A kind of ecstatic trance overtakes him, his mind on nothing but his actions, which are manic, focused, seemingly unstoppable now that he’s set them in motion. He cleans off the bookcase shelves, the slats in the doors to the cubbyhole, the chairs around the dining-room table. He accidentally breaks a bulb in the overhead light as he tries to rid them of cobwebs, but he just wraps the glass in a blanket and adds it to the pile.
He wipes away the remaining dust from the mirror hanging over the settee. Dirt still clings to the glass, so he picks up one of his wetted rags and presses harder on the mirror, scrubbing away in repeated motions, trying to get it clean.
“Come on,” he says, hardly aware that he’s speaking aloud. “Come on.”
He steps back for a second from the effort and stands there panting. He raises his arm to go back to it –
And in the lantern light, he sees himself.
Sees his too-skinny face, his short cropped hair, sees the dark whiskers sprouting below his nose and under his chin, though not so much on his cheeks, where he’s despaired of ever being able to grow a beard.
Sees his eyes. Sees how they’re the eyes of someone being hunted. Or haunted.
And in the mirror, he sees the room behind him. A hundred times more livable than it was before he started on this frenzy, a frenzy he can’t really explain to himself.
But there it is. A clean or at least cleaner room. He’s even cleared the dust from the terrible, terrible painting of the dying horse. He looks at it now in reflection, its eyes wild, its tongue like a spike of terror.
And he remembers.
This cleaning. This straightening out of things. This frenzy of order.
He’s done it before. To his own bedroom back in America.
“No,” he says. “Oh, no.”
It was the last thing he did before he left his house.
The last thing he did before he went down to the beach.
The last thing he did before he died.
27
“Don’t you think I hate it, too?” Gudmund whispered fiercely. “Don’t you think it’s the last thing I want?”
“But you can’t,” Seth said. “You can’t just . . .”
He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t even say the word.
Leave.
Gudmund looked back nervously at his house from the driver’s seat of his car. Lights were on downstairs, and Seth knew Gudmund’s parents were up. They could discover he was gone at any moment.
Seth crossed his arms tightly against the cold. “Gudmund –”
“I finish out the year at Bethel Academy or they don’t pay for college, Sethy,” Gudmund practically pleaded. “They’re that freaked out about it.” He frowned, angry. “We can’t all have crazy liberal European parents –”
“They’re not that crazy liberal. They’ll barely even look at me now.”
“They barely looked at you before,” Gudmund said. Then he turned to Seth. “Sorry, you know what I mean.”
Seth said nothing.
“It doesn’t have to be forever,” Gudmund said. “We’ll meet up in college. We’ll find a way so that no one –”
But Seth was shaking his head.
“What?” Gudmund asked.
“I’m going to have to go to my dad’s college,” Seth said, still not looking up.
Gudmund made a surprised move in the driver’s seat. “What? But you said –”
“Owen’s therapy is costing them a fortune. If I want college at all, it has to be on the faculty family rate where my dad teaches.”
Gudmund’s mouth opened in shock. This hadn’t been their plan. Not at all. They were both going to go to the same college, both going to share a dorm room.
Both going to be hundreds of miles away from home.
“Oh, Seth –”
“You can’t go,” Seth said, shaking his head. “You can’t go now.”
“Seth, I have to –”
“You can’t.” Seth’s voice was breaking now, and he fought to control it. “Please.”
Gudmund put a hand on his shoulder. Seth jerked away from it, even though the feel of it was what he wanted more than the world.
“Seth,” Gudmund said. “It’ll be okay.”
“How?”
“This isn’t our whole lives. It isn’t even close. It’s high school, Sethy. It’s not meant to last forever. For a goddamn good reason.”
“It’s been –” Seth said to the windshield. “Since New Year, since you weren’t there, it’s been –”
He stopped. He couldn’t tell Gudmund how bad it had been. The worst time of his life. School had been nearly unbearable, and sometimes he’d gone whole days without actually speaking to anyone. There were a few people, girls mostly, who tried to tell him they thought what was happening to him was unfair, but all that did was serve to remind him that he’d gone from having three good friends to having none. Gudmund had been pulled out of school by his parents. H was hanging out with a different crowd and not speaking to him.
And Monica.
He couldn’t even think about Monica.
“It’s a few more months,” Gudmund said. “Hang in there. You’ll make it through.”
“Not without you.”
“Seth, please don’t say stuff like that. I can’t take it when you say stuff like that.”
“You’re everything I’ve got, Gudmund,” Seth said quietly. “You’re it. I don’t have anything else.”
“Don’t say that!” Gudmund said. “I can’t be anyone’s everything. Not even yours. I’m going out of my mind with all this. I can’t stand the fact that I have to go away. I want to kill someone! But I can take it if I know you’re out there, surviving, getting through it. This won’t be forever. There’s a future. There really is. We’ll find a way, Seth. Seth?”
Seth looked at him, and he could now see what he hadn’t seen before. Gudmund was already gone, had already put his mind into Bethel Academy, sixty-five miles away, that he was already living in a future at UW or WSU, which were even farther, and maybe that future included Seth somehow, maybe that future really did have a place for the two of them –
But Seth was only here. He wasn’t in that future. He was only in this unimaginable present.
And he didn’t see how he’d ever get from here to there.
“There’s more than this, Sethy,” Gudmund said. “This sucks beyond belief, but there’s more. We just have to get there.”