“Departures” is a supernatural thriller and love story published as a serial novel with new episodes dropping every Tuesday morning. Anyone can read or listen for free. Paid subscribers gain early access to new episodes. Watch the trailer or visit the table of contents to browse all the published episodes.
Previously…
In the last episode, Wild was babysitting Millie when she was just a little girl and he came into contact with a boy her age. Wild had a powerful premonition that the boy would die within a year and he was so distraught that he made a point of getting to know the boy’s mother, Eileen. Eileen is a single mother, working her way through law school. He offered to help get her a job with his family’s company in part because it would pay better and give her more time with her boy, but also so he could stay close to them during what he knew would be a horrible time.
Wild woke to the sound of rain thrumming softly on the roof of their small maloca. A slight breeze through the open window made the sheer curtains billow. He breathed in the clean, ionized air that was cool and damp. His throat was sore, and his mouth was dry and chalky.
He rose slowly and reached for the water bottle beside his bed. As he drank, he took in the dim interior of the one-room space. It was impossible to know what time it was. Maybe late afternoon? He stood and stretched. Millie and Raina had pushed their cots together and were sleeping there, arms entwined. Millie’s blonde hair spilled across the pillow and flowed into Raina’s dark curls like a tributary joining a river. He studied them for a moment as if he were standing before the painting of a Dutch master in a museum. They were a composition, a study in contrasts, their differences, complimentary. Wild’s old heart ached, remembering the feeling of belonging to someone.
He found his boots, put them on quietly, and opened the door to step out onto the small landing. The rain was a thousand imperceptible pin pricks so small and light like acupuncture needles, each one delivering a powerful message to his nervous system. He felt alive, more alive than he had felt since he was a boy. He stepped down onto the path and followed it with no thought to where he was going. There was an easing in his joints that made him think of the tin man from the Wizard of Oz after a few blessed drops from his oil can.
He had come to see the wizard. The most wonderful wizard of all. Because, because, because. Because of the wonderful things he does…
Wild found he was whistling the song and when he stopped, the melody seemed to be picked up by a bird somewhere above in the canopy of trees. He followed it, meandering until he eventually found himself at the edge of the compound of huts and staring off into the dense jungle. As he peered into it, visions of the infinite geometry from the night before flickered beneath every root, trunk, leaf, and flower. It was a feeling of knowing, of somehow seeing the intricate wireframe that gave structure and definition to the facade of the living world.
He stepped off the path and into the jungle, enjoying the give of the rich soil beneath his boot. He picked his way through the overlapping branches and undergrowth for a time to avoid getting too wet before eventually surrendering. The wet leaves, like large brushes, painted his shirt and pants until he was soaked to the skin, and he could feel no separation between himself and the forest.
As he walked, the rain gradually stopped, a sensation he could feel but also hear and see. In the stillness, the birds and crickets emerged, and his thoughts returned to the visions from the night before. The red-faced patriarch with the whip was as real as if the man had been in the room, looming over him. Even here, in the sober light of day, in the middle of the jungle, he could smell the man’s breath and the stench of his sweat. Wild wanted to push past him so he could replay the memory of June, catalog every detail and tuck it away for those days in the future when it might be harder to get out of bed, but the plantation owner with his square jaw and hard eyes persisted, blocking the way.
The origin of the Thorne family’s wealth could not be found in a timeline on the company’s website. It wasn’t discussed at family gatherings. It had been sanitized by obfuscation over the years with every new generation slathering a fresh, thick coat of white paint to cover the stain. In eighth grade, Wild’s teacher had given the class a research project to interview their parents and grandparents to create a family tree and write a paper. Wild had pursued the project with uncharacteristic diligence, pestering his father at the breakfast table and in his study after dinner where he sat with a tumbler of whiskey and watched football. He learned that the first Thorne man, Emmet, set foot on American soil in 1790 at the tender age of fifteen and over the course of the next fifty-four years amassed a fortune in agriculture. Cotton, son, his dad had said before dismissing him.
At thirteen, of course Wild knew about slavery and had been taught the abridged version in picture books about Harriet Tubman and Abraham Lincoln. While it had stoked in him a hot flicker of righteous anger and indignation that people could be treated that way, the villains in those books were abstract ghosts, floating somewhere outside the pages. A week into working on his paper, he asked his mother to take him to the large public library in Buckhead on a Saturday so he could continue his research. While she shopped nearby, he browsed through a stack of books. There was one with a series of engravings that depicted the life of slaves in Georgia that made him stop and become absorbed. Blood had rushed into his face and roared in his ears as he poured over the pages. He felt sick as he studied images of white men in broad-brimmed hats standing over dark-faced figures made to cower as they stooped over baskets in fields.
That night, at the dinner table he had asked the question: did the Thorne’s own slaves? He was told that was not appropriate dinner conversation. When he persisted, he was sent from the table. Later that week, Wild finished his paper but shoved it in a drawer and never turned it in. That event marked the beginning of his giving up. He rebelled in every way possible from his legacy without actually running away. He only got into college because he realized in his junior year of high school that college was the only real option in the short term to escape so he applied himself, took the SAT and raised his GPA to a near respectable level. It hadn’t been enough, but a generous donation to the University of Georgia from Wilder Thorne Senior nudged his application through.
This became the story of Wild’s life. His true inheritance was complicity, hypocrisy, denial, and self-hatred. It was woven into the strands of his DNA like a razor-sharp ribbon as black as obsidian.
He had been so deep in his thoughts that when he lifted his gaze to look around, he found he was standing in the middle of the jungle, far from the sound of the river and far from the sounds of people at the retreat. He turned around, hoping for some recollection of the path he had taken, but nothing was familiar. There was no path. For some reason, he didn’t feel afraid, quite the opposite. He felt he was standing inside the infinite geometry of the world he’d glimpsed the night before. He was of no consequence here. He was no different from the tiny lizards that darted across the forest floor. He continued to walk, as if in a dream. The sun emerged somewhere far above in the canopy of trees and its rays, the color of lemons, slanted through the foliage illuminating the silvery steam rising from the undergrowth in gauzy wisps.
Something had shifted inside him. He felt it as surely as he’d felt it at twenty-three. But unlike that feeling which he could only describe as a constricting, shrinking down of his spirit, this felt like an expansion. He smiled and drew in a deep breath of the fragrant air, cool and alive. The lightness of it brought a smile to his lips and that smile seemed to lift the iron cage that had enclosed his heart for as long as he could remember. There was a shivering sensation of being naked and raw like he was covered in new skin. He wasn’t thinking of his parents or his curse. He wasn’t thinking of June or Millie or anyone. He wasn’t thinking of Wild either. Wild was just a collection of atoms exchanging themselves with the landscape he moved through.
He came across a stream with clear water rushing silently over smooth stones and a sandy bottom that shimmered in the sunlight. He knelt and plunged his hands into the cold water, bringing handfuls to his face. He rocked back into a sitting position. There was a massive tree to the side of the stream, and he crawled over its sprawling network of roots to lean against the trunk so broad that he couldn’t feel its curvature. He closed his eyes and was drifting off when he heard something tromping in the undergrowth in the direction from which he’d come. He sat upright, his body suddenly flooded with adrenaline. He cursed himself for stupidly wandering off into the jungle. Emboldened by his recent out-of-body experience, he had forgotten the vulnerability of that body.
“Wild?”
He exhaled and collapsed back against the tree. It was Millie.
“Yeah, I’m over here.”
“I was looking all over for you. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sugar, I’m fine. Sorry to worry you. I just found this nice little stream. Sit down with me?”
Millie sat down beside him with her back to the tree. She took his hand in both of hers and rocked her head back. He did the same. Their eyes followed the trunk of the ancient tree as it tapered and disappeared into the canopy.
“I thought I might do the ceremony tonight,” she said. “But I’m a little scared after watching you. What happened? Where did you go?”
“It’s hard to describe in words.”
“But something really scared you, especially in the beginning. What was it?”
“Just a visit from the ghosts of Christmas past, generations of them.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I saw the whole line of Thorne men. Your mama ever tell you about old Emmet Thorne, the man who built our fortune? No, well he was an enterprising motherfucker. I looked it up in archival court records a few years back. He owned more than two-hundred slaves at the height of his power.”
“What happened? Did he talk to you?”
“He did. Threatened me, actually.”
“What? But that’s not real, just your brain tripping.”
“Maybe, maybe not. It felt pretty goddamned real. But I agree. There’s no ghosts or demons.”
“So, you got two trips for the price of one,” she said.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean you paid for a psychedelic trip and got a guilt trip too.”
“I guess that's true, but I’ve always felt more than a little uncomfortable with our family’s history even when I was a kid.”
“That’s a heavy thing for a kid to think about.”
“I was a weird kid. I was obsessed with it for a long time and used to have nightmares. But I don’t think I truly appreciated what all of it meant until I was in college.”
“What happened in college?”
“You’re gonna think it's ridiculous but you have to remember these were different times.”
Millie squeezed his hand. “Well come on, tell me.”
“There was a popular mini-series on TV called Roots. This was before your time. It’s an amazing story that was maybe the first mainstream account of what happened during slavery. You have to understand, this was when everybody watched the same thing cause that’s all there was to watch. The girl I was dating was from Athens, so we went over to watch it with her family. It was kind of an event.”
Wild wasn’t sure why this story came into his mind or why he was telling it to his niece, but he sensed it was the ayahuasca working on him, pushing the splinters up and out of where they had been embedded for so long.
“It sounds ridiculous that a TV show could change the course of a person’s life, but it did. I was that sheltered from the real world. Every episode I watched made me feel more and more sick. It was a long series too, like six or eight nights in a row. As I watched the horrors play out on screen, I understood that the men doing the beatings, raping the women, and tearing families apart weren’t people I had some distant connection to. There was a clear and direct line between me and them. Everything I had was built on that cruelty.”
“Is that when you dropped out?”
“Yeah, that’s what drove me to come over here. I wanted to be as far away from the family legacy as possible. I wanted to find some way to atone. But I was weak and restless. I couldn’t even get that right. Dropped out of the Peace Corps to fuck off with some friends I met. Diego was one of them. What happened to me on that trip, I think it was fate. I think it was a reckoning.”
“That’s not a very healthy way to see your life. You can’t be held responsible for what our family did over two hundred years ago and even if you could, it’s crazy to think the universe or God or whatever would punish you.”
“I’m glad you can see it that way. But honestly, I don’t know how you do. Everything you manage at that company wouldn’t exist if our family hadn’t enslaved a couple of generations of human beings.”
Millie pulled her hand away and Wild could feel her body tense. She didn’t want to hear this. Why would she? He hated himself for laying this at her feet, but she wasn’t a little girl in pigtails anymore.
“How can you sit there and judge me? I’ve worked my ass off and I’ve done so much for the community you have no idea about.” She paused a beat and frowned like she might spit. “You just bury your head in the sand and live off the trust.”
“I do but I’ve never been okay with it. I’ve never been happy. But if you’re free. If you truly feel like the scales have been balanced by a few charitable donations and some scholarships, then I’m happy for you.”
“You’re being an asshole. Why are you trying to make me feel like shit? I did all this, planned this whole trip for you.”
“I’m not trying to be an asshole, Mills. I’m telling you what I believe is true because I don’t think anyone else around you will. I’m near the end of my life and I’ve got nothing to show for it. You have time. I know for a fact that you do.”
“So, what is it I’m supposed to do with this? I’m supposed to just walk away from it all or would you prefer that I blew it all up, gave it all away? Would that make you happy?”
“It’s not about making me happy. It’s about helping you find happiness and joy. I see you starving yourself and running like a hamster on a treadmill. I know what you’re running from. It’s this. What I’ve been telling you. All the money and how we came by it, it’s a sickness, a poison. It’s too much.”
Millie rose to her feet. Her face was red and contorted and tears tracked down her cheeks. Wild had a vision of the six-year-old girl she once was, angry about not getting an ice cream.
“You don’t know me. I’ve worked really, really hard to be a good person. Shame on you, Wild.”
She turned and stomped back through the jungle until Wild could no longer hear her above the rushing water and the symphony of birds and crickets.
“Yes, shame on me,” he said.
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