Death Watch (3 page)

H
IS FATHER WAS COMING HOME
.

Silas Umber had been waiting all day for his dad. He’d stayed home “sick” from school that day.

“Uh-huh. Sick of school, you mean! Silas, please. Just tell me you’re going to graduate,” his mother pleaded when he’d told her he was staying home.

This was their usual conversation. Silas would come up with an excuse to remain home. His mother would complain. He’d try to calm her by saying he wasn’t missing anything and that his grades were good enough for him to graduate high school, that he’d catch up when he went back. For the most part, Silas made good on such promises, though he could tell his mother was disappointed in him, but she was too tired most of the time to fight about it.

“Then run to the store for me, Si,” she said, “we’re out of a few things.”

Toward dusk Silas thought he could hear his dad’s shoes on the stones, could hear his father’s familiar step making its way up the drive and onto the porch.

It was time for their little ritual: Silas would run to get to the door before his dad could put in the key, throw the door open, and playing the annoyed parent, yell the famous lines,
Well, young man? Where have you been?

Although he had not yet heard the key in the lock, Silas turned the knob and swiftly pulled the door open, but no one stood on the porch. A nightbird called from the park at the end of the street, and the smell of the distant salt marsh rolled past him into the house, but his father was nowhere to be seen.

His mother called wearily from the den, the sound of her voice accompanied by bells of ice ringing in a thick, half-empty glass.

“Si? Is that your father?”

Silas couldn’t answer her. He stood looking out past the certainty of the empty porch, but he couldn’t imagine his father standing anywhere else. It was like listening for the phone to ring, wanting it to ring so badly you convince yourself that you can feel the person on the other end of the line, feel them dialing your number, but then you wait and wait, and it never rings.

I
T MIGHT HAVE BEEN NOON OR MIDNIGHT
. When Silas woke each day, only the light beyond his window gave a sense of the hour. Since he now often slept in his clothes, when Silas looked in the mirror, he saw the same person as the day before, the same costume. He had become a character in a play, same story, over and over.

With each day of his father’s absence, time fell further and further away from Silas. He spent his time moving belongings across the surface of his desk, examining them. An old arrowhead, a toy gun made from PVC pipe, a book given to him by his father. Everything came from somewhere. Everything was going somewhere. Even the smallest toy was moving its way through time. Each treasured object in his collection occupied space, had weight and a story. Since his father’s absence, memories became the minutes and hours of Silas’s days.

He needed the quiet that attended memories.

Even common sounds now annoyed him terribly. The texture of certain noises became harsh, even unbearable: The awful scrape of his mother’s butter knife across the ragged surface of a slice of toast would drive him from the breakfast table back to the safety of his room.

The sound of some words—like “school”—affected him badly. Certain words were banished altogether.

Silas refused to say the word “dead” in the same sentence as
his father’s name. He worried every day that he’d get the actual news that his dad had died, but he believed, absolutely, in the power of words and so, for a long time, he was careful with what he said. Growing up, he’d watched his parents throw words like rocks at each other, words like weathering tides that would tear at the shore and eat away at their lives. So he wouldn’t say his dad was
dead
, even when his mother told him it was possible, even probable.

Silas knew words could have power behind them. Usually it was just a sort of bad luck. He also knew, very early on, that you could never tell when that bad luck would jump up to claim its due, so it was best to be careful. Quiet was safer. He wished his parents had been quieter when they were together. Who knew what might happen when you said something awful to someone else? It was hard to take some words back. Some words stuck and you couldn’t shake them off. Silence was better than those kinds of words. Silas had learned that lesson the hard way.

When Silas was eleven, he had a real friend. Not one of his imaginary friends. This was a real kid from his real neighborhood who lived in a real house just like Silas’s, although in mirror opposite with the living room to the right of the entry hall instead of the left. Tom was his only friend, and Silas’s parents were pleased he finally had someone in the neighborhood to play with, someone real. Before Tom, Silas hadn’t wanted to play with any other kids from his school.

When his parents asked him why, why not play with some of the kids from the neighborhood who also went to his school, all Silas would say was they looked different at school. School made them different. But Tom looked the same wherever he was, and he smiled a lot and didn’t seem to mind when Silas got quiet and started talking fast about something that had nothing to do with
what they had been doing. Tom would just wait him out. And when Silas looked up, or stopped rambling, Tom was still there, smiling.

It was a holiday weekend, and early Saturday morning, Tom had come to Silas’s house and yelled from the lawn, “Come outside and play, Si! C’mon already!” Silas and Tom played with guns they had made from white plastic PVC pipe and black electrical tape. The battle waged all day Saturday and well into Sunday. Sometimes they were on the same team, running missions behind enemy lines; other times they each took a side, and tracked and chased each other through the neighbors’ yards and through their own houses until one or the other of their parents ordered them back outside.

Silas had been hiding behind the trash cans in front of his house. He’d been waiting for over fifteen minutes for Tom to appear. Just as Silas thought Tom might have quit, Tom came around the wall of the house next door. He crouched low and moved close to Silas’s hiding place. When Tom passed in front of him, Silas knocked over the cans, jumped up, pointed his gun and made a barrage of shooting noises, then chanted, “Dead! You’re dead! Dead, dead, dead, Tom! You’re dead!”

Always a fair player, Tom fell over dramatically, and his gun flew out of his hand and landed on the lawn a few feet away. Gracious in victory, Silas went to help him up and a few minutes later, Tom’s parents called him in to dinner. The boys went home dirty and exhausted but agreed that this was the best time either could remember.

As Silas got ready for bed that night, he did something he rarely ever did: He thought about the future. Made plans in his head for sleepovers and bike rides and a dozen other adventures. He thought things might change for him. Even if his parents
didn’t get along any better, Silas thought he might now have something to do other than try to avoid them when they were fighting. Maybe Tom’s parents would let him spend some weekends at their house, you know, when things got bad at his.

Three days later, Silas and his parents were eating dinner when the phone rang. Tom had been struck by a car and killed. Silas’s mother refused to let him go the funeral, but allowed him to accompany his father to pay their respects. Silas remembered his dad telling his mom that he wanted to speak with Tom’s parents, but before he could even say what it was about, Silas’s mother started in on him: “Oh, leave it, Amos! Let it alone. No one here cares! When someone dies out here in the suburbs, that’s the end of it!”

His parents barely spoke a word to each other for almost a month after that, and Silas grew quiet too. He kept mostly to himself, invited no more friends home, and hid the guns he and Tom had made in the back of his closet. Silas got sick a lot, or said he was sick, and stayed home more than he went to school.

Silas’s mother, Dolores Umber, looked into her son’s room and saw him holding that old toy gun he’d made seven years ago with that other boy, the one who’d been hit by the car. She drew herself quietly back into the hall without disturbing him. She remembered that event very well. It was shortly after the boy’s funeral when she began noticing differences in her son. Silas seemed off somewhere. Absent, even when he was standing right in front of her. She’d talk and talk, and he’d stand there with a blank look; his face might have been the still glass surface of a lake on a windless day.

And now it was bad again, since Amos had vanished. Dolores even tried to cut back on the drinking some, tried to talk to Silas
when he came home from school, or wherever he took himself when he ditched. He’d just look at her. Blank. Then, sometimes, maybe a few words. She tried to talk to him, but if she mentioned one of the Forbidden Things, like school, or making plans for the future, or moving on in general, he’d get mad fast and then go quiet again for days.

She thought he cared too much. Sometimes Dolores could see that her son felt what other people were feeling. He was sympathetic, she knew that. But Silas managed to make his feelings about others into another kind of absence. You’d laugh, Silas would laugh. You’d cry, he’d start crying. It was like he was tuning in to a radio station. It took a moment for the distant signal to lock in, but once it did, he’d be right in sync with you. Only when he got angry, or hurt, did the signal fail and he’d become very present indeed, and very annoyed to have his calm broken. Then it was nothing but static.

She couldn’t win. Eventually, Dolores came to dislike her son’s empathy intensely. She worried it would hold him back, distract him, keep him worrying so much about others he’d be unable to look after himself. Her son’s empathy was just another one of his father’s “gifts.” Why take on another’s misery when you had your own to deal with, was her feeling. But there was Silas, after she and Amos had been fighting, standing in the doorway of her room crying because she was crying without knowing why in the world either of them was crying. It was like he was trying to take the pain from her, as if anyone could. Old pain was heavy in the heart, hard to move, and anyway, Dolores Umber kept a tight hold of her pains and grievances. She thought her pain was the last thing she really owned, the last thing that she could keep all to herself. Her very own thing, and she didn’t much care for the idea of someone else trying to take that away from her too.

Amos Umber had been gone for three months.

It was a Tuesday.

Silas was on the porch for a change. Paint was peeling from porch rails, and he was pulling it off like dried skin after a sunburn.

He was wearing the usual, too, clothes that hung on him because they were slightly too big. He was on the tallish side, but in between more usual sizes, so the pants that fit him almost everywhere were always a little too long. His mother did no hemming, although she used to embroider years ago, so the pants Silas wore were frequently frayed along the bottom edges. This infuriated his mother, and Silas knew it. But if she wouldn’t hem them, they’d stay long, a symbol of her inattention. He even left her a note on the near-empty fridge:

Things Mothers Do

1. Keep food in the house

2. Wash clothes

3. Stay sober

4. Say “I love you”

5. Hem pants

It was a stalemate Silas was willing to live with, and apparently, so was his mother. They both knew it wasn’t about the hem on a pair of pants. One of them was mourning, the other was not, and their individual reactions to Amos’s disappearance created a powerful tension. The air in the house was charged with it.

Silas knew, instinctively, that mourning required people. Effort. Community. Although he had been to only one funeral and hadn’t at the time been allowed to participate in it fully, something deep down in him told him that sadness is best when
shared out among others. His mother believed anything that caused distress was a weakness, something that might embarrass you in front of the neighbors. It was plain in the days following Amos’s disappearance that whatever had happened to him, his wife and son would never be able to agree on how to handle it. So Silas grew sadder, more detached. The fatherless world he now lived in left him with no one to talk to, no one to help him see his fears as part of something reasonable, practical, or even natural. Every day Silas felt like he was standing at the edge of a cliff, and try though he might to see the how deep it was below, or catch a glimpse of the land on the other side, he couldn’t see anything but his own feet wavering against a chasm.