Chapter 9: Written in Water

Written in Water

He woke sitting up.

The sheet was wet through where he’d been lying and cold at the edges where he hadn’t, and his shirt was stuck to him. He sat with his hand flat on the mattress and let his breathing come down out of the red.

The house had nothing to say. No radio, no water running, no chair leg scraping on the floor below. The rain had stopped sometime in the night; what was left of it was coming off the gutter over the porch at a slow, even count.

“Mom.”

It came out thin. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder, and the second one went all the way down the hall and came back with nothing on it.

“Dad.”

He sat another second, then swung his feet out onto the floor and the cold went up both legs. The cut at his temple pulled when he frowned. Barefoot, and still in yesterday’s clothes. The board under his heel gave its usual complaint, and that, of all things, was what put his hand out to the nightstand.

He could not get from the front door to this bed.

He tried it in order. Rain. The porch. The key not wanting to turn. He had that much: his shoulder against the door, wet wool in his nose. Then the sheet. Nothing in between, not even the dark. It wasn’t forgetting; forgetting leaves the shape of a thing. This was a page torn out along the fold.

They’d gone in early, then.

He got up.

In the hall his jacket was on the hook by the front door. The rack had three hooks on it and two were bare.

He stood and looked at the jacket for a while. Dark at the shoulders still, hung straight, sleeves even, collar turned up so the lining could dry. He did not hang things like that. He dropped them, and stepped on them, and eventually hung them somewhere and forgot.

He checked the lock. Unlocked. He turned the bolt with his thumb and did not know why that made it worse instead of better.

The hall floor had footprints on it, his, in water, running from the front door to the kitchen, the ones nearest the door already gone gray and drying into the varnish. There were more of them than one trip would make. He put his head into every room off the hall as he went, and there was nothing in any of them but the furniture.

The dining room was still set. Two plates, two forks laid down beside them, the food gone stiff and cold. Both chairs pulled out and not pushed back.

He did what he did on a stage before the doors opened. What’s moved. What’s missing. What has no business standing where it’s standing. Two people up in the middle of a meal and out into weather. The house did not look robbed.

He went into the kitchen and got hit at the ankle.

He caught himself on the counter and looked down. A bucket, one of the big ones, on its side, gray plastic, five gallons, a split down the seam, and the rim chewed.

He crouched and turned it. The plastic had been bitten and pulled, and where it had been pulled the edges stood up white, three deep gouges through the rim and a fourth that had gone through the wall of it, and the water it had been holding was spread across the linoleum in a sheet.

He said it out loud, because out loud it would sound like something a person could think. “Froze and cracked.”

It didn’t. Ice doesn’t chew.

He carried the bucket to the corner, out of the way, and got the rag from under the sink. He was hungry in a way that had stopped being about food. Whatever he had done last night had cost him something and there was no invoice for it. He crouched at the edge of the water and put the rag down in it, because water would go through a floor this old and take it with it.

The water moved.

He stopped with the rag an inch off the floor.

Water slides when the surface under it tips. It gathers and runs downhill to find the low place. Except the low place was behind him. The whole floor ran back toward the door; he had watched the footprints dry toward it. And the sheet on the linoleum was going the other way now, thinning and sliding and gathering in the middle of the floor into something that was not a puddle.

It was being drawn. Like somebody crouched on the other side of the water, invisible, fingertip down, drawing a line through it and pulling the line along.

His knee hurt from kneeling on it, and that was all he could think about for a second. The knee, and the cut at his temple, and the rag going cold in his hand.

Then the water went red.

Not all at once. Thread by thread, the way blood goes into water if you let it, and the threads met and thickened, and where they had been drawn the color stayed. It was the red of the inside of a wrist, and it held its shape on the floor.

The shape was letters, and some of the water was still running at the ends of them, working out the last of the strokes.

WE ARE WATCHING YOU

He didn’t lean back. He didn’t stand up. He crouched there with the wet rag in his hand and read it, and the letters were crooked and uneven and about the size of a hand.

He counted to four — a cue, four beats before he was allowed to move — and he did not touch it. He noticed himself deciding not to wipe it, and he didn’t.

There was blood on his kitchen floor that he had watched being written, and there was nobody else in the house.

The Wardens, he thought.

It came up whole and ready. Go out to the street, find a pay phone, or bang on a neighbor’s door and use theirs, and say the words: someone’s in my house, there’s blood on my floor, my parents are gone and their coats are gone with them. The Wardens would come with their kits and their notebooks, and they would write all of it down.

His father’s voice came back to him, through the bedroom door, from before he slept. I’m going to go see where we buried it. My own eyes. And after it the other thing, quieter, said in the kitchen and not meant to carry: The Wardens write everything down. Once it’s in the book it doesn’t come out again. We go where they put us.

He stayed on his knees.

He knew what he could tell them. Nothing, and that was the problem: a boy with eight hours missing out of the middle of his night, a bucket with teeth in it, two plates going cold on a table, and the second question they would ask was where his mother and father had gone in the rain without their coats.

The moment he said it out loud to a Warden with a notebook, someone else would decide what it meant and what happened next.

He put his hand flat on the floor beside the letters, not in them. The linoleum was cold, and the blood was cold with it.

He put the rag down where he could reach it and stayed where he was. In front of him the letters had begun to dry at the edges and were still wet at the ends of the strokes.