More Than This (4 page)

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.

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.

Seth had long since been told about the real
Guernica
by his father, long since understood the story behind it, but even though his uncle’s version was the palest of pale imitations, it was the first painting Seth had ever properly seen, the first real painting his then-five-year-old mind had tried to figure out. For that reason, it loomed larger for him than any classic ever would.

It is something out of a nightmare, something horrible and hysterical, something unable to listen to reason or understand mercy.

And it is a painting he last saw
yesterday,
if yesterday still means anything. If time passed at all in hell. Whatever the answer, it was a painting he saw on his way out of his own house on the other side of the world, the last thing his eyes had glanced over as he shut his front door.

His actual front door. Not this. Not this nightmare version out of a past he’d prefer not to remember.

He watches the painting as long as he can bear, long enough to try and turn it into just a painting, nothing more than that, but he can feel his heart thudding as he looks away from it, his eyes avoiding a dining-room table he also recognizes, and the bookcases full of books, some of whose titles he’s read in another country than this. He shuffles as quickly as his weak body will carry him into the kitchen, keeping his thoughts only on his thirst. He heads straight to the sink, almost whimpering with anticipated relief.

When he turns on the taps and nothing happens, he lets out an involuntary cry of despair. He tries them again. One won’t move at all, and the other just spins in his hand, producing nothing, no matter how often he twists it.

He can feel a weeping rising in him again, his eyes burning at how salty the tears are in his dehydrated body. He feels so weak, so unsteady that he has to lean forward and put his forehead against the counter, feeling its dusty coolness on his brow and hoping he won’t faint.

Of course this is what hell would be like,
he thinks.
Of course it is. To always be thirsty but have nothing to drink. Of course.

It’s probably punishment for the Baby Jesus thing. Monica had even said so. He feels a rueful flutter in his stomach, remembering that night again, remembering his friends, how relaxed and easy everything usually was, how they liked that he was the quiet one, how it hadn’t mattered that the differences in English and American curriculum meant that he was nearly a year younger than them all despite being in the same grade, how they – but especially Gudmund – included him in everything as only friends could. Even the theft of a deity.

They’d stolen it, almost shamefully easily, their stifled laughter the only real threat to getting caught. They’d lifted the infant out of the manger, surprised at its lightness, and carried it, barely able to contain their hysteria, back to Gudmund’s car. They’d been so nervous in the getaway that a light had come on in the Fletcher house as they peeled down the road.

But they’d done it. And then they’d driven out to the head cheerleader’s house as planned, shushing each other vigorously as they snuck Baby Jesus out of the backseat into the middle of the night.

Where H dropped him.

It turned out that Baby Jesus wasn’t, in fact, made from Venetian marble, but from some kind of cheap ceramic that broke with astonishing thoroughness when it came into swift contact with the pavement. There had been a hushed, horrified silence as they stood over the bits and pieces.

“We are
so
going to hell,” Monica had finally said, and it sure hadn’t sounded like she was joking.

Seth hears a sound in his chest and realizes with surprise that it’s laughter. He opens his mouth and it comes out in a horrible, painful honk, but he can’t stop it. He laughs and laughs some more, no matter how light-headed it makes him, no matter how he still can’t quite stand up from the countertop.

Yes. Hell. That’d be about right.

But before he starts to cry again, a feeling that has threatened behind every second of his laughter, he realizes he’s been hearing another sound this whole time. A creaking and groaning, like a baying cow lost somewhere in the house.

He looks up.

The groaning is from the pipes. Dirty, rust-colored water is starting to dribble from the kitchen tap.

Seth practically leaps forward in his desperate rush to drink and drink and drink.

The water tastes awful, unbelievably so, like metal and mud, but he can’t stop himself. He gulps it down as it comes, faster through the tap now. After ten or twelve swallows, he feels a churning in his stomach, leans back, and throws up all the water he just drank into the sink in great, rust-colored cataracts.

He pants heavily for a minute.

Then he sees that the water is running a little clearer, though still not exactly drinkable looking. He waits for as long as he can bear, letting it clear some more, then he drinks again, more slowly, this time taking breaks to breathe and wait.

He keeps the water down. Feels the coolness of it spreading out from his stomach. It feels good, and he notices again how warm it is in this place, but especially in this house. The air is stuffy and oppressive, tasting of the dust that covers everything. His arms are filthy with it just from leaning against the counter.

He begins to feel slightly better, slightly stronger. He drinks again, and then again, until the roaring thirst is finally satisfied. When he stands up fully this time, he does so without feeling dizzy.

The sun through the back window is bright and clear. He looks around the kitchen. It’s definitely his old one, which his mother never stopped complaining about being too small, even after they moved to America, where kitchens tended to be big enough to seat a family of elephants around the breakfast nook. Then again, in his mother’s eyes,
everything
in England compared unfavorably to America, and why shouldn’t it?

After what England had done to them.

He hasn’t thought about it,
really
thought about it, for years. There was no reason to. Why dwell on your worst memory? Not if life had moved on, in a brand-new place, so many new things to learn, so many new people to meet.

And though it had been terrible, his brother had survived, hadn’t he? There had been problems, of course, as they watched to see how bad any neurological damage might be as he grew, but his brother had lived and was usually a charming, functional, happy little kid, despite any difficulties.

Though there had been that unthinkable period when they all thought the worst, when they all looked at Seth and while saying over and over that they didn’t blame him, still seemed to think –

He pushes it out of his mind, swallowing away the ache in his throat. He looks out toward the darkened sitting room and wonders what he’s supposed to
do
here.

Is there a goal? Something to solve?

Or is he just supposed to stay here forever?

Is that what hell is? Trapped forever, alone, in your worst memory?

It makes a kind of sense.

The bandages don’t, though, smudged with dark, dusty stains but stuck fast to his body in an arrangement that covers all the wrong parts. And for that matter, the water – now running almost clear – doesn’t make sense either. Why satisfy his thirst if this is a punishment?

He still can’t hear anything. No machinery, no human voices, no vehicles, nothing. Just the running of the water, the sound of which is so comforting, he can’t quite bring himself to turn it off.

He’s surprised to feel his stomach rumbling. Emptied twice of all its contents, he realizes that it’s hungry, and rather than give in to the fear that this causes – because what do you eat in hell? – he almost automatically opens the nearest cabinet.

The shelves are filled with plates and cups, less dusty because shut away, but still with an air of abandonment. The cabinet next to it has better glasses and the good china, which he recognizes, most but not all of it surviving the shipment to America. He moves quickly on, and in the next cabinet, there is finally food. Bags of desiccated pasta, molding boxes of rice that crumble under his touch, a jar of sugar that’s hardened into a single lump that resists the poking of his fingers. Further searching reveals cans of food, some of which are rusted over, others bulging alarmingly, but a few that look okay. He takes out one of chicken noodle soup.

He recognizes the brand. It’s one that he and Owen used to be unable to get enough of, used to ask their mother to buy over and over again –

He stops. The memory is a dangerous one. He can feel himself teetering again, an abyss of confusion and despair looking right back up at him, threatening to swallow him if he so much as glances at it.

That can be for later,
he tells himself.
You’re hungry. Everything else can wait.

Even thinking it, he doesn’t believe it, but he forces himself to read the can again. “Soup,” he says, his voice still little more than a croak but better now, after the water. “Soup,” he says again, more strongly.

He starts opening drawers. He finds a can opener – rusty and stiff, but usable – in the first one and lets out a small “Ha!” of triumph.

It takes him seventeen tries to get the first cut into the top of the can.

“Goddammit!” he shouts, though his throat isn’t quite up to shouting yet and he has to cough it away.

But at last there’s an opening, one he can work with. His hands are aching from the simple act of twisting a can opener, and there’s a terrible moment when he thinks he’s going to be too weak and tired to get any further. But the frustration drives him on and eventually, agonizingly so, there’s enough of an opening to drink out of.