“Yes,” Officer Rashadi said, not writing it down in her notebook. “He had a tattoo removed.”
“Is that important?” Seth asked. “Or is it stupid?”
She’d just smiled at him, her front two teeth slightly crooked but bright as moonlight.
He remembers all of that now but can’t remember the name of the man they were talking about, as if that information has somehow been erased from his memory altogether.
He looks down at the photo again. Owen and Mickey are in the middle, Owen smiling so wide it looks physically painful, and his mum and dad on either side, grinning with slight embarrassment but also, he can see, having a great time in spite of themselves.
And there’s Seth, smiling, too, looking at Mickey a little more shyly and keeping his distance – he remembers being freaked way the hell out by the giant brightness of the suit and the grin that never changed and the weird silence of Mickey in person, though he supposes it would have been even weirder if Mickey spoke French.
In the photo, there’s a little gap between him and his family, but he’s not going to put too much emphasis on that. Just an accident of photography, where he’d probably stepped back from Mickey just as it was taken.
Because he’s still smiling. He still is.
He doesn’t know what’s to come, Seth thinks, putting the picture back on top of the filing cabinet.
He doesn’t look back at it as he leaves the office and shuts the door behind him.
26
He spends the time until dawn keeping himself active so he doesn’t fall asleep. He digs himself deep into a new book – the one about the satyr still sitting there unfinished on the coffee table – and when he’s in danger of nodding off, he gets up and paces the room. He fixes himself a can of spaghetti, but again eats only half before setting it beside the unfinished soup and hot dogs from earlier.
Dawn comes with a slight let up in the rain. It’s now more mist than anything, but still coming down, muddy water swirling everywhere outside.
Seth starts to feel weirdly hyper from the lack of sleep, and he thinks that what he’d most like to do is go for a run. Cross-country season was long over when he drowned, and he’d only been able to get in a few runs in the bad weather they’d had over the winter.
His mum had kept up her running, though, almost out of spite. The worse the weather, the better she liked it. She’d come back soaking wet, her breath making clouds in the air. “Jesus, that’s good,” she’d growl, panting heavily just inside the doorway, swigging her bottle of water.
It had been years since she’d asked Seth to join her.
Not that he would have said yes.
Well, maybe. Probably not. But maybe.
But he misses it, the running. Trapped in this house, he misses it more than ever. Misses the rhythm of it, the way his breathing eventually just slotted into place, the way the world kind of fell toward him, like he was standing still and the whole planet was turning underneath him instead.
It was solitude, but it was solitude that wasn’t lonely. Solitude that could sort things out. And he hadn’t had that in ages.
No wonder everything had gotten so screwed up by the end of that winter.
He looks again out the front window. The mist is still there, the world still gray.
“Next time the sun’s out,” he says, “I’m running.”
He’s stuck inside through the day and into the evening. The clocks in the house, of course, are all stopped, so he can only guess how quickly time is passing.
More than anything, he doesn’t want to sleep. He tries stupid things to keep himself awake. Singing at the top of his lungs. Attempting to perfect a handstand. Trying to remember all fifty states (he gets up to forty-seven, goes absolutely crazy trying to remember Vermont, gives up).
He gets colder as the night draws in again. He lights every lantern and makes his way upstairs to his parents’ bedroom to steal more blankets. He wraps them around himself and paces up and down the main room, trying to think of something, anything, to keep his mind occupied, to stave off both sleep and boredom.
And loneliness.
He stops in the middle of the main room, the blankets wrapped around him like robes.
The loneliness. In his accumulating exhaustion, the terrible loneliness of this place swamps him, just like the waves he drowned in.
No one here. No one at all besides him. No one.
Forever.
“Shit,” he says under his breath, starting to pace faster than ever. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”
He feels like he’s underwater again, fighting for breath. His throat chokes shut, just like it did as he was forced under yet another freezing wave. Fight it, he thinks, panicking. Fight it. Oh shit, oh shit –
He stops in the middle of the floor, only dimly aware that he’s letting out a slight moan. He even raises his head, like he’s reaching for air that’s getting farther and farther away.
“I can’t take this,” he whispers into the shadowy darkness above him. “I can’t take this. Not forever. Please –”
He flexes and unflexes his hands, pulling at the blankets that suddenly feel like they’re suffocating him, dragging him farther down. He lets them drop to the floor.
I can’t hold it back, he thinks. Please, I can’t hold it back –
And then he sees in the lantern lights that the blankets have swept the dust away in a pattern on the floor as he paced. The polished floorboards are actually glinting back at him slightly.
He nudges a bunched-up blanket with his foot, leaving a stripe of clean floor beneath it. He pushes it farther along the floor to the wall, wiping away more dust. He picks up the blanket. The underside is filthy, so he folds it to a cleaner side and pushes it along the wall to the hearth.
He looks back. A big stripe of the floor is now relatively clean.
He folds the blanket again and follows the wall around the room, then the floor around the settees, folding and refolding as necessary until he cleans almost the entire floor. He tosses the dirty blanket into the middle of the kitchen and picks up another, folding it into a square and wiping down the dining-room table, coughing some at the dust he churns up, but once again, the surface mostly shines back at him.
He wets the corner of a smaller blanket in the sink and scrubs away the heavier dirt on the dining table before moving to the inert television. Every time a blanket gets too dirty, he piles it in the kitchen and gets another. Soon enough, he’s upstairs in the linen cupboard, taking out painfully stiff towels and sheets and using them to wipe down the hearth and windowsills.