The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud

by Ben Sherwood

  “You sure you’re okay?” Tink asked. “You don’t look so good.”

  “I’m fine. Call me later if you hear anything.”

  “Will do,” Tink said.

  With that, Charlie took off in a sprint. He knew he would be late. Five minutes, maybe even ten. He raced up State Street, cut through an alley, hopped a picket fence, and dashed across Mrs. Dupar’s lawn. A dog in the window barked as he flew past. A delivery van screeched when he cut across Washington.

  It was almost dark in Marblehead. Lights glimmered behind curtains. Smoke spiraled from chimneys. And Charlie ran as fast as he could . . .

  For Sam. And for life itself.

  TWENTY

  HE HAD A STITCH IN HIS SIDE AND HIS LUNGS ACHED AS HE made the last turn down West Shore Drive. When his fists closed at last around the heavy wrought-iron bars of the gates, he rested his forehead for a moment against the cool metal. Then he wiggled the key in the lock, tried to turn the latch, and, for the first time ever, it wouldn’t open. He felt a shot of panic, pulled the key out, jammed it back in again, and twisted it with all his strength. He heard the metal click, and he hurried inside. The main gravel path felt good underfoot, and the wind brought the scent of burning leaves.

  He found the utility cart beside the Fountain of Youth and he aimed the little vehicle toward the Forest of Shadows. He steered along the bumpy trail and stopped under the low branches of the blue spruce. He was in such a hurry this time that he didn’t even bother to check over his shoulder.

  Instead, he reached under the front seat and patted around until he found the glove holding the ball in its firm embrace. Then he leaped over the old rotting log and dashed through the woods, up a little hill to its crest, past a copse of maple trees, then down beside a waterfall and swirling pool. A sliver of gray graced the canopy of the cedar grove as he tore into the clearing with its perfect lawn, ninety feet long and wide. In the twilight, he could just make out that the pitcher’s mound, rubber, and plate were empty.

  “Sam!” he yelled. “Sammm?”

  The seesaw and swings hanging from the thick arm of the sycamore were empty too.

  “Sam?!”

  But there was no answer. Charlie could feel the dread begin to rise—first in his stomach, then his chest. His head began to pound. It certainly didn’t help that he was so tired. Fear flooded through him.

  He knew he had to stop himself from thinking the absolute worst. So he crossed a few yards of grass and settled onto the slat of wood suspended by ropes. He leaned back, kicked at the hollow of dirt beneath his feet. For a moment, he could see the crescent of moon right above his toes and then he swooped back again.

  “Sam!” he tried again. A covey of doves burst from their nests in the spruce trees and flew into the darkening slash of horizon. When the rustle of wing beats passed and the air was still again, Charlie called once more.

  “Sammm . . .”

  And then, as his voice trailed off, a little miracle happened. Charlie heard a sound—so faint at first that he wasn’t sure it was anything more than his own imagination.

  “Charlie!”

  There was Sam in his Sox cap, shorts, and high tops, coming from the forest. Oscar pranced behind him.

  “Where’ve you been?” Charlie said, jumping from the swing. “You scared me.”

  “I’m here. Relax, everything’s okay.” Sam smiled. “Want to play catch?”

  “No, I need to talk about something.”

  Sam walked over to the picnic table and sat down. “What’s going on?” he said. “How was your day?”

  “Miserable,” Charlie said.

  “What happened?”

  “It’s Tess.”

  Sam’s eyes were wide. “So you found out.”

  Charlie felt his stomach clench. What did Sam know? How did he know it? “Have you seen her?” Charlie asked. “Has she been here today?”

  “She came looking for you.”

  “You saw her?”

  “Yes, I saw her.” His voice was soft, like he was cushioning the blow. “And she saw me.”

  Charlie felt himself deflate. There was no denying it anymore. In all his years in Waterside, he had never met a living person who could see his brother, or any other ghost for that matter. Salem was full of self-proclaimed witches who claimed they could speak to the dead, but Charlie had never seen any proof. Psychics and mediums stopped by at Waterside all the time with desperate clients in tow. But again, they never seemed to notice Sam frolicking with Oscar on the grass or the spirits of their loved ones reaching out in a gentle breeze or sending an autumn leaf sailing onto their shoulders.

  “Why didn’t you tell me last night?” Charlie asked.

  “I didn’t know. Honest. I didn’t get a good look,” Sam said. “Remember? You didn’t want me anywhere near her.”

  “Does she know yet?” Charlie asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean you’re not sure?”

  “I think she’s figuring it out.”

  “Is she fading already? Is she moving on?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  Charlie threw his head back and looked up into the darkness. All day he had hoped she was alive, but now he understood she was a spirit in the middle ground. Across the western sky, he saw the fuzzy patches of the Magellanic Clouds, each with 200 billion stars like the sun, and he suddenly felt insignificant and without hope.

  Sam was sitting right next to him, but for the first time it wasn’t enough. Charlie knew he wanted more. He needed more. He ran his hands through his hair and wondered if Sam knew what he was thinking.

  “It’s going to be okay, big bro,” Sam said softly.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Don’t worry,” Sam said. “She’s coming here tonight.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  WHAT HAD BEGUN AS MERELY THE STRANGEST DAY OF HER life had quickly morphed into the most frightening. It had started with that headache that refused to go away and it had ended in total despair back at her father’s grave.

  After meeting Sam St. Cloud in the cemetery, Tess had spent the day in a thick soup of confusion. The kid was Charlie’s brother, but he was dead, killed thirteen years ago in that terrible car wreck. How was it possible to have a conversation with him? Maybe it was true what they said: Hang around a graveyard too long and you start to see ghosts. Was the boy an apparition? Or was she hallucinating?

  On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t Sam St. Cloud at all. Perhaps it was some punk playing a stupid trick. More than ever, she knew she had to see Charlie again, and she would ask him about his brother.

  As the sun had risen over Marblehead and the weekend sailors had made their way from the harbor, Tess walked Bobo back home to Lookout Court. No one greeted her on the street, not even her old friend Tabby Glass, who was jogging on the far sidewalk behind a stroller with her new baby girl.

  “Want some chow?” Tess asked when they finally reached her house, but Bobo just plunked down on the front steps.

  “All right, suit yourself,” she had said. “I’m going down to check on Querencia.”

  She jogged down the steep public stairs that descended the hill from her little street. She strolled along the waterfront. The colors of the hulls and the sails seemed brighter. The smell of salt in the air was sharper. The fryer from the Driftwood was sending up more smoke than ever.

  She walked along the dock, stopped suddenly at her mooring, and in that instant, she knew something was really wrong. Querencia wasn’t there. Tink would never have taken her out without asking permission. She felt a little woozy, and her head seemed to spin. She kneeled down to get her balance, bracing herself with one hand on a weathered plank. She thought she might be sick, leaned over the ledge, and peered into the water below. She adjusted her eyes and she gasped.

  Her reflection was missing.

  Only the sky and the clouds looked back at her. There was no outline of her head or body against the blue. There was not even
a shadow on the water. A sudden numbness overwhelmed her. Tess finally understood.

  She wasn’t there at all.

  Her mind raced back over the puzzling events of the last day. Nana not seeing her in the rest home. Bobo paying no attention to her commands. Dubby Bartlett ignoring her on the beach. No one had acknowledged her because no one could see her.

  No one except Charlie St. Cloud and his dead brother Sam.

  What on earth was going on?

  She leaped up and spun around. She grabbed her waist and then her hair. She rubbed her jeans. She rolled a button on her shirt between her fingers. Everything felt as normal as ever. And yet it wasn’t.

  She called out to the old guys under the tree—Bony, Chumm, Iggy, and Dipper—but they kept on chatting, and her soul filled with dread. Something terrible must have happened. She tried to remember the boat and the storm. She could see herself capsizing, then fighting her way onto the deck after Querencia righted herself. But then what? Had she made it back to port? Her memory was a fog. She groped around but could grasp nothing.

  When did she die?

  The question seemed impossible. Tess felt the terror and turmoil inside. She desperately needed an anchor. Then she realized she only had to do one thing: Find Charlie. If anyone could explain what was happening, he could. But what if something had changed, and now he couldn’t see her, like everyone else? What if she had become invisible to him too?

  Anxiously, she tried to spot Charlie in the huge cemetery, but he was nowhere to be found. Finally, Tess all but threw herself on her father’s grave under the Japanese maple. If this was death, she thought, then Dad would come to be with her. Or maybe he would be waiting for her somewhere else. Where was she supposed to go? What was she to do? Was there an information desk somewhere? A bulletin board? She didn’t have a clue.

  Then she began to cry and didn’t stop until she fell asleep, exhausted. She awoke, gasping with fear that she would never find Charlie. The sky was almost dark, and as she pulled herself up from the grass, she remembered Sam’s instructions: Find the blue spruce in the forest and the trail on the other side of the old log. She shuddered. The woods were so creepy last night. Could she do it alone? To her surprise, the forest was peaceful and calm. She followed the path past the waterfall and pool, then threaded her way through the cypress grove. Suddenly, she heard voices up ahead and a beagle’s yowl. When she came into the clearing, there was Charlie on a bench.

  The very sight of him lifted her spirits. At least she could be certain that part of her life was real. She just wanted him to tell her it was all some big mistake. She wanted to kiss him and start up exactly where they had left off last night.

  As she approached, she prayed Charlie would still be able to see her, and when he leaped up and smiled at her, she felt an incredible wave of relief. She wasn’t alone anymore. She heard his deep voice: “Thank God you’re here. I was so afraid you were never coming back.”

  She was impossibly beautiful. Her hair was tousled around her shoulders. Her eyes were full of feeling. Charlie stood up to hug her hello. He reached out with his arms but she stopped short by one foot.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. “I was looking all over for you.”

  “Been looking for you too,” he answered. “I take it you met my brother.”

  “Hi, Sam,” she said. They were the two sweetest words ever. Charlie had never imagined he would hear a woman greet his brother that way.

  “Hi,” Sam said. “Shame you got here so late. It’s too dark to play catch.” He turned to Charlie. “She says she doesn’t throw like a girl! You believe her?”

  “Now’s not the time,” Charlie said. He looked at Tess. She was just standing there—as real as anyone he had ever known. There wasn’t a single sign that she was fading away. And yet, in his brain he knew she was. He wondered how much she understood. He decided to start with a simple question. “How are you doing?”

  “I was fine until I couldn’t see my reflection in the water,” she said. “Now I’m just confused. Tell me what’s going on, Charlie.”

  She obviously didn’t know what had happened, and he knew he would have to be the one to break the news.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’m a big girl. I can handle it.” She was obviously trying to be brave, but her tremulous voice gave her away. He had seen this before as spirits passed through Waterside. He ached over what she was going through—the confusion, the fear, the sadness.

  “I’m not sure where to start,” Charlie said.

  “How about the beginning?”

  “All right,” he said. “Querencia has been missing for forty-eight hours. The whole town is worried sick. The fleet went out to search.”

  “Missing for forty-eight hours?” She stomped the ground. “Damn, that’s a long time. . . .”

  “A fisherman found a piece of your hull off Halibut Point. Tink and I found your life raft in Sandy Bay.”

  “Where?”

  “Sandy Bay, off Rockport.”

  “That’s strange. I wasn’t anywhere near Rockport. Must’ve been the wind and the current.” She walked over to the swing and sat down on the wood plank.

  “Do you remember what happened?” Sam asked.

  “Not really,” she said.

  Charlie watched her carefully. He hadn’t missed any obvious clues. There were no telltale signs. She wasn’t fading at the edges. There was no heavenly glow around her. She just seemed like herself, radiant as ever. She kicked her legs in the air, and the swing began to sway.

  “You’ve got to try to remember,” Charlie said. “We need to know where you were when it happened.”

  Tess jumped down from the swing. “Look, I know exactly what happened. The storm was Force 10, and I spent the night upside down on the water. It was freezing. A damn bottle of salad dressing shattered in the galley. It stank up the whole joint. I can still smell it on me.”

  “Then what?”

  “Next thing, I was at Dad’s grave.”

  “Do you remember coming back to port?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Do you know how you got to the cemetery?”

  “No, Chas. It’s a blur.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “Sometimes when it happens suddenly, you don’t even realize what’s going on. It takes time to sink in.” He watched her carefully, weighing the impact of his words.

  She seemed dazed at first, then she said, “Dear God, what’s going to happen to me?”

  “Everything will feel better soon,” he said, his voice choking on the words, “and you’ll realize you’re going home where you belong.”

  “Home? What are you talking about? Home is on Lookout Court with Bobo. Home is with my mother and friends.” There were tears in her emerald eyes now. She brushed them away and tried to force a smile, but it came off a little crooked. Then she said, “And I was even beginning to think home might be with you.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  TESS WASN’T A SUPERSTITIOUS SAILOR. SHE NEVER CARED if her crew said “pig,” a word most mariners dreaded because of an obscure belief that swine could somehow see the wind and mentioning them could whip up gales. She even dared to whistle while she worked—another taboo on the water—and she never hesitated to set sail on Fridays, which for centuries had portended disaster. She often stepped onto her boat with her left foot first, and she insisted that Querencia be painted blue, a color associated with tragedy at sea.

  Now, incredibly, she wondered if it had been stupid to keep testing her luck. She had brought flowers aboard her boat, even though seamen insisted they be reserved for funerals. She had always looked back to port after sailing out, another violation of the code. Yes, she had broken the rules a thousand times or more, and Tess couldn’t help thinking: Maybe this was her fault.

  Night was falling on the forest. The moon was up, the stars were out, and Tess sat with Charlie and Sam at the picnic table in the clearing. She was trying to hold herself together. Crazy, random thoughts we
re flooding her brain. She didn’t want to unravel in front of them. But little by little, the reality of it all was locking into her consciousness.

  Life was over.

  As she felt the bump on her head, she began to have flashes of what had really happened the night of the storm. The images struck her in fragments. She didn’t have the whole picture yet, but she could see the waves overtaking her and the world going black.

  Deep down, she glimpsed what death meant. . . .

  She would never race solo around the world.

  She would never sail the Strait of Malacca or the Sulu Sea.

  She would never see her name in the Hall of Fame in Providence.

  She would never walk down the aisle of the Old North Church.

  She would never honeymoon in Spain or run with the bulls in Pamplona or see the sunny, safe spot in the bullrings of Seville.

  She would never feel the miracle of new life kicking inside her.

  She would never teach her daughter how to hoist a mainsail or strike a luff curve.

  Worst of all—and this was what distressed her more than anything—she would never know true and lasting love.

  She tried to stop herself. She never even thought about a list like this yesterday or the day before, but now it went on and on. . . .

  She would never again taste the roast beef at Mino’s. She would never bundle up and play in the Powder Puff game on Thanksgiving. These were her rituals, the routines that made her feel alive and connected. Without them, where would she be?

  Lost.

  And there was this wonderful new man. She would never get to know this Charlie St. Cloud, who appeared from nowhere in her life and instantly was snatched out of reach. Why had she met him now? God must have had a reason.

  She tried to concentrate on what Charlie and Sam were saying, taking turns describing the afterlife and the road ahead. They made it all sound like the most natural transition in the world. After a while, she interrupted Charlie. “I need to understand how this works. How can you see Sam?” She hesitated for a moment. “And how can you see me?”