The Night

What happened that night is the part of this letter that I have written and torn up more times than any other, because I know how it will read, and I know that nothing I can say will make it read differently. I will write it once, as it happened, and I will not read it again until I have finished.

Eliot came to my room at eleven o'clock, in his pajamas, and he looked at me with his beautiful, patient face and said, “I want to go back to school.”

“School is not in session,” I said. “You know that.”

“I don't mean now. I mean in the fall. I want to go back, and I want you to write to my uncle and ask him to send me.”

I had been packing. The bags were in the closet, and the letter was in my bag, and I remember thinking, with the part of my mind that was still mine, that I had heard this wrong. “Eliot,” I said. “You were asked to leave. They don't want you back.”

“They asked me to leave for what I said,” he said. “But it wasn't me who said it. It was him. He told me to say it, and I said it, because he told me to, and because he said it would be a test, and if I passed, I could stay with him forever. I didn't know it meant I'd have to leave. I didn't know I'd have to come here.” He looked past me, at the window behind my bed, and his face changed. “He's here,” he said. “He's here now.”

I did not turn around. I had learned not to turn around.

“Who is here?” I said.

“You know who.” His voice had gone small, the voice of a child telling the truth in a room full of adults. “He comes to the window. He's been coming to the window all summer. He wants me to come out to him, and I want to go, but I'm afraid of the dark, and I'm afraid of what you'll say, and I'm afraid of what Fern will do without me.”

I knelt in front of him. I took his shoulders, and I made myself look at him, and I said, “Eliot. Listen to me. There is nobody at that window. There is nobody in this house. You are going to be all right, and I am going to take you away from here, and you are never going to see him again. Do you understand?”

He looked at me, and his face was the face of a child who has just understood something terrible, and he said, “You can't take me away from him, Nora. He's inside me. He has been since I was nine. He told me that if I ever told anybody, he would take Fern, and I've never told anybody, and now I've told you, and he knows.”

I heard the window behind me move. It did not creak; it moved, the way a window moves when a hand finds the latch and presses. I heard the latch lift. I heard the glass begin to slide, and I heard, in the same moment, the sound of the house waking up around us, doors opening on the floor below, footsteps on the stair, and I knew, with the certainty that comes once in a life and is never wrong, that I had one chance, and that I had to take it now, or lose them both.

I did what I did because I believed it was the only thing left. I picked Eliot up — he was light, lighter than he should have been — and I carried him out of my room and down the hall, past the open doors, past the empty wing, down the stairs to the front door. I had said her name on the stair, meaning to go back up for her, and I was reaching for the latch when the house went dark.

Not dark as in the lights went out. Dark as in the dark came in. The air in the hall changed, the way it changes when a door to a cold place opens, and I heard Fern's voice from the top of the stairs, small and clear, the way she had said it at the boathouse: “He's at the window. He's at the window, and he's coming in.”

I turned. The front door was a glass door, and the glass was full of him — the narrow face, the long hair, the dark coat, the dead caretaker, Colin Vance, standing on the porch with his hand on the latch, looking in at us with eyes that had been waiting for two winters to be let in.

And I — I did the thing that I will carry for the rest of my life. I put Eliot down, and I took him by the shoulders, and I turned him to face the door. “Look at him,” I said. “Look at him and tell him no. Tell him he is dead, and he has no right, and he will never take you, and he has no power over you. Say it, Eliot. Say it to his face.”

Eliot looked. He looked at the man in the glass, and his face went through something that I have no words for, and he opened his mouth, and he said, in a voice I had never heard, a voice that was not his voice: “He's not dead, Nora. He's the only one who ever loved me.”

The man in the glass smiled. And Eliot turned to me, and his eyes were his own again, and he said, “Nora. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I lied to you. I've been lying to you all summer. There was no music. There was no voice in the east wing. I made it all up, because I wanted you to pay attention to me, and I didn't know how else to make you stay.”

I said, “It's all right. You don't have to explain. I'm here.”

And then his face changed, and he looked at the window, and he said, “He's gone. He's gone, and I'm cold.”

I caught him as he fell. He was dead before his head touched the floor.