Death Watch

by Ari Berk

  Her skin was taking on a cold green hue, like the weeds at the bottom of a river. The wind continued to rise, and whipped Bea’s hair about her face like the thin tails of a scourge.

  “That’s how you tell me you like me?” Silas yelled, the anger rearing up in him. “Well, here’s a moment for your scrapbook: I want to go home. Tonight is over!” His voice went low in his throat, becoming a growl. In his head, he felt a door slam shut, and he and Bea were on different sides of it. He regretted his words even as they were coming out of him. The air about them became suddenly freezing cold and full of static. Bea’s head hung to the side, as if he’d slapped her with his words. She fell away, into the violence of the wind.

  Words were woven all through the turbulent air, and Silas could hear a woman’s voice Drink, drink. Drink, Lonesome Water. Now you will sink down … back to your bones … down … below … sink down … Now.

  The first stars of evening appeared and were quickly covered by gathering clouds. Bea was already in the distance, dragged away from him by invisible hands. Then, as though a fever had broken, Silas felt desire pour through him. Without thinking, he ran after her. His heart pounded, his body fueled by his fears; fears temporarily smothered while he and Bea were together, that now flew up into flame from their waiting embers. He couldn’t hold on to anything or anyone. If he loved them, they left.

  As he ran, he watched, helpless, as she was drawn farther and farther away. He felt broken and couldn’t bear the thought of another person vanishing from his life. She was far ahead of him already, the world passing through her easily like water through a sieve, catching on nothing. She was all hue and shade and no substance Silas could feel except with his heart, and her sudden absence had already begun washing the color from his world. Without her, there was only obligation hanging about him like a heavy yoke. What was happening to her? He had spoken awful words, and now she was suffering. Because of him. In his mind he suddenly knew, with the surety of desperation, that if he loved someone, he would eventually drive them away.

  “Bea! Wait!” he shouted after her. More clouds had gathered, and rain was coming down in sheets. Where was she going? Silas wondered frantically. He knew it would do no good to yell again. He was panting as he ran, his feet slapping against the wet street and then into the mud as he approached the millpond.

  Ahead, he could see her. She was standing, motionless, at the pond’s edge. She leaned away from it, as if fighting against a force trying to pull her down into the water. As Silas approached, trying to catch his breath, her features sharpened in his sight, then blurred, both in time with his labored breathing. When he breathed out, he could see her more distinctly, as if his breath was filling her form with color, making it more present, more real. She turned to look at him. But before he could catch his breath, or say anything, Bea was pulled backward into the water and drawn quickly below.

  There had been no splash, no ripple. Her body slipped beneath the surface without disturbing the dark mirror of the pond. Silas didn’t think, didn’t pause for a second. He ran to the edge and jumped in after her.

  The water was freezing. Silas could see Bea’s face in front of him, below, but he was falling fast through the water. As he sank, she smiled. She reached out to him. Her long hair was flowing into his face, and as it moved slowly with the currents of the water, he saw her usually pale eyes lit with cold, bright fire. His mouth filled with water. He tried to scream and drew the water into his lungs. Bea was still there, smiling, her eyes closed as she reached out for him with both hands.

  And then he didn’t care that he was drowning because, at last, she was touching him. He could feel her hands on him, feel her body moving against his. Her cold embrace lingered on his skin, held his body tightly.

  At last, he thought.

  At last, her caresses seemed to say.

  We are together.

  And as she, the water, held him, he grew warmer and his eyes closed and he smiled, forgetting everything but her and how good it felt to finally touch her and feel her touching him. She was there, and he could feel her.

  Down he fell, with her entwined in currents around him. At the bottom of the pond and in the dim waving light he could see a pile of white stones, and something else, like small branches of pale, sun-bleached wood. Here is our bed, he thought as thought left him. Silas closed his eyes and she was there too, waiting in the darkness behind his eyes, and there was nothing else. No family. No sorrow. No mother. No father. Nothing. Just the two of them, together.

  But as life began to ebb from him, words rose in his blood out of the sound of his still-beating heart, a strain from a song he hadn’t heard since he was a child. It was far off, but the sound kept coming, more and more words, but slowly getting softer as his heart slowed. Broken as they were, he knew they were his father’s words, words from long ago … but in Mrs. Bowe’s voice, trying to wake him, trying to help him.

  Fly with me, fly with me …

  the bells …

  Little Bird, fly …

  Then Mrs. Bowe’s voice was gone in a swirl of mud at the bottom, and everything was dark. The water held him, no longer a caress. Something was lifting him from the stones at the bottom, and something was pulling him, up or down he could no longer tell. There were other words. Not heart words, but water words. Bea’s voice, her tone different now, warming the water. Eddying in spirals. Bea’s words were inside him. In his mouth, in his nose, in his eyes. Everywhere in the water were her words:

  because I love you … live … for I am lost I cannot be … remember … I am sorry … live … do not look back. remember … I am sorry … from cold bed I release you … in cold bed I will wait … Silas … come back for me …

  Silas thrashed his head around to find her, to see her face floating before him in the deep murk, but that was all he had left in him. A second later, consciousness again fled with a trail of bubbles from his mouth, and then he was nearly nothing anymore, no one, just another thing gone cold in the dark.

  Then, through the darkness, came the other voice again. Mrs. Bowe. Her tone was sharp as the sun, cutting slashes into the surface of the water.

  Little Bird, fly! The voice beamed bright in his mind. Feeling the mossy water in his throat and in his eyes, he kicked out and up from the dark bottom of the pond. When his face broke free from the water, he pulled and pulled with his arms until he felt mud in his hands. He put his face to the shore, and among the reeds, fell again into unconsciousness.

  When Silas awoke, his legs were still in the water. As he pulled away, the surface of the pond cracked. The surface had frozen. He dragged himself all the way out and managed to get up on his knees before he threw up. He sat there, freezing cold on the bank of the mill-pond, for he wasn’t sure how long. The first time he tried to stand, he fell back to a crouch and vomited again. But the second time he managed to stand up and lean against a tree. He stumbled the short distance back to his house, and as he came down the street, the front door of Mrs. Bowe’s house flew open. She came down as far as the front steps to wait for him. He couldn’t speak. She came out with a blanket, wrapped it around him, and held him by the shoulders. She brought him up the steps and into the warm house.

  Mrs. Bowe was frantic as she got Silas up the steps and half carried him into the parlor where he collapsed on the sofa. She sat by him, singing gently, brushing his brow over and over, until he partly opened his eyes and said, “I heard a song….”

  “Just an old song I was singing to you, child.”

  “But I heard it under the water….”

  She stopped him. “Enough talking now, you must rest.” And then she whispered, “Holy Mother, forgive me. Holy Mother, let no harm come to him by my hand or any other.”

  But he was beyond comprehension as he tossed his head from side to side.

  “I want to go home.”

  “Silas, dear, you are home.”

  “Oh, God …” With that, Silas began to cry very softly, folding into himself. �
�I want to go home, please.”

  Distress welled up in him like a flood tide.

  “What do you mean, Silas? Where do you want to go? Where is home if not here?”

  Still crying, he said, “I don’t know … I don’t know what to do anymore—”

  “You’re exhausted,” she said, brushing his brow with her hand. “Morning will bring a new day and a brighter one. But now let’s get you to bed. For the moment, dear, that will have to suffice. All the shadows are gone for tonight. Be easy, child. Do you think you can make it to your room if I help you?”

  As Mrs. Bowe got Silas into his bed, she tried to smile.

  “Good night,” she told him. As he closed his eyes, she very softly added, “Oh, Silas. I am so, so sorry. Forgive me.”

  A few moments later, he was somewhere soft and sinking down again. But he was warm and below the covers, and in the dark of the bedroom, there were no more voices. He fell from himself into sleep, and his name became the name of the night and the silent, distant stars blinking like a million watching eyes.

  EACH DAY SINCE HE’D NEARLY DROWNED in the millpond, Silas thought less and less about Bea. It had been only a week since then, but each passing day, her image blurred a little more in his mind. Were her eyes blue or green? The harder he tried to remember something about her, the faster she faded, like a dream upon waking. As his memories of her fell away, his other worries sharpened—his parents, his responsibilities, and the clear but comfortless fact that both needed to be attended to as soon as possible.

  Still fearful, but more resolved, he decided to pay his mother a visit. As he turned the corner onto Temple Street, his mind said, It’s just a house, but his gut told him to go back the way he’d come.

  It was Mrs. Grey who opened the door when Silas arrived unannounced at Uncle’s house. She said “The lamps are lit, Silas,” and moved aside to let him in. He could hear his uncle from the second-floor landing.

  “Ah! Here he is, without even a note sent round to say he’s coming! Silas, I see you’ve learned Narrows manners. I shall be down to join you and your mother momentarily. You’ll find her in her usual place.”

  As Silas passed Mrs. Grey, she whispered to him, “Be careful, Silas. You can see it in his eyes. The Danger Lamps are lit all the time now. You should keep away from this place.” Silas looked around the corner for his mom, but when he looked back to Mrs. Grey, she had already vanished into the back of the house.

  The moment Silas walked into the parlor, his mother began speaking from the chair. Dolores’s slumping posture made it look like she had been thrown there. She squinted as she looked up at her son. Her skin had taken on a yellowish hue.

  “God, Mom,” Silas said, shocked at her appearance.

  She took no notice of his concern.

  “Are you ready to move back here with me? With us? Your living away from your kin is unnatural. We should all be together here, Si,” his mother told him pointedly. Silas could hear his uncle’s voice flowing beneath her words; this was his script, not hers. She looked awful. He saw Dolores notice his looking at her and seeing a problem.

  “It’s the smell of the sea that isn’t doing me any good. That rotting smell. Even up in this part of town. Fish and fishermen, crab shells and kelp and garbage floating in on the tide from God knows where. That smell gets into my head is all.”

  “Then why were you so eager to come back here?”

  “You know we had no choice.”

  “I know, but if you knew it was going to be like this, we could have tried to—I don’t know, tried something else.”

  “It’s okay, Silas. I can distract myself. I want lovely things around me. I have that here … like where I grew up …” Her voice trailed off, but then quickly sparked up again. “Only chance I had to get somewhere else, wasn’t it? Saltsbridge was no good for us, Si. You know that. We need nice things. You should come back to this house. Not that you ever bothered to say good-bye to me. Well, that’s your father all over, isn’t it? Just get it into your head to leave without a word and off you go.”

  Something caught her attention and Dolores lifted her head slightly, sniffing through her nose. “Silas, you smell like the low tide … where have you been keeping yourself?”

  She was talking in circles, and he was letting her get to him, like always. “Why would I come back to this house?” he asked, his voice getting higher as he spoke.

  “Where else is there? Not that spinster-haunted pile your father stayed in? Or some poor shack down in the filthy Narrows? That was the rubbish of your father’s life. We’re meant for better. Doesn’t your uncle have enough books for you here?”

  Silas had heard his uncle come downstairs and assumed he was standing in the hall, listening and waiting to make an entrance, but as the pitch of the conversation rose, he heard him climb the stairs and return to the second floor.

  “Oh dear,” Silas said, filling his voice right up to the brim with sarcasm, “now you’ve scared off the landlord.”

  “Sure. Have a go at me, or your uncle, the only people in the world who care whether you live or die. Go on and make yourself look stupid. Silas, you don’t know anything. I thought it would be better to keep your father’s awful life from you. Tried to keep you safe and away from those kinds of people, away from a life filled with ridiculous superstitions and nonsense. I did this, Silas, because I’ve always known how soft you are. You’re the kind of person that other people will always take advantage of. No one can count on a man who’s soft on the inside. Believe me, I know! But now I’m thinking it might have been better if I’d let you see a little more of the cruelty of the world, and let you see more of the truth about the kind of man your father was, the things that he built his life out of. He was a man of such selfish, wretched, soft parts.”

  Silas rose from his chair. He knew now it was pointless coming to talk with her. No one here would help him. It was all the wrong way around now; he the parent, she the child. He walked to the threshold between the hall and sitting room and stared at his mother.

  “What?” she said. “What?”

  He kept staring, as though he was waiting for her to change into something else. He knew that if he waited her out, she would usually start saying something a little more thoughtful.

  “What the Christ are you staring at?”

  This time it clearly wasn’t working. So Silas spoke again, his voice slow, trying to be reasonable, but behind his teeth was a throat full of quiet, suppressed anger. “I don’t think you know me at all. I don’t think you’ve ever been very interested in knowing me. You hated Dad, and now, since he’s gone, you hate me instead. And for what? Because I’m like him? Because I care about something other than you? Because I like parts of this town other than Charles Umber’s dining room?” That last part rang loud in his head. Yes. He did like being in Lichport. It was strange and full of the oddest people he’d even met, but they were his people, he was realizing. His kind of odd. Both the living and the dead.

  “Silas … you’re my son—,” she began to protest, but he interrupted her.

  “And that’s about as far as it goes, isn’t it? I am your son, but what else? We don’t have anything else in common, do we? So why should you care? You know, not once in the whole long year after Dad disappeared did you ever ask me how I felt, or what I was feeling. Not once.”

  She tried to get up, but the liquor swam in her blood, and her torpid limbs pulled her back down onto the chair.

  “Silas, hon, it was a hard year for both of us….”

  Again, he was at her. “Oh, I don’t think it was so very bad for you. You didn’t love Dad, so now he’s gone, and that’s okay with you, right? You got to move out of a house you hated, so that was okay too. You have a few more reasons to sit and drink away the days. Score. Not so bad by my count. What did you lose? Nothing. I mean, what is a lost husband when you wanted him gone anyway?” Silas pulled his coat tighter around him, trying to block the air of the room from touching his skin. No
w that he’d started, he was shaking and couldn’t stop himself, as if his growing anger was the only thing that could keep him warm.

  “Should I tell you how scared I was? Should I tell you how much I worried, how much I still worry, that I might have said or done something that made Dad leave, or that made him feel like not coming home? But then I’d think, maybe something happened to him. Should I tell you how, every night in my mind, I traced over every map I’ve ever seen, hoping that some point would leap out, some crossroad or lane would stand out from the others and say to me, He’s here, Silas. Your father is here. Come and find him. And the only place that ever spoke to me was this town. Every street and lane says, Come and find me. How do you think it feels to lose the only person who ever loved or understood you? I hear his voice all the time, all around me now, but in my gut, I know I’ll never see him again. What am I supposed to do with that? What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”

  Dolores looked away. She breathed in deeply and then said, with every thin bit of kindness she could muster, “Honey, your dad is somewhere, we just don’t know where that is. And we’ve done everything we can and can’t do any more, so it’s time to get on with things. If he’s gone somewhere, well, that means he left us, and there’s nothing we can do about it. If he’s gone gone, then he’s in heaven.” She smiled wanly.

  “Do you actually believe that?” Silas responded, surprised at what she was saying.

  “Well, Si, no, not really. I don’t think I believe in heaven anymore. I mean, I don’t know. I believe in the things I can see and touch. I believe in this dress, in this chair, in those candlesticks. I believe we make heaven for ourselves out of what makes us happy. So now, for me, heaven is someplace with nice things, and a full glass, and someone bringing me breakfast on a tray.

  “Silas, if you’d just calm down and see things straight on, you might understand. I don’t have any money of my own, and that gives me very few choices. You won’t like to hear it, but people lose things every day. We’ve lost a house. It happens to people all the time. I’ve lost a husband. Commonplace. You’ve lost a father. Hell, your father lost a father. And to keep going on and on about what you’ve lost, well, it’s unmanly, for one thing. And it’s rude, son. It’s selfish and rude. This is my home now, and I plan to make the best of it.”