What Eli Sees – Chapter 29
“Growing Up”
The years passed. Eli grew. Hartford was kind to him in the way that cities are kind to children who are perceptive and quiet and have interior lives rich enough to make the exterior world interesting rather than overwhelming. He went to school and read widely and wrote letters to Dora Kent in Rhode Island and to Dr. Hooper in Dunmore and to Thomas Birch who wrote back in an increasingly competent hand with increasingly detailed reports on the Harwick house.
He saw the dead everywhere, as he always had. In Hartford they were thicker than in Dunmore — the density of a city meant more accumulated history meant more unresolved presences. He learned to manage the volume of it, learned to distinguish between the dead who needed him and the dead who were simply passing through their own long business, learned the difference between a presence that was merely haunting and one that was suffering and required intervention.
He kept his notebooks. By the time he was twelve he had four full ones. By fifteen, nine. A systematic record, growing more sophisticated as he grew: not just observations but analysis, methodology, the beginnings of a framework for understanding what he saw and what it meant and what, in the cases where it was possible, could be done about it.
He spoke at the edge of his ability to each presence he encountered — not forcing, not performing, simply making himself available to the ones who needed to be heard. He freed seven more in the Hartford years, small ones, ordinary hauntings, nothing with the weight and age of the Pale Woman but each one significant to the person inside it and to the living spaces they occupied. An old man in a house two streets over who had been waiting, in the specific pattern of his haunting, for his estranged son to forgive him — Eli found the son, now in his forties, and told him his father was waiting, and had the conversation that followed, which was the hardest conversation of his twelve-year-old life. The son went to the grave. The haunting ended.
His parents watched all of this with the particular attention of parents who understand that their child is doing something they cannot fully see and have decided to trust the child’s judgment about it. Ruth talked about Michael more openly now — not daily, not performed, but in the natural way of someone who has given their grief somewhere to go and found it lightened by the going. Robert built his workshop, eventually, in a shed in the Hartford yard, and made things with his hands with the absorbed pleasure of someone doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing.
Claire left for college in 1977. She studied psychology and did not become a parapsychologist but she became a therapist who had, her clients sometimes felt, an uncanny ability to sense the specific shape of what they were carrying before they had said it aloud. She never discussed this with Eli directly. They had an understanding that did not require direct discussion.
Agnes Birch died in 1979. She was seventy-nine and she died at the library, as she had wished, and she was reading something and the something was good. Eli went to the funeral and Thomas was there and they stood at the grave in a November that smelled exactly like the November of 1974, cold and pine and the specific New England quality of a world preparing to go dark for a while before coming back.
“She said you’d come back to Dunmore,” Thomas said at the graveside. “She said it every year. She said: he’ll come when he’s ready.”
Eli looked at the cemetery around them. The old stones, the newer ones, the elm trees bare and black against the sky. He could see, here and there among the headstones, the shapes of the dead going about their long business, unfrightened and unfrighteneable now, just the ordinary population of a place that had a great deal of history and not all of it resolved.
“I’m not ready yet,” he said. “Almost.”
“She said that too,” Thomas said. “She said: he’ll know when.”