He spends the time until dawn keeping himself active so he doesn't fall asleep. He digs himself deep
into a new book – the one about the satyr still sitting there unfinished on the coffee table – and when
he's in danger of nodding off, he gets up and paces the room. He fixes himself a can of spaghetti, but
again eats only half before setting it beside the unfinished soup and hot dogs from earlier.
Dawn comes with a slight let up in the rain. It's now more mist than anything, but still coming
down, muddy water swirling everywhere outside.
Seth starts to feel weirdly hyper from the lack of sleep, and he thinks that what he'd most like to do
is go for a run. Cross-country season was long over when he drowned, and he'd only been able to get
in a few runs in the bad weather they'd had over the winter.
His mum had kept up her running, though, almost out of spite. The worse the weather, the better she
liked it. She'd come back soaking wet, her breath making clouds in the air. "Jesus, that's good," she'd
growl, panting heavily just inside the doorway, swigging her bottle of water.
It had been years since she'd asked Seth to join her.
Not that he would have said yes.
Well, maybe. Probably not. But maybe.
But he misses it, the running. Trapped in this house, he misses it more than ever. Misses the rhythm
of it, the way his breathing eventually just slotted into place, the way the world kind of fell toward
him, like he was standing still and the whole planet was turning underneath him instead.
It was solitude, but it was solitude that wasn't lonely. Solitude that could sort things out. And he
hadn't had that in ages.
No wonder everything had gotten so screwed up by the end of that winter.
He looks again out the front window. The mist is still there, the world still gray.
"Next time the sun's out," he says, "I'm running."
He's stuck inside through the day and into the evening. The clocks in the house, of course, are all
stopped, so he can only guess how quickly time is passing.
More than anything, he doesn't want to sleep. He tries stupid things to keep himself awake. Singing
at the top of his lungs. Attempting to perfect a handstand. Trying to remember all fifty states (he gets
up to forty-seven, goes absolutely crazy trying to remember Vermont, gives up).
He gets colder as the night draws in again. He lights every lantern and makes his way upstairs to
his parents' bedroom to steal more blankets. He wraps them around himself and paces up and down
the main room, trying to think of something, anything, to keep his mind occupied, to stave off both
sleep and boredom.
And loneliness.
He stops in the middle of the main room, the blankets wrapped around him like robes.
The loneliness. In his accumulating exhaustion, the terrible loneliness of this place swamps him,
just like the waves he drowned in.
No one here. No one at all besides him. No one.
Forever.
"Shit," he says under his breath, starting to pace faster than ever. "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit."
"Shit," he says under his breath, starting to pace faster than ever. "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit."
He feels like he's underwater again, fighting for breath. His throat chokes shut, just like it did as he
was forced under yet another freezing wave. Fight it, he thinks, panicking. Fight it. Oh shit, oh shit –
He stops in the middle of the floor, only dimly aware that he's letting out a slight moan. He even
raises his head, like he's reaching for air that's getting farther and farther away.
"I can't take this," he whispers into the shadowy darkness above him. "I can't take this. Not
forever. Please –"
He flexes and unflexes his hands, pulling at the blankets that suddenly feel like they're suffocating
him, dragging him farther down. He lets them drop to the floor.
I can't hold it back, he thinks. Please, I can't hold it back –
And then he sees in the lantern lights that the blankets have swept the dust away in a pattern on the
floor as he paced. The polished floorboards are actually glinting back at him slightly.
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 cleaner room. He's even cleared the dust from the terrible,
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.