that I couldn’t see what they looked like. The fourth canvas was still on the easel. It was in the early stages, just a few blocks of color over some pencil marks, but I could tell that it was of the swimming pool at the back of the house, and that a figure had been sketched in the corner of the pool. There were no details but I knew it was me. It was a pretty small canvas, not a lot bigger than a normal TV screen. I took it off the easel and twisted it so that its fragile wood frame snapped, then I put it on the floor, and stacked the other canvases on top of it. I barely looked at them but they all seemed like finished paintings. Abstract splotches of color with, here and there, something that resembled a figure. I could have painted them.
The easel was Chet’s, since I was pretty sure there had never been an easel in the apartment. It was small, with three telescoped legs supporting it. I collapsed it and folded it into itself till it was the size of a small briefcase, a block of stained wood with a handle to carry it. I added it to the pile of paintings.
I looked around the room, thinking that I had gotten everything. Even if something was left behind it would merely look as though Chet had left it himself.
My finger throbbed where I’d torn at the nail. I looked at it closely. The blood had clotted, turning brown and sticky, and I didn’t think that I had splattered anything in the apartment. Suddenly, I wanted to get out of there, and be back in my bedroom. And I was hungry. Unless my parents had gotten to it, there was leftover shepherd’s pie in the fridge.
I set my alarm for six the next morning. But when my owl-shaped clock whoo-whooed I was already awake, out of bed, and half-dressed. I’d slept some, but it was the kind of sleep where you are aware of every squeak and click and scrape that old houses make, where you think you haven’t slept at all and then realize that the strange thoughts in your head were actual dreams, and that the pulled curtain is glowing slightly, that dawn has broken.
It took three trips to bring everything from the apartment to the well. I brought the duffel bag first and that was the hardest. I had to drag it for a while when it got too heavy to carry. The meadow was covered with a cool dew that dampened the bottoms of my jeans. I peered down into the well before dropping the duffel in. Chet was still there, buried under the rocks I’d dropped on him. A few clumsy blackflies batted around his body. On the next trip, I brought the three larger canvases. They weren’t heavy but they were awkward, and I had to break one of them to get it down the well. On the last trip, I brought the small backpacker easel and the painting that Chet had started, the one of me in my pool. After dropping them down the well, I grabbed the rest of the rocks I’d been unearthing and dropped those in. It was satisfying, especially as I watched all evidence of Chet disappear under a pile of rocks. I had used an old rusty trowel to pry some of the rocks loose. It was still in the meadow and I used it to dig up clumps of dirt, dumping them down the well until it looked as though there was nothing down there except dirt and rocks. I knew it wasn’t perfect but I was satisfied.
The last thing I did before leaving the meadow was to drop the rusty trowel down into the well, then replace the cover. Using my already filthy fingers I swept some of the long, dried-out grass across the cover to try and camouflage it. I circled the area before leaving it, an eye on the ground to make sure that nothing had been left behind, but there was nothing, not even a cigarette butt. Chet was gone from the world. The morning was quiet, just the rising hum of bugs, and the cawing crows that were the true owners of this meadow. I cawed back at them, like I sometimes did, and wondered what they thought of me.
Back at the house I showered for a long time, scrubbing at my fingers to