Chapter 3: House Lights

The chain held.

Through the door, over the rain: a woman’s voice. “Milo.”

Nothing moved. Then the voice again, closer to the gap. “Why’s the chain on.”

Milo had one hand still up where the lamp chimney was and the other flat on Elliot’s chest, walking him back.

“Back door,” he said, his mouth almost at Elliot’s shoulder. “Go.”

Elliot’s shoes were on the mat. He didn’t stop for them. He went through the doorway at the end of the hall into a kitchen that smelled of something cooked a long time ago. The back door had a bolt that had been painted over twice. It took him longer than it should have.

The door swung out into a yard. Rain, a fence, a barrel under the gutter, a shed with a door that hung.

Behind him the kitchen door clicked shut and the bolt did not go back.

Then the front door opened and the sound of the house changed shape: two people in the hall, coats coming off, the curtain rings running on the rod.

The kitchen window was over the sink, close enough that he could have put a hand on it. The glass was old and full of bubbles. He could hear her without seeing her.

“There’s water the whole way down this hall.”

A pause.

“Whose shoes are these?”

Elliot stood on the back steps with his jaw set.

Milo said something, too low to carry.

Then a man’s voice, low and flat, not carrying past the doorframe. “Leave it.”

The kitchen light came on. The window went yellow. The water started running, and Elliot was already moving along the wall of the house into the dark by the shed, and he stayed there with his back against the cold tin and the wet coming through his socks.

Somebody stood at the sink with their back to him. A woman, from the shape of the shoulders. Both hands on the rim, and she stood there until his leg started to go, and then she turned her head to the side — not around, the way a person checks a window without looking at it — and the light went off.

He stayed by the shed.

Later the front door opened and a man came out onto the porch in his shirtsleeves and stood in what was left of the rain, looking up the street and down it. Then he went back in.

The rain stopped sometime after that. Water kept coming off the roof and the gutter and the shed, and Elliot got the shed door open far enough to stand inside, out of it. There was a lawn mower in there with the engine taken out of it. It sat on the boards with its handle up like something in a museum.

He waited for light.

It came grey, and then it came green.

The shoes were on the back step, set together with the heels up. He put them on.

He saw the green first in the puddles — every one of them, the whole length of the yard, holding a color that wasn’t in the sky. Then he got the gate open, where the fence met the neighbor’s garage, and went down the alley and out onto the street, and looked up. The sky was doing it too: pale morning, clouds in it, and through the clouds a light like the inside of a bottle, moving slow, folding over itself.

It made no sound.

The street was busy. Men going one way with their hands in their pockets, a woman pulling a cart with two baskets of laundry, a boy on a bicycle too big for him. Under all of it, no engines. No engines anywhere — footfalls and wheels and water and a dog, and no engines in a city this size.

He walked.

A boy of seven or so stopped in front of him, put his head back and his mouth open, and his mother took his chin in her hand and turned it down without breaking her stride.

“Walk,” she said.

On the next corner two men stood with a broom between them, both looking at the pavement.

“Third one since Sunday,” the one with the broom said.

“Fourth.”

“You don’t count the one you slept through.”

“I do.”

“Then it’s four.”

Elliot stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and looked up.

He stood there with his hands loose at his sides while the woman with the cart went around him. He stood there through two more people and a dog. He counted to thirty. He counted to sixty.

Nobody else looked up. A few of them looked at him.

He looked at the pavement and walked.

By the time he reached Coldbrook he had it. You didn’t look up. Looking up was what children did, and what strangers did, and there was no third kind of person.

At the corner, two men in grey coats had a man against the wall of the laundry with his hands out of his pockets and his feet apart. A bicycle leaned on the curb. The crowd went around them the way water goes around a post; nobody stopped to watch, and a few people slowed, and then didn’t.

Elliot slowed, and then didn’t, and looked at the coats as he passed. Grey wool, wet to the knee, a single silver chevron on the sleeve of the nearer one. He filed it without knowing what it meant.

He walked the block up to Winter Street and stood at the corner of it, and watched the house.

The clock on the trust company said seven-twenty when the front door opened and the woman came out with a canvas bag over her shoulder. She stopped on the walk.

And looked up.

She looked at it long enough that he counted.

Then she put her chin down and went up the street toward Coldbrook, and she did not look at the sky again.

At eight the man came out, locked the door with a key, tried it twice, and went the other way.

Elliot went around the back.

The door was unbolted. He didn’t knock.

Milo was at the table with the sewing machine and something small in his hands, and he didn’t look up.

“You’re supposed to be gone,” he said.

“I was.”

“Gone gone.”

“I know.” Elliot sat down in the chair with the towel on the back of it, not the other one. “What’d you tell her. About the shoes.”

Milo pulled the thread through. “That they were mine.”

“They’re not.”

“They’re not yours either.”

Elliot let that sit.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” he said.

“No.”

The knock came then. Three of them, flat-handed, on the front door.

Milo’s head came up.

“Grey coats,” he said, at the curtain. “Two.”

Elliot came to the window and put two fingers into the gap. Two of them on the stoop. One had a bicycle leaned against the fence and a paper folded in three. The other had a daybook under his arm and a wet cap.

“Don’t answer it,” Milo said.

“They’ll knock at every house on this street. If ours is the one that doesn’t answer, that’s a thing about our house.”

“He’s got a book.”

“I know.”

“You’re dead.”

“I know,” Elliot said. “Stay where I can see you.”

He opened the door, stepped out, and pulled it most of the way shut behind him.

“Morning,” the older one said. “Mrs. Vance?”

“Out.”

“Out working.”

“Something like that.”

“Warden Doyle,” the older one said. “Registry.” He nodded at the house. “You’re family.”

“Cousin. Wes Hollis. I’m staying while she’s working.”

“Wes Hollis.” Doyle looked at him a moment longer than the question needed. Then he unfolded the paper. “Then you’ll know this. Elliot Vance. Eighteen. Registered the eleventh.”

Elliot stood on the stoop with his own name two feet from his face.

“He hasn’t been seen since,” Doyle said. “Registry wants the household’s line on it. It goes in the book on the first one way or the other, but they like a signature.”

“A signature saying what?”

“Whether anybody’s seen him.” Doyle turned the paper a little to let the light get at it. There was a box printed on it, and a line under the box, and one word under the line.

“Nobody’s seen him,” Elliot said.

Doyle looked up, slow. “That’s for the family to say. And you’re not family, the way the registry counts it.”

“My cousin’s fifteen,” Elliot said.

“I know how old he is.”

“Then he can put his name on it, or I can. He’s fifteen. He shouldn’t have to write down that his brother’s gone.”

Doyle considered the door, and the street, and then Elliot. “All right. But I’ll hear it from the boy first.”

The door opened behind him. Milo came out and stood against the frame with his arms folded.

“Morning,” Doyle said. “You’re Milo.”

“Yes.”

“How old?”

“Fifteen.”

“All right. When’d you last see your brother?”

Milo didn’t look at Elliot. Elliot noticed that, and hated that he noticed it.

“The eleventh. In the morning. He went out and he didn’t come back.”

“Where’d he go?”

“He didn’t say.”

Doyle waited a moment, in case more was coming. Then he said, “All right,” and held the pen out to Milo.

Milo looked at it.

Elliot took it.

The hand did it without asking him anything. A quick forward-slanting signature, impatient, the kind a man makes four hundred times a year. He had never made it before.

He looked at it. W. Hollis, in ink, on a line under ELLIOT VANCE.

Doyle looked at it too, and at the printed name above it, and said nothing.

The younger one took the paper and blotted it and opened the daybook. “Hollis. First name Wes?”

“Wes.”

“Address.”

“One twenty-eight Winter.”

The younger one wrote. Doyle watched him write. Then he said, “Put him in the back.”

“Sir?”

“The back of the book. Under returns.”

Elliot kept his face where it was.

“File closes on the first,” Doyle said, capping the pen. “After that the registry’s done with it. If he turns up after the first, it’s somebody else’s problem.”

“Whose?”

“Somebody else’s.” He put his cap on. “Tell her the registry doesn’t come twice.”

They went down the walk, the younger one pushing the bicycle, and turned up toward Coldbrook. Elliot stood on the stoop until they were out of sight, and then he shut the door and put the chain on, and then he stood there with his hand flat against it.

“Hollis,” Milo said.

“Yeah.”

“You signed it.”

“He wanted a name.”

“He’s got one.” Milo went back to the table. “You put it in his book.”

“What’s a return?”

Milo’s head came up. “What.”

“He put me in the back of the book. Under returns.”

Milo looked at him for a long moment. “You know what it is.”

“Do I.”

“Don’t.” His voice was flat. “Don’t ask me things you already know.”

Elliot said, “All right.”

He went to the kitchen door. Milo watched him and didn’t say anything, and then, when Elliot had the door open, he said, “Where.”

“Where’s a doctor?”

Milo told him. Two blocks over, up past the laundry, between that and the hardware store. Then he said, “Why.”

“I want to know if I’m sick.”

“You’re not sick.”

“How do you know.”

Milo didn’t answer that one either.

“They come back at six,” he said.

The clinic was a storefront with a hand-lettered sign in the window, CLINIC, and under it, smaller, WALK IN.

Inside there were three chairs, a counter, and a smell of alcohol over wet wool. A woman sat in one chair with a boy asleep against her arm.

The woman behind the counter had glasses on a chain and a form already squared up in front of her.

“Name.”

“Wes Hollis.”

“Address.”

“One twenty-eight Winter.”

She wrote it. “Four dollars.”

Elliot put his hands on the counter. They were shaking, and he let them.

“I don’t have four dollars.”

She looked at his hands, and then at his face, and took her time about it. Then she said, “Go on back. He’s between.”

The back room had a table, a basin, a scale, a chair, and a window with the green in it. The doctor was sixty-odd and wide, with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his hands in the basin. He didn’t look up.

“Sit.”

Elliot sat.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I was out in it last night. I want to know if anything’s broken.”

The doctor dried his hands on a towel, one finger at a time. “Anything hurt?”

“No.”

“Then nothing’s broken.” He put a glass thermometer in Elliot’s mouth. “Two minutes,” he said, and then somebody said his name from the front room and he went out.

Elliot sat with the thermometer under his tongue and listened to the water running somewhere and the woman’s voice and the doctor’s voice, and then just the water.

He took the thermometer out and held it up to the window.

Ninety-six point four.

He set it on the counter next to the form.

The kettle was on the sill, enamel with a chipped lip and a black bottom. He poured into the mug that was already there, stained brown to the handle, and sat down again and put both hands around it.

It was the first warm thing that had touched him since the night before.

He drank.

It went down warm and thick, and it tasted the way the inside of a mouth tastes after a nosebleed — pennies, salt, and under that something sweet that had turned.

He took the mug away from his face and looked at it.

Blood. Red to the rim, dark where it had cooled against the enamel, a skin on it that moved when he breathed on it.

The smell came up then. A butcher’s shop in August.

He didn’t spit.

He sat with it in his mouth and it went through him and came out the other side, and what was left was the taste, and the mug in his fist, and the fact that his hands had stopped shaking.

He set the mug down on the clinic form, and the paper took the ring of it at once.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. The wrist came away clean.

He looked in the mug.

Tea. Brown, stewed down to nothing, a skin on top. The mug was warm in his hands.

The doctor came back and shut the door with his heel. “You take that out?”

“Yes.”

He picked the thermometer up and held it to the window. “Ninety-six four.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s low.” He dropped it in a jar. “You been sick?”

“Not that I know.”

The doctor looked at the mug. “You want tea, you use the kettle. I been telling her a year about that tap. There’s a block of old pipe in this water.”

“I used the kettle.”

“Then you’re the first.” He sat down on the stool with a grunt and pulled the form over — and Elliot reached it first, sliding it off the counter and turning it face down on his knee.

The doctor stared at him.

“Sorry,” Elliot said. “The shaking.”

“Uh-huh.” The doctor took a fresh sheet and wrote on it in a heavy, flat hand. “Ninety-six four, no complaint, no injury. Come back Thursday if the cold’s still in you. Eat something that isn’t bread.”

“Does the tap taste of anything?”

The doctor looked up at him.

“It tastes like pipes,” he said.

“Right.”

Elliot stood. The chair scraped. He put the folded paper in his pocket with the ring side against his leg and went out past the woman in the chair and the boy asleep on her arm, and the woman at the counter said something to him that he didn’t hear, and then he was on the sidewalk in the green.

He took the paper out and opened it.

The ring had gone through four folds. Brown at the edge, still wet in the middle, and the middle of it sat over the name, so that W. Hollis was under the blood, and could still be read through it.

He folded it down to the size of a card and put it in his pocket and started back. The trust company clock said nine. They come back at six.