Page 9 of My Halloween Keeper
"Eli." My voice cracks. "I found your notes.”
He goes very still.
"You've charted every breath I've taken for ten days," I say. "You sit up all night watching me sleep. You won't let me wash a spoon. And I love it, God help me, I do, but you're keeping me like a patient, and patients get discharged." I swallow. "You haven't slept in ten days, either. I've been counting too. You're averaging three hours. You won't let me do one single thing for you, and you won't tell me one single thing you want."
He stands up, puts his mug in the sink with his back to me, and goes out into the garden in the dark.
I lie awake alone in his bed until four. He doesn't come in to sit in the chair.
Halloween comes in cold and clear.
Every year, Edna told me, Eli plants a maze in the south field for the valley kids — corn and sunflowers, head high, gone dry and rattling by the end of October — with a carved pumpkin burning at every turn. By the time the sun's going down I can hear them in it, shrieking and laughing and getting lost on purpose, and from the porch I can see the little lights winking in and out between the stalks.
My bag's in my car. I packed it this afternoon while he was out there setting lanterns, folding everything very neatly, the way I pack a patient's things when they're being transferred. I told Edna I'm leaving at dawn.
I haven't told Eli.
I stand on the porch with my coat buttoned right for once and watch the last of the kids come out of the maze with their parents and their buckets and their pumpkins, and Edna shepherding them all down the road in a pointed hat with a lantern swinging, and the field going quiet. I watch him come out after them, tall and dark against the lanterns, and stand at the entrance with his hands in his pockets looking back at all that light.
Then I walk down the porch steps toward him.
6
Eli
She's right.
That's what I've been standing in this field with all day, setting pumpkins at the turns and lighting candles and not hearing a single child. She's right, and I've known it since she said it.
I kept her so I'd never have to ask for anything.
My mother pressed a call button for six hours in the dark. Afterwards I swore I'd never be the one lying there, waiting on somebody who might not come. So I became the one who comes. For five years I've been the one who comes, to every flue and every washer and every cabin in this valley, and nobody's ever had to come to me.
Then a nurse fell asleep in her car at the turnoff with her badge turned in, and I stood in the trees and counted her breaths, and I've been lying at the bottom of that ladder ever since.
Her bag's in her car. I saw her carry it out this afternoon while I was setting pumpkins at the far turns, folded small and neat, the way you'd pack for somebody who wasn't coming back to the room.
Edna found me in the corn at four, with a box of candles and a face I've seen her wear at funerals.
"She's leaving at dawn," she said.
"I know."
"You going to let her?"
I set a candle in a pumpkin and lit it and didn't answer.
"Eli." Edna waited until I looked at her. "Five years you've been checking every flue in this valley at midnight so nobody freezes. You think I don't know why? You think I don't know what it's like, sitting up with somebody who isn't going to wake?" She put a hand on my arm, briefly. "The trouble with being the one who always comes is that nobody ever gets to come for you. That girl came to your greenhouse, sweetheart. She came. Don't make her do it twice."
She went back down the rows without another word, and I stood in the corn with the candle guttering in my hand for a long time.
Near dark a small ghost finds me at the last turn before the centre, her sheet dragging in the frost and one eyehole slipped down over her nose.
"Are you scared of the dark?" she asks me, through the sheet. "My brother says you live by yourself. He says you're not scared of anything."
I crouch down to her height and fix her eyehole so she can see.
"Empty rooms," I tell her. "I'm scared of empty rooms."
