Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  He liked feeling that it was the two of them. But when they were together, he noticed, the shadows drew in just a little. The world around them darkened. The light wasn’t so bright or revealing. All the rough edges of things were rounded down. He liked feeling as though he had a little secret he was keeping from the world, though he was beginning to sense there was something unnatural about their attraction for each other, something dangerous in their desire to be together, in the way she looked at him. Still, Bea was match to the field of dry weeds Silas’s heart had become in the time since his dad had disappeared. Their little fire had started fast, and Silas didn’t want to worry about what else might catch or who else saw the smoke. When he thought about her, he was warm all over, and it was so nice to feel something, anything, other than scared and abandoned.

  The clouds had slowed and gone ashen, swinging low toward the ground. It was going to rain.

  He could just go along with it for a while. It was, after all, a learning experience. Like, if you wanted to learn a language, it was best to go and live in that country. And Bea was a Lichport girl. Born and raised here, Bea knew so much about the town’s dead and living both. He loved seeing the town through her eyes. She was part of Lichport, but also of some other land, an oddly distant place that happened to be right around the corner. Maybe love just felt that way, like a kind of fever dream, making things seem both frighteningly close and unbearably far away all at once.

  From the story she’d told him about Orpheus, he assumed Mrs. Bowe knew something about him and Bea and did not approve of her. But why bother worrying her with details? Now that he had his own place to live, and was finished with school, he could do as he pleased. How long does a guy have to ask permission for everything he does? His great-grandfather had made a generous gift to him. He was buying his own food when he wasn’t eating with Mrs. Bowe or the Peales down in the Narrows. He could live on his own and on his own terms. Okay, he wasn’t washing his own clothes, but that was only because Mrs. Bowe insisted on doing it. She derived great pleasure from doing the laundry and found nothing demeaning in it. She said it was something traditional in her family, that her mother and grandmother and back and back were all “washerwomen.” He didn’t understand what she meant, but whatever. He could pay someone else to help him with housework now if he needed to. The point was, he didn’t need anyone’s approval or permission for anything anymore.

  Silas paused again very briefly, weighing possibilities. “Screw it,” was his conclusion. He always thought too much, worried too much. Besides, after the year he’d had, was spending time with someone like Bea really going to make things worse? For once, things weren’t quite so awkward. Like with the girl in his homeroom class. She had looked at him sometimes and once, had slipped him her phone number on the corner of a piece of paper. He’d never called her. Wanted to. A hundred times. But every time he thought about it, his mind boiled up with every reason not to do it, every doubt he’d ever had about himself. His mother’s comments hadn’t helped. She said it was because no decent girl would date a man with hair in his eyes and that he should get a haircut. But Silas had seen pictures of both his parents when they were dating, so he said, “But Dad’s hair was over his eyes when you dated him.”

  “Yes!” his mother spat back. “And look where that’s gotten me!”

  Silas was sure his hair had not been the problem. Homeroom-girl had given him her phone number despite his hair. She’d told him—when he awkwardly apologized for never calling—that he was “cute, but kinda weird,” and that her friends had made fun of her for giving him her number.

  “Okay,” he’d said, embarrassed. “That’s okay.”

  Most of the girls he had looked at in school wouldn’t talk to him at all.

  Better to keep Bea a secret. It felt better as a secret. Only the two of them. Only him and Bea. And she was interested in him. Waited for him, sometimes. He even thought he could feel her thinking about him. It was easy spending time with her. They had walked through many of the town’s cemeteries together, one after another in no particular order, drifting among the stones, Bea telling Silas stories of the folk who lay below them.

  He might have grown up in Saltsbridge, but that didn’t mean he was stupid, or normal. He was his father’s son.

  He knew she was dead.

  Silas wanted to admit that to himself up front. He wanted to be sure he believed it (not so hard, these days) and understood what it meant (much harder). He thought saying it to himself might help, so he did. He said it out loud, but not very loudly: “Your girlfriend is a ghost.” He said each word slowly, like part of an equation. A plain fact.

  Okay. There it was.

  Did they both have to be alive so long as they liked each other and talked to each other? Again, best not to overthink it, he decided. He realized that because she was a ghost, it might make things awkward, but it didn’t mean they couldn’t have feelings for each other.

  What he wondered most about was why she seemed so interested in him. Was it his coming to Lichport that had brought her into the world again? From some of the things she said, it seemed that she had been waiting for him. Just him. Didn’t that mean they were connected? If he stopped thinking about her and talking to her, would she even exist? If he chose to forget her, where would that leave her? But, he could now see, when they weren’t together, their relationship was a memory too. Just a memory. Same for everyone he knew. Even Mrs. Bowe, whom he’d only just seen this morning. Now: a memory. A figment. Sure, he would see her again, but between one meeting and the next, she was nothing but an ember of the mind, getting colder by the minute. But the instant he thought about her, his memory blew the ember once more to flame.

  Rain had started falling lightly.

  Yes, thought Silas. Just like that. He was beginning to feel his head swim a bit. It all came to this, a glance, a word, a face … everyone he knew was, most of the time, merely a recollection. Then a thought fell on him. Ghosts. Maybe we’re all ghosts anyway, just as soon as the moment’s passed.

  So what if Bea seemed a little needy and sometimes just stood and stared at him? Who back in Saltsbridge had ever paid him any attention at all? And at least Beatrice talked to him.

  Still, guilt nagged at the corner of his mind. He should be looking for his father. He could tell himself that being with Bea was part of his search; in his gut he knew it wasn’t, knew it was taking him in another direction entirely. But he just wanted to walk and talk with her, just to be with her.

  He rose and walked down to the Umber family cemetery and there she was, waiting, as if they’d had an appointment. As if she knew he’d been thinking about her.

  Seeing her there among the tombs of his ancestors—the early light arrayed about her pale skin, the curve where her neck flowed into her shoulders—the line between Silas’s obligations and his desires blurred. He willingly took his place at her side.

  LEDGER

  The Hebrews see that death and dream share a wide frontier. Words for reviving the dead have been widely used rabbinically and in certain of their ancient and accustomed prayers. Their Talmud recommends saying Baruch atah adonai, mechayeh hametim. “Blessed art thou, Lord, reviver of the dead.” This is said when greeting a friend after a lapse of twelve months, and upon waking from sleep.

  —Anonymous entry, eighteenth century

  SILAS AND BEA HAD BEEN WALKING together most of the day, and twilight was drawing on. A sickle moon had risen early and already hung low in the late autumn sky. The evenings had grown more cold than crisp and mornings found the leaves rimmed with a hint of frost.

  Now they were slowly wandering back toward Silas’s house after making their progress through the small cemeteries on the southern side of town: the Lost Ground, whose earth bore the nameless folk who washed up out of the sea, and God’s Small Acre, which held the children who’d perished in a smallpox epidemic two hundred years ago. Silas liked this small plot and found it full of tenderness from the living for the dea
d: tenderness in the smooth corners of the gravestones, where centuries of hands had rested before and after prayers were spoken, tenderness in the slight mounds of earth grown over the graves where flowers and offerings had been left, year after year, thickening the loam. Kindness was especially in the Lost Ground, where the people buried were strangers to Lichport. The townsfolk were hospitable and kind, giving good-quality stone for headstones and adorning them with carvings of dolphins and shells in remembrance of the journeys the deceased had made. Fine, ornate gates were raised to give the plots a feeling of importance and protection. Lacking names, the townsfolk had written brief but charitable descriptions and epitaphs on the stones:

  “BY TEMPEST BROUGHT, TO THIS EARTHEN PLOT,

  SLEEP YE SAFE, THOUGH YOUR NAME BE FORGOT.”

  “BE WELCOME HERE, AND FIND REST, LADY OF THE SEA.”

  “A WANDERER. MAY HE FIND HIS PATH HOME.”

  On and on they went. One kindness after another, yet each remaining its own mystery, each stone a fragment of a lost tale.

  While Silas was looking at the inscriptions, Bea wasn’t talking much. That wasn’t like her when they were in a cemetery; she enjoyed telling him the stories of the names they saw, but today she seemed sullen and hardly even looked at him. She had drawn down into herself and didn’t even seem to remember who Silas was. He began to worry that she could sense he was having doubts about the two of them.

  He stopped walking and turned to look at her. The last light of the setting sun was on them both, and Silas felt hot, though a cold air was coming in off the sea. Bea’s expression was distant. She was standing in the light of the approaching dusk, a little dim around the edges. When she turned, she saw Silas looking at her, waiting for her to say something.

  “Do you think I’m beautiful, Silas?”

  Silas began breathing harder and she brightened, as though every breath he took when looking at her was a gift, a portion of life, given from him to her.

  “Do you?” she asked again.

  He was turning red. He wanted to tell her how pretty he thought she was, that when he looked at her his eyes were filled with silver light, but he was worried it would come out sounding stupid. So he said, “Yes. You know I do. I tell you that all the time.”

  “I know you do,” she said, mimicking his low tone. “You know, Silas, we could be a lot closer….” She walked up to him and leaned in, the skin of her face luminous and smooth as a pearl.

  Silas had thought about this, about “getting closer” to Bea and what it might mean. He realized that one of the things he liked about her was that he could have feelings for her and not worry too much about the future, because, well, she didn’t really have one.

  “I—I—I don’t think I can go any further with you, Bea. I mean, not yet. I don’t want to go too fast. We haven’t known each other that long, I mean …” he stammered, knowing that sounded lame. Wasn’t that what the girl usually said?

  “We have known each other for a very long time, Silas. Though I guess I’m the only one who can feel that.” Her voice trailed off, as though she was thinking about something else now, something further along than where they were standing, what they were saying. Under her white skin, dark ripples began to flow, filling the space around her with damp, cold currents of air.

  Silas pulled his jacket’s collar up and adjusted his scarf against the increasing chill, the fabric scratching at his neck. Something was now clearly bothering her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Bea did not answer.

  “Bea, please. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  Again she said nothing. She began to sing sweetly, absently as she walked.

  Come all ye fair and tender girls that flourish in your prime,

  Beware, beware! Keep your garden fair

  Let no man steal your thyme, your thyme

  Let no man steal your thyme.

  For when your thyme is past and gone

  He’ll care no more for you,

  And every place where your thyme was waste

  He’ll spread all over with rue, with rue.

  He’ll spread all over with rue.

  A woman is a branchy tree

  And man a clinging vine,

  And from her branches, carelessly

  He’ll take what he can find, can find

  He’ll take what he can find.

  Come all ye fair and tender girls that flourish in your prime,

  Beware, beware! Keep your garden fair

  Let no man steal your thyme, your thyme

  Let no man steal your thyme.

  Silas thought this was a strange song to sing to someone you liked. As she finished, there was a challenge in her eyes, and the smile that usually greeted Silas when she sang to him was nowhere to be found.

  She drew up one corner of her mouth in a half grin and said, “You like all this, all these reminders of the dead?”

  “I do, I guess. I mean, it’s part of my life, my dad’s life. It’s part of the work some of the people in my family do …,” he began, feeling led on. He kneeled down to pull some dead weeds away from the base of one of the tombstones.

  “You know you can’t help them all. By all means, forgive them for not forgiving themselves, but you Umbers can’t solve all their problems for them. Your dad tried, but now what’s become of him?”

  Standing up quickly, Silas whipped his head around to stare back into her face. “What do you know about my father? Bea, tell me!”

  She stood silent and defiant, yet her face looked pained.

  Silas was angered at the thought she’d been keeping things from him and hurt both by her implications about his family’s work and the cruel irony of her comment. He tried to calm himself and answer her accusation. “I never said I was trying to help them all. I will try to do what I can, like my dad would have if he were here. But if you know anything about him, or where he is, you must tell me now. Bea, please.”

  Bea continued, unmoved by his repeated requests.

  “So many were beyond his help. He was so distracted. Like you. You need to focus on what’s important.” She smiled broadly at him, drawing in close to his face. Her skin was nearly translucent now and blue, as if carved from ice or aquamarine. “I mean, you should spend your time with those who really need you, who really want your attention. Those others? Forget them, let them go. Remember me.”

  “Remember you? From when exactly? We’ve only known each other a couple of months!” Silas said.

  “Silas, we’ve known each other much longer than that, and you know it.”

  “No,” he said quietly but sharply, “I don’t know it.”

  Silas knew he was missing something. He could feel himself beginning to blush in both embarrassment and renewed anger. He could sense that she knew things about him from a time before he knew anything about her. How long had she known him? His family? What did she know about his dad that she wasn’t telling him?

  They were walking up Coach Street, approaching Main. As they approached the Bowe family tomb behind its overgrown fence, the wind rose and made dust spirals on the street about their feet, and for the briefest second, Silas thought he smelled a hint of Mrs. Bowe’s perfume on the air.

  Bea seemed to stumble back away from Silas, as though she’d been pulled, then stood straight again. She tilted her head to one side, raising an eyebrow as if pointing with it toward the fence, and said, “You see that tomb?”

  “Yeah,” Silas replied.

  “You too are about to die,” Bea said flatly, but with a strange, breathless giggle at the end.

  “What?” Silas asked, shocked and confused. He looked quickly at the street in front of them. Nothing stood out. He looked hard at Bea. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sure. You are. Really. I mean, everyone is. Dying is so common. Everyone dies. Are you going to help them all, Silas? Or are you going to spend your time at something that matters? Time flies, Silas Umber. It really does.”

  He stared at her. W
hatever game she was playing, he didn’t like it. He was about to demand that she make whatever point she was trying to make, but then he thought again and said quietly, “I—I feel fine, and what I am trying to do does matter.”

  “If you say so. I believe you,” she said with no commitment whatsoever. “Just don’t wait too long … or what you really want might have moved on. Tell you what, though, just for fun, let’s see how long you’ve got. Okay? Just hold still.”

  Bea looked at him so hard that Silas thought the stare was going to cut him. His arms went very cold, and goosebumps rose like a rash across his arms and torso. Bea inclined her head toward him and closed her eyes. A breeze was lifting leaves from the ground, but her hair and dress hung motionless.

  Finally she said, “I guess you’re all right for a while, but only for a while. If not today or tomorrow, next year maybe, or in ten years, or seventy. So hard to tell.”

  Silas’s eyes were wide, and he broke out in a sweat.

  “What the hell does that mean? Why would you say that to me?” he demanded, his face forming hard angles about his mouth and eyes.

  “Because,” she explained, lifting her face to meet his, “I just want you to know how important moments are. All these moments we spend together. They are so dear to me, and they are all we have.”