by Ari Berk
Silas thanked him and looked down at the apple. He picked it up to take a bite. It felt soft in his hand, and as he turned the apple around, he saw the other side was brown and bruised with rot. Uncle seemed to smile with self-satisfaction as Silas returned the apple quickly to the tray and rubbed his hand on his napkin.
“You see? Preserved is always best. Lasts nearly forever that way. No nasty surprises. Now,” Uncle said, apparently prepared to mount the aforementioned expedition to the cellar for dessert. “Who wants jarred peaches?”
Silas chose to restrict himself mostly to nuts and olives because they seemed somehow safer, more natural than the strips of translucent meat. He had been eating slowly, as he watched the two of them talk for over an hour, and what a script. His uncle appeared almost gleeful as he talked about the other families in town who were dying out, or leaving, as if he wanted the town all to himself. There was an edge to his uncle’s tone that seemed arrogant and a little mean: a note of superiority.
His mom and Uncle then turned to Amos as a topic of conversation. Although they were clearly being careful about what they said, trying to be pleasant, cordial, respectful, every now and again one of them said something that proved neither of them had much esteem for Amos Umber. Silas looked down at his plate while they spoke, chasing olives around with a fork.
“Always undependable,” one said.
“A little weak when it most mattered,” replied the other.
“Youthful temperament, even later in life.”
“Soft.”
Silas pretended to be distracted, allowing them to continue talking freely as if they were alone.
His uncle and his mother seemed to agree on everything they said about his dad, but there was something different about the tone of their comments. Silas tried to read the rise and fall of their voices, the angles of their necks, the arch of their eyebrows, and after a while, he thought he saw what the difference was. His mother was pretending, trying to convince herself that Amos was dead and she knew what had happened to him. His uncle, Silas suddenly felt, was lying and rather enjoyed doing it. Uncle knew something about his father. And worse, Uncle seemed to take pleasure from knowing things other people didn’t. Silas did not like thinking this about the man who’d given them a place to live, but there was a sort of smirk hidden inside his uncle’s words that made Silas feel like he was being laughed at. He knew that tone. He’d heard it often enough from kids at school, from the ones who’d look at you like you weren’t worth talking to, from the ones who looked at your unfashionable clothes, or the shape of your face, and told everyone else that you were a freak. Silas was scared of those kids, because usually, those were the ones who didn’t think that normal rules applied to them, the ones who thought they could get away with anything.
Eager to be thought a pleasant conversationalist, his mother had been asking a string of questions as the candles at the dinner table burned lower and lower in their tarnished silver candelabras. Uncle answered everything cordially, although Silas could see him gently steer his mother away from certain topics, like his wife. It was clear to Silas that his uncle didn’t care much for that topic when Uncle said merely, “Oh, I hardly think of her anymore. I mean to say that a man can only endure so much heartache and then must either expire, or do the best he can and not look back.” Dolores looked impressed with his answer and so continued on, obviously enjoying having a man’s attention on her, especially when there was candlelight to improve her complexion.
Silas tried not to look at his mother, because she had this simpering smile plastered across her face every time she gazed across the table at Uncle.
“And what of Adam? Still off at school, is he? You must be so very proud of him. A son at college in Europe! What parent wouldn’t be bursting with pride at such a child?”
Silas deliberately ignored that question, which he knew was as much for him as it was for Uncle. It was going to be one of those nights where she’d sink her teeth into a topic and keep chewing and chewing at it.
Uncle looked up just briefly and then replied, “Oh, goodness yes, though that boy is costing me a fortune in upkeep! Not to mention tuition. But I don’t begrudge it. When he graduates, he’ll have his pick of careers. He’ll move in the best circles. He’ll have a life I never had.”
Silas lifted his head at this. “You seem to have done all right for yourself, Uncle.”
“You mistake me, Silas. Yes, I have done well and am comfortable here, but I have, on occasion, longed for a life somewhere else. Though I have been fortunate in Lichport. I have had several businesses. At one time, as I think you know, I dealt in antiquities, and still sell the occasional piece. There was an excellent market for such things here, once, and I sold to galleries and collectors all over the country. Again, this was some time ago, but I have invested well and have remained immune to the town’s general decline. Perhaps you are not aware, but this town has seen more vibrant days. I have, once or twice, thought of leaving, wondered, What if? But this is my place, and I am at ease with my fate. And now that you have come, we might make a new life for ourselves, together.” Uncle gazed across the room, over both their heads, perhaps at his reflection in the window. Somewhat dreamily he said, “Having you here, Silas, well, it’s like getting to live with the son I never had.”
What the hell did that mean? thought Silas. How long has Adam been away at school?
“Of course,” said Uncle, as he adjusted his posture and looked at Silas again over laced fingers, “I mean, having a young man in the house again will just be so pleasant. It will make it feel like a real family is here, all together again.” He looked now, very deliberately and as if on cue, across the table at Dolores, who still had that smile pulled across her face, even as she chewed.
“My dear nephew,” Uncle said, “I know the move must be awkward. I suppose you will miss your friends back in Saltsbridge?”
Before Silas could reply, his mother leapt in.
“What friends?” she said through a full mouth. “The only friends he spent any time with were the ones he made up. Oh, mind you, there were plenty of those. I used to remember all their names. Had to, or the little prince wouldn’t speak to me for a week. There was this one time—Amos was away, of course—Silas was maybe seven. Guess this was the first time he took it in his mind to leave school. But he just up and walks out of class, right past his teachers and out into the hall. No one noticed. No one knew he was gone. It was like he was invisible, like he lived his whole life at noon and cast no shadow. Well, why would they notice him? Head in a book all the time, drawing those weird pictures on everything, and never caring for anyone other than his father.”
At first Silas didn’t look up from his plate. Just kept eating. Fork to plate to mouth to plate to mouth to plate. But then he couldn’t hold it in and spoke, again without looking up.
“As usual, you have your facts mixed up. I was always invisible. That started at home. Remember how you hardly ever spoke to me or asked me how I was? Remember how when you and Dad would start screaming at each other, I never seemed to be around? Just invisible. But I heard every word.”
Uncle had stopped eating as he watched what was unwinding between Dolores and the boy. By his posture, Silas could tell Uncle was fascinated.
“But when you made me go to that school, that’s when I learned how to take it one step further. It wasn’t hard. I’d just repeat over and over, ‘Look right through me, through me, through me. I am not here. I am not here. I am not here.’ And pretty soon, I just wasn’t. I could sit right in front of the teacher and she’d never even see my hand go up. It was magic. I could just disappear. My first spell.”
“You pushed them away, Silas. No one will keep trying forever when you just sit there with your head down on the desk.”
“Maybe, but when you’re sitting right in front of someone and they can’t see you, refuse to notice you—I mean, what was I supposed to think?” he asked more forcefully, as he looked directly at his mot
her. “Of course,” he added, “you could make things disappear too, right? One glass after another would just vanish.” Silas could see that one struck home, and for just an instant, he could see sorrow and shame in his mother’s eyes as she looked back at him, but then the challenge took over again and her back went straight and she slowly turned her head, looking past Silas to Uncle.
His mother shifted the topic, but only slightly, and evaded her son’s stare. She said to Uncle, “And if you could have seen the pictures he made. You know how most children draw the same things: houses, suns, flowers, animals? Not this one. Boxes with eyes. Tunnels. Old men with two heads. Whole pictures painted black.”
“There were people in that picture, but it was nighttime. Duh. All you had to do was ask where they were and I could have pointed them out to you. Dad always asked.”
Dolores looked back at her son as she tried to bring a kindness into her voice that she clearly didn’t feel.
“Silas—and hon, I don’t say this to be hurtful—it was easier not to ask you anything, because, let me tell you, some of the things you’d say, about people who weren’t there, about things living in the basement, about your drawings, about what you saw looking in the window after dark—let me just tell you I couldn’t sleep at night for your wonderful imagination.”
His mother watched him, but he didn’t respond. Silas remembered those days, and how he would talk about these “friends” in such detail that sometimes his mother would think someone was with them in the house. “More of your father’s nonsense,” she would say to him as she quickly closed the drapes or hid his pictures in a drawer.
“Anyway,” Dolores said, returning to the present, “we hardly spoke at home, anyway. In the door you’d come, and right up into your room. All day long, in that room, with them. And how he’d talk and talk into the air.”
“A wonderful imagination indeed,” Uncle said, weighing in.
“Yes,” said Silas, his face beginning to redden with embarrassment and anger. “You needed an imagination in my house. Dad worked long hours and probably didn’t want to come home, because someone had spent the day drinking and stank of it by dinner. I mean, it took an active imagination to keep from killing yourself in a house like that.”
Dolores threw her silverware down on the table and pushed back her chair. Silas said, “Don’t bother. I’m going upstairs to my room now.”
He rose, thanked his uncle for dinner, and left the room, but he paused on the other side of the door to hear what they’d say behind his back.
“Shall I assume these little flights from the dinner table are to become customary?” Uncle asked Dolores. When she didn’t answer, but only closed her eyes and sighed, he continued.
“It’s all right, Dolores. A passionate consistency is not unacceptable. A little supper, a little light conversation, a little attitude, a little defensiveness, a little walk around the block to clear one’s head. It is good for a man to be regular in the governance of his day’s business. That leads, eventually we may hope, to regularity in the habits of the mind and body. Yes. Eventually. So you see, Dolores? Even in such trying moments, there is hope for improvement. He is a remarkable person, I think. Yes. I think he may eventually prove extraordinary. He has important work ahead of him. Be assured of that.”
Instead of going upstairs, Silas left the house without even getting his jacket.
BEATRICE HAD BEEN WANDERING THE TOWN since before the rain began, following the paths he had walked. She wanted her feet to follow his feet, although she did not go down the lanes of the Narrows, even though she could strongly feel he’d been there or would be going there. Some days past, present, and future were hard to reckon. Anyway, she didn’t want to see the ocean. Too much water, and how wide it was. The deep endlessness of it made her feel hopeless. So she was keeping to the little side streets around the square. It must have been late because there was no one out, no one else walking, not that she could see. Something was beginning to pull at her, and without thinking she turned south down Fairwell and walked along the large avenue that would eventually lead to the gates of Newfield Cemetery, drawn by the sense that where she moved, he had moved before, and if she stepped where he’d stepped, they were walking together … in a way.
The year was turning. She could feel that much. Strong winds would rush by, briefly blowing the mist aside, and there were the trees that reached up with long arms and fingers, and burning orange leaves setting all the branches to flame. Like my heart, she thought. Just like my burning heart. She needed to love someone again. Longing gave her back a sense of herself.
She kept walking, farther than her usual and habitual boundaries. It felt good to be away from the millpond, where everything always felt so stagnant. She was following a sound she could barely hear. Like a distant drum, or a heartbeat. But just below the thump, there was pain and anger. Every time the beat came, there was a cry that tore its way up the street toward her like some mad thing running just because it could. And this sound had something do with him, with the one who’d looked down to see her. It was connected to him, close to him. That much she could feel.
She wasn’t sure how long she had been walking, but when she looked up, she found that she was standing outside a house on Temple Street, and knew that he was here, that he had slept in this house, and that he was in it now. She also knew some of his relatives lived there because she could feel the common blood song inside the place, the chorus of ancestors moving about in familiar constellations. It was late and the house should have been quiet, but as she stood in the street looking up at one of its high windows, a rising howl was making her head throb.
The house seemed to be shaking too, like all its walls were being hit with hammers. If she closed her eyes and just listened to the crying, she thought she could see a figure through that high window, although it was a dark night, and the glass was black. This figure was in one of the upper rooms, and repeatedly threw its head and upper body against the wall of the house, and each time it did, it cried out and screamed, a long, awful, lonely wail. Buried in the piercing volume of the cry she thought she could just detect a word.
“SSSSIIIIIAAHHHSSS … SIIIIIAAHHSSS …”
It was calling out for someone with whom it shared something, and it wanted that person so much it hurt. She knew how that felt, but this was … horrible, a siren of anguish and fear and loneliness.
The rain was coming down harder now, but it couldn’t keep the mist from rising. She should go back. This was not one of her places, and she didn’t like this street or this house, or that sound, and the longer she listened the more she was forgetting why she’d come here. As she turned away from the house, the front door was thrown open and a tall man staggered out onto the porch with his hands clapped over his ears. He tried to pull the door shut but struggled with it, as though someone was holding the door from the other side. Finally, whatever it was let go, and he managed to pull the door closed. The force of that, along with his pulling so hard, made him fall back, nearly between the columns and down the steps. He looked sick and scared.
He looked back at the house as another scream sounded. He threw his hands over his ears, hunched over where he’d fallen on the porch with his arms wrapped around himself, and began to cry.
“SSSIIILLAAASSSS!”
The scream drove itself out into the night, where it blended with the wind’s striving rasp. It was no word at all, but when the scream rose a final time, she thought she could hear what it might be saying. It sounded like a desperate child crying for its parent, and she began to realize that it was saying a name, and the more she heard it, the more she was sure she knew what that name was: Silas. She went cold right through as all the recent cheer poured out of her and left her shaking in the air.
She was scared and began to run, passing through the thick ropes of rain that now fell all around her. She ran back the way she came, but instead of going left on Main, she stopped very suddenly. She needed to know that Silas was all right, d
espite whatever else was trapped inside that house. She turned into the mist on Fairwell once again and in an instant stood once more on Temple Street below the window of what she now knew to be Silas’s room.
The wailing stopped.
She could feel Silas breathing in his sleep and focused on that steady, quiet sound. She just stood there, wet right through, water pooling around her, covering her, running over her eyes, down her body. This was familiar. She began to calm. He was all right. He was sleeping. No one else was here. The tall man had returned inside, and the fury that had wracked the house had now subsided.
All this water, she thought. Time to go home.
But to be so close to him filled her with such exquisite joy. She knew his name now, and she thought it, Silas, Silas, Silas, the name working through her like a spell. Had that always been his name? No matter. She held it in her mind like some treasured thing. She said it out loud, and as the name left her and wove itself with the wet air, she could see him, really see him. As if he had been there all along, waiting just for her. Then and now. Only for her.
Asleep in his room, Silas threw his head from side to side, in the grip of a bad dream that was trying to settle its business before morning. He could hear rain, somewhere.
He knew that he was dreaming and that water was rising all about him. He knew that he was drowning in his dream. There was a girl there. Below the water. She was wet and beautiful and she kissed him as he screamed, and his mouth instantly filled with water.
At that, his eyes opened and went wide, and he sat upright, although for a moment he could see only the distant distorted features of a room, as if through rounded glass, as if he were still underwater.
Beatrice smiled.
It was almost dawn. She liked the morning. As the sun rose, things seemed to make more sense to her. She could remember more, although not all her memories brought her joy. Old thoughts rose up inside her too, and inhabited her again, like fish in a net, blurry and distant but quickly becoming clearer, plainer, more certain as they were dredged up from the bottom. She remembered the last one, the last little fish. How he watched her, and how he would look for her. She remembered how she had followed him and how he had liked it. She remembered how they never spoke, but were often together. Then the last one was holding a child. A boy. How interesting that was, watching father and son, knowing then it might never end, one fish following another, on and on and on. Always someone to love her. She felt an unfamiliar warmth at the endings of her body—fingers, toes, knees, the very top of her head. But the last one—Amos, she remembered now—he saw her looking at his child and his face changed, as if he’d just realized there was a knife on the floor and he needed to snatch his child away from it. The father turned very quickly, and the air seemed to close behind him. The mist drew in about him, and she could barely make out his body. But over his shoulder, the child’s face was clear and bright, a little sun shining through the clouding mist. The baby looked at her, she could feel it. The child looked right at her and smiled.
