The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud (11 page)

SIXTEEN

I
T WAS MIDNIGHT IN
W
ATERSIDE, AND THICK FOG OOZED
between the monuments. The moon was invisible behind the clouds, great walls of darkness closed in on every side, and Charlie led the way across the lawn. All was silent, and even their footfalls were muffled by the murk. Marble angels and granite nymphs appeared from nowhere as his flashlight slashed the gloom.

It was the witching hour, and Charlie was under a spell. Everything about Tess had thrown him off balance in the best possible way. Sure, his nervousness had made him go on too long about the origins of the St. Cloud family name in Minnesota. Yes, he had filibustered about the differences between cirrus and stratus accumulations. And yet, he could tell she was having fun. She was knocking back beers and laughing at his jokes.

From the moment she had come strolling down West Shore Drive at 8:00
P
.
M
. sharp, he had tried to memorize every detail about the evening. Her hair was blowing wild, and when he greeted her with an outstretched hand, she ignored it, got up on her tiptoes, and kissed him hello on the cheek.

“Dinner ready?” she said. “I’m starving.”

Sure enough, she ate two portions of everything and was lavish with her praise of the food. He loved the way she seemed to devour life, savoring every bite. He told real stories, not the canned ones that usually came out on dates. Tonight he had dispensed with the usual version that he projected to the world: the young man content with his job in the cemetery, the happy-go-lucky guy who never wanted to leave Marblehead. Tess drew out the real Charlie, the one with dreams of breaking free of everything and everyone that reined him in.

He even wanted to tell her about his maps on the wall, the sunset tables, and how those concentric circles governed his life. The rings on the charts showed the ambit of his world, demarcating exactly how far he could go from Waterside and still get back for Sam. A trip to Cape Cod. A drive up to New Hampshire. The outer circle was the absolute farthest he could go. Beyond that line, there was no chance of making it home in time. The promise would be broken and his brother would be gone. It could be dangerous sharing all this with Tess, but now, with the night winding down, he was feeling safer and ready to reveal a little more.

“First you get me drunk, then you take me on a forced march,” she was saying as they tramped up a hill. “Where are we going?”

“Trust me, it’s special.”

They walked on, and the moon finally poked through the clouds, gently touching headstones in every direction. “We used to sneak in here all the time when we were kids,” Tess said. “I made out with my first boy behind that obelisk over there.”

“Who was the lucky guy?”

“Tad Baylor. I think he was in your class.”

“The human fly?” Tad had run afoul of the law junior year, when he was captured stealing final exams from the copy room after scaling the wall of the administration building and climbing through a fourth-floor window. “You have excellent taste.”

“I was fourteen,” she said, “and he was a great kisser.”

They kept on going across the lawns. An owl hooted from the treetops. The air was cool, and Charlie buttoned up his pea coat.

“So how long have you worked here?” Tess asked as they passed through a plot of Revolutionary War graves.

“Thirteen years,” Charlie said. “Barnaby Sweetland gave me my first job here when I was in high school. He was the caretaker for thirty years. Remember him? The guy had a voice like an angel, and he ran the chorus at the Old North Church. Every day in the field, planting, cutting, sweeping, we could hear him singing to the skies.”

Charlie kneeled down near a gravestone and pointed his flashlight at the damp ground. “Barnaby showed me every single thing I know about this place.” He scooped up a handful of damp earth with an unmistakable aroma. “You’ve probably smelled this your whole life when you’ve gone outside in the rain. It comes from these strange compounds called geosmins. Barnaby taught me the chemical names for everything.”

Tess started to laugh. “Be still my heart,” she said.

Charlie smiled. His mind was cluttered with all sorts of obscure information, but now he had to wonder: Would a girl setting off to conquer the world ever really fall for a guy who lived in a cemetery and knew why grass and dirt smelled the way they did?

“This way,” he said, pushing forward into the night.

“So whatever happened to Barnaby?” Tess said, following closely.

“One winter he took a long walk in a snowstorm and never came back. I found his body up there on the Mount of Memory.” Charlie aimed the flashlight into the night. “He had a choir book with a note in it, saying he was tired of working so darn hard. After seventy-two years on earth, he was ready for the next world.”

“You mean he killed himself?”

“I don’t think so. He just wanted to spend the rest of eternity singing. That’s where he promised I would always be able to find him. You know, in the songs of the choir and the organ on Sundays.”

“Was he right? Can you still hear him?”

“Yes,” Charlie said. “If I pay attention, he’s always there in the music.”

They had reached the crest of a hill where two willows hovered over a small, square stone building above the harbor. Guarding the entrance were two columns and a pair of crossed baseball bats. Tess walked straight to the front steps. Charlie aimed the flashlight at the name S
T.
C
LOUD
carved on the lintel.

“Your brother,” she said.

“Yes, Sam.” Charlie traced the sharp outline of the structure with his beam. “Mausoleum, noun,” he said. “A floor covering used in crypts.” He paused. “That’s one of Sam’s jokes.”

Tess smiled, touching the smooth stone. “Is it all marble?”

“Imported from Carrara. They spared no expense. The driver of the eighteen-wheeler that hit us was drunk out of his mind. His company paid for every inch of this. It was all about public relations.” He ran the flashlight down one of the columns. “They gave the guy five years, but he got away with three for good behavior. He’s probably in a bar right now getting loaded.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He shook his head. “It was my fault. I never should’ve taken Sam to Fenway, and we never should’ve been on the bridge in the first place. If I’d been paying any attention, I could’ve avoided the crash, you know, gotten out of the way of the truck.”

And so without noticing, Charlie broke one of his cardinal rules. He began talking about Sam. With everyone else in the world, he had always dodged the topic. It only made folks uncomfortable and awkward. But, he could tell, Tess was different. From the moment he met her, he knew she would understand.

He sat down on the steps of the mausoleum and said, “You were right this afternoon. Sam is why I work here. I promised I’d always take care of him.”

“So you think he’s around?”

Charlie looked up at her. “As sure as I am of anything.”

“God, if only I had that same certainty about my father.” She sat down beside him. He could smell her shampoo and feel her warmth. “I wish I knew Dad was close by.”

“What makes you think he isn’t?” Charlie said.

“There’d be some kind of sign, don’t you think?”

“I think those signs are all around if you know where to look.”

He made an absentminded looping motion with the flashlight beam, and as it swept the darkness he saw the most unexpected sight: Sam was hanging upside down from a hemlock branch and making a funny face. Charlie shut off the beam and leaped to his feet.

“What’s wrong?” Tess said.

“Nothing. Just got a chill.” He flipped the flashlight on again, turned it in the direction of the branch, but Sam was gone.

“You were telling me about Sam,” she said. He focused on her emerald eyes. Did she really want to hear the answers? He was about to speak, but with his peripheral vision he saw something move. Over her shoulder in the light of the emerging moon, there was Sam racing across the lawn with Oscar.

“What do you miss most about him?” Tess asked.

“I miss punching him in the nose when he was a brat,” he said in a voice that he hoped Sam would hear. “He liked to spy on people even when it was totally inappropriate.” Charlie checked over Tess’s shoulder again, and now Sam was gone.

“Most of all,” he continued, “I miss that feeling when you go to sleep at night and when you wake up in the morning. It’s the feeling that everything is all right in the world. You know, that amazing feeling that you’re whole, that you’ve got everything you want, that you aren’t missing anything. Sometimes when I wake up, I get it just for a moment. It lasts a few seconds, but then I remember what happened, and how nothing has been the same since.”

“You think that’ll ever go away?”

“I doubt it.” And then, incredibly, he found himself opening up even more. “Some days are better than others. You know, I finish work and hang out at the Barnacle or shoot pool at Bay State Billiards. It feels like it’s gone, and I’m just like everyone else. Then, without warning, it comes back and lodges in my mind. That’s when I don’t feel right being around anyone. So I stay here behind the gates, listening to music, thinking, and reading books. I guess I never really know when it’ll hit me. It’s like the weather. Blue sky one day, thunder and rain the next.”

“Same for me,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “But it’s strange. Tonight’s the first time in two years that I haven’t missed him so much it hurts.” Then she smiled and did the most incredible thing. She reached over and squeezed his hand.

A hemlock branch snapped behind Tess. She spun around, surprised by the noise. A fistful of needles landed on her shoulder. She turned to Charlie with one eyebrow arched. “Did you just see something? What was that?!”

He laughed. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Go ahead, try me.”

“Maybe it was your dad.”

Tess scoffed. “If Dad was here, he wouldn’t pussyfoot around making tree branches snap. He’d really let me know.” She stood up. “Tell the truth, do you really believe in that stuff?”

“Absolutely. I’ve seen too many things that defy explanation.”

She chuckled. “You mean like twigs falling from a tree?”

“No,” he said. “Like meeting you. Like dinner tonight.”

She looked at him for a long moment. Her eyes seemed full of feeling. Then she abruptly changed the subject. “Charlie, tell me. You ever seen a ghost?”

Sam was now perched behind her on the roof of the mausoleum. His fingers were jammed into each corner of his mouth, stretching it wide into a funny face. Irritated, Charlie knew there was no good answer. He had gone far enough tonight and they were entering uncertain terrain. He didn’t want to lie, but he didn’t want to scare her away either, so he chose the safest route. “I’ve heard the Screeching Woman down by Lovis Cove.”

“No way, the one killed by pirates?”

“The very one.”

“So you think your brother and my father are here somewhere?”

“Maybe.” Charlie looked for Sam in the darkness, and he popped up behind a gravestone. “But I don’t think spirits stay here for very long unless they want to,” he said. “I bet your dad has moved on to a better place.”

“You mean heaven?”

“Sure, heaven. Or someplace else. Wherever it is, death isn’t the end. It’s an elevation, really. It’s like catching the moon.”

“Catching the moon?”

“It’s hard to explain,” he said. “I read somewhere that 75 billion human beings have lived and died since the beginning of history, and I believe their souls are out there somewhere.” He looked straight up into the sky. “It makes me think of that John Lennon song. You know, ‘We all shine on in the moon and the stars and the sun.’ ”

Tess was quiet for a long time. She stared into the opening between the clouds. The Milky Way spread out in a great swath. “I like that, Charlie,” she said. “More than anything, I need to know he’s out there somewhere. You know? That he’s okay.”

“He is,” Charlie said. “Trust me. It’s hard to explain, but I’m sure.”

“You’ve got a feeling?”

He smiled. “Yeah, a feeling.”

Then she turned to Charlie and said, “I’m glad you took me here tonight. It really means a lot.”

“Me too.”

They were so close together now that Charlie thought he could actually feel an electrical charge. He had heard touchy-feely types talk about energy fields before, and it seemed like hooey, but Tess definitely had one. He leaned forward the tiniest amount, watching for her reaction, hoping she would give him an opening. They stayed there in each other’s glow for what felt like forever, until she looked down at her watch and said, “I better go.”

For a moment, Charlie felt defeated, but then he decided to be daring. She was leaving in a few days, and who knew if he would see her again. So without saying a word, he reached for her waist and pulled her close. To his surprise, she came to him without resistance. She tilted her head back and her lips parted. He kissed her softly and tumbled into the most incredible feeling. It lasted only a few seconds, but it was bliss. The warmth reached all the way inside and filled him with the most exhilarating sensation he had ever known.