What Eli Sees – Chapter 16
After the Night”
The morning after was one of those November mornings that New England occasionally produced as if in apology for all the others — a sky of such pure cold blue it looked painted, the frost on the yard catching the early sun, the elms on Cemetery Road casting long clean shadows. Eli sat on the front porch in his coat and watched the morning happen.
Walter Finch sat on the porch railing beside him.
Not threatening now, not the too-wide smile of the classroom. Just sitting, his feet swinging in their wrong-decade shoes, his dark eyes on the street with the expression of someone watching the world from a slight remove that was both separation and peace.
“She’s weaker,” Eli said.
Walter nodded. His lips moved: less hold.
“Will you go? Now that Harwick’s gone?” Eli asked.
Walter looked at him. Something in the dead boy’s face was lighter than it had been — some weight of the Pale Woman’s possession reduced, some degree of the terror Eli had seen last night when Walter had warned him about his mother.
Soon, Walter’s lips formed. Not yet. Few more days.
“What are you waiting for?” Eli said.
Walter was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully: My mother to stop blaming herself.
Eli understood. He thought about Edmund Harwick and forgiveness and grief and the way the dead were held not only by dark forces but by the unresolved weight of the living who mourned them.
“She will,” he said. “Eventually.”
Walter looked at him with those dark, pond-drowned eyes.
I know, he said. That’s why I can wait.
Eli nodded.
Behind him the front door opened and his mother came out with two cups of cocoa and sat beside him on the porch step. She couldn’t see Walter on the railing — nobody but Eli could. She handed him his cup and wrapped her hands around hers and looked at the blue morning.
“I want to talk to you,” she said. “About Michael.”
Eli looked at her.
“Agnes says the grief is the door,” Ruth said. She was looking at the elm trees, not at Eli. “That as long as it’s a secret, it’s a weakness she can use.” She paused. “I’ve been keeping it as a secret for eight years. From your father, mostly. From myself.” She stopped. “He was born in 1963. He lived for six weeks. And then—” she stopped again. Her eyes were bright. “And then he didn’t.”
“I know,” Eli said. “A little.”
“I should have told you,” she said. “He was your brother. He deserved to be known.”
Eli thought about Walter Finch on the railing, waiting for his mother’s grief to resolve. He thought about the specific gravity of unprocessed loss and what it left in the air for darker things to find.
“Tell me about him,” Eli said. “Tell me everything.”
His mother looked at him.
She told him.
On the porch railing, Walter Finch listened, and the morning held them, and the blue sky held everything, and somewhere under the house the Pale Woman lay in her salt-line boundary and waited with the patience of something that had been waiting since before any of them were born, and would wait long after they were gone.
But today she would not have them.
Today the living were talking to each other, and grief was being given somewhere to go, and the door she had been prying open was, for now, being held shut from the inside.