They had just finished preparing the hearty salad—onions, radishes, and raspberries over a bed of spinach and red lettuce—when Ben crashed through the front door, rouge-cheeked, smelling of boy-sweat and the outdoors.
Still caught in that delicate blink of time between boy and man.
Theresa went to her son and kissed him and asked about his day.
Ethan turned on the vintage Philips—a tube radio from the 1950s in immaculate condition. Pilcher had inexplicably put one in every inhabited house.
Surfing was easy with one station to choose from. Most of the time, it just blared static, but there were one or two talk shows, and always, between seven and eight o’clock, “Dinner with Hecter.”
Hecter Gaither had been a moderately famous concert pianist in his past life.
In Pines, he taught lessons to anyone who wanted to learn, and every night of the week, played music for the town.
Ethan turned up the volume, heard Hecter’s voice as he joined his family.
“Good evening, Wayward Pines. Hecter Gaither here.”
At the head of the table, Ethan dished out servings of their salad.
“I’m sitting at my Steinway, a gorgeous Boston Baby Grand.”
First to his wife.
“Tonight, I’ll be playing the Goldberg Variations, a work originally composed for harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach.”
Then to his son.
“The construction of this piece is an aria followed by thirty variations. Please enjoy.”
As Ethan served himself and took a seat, he heard the creak of the piano bench come crackling through the speaker.
After dinner, the Burkes took bowls of homemade ice cream out onto the porch.
Sat in rocking chairs.
Eating and listening.
Through the open windows of the neighboring houses, Ethan could hear Hecter’s music.
It filled the valley.
Precise and radiant notes bubbling up between the mountain walls that had become ruddy with alpenglow.
They stayed out late.
A millennium without air or light pollution made for pitch-black skies.
The stars didn’t just appear anymore.
They exploded.
Diamonds on black velvet.
You couldn’t tear your eyes away.
Ethan reached over and held Theresa’s hand.
Bach and galaxies.
The night grew cool.
When Hecter finished, people clapped inside their homes.
Across the street, a man shouted, “Bravo! Bravo!”
Ethan looked over at Theresa.
Her eyes were wet.
He said, “You okay?”
She nodded, wiping her face. “I’m just so glad to have you home.”
Ethan finished the dishes, headed upstairs. Ben’s room was at the far end of the hall and the door was closed—just a razor line of light visible underneath.
Ethan knocked.
“Come in.”
Ben was sitting up in bed sketching—charcoal on butcher paper.
Ethan eased down on the comforter, asked, “Can I take a look?”
Ben lifted his arms.
The sketch was the boy’s current vantage point from the bed—the wall, the desk, the window frame, the points of light outside which were visible through the glass.
“That’s amazing,” Ethan said.
“It’s not exactly like I want it. The night through the window doesn’t really look like night.”
“I’m sure it’ll get there. Hey, I picked up a book from the coffee shop today.”
Ben perked up. “What is it?”
“It’s called The Hobbit.”
“I never heard of it.”
“It was one of my favorite books when I was your age. I thought maybe I could read it to you.”
“I know how to read, Dad.”
“I know. But I haven’t read this in years. Might be fun to read it together.”
“Is it scary?”
“It has some scary parts. Go brush your teeth and hurry back.”
Ethan sat against the headboard, reading by the light of a bedside table lamp.
Ben was asleep before the end of the first chapter, dreaming, Ethan hoped, of dungeons deep and caverns old. Of something other than Wayward Pines.
Ethan set the paperback aside and cut the lamp.
Pulled the blanket up to his son’s shoulders.
He laid his hand down against Ben’s back.
Nothing better in the world than feeling the rise and fall of his child’s sleeping respirations.
Ethan had still not recovered from his son growing up in Wayward Pines. Doubted it was something he would ever accept. There were small things which he tried to tell himself were better. Tonight for instance. Had Ben grown up in the old world, Ethan would probably have entered his son’s bedroom to find him glued to an iPhone.
Texting friends.
Watching television.
Playing video games.
Twitter and Facebook.
Ethan didn’t miss those things. Didn’t wish that his son was growing up in a world where people stared at screens all day. Where communication had devolved into the tapping of tiny letters and humanity lived by and large for the endorphin kick from the ping of a received text or a new e-mail.
Instead, he’d found his almost-teenage son passing his time before bed by sketching.
Hard to feel bad about that.
But it was the years to come that weighed down on Ethan’s heart with the black pressure of depression.
What did Ben have to look forward to?
There would be no higher learning. No real career.
Gone were the days of—
You can be whatever you want to be.
Whatever you set your mind to.
Just follow your heart and your dreams.
Golden-age platitudes of an extinct species.
When people failed to pair up on their own, marriages in Pines were often suggested. And even when they weren’t, the pool of potential mates wasn’t exactly deep.
Ben would never see Paris.
Or Yellowstone.
Might never fall in love.
He would never have the experience of going away to college.
Or on a honeymoon.
Or driving across the country nonstop, spur-of-the-moment, just because he was twenty-two and could.
Ethan hated the surveillance and the abbies and Pines’s culture of illusion.
But what kept him up with his mind racing late into the night were thoughts of his son. Ben had lived in Pines for five years, almost as long as he’d lived in the world before. Whereas Ethan suspected that the adult residents of Pines struggled every day with the memory of their past lives, Ben was very much a product of this town, of this strange, new time. Not even Ethan was privy to the things his son was being taught in school. Pilcher kept a pair of his men in plainclothes on school property at all times, and parents weren’t allowed inside.
3:30 a.m.
Ethan lay awake in his bed, his wife in his arms.
Miles from sleep.
He could feel Theresa’s eyelashes scraping against his chest with each blink.
What are you thinking?
The question had haunted their marriage before, but in Pines it had assumed an entirely new gravity. In the fourteen days they’d been together, Theresa had never broken the surface illusion. Of course, she had welcomed Ethan back home. There’d been a tearful reunion, but five years as a resident of Pines had made her a stone-cold pro. There was no talk of where Ethan had been or of his tumultuous integration. No mention or discussion of the strange events surrounding his becoming sheriff. Or what he might now know. Sometimes, he thought he caught a glint of something in Theresa’s eyes—an acknowledgment of their circumstance, a suppressed desire to communicate on a forbidden level. But like a good actor, she never broke character.