Chapter Text
I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee,
I'm goin' to Lousiana, my true love for to see
It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry,
The sun so hot I froze to death, Susanna don't you cry.
-"Oh, Susanna!", composer unknown.
The day God decided to kill Toby Rogers' mother and sister dawned bright and airy.
There were four of them in the car, the two parents and the kids, barrelling down a busy highway in a battered Ford Aspire. Toby's father was at the wheel. He was hungover. He was going too fast.
The Ford slammed into an oncoming Mini Cooper at half-nine exactly. Both cars were doing ninety miles per hour, which resulted in an impact speed of twice that. The Mini bore the brunt of the physical damage, but the Ford spun off the road like a top and careened sideways into a tree. One of Toby's teeth got knocked out. His mother and sister were mangled beyond recognition, their bodies speared by the splintered wreckage of the right-hand doors.
After about a minute and a half of effort, Toby's father managed to wrench open his door. He clambered out of the car, fell to his knees, and vomited onto the gritty yellow grass.
Toby stayed very still. His sister's hand, still warm and intact, was limp around his own. He sat there in the hissing car, mouth filling with blood, until the paramedics arrived to cut him out.
In the months and years that would follow that bright morning, Toby found that his memory of the crash was sanded over, chipped at, washed away. He forgot the crazy panic of that single second when the car ricocheted off the motorway. He forgot his sister's scream when the first of the shrapnel pierced her.
By the time he'd reached seventeen, he recalled nothing of it. He knew, in theory, that his mother and sister had existed, and that they did not exist anymore because of a road accident.That contented him; he could live with that. As far as he was concerned, that was the end of the matter.
Toby dropped out of high school two months after the crash. He was fourteen. His father, at that point, was more of a hermit crab than a man; he stayed inside the house, in his room, drinking more than he ate and always, always staring out at the forest. Toby ran into some problems with a gang of sophomores, due to a mild stutter, and began to cut class. Two weeks later, he ran out of the main entrance for the last time. His hair dripped toilet water. His backpack was missing. His father didn't say anything about it. The teachers, unwilling to get involved with the situation, didn't pursue it.
Toby still liked learning, despite his ambivalence towards school, and made weekly pilgrimmages to the library to chew through the Dewey Decimal System. He read what he liked-astronomy, mythology, the occasional brave foray into calculus. The library became his second womb-a warm little attic above the town hall, muffled and quiet, replete with beanbags and soft chairs. Toby stopped noticing style, or voice, or metaphor-he was only ever satisfied by dry facts. He immersed himself in the regular and the expected as his home and father fell apart.
Mr. Rogers still bought food for himself and his son out of his wife and daughter's life insurance, but apart from that he might as well have been a figment of the imagination. He didn't speak to Toby. He didn't wash himself, and developed a crusty layer of dirt all over his body. His beard darkened along his jaw.
One night, when by some miracle they were both eating in the kitchen, Toby happened to feel a long hair in his mouth. He grimaced and spat out the bolus of takeaway hamburger into his hand to throw away.
His father grunted, reached across the table, and smashed Toby's head into his plate.
"Don't do that," he growled. "Fuckin' hell, we didn't raise you to do that."
It was the first time he'd said a word to Toby in three years.
Toby stayed sprawled on the table for a moment, breathing hard. Then, he pushed himself back up onto his elbows and carried on eating, his expression thoughtful. As he chewed, a striking purple bruise bloomed on his forehead. When he was done, he washed the delph he'd used and sloped back up the stairs into his room. There was a door set into the wall beside his window that he'd never seen before.
Or maybe he had. Holes were appearing in his memories, as though his mind were a bedsheet attacked by moths.
The door was still there when he woke up later on that night, and there was a person-shaped shadow crouching on the end of the bed.
Shock ripped through Toby like a gunshot. He turned over, fingers twitching, but the figure sprang at him and clapped its soil-smelling palm over his mouth.
"If ya didn't wanna visitor," it drawled, its words marbled with a Southern twang, "ya shouldna left the window open."