Chapter 8 #2
The door was unlocked, like Shiloh promised it would be, and we stepped into a large cathedral living room with wood-paneled walls and big windows gone green with moss.
Stewart Gavin sat in an armchair in front of the TV.
He only turned to look at us when the door closed, its screen snapping shut loudly.
He was small and pale. Something about him reminded me of a porcelain doll—if porcelain dolls had thick bifocals and wore red gingham flannels.
He craned to look at us over the top of his recliner, waved us into the living room with a shaking hand. “I didn’t expect there to be two of you.”
I was stunned. “Y-you know why we’re here?”
“Course I know,” said the man, affronted. “I’m eighty-five years old and you think I don’t know death when it comes through my own front door?”
Bewildered, I looked to Shiloh, who seemed impressed but not surprised. “It happens sometimes,” she said. “People—the older ones, especially—know when it’s coming. They see us for what we are even if we don’t tell them.”
“My wife went on ahead of me,” said Stewart, as if to explain himself. “I was waiting for my turn. Things got boring around here anyway. All they seem to play on TV these days is reruns and new shows so bad they’re not worth watching twice.”
I didn’t know what to do or say. I felt the moment warranted something grave and reverent, but I came up with nothing, and Shiloh didn’t offer any condolences or apologies. She watched me, waiting to see what I would do.
“I—I’m so sorry,” I sputtered, choking on tears.
Stewart just waved me off with a flap of his hand. But he looked, for the briefest moment, afraid. And I could tell, from the way his chin wrinkled, that he was struggling to hold back tears. “There’s nothing for it. Let’s just get on with it.”
Those were his last words.
Shiloh came to stand behind the man, a motion so fluid I didn’t even see her move. “Come here,” she said. “Stand with me.”
I walked to her, my legs leaden, and came to stand behind the recliner next to Shiloh. Stewart gazed very pointedly at the TV.
“Give me your hand,” said Shiloh. “The one Death touched.”
I gave her my left hand. I had long fingers—piano hands, my mom always said, wasted on my lack of music talent—but Shiloh’s were longer still, her palm warm and calloused.
When she touched me, small shocks raced up my arms, spreading through me in a series of soft chills, and I had to fight not to shudder.
Shiloh turned my palm over in her hands and guided it gently to the base of Stewart’s neck.
His nape was covered in downy wisps of white hair, and his skin was warm to the touch.
I felt the animal of him then—the organic aspects of his body separate from humanity and sentience and all the other qualities we believe set us apart from other living things.
I thought, in passing, that if I’d touched him with my eyes closed, I wouldn’t have known him from a dog or a pig.
“I want you to think about the gift that Death gave you last night,” Shiloh told me, pressing my palm flush to Stewart’s neck. “Let it carry through you into him.”
At first, I felt nothing, but then my hand began to throb, and that throb turned into a sharp pull, as if my mind, my soul, was being drawn out through my palm.
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, I was in a different body.
Smaller, younger…softer. The body of a little boy.
I could see myself in the window of the car I was sitting in, my round face, cheeks flushed red with rosacea, eyes narrowed against the sun.
In the driver’s seat, behind the wheel, was a tanned man with deep smile lines and crow’s-feet creases at the edges of his eyes.
A father. My father.
He was singing along to a song on the radio. A country ballad I didn’t remember hearing before, and yet, somehow, I sang along with him as we drove.
I closed my eyes against the sun, and when I opened them again, I was older and taller, standing in a sea of high grass.
In the distance, there was a mountain, washed blue with fog, a wedding unfolding at the foot of it.
There were flowers strewn across a narrow aisle shorn right through the high grass.
A woman in white stood at its end, a hand extended to me.
I took it, and we promised that we would never let go of each other.
The memory changed again. I saw the same woman walking ahead of me.
Her hair had turned white, and she had hiking sticks in both hands.
She seemed frail, squatting under the weight of an overlarge backpack, but even in her weakened state, I couldn’t keep up with her, no matter how fast I went or how hard I tried. She was always just ahead of me.
There was the white flash of a hospital waiting room.
And then I was back in the cabin with the woman, my wife.
Her hair was gone, and she was shivering despite the heavy quilt draped around her shoulders.
I took her cold hands in mine and worked ointment into her rough calluses and swollen knuckles.
She told me, with tears in her eyes, that it was time for her to go.
This time, I could follow her.
I was pulled backward out of Stewart’s body, and all at once, I returned to my own. Hot tears slicked my cheeks as I peered down at Stewart. He lay dead in his chair, eyes open. Maybe with the woman from his memories, following her wherever she went.
Or maybe he was nowhere at all.
One with nothing.
“You see?” said Shiloh, eyes not on the dead man but me. “It’s not so bad, is it?”
I needed to sit down after that, and did on the recliner beside Stewart’s. It was slightly smaller than his, and I wondered if it had belonged to his wife. I cried for a long time, out of guilt and maybe grief, though I didn’t know Stewart well enough to mourn him properly.
Shiloh took a seat on the brick hearth of the fireplace, legs braced apart, staring at the floor.
She startled me when she stood abruptly and made for the kitchen.
When she pulled open the fridge, I saw that there was nothing much in it apart from frozen bricks of meat and energy drinks.
I wondered, in passing, who had attended to Stewart in his final days.
Who, if anyone, had made him warm meals and made sure he’d had enough to eat.
I hoped he’d had someone, a nurse or a daughter, or perhaps a son.
“Do you want anything to drink?” She held up a Red Bull.
I must’ve said yes, because she put it in my hand. The can was so cold it hurt to hold, but I didn’t flinch. The pain was grounding. It brought me back to myself.
I peered up at Shiloh, who loomed over me, silent and watchful, as if waiting for me to break.
I decided only then that I wouldn’t, swallowing down my tears, squaring my shoulders.
They thought I was weak, but I intended to show them all just how tough I really was.
“How did all of this begin, anyway? With you and Death?”
Shiloh shrugged, like it wasn’t a story worth telling.
“He appeared to me one night when I was still a kid and told me things no one else could’ve ever known—things about me and my friends and family, when they were going to die and how.
I guess he wanted to prove to me that he was the real deal, and when I was thoroughly convinced, he told me he wanted me to help him with a project.
And that project was this, us, all these girls he enlisted. ”
“Why girls?” I asked, because, frankly, I feared Death was a bit of a pervert.
“Death never really said, and I never asked. I think it’s less a boys-versus-girls thing and more that he happened to find us interesting. I mean, you try being immortal, living through the eons all alone. It gets old after a while, I bet.”
“Speak of the devil.” Shiloh got up then and walked to the door and ducked her head outside.
Against her wishes, the girls had made their way out of the RV and were milling around in the front yard.
Naomi and Riley were splitting a vape by the vegetable patch.
Skye was holding what appeared to be a very well-fed farm cat, her face buried in its fur.
“I thought I told you all to wait in the RV,” said Shiloh, but she waved them inside anyway. The girls cut off the vape, and Skye put down the cat, checking its tags first to make sure it didn’t belong to Stewart. They streamed into the living room, quiet and grave, gathering around Stewart’s body.
Skye stroked his cheek, which still had a bit of color in it. “Poor thing. He seems like a sweetheart.”
“Should we bury him?” I asked, feeling uneasy. There had been a sense of sacredness when it was just me and Shiloh keeping vigil over Stewart. But with the rest of the girls filling the room, his corpse seemed more like a spectacle.
“No,” said Shiloh. “That’s against the rules. We leave them be. Always.”
I swallowed dry. “B-but what if no one knows he’s dead?”
“So?” Riley snatched the energy drink from my hand, pried back the tab, and downed it. “Dead is as dead does. What difference does it make?”
“Show some respect,” said Shiloh with an edge.
And then, to me: “We don’t interfere after a death.
It’s not just against the rules; it’s distasteful.
The people we assist don’t belong to us just because we spent a few moments with them at the end of their lives.
We don’t have the right to decide how the news of their death is distributed.
We let the people they’ve chosen to allow into their lives handle that. ”
“But what if someone finds out we’re here?” I asked. It was the question that had been eating at me since we’d first stepped onto Stewart’s porch.
Naomi traced her fingertips along the mantel of the fireplace, checked them for dust. There was none. “They won’t. We leave no finger- or footprints. No hair. No DNA. Nothing.”
“We’re invisible.” Skye waved her fingers for dramatic effect. I wondered how a girl as young as her could be so cavalier, so comfortable with a dead man sitting in his recliner just a few feet from where she stood.
I looked to Shiloh. “How can you be sure of that?”
“It’s Death’s doing,” said Naomi. “The work we do is important, and he makes sure it’s protected.”
“He makes sure that we’re protected,” said Shiloh, not looking at me or anyone. “As long as we keep up our end of the deal.”