What Eli Sees – Chapter 25
“Moving Day”
The truck came at eight. Two men named Phil and Dave who loaded boxes with the efficient indifference of people for whom every house was simply a collection of objects to be moved from one location to another, for whom the weight of a place was measured in cubic feet rather than years. Eli watched them carry out the furniture and thought about all the ways that houses held people and all the ways that people left them anyway.
Agnes came to say goodbye.
She came with Thomas, who stood on the frozen lawn with his hands in his Patriots jacket and watched the loading with the expression of a child trying not to show that he was sad, which was an expression Eli recognised because he was wearing it himself.
“Your notebook,” Agnes said to Eli, standing on the porch. “The one with all the records. I need a copy.”
Eli had anticipated this. He had spent the previous afternoon making a careful copy of everything — all the names, all the dates, all the specific details of each of the thirteen presences he had encountered, the ones freed and the ones remaining. He gave Agnes the copy.
She took it with both hands and held it for a moment with the seriousness of someone receiving something important.
“I’ll give this to Dr. Hooper,” she said. “And to Thomas, when he’s old enough.”
Eli looked at Thomas.
“Thomas doesn’t have the sight,” he said.
“No,” Agnes agreed. “But he has good instincts and a clear head and he loves this town enough to want to protect it.” She looked at her grandson. “Different gifts serve different purposes.”
Thomas looked at Eli from the lawn.
“I’ll check on Dr. Hooper,” Thomas said. “Make sure he’s doing the salt lines right.”
“He probably won’t,” Eli said.
“Then I’ll make sure he learns,” Thomas said, with eight-year-old certainty that was also, Eli thought, entirely genuine.
Mrs. Pearce came at ten-thirty, as the last boxes were going in. She brought a container of cookies from the tin by her door and she shook Robert’s hand and hugged Ruth briefly and she stood in front of Eli and looked at him for a moment in the winter sun.
“I have been waiting,” she said, “since 1952, for someone to do what you did in that barn.” She paused. “I could not do it. I was nine and I was not equipped and I have carried the guilt of that ever since — that I saw what was happening to my father and I could not help him.” She looked at the house behind Eli. “You helped them. All the ones you could. And you were eight.” She paused again. “Thank you, Elijah.”
Eli thought about what to say.
“He was going to get there eventually,” he said. “Edmund Harwick. He just needed someone to hear him first.”
Mrs. Pearce nodded, and her eyes were bright, and she turned and walked back to her car with the briskness of a librarian who has always known that some things were worth waiting a very long time for.
The truck left at noon. The Cranes left at twelve-thirty, in the station wagon, all four of them, with the backseat filled with things that hadn’t fit in the truck. Claire was in the rear seat reading a magazine with the slightly over-performed nonchalance of someone who didn’t want to look like she was looking at the house as they drove away.
But Eli looked.
He turned in his seat as they went down the gravel drive and he looked at the house on Cemetery Road — at the white clapboard and the red door and the covered porch and the bare maples over the drive and the barn at the back of the property, dark and quiet in the December noon.
He looked at the second-floor window. The window of the northeast corner.
Something was in it. A shape. A woman’s shape, smooth-faced, standing at the glass, watching them go.
Eli held its gaze as the car reached the road and turned north.
He did not look away first.
Then the trees took the house and it was gone.