What Eli Sees – Chapter 17
“What Claire Saw”
Claire Crane came home from her friend Deborah’s house on the morning of November seventeenth to find her family sitting in the kitchen with an old woman she didn’t know and the smell of burned herbs in the air and the expression on all their faces of people who had recently been through something and were in the early stages of processing it.
She stood in the kitchen doorway with her coat still on and looked at them.
“What happened?” she said.
They told her.
Claire was fifteen and she had the specific brittleness of a fifteen-year-old who has constructed her personality around being competent and unimpressed by things, a brittleness that served as armor against the vulnerability that was also there, underneath, as it always was at fifteen. She listened to everything — Eli’s abilities, the Pale Woman, Edmund Harwick, the previous night’s events — with her arms folded and her face doing the fifteen-year-old version of careful neutrality.
When they finished she said: “I knew something was wrong with this house.”
“You never said anything,” Robert said.
“Neither did any of you,” Claire said. She looked at Eli. “Not even you.”
“I didn’t know how,” Eli said.
Claire sat down at the kitchen table. “I didn’t go into the northeast corridor,” she said. “Once was enough. I felt it and I avoided it. That’s what I always do.” She was quiet. “I should have said something.”
“So should I,” Ruth said. “So should all of us.”
Agnes Birch, who had been sitting quietly with her tea through all of this, said: “The Pale Woman’s best tool is silence. She works better in the dark between people who are not talking to each other. Your family talked last night. That is the most significant protection you have.”
Claire looked at Agnes. “Who are you exactly?”
“An old woman who knows too much about this town,” Agnes said pleasantly. “Also Thomas Birch’s grandmother.”
“Thomas is eight,” Claire said.
“He is indeed,” Agnes said. “Old souls come in young bodies sometimes.”
Claire looked at Eli.
Then she did something she had not done in two years — she reached across the table and put her hand briefly over her brother’s hand. A gesture so quick and so unlike her current public persona that she withdrew it almost immediately. But it had been there.
Eli looked at the back of her retreating hand.
He thought about the dead and what they needed and what the living could give each other that the dead could not.
He thought: I need to write this down.
November 17. Last night happened. Too much to write. Key things: Edmund Harwick is free. The cold is less. Mum told me about Michael. Claire came home. Agnes says talking is the weapon. I think I understand something I didn’t understand before. The dead are not just what’s left over when people die. They are also what gets left over when people don’t talk to each other while they’re alive. The silences are what the Pale Woman lives in. The silences between people who love each other and are afraid of each other’s pain. I am going to be less silent. Even when it is hard. Especially then.