The richness of the amber marigolds and silky tulips with long stems, the vitality of their nourished petals, the stability of their long green stems lay there in sharp contrast to the drab, crumbling, neglected objects that surrounded them.
Drawn to the flowers, Hazel stepped forward gingerly, so as not to disturb the sanctuary. When she crouched down to take the flowers up in her hands, she noticed some worn painted red lettering on the end of the basket.
Torrey’s Picks. The letters were delicate and feminine, and slanted gently and elegantly backward.
Hazel twisted the basket toward her to look for more. Behind that basket, originally hidden from sight, was another, smaller basket with similarly graceful lettering, but pinker and more youthful, carrying a teeny pair of gardening gloves.
Ruby’s Picks. The letters curled at the ends and concluded in playful dots.
“Who are Torrey and Ruby?” Eve yelled from behind Hazel too loudly, given the quiet of the place.
Hazel flinched, startled by Eve’s voice. Hazel hadn’t realized Eve had been towering behind her in her transfixion with the baskets. And, in earnest, the whole garden. The whole shrine.
Hazel twirled her body and started to say, “I don’t know,” but paused when she observed a figure emerging from the end of the pergola. As it moved closer, the fuzzy outline of its silhouette hardened into the unambiguous contour of Silas’s broad, strong body.
There was suddenly a feeling that they were in a place they were not meant to be. Seeing things they were not meant to see. Hazel’s body tensed, and she could sense that the same was true for Eve.
“You girls really leave no rock unturned, huh?” His tenor was buoyant and breezy as he marched toward them with his typically clunky strides.
“Torrey and Ruby are just two gals I know. Well, more like used to know.” He winked, casually. But Hazel could detect restraint in his voice.
There was something fabricated about his vagueness. It gave the impression that he was deeply and intimately connected with these facets he pretended not to know. That Torrey and Ruby, whoever they were, once meant something to him. Probably still meant something to him. Something big and painful even.
Hazel and Eve remained still and quiet.
Silas sat down on the old bench and tapped on the seat, urging Hazel and Eve to join him. Both girls slowly broke free from their fixed positions to join Silas.
“What is this place?” Eve asked brashly, ignoring the thick tension that had enveloped the garden since Silas came, before her bottom even met the bench.
He pulled three cold cans of Coke from a small bag he was holding. They had little beads of cold around the outside. There was a crisp crack when he opened one and handed it over to Eve.
“Well, this place was a garden.” Silas opened a second can and pretended to take a sip before handing it to Hazel. He leaned back, crossed his legs and extended his arms along the back of the bench, one arm resting casually behind each girl’s back.
“But it appears it has been turned over to the woods now.” He smiled and took a big long gulp from his can. Hazel watched his throat ripple.
“Cool,” Eve said and returned to her drink. “I like that thing,” she continued, pointing at the pergola.
Hazel had her eyes on Silas, though. There was a quality of discomfort in his position. She detected a tension in his chest and shoulders. A disquiet in his legs that he crossed and recrossed as if to displace or dispel it. His long dark lashes were shining. The green in his eyes was dustier than usual.
After another brief moment of silence, Silas abruptly lunged forward.
“Well, that’s enough of this,” he said impatiently, interrupting nothing but quiet. “Let’s head on up to the house, yeah?”
Eve popped right up off the bench, sipping from her frosty Coke, and walked briskly back into the pergola.
Hazel lingered on the bench for a moment, as Silas turned around to follow. There were two big roses, one a vivid pink and one a deep ruby, sticking out of his back pocket. The flowers were crushed from Silas neglecting them as he’d sat there on the bench with Hazel and Eve, drinking soda.
27
The next day was hot and sunny again in Grandor, and Hazel found herself in the kitchen quietly swirling the last bits of her cereal in its milky lake and trying not to make eye contact with Silas and Eve as they did the same. She did not want to appear too desperate for attention. Eve poured herself a glass of water, making the sound of the ice clanking against the glass the only sound in the room.
Silas eventually looked up from his newspaper to greet the girls. He did it with a curious weight in his smile.
“Listen, gals, I’m sorry to do this but I just got word of a big job with a deadline pretty soon. I really hate to leave you to your own devices when there’s so much fun we could be having together today, but I’ve gotta take a day to get this stuff done.”
Hazel and Eve both looked up but didn’t respond.
Hazel had the impression that although she was absorbing the scene, there was an energy in the air, scattering around her, that she couldn’t identify. A shifting momentum. A cause for unease that she couldn’t quite grasp.
“You know how it goes. Get the materials. Get into the shop. Cut, saw, sand, hammer, you name it.”
She had never heard Silas talk like this. Hint at even the smallest particle of sentimentality. Or remorse. He always carried himself so confidently. As if at every moment he was doing precisely the thing he wanted to be doing. And that nothing could sway him otherwise. This wavering was unconvincing, sliding across his lips.
Neither Hazel nor Eve uttered a word, but Hazel found herself nodding.
“I knew you girls would understand,” Silas said.
But he grabbed his car keys and rubbed his palm against Eve’s head.
“You know I hate when you do that!” she said, not fully in good spirits, as she tried to duck out of the way.
“I know, but it’s our thing now,” he responded, unfazed by her annoyance. And then he winked and slipped out the door.
Hazel and Eve returned to the quiet. Eve scrolled through her phone and Hazel scanned the kitchen looking for things she could busy her hands with by cleaning. She was starting to really hate the quiet.
The sounds of home back in Verona always vexed her, too—the twins babbling nonsense, the murmurs of her mother and Cam scheming their next parenting move, the drone of the TV as she took care of the boys at her mother’s request. But this silence, it was worse.
With nothing else noticeably dirty in sight, Hazel rinsed a set of large bowls from last night’s dinner that were possibly already clean.
And then Eve’s luring voice broke the silence.
“Let’s go see if there are any hot dudes with boats.”
Hazel rolled her eyes. “I think we both know that’s not an option here.”
“Can’t you let a girl dream?” Eve responded, and flipped her hair over to one side of her head. “Plus, I need something new to post that doesn’t look like it’s part of this rickety old cabin.”
Hazel wasn’t convinced.
“Come on. I’ll get one of you laughing or looking cool by the lake. People have been asking me for sister pics.”
Hazel couldn’t help it but she swelled with excitement at the idea of appearing on Eve’s feed. It wasn’t even about how many followers she had. It was more about memorializing their connection. Documenting their togetherness. Showing the world that they were a part of each other. It was curious, even to Hazel, that she could spend all these days with Eve and still feel a gaping hole in their relationship without being pictured in her digital world. Hazel thought back to the moments she’d first come across Eve, clicking through her Wassup? profile. She had learned so much about her that way. And surely others were looking for a glimpse into the life and thoughts of Eve Warri
ngton. Hazel felt another rush course through her veins at the idea that she could be a part of that story.
She sat up from her position and said, “Fine,” as casually as she could muster.
Hazel followed Eve, who had her phone clutched between her fingers, down toward the lake’s edge. Hazel took note of the workshop as they passed it and pressed her ear in that direction to see if she could get even a hint of what Silas was up to in there, but she didn’t hear anything.
As they traipsed down the path and toward the water, Hazel made out the silhouette of a figure lying on the dock. It was almost certainly a man’s body, legs splayed out and hands resting behind the head. With just a few more steps closer toward it, the outline of the sweeping curls of hair, the broad hairy chest and shoulders, and the shape of the aviator sunglasses revealed themselves. By now, Eve had caught on, too.
“Oh my god, is that Silas, literally doing nothing when he told us he was working all day?”
It couldn’t be anyone other than Silas. As they got closer, they could identify a cooler filled with icy beers and an upright fishing rod lodged into the dock keeping him company as he lay there. It was almost comical how bad a liar he was. He could have gone anywhere that wasn’t that dock.
“He really wanted an excuse to get away from us, huh?” Eve threw her hands up, apparently stricken but not showing any signs of distress. “Ugh, he’s so moody sometimes! He did this last year, too, but whatever.”
Hazel, on the other hand, felt as if she had been punched in the gut. She thought of her mother. The great void in Hazel’s life Jane had created by inviting Cam and the twins into their home. The gaping hole that Hazel felt Silas and Eve to be filling. All of a sudden, she was empty again. Stuck in a sad limbo of home and alone.
The feeling was compact and familiar. She felt it right in her heart.
“Whatever.” Eve shrugged and pushed Hazel into a beam of sunlight caressing the trunk of a tree. “Stand there and look out onto the lake. I’ll snap a few and we can decide which one to post.”
Hazel debated whether this was what she’d come all the way to the lake for. And in the absence of answers, she stood next to the tree and looked out toward the lake like Eve told her. She couldn’t help but stare at Silas’s body sprawled on that dock as she did it, though.
“Why do you think he lied to us?” Hazel blurted out. She couldn’t keep it inside. She was so scared it would all come crumbling down.
“Who knows! Parents are weird. Sometimes they love you, sometimes they really, really act like dicks.”
“Tell me about it,” Hazel responded, feeling increasingly comforted.
“So, sometimes I’m a dick right back,” Eve said smugly and then whipped her long hair around to her other shoulder.
“What do you mean?” Hazel responded, the anxiety creeping back up in her now.
“I mean, that’s pretty much why I’m here anyway.”
There was a pause that was long enough to indicate that it may be the end of the conversation, but then Eve continued.
“My parents only told me that my dad wasn’t really my dad like two years ago. I was so pissed. They lied to me my entire life and expected me to just sit around and take it? No! I had to punish them. So I found Silas online. To punish them. It was seriously so easy. They freaked out when I told them I had arranged with Silas to come here. I think they thought I was going to like Silas and Grandor better than I like my life at home. What a joke. Silas is a total mess and this place is a shithole.”
Hazel’s heart was pounding and her breathing became audible. Eve continued on without a trace of pain behind her words.
“But the more I say I want to come back, the more and more upset my parents get, so it seems like a good idea to keep doing it. At least until I graduate high school. And, oh my god, when you responded to my Wassup? message, I was like ‘This is perfect!’ Seriously, you should have seen my mom’s face. It’s not like they’re going to give me a sibling, so they’re totally panicked that this is the final straw and I’ll never come back home. Ha!”
Hazel could barely breathe. She felt an intense pressure behind her eyes and down in her throat. She placed her hand on a tree next to her to make sure she wouldn’t fall over if her knees gave out. The cracks were starting to form and her whole life, her whole new life, could sink through. She hoped it wouldn’t. She hoped so badly it wouldn’t. Eve swung her hair back to the other side and flashed another smile. She may have detected something in Hazel’s face because she dropped her smile.
“No offense or anything.”
There was a big, thick pause.
“Oka-yyyyy, well,” Eve said with wide eyes. “Guess we should get back to the house.”
Hazel thought she heard Eve mutter “awkward,” as she skipped away as quickly as she could back up the hill. Hazel sat right down in the grass and alternated between looking down at Silas on the dock and up at Eve walking away.
* * *
Later that evening, Hazel and Eve slipped right into what had become their routine of sitting in their own beds on opposite sides of the room. Eve, as usual, alternated between jamming her fingers into the screen, giggling or scowling at whatever was on the screen, taking pictures of herself and scrolling through pictures of and messages from others. Hazel, as usual, sat either observing Eve on her phone or trying to pretend like she was equally enraptured by her own. Occasionally, Eve blurted out a comment, not necessarily directed at Hazel, but she felt entitled to respond.
“Christie Channer has the best hair but I heard she gets a $400 highlight job every month even though she won’t admit it.”
“Tommy Dens is fucking hot but I heard he got a blow job from Rainey Popper, which makes him a lot less hot.”
“Don’t you think it’s funny when people have two first names? Elizabeth Aaron has that and also yellow teeth. Once, John Spencer left an electric toothbrush in her locker for her birthday and when she opened it she cried.”
“Pam Jackson went from barely an A-cup to a D in like a month. Tyler Hanner used to think she stuffed but I checked her out in the locker room before gym class and she definitely doesn’t.”
Hazel wondered if it would be better to be scrutinized by Eve, or ignored, but always netted out on scrutinized. Hazel had certainly been held under Eve’s microscope and latched on to her editorial review of her body. Hazel always felt Eve appreciated her physiognomy in a way that was not as disconnected or brutal as she scrutinized others. Eve understood Hazel’s body in a way she didn’t have to contemplate. They had been created from the same genes, after all.
Suddenly, Eve interrupted her own trance and stared right at Hazel. Her green eyes were swirling and sparkling.
“You’re not going to believe this. Connor Samuelson wants to FaceTime! He said he’s going to call me in an hour.”
“Who is Connor Samuelson?” Hazel asked.
And Eve just laughed, pulled her hair out of its messy bun on the top of her head and then dragged Hazel from her bed to her feet.
“Come downstairs with me,” Eve urged and disappeared into the hallway with the lure of her energy trailing behind her.
Hazel instinctively followed Eve, who was racing down the stairway so quickly she appeared to be floating over several stairs at once. The energy was contagious and Hazel found herself running down the stairs, too. She finally caught up to Eve, who was standing in the cold white glow of the open refrigerator. Eve popped her head out from behind the refrigerator door when she heard Hazel’s footsteps. Her green eyes had now acquired a menacing stir.
“We’re getting drunk!” Eve announced without hesitation.
Hazel felt a wrenching in her gut but before she could say anything, the refrigerator door closed with a whoosh and Eve took off past Hazel and back up the stairway.
Hazel’s heart and whole body immediately became heavier, and she pulled
one leg and then the other up the stairs, following Eve back to their room. As Hazel reached the top of the steps, she could just make out Eve’s socks sliding across the wood floor of the hallway and back into their bedroom. When Hazel entered the room, Eve was already sitting on the floor with two open beer bottles and wild eyes.
“Cheers!” Eve declared as she tilted the neck of the bottle up toward Hazel.
Hazel sank into a cross-legged seat across from Eve and clanked the neck of the bottle against Eve’s.
Eve immediately tilted her head back and gulped sips of beer down. She removed the tip of the bottle from her mouth and let out a deep and grumbling belch. She cackled briefly before throwing her head back and dumping the carbonated amber liquid into her mouth again.
Hazel brought the rim of the bottle to her lips. Her tummy seized immediately at the fermented smell but she inhaled through her nose and tilted the bottle up. As soon as a drop of beer hit her tongue, her throat constricted and tummy seized again.
Hazel placed the bottle delicately on the floor.
“I’m actually okay without the beer,” Hazel said, with a quiver in her voice, afraid of how Eve might react.
“Are you serious?” Eve responded. Her eyes were focused and piercing. Hazel saw black flecks in Eve’s eyes she hadn’t noticed before. They held the light in exotic ways that made them swirl into a deeper, darker spiral.
Hazel felt stunned. A tingling began in her cheeks and then made its way all the way down to her fingertips. She looked right back into Eve’s eyes, unsure of what to do next.
“Whatever,” Eve said and scooped Hazel’s beer into her fingertips and repositioned herself in front of the mirror.
In seemingly opposite forces, Eve ran her fingers through her hair to pull it straight and smooth and then rubbed her palm into the side of her head to tousle and muss it. She puckered her lips and pressed her chest out and pulled her shirt down and moved her head from side to side, keeping her eyes fixed on her own eyes as she did it.
That Summer in Maine Page 18