More Than This (16 page)

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.

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 clean
er
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.

“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.”

“We just have to get there,” Seth said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“That’s right.” Gudmund touched Seth’s shoulder again. “Hang in there, please. We’ll make it. I promise you.”

They both jumped at the sound of a door slamming. “Gudmund!” Gudmund’s father shouted from the porch, loud enough to wake the neighbors. “You’d better answer me, boy!”

Gudmund rolled down his window. “I’m here!” he shouted back. “I needed some fresh air.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot?” His father squinted into the darkness where Seth and Gudmund were parked. “You get back in here. Now!”

Gudmund turned back to Seth. “We’ll e-mail. We’ll talk on the phone. We won’t lose contact, I promise.”

He lunged forward and kissed Seth hard, one last time, the smell of him filling Seth’s nose, the bulk of his body rocking Seth back in the seat, the squeeze of his hands around Seth’s torso –

And then he was gone, sliding out the door, hurrying back into the glow of the porchlight, arguing with his father on the way.

Seth watched him go.

And as Gudmund disappeared behind another slamming door, Seth felt his own doors closing.

The doors of the present, shutting all around him, locking him inside.

Forever.

It takes Seth a moment to realize he’s on the floor. He doesn’t remember lying down, but he’s cramped and stiff, like he’s been there for hours.

He sits up. He feels lighter.

Like he’s almost empty.

The weight from the dream feels like it’s in the room somewhere, and he’s distantly aware of it, but of himself, he feels –

Nothing. He feels nothing.

He gets to his feet. The sleep has returned some of his strength. He flexes his hands, rolls his neck, stretches.

Then he sees that small beams of sun are pouring through the cracks in the blinds.

The rain has stopped. The sun is back out.

And he promised himself a run, didn’t he?

Keeping his mind clear, he changes into a pair of shorts and one of the new T-shirts. His sneakers aren’t proper running shoes, but they’ll do. He debates whether to take one of the bottles of water but decides to leave it behind.

He skips breakfast. He’s barely eaten in the last day and a half, but there’s a purpose in his chest that feels like it’s feeding him.

It’s the same purpose he felt when he went down to the beach.

He lets the thought slide through his head and out the other side.

There is nothing this morning.

Nothing at all.

Nothing but running.

He goes to the front door. He doesn’t shut it behind him.

He runs.

It was cold, possibly below freezing when he left his house that afternoon, having meticulously cleaned his room without really knowing why, without somehow even really being aware of doing it, just getting everything in its right place, neat and tidy and final, so nothing was left undone.

His mother had taken Owen to therapy and his father was working in the kitchen. Seth walked down the stairs to the living room. His eyes caught that horrible painting by his uncle, the horse, in terror, in agony, but stilled, forever, watching him go, watching as he closed the front door behind him.

It was a good half hour walk to the beach, the sky threatening snow but not delivering. The sea that day wasn’t as monstrous as it often was in winter. The waves were shallower, but still reaching, still grabbing. The beach as rocky as ever.

He stood there for a moment, then he started to take off his shoes.

Seth runs toward the train station, leaving footprints in the drying mud, his legs creaking and groaning from lack of this kind of use. He turns up the stairs between the blocks of flats, heading to the station.

His first sweat is on, the drops stinging his eyes as they drip from his forehead. The sun is blazing down. His breathing is heavy.

He runs.

And as he runs, he remembers.

He runs faster, as if he might escape it.

There was sand there, between the rocks, and he stood on a little patch of it to remove first one shoe and then the other. He set them carefully together, then he sat on a rock to take off his socks, folding them and tucking them deep inside his shoes.

He felt . . . not quite calm, calm wasn’t the right word, but there were moments, moments when he wasn’t focused on the precise folding of his socks when he felt almost faint with relief.

Relief because at last, at last, at last.