But still he waits.
Until finally, the adrenaline starts to fade and his exhaustion returns. He has to lie down, that’s all there is to it. He has to eat, as well. He has to get over this weakness that’s making everything here so hard.
And the final truth of it is, where else is he going to go?
Keeping the torch in front of him, he walks slowly down the path, up the steps, and to the doorway. He stops there, shining the light down to the staircase. Now that he’s looking, he can see the footprints pretty clearly, coming down from the very top step, some places with a clear print, some with the dust smeared like the person was stumbling down the stairs.
Down, but not back up. They’re only facing one direction.
“Hello?” he calls again, more tentatively this time.
He edges inside, toward the doorway to the main room. Heart thumping loudly, he turns the corner, ready to club someone with the torch.
But there’s no one there. Nothing’s been disturbed, other than where he disturbed it, in either the living or dining areas, nothing moved in the cubbyhole, everything in the kitchen just as he left it. He even looks out the back, but it’s the same, too, the metallic-sided bandages still lying in their heap, unmoved.
So the footprints could have been there for who knows how long, he thinks, relaxing a little. They could have been there since before he –
He stops.
Stumbling down the stairs, he thinks, the words suddenly making a kind of sense.
He goes back and stands over the bottom step. He’s looking at prints of feet, bare feet, not shoes.
He kicks off a sneaker and peels off his new sock. He places his foot by the lowest, dusty footprint.
They match. Exactly.
He looks, for the first time, up the staircase. There’s been something about the thought of going up there that’s made him wary ever since he first arrived. That cramped attic bedroom he shared with Owen when they were small. Those nights he spent there, alone, wondering if they were ever going to get Owen back, and then wondering if he’d live when they did.
But he’s already been up there, it seems.
He woke up on the path outside, and the reason was obviously because he’d stumbled down the stairs, in those horrible, confused moments after he died. He’d come down the hallway, out into sunlight, and collapsed onto the path.
Where he woke up.
But clearly not for the first time.
He shines the torch up the stairwell but doesn’t see much past the bathroom door at the top of the landing, shut tight. The bathroom is over the kitchen, and the landing turns from it, to the office and his parents’ bedroom over his head and the attic another floor up.
What was he doing up there?
And why had he run from it?
He shucks off the backpack, dropping it to the floor, then he places his foot on the bottom step, avoiding his footprint. He takes the step up. And then another. Holding the torch in front of him, he reaches the bathroom door. There’s a sliver of light underneath it, so he opens it, shedding sunlight on the landing from the bathroom window.
The bathroom floor is the same terrible burgundy linoleum that his mother always hated but his father had never gotten around to replacing. There are no footsteps across the dust of it, nothing’s been disturbed here. He leaves the door open for light and turns back to the landing. Across which his bare, smeared footprints are walking toward him.
He takes care, without knowing precisely why, to avoid stepping in them as he crosses the landing. The office is first on his right, and he looks inside. It’s exactly how he remembers it, down to the ancient filing cabinet his mother refused to allow to be shipped to America and a hilariously bulky old-fashioned computer. He flicks the light switch without much hope or success, but like the bathroom, nothing in the office has been disturbed.
There are no footprints coming from his parents’ bedroom either, but Seth opens the door anyway. Inside, the bed is made, the floor is clear, the closet doors are shut tight. Seth goes to the curtains and looks down on the front walk. The shopping cart is still out there, unmoved, unbothered.
He heads back out to the landing and confirms what he suspected all along. His footsteps come down from the upper floor, from the attic where his bedroom was.
And they don’t go back up.
However this started, it started up there.
He shines the torch up the second flight of stairs. There’s only a small landing up top as the house narrows to the peak of its roof. The door to the attic bedroom is there.
It’s open.
Seth can see a dim light coming through it, no doubt from the skylight that served as the bedroom’s only window.
“Hello?” he says.
He starts up the second flight, torch still out in front of him. He can feel himself breathing harder. He keeps his eyes on the door as he climbs, stopping on the last step. The sweat on his palms is making the torch slippery in his hands.
Dammit, he thinks. What am I so afraid of?
He takes another deep breath, raises the torch until it’s practically over his head, and leaps through the doorway and into his old bedroom, ready to fight, ready to be fought –
But there’s no one there. Again.
It’s just his old bedroom.
With one big difference.
There’s a coffin sitting in the middle of the floor.
And it’s open.
16
Everything else is the same.
The crescent-moon wallpaper is still on the walls, the water stain still spreading through it under the skylight in the sloped ceiling. He thinks he can even see the face patterned there that he always used to scare Owen with, telling him that if he didn’t fall asleep in the next one minute, the face would eat him alive.
Their beds are there, too, unbelievably small against two corners, Owen’s little more than a cot, really. There’s the shelf with all their books, very roughly used but still favorites. Below it is their box of toys, piled with plastic action figures and cars and ray guns that shot out little more than loudness, and on Owen’s bed is a whole array of stuffed toys – elephants, mostly, they were his favorite – every single one of which Seth knows is across the ocean in his brother’s bedroom.
And taking up the middle of the room, on the floor in the space between the beds, sits the long black coffin, the lid opened like a giant clam.
The blind is down over the skylight, making the light vague in here, but Seth doesn’t want to step past the coffin to raise it.
It takes him a moment to remember that the torch has other uses than as a weapon. He shines it on the coffin. He tries to remember if he’s ever actually seen one in real life. He’s never been to a funeral, not even in ninth grade when Tammy Fernandez had a seizure on school grounds. Nearly everyone went to that one, but Seth’s parents weren’t going to be swayed from an overnight trip to Seattle. “You didn’t even know her,” his mother had said, and that was that.