Seely, Part 7

The final part of a serialized short story by W. McCrae.

Sep 01, 2023

This is the final installment of

’s short story. You can find the rest of the story here: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5, Part 6. Look for more of McCrae’s work in the future, here and elsewhere; I’ll be getting back to business as usual next week.

Every piece of wall décor had been laid out beneath newspaper shrouds. The kitchen was scoured smooth, but the carpet still bore a hard lattice of furniture outlines. All the remains of Charles’s childhood home had been interred within a necropolis of cardboard boxes, and his presence among them now felt like a haunting.

It was a six-hour drive to get here from San Diego: in hindsight, not remotely worth it, no matter how badly he’d wanted to see Howie before the move. The plan had been for Charles to spend the night here, and see off his mother and brother first thing Sunday morning—but plans change, so said the note taped to the back door when he finally arrived, near dark. Mom, in her classically callous fashion, had chosen to leave for Santa Fe twenty-four hours early, without so much as a courtesy call to her eldest son.

So he’d wasted his entire Saturday traveling, to find nothing but a locked door at his destination. The spare key under the Kokopelli pot granted him entry to a hot and empty house; it was too late to turn back, and he hadn’t enough time to drive all the way to New Mexico and still be home for class on Monday. What should have been a bittersweet homecoming was only really bitter.

In order to cope with the pointlessness of it all, he’d had chosen to spend the hours on either side of sunset commiserating with a couple of six-packs and the ancient countertop television from the kitchen. He and Sony and Stella Artois whiled away the night together as three old friends, sprawled on the floor of the home office which had once been his bedroom. The TV hummed comforting blue frequencies; the ceiling fan turned and turned. Time diluted like whisky on the rocks. It was well past four in the morning by now, and he wasn’t tired at all.

Surprisingly, some of his belongings were still here, in a single plastic tub set apart from the rest, brusquely labeled “C.T.,” which were also his father’s initials. Not until the last of the late-night broadcasts fizzled off-air did he start to wonder, and only once the beer was gone did he finally look inside.

Junk. Nothing but junk, of course—his mother had pawned his high school clarinet at the first opportunity, but found this garbage fit to keep. From the stale container he withdrew a puzzling selection of ephemera: dress shoes long out of fashion and blockbusters on Betamax; first-prize ribbons and dry fountain pens. A half-unspooled mixtape with a little heart scratched into the sticker. He lingered wistfully on that one for a moment, and then set it aside with the rest. A flattened, stained box of C-3PO’s. Cute.

Not until his fingers scraped the bottom of the tub did he realize that he was searching for something, sort of. He used to have a little bag, didn’t he?, with an opal and an ammonite fossil inside… God knew what ever became of those little treasures. Probably long gone, if Mom thought they might be worth a few bucks.

Pre-dawn, the near atmosphere was beginning to sparkle with the sounds of songbirds. A spring breeze stirred the ironwood outside the window and filled the room with the smell of hot tar. Charles leaned back against the wall, plucking at his shirt to catch a little relief. He was buzzed and perspiring and his skin felt too tight. If he didn’t get out of this house, he was going to kill himself.

He felt his way down the hallway and out the front door in the dark. The building that he left behind felt as sentimental as a cereal box.

Outside, that balmy wind eased the mid-season heat. Charles tripped past Mrs. Schneider’s old house toward the darkened dead-end of Ocotillo Street, where the sidewalk gave way to acres of milkweed and velvet mesquite. His eyes cast beery little haloes on the stars suspended in cosmic nacre.

The long road toward Lime Slope was a path which turned to gravel, which turned to dust, and dust agitated and sighed away across the vista.

Around the final curve at the bottom of the hill, Charles was given pause by a dark gash across the road, where the ground had been deeply rent by wheels or churning machinery. Further down, he found that the chain-link fence had been replaced by low plastic netting, flagging in the breeze. The air inside the quarry was sterilized, deadened of the sounds of frog or owl or cricket or sluicing water; what had used to be a pond was now a drained black cavity in the earth, ridged like a throat and faintly exhaling decay. The sand on the once-shore was textured by bootprints and knotty tire-tread. Dead grass lanced from the upheaved soil like cactus bristles.

And someone was here, sitting atop the largest boulder on the western bank. Charles picked his way past piles of stone and coils of hose large enough to swallow a child, watching her form resolve itself in the night. Seely was hunched cross-legged, still wearing the same too-small overalls, still with dirty feet and long hair washed out by the darkness. A book sat open in her lap, tilted to catch as much starlight across the page as possible.

Charles drew to a stop a few yards away from her. She raised her face to look at him, so it seemed that each of them was waiting for the other to speak.

“What are you doing?” he finally asked.

“Reading?” Her tone said she thought that was a stupid question.

“In the dark?”

“I used to have a flashlight, but the battery died.” Seely closed the book around her finger and stretched out some stiffness in her back. She didn’t so much as glance twice at Charles’s glasses, or his beard, or the ink on his arms; in a surge of doubt, he wondered if she even recognized him. How did that look, a grown man cornering a young girl in the dark of night?

“S’me. Charlie,” he slurred. She looked at him askance again and made a lemon-sucking face. I moved to California, he thought about saying, or I’m going to have a daughter soon; but instead what came out of his mouth was a slightly apologetic, “I’m drunk.”

“You smell like it,” she shot back without skipping a beat. Charles ran a bashful hand back through his hair. “Sit down before you fall over, then.”

She made space on the boulder, but the two of them no longer fit side-by-side. Charles perched on the very edge and settled in facing mostly away from her, surveying the unfamiliar wreck of a landscape before them. The moon had long since flown westward, but a scattering of clouds still remembered its light. His sense of reverie was crushing.

“What happened to the pond?” he asked after a while.

Seely sounded as though she hardly cared: “A girl almost died here.” Warily Charles eyed the yawning pit before them. “Maybe her dad was some kinda big-shot… pulled the strings to finally get them to fill in this death trap. They had to divert the spring.” Her pale hand passed into his field of view, pointing toward the north face of the quarry. “Then brought in this big pump to drain the water. It stank for weeks.”

From many muddled thoughts and feelings, Charles tried to distill a single thing actually worth saying. He could only muster the question, “When?”

“You could still see Pisces, so… November, I guess.”

“But you’re still…?”

“Reading. Yeah.” In the twilight he recognized that worn hardback on her lap as The Wishsong of Shannara. First printing. 1985. “What are you doing back here?”

Hell of a question. He craned back his head and searched the stars, waiting for an answer to fall into his slack mouth. “M’ mom is moving to New Mexico. To be with her boyfriend,” he drawled finally. “I didn’t want Howie changing schools a year before graduation but… ‘s not my decision.”

“Howie. Yeah. He was a cute kid. How is he?”

“In Santa Fe. With our mom.” He’d misheard her, but was too scattered to try again. “This is my last chance to see the house before it goes, y’know? But it doesn’t feel like a real place anymore. I thought I’d be sad. Mostly I’m just pissed off. I don’t think I’m ever coming back.” She hummed, sounding neither happy nor sad to hear that. “Hey, I’m sorry. Here’s me going on about my bullshit and… Are you okay?”

A long curtain of hair fell between them. Seely scoffed, unseen: “Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

He’d asked the question already knowing she would answer that way. For some reason, it made him unaccountably sad to hear. Carelessly he slurred, “It seems lonely, is all.” She bristled. “And now the water’s gone, so I just… I thought you’d feel—”

“Oh, is this what we do now? Talk about our feelings?” Abruptly, aggressively, she drew up her knees like battlements. “You wanna hug, too? We can braid each other’s hair?”

“No. C’mon.”

“I don’t care if you’re old now. You’re not my dad.” Charles, who had been entertaining a quietly paternal regard toward the skinny young girl aside him, was very annoyed at her for saying so. He crossed his arms and shut up, so as not to respond churlishly; she huffed and opened up her book again, and went back to reading.

Like photographs in slow development, the hard profiles of mountains began gradually to manifest against the sky. Slow rolls of filmy cloud unfurled across the east, and the desert-battered horizon clarified shades of gold and gray. When Seely spoke again, she did so without looking at him: “That’s a cool tattoo.”

Charles turned out his forearm to expose a swallow soaring beneath the surface of his skin—supposedly guaranteeing him a safe voyage home, should he ever find himself at sea.

“There used to be lots of birds like that around,” she said. “I liked watching them.”

“Hm. Me too.”

“I always wanted a tattoo. My brother had this—”

But her mouth twisted and she made a face, as though she were angry at herself. It seemed like a long time before Seely continued, “My… brother had this poster on his bedroom wall, that I think he ordered from a magazine. It was almost as tall as him, with the sun at the very top…” She framed the growing light over the mountains with both hands. “And this golden line falling down from it, with the solar system attached. Like pearls. It was art, you know, and really stylish, so they weren’t labeled. You could tell every planet by size and shape.” Seely dropped her hands again and cast a resigned look at the ground. “I used to think that would make a pretty good tattoo.”

Charles tried to smile. “Sounds like the kind of thing I’d get, too.”

“Well, don’t steal my idea.”

“No. Of course not.”

“But now you’ve got me thinking about it.” Her gaze drifted back toward the horizon. “Every night, all this time, I wasn’t looking at my skin and thinking—‘I wanted there to be planets here.’” She laid her left hand across her right wrist, and squeezed. A furrow formed across her brow.

“I didn’t miss you,” she grumbled. “I was fine until you made me think about it.”

Charles looked at her sidelong for a second. “You’re a pain in the ass and I didn’t miss you either,” he promised, and her frown cracked open around a quick snort of laughter.

By morning’s thin glow, the dead shore all around them was leafed in gold. The crown of the sun lay low behind the mountain crests, and for the first time Charles could see the poppies seeded around the shoreline—hundreds of closed poppy-heads, red-hot like cinders rising from the tossed earth. Shadows hung thick beneath the quarry walls, waiting for daylight to break them.

“Remember that summer I was here almost every night?” Charles asked Seely. “But I never stayed long enough to see the sun rise like this.”

“Me neither,” Seely told Charles, in a tone of mild surprise at herself. In this light, her hair didn’t look just red, but the particular candy-shade of desert honeysuckle. Her eyes were pale and her nose was sharp, and her shoulders were so narrow it seemed he could have spanned them with one hand. She was of an age with Howie now, but she looked younger. Charles gazed down at his arms, hung over his knees. Changing light aurified the blue-lined swallow, wings outspread.

He asked her, “Wanna read together?”

Dawn that morning never seemed to break, only to build higher and higher, a great hazy rose slowly piercing the veil. Charles opened The Wishsong of Shannara near the end and began reading aloud those passages he’d once known like old friends, which now sat overwrought on his tongue: “‘Autumn had settled down across the land, and everywhere the colors of the season brightened and shone in the sunshine’s warmth. It was a clear, cool day in the Eastland forests where the Chard Rush tumbled down from out of the Wolfsktaag, and the skies were a depthless blue…’ What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Seely said, although she was viciously frowning. She followed this immediately with, “Doesn’t it make you pissed, how the magic goes away in the end?”

“Pissed?” He ran a finger up and down the softened edges of the page. “I don’t remember if I was pissed. It’s sad.”

“And nobody even remembers.” Even Seely sounded more mournful than angry. It was probably a coincidence when her knuckle brushed his on the stone, but he dared to intentionally reach out and place his hand atop hers. She didn’t recoil from the touch.

Charles kept on reading aloud, until his throat was parched and the paper burned magnesium-bright in front of his sleepless eyes. In a moment of weakness he raised a hand to shield his vision, and lost his page to the impish breeze. Daylight blazed red between the blinds of his fingers.

One more time he tried to squeeze Seely’s hand, but his palm only brushed cold stone. As far as he could spread his hand, there was no one else on the boulder’s surface next to him.

Charles let out all his breath and didn’t take it in again. He closed his eyes tight and held his body rigid, until that lingering moment of uncertainty ripped out of his hand whipped away on the breeze. He inhaled again sharply, and finally raised his sore gaze up to where the meridian turned from purple to gray to blue. The Sonoran dawn curled up from the horizon like fruit on a vine.

In that skyward moment, he made the decision to continue on to Santa Fe. That meant he had a long drive still ahead of him, but he thought he should linger in town a bit longer anyway. He could walk by the school, and stop by Goldman’s Market to sober up with a good bagel and a bad cup of coffee. Find a phone to call in a substitute teacher for Monday morning, and then head back to the house. Make sure the lights were off and the windows closed. Lock the door behind him.

Charles left the book behind him on the boulder, closed and with the jacket neatly squared across its cover. As he stood, a glimmer caught his eye from among a pile of broken stones at his heel. From the rubble he picked a tiny opal, smaller than a pea. He hadn’t been able to see it in the dark.

He’d bring it with him when he went to visit his brother.