"It's too deep."

The sound of the thought woke Eddie. Far above him, he could see a spot of light. Only a spot, that light, and too far away to reach. Eddie narrowed his eyes to peer at the walls rising up through the dense shadows. Those walls had been harsh and bruising on the way down, but now they appeared slick and smooth and impossible to scale.

He couldn't try to climb the walls, though, because he couldn't move.
During his decent into the well, his arms had flailed and his legs had kicked, but his flailing arms had been cracked and damaged by the stones rushing past him, and his legs had kicked out at awkward, bone-snapping angles. His arms and legs were as useful as the appendages of a puppet with no one working its strings.

Worse, he couldn't call for help. Sometimes he could hear them; he knew they were searching for him, they would even come near the well. Once, he saw his mother's terribly sad face looking down on him, almost as though she beseeched him to call to her and let her know he was there. Another time, his father's face peered down the hole above him, heartbreaking concern etching new lines into the leathery skin.

Eddie could not speak.

Along with his arms and legs, he knew he must have broken at least two ribs when he hit bottom. It hurt to breathe. It would be impossible to draw in the breath he would need to speak. If someone had been capable of bending an ear close to his lips, Eddie might have struggled out a whisper. But no one could come that close. No one else could even fit into this narrow shaft, except his sister Chloe.

Eddie closed his eyes against the breath-stealing darkness surrounding him, he closed them against the hopeful spot of light as it faded toward darkness.

Because he was in a well, Eddie did have water. He needed only to extend his tongue to catch the mineral taste of a seemingly endless trickle that ran down the wall. Days upon days must have passed since he lay in the bottom of the well, but he had no idea how long it had been. His mind only seemed capable of considering his predicament. Every aspect of it, from the agony of laying virtually motionless, with everything bent in impossible, terrible directions, to the confusion of all that had led up to it.

Eddie asked himself, over and over, what exactly had brought him to this critical situation. Naive, yet growing wise in death's stare, he suspected it had been more than an accident.

His desperately unhappy mother might have contributed to the situation.
His mother (and her condition) had been labeled "Chronically Depressed," and Eddie's wandering thoughts guessed if it could be named, then perhaps it could also be contagious.

His father could have led Eddie toward his fall, too. Although he had never been labeled "depressed," the nature of his work called upon his own melancholy. A poet, a man who wrote about sadness, who raked wounds into the souls of his readers and left them flowing dismal tears.

Could Eddie be at the bottom of the well because his mother was chronically depressed, and because his father's thinking had always been ruthlessly bleak? Or was it because the mix of the two adults had been a classic ruin of despair?

He did know what had literally brought him down the round, narrow chasm.

Chloe.

Chloe, only nine years old, five years younger than Eddie, but still his best friend. He was her playmate and mentor, he gave her the attention she craved, he cared for her happiness and believed he did so better than their parents ever could. In the isolation of their lives, he promised they would never be apart, and he would never let her be sad.

They lived away from the world, away from it all, on acres of land bordered by thick woods. Their home, tremendous and drafty, housed two servants aside from the small family. Too many dark corners in such a place, too much for a mother and a father and two small children.

The house and the land and even the servants had been left to Eddie's father by his grandfather, and Father insisted the inheritance gave him inspiration. The only legacy he would claim was the big, dark dwelling on the sprawling land; the rest of his family's flush of wealth might vindictively purchase his creative soul, and leave his art abandoned.

The far-north hideaway meant desolate seclusion for their mother, whose greatest needs were about life and people. Her needs were to experience life rather than to only exist, but those needs would come at the cost of Family Funds, and Eddie's father would not hear of it.

The family swam around in the big house like four melting cubes of ice in a massive punch bowl. Chloe and Eddie were able to escape the walls each year as spring approached, to play in the day and make tents in the night on the back lawn. When winter returned, their mother closed the doors and reminded them of the uncle they had never known, the young brother of their mother who had been found frozen in a drift, and who had been buried in a northern grave that never thawed.

Winter meant tutors and studies during the fleeting hours of light, and night came before they could run free. Each Sunday brought a reprieve from studies, but they were kept inside, safe from dangers of the land--including the well--which were hidden by the alluring eiderdown of snow.

As light came again above Eddie, the hole of light showing him the same fraction of a new spring day, he considered the irony that it had been the freshness of spring which had brought about the family's destruction.

Spring, which meant a relative freedom for the children, had a different effect on their mother. For her, it illuminated the crushing isolation of their lives, and each spring she approached her husband to beg that they escape before the cold, killing, country snowscapes returned.

The children could hear her seeding her requests to move away, requests which would grow solid roots and become riotous flowers of demands. Their father refused her, always, always with the same harsh, biting sadness that his emotionally masochistic readers sought in his work. The crackling conversations between man and wife didn't echo in the big house, instead their words seeped into the soft polished wood of the panelled walls and rebounded later, from the children's bedtime pillows and into their nightmares.

At the start of this spring, Eddie's mother insisted she would move back to the city to live among neighbors and parties and cafes and clubs, with or without their father. If he wouldn't leave with her, she would take the children, and if he wouldn't allow that, she would leave alone.

Their father told her she would leave alone.

She stayed another week, imploring, but their father remained firm: If she left him, he would keep the children. Once, their mother's choked voice cried out, "But you're suffocating them!" Father's caustic and effortlessly condescending response came, as though quoting his own work; "And you suffocate me. I suffocate under the shroud of your stinging voice, the very perfume of your depression robs my throat of so much air that I can only breathe through my pen. The decadence you crave will not be what teaches my children about life."

The parents left for two days, and after they returned, stoic silence burdened the air. Another two days passed, and a lawyer came to the house.
Eddie and Chloe fluttered silently near the veranda to hear him describing the judgement. Although it was highly unusual, the judge would allow it; the boy would stay with his father and the girl would move with their mother to the city.

Chloe had flown out from where she'd been listening with Eddie, she had railed against the decision, while Eddie stayed hidden, stunned, confused, understanding his helplessness.

"I need Eddie and Eddie needs me!" Chloe sobbed. "You can't take us apart!"

The lawyer sidled away as the parents tried to calm her, tried to explain their adult machinations, to clarify their complicated, grown-up reasons that revealed no good excuse.

The children were told they could visit each other often. The promises trickled out like burnished pennies, blindingly polished but essentially worthless: Chloe would live with her mother and Eddie with their father, but they could see each as much as they liked.

When Eddie's mother left with Chloe, Eddie said goodbye with a throat so tight that there might have been fingers squeezing his neck.

The promises shed their gossamer hope to reveal the lies. Eddie had asked his father again and again when he would see Chloe, but his father only responded with distant distraction. His family had funded his wife's escape. With this new angst, his poetry flowed like a relentless river, tearing at its own banks and recklessly crashing stones over Eddie's lost joy.

Worse than his own loss, Eddie felt Chloe's ache. He knew she begged to visit her brother, and he knew their mother could only answer with more lies. He knew beyond instinct that their mother desperately needed time to revel in her new freedom. She would be grasping the hand of every dancing stranger and chasing away the night with every late party in the city, her release more intoxicating than her daughter's needs. He knew she could not, just yet, find the strength to hear Chloe's cries.

Chloe ran away. Young Chloe had called a taxicab on her own, she had told the driver her father's address and that he would pay for the cab when they arrived.

Chloe, with her brooding eyes and set jaw and convincing manner; she had seduced the driver into believing her.

Eddie had been sitting at a quiet dinner with his father when the call came from his mother.

"She's gone?" his father had asked, incredulous.

Eddie could hear his mother's cries piercing through the phone line; she had left Chloe alone with the nanny, the nanny didn't know where the child had gone.

Eddie's father demanded, "How could anyone allow a nine-year-old child to simply disappear?"

The sound of the knocker falling on the door clattered through the house.
Eddie's father set down the phone and half-stood while the housekeeper opened the door. He ran from the dining room even before he heard Chloe's voice.

He paid the driver and returned to the phone. Eddie hadn't moved, he had watched the handset, not wanting to touch it, not wanting to hear more of his mother's despairing sobs.

Eddie's father picked up the phone and said, with a calm force, "She's here." He listened for a moment longer before replacing the handset in the cradle.

Eddie sat staring at his sister, his best friend, and watched her face begin to shine.

Their father said, "Your mother is coming."

Eddie's hand just brushed Chloe's as these words were spoken, but before he could grasp her, she ran. She ran outside into the spring twilight and Eddie followed her.

They heard their father calling after them, but they ran. Chloe fell to the ground and dropped her head into her hands, crying from deep in her chest. "They'll never let us see each other again! They want to stay apart forever and they're going to keep us apart forever, too!"

Eddie couldn't refute this. He believed it, too. His parents couldn't care about each other any longer. They couldn't bring themselves face to face anymore. Their differences were too much alike. They wanted to begin their own lives, separate lives of mother and daughter, father and son.

Chloe stared at her brother out through pools of tears, and said, with the convoluted wisdom of a betrayed child, "You promised you would never let us be apart."

They heard the sound of their father's voice as he called to them, searched for them, in the darkening evening. Chloe leapt to her feet and ran again, ran blindly. Eddie followed again, reaching for her. She stopped abruptly, Eddie didn't know why, but it happened so quickly that he fell against her.

She fell forward, and over the edge.

Over the crumbling edge of the well.

He caught her dress, just the hem of it.

Eddie lay in the bottom of the well and saw it all again, saw it over and over, saw her fall over the edge again and again.

He caught her dress, but it was just the lacy hem and it tore. Slowly, it tore, and he clutched the fringed fragment of material that had become so light from the loss of her weight.

He heard her crying out, he heard the sounds of her hitting the jagged walls on her way down. It had to be happening quickly but he heard each sickening moment of contact. He leaned in, calling out to her, but the sounds of her beaten body falling down and down came too loud to his ears.

When she hit the bottom of the well, Eddie felt it in his chest, and it crushed the air in his lungs. He leaned in further, and now whispered her name, a question. He thought he could hear her breathing and he balanced precariously on the edge of the well, listening. He could hear her breathing.

The breathing stopped.

The rocks beneath him gave way, and he fell behind her.

While he lay trapped at the bottom, he sees his own fall. It happens just as it did to Chloe, and his body is battered--just the same--against the one continual circle of the well. It seems to be taking forever for him to reach the bottom. He can distinctly hear each bone split and shatter, he can feel the pierce of agony that comes with each new blow. Not one moment of the journey escapes him. And now there is no escape.

All he can think of is the loss of his sister, his best friend, his charge, to a deep, dark, cruel death. Had it been his fault? If so, what had been the nature of his failure? That he allowed their parents to separate them?
Or had it been his promise that they would never be apart? Perhaps he, too, had laid part of the foundation of hope that had split and shattered beneath the soles of his sister's quaking feet.

He examined the thoughts as they came to him, he endured the memories that brought him so much pain. He kept himself aware, because if he had been committed to this hell he must pay his penance.

Throughout the time he had been there, the time he'd been unable to measure, he had kept one nuance of memory at bay, kept it so far away that he didn't even know, consciously, what it might be.

Until it whispered to him, from a shadowed layer of his mind, calling to his consciousness that he must take heed. He pushed the thought away, but it returned, it came like a monster from under his bed, like a ghostly nightmare that chased him while he could not run.

This time, its fingers curled around his scalp and he felt the tingling of horror spreading through his numbed body. Because he fought it, the thought might have gained sentience by gradually slithering in, but instead, it pounced.

Mustn't Chloe be trapped, dead, beneath him?

He felt his eyes pushing out from his head, he felt his mouth open wide, wider, he felt his own nostrils as they flared with a dread beyond the sight of any monster, beyond capture by any imagined fiend.

Although he could barely breathe, although he could not speak--he cried out. The cry came desperate and feeble from the coldest fears in his soul.

Something passed across the light at the top of the hole, like curtains blown across windows in a breeze. In some part of his mind where panic had not reached, Eddie believed he could see his mother. He opened his eyes, and his mind's eye closed.

In his mother's face, he could see she would forgive him, if only she could reach him. She sat next to him where he lay on a bed covered by bright-white, bleach-smelling sheets. He could feel her stroking the hair back from his face, while her own face was painted with the catastrophic grief of losing both her children. He could hear her, forgiving him. "You tried with all your might to hold Chloe," her breaking voice told him. "It isn't your fault. Please come back to us." And her voice, in a pleading question to his father, "Why won't he wake up?"

Eddie's eyes closed again, and as he drifted back to his troubled dreams, he could hear his father answering his mother.

"He can't wake up. He can't come back." Through the sound of his mother's tears, Eddie heard his father say, "You have your parties, I have my poetry, what he had was Chloe. Chloe is gone. We know this pain. It's too deep."