What Eli Sees – Chapter 32
“What She Was”
She had been a child. This was what had been buried under everything. Before the centuries of accumulated darkness, before the collected dead, before Edmund Harwick, before the house, before any of it — she had been a child who had died on this land alone and in the dark and unmourned.
She could not give him a name. Names had been the first thing lost, in the centuries of becoming what she had become. But she gave him the shape of it — through that ancient child’s cry, through the cold that was not only menacing but also plaintive, through the way she stood in the hallway with her blank face and her reaching hands with the specific quality of something that had been reaching for a very long time for something it had lost and had never been given back.
She had been someone’s child.
She had died here, alone, in an act of darkness that was not her own and had not been hers to prevent. She had died and not been found and not been mourned and in the unmourned dying she had grown, slowly, over decades and then centuries, into the thing that she was — the grief given form, the sorrow given teeth, the long unanswered cry of a child in the dark that had drawn, again and again, the grief of others to it because grief recognises grief and even the darkest versions of grief are still, at their foundation, the echo of love.
She had been loved once.
She had been lost before the love could reach her.
And everything she had become was simply that: the love that had tried to reach her and hadn’t. The mourning that had never been performed. The specific absence of a hand finding a child in the dark and saying: I see you. I’m here. You are not alone.
Eli sat on the floor of the second-floor hallway in the Harwick house and felt the cold of her around him and said all of it. He said it clearly and completely and without performance, the way he had learned to say things to the dead — with full honest attention, with the presence of a person who understood that this was the only thing required, the only thing that had ever been required, the original thing and the final thing.
“You were a child,” he said. “And you died alone and in the dark and no one found you in time and you have been in the dark ever since. And everything you became was the shape of that unanswered cry growing in the ground.” He paused. “I see you. Not the thing you became. You. Whatever your name was. Whatever you were before the darkness.” He paused again. “You deserved to be found. You deserved to be mourned. And I’m here now, and I’m telling you: you are mourned. I mourn you. This town mourns you. The land mourns you. It has been mourning you for centuries without knowing it and now it knows.” His voice was steady. “You can let go. You can put it down. Everything you collected, everything you held — you don’t have to hold it anymore. They can go. You can go. It’s all right.”
The cold in the hallway held for a very long moment.
Then it began, very slowly, to change.