murmuring about a debt and permission neither given nor needed.
I don't fully know why I did what I did next, except that I was thirteen and terrified and running out of both breath and distance, and some instinct older than reasoning took over. I began to speak — out loud, in a voice that came out much steadier than I felt, though it shook badly on every second or third word — my own name, and my father's name, and my mother's name, over and over, the way you might recite an address to a stranger who's found you lost, as though I were trying to prove to whatever was on my back that I belonged somewhere, that I was known, that I was owed to a family who would come looking for me if I disappeared.
I don't know if that's what did it, or if it was simply the iron hinge on the gate as I finally, finally reached it and half-fell against it, one hand slapping flat against the cold metal latch. But I felt it — the exact moment, sharp and sudden as a rope snapping — when the weight left my back. It didn't fade gradually the way it had grown. It was there, and then, between one gasping breath and the next, it was simply gone, so completely and so abruptly that I actually stumbled forward onto my hands and knees in the dirt of the yard, because my body had been braced against a weight that no longer existed, and for a moment my own balance didn't know what to do with itself.
I was shaking too hard to speak when my mother found me there, and it took her nearly twenty minutes of holding me on the verandah, rocking me the way she hadn't done since I was very small, before I could get out even a fragmented version of what had happened. And it was that night, hearing my broken, hiccuping account of the walk back, that my mesho — still pale and hollow-eyed himself from his own encounter two nights before — made the decision that changed the rest of that summer, and, in its own way, the rest of his life.
"It's not finished with us," he said quietly, to my mother and my aunt, once my brother and I had finally, exhaustedly, fallen asleep. "It let the boy go because the boy wasn't what it wanted. But it wanted me two nights ago, and it will want me again, and it is not going to simply give up because we've been lucky twice."