Death Watch

by Ari Berk

  Yes. Yes, she thought, opening her eyes as she began her short walk home. Let the child come home again.

  She could hear Mr. Peale hollering within the house even before she’d crossed the threshold. He was having one of his fits. Mother Peale walked in quickly and saw her husband sitting in his chair by the fire. He was covered in sweat, his wet hair plastered down onto his skull in strips and his night clothes clinging to him, yellowed and translucent.

  As she entered the room, he threw back his head and yelled, “There is a shadow on the sea, my girl! Wandering it goes, yet sure it comes to harbor! The ship of air … the ship of mist … Hold fast!” And before Mother Peale could cross the room and soothe him, he jumped from his seat, his eyes still closed, and began leaping on the stones near the fire in a sort of dance, singing out,

  Hear the wailing of the crew,

  Hark! There’s the tolling bell!

  Away! And weigh the anchor,

  A ship sails forth from hell!

  Had it been a hundred years? Fever or no, she knew her husband could see the truth in the turning tide. The mist ship was coming into harbor, and before sailing forth again, it would take a soul with it out of Lichport and into perdition.

  IT WAS THE BEGINNING OF THE END of their time in Saltsbridge. The day before departure. It had been quiet in the house all morning. Silas and his mother were each doing their own last-minute packing, but there was a heaviness in the air. Too many boxes unfilled and unsealed. Too many things still to sort out and no time left. Silas was trying hard to ask his mother only easy questions, the kinds of things you could answer with a plain fact.

  “What time are we driving to Lichport tomorrow?”

  “We aren’t driving,” Dolores said a little smugly. “We are being driven. Your uncle is sending a car for us.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll drive over myself in the car while you’re chauffeured.”

  “That might be difficult, Silas. That car’s gone.”

  “What? What do you mean, gone?”

  “I mean it’s gone. I sold it. Go look in the garage if you don’t believe me. How do you think we paid for the movers?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Silas yelled, his calm shattered. “That was my car!”

  “Si, it was your father’s car—”

  “It still is his car!”

  “It was your father’s car. And when he … didn’t come back … it became my car, and I sold my car so I could get some of our things to our new home and pay to put the furniture in storage because we can’t just go redecorating the house of our host. You understand that, right?”

  Silas couldn’t speak. He was beyond angry. No car? What would he do if things in Lichport went bad, or he hated living with his uncle? He’d always assumed he’d have a way out, but, with no car, now what? Not to mention, his mother had just pretty much admitted that she thought his dad was never coming back. He ran to the garage and opened the side door. Even as his eyes adjusted, he could feel the unfilled space in the way his quick breaths echoed loudly off the floor and walls.

  It was all falling away, everything he knew he could count on. All vanishing. And tomorrow he was leaving for Lichport. He’d be just another item on a growing list of things that weren’t where he needed them to be.

  Dolores sat on the porch, watching the movers carry all her marked boxes across the yard. Only the boxes with her handwriting on them were being stacked in the truck, while Silas’s boxes of books sat idle in the driveway.

  “Well?” she said as though someone was secretly questioning her. “What if there’s not enough room for important things, for the valuables? I don’t know why you’re taking all your father’s old books along. They’re rubbish anyway.”

  “These are my books,” Silas said calmly, not wanting to argue with her again today.

  “They are not your books!” she insisted, and then sneered, “Your dear father bought most of those books or slipped you the money for them. Money that might have been better used, I might add.”

  “Do you see him around?” Silas asked, rising to the offer of a fight after her remark. He hadn’t forgotten she’d sold the car.

  She glared at him from her chair on the porch, her eyebrows and lips pulling thin as if someone were standing behind her and making a knot of the flesh on the back of her skull.

  “No. You don’t,” Silas said flatly, answering for her. “So that makes them mine. But,” he added out of spite, “when he comes back, I’ll return all the books if he asks me for them.”

  “Besides,” she called back over her shoulder at Silas, unable to let him have the last word, “haven’t you washed your hands of school? Didn’t you call it quits at high school? No college, right? At least, not in the foreseeable future. You’ll see, right? So all that reading, it’s just a waste of time, isn’t it?”

  “I did graduate, or don’t you remember? You bought a cake,” Silas said coldly. “And I’m not wasting time. Time is what my father left me, and I’m keeping a good hold on every second, even if you have made other plans for yourself and forgotten your obligations.” Then he walked up to her chair and leaned over to whisper, “But it looks like you need another drink. Can I bring you something from one of the crates? Perhaps you’d like to join me in the kitchen to see if we can find a bottle that you haven’t already emptied?”

  Dolores didn’t reply with words, but her hands, dry and chapped from days of wrapping everything she loved in layer after layer of paper, were clutching the arms of her chair like claws. Forget her obligations? Her? Run from them, maybe, but she’d never forget them. She had sunk down into herself, into a seated, crouching posture that said, Try and get me out of this chair, and go to hell while you’re at it. Besides, she knew there wasn’t a single bottle in the kitchen that had even a drop in it. The well was dry.

  So she just sat there while Silas stormed back into the house, just sat, watching the men make a river of her belongings across the lawn. Down the steps and across the stone pavers set into the lawn like little islands on a wide green sea. One, two, three. The movers were timing their steps so their feet came down in the middle of each stone. One, two, and just there, under the third stone, she remembered, there was a little corpse, another thing being left behind.

  In her mind she could see Silas as a boy sitting on the lawn in that very spot, carefully digging a hole. She remembered his slow, deliberate movements as he gently placed the mouse wrapped in one of her good linen napkins into the ground. She was about to start yelling about the napkin when she saw Silas take a handful of small seeds, the mouse’s favorite food, and cast them into the little grave. She asked him, more annoyed at the action than the theft of the napkin, “What the hell is the food for?” And she’d never forgotten his answer, which he said so slowly and carefully, as if he thought she didn’t know English—

  “So he knows I love him.”

  She knew then, all those years ago, that Silas would be headed back to Lichport, that he was his father’s son. She never would have guessed that she’d be returning with him. She could have done with forgetting a lot of things from the days when Silas was little. But gin never seemed to work quite as advertised on her. She remembered a lot. Too much, she thought, getting up to go in to get a drink, maybe from a bottle she’d hidden in the bathroom.

  “You okay?” Silas asked, trying to make peace.

  “Damn dead mouse,” was all she said. But she thought: A dead mouse gets to stay put, but I have to move. Christ.

  Although she had actually admitted to wanting to move into a bigger house, and knew that Charles Umber was a man of some remaining means, she didn’t like to do anything because someone else’s actions made it necessary. Her husband had failed to come back. Failed to support his family. Failed to raise his son properly. Failed to save them from bankruptcy and the awful but necessary charity of family. Failed to keep them out of Lichport like he’d promised when their son was born. She could blame him for these things until the
day she died, and in that, she took some comfort and eased her grasp on the chair just a bit. Was it so much to just want a normal life? For things to be unremarkable, simple?

  Maybe in Charles Umber’s house, with all that good furniture and art on the walls, things might get easier for once instead of harder. If only he didn’t live in Lichport. Maybe she could convince him to move someplace nicer. What did he have to tie him there? Unlike Silas, Uncle’s son was in college, and his wife had abandoned them long ago. There. They already had something in common. She knew he was sweet on her. Always had been. She could see that in the way he’d looked at her years ago. Maybe this could turn out okay. Big house meant some money, savings. But back in Lichport. Maybe she’d get some brochures of condos in Florida, leave them around the house.

  But Lichport.

  Right back where you started, she told herself. Right back in the middle of that town. You were out, she told her heartburn. You. Were. Out. Her father once told her that when you leave a place, you should never go back, because no matter what the actual circumstances, it will always look like a retreat, a failure. That was sure how it felt. As the men with the boxes flowed past her chair, her mind began to make a list of things in her life for which she was now being punished. But this time there would be a fine house and someone with money looking after her.

  But Lichport! Every time she so much as thought the name of that town, she felt nauseated and nervous.

  Silas looked at his mother in her chair. He could feel her doing that list thing, where she didn’t speak or look at you because she was tallying something in her head. Figuring out how bad you’d messed up.

  Yet, seeing her like that, he started to feel bad for having taken such a nasty tone with her. Didn’t she have enough to worry about without him being such a pain and trying to pick a fight?

  He looked around the living room, empty except for a few small boxes and the luggage that would go with them in the car. Where the furniture had been, Silas could see marks sunk into the carpets, footprints of the arrangement of their life here in this house. In that moment, he felt like the illusion that his family had become was held together only by the constellation of patterns left by the furniture feet set on a rug, by the runes formed in the shadows that the chair backs threw on the walls, and that once those things were moved or faded, he wouldn’t know who he was anymore. All the pictures had been taken down, and the walls were scarred with the holes of rusted nails. When he passed his hands over the holes, he could feel little jets of cold air blowing into the room from the space beyond. He leaned his head close to the wall and felt a pencil-thin stream of air on his face, and the sound of it escaping from behind the walls was like one soft, continuous exhalation of breath, like the whole house was dying.

  FOR SILAS, LICHPORT WAS ONLY A NAME, like that of a distant cousin or a dead relative he’d never met. Familiar but abstract. Even though Amos had told his son about Lichport many times, the town had always felt far off, a place that kept his father from him. Although he’d been born there, it was like a foreign country to Silas. Now that he could feel the night wind on his face, now that the car was driving swiftly in the direction of that otherworld, Lichport was becoming more real, part of an actual landscape that he was just beginning to be able to see.

  What is it about traveling by night that makes even a short journey strange and a little wonderful? Momentary lights appear and pass across the windowpane so fast they burst suddenly into view before becoming patterns of the past, stars that grow ever more distant as they follow their opposite course away from the car as it hurtles on its way through the darkness.

  As Silas rolled down the window, the smell of the salt marsh and the distant sea flooded the interior. He imagined his father driving this same road hundreds and hundreds of times. He could feel his father’s history like ruts worn deep in the road. He wanted to walk where his father had walked. Wanted to live where his dad had spent so much of his time. That’s how you’ll find him, he said to himself as he put his hand out of the car into the night air, feeling the wind push against his palm. His mother was dozing and didn’t notice they had crossed from the town into the empty lands surrounding it. As the biting air buffeted his face, he realized he was holding his breath the way you do when going through a tunnel.

  Everything was changing. Silas brought his hand back into the car and reached into his pocket, taking out a folded piece of paper, the last thing he’d taken from his desk before the furniture had been carried away. He opened it and read the words he’d written just before his dad disappeared: “Do It Now List. (1) Start on English paper, (2) CALL HER, (3) Talk to Dad about a car, (4) Get college application stuff.”

  Not one thing on the list had been done. He’d passively ignored any plans to pursue college during his father’s absence. Silas put his hand back outside the window, holding the paper by the corner between two fingers. He watched it blow wildly for a moment in the night air before letting it go.

  The car turned left down a road marked by a worn and bullet-riddled sign, briefly illuminated by the headlights as the car slowed. The sign leaned precariously toward the highway, as if it was about to fall over. The old white decorative letters could still be seen to proclaim with a misplaced funereal enthusiasm:

  WELCOME TO LICHPORT—COME FOR THE DAY, STAY FOR ETERNITY!

  The car slowed almost to a crawl as it drew toward dark shapes ahead. The moon was very bright and lit the town and surrounding country in a milky light. The first buildings of Lichport’s main street rose up in shadow ahead. Silas could see a church steeple in the distance and a hill curving upward like a bell. He knew—but could not see—that the sea flowed away to the east beyond the far side of the town.

  On the left side of the car was some open ground, a millpond with the moon reflecting on the water, and beyond it the salt marsh stretched out and faded away where a small, silhouetted line of reeds pointed up at the cold stars.

  There was a light over the millpond.

  As his mother softly snored, Silas saw it, flickering, hanging above the water.

  “Could you stop the car, please?” Silas asked the driver, staring hard through the window.

  “Sir, we’ll be at your drop-off point in five minutes.”

  “I’ve gotta pee,” Silas lied. “I mean right now.”

  The car pulled over and Silas got out. He walked past an abandoned shop, its windows long since boarded over, and made his way toward the millpond. The light was still there, like a candle flame, floating above the water. It gave no reflection, but as Silas approached, the light wavered and slowly drifted toward the bank where he stood with his feet almost touching the water. As the flame got closer, it grew brighter and smaller, a tiny star hanging low in the air, but as Silas reached out to touch it, the wind rose and the light dropped suddenly into the pond and vanished. Silas realized he had taken a step forward, and his right shoe was now half-submerged in the cold water.

  In the distance, the long, searching cry of marsh birds sounded from among the reeds. As water seeped into his shoe, Silas looked down. It seemed that the bright reflection of the moon had somehow pierced the water. The small light now seemed to have settled at the bottom of the pond, where it illuminated various silt-covered shapes and a few pale sticks. A trick of the moonlight, Silas thought, and he leaned down until his face was just above the water. Something was moving at the bottom. A fish? Perhaps the rising wind rippling the water’s surface was stirring the silt on the bottom. The water seemed pretty shallow. Again, maybe a trick of the light, but Silas thought he might be able to reach the bottom. He put his hand onto the cold surface of the water. He was about to stretch his hand below toward the objects that reflected the glow of the bone-white moon, when from behind him, the driver’s voice called out, “Sir? Sir?”

  Silas walked quietly away from the millpond.

  Below the surface of the water, something stirred, awoke, and watched him walk away.

  ABOVE THE WATER, SOMETHI
NG LOOKED.

  Below the surface something saw.

  She could feel him.

  She wanted him and began to stir her mind up from the murk and mud.

  I am here, where I was

  I am Be.

  The high torches bring shadows

  grasses turn, weave about, fold and flash, leaves above,

  some sink down

  bright leaf, dark leaf, catching the torchlight.

  Even in dark nothing is still

  little crabs move along all the white branches and I cannot sleep

  eels thread through the hard sticks that are mine and I

  cry because I am not with him

  not warm

  when jewels are in the water weeds it is quiet

  nothing breaks the high still glass above

  he has not been

  once a time

  anyone is not there

  is not saying my name

  I want to be

  I want to be

  I am again

  but now and there on the glass

  his dark moves

  moves for me to be

  to be with him

  the dark on the glass is Solace

  we will be

  now in the bright time

  he puts his face down to the glass

  looks low for me

  he is looking

  looking down for me to be with him

  he was again

  I did not see before when my own blood men took the

  thyme he gave me and put me in the cold bed and I

  thought he left and always

  forgot the thyme he gave me wild

  from the mountain time

  there was another

  But I did not forget

  that one did not want to be with me

  But I did not forget

  Even when the crabs and eels and the white things that