Chapter Thirty Three
THIRTY-THREE
You gather around Silas’s body with nothing but moonlight and a makeshift torch for light.
Will holds the flame out in front of him, and the gentle flicker sends long shadows rippling across the forest floor.
Everyone looks down at the body, where you can still make out the outline of Silas’s face under the shirt you used to cover him.
There are bugs crawling on him, but Diana brushes a few of them off.
The only sound is a cold wind through the leaves.
Troy steps forward, and you all form a half circle around the body, waiting for him to speak.
You’re expecting something Buddhist now that you know Troy better.
Maybe something about emptiness or impermanence.
You don’t know that much about Buddhism, but Sean read you the Heart Sutra once, and there was a lot of stuff in there about how nothing exists.
Nothing is born. Nothing dies. That kind of thing.
But this, you know, is real. There is a corpse here that was once a person.
Troy shuffles in place. Since he was the one who spoke up for Silas, everyone just kind of assumes he’s going to be the one to talk now, and he seems okay with that. He gets a little closer to the body, then he clears his throat.
“Almost heaven,” he says.
He pauses a moment.
“West Virginia.”
He has his eyes closed and his head down like he’s delivering a eulogy, so he doesn’t notice the confused squints on the faces of his fellow mourners.
“Blue Ridge Mountains,” he adds.
“Um, Troy?” says Fran. “What is this?”
Troy doesn’t look at Fran. But when he speaks again, his voice is louder.
“Shenandoah River,” he continues.
You look around, but everyone else is staring down at the body. Troy’s poem sounds incredibly familiar, but you’re still not sure what he’s reciting. It’s possible others catch on sooner, but your confusion doesn’t fade until Troy speaks the chorus.
“Country roads, take me home…”
No one joins him, so his voice is all alone. Unsupported in the woods. But still he goes on, just saying the words.
“Take me home, country roads.”
When he’s done with the last phrase, his voice tapers off and leaves only the sound of the lake water lapping on all sides of the island.
And you’re pretty sure this is it for his speech, so a couple of you start to turn away.
But then Troy looks at all of you, his smudged glasses gleaming in the firelight.
“Guys,” he says. “Do you remember how embarrassed you were when he first sang that on the bus?”
He gives you a moment to call it back: the song blaring through the bus’s bad speakers, Silas marching down the aisle making unnecessary eye contact.
“I wanted to die,” says Diana.
“Me too,” says Troy. “And I still don’t know why he picked that song. Was he from West Virginia? Was it just the most embarrassing thing he could think of? Is it because we’re in the country? I’ve got no idea.”
He looks down at Silas.
“I didn’t know him well enough to be sure if we should celebrate him right now.
But he told us we had to give up our embarrassment and be vulnerable if we wanted to make any progress, remember?
And that part at least seems true. Doing that with you guys is the only thing that’s made me feel better. ”
“So what are you saying?” asks Will.
“I think you know what I’m saying,” he says.
A cool breeze blows and the torch sheds a few sparks.
“I don’t get it,” says Fran. “Somebody tell me what’s going on.”
You look over at her. She’s back in her hoodie, huddled inside.
“You don’t have to sing it,” says Troy.
Diana scoffs, but Troy is already beginning to speak the words of the chorus again.
“No,” says Fran. “No way. I refuse.”
Then another voice joins in the recitation, and you’re surprised to see that it’s Will. He’s not much louder than a whisper, but he’s speaking.
“Will!” yells Diana. “How dare you!”
But it’s too late now. This is quickly becoming a true chorus, and you’re next.
And you don’t just speak; you start to sing the chorus, atonally.
And the lyrics, which you’ve always found pretty cheesy, suddenly have some inexplicable new power over you.
In fact, in this moment, they kind of make you want to cry. It’s just those three words, you think:
Take me home.
In this small forest, on an island in a lake you may never return from, it sounds like a prayer, one everybody can identify with.
If you could make it work like a spell, you would.
Take me home. Take me home. Take me home.
And then you’re gone, back to a hard life that suddenly doesn’t seem quite as hard.
Fran is the next to break. She pulls her hood down over her eyes and starts to sing too, just a few decibels over a whisper.
Then, it seems, Diana has no choice. She’s the last to join, but join she does.
Nobody knows the rest of the verses—not even Troy—so you just sing the chorus over and over again.
You try to make it as loud as it was your first day on the bus.
You’re not sure how long it should go on.
Maybe all night. Maybe you’ll never stop singing.
But then, after ten or so choruses, you all seem to understand intuitively that you don’t have any more in you.
So you belt it out, hitting that last “take me home” with raspy throats.
When you’re done, you all take one final look at the body beneath you.
In spite of everything, it still seems sad to leave him like this with no burial, no shroud, no Viking funeral.
Just your off-key voices. But if you want to keep from ending up like him, you know you need to move forward toward your only chance at survival.
Will waves the torch above his head and starts walking.
You all follow him back to the campsite, which now consists of three tents instead of two.
At least he gifted you another shelter and boat before he died.
Everyone knows it’s time to go to bed. But no one goes into their tent just yet.
Instead, you all sit by the fire, staring into the coals, which are still breathing red in the wind.
It’s a chilly night again—they’re definitely getting colder—and you all put on your extra clothes until you’re bundled up like arctic explorers.
In the morning, you will start the final part of your trek.
The most important part. The only part that matters.
“I’ve never seen a dead body before,” says Will finally. “That was my first time.”
He rests his chin on a palm, watching the embers blink out.
“Do they all look like that? Like, so freaking sad and empty?”
Nobody says anything for a moment. You feel so drained suddenly.
The surge of energy you got from eating real food has faded.
Just as importantly: so has the Xanax. You know this comedown well, the moment when your anxiety senses a drop in defenses and starts lurking in your chest. Soon, before you even know it, it will move to your head and everything will be charged with a foreboding edge.
You really want to say something to make Will feel better, but you find that you can only tell him the truth.
“Yeah,” you say. “They do.”
Everyone looks at you.
“When I saw my brother for the last time, I didn’t feel anything because I knew it wasn’t him. Not anymore. It was just this sad husk.”
You don’t know how much people remember about what you were shouting in the fog yesterday, but everyone keeps quiet now. Even Diana can’t look at you for long. Will is the only one who maintains eye contact.
“How did he die?” he asks.
It sounds like a simple question, but there are actually a thousand answers.
You’ve constructed so many different timelines and explanations.
There are, of course, basic facts to rely on, but they don’t tell the whole story.
The facts never do. Still, saying all this to the group is too much, so you dig into the pocket of your pants and pull out a blank piece of paper.
It’s the paper from the very first game of Fear in a Hat—the paper where you should have written Sean’s name—and you set it on the ground in front of you.
“It’s complicated,” you say.
And then, because you don’t know what else to do, you start to tell the story.