Seely, Part 6
A serialized short story by W. McCrae.
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continue this week. This is Part 6 of her original short story. You can find the previous installments here: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5.Charles never warned Seely that he wouldn’t be coming by as often.
He hadn’t intended for it to happen—didn’t realize how much time had passed, until he noticed the date at the top of an Economics test one morning. It was nearly June. He hadn’t been down to the quarry since Presidents’ Day. He stared at the numbers for so long that their lines turned to scratch, and Clarisa Martinez, who was sitting next to him, gave him a concerned nudge with her elbow.
Later, he walked to Lime Slope as soon as the evening light began to fade. Seely acted as though she’d known he was coming, awaiting his arrival with a sly look on her face. “What is it?” he asked. In her palm was cupped an egg-sized stone, impressed by the spiral shell of an ancient animal. Triumphantly she showed it off in the diminishing light, then held it out for Charles to take a closer look.
“Wow,” he said, before asking again, “What is it?”
“I dunno what they’re called. One of those dinosaur-snails. You don’t find the big ones all in one piece, usually.” She leaned in to appraise it one last time with a self-satisfied look, before casually mentioning, “Anyway, happy birthday.”
It took Charles a few seconds to register her words while he examined the fossil. “What? It’s not my birthday.” Her expression turned sour, so he stumbled onward to justify himself: “I mean, you don’t have to give me anything. It—it’s really cool, but I don’t deserve—”
Seely snapped, “Who said you deserved anything?” and snatched the rock back, only to turn it over in her hands a few times, seeming not to know what to do.
“...Virgo’s past the meridian,” she insisted sullenly. “It is too your birthday.”
“Not until the tenth,” he said. Her frown demanded clarification. “June 10th. That’s still a couple of weeks away.”
“Oh,” she said, and seemed to relax. “Only a couple weeks off. That’s nothing.” Imperiously she regarded Charles, tilting up her chin to look him in the eye, before finally handing back the fossil like a benefaction. Side by side they sat down on the boulder. Charles kept rolling the stone in his hands, catching the last of the light across its ancient face.
“I have to get a job,” he told her after a while. Seely looked over at him. “In a couple weeks after I turn sixteen, I mean. My parents are… I could use some money.”
“Okay,” she said, in a tone carefully slanted to offset his seriousness.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been around in so long.”
Seely crossed her legs atop the stone. “‘The days are long but the years are short,’” she mused, not as though it were her own insight, but something she’d heard before. Charles appreciated the sentiment. For himself, though, he thought the years were more than long enough.
The season spun back into panting-hot summer. Howie came home one day with a bloodied forehead; after some wheedling, he told Charles about the older girls down the street who had pushed him off his bike. Charles held him tight and saw red. Soon, he would empty his bank account and buy a shitty car, to drive his little brother to school and wherever else in the whole world he wanted to go. He’d found work at the deli; it gave him somewhere to be other than home, and a few meals each week that didn’t come out of a box.
Delaney stopped attending D&D nights after he got arrested for driving drunk. Dad never came to visit in August like he promised he would. Mrs. Schneider went to the hospital for heart murmurs. Memories of that second summer would not evoke stars scattered across gentle darkness, but instead, the harsh sun glare of the sun on the checkered floor of Goldman’s Market.
School’s abrupt return cut a wasteland swath from the middle of September. Charles made marching band tryouts, as everyone knew he would. Riding a high of confidence, the very next morning, he asked Clarisa Martinez to go to Homecoming with him.
By the time he saw Seely next, the dance had long since passed, and been eclipsed by his first kiss. It was all such an enormous thing to talk about that he resolved never to try. Instead, he tossed his bedroom in search of every book he didn’t have time to read right now, even his collector’s edition of The Sword of Shannara, and stuffed them in three grocery bags. Seely crowed over the number of volumes he turned out onto the ground at sunset that evening.
“Holy crap,” she laughed, spreading the volumes out around her for examination. Charles felt pleased with himself, until he looked up and realized that this civil-twilight composition of girl and grass and so many books was one he’d seen before, in a vision of his own death. Déjà rêvé hit him so hard he had to step away from her.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. He said it was nothing, but the memory stuck to him like cactus spines.
Now he was visiting the quarry once every couple months at most. It was the best he could do. Marching band performed at football games every two weeks in the fall; then came band competitions throughout winter, on top of chess club on Thursdays, working at the deli every evening in between. He wasn’t a kid anymore. He didn’t have time to sneak across town in the middle of the night. Every once in a while Howie still asked about Seely, but Charles always told him No, he didn’t know how she was. No, Seely was too busy to see him lately. No, Seely moved away.
“Like Dad?” Yeah, like Dad. “So she’ll come back to visit sometime.” No good could come of arguing against that.
Spring swelled with hot air and burst across the desert in tides of rain and wildflowers. On Charles’s seventeenth birthday, Clarisa gave him a cassette player with a custom mixtape inside, and whispered a secret in his ear. Nine hours later he was sitting over his knees at the edge of her bed, elated and incredulous with eyes on the deep-field of glowing plastic stars stuck to the back of her door.
Her jaw rested on his shoulder while he tied off the condom. She murmured that she didn’t want him to go, but her mom would be off work soon, and at the end of a drawn-out goodbye he finally left. Driving away in his rattling car with all the windows down, he leaned his head out into the hot air to watch the real stars pace him across the firmament.
In the last couple blocks before Ocotillo Street, he began to feel that something was wrong. On an instinct he turned off his headlights as he came up on the house. His stomach clenched against the force of the familiar scene looming ahead: the blue of the television shining from the living room, the heavy curtains drawn. Shadows crossing the kitchen window again and again, squaring off against one another in silhouette.
Dad’s truck was right there, sitting in the driveway as though it had never left. No one told him that Dad was coming down today, they’d barely heard a word from him since January… How could this have happened? The divorce was supposed to stop this from happening. It was almost eleven o’clock, and in his mind’s eye Charles could see Howie laying in bed, maybe even in his big brother’s bed, listening to the worst thing in the world and wondering why he was all alone. Helplessly Charles idled in the street, until headlights swerved in behind him and a neighbor passed on the left, with one angry finger thrust out the window at his darkened vehicle.
He didn’t go inside, although he should have. He should have burst through the front door to jump the argument off its rails, and marched straight through the house to find his brother… but instead, he shifted into first gear and started rolling down the road like he’d come to the wrong address. His hands shook. He watched Howie’s lit bedroom window in his right-side mirror so closely that he almost rear-ended a parked car, lurched back into the middle of the lane, popped the clutch and jumped to third, screeched away before he was noticed or before valor could find him. He thought for a moment to go south and drive into the badlands as far as a half-tank of gas would take him. At the last minute, he swerved toward Lime Slope and careened down its tight dusty curves, riding the edge of some idea that to jump the cusp would mean to fly away into the perfect black sky.
Arriving at the bottom alive and intact, for better or worse, he parked his car out of view of the water and walked to the fence, shivering in spite of the heat. The fireflies were out. They drifted and blinked like motes of pollen across the grassland. Incandescent light glared from the western shore. Seely looked up from her book and turned her flashlight on Charles as he drew near the boulder. He shielded his eyes.
“Hey,” she said, in a tone more curious than surprised. “What are you doing here?”
All the things that had happened tonight crowded behind his lips. It was too much for one story, too much for one life. Charles mouthed like a fish for a few seconds before croaking, “It’s my birthday.”
“Oh.” Seely dropped the light back into her lap and regarded him with confusion. “I didn’t think you were coming. I didn’t get you anything.”
He shook his head.
She looked at him tentatively. “I’m reading through Shannara again. I could read some to you.”
He nodded, still mute, and she dog-eared her page and flipped backward in the chapter.
“Herein lies the heart and soul of the nations. Their right to be free men, their desire to live in peace, their courage to seek out truth. Herein lies the Sword of Shannara…”
Charles slipped down to sit in the grass with his back to her. If Seely heard when he started to cry, she didn’t act like it. She kept on reading until her voice became background, as embracing as the crickets and the hushing water and the sight of stars over the desert.
In the morning he woke with clothespin crimps in his back and neck, and raised his eyes to a horizon the color of powder. He stood up to gaze across the pond and the waist-deep grass; it was a new day, and he was alone. Back at the house, Dad’s truck was gone again. The kitchen was silent. Charles tripped inside and fell asleep like a guard-dog across the foot of Howie’s bed.
For a full year afterward, Charles would make sure that no matter what, his brother was never left at home without him.
The days were sometimes eternal, but that year in retrospect seemed very short.
On the night of his eighteenth birthday, the night of his high school graduation, while the rest of town thrummed on a beat of adolescent triumph, Charles was at home packing. He stuffed old sneakers into a backpack and checked the time on his shaking wrist once again, to track the hard deadline that waited implacably at 9:30 pm. Howie sat anxious on the edge of the bed, kicking his legs out over and over again like the clock’s jolting second-hand.
“But why?” he kept asking.
“I’m sorry,” Charles answered. He’d said it so many times that he hardly meant it anymore, and that might make him the worst person in the world. He forced the backpack’s zipper closed along a bulging seam, then crouched before his brother and put everything he had left into a smile. “Look. This isn’t a big deal. I’ll come to see you as much as I can.”
“But why do you have to go?” Howie asked again.
Charles used the comforter to hide the tremors in his hands. The note that his mother had served him when he walked in the door forty-five minutes earlier was burning a hole in his pocket. “I told you, I just—I’m a grown-up now, so I can’t keep living here anymore. I have to pack my things and—”
Howie tipped forward to wrap his arms around his brother’s neck. Charles had to stop speaking for a moment to keep from breaking down. “Don’t worry about me. This is okay, okay? I’ll come to see you all the time.”
Howie whimpered, “Like Dad?”
“No. Not like Dad. Listen—” He took his brother by the shoulders and sat him upright, so they were facing each other man-to-man. “There’s something I’ll need you to do, okay? Only you can do it. Will you try?” Howie sucked on his lips and nodded. “I’m going to give you something. Mom said she’d… She can’t keep storing my things, but I need you to hold on to this, and keep it safe.” He tipped back on his heels to scrabble in an open cardboard box, and withdrew a small velvet bag.
“Look. I want you to have this. Mom said… Anything I don’t take with me tonight, it’s going to go away. Go in the trash. But not if you keep it safe for me. Alright?” He searched the eight-year-old’s face for understanding, then tipped the contents of the bag out into his palm. A walnut-sized opal, and an ammonite fossil. “These are the… my favorite things that I own. Okay? Seely gave them to me. You remember Seely? And they’re very rare. Like treasure. I want you to keep them safe for me, okay? Don’t tell Mom where they came from. Secret treasure, just between you and me.” Howie started nodding, faster each time. “Thank you. I have to—” He made to look at his watch again, and Howie caught his hand.
“I wanna come with you,” his brother said. But God knew what would happen if they tried to sneak out of the house together. The police would be involved within an hour. Charles just shook his head.
“Please,” Howie begged.
“She won’t let you come. I wish I could, I want—” Charles jumped at the sound of a chair moving in the kitchen. He turned to look at Howie again and gripped his arms tight. “Look. We’re gonna be like spies, working undercover. You just have to act like everything’s okay, and we’ll be able to see each other again soon. I promise.” He wiped his brother’s nose with his sleeve. “I promise.”
Howie whimpered, “Okay.”
“I love you.”
“Gross,” Howie said. But he smiled. Charles gave him a final squeeze and then left the room with a cardboard box in his arms and a backpack full of clothes slung over his shoulder. He marched down the hallway to the front door, and didn’t stop in the kitchen, didn’t even spare a look in that direction. He had nothing else to say.
He dropped the last bag atop a mess of pillows and textbooks in the back seat of his car. After ten minutes of driving toward the pink horizon, he pulled over to use the pay phone outside a convenience store. He called Delaney out in Maricopa, to ask if he could crash at his place tonight; then he called Clarisa to let her know he would be at Delaney’s. Clarisa was out, attending the graduation party where he had planned to join her. He left a message with her mother instead.
The ringer rattled on impact when he hung up, and then the only sounds were of his idling car, and traffic moving down the interstate, and crickets piping around the edges of the parking lot. Exhaust and garbage fouled the too-warm air. Across the street, a shuttered mattress outlet advertised top brands through the tinted window. Pacific, Simmons, Sealy.
A low hiss escaped Charles’s throat, small but growing harsher and louder as it ran. He covered his face and crooked his fingers and exhaled a silent scream out and out until there was no air left in him, and finally threw his chin upward again with a gasp. He stood panting under the streetlight and dusty sundown sky, breaths deep and deliberate to move as much of the enormous night through his body as he could.
When his car engine began to dim and stutter, it seemed a clear sign that it was time for him to go. There was a moment of uncertainty before he left the parking lot, when his eyes and thoughts strayed toward Lime Slope; but he had miles still to go, and none of them ran eastward.
He left the crossroads by the onramp to Interstate 10.
Look for Part 7, coming soon.
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