What Eli Sees – Chapter 21
“Walter Says Goodbye”
Walter Finch had been watching all of this. Eli was aware of him throughout the long Sunday — present at the edges of the rooms, observing, his expression gradually shifting across the hours from the frightened thing it had been to something quieter, something that had the quality of a person watching an outcome they had hoped for and not entirely believed in.
By evening Walter was sitting on the porch railing again, his usual spot now, his feet swinging, and when Eli came out and sat on the step Walter looked at him with an expression that was, Eli thought, the expression of a goodbye.
“Today?” Eli said.
Walter nodded. His lips: It’s time.
“Your mother?” Eli asked.
She had a good day today, Walter said. She went to her sister’s. She laughed at something. I heard it.
Eli thought about what Agnes had said. The dead waiting for the living to resolve things. Walter, hovering for thirty-three years over the town of his drowning, waiting for his mother’s grief to release him — not because she was doing anything wrong, but because grief was a thread and some threads needed time to thin.
“Will she know?” Eli said. “When you go?”
Walter thought about this.
I think she’ll feel lighter, he said. I think that’s how it works. Not that the grief goes. Just that it stops pulling.
Eli nodded.
They sat on the porch in the November night for a while — the living boy and the dead one, in their odd companionship born of the terrible and accidental intimacy of one being able to see the other.
“I’m glad I could see you,” Eli said. “I know that sounds strange.”
Walter’s expression was warm in the specific way that faces are warm when they have been given something they needed.
It doesn’t sound strange, he said. I’ve been waiting thirty-three years to be seen.
The light came when it came — that warm sourceless light, reliable now as a familiar phenomenon, arrived and expanded and Walter Finch was in it and then was not in it because he was gone, fully and completely gone, the porch railing empty in the moonlight, just wood and paint and the cold of the November night.
Eli sat for a while longer.
Then he went inside and up to bed and slept, deeply and completely, for the first time since October.