“Well, I may be a cover hog, but you snore,” he retorts in protest, and I can’t help but laugh at his face, the mock outrage I see there. But our smiles quickly fade as we stare into each other’s eyes and the room becomes hushed and somber.
“We need to go back,” I say, wrapping my arms around my waist, my bare arms chilled, covered in tiny pricks of gooseflesh.
Riley stops midbutton, his expression grave—a sharp contrast to his usual carefree attitude and ready grin. There’s a moment when I know it would be possible to stuff the words back inside me, but I know that we can’t, that in some ways we’re already back in Plainewood, the orderly rows of tree-lined streets calling our names, the leaves rustling together in the breeze, whispering our secrets.
“I know,” he says with a sigh, his fingers fastening the last button with a finality that makes me want to erase it all, to get in bed with him and stay there forever, living on stale chips, my lips stinging with salt and drunk with the heat of his mouth on mine. But I know I can’t.
“We will,” he says after a long moment. “We are.”
I grab Riley’s jacket, pulling it over my shoulders like a shroud.
• • •
The car ride back seems to fly by, moving too fast, the roads clear of traffic, the speedometer creeping toward eighty. Sunlight fills the interior, warming us without our having to run the heater, and Riley stares straight ahead, quiet, pensive, as if he’s by himself and I’m not really there at all. At a gas station, he buys two cups of coffee, and the car fills with the rich scent of roasted beans. I hold my cup between my hands, grateful for its reassuring warmth even though the coffee itself is beyond atrocious. Riley turns the music way up with a flick of his wrist, the screeching guitars and ponderous drumbeats eliminating any possible hope of conversation.
When I see the exit for Plainewood, my heart starts to skip, and I wonder if it’s the caffeine in my system or my trepidation at being right back where I started. We drive through the center of town, the noise of the day bustling just outside of the windows, a typical Sunday morning, people coming in and out of the bakery on Main Street, church bells ringing intermittently with ecstatic, joyful chimes. As we pass the cemetery, I see Luke walking beneath a tall tree, his fingers trailing the metal fence, and my arm reaches out involuntarily, grabbing on to Riley’s wrist, squeezing it tightly.
“Stop,” I say, suddenly frantic for him to pull over, to let me out. “You can drop me off here.” Riley looks at me, confusion blanketing his face, and pulls the car to the curb, the engine still idling in a slow growl.
“You want to get out here?” Riley asks, taking in the rows of tombstones, the tall oak trees sprinkled throughout the cemetery, their wide arms outstretched.
I nod, one hand on the door, the metal cold under my palm.
“Are you going to be okay?” He reaches over, pushing my hair back with one hand, and the tenderness of his touch almost brings me to tears, makes me want to crawl across the seat and bury myself in his arms.
“I think so,” I say, and for the first time the words feel like a little less of a lie. Not much less, but a start. I push open the car door, and shiver, the morning air still chilly. I turn back to Riley, and he’s staring out the windshield, not watching as I leave.
“Are we still friends?” The words leave my lips before I can second-guess them.
“You bet,” he says, grinning broadly, his eyes shockingly blue in the morning light. “Always.”
I look at him for a long moment, memorizing the lines of his face, the way the sunlight turns his hair to spun gold, how its rays wash everything clean. I get out, closing the door gently behind me, and stand there at the curb as Riley pulls away, exhaust pumping, a trail of vapor hanging in the air long after he turns the corner and disappears out of sight.
SEVENTEEN
The ground under my feet is damp, my heels sinking into the grass, and by the time I make my way across the wide expanse of lawn to Luke’s grave, my shoes are soaked, ankles dotted with droplets of dew. I crane my neck, twisting my head all around, but I don’t see my brother anywhere. My heart dips in disappointment, but I keep going, trudging across the grass until I am right in front of Luke’s headstone, throwing Riley’s jacket to the ground. What I see there makes my hand fly to my mouth, my eyes wide pools of disbelief. I sink to my knees in front of the white stone, MURDERER scrawled across the smooth surface in some kind of thick red marker, the letters jagged and ominous. The stone is cool under my fingers, and I trace each letter as if by doing so I can erase it, dissolve the stain from the pure white surface until nothing remains but the letters of his name.
Lucas David Aronson.
I grab a handful of grass, ripping it up angrily, my face hot and stinging, and scrub the grass against the headstone, using all of my might. When that doesn’t work, I search the perimeter, picking up a rock with a sharp edge, digging it into the stone, scraping the side of it against the letters. I work hard, pushing my hair back with one hand, my shoulders aching, sweat beading on my brow, but the word remains, damaged now, but still staring up at me defiantly, mocking me.
“I wouldn’t knock myself out if I were you.”
When I look to my right, Luke is sitting there, a blade of grass in his mouth, watching me with amusement. Just looking at him, I am angrier than I’ve ever been. I can feel the rage building inside me, a kettle giving off clouds of steam, ready to shriek, ready to make its presence known.
“And why is that?” I say nastily, continuing to scrub at the unyielding stone. “Maybe you don’t care anymore what people think, Luke, but I do.”
He tosses the blade of grass to the side, stares up at the sky, squinting into the sun. I wonder if he can feel the rays on his skin, warming him from the outside in, or if they simply shine through him. “That was always your problem, though, wasn’t it? You cared too much—about everything. I used to hear you practicing your violin at night, playing the same piece over and over, working on it until you got it exactly right. I could almost see you patting yourself on the back afterward.” He lets out a short, dry laugh. “As if getting into some dumb summer program was going to really change your life.”
I put the rock down on top of his grave, stone on stone, and look him in the face, smarting from the meanness of his attack, tears springing to my eyes. I will not cry for you anymore, I tell myself. I will not.
“Well, if we’re really talking now, I guess your problem is that you didn’t care enough. About anything.”
He looks at me, and I can see the outline of the trees directly behind him through the slightly transparent parameters of his head. His eyes are filled with an otherworldly radiance and examine me as coolly as if I am a science experiment, not a real flesh-and-blood human being sitting in front of him. Not his sister. Not anyone who counts. I think of the gun, how he held it so nonchalantly in front of my face. Hey, he said, his face expressionless.
Hey.
“Maybe we just care about different things,” he says, his hands pawing at the grass, ripping it out by the handful. “But I guess you never thought of that.” His face is full of sadness now, and I want to reach out and touch his hair, his shoulder, but something stops me, an invisible force field surrounding his body, a warning.
“When did you start hating me, Luke?” I ask, my voice swallowed up by the words themselves, not sure that I really want to know.
“I don’t hate you, Alys.” His fingers are still full of grass, but he stops ripping it momentarily, holding very still. “I was jealous of you, if you want to know the truth.”
Jealous. Of me. His little sister. The girl who followed him everywhere, diaper sagging at her chubby thighs.
He glances up at me, his features distorted by pain. “You had something you were good at, something you cared about. I had nothing. I was ordinary. Boring. Even Mom and Dad thought so.”
�
�That’s not true, Luke,” I say, protesting. “You were great at science! At math!”
He looks at me skeptically, but I press on, wanting him to see how wrong he was, how stubborn he’s being.
“And you were never boring,” I say. “Never.”
“Well.” His expression shifts to a smirk, Mr. Sarcasm entering the room with a flourish. “Now I’m not.” He lets out a small, dry laugh, and I shiver, picking up Riley’s jacket and wrapping it around my shoulders.
“I don’t want people thinking you’re a killer,” I say quietly, unable to look at him.
He laughs again, bitterly, and even though I can’t see his face, I know he’s looking at me incredulously, that once again I’ve amused him without even trying.
“Why not? It’s what I am.”
I look up as he shakes his head from side to side as if he can’t believe my stupidity, then closes his eyes, his head tilted back as if he’s drinking in the sunlight.
“It’s not all you are,” I mumble, staring over at those red words splashed across his tombstone, the sad brutality of them.
“Don’t you mean ‘were’? I’m dead now, Alys, in case you haven’t noticed.” Luke snorts in that practiced way of his, and I wonder how long I can keep the conversation going without him tearing what’s left of my heart to shreds.
“That day in the library . . . did you want to . . .” I can barely make myself say the words. They stick in my throat, and I have to cough once, hard, to get them out. “Would you have . . . Did you want to . . . shoot me?”
His gaze is steady and without malice. I can almost hear him thinking, the gears in his brain clicking through their delicate circuits.
“I don’t know,” he says finally. “Maybe. I can’t remember.”
I am stunned for a moment, his words pinning me to the earth.
“Why?” I ask, when I can finally speak, because in some way I’ve needed to ask ever since he put a gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger, leaving me here to clean up his mess. My voice is scratched and faded as an old record, the needle skipping. “Why, Luke?”
“Why what?” he answers, perfunctorily as a machine.
“Why did you do it? Hurt all those people?” The words spill roughly from my lips in a torrent of bitterness. He doesn’t answer me right away, so I go on. “Why were you building a bomb, Luke? What the hell were you thinking?”
“You still can’t say it, can you?”
Luke crosses his legs beneath him, resting his elbows on his thighs, his chin in his hands.
“I didn’t just ‘hurt’ them—I shot them. And, as usual, you’re asking the wrong questions.”
There is a pause as I rack my brain, trying to figure out what he means, but come up blank. Aren’t these the only questions? The only questions that count? Sensing my confusion, he tries again, patiently, and all at once I am six years old, sitting on his bed, a book on deep-space travel spread out across my knees, Luke’s voice filling my ears, explaining the world, the universe, the way things work.
But they don’t. They don’t work. Not like this. Not without him.
“It doesn’t matter why I did it. Everyone will just make up their own reasons anyway. They’ll never forget me now, after what I’ve done, but they’ll never have all the answers either. Why doesn’t matter, Alys. Why won’t make you—or anyone else—feel any better. It won’t give you closure. And it won’t bring me back either.” His face suddenly softens, the anger melting away. “No matter how much you want it to.”
“I know that,” I say, and the sudden openness of his expression, the absence of all meanness, disarms me momentarily. Sitting there across from me, he is my brother again, the Luke that I know, the one who put Band-Aids on my scrapes when I fell roller skating in the driveway, who taught me to play cards, reaching over to tousle my hair when I showed off a good hand. The one who protected me from the monster under the bed, from the ever-shifting, unsteady ground outside the front door. “I know it won’t. I just really miss you. I miss you, Luke. And I feel like I can’t, like I’m not allowed to because of what you did, and it hurts. It feels like crap.” The past hangs there in the distance, shimmering but rapidly fading from view. Our arms entwined in an old photograph, chins jutting toward the camera, the weight of his body leaning into mine. I drop my head, crying openly now, unable to stuff my emotions back inside. There is, it seems, no limit to the tears I will cry for him, no end in sight.
“I miss you too, Alys.” It’s getting hard to hear him, and when I look back over, I notice that he’s getting more transparent by the minute, his body blurring wildly around the edges. “So much.” For the first time since he’s been gone, there is something ragged in his words, his expression, a kind of tearing, and I notice that his face is contorted as if he is crying, though no tears fall from his eyes. “And that’s the truth. But you have to let me go.”
I nod, not wanting to agree out loud, to say the words that will make him, like a magic trick, disappear from the world forever, and it dawns on me that as much as he’s frightened and annoyed me in equal measure, that all this time I’ve invited in his spirit. That having his ghost roaming around the house was better than not having him here at all. I’ve clung to his memory, refusing to let go, unable to let him rest.
“You need to get on with your life,” he says, fading in and out, so close, then so very distant. “I need you to do that for me.”
“How?” I say, watching as his feet begin to dissolve, then his legs, then his torso, until all that remains is the spectral glow of his face. “How am I supposed to do that?”
He smiles, his eyes shining brilliantly, so full of unbridled love and compassion that it threatens to take my breath away, his face half gone now, the rows of tombstones growing increasingly sharper behind his skull. He winks at me, that old mischievous Luke I lost so long ago.
“You’ll find a way,” he says right before he vanishes completely, leaving me alone with his grave, his body buried six feet under, dissolving into the dark soil of the earth with each day, each hour that passes, until nothing of him remains.
There is the smell of hothouse roses drifting through the air, the first breath of summer, and I run my hands over his headstone, then lie down so that my head is on top of it. I want, at this moment, to get as close to him as I can, to make sure that wherever he is, he can hear me, can hear my voice clearly when I tell him what I’ve wanted to say for so long now, the words that have stayed stuck inside me, unheard by anyone at all.
“I loved you,” I whisper to him through the stone, picturing the words echoing all the way down to his coffin. The past tense sounds funny to me, not quite right, so I try one more time.
“I love you, Luke,” I whisper, hoping with all of my heart, cracked and patched in places but still beating, that he can hear me, that he understands, and all at once it hits me that just because he’s gone now doesn’t mean the love is too—I can love my brother even though he’s dead. I can love him in spite of the fact that he’s done terrible things, even though he’s hurt people inexplicably. Me among them.
I lie back, staring at the blueness of the sky, my arms outstretched in a cross, wet grass tickling my bare legs. I’m cold, but I don’t want to get up and move, don’t want to go home just yet. I know that in less than a week, whether I’m ready or not, I’ll get in the car and drive to Madison, traveling down the long road, so familiar that I could navigate it blindfolded, taking the exit for the university. I will drive onto campus, marveling at the beauty of the oak trees lining the long paths, the redbrick buildings, so stately and somber. When my name is called, I will stand on the stage in front of the judges and raise my violin, nod to the accompanist seated behind the black, gleaming piano, and bring my bow down onto the strings, my body trembling with excitement and fear, the lure of possibilities wide open. My mother will be in the audience, clutching her purse in her lap, huggin
g it tightly in her nervousness, Grace seated beside her, muttering softly under her breath, urging me toward the finish. Maybe even my father will be there, nodding his head, one foot tapping the floor, keeping time with the music that fills the womb-like theater: the sweet, high wail of the strings, his hand reaching for my mother’s, their wedding rings crossing in the dim light of the auditorium. And whether or not I drop a note or two, my fingers tripping on the strings, even if the bow falls clumsily from my hands, I know that whatever happens next, life, in all of its wonder and grace, will open up again when the first pulses of light hit the morning sky each day, painting it indelibly—even if I don’t make the cut.
Or maybe that’s just what I want to happen. I’m not innocent enough anymore to believe that my life will change overnight, simply from one well-played piece of music, one moment of beauty lighting my way out of the darkness. This is not that story, and I am not that girl. Not anymore. But I hold on to the thought nonetheless, cradling it in my chest like the first spring flower, like a poem or a sonata.
A song.
The sun peeks its face from behind a cloud, and I close my eyes, taking in the feel of the rays on my face and arms, the cool, damp lawn under my dress, the moisture soaking through. I know it will be ruined, the silk grass stained and wrinkled, but right now I don’t care. I breathe deeply, in and out, and I know that when I’m ready, I’ll get up and brush the grass from my skirt, slapping my thighs briskly, my stinging skin alerting me to the fact that I’m here, I’m still here, I’m alive, and when I walk out of the cemetery, I will leave behind an infinitesimal pinch of the sadness I’ve carried with me for the past few months, the tiniest fraction of it, even though I know all too well that there will never be a time when I will forget completely, when the memory of that day will fade from the fabric of my dreams. The imprint of that sadness, that regret, still colors me like a stain, but one that someday I might learn to live with, one that, if I’m lucky, will grow lighter with each passing year, each day that ends with my face turned upward to take in the pinpricks of stars, light-years away, the beauty of the known universe, the miracle of another day, another chance.
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