Pines

acutely, the inexorable passing of a thousand moments with this little person who will be a man sooner than he can possibly imagine.
    He touches Ben’s cheek with the back of his hand.
    Leans forward, kisses the boy’s forehead.
    Brushes a wisp of hair back behind his ear.
    “I’m so proud of you,” he whispers. “You can’t even imagine.”
    Last year, the morning of the day he died in a nursing home, wasted from age and pneumonia, his father asked Ethan in a raspy voice, “You spend time with your son?”
    “Much as I can,” he’d answered, but his father had caught the lie in his eyes.
    “It’ll be your loss, Ethan. Day’ll come, when he’s grown and it’s too late, that you’d give a kingdom to go back and spend a single hour with your son as a boy. To hold him. Read a book to him. Throw a ball with a person in whose eyes you can do no wrong. He doesn’t see your failings yet. He looks at you with pure love and it won’t last, so you revel in it while it’s here.”
    Ethan thinks often of that conversation, mostly when he’s lying awake in bed at night and everyone else is asleep, and his life screaming past at the speed of light—the weight of bills and the future and his prior failings and all these moments he’s missing—all the lost joy—perched like a boulder on his chest.
    “Can you hear me? Ethan?”
    Sometimes he feels like he can’t breathe.
    Sometimes his thoughts come so fast he has to find one perfect memory.
    Cling to it.
    A life raft.
    “Ethan, I want you to grab hold of my voice and let it bring you to the surface of consciousness.”
    Letting it play over and over until the anxiety recedes and the exhaustion comes and he can finally slip under.
    “I know it’s hard, but you have to try.”
    Into the only portion of his days that anymore affords him peace...
    “Ethan.”
    Dreams.
    His eyes shot open.
    A light bored down into his face—a small, focused point of bright and blinding blue.
    A penlight.
    He blinked, it disappeared, and when he opened his eyes again, a man peered down at him through gold wire-rimmed glasses, less than a foot away from his face.
    Small, black eyes.
    Head shaven.
    A faint silver beard the only indication of age, his skin otherwise smooth and clear.
    He smiled—small, perfect white teeth.
    “You can hear me now, yes?”
    There was formality in the man’s tone. Implied politeness.
    Ethan nodded.
    “Do you know where you are?”
    Ethan had to think for a moment—he’d been dreaming of Seattle, of Theresa and Ben.
    “Let’s start with something else. Do you know your name?” the man asked.
    “Ethan Burke.”
    “Very good. And again, do you know where you are, Ethan?”
    He could feel the answer on the cusp of memory, but there was confusion too, several realities in competition.
    In one, he was in Seattle.
    In another, a hospital.
    In another, an idyllic mountain town called...There was a hole where its name should be.
    “Ethan.”
    “Yes?”
    “If I told you that you were in a hospital in Wayward Pines, would that jog anything loose?”
    It didn’t just jog something loose—it brought everything back at once like a hard, sudden hit from a linebacker, the memory of his last four days jarred into working order, into a sequence of events he felt confident he could lean on.
    “OK,” Ethan said. “OK. I do remember.”
    “Everything?”
    “I think so.”
    “What’s your last recollection?”
    It took a moment to retrieve, to brush the cobwebs off the synapses, but he found it.
    “I had a terrible headache. I was sitting on the sidewalk of Main Street, and I...”
    “You lost consciousness.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Do you still have that headache?”
    “No, it’s gone.”
    “My name is Dr. Jenkins.”
    The man shook Ethan’s hand and then took a seat in a chair at Ethan’s bedside.
    “You’re what kind of doctor?” Ethan asked.
    “A psychiatrist. Ethan, I need you to answer a few questions for me, if that’s all right. You said some interesting things to Dr. Miter and his nurse when they first brought you in. Do you know what I’m referring to?”
    “No.”
    “You were talking about a dead body in one of the houses here in town. And that you hadn’t been able to get in touch with your family.”
    “I don’t recall speaking with the nurse or doctor.”
    “You were delirious at the time. Do you have a history of mental illness, Ethan?”
    Ethan had been fully reclined in bed.
    Now he struggled to sit up.
    Threads