“I’m sure they’re fine. There must be some rational explanation.” A few moments later, my father wheeled his chair to the foot of the stairs. He motioned me down. I stood in front of Mr. Templeton in my nightgown. He looked terrible, all bloodshot and bleary, like a zombie, teetering between life and death. My dad said, “Now, Ari, when did you last see Noah?”
“Saturday night. At the party.”
Mr. Templeton hung his head. “Did he say . . . anything to you, Arianna?”
Yes, Noah had said plenty of things to me. But none of them seemed relevant to this situation. “No.” I wanted to be more helpful than that, so I added, “He did seem to be in a bad mood. He kind of just disappeared from the party.”
“Right,” my mother piped in. “He wasn’t there when I came to pick them up. So I called Annie and she said she’d gotten him earlier. She said he wasn’t feeling well, but other than that, things seemed perfectly normal.”
Mr. Templeton nodded calmly, so we all nearly jumped out of our skins when the quiet, bookish man, suddenly punched a throw pillow and shouted, “Shit!”
“Look,” my father said, laying a hand on the man, who was now trembling with rage or terror or something. Then he looked at me. “Ari, please go upstairs.”
So I did. When I left, Mr. Templeton had his face in his hands. He was crying, I think, and I’d never seen a grown man cry before. My father was hovering over him, telling him to pull himself together and that he was sure they’d show up, just fine, sooner or later.
But as I thought of the way Noah’d looked the last time I saw him, somewhere inside, I knew things weren’t just fine. I looked outside, toward the window to his room, which was now dark. Noah, I thought. You can’t just leave. Wherever you are, you have to come back.
Chapter Seventeen
You were expecting something different?
Yeah. Call me naïve. But long before, even when all the other boys at school were . . . I don’t know . . . all into sports and thinking girls had cooties or whatever—I’d always had this dream. This dream I’d meet a beautiful girl and fall in love and get married, have a dozen kids and take them on picnics every weekend on the banks of the river. That’s all I really wanted.
And you felt like that dream was over.
It was over. It is over, now.
#
The work does continue, well after the sun goes down. My dad’s busy bees swarm through the house, and Mrs. Lancaster brings an entirely new meal for dinner—this time ribs and coleslaw. Eventually, Noah finds his way out and gets something to eat. Later on, I even see him standing with a bunch of guys on the deck who are trying to figure out what to do with the hot tub.
“It shouldn’t take long to get it running,” Mr. Burke tells him. “Just a couple new parts and you’d have it working by tomorrow.”
“I thought I’d just sell it,” he tells my father. “I’m not going to use it.”
I think about that day I’d seen him outside and naked in it. Annie had been hovering around inside, wearing that obscenely short kimono. It wasn’t until after the story broke and I went over every interaction I’d ever had with Noah ad nauseum that I realized I’d been intruding on something very private, something well beyond my comprehension. Had they been having sex, even then? He was such a gentle, innocent thing then, afraid of his own shadow.
I feel a stab of pain in my heart for him. How could any woman do that to him? He’d said he wasn’t innocent, but I know he didn’t provoke it. I know him better than anyone, and he was always shy and meek, like his dad. She forced herself on him, taken advantage of his always helpful, trusting nature.
I cringe and have to force the image out of my head for the thousandth time this week. I concentrate on him now. Laughing, trying his best to move on despite the wrench thrown in his way. He’s healthy now—god, gloriously so— and he can be happy, too.
Which is why, while he’s sitting out on the steps that evening, smoking a cigarette and stabbing the screen of a cell phone with his thumb, I come and stand in front of him, so close our toes are touching.
He looks up at me, his face silhouetted in the light blazing from the cabin. It’s nearly ten, and things have begun to wind down. He exhales a cloud of smoke and stubs out the cigarette he just lit on one of the steps. “Hi,” he says.
“You got a cell phone?”
“Yep.”
“Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
He shrugs, pockets it, then makes a fist and starts to talk like an old man. “These newfangled things. I’ll never understand them.”
“You’ll get the hang of it.” I grab the lantern off the stoop and take one of his hands. “Come on.”
He pushes off and follows me. He doesn’t need to ask me where we’re going. It’s not too hard to figure out. I lead him deeper into the forest behind our house, until all the lights of the cabin fade in the distance. Here the stars are not visible under the thick canopy of leaves, and the glow of the lantern is our only light. When we get to the treehouse, I hand him the lantern and climb up. The ladder is part a bunch of metal rungs fastened into the trunk of the old elm, but once you get up to the top, about twenty feet in the air, you have to grab onto a rope and pull yourself in. It was hard at first, but I’ve come here so much that I can do it with my eyes closed.
When I hoist myself up to the top, I look down and see that Noah’s close behind me. He might not have done it in years, but it doesn’t matter. He skips over most of the rungs and I laugh when I realize he has the handle of the lantern between his teeth. I take it from him as he grabs hold of the rope.
Kneeling, he looks around in the dim orange light. Shadows play on his face, making him look more like his younger self. “You fixed this place up.”
I nod. It’s almost embarrassing how many times I came here, after he left. It may have been my dad’s before it was ours, but if it can be said that living and loving a place confers ownership, then it’s only ours. We’d fixed it up together, but after he left I continued to repair the boards, bring in broken old chairs, threadbare throw rugs, and patio furniture cushions when my parents were getting rid of them. My mom had a series of old pictures of birds that she had to remove from the living room to accommodate every one of my school photographs, so I hung them on the ceiling. They’re yellowing and faded now, as were most of the things we’d carved and written on the boards. We’d made so many memories here that after he left I’d come here just to sit and think of him. “I felt closer to you when I was here,” I mumble.
His eyes snap to mine. “You thought about me?”
I smile. “Duh. Every day.” I point to the wall and hold up the lantern so he can see the walls, littered with our doodles, our dreams, the things we wanted to remember. I’d traced over them when they faded, wanting to make sure they never disappeared.
“I thought of you, too,” he murmurs. He approaches a wall and runs his finger over some words etched there. Wherever the road leads us . . .
It’s a poem he’d written, unfinished. He liked to write pretty words on the walls. Some his, some belonging to others. I was never very good at it, but Noah? He had a romantic heart.
No, I’ll never, ever believe he just fucks.
“I’m not much for writing poems anymore. It’s been a long time since I thought that way.” His fingers trace another line. I know exactly what that one says, even in darkness, as I have the map of this place written on my every heartbeat. That one is a Byron poem. As if reading my thoughts, he says, “See the mountains kiss high heaven. And the waves clasp one another.”
I come up close behind him. I know his memory. It was the week from hell, for me anyway. We’d had to memorize a poem. He’d memorized some long, difficult thing with infinite stanzas from T.S. Eliot, because if there was one thing Noah could show off, it was that big ol’ brain of his. He’d helped me pick the shortest one, and I still had trouble.
But funny, I know it now. Forever. “No sister-flower would be forgiven
if it disdain’d its brother,” I whisper.
We finish the rest of the poem in unison, smiling at each other.
“And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?”
It seems to be leading up to something, a something that never happens, because when we’re done, it’s so quiet and we’re frozen, just looking at each other. I swear I’d hear our heartbeats if it wasn’t for the song of the crickets.
“I was terrible at that,” I mumble. But without a word, he takes my hand and pulls me flush against him, then tucks a finger under my chin, tilting my mouth to his. He tastes like tobacco and fresh air, and his lips are so soft and warm enough to feel like home. His kiss sings to me of that night in the pool shed, though there is very little about it that’s the same. Yes, it’s us, but we’re older and we’ve done this before.
So why am I trembling so much? Why is he?
“God, Ari,” he murmurs into my skin. “God.”
He’s that tongue-tied kid again. And I can’t say I’m much better. “I know,” is the only eloquent thing I can get out, over and over again, in something less than a whisper.
His lips trail down my jawline, and he just holds his head there, resting his forehead on my shoulder. My hands find their way over his broad back. He murmurs, “There’s nothing written on that wall over there.”
“Yeah,” I tell him. The bare wall behind me stands out, of course, because I’d kept it that way for a reason. I knew there was more to the story of us. “I was saving it for when you came back.”
He takes in a breath, and slowly lets it out. “Oh, Ari. I’m sorry,” he whispers into my neck. “You never stopped believing. And I was the weak one and gave up.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
He says, “That night. I’ve played it over and over again in my mind, a million times since. Everything was wrong with it. You know, even when I was eleven, I dreamed what our first kiss would be like.”
“You did?”
“More than anything. I mean, I more like fantasized about it, because I didn’t think it would ever happen. In my fantasies, it wasn’t in a grubby old pool shed, and it wasn’t . . . let’s just say, that night, you did everything beautifully, like I’d imagined. You were the fantasy. But I’ve spent the past seven years thinking of how I’d blown it.”
“You didn’t blow it . . . you just . . . I wasn’t ready. I was twelve. But I trust you, Noah. Any way you want to touch me, anything you want to do now . . . I’ll want.”
He groans softly. “That’s some invitation.”
“I mean it.”
“You’re still the fantasy, Ari. And I don’t want to ruin it. What if we just . . . I wonder . . .” He pauses, fishing for the words.
“What?”
His voice is soft, hoarse. “I’m just wondering. If everything hadn’t happened. If we were kids again. What would you have wanted me to do?”
I start to laugh, because hell, it’s been a lifetime, can I even remember what that was like? I’d spent a lot of my time wanting never to be that awkward age again.
But then I realize something.
He’s never been that age. Not really.
He didn’t follow the usual timeline; not even close. His was a mix of awkward epiphanies, leaps and stops, milestones swaddled in confusion, pleasure drowned in fear.
And now he’s looking at me, and I can recall perfectly that awkward boy who never quite knew how to act. He wants to know what normal thirteen year olds do.
“Do you want me to show you?” I ask.
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
“My pleasure.” I hold my fingers in front of his face and wiggle them like I’m casting a spell. “Close your eyes. You’re thirteen.”
He does as I tell him, a small, fragile smile on his lips. I stand on my toes, wrap my arms around his neck, and brush my lips over his, very gently.
He tenses. “I’m sorry. I must taste like cigarette smoke.”
I do it again. “No. You taste like you. I love it. I love your taste.” Still, something’s missing. Ah, music. “One second.” I pull out my phone and he starts to open his eyes. “No peeking!” I tell him, finding some old slow song we used to like in middle school. Then I snake my arms around his neck and start to sway with him.
He’s still closing his eyes, swaying with me. “What is this?”
“Slow dancing. You never . . .”
He shakes his head.
I’m about to tell him he’s been missing out, but he knows that. God, he’s missed so much. And maybe he thinks it’s too late and he isn’t worth it, or it doesn’t mean anything anymore, but I don’t care. I want him to experience it. I want to wipe away the past few years and bring him back to when we were pre-teens. Start when things were crazily confusing, yet so simple. I pull him to me and kiss him on the ear. “You were the only one I wanted to do this with, you know,” I whisper.
He nods, and the breeze blows around us, rattling the leaves. I can feel his body trembling under his thin t-shirt. When I look up, I see the glistening track of a tear on his cheek, right near that sad-clown birthmark.
“Oh. I’m sorry. Did I . . . Are you okay?”
He doesn’t open his eyes. He just nods, holding me closer to his chest. “Yeah. Just. This. This is perfect.”
“But you’re crying.”
“I haven’t done that in years.”
“So crying is good?”
“Yeah. Crying is very good.”
I kiss the salty track on his cheek and lead him to cushions from some old patio furniture. We lie down, side by side, and I hover over him, kissing his lips again. My fingers entwine with his, between our hearts, and I sweep the hair out of his eyes with the other hand. He gazes up at me, kind of in awe. “Thank you for this.”
I smile. “Any time. All the time, if you want.”
“That’s some invitation,” he whispers again.
“Like I said, I mean it.”
I nestle next to him with my head on his chest. He wraps an arm around me, and uses the other to prop his head up. “It was here, all those years ago,” he whispers, looking up at the criss-cross wooden beams above us, those yellowing bird pictures. He’s studying them carefully, maybe remembering all the sweat and blood we put in to getting that ceiling just so.
“Hmm?” I murmur, counting his perfect, strong heartbeats.
There’s a small smile on his face. “When I imagined it. When I imagined my first kiss with you, it was here.”
#
By Wednesday, our street had transformed. Police cars had never travelled up or down Peasant, and now here they were, all the time. They’d stop in the Templetons’ front driveway, sometimes one, but often two or three. Other cars showed up, and once or twice, a news van. I watched all of it from my window, and at night we’d turn on the news. It was surreal to see reporters standing in front of our home. They’d even interviewed Mrs. Burns, who said that “Noah was a good, quiet boy.”
Asked about Annie, she’d said, “That woman looked like trouble.”
“Well, of course,” my mother grumbled. “She knew it all along. Award her the medal. She knew Annie was trouble waiting to happen, and yet she did absolutely nothing about it.”
The fact was, none of us knew. But looking back, everything seemed like a hint. She’d rarely pack him wholesome lunches; for someone who complained how Netflix made people fat, she gave him an awful lot of junk food. She dressed so well but he always looked like a street urchin. She was heavily into fitness, showing she was self-absorbed and not family-minded. She’d been a former model who couldn’t stand to be tied down in a small town. And sometimes she’d look at me like I was the devil, corrupting her stepson. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like this was just bound to happen.
The official story, or at least, the story that kept being rep
orted on the news, was that Annie had taken Noah. It didn’t matter if it was against his will or not; because he was under eighteen, it was considered a kidnapping. Police had discovered their SUV in a parking lot in Ohio Tuesday night. People reported sightings everywhere from the Chicago O’Hare airport to Japan. But none of those leads ever panned out.
This caused huge excitement at school. The news vans showed up in the parking lot, and the principal spoke with the reporters for a while. Everyone theorized as to where he could be.
When I sat down at lunch, Claire said, “So where do you think he is, Ari? As his best friend, you have to have some ideas.”
All the heads swung to look at me. I cleared my throat, wiped my bleary eyes. I’d spent the night before in the treehouse, trying to come up with a theory. I traced my finger over all the things we’d written on the walls, thinking it would give me a clue, but I had nothing. “I don’t know.”
“I think,” Gabe said, grinning. “He was getting some from that hot stepmom of his.”
“Ew!” a bunch of the girls said in unison.
Claire said, “That’s nuts. She was like, fifteen years older than him. And a model. And Noah was, well, Noah.”
Gabe looked defiant. “Say ew all you want, girls. But Noah’s fresh meat. Cougars love that shit.”
I felt sick at the prospect. Getting some? Oh, no. Gabe might think that way, but not Noah. Never would Noah even think of doing something like that. Not in a million years. I mean, we were only in eighth grade, and like Claire said, Noah was, well, Noah.
Still, I felt horrible for him. I missed him. Was he hurt, or worse? Was he thinking of home?
Was he thinking of me?
Chapter Eighteen
Things went on like that for some time, though.
Yes. Over six years.
Six years? What was the day-to-day like?
It was kind of routine. We worked a lot. Got the chores done. When the chores were done, we’d go to bed. I learned the men didn’t have set bedrooms—it was the women who did, and they’d choose what man they wanted to invite into their bed. Annie started thinking it was good that we “follow the rules” with that, even though she never followed any of the other ones. So we started exploring, being with other people. On the weekends, we’d have parties.
Lost Cause Page 17