It seems a surprise, as if he’d forgotten it until the dream or the memory or whatever the hell it was that just happened. It had been so clear it’s almost painful to recall it. And the sudden rush of information that comes with it is painful, too. Not just his name. No, not just that.
He had been right there, so much more vividly than any memory or dream would have been. He had actually been there, with them. With H and Monica. With Gudmund, who had a car so always drove. His friends. On the night they stole the Baby Jesus out of Callen Fletcher’s front yard.
Not two months ago.
Seth, he thinks again. The name slips from his brain strangely, like sand held in an open palm. I am Seth Wearing.
I was Seth Wearing.
He takes a deep breath, and his nostrils fill with a gag-making smell from where he was sick in the bushes. He sits up. The sun is higher in the sky. He’s been out for a while, but it doesn’t feel like noon yet.
If there is a noon in this place. If time means anything here.
His head is pounding badly, and even in the confusion of memories laying heavily on him, he becomes aware of a powerful new feeling, one he realizes he’s felt all along but can now put a description to, a word, now that things are clearing, now that he knows his own name.
Thirst. He’s thirsty. More thirsty than he can ever remember. So much so it drives him almost immediately to his feet. Once more, he’s shaky as he stands, but he steadies himself and manages to stay upright. He realizes it’s what had driven him into the house before, an unnameable, undeniable urge.
Now that it’s named, it feels even more undeniable.
He looks again at the strange, silent, empty neighborhood around him, with its layers of dust and mud. The familiarity that had hinted itself before is much firmer, much clearer now.
His street, yes, where he’d lived when he was small, a street that had been his home. To the left it led up to the High Street with all its shops, and he can remember now, too, the commuter trains off to the right. More, he can remember counting them. On those early mornings, just before they moved from this little English suburb all the way across the world to the freezing coast of the Pacific Northwest, when he used to lie awake, unsleeping, counting trains, as if that would help.
His younger brother’s bed empty across the room.
He winces at the memory of that summer and pushes it away.
Because it’s summer now, isn’t it?
He turns to the house again.
His old house.
Unmistakably, his old house.
It looks weather-beaten and untended, the paint peeling away from the window frames, the walls stained from leaky gutters, just like every other house on this street. At some point, the chimney has partially collapsed onto the roof, a small rubble of bricks and dust scattered down the slope to the edge, as if no one ever noticed it falling.
Which maybe no one has.
How? he thinks, struggling to organize coherent thoughts against his thirst. How can this possibly be?
The need for water is almost like a living creature inside him now. He’s never felt anything like it before, his tongue fat and dry in his mouth, his lips cracked and chapped, bleeding as he tries to lick them damp.
The house looms there, as if waiting for him. He doesn’t want to go back inside, not even a little bit, but there is nothing else to do. He must drink. He must. The front door is still open from where he ran out before, panicked. He remembers the shock of what awaited him above the mantelpiece, like a punch to the gut, telling him just exactly what hell he’d woken up to –
But he also remembers the dining area leading on from the sitting room, and the kitchen beyond that.
The kitchen.
With its taps.
He moves slowly to the doorway again, coming up the three front steps, now recognizing the crack in the bottom one, a crack never quite serious enough to get fixed.
He looks into his house and the memories keep coming. The long hallway, still shrouded in shadow, is one he crossed countless times as a young boy, tumbling down stairs he can now just barely see in the deepness of the house. He remembers that they lead up to the bedrooms on the floor above and continue up farther still, to the attic.
The attic that used to be his old bedroom. The one he shared with Owen. The one he shared with Owen before –
He stops the thought again. The thirst is nearly bending him double.
He must drink.
Seth must drink.
He thinks his name again. Seth. I am Seth.
And I will speak.
“Hello?” he says, and the word is sharply painful, the thirst turning his throat into a desert. “Hello?” he tries again, a bit louder. “Is anyone there?”
There’s no answer. And still no sound, nothing but his breathing to let him know he hasn’t gone deaf.
He stands at the doorway, not moving yet. It’s harder this time to go in, much harder, his fear a palpable thing, fear of what else he might find inside, fear of why he’s here, of what it means.
Of what it will mean. Forever and ever.
But the thirst is palpable, too, and he forces himself over the threshold, stirring up the dust again. His bandages are no longer anything approaching white, and his skin is streaked with dark stains. He heads deeper inside, stopping just before the bottom of the stairs. He tries the light switch there, but it flips on and off pointlessly, no lights coming on anywhere. He turns from the stairs, not willing to brave the darkness of them just yet, not even really wanting to look at them, just gathering his courage before entering the living room.
He takes a deep, dry breath, coughing again at the dust.
And steps through the doorway.
6
It is as he left it. Scattered rays of sunlight are the only illumination, since the light switches don’t work in this room either. A room filled, he now fully realizes, with the furniture of his childhood.
There are the stained red settees, one big, one small, that his father wasn’t going to replace until the boys got old enough not to mess them up anymore.
Settees that got left behind in England when they moved to America, left behind in this house.
But here is a coffee table that didn’t get left behind, a coffee table that should be thousands and thousands of miles from here.
I don’t understand, he thinks. I don’t understand.
He sees a vase of his mother’s that made the trip. He sees an ugly end table that didn’t. And there, above the mantelpiece –
He feels the same stabbing in his gut despite knowing what to expect.
It’s the painting made by his uncle, the painting that came to America, too, with some of this furniture. It’s of a shrieking, wrongly proportioned horse with terror in its eyes and that awful spike for its tongue. His uncle had patterned it after Picasso’s Guernica, surrounding the horse with broken skies and broken, bombed-out bodies.