Death Watch (58 page)

At first, nothing stood out. The day remained gray. The weeds waved from their beds of broken pavement. The sound of the birds was getting louder, many of them calling out from their hidden perches, though none in concert. And in little pockets about the edges of the playground, the shapes of children stepped from the shadows. It was hard to make out faces, but their eyes, lidless and white as stones, shone from below their brows.

Silas turned in a full circle, and when he looked at the tree, one child hovered there near the trunk, slightly more discernible than the others, looking at him. When Silas took a step toward him, stooping slightly to bring himself closer to the child’s height, the little boy drew back from him, scared.

The surface of the child’s form was constantly changing, his skin a palette of shifting colors. He was covered in blotches of dark pigment, like clouds casting their shadows on his skin. Bruises, all the colors of bruises.

“Did someone hit you?” Silas asked, reaching out to the child.

“No one hit me,” he said, recoiling back into himself, becoming smaller, the colors on his skin intensifying as he shrank.

“Did someone hurt you?”

“My stomach hurts. I want to go to the nurse. Why won’t they play with me? I want to go home.” The child was drawing farther and farther away from Silas now, and the air around his form began to darken like his skin, so it was becoming harder to see the child’s shape. It was receding into the long, irregular shadow cast by the tree. “Why can’t you leave me alone like everyone else?”

“Wait! Wait! I won’t hurt you. I want to help,” Silas called out.

“Please!” the child pleaded. “No more. No more words. They hurt. You’re hurting me.” The child moved in and out of the dusky air. When for a fleeting moment Silas could see him clearly, he saw that all the child’s skin was now the plum-black stain of a bruise. The boy was defenseless and everything he heard hurt him.

“Where is my father?” the child asked pitifully, his eyes cast down, his shoulders making tiny jumps as he began to cry. “Do you know where my dad is?”

Silas had begun to grow very cold. At the edges of his vision, the gates of the playground were growing less and less distinct.

“What is your father’s name?” Silas asked. “Maybe I can help you find him.”

The child moved toward Silas very slowly and stood before him, a wave of freezing air rising up behind and breaking like a wave, crystallizing his features, making them sharper every second. The small boy raised his head to look at Silas, his white eyes bright and hanging in the air like two cold stars.

“Amos. My father is Amos,” said the child, “and I can’t find him. Where is he? I can’t find my dad. Why won’t he come for me?”

When the child spoke his father’s name, Silas felt hands seize his chest and he stood stunned, unable to move or breathe. The boy’s face was clearly visible now, even behind the bruises, and Silas could see himself in the childish features. He reached out and took the child’s small hand and he could feel it, like it was one of his own hands holding its mate. In that instant Silas knew with complete certainty that he had unknowingly found his way into the limbo that awaited him at his death. Here, to this awful twilight, was where he would come at his life’s end.

Papers blew and drifted over the shattered pavement. There were birds in all the trees, and each called out discordantly against the others so that no one song could be heard, but the air was full of noise and distraction. The equipment on the playground was now filled with gray shapes of children. They did not look at one another, their pale, unblinking eyes staring forward. Silas looked absently this way and that, trying to make out any of the faces, but no one held its form and no one would look back at him. And how could he know them? Here were lost children from many lands, many times. Silas felt very small and as though there were no weight to him anymore. A word from anyone, the smallest wind, would puff him away.

He sat at the base of the familiar tree, his once daily perch, its exposed roots polished from years of other children waiting there; waiting for a bell to ring, waiting to go home. He could see
a few names carved into the lower trunk of the tree. None looked familiar. Nothing stood out.

Silas had crumpled into a posture of retreat and fearful expectation. Among the timeworn roots of the tree, he sat with his head on his upraised knees and his arms wrapped around, clasped together in front of him. There was cold metal clutched in his right fist. He couldn’t remember what it was, but he knew he couldn’t let go of it. Not ever. He was staring at the ground in resignation. When he heard a noise, his head would briefly fly up to see if someone was coming, but then quickly fall back down again, his eyes rimmed with rising tears. In the distance, he thought he heard a car. He strained to see, searching for a familiar shape: his dad’s car, or one of his parents walking to the playground to find him. But his father wasn’t there, and his mother had forgotten to come. So he waited, for a hundred years it seemed, and his father was not there, and was not there, and was not coming. He put his head back down and felt himself melting—like the old carved names—down into the bark of the tree. He could hear the other birds but not see them. The voices of other children were about him too but had become just an indistinct circle of sounds, isolating him from the rest of the world.
I am invisible
, he said to himself, at himself, trying to block out the noise.

I am invisible
.

And I am alone
.

They forgot me
.

I don’t want to be here by myself
.

I don’t want to be alone
.

I want to go home
.

I don’t want to look at their faces. When I see them not seeing me, I feel sick
.

My stomach hurts. I want to go to the nurse. I want to go home
.

The kid from math I never spoke to walked past me
.

I am not here
.

Is that the girl who’s been in homeroom with me for three years?

You know her. You know her name. Idiot. Say it
.

There’s Math Kid. Say his name
.

He’ll turn around
.

I can’t. He won’t hear me. He’ll ignore me because I am not here
.

See? Invisible. No ones saves me a place at lunch
.

Because when someone looks I look away
.

They go on talking about something else. I’ll never ask now
.

Maybe at recess. Maybe they’ll see me. Maybe someone will call my name
.

I might get called. I might. Hey! You wanna play? No one will mind
.

I’m Silas
.

Hi
.

I’m Silas
.

Can I play?

Can I play with you guys?

The playground is loud with words, so many I can’t hear myself anymore
.

But no words for me
.

Okay. Later, guys. I’ll just say: Another time, it’s okay. They don’t turn around because I am not here. I am invisible
.

I’ll be over there. By the tree. If you need another player. I’ll just be by the tree. But when I walk away, I disappear like I was never there
.

Liar. I just lied. I told my dad I’d try to make friends, but I can’t say their names
.

There’s something wrong with me. They know it
.

I won’t tell my dad about school, because he hates a liar
.

Lies murder the world, he tells me. I’m a liar because I don’t want to make him angry
.

Maybe he knows. Maybe that’s why he won’t come to get me and bring me home. Because he knows I’m invisible too. It’s not my fault they can’t see me. He’s mad at me because I don’t have any friends and because he knows it
.

If you’re invisible, you don’t count
.

No one wants to be with someone they can’t see
.

My stomach hurts
.

I want to go home
.

Please
.

Dad?

A child sits by the tree on the playground. Every day it is the same. He sits by the tree. He does not look up anymore. No one comes for him. He can no longer remember what he is waiting for or how long he’s been waiting. There is only the tree and the cold earth below him and the voices calling out from the yard, but they never once say his name. He can barely remember his name anymore. He lays his head down on his folded arms and closes his eyes, and he doesn’t know how long he’s been there or how long it has been since he closed his eyes, and every second becomes a lifetime to him
.

The child does not know how long he’s had his head down
.

But then, as his tears fall, the ground begins to feel different, no longer the frozen clay of winter, but warming now, even as he sits on it. There is movement in the branches, and the air around the tree stirs with unexpected heat, and from the brightening air behind the tree, these words fly to him, and he hears a name—his name
.

Come outside and play, Silas! You’ve been inside too long! Come outside!

Silas lifted his head to look about him for the source of the voice.

It was Tom.

And Tom’s name, like a key, opened a door in Silas’s mind, and bright memories began to fill up the dark corners.

At first he could see Tom’s face as it was on a Saturday afternoon seven years ago, when they played and played until the dark came, but then more of the past emerged. Silas watched Tom’s face change, saw it pale and grow still as it might have looked on the day of his funeral. Silas wasn’t allowed to go, but he’d had nightmares about seeing Tom in his coffin. And now that image rose again. Silas slammed his eyes shut and turned his head back to the roots of the waiting tree, the cold light falling around him once more.

But the voice spoke again, pushing back the graying air.

No
, said Tom.
Not like that. Like this. Silas? Look! Say my name. Remember me
.

“Tom?”

Silas raised his head again and Tom was standing before him, smiling, holding out his hand. Silas reached up and took it, and as he stood up, the present enfolded him. As he remembered what had happened and where he was, some of the heaviness fell away from his limbs like dead branches shaken from a tree by spring winds. But as he awoke to himself, he was concerned now for Tom, worried to see him in such a place.

“Are you trapped here too, Tom?”

“I am not trapped here, Si, I’m waiting here.”

“For what?”

“You, Silas.”

Silas’s eyes welled up at hearing his name spoken by someone who loved him.

“Why? I mean, how could you know? I don’t understand.”

“Nothing to understand. There is no great mystery in friendship. You brought yourself here, just as I brought myself here to wait for you. I don’t even mind that you’ve kept me waiting.” Tom
was grinning now. “To me, it is hardly a moment anyway since last time I saw you. Just a breath ago we were playing. But why have you come to such a place?”

“I … I don’t know.”

Tom looked around and then lifted his head as though seeing something familiar in the distance. Silas couldn’t see anything else, and he wondered if they were both looking on the same world. He saw the shattered concrete of the playground. A place where lines were drawn and some were out and some were in. A place he hated.

Tom saw Silas’s face, fallen and unsure, and moved closer to him.

“While I waited for you, I’ve been running through our Saturday afternoon. That moment is ours to keep. Look, it’s just there.” At the far end of the playground, Silas could see the long stretch of grass that ran between the houses on their street back in Saltsbridge where he and Tom had played seven years ago, an island of light lying beyond a gray sea. Silas looked at his arms, his hands, his ashen skin, and then looked at Tom’s golden hands and face. They were lit by the light of two different worlds.

“That world and a thousand others are waiting, yet here you are,” Tom said, gesturing at the bleak landscape of the playground around them. “You should know better than anyone, Silas, better than anyone. We choose these things. These are our choices to make and nobody else’s.”

As Tom was speaking, the hard shadows of the playground’s embankments and borders had become a receding tide. Silas could see the gates and the empty playground equipment again. The childlike forms had vanished, though the small branches of the tree were filled with birds and were shaking with anticipation. The air of the playground was changing, and the birds could feel it. They began
calling and crying out all at once from the foliage, but their voices suddenly dropped off, becoming low, frantic chirps. The whispering world was holding its breath, and the small birds were waiting.

Tom was fading from the brightening air.

“Tom!” Silas called out to him. “Tom! You are my best friend!”

Tom, still smiling, was nearly indiscernible from the light rising from the land.

“See you soon, Silas. Okay? See you soon?”

In the space left by Tom’s absence, Silas remembered how many times his dad had come to the playground to pick him up; late, because his mother was supposed to come but had forgotten. One time his father had driven all the way back from Lichport to get him. One of the teachers had offered to drive Silas home, but he had refused, saying he was sure one of his parents was coming. He had wanted them to come, but if they didn’t, he was going to sit there until they noticed he hadn’t come home. Had he been less stubborn, he’d have been home hours ago. His choice. It was nearly dark when Amos walked onto the playground and found Silas sitting under the tree. Silas didn’t look up when his dad sat down on the ground next to him.

“I thought you’d forgotten me.”

“No way, little bird. Did you forget me?”

“No.”

“That’s right, because we are stuck together. I might be late, but I’ll always be there.”