by Jen Brooks
“I hope this is okay,” I say.
“I’ve never actually been here.”
“It’s been a while for me.”
The driveway is wide enough for only one car, so there are a few turnouts along the way. Kylie ducks into one to let a car heading toward us pass. Then we find our way into the dirt parking lot, and I put a handful of birdseed into a baggie. We go up to the welcome building to pay six dollars for a two-person day pass and are given a photocopied map of the sanctuary. We head for the rockery down the Chickadee Trail.
I don’t remember this trail in particular, but my fondest memory of coming here as a kid is of chickadees following through the trees in order to eat seed from our hands. Kylie and I find the entrance to a woodland trail, well cleared and well marked with signposts at the numerous intersections with other trails. The birds start stalking us almost instantly.
We go a little ways down a hill before I put some birdseed in Kylie’s hand and take some for myself. A few chickadees descend into the branches just above us and cock their heads as they judge the hands that mean to feed them. One daring bird does a flyby and perches on a branch just out of reach. Kylie jerks her hand in surprise, which doesn’t do much for the chickadee’s confidence.
Another chickadee chances a landing on my hand, its gentle claws grabbing hold as it pecks a seed from my palm. Then it’s gone.
Kylie stretches out her hand for another try. When a chickadee lands on it, I can see her work to avoid flinching at the touch of the claws, and she manages not to scare the bird away. It pauses a couple of seconds before pecking a seed and taking it to the trees.
Now there are something like a dozen birds chirruping around us. Most of them are chickadees, but there’s also one I think is called a nuthatch, and another whose name I totally forget. My mom once taught me the names of birds that came to our backyard feeder, but those names have long since left me.
Kylie is thoroughly enjoying herself. The little black-capped birds dive and peck, and I lower my hand so she’ll get all the action. “Hello, little one,” she says.
The birds pick her hand clean, so we consult our map and decide to continue on to the rockery. We have to cross a couple of boardwalks to get through some wetlands, and on the way we rest on an observation bench overlooking a pond and a group of foraging ducks. The chickadees have followed us even though there aren’t any trees this far out on the boardwalk. They hop along at our feet between flybys. I throw some seed at them. Kylie throws some at the ducks.
“You’ve surprised me, Jonathan.”
“How so?”
“By taking me here. I wouldn’t have thought you were the kind of person who gets a kick out of feeding birds.”
“I came here because I thought you were the kind of person who’d get a kick out of it.” I give her the bag of birdseed, relinquishing control of the rations. She tosses a little more at the ducks, who paddle over and dip their beaks into the water.
Kylie’s thigh is pressed against mine. Despite the width of the bench, we’ve chosen to sit so close that we touch. The April sun shines down with that spring reminder, after a long New England winter, that sunshine should feel warm on the skin. I’m ready to talk seriously with Kylie, but I don’t dare spoil the moment. We just sit and throw seed.
When the supply of seed grows low, Kylie zips the top as if to conserve for later what’s left. Then she goes still. Not stiff-still but quiet-still. Awkwardness settles between us because, with the birdseed put away and the ducks paddling off, we should resume our walk to the rockery, but instead we sit, thighs touching, because this closeness is nice and the air is charged with desire to be closer.
Kylie turns her face to me, so I look back at her. Her eyes search mine, a strange darting from left eye to right eye and back, as if the two don’t match and have to be studied separately. Her gaze flicks to my lips. She wants me to kiss her. If I don’t, she might press up and kiss me.
I turn to the ducks. Despite her normal-ish demeanor, something still isn’t quite right. Her calm is tinged with a little bit of effort. Like she’s trying to be patient. After a second or two of my studying waterfowl, she gets the hint and slouches back down. I want to reassure her I’m not rejecting her, just not convinced she’s herself enough to be making proper kissing decisions.
As compensation I stand and offer a hand. She gives me hers, and as we continue down the boardwalk, I regret the offer. Her hand is too warm and her grip too tight. Our steps don’t fall into rhythm, so our bonded arms don’t swing comfortably to our strides. We alternate leading down the trail, tugging on each other as if we’ve been glued together involuntarily. I don’t have the guts to release her. Her fingers tangle between mine and squeeze. She wouldn’t let me go anyway.
We make it over the bridge by the beaver pond, and the pine needles on the trail thin out into pure dirt. The rockery is just ahead, a pile of giant boulders stacked into a two-story mound with a tunnel built through one side and a patio of natural boulder at the top. We spiral through the tunnel and up to the top, where we have an obstructed view of the pond through pine branches. Chickadees stalk us, twittering in the branches, hoping for another meal. The seed baggie sticks out of Kylie’s pocket, so with my free hand I tug it out, but can’t open it one-handed. Kylie sees what I’m trying to do but stubbornly hoards my hand while pretending her focus is on the view.
I give up on the seed and pretend I’m also interested in the view. Kylie’s eyes follow a bird, and she takes a step closer to me as if she needs to come closer to track the bird. Her chest grazes my arm. My body responds with a tremor.
The woods are alive with birdsong and pine branches shushing in the breeze. Sunlight catches ripples on the pond below. The boulders of the rockery stand, ancient and mossy and built as a stage for me to give Kylie what she wants. The rational part of me knows she’s not herself, but another part wonders if she might genuinely be attracted to a guy who takes a girl to a bird sanctuary. I didn’t choose this place to make her like me. I chose it because it was a peaceful spot to sort out whatever is between us. I don’t feel at peace right now.
“Come on, Kylie,” I say, and tug her toward the path down from the rockery.
It’s like pulling on a statue. She doesn’t budge.
“Are you mad at me or something?” she asks.
“No.”
“Have you changed your mind, then? About liking me?”
“Of course not.”
“You just seem distant all of a sudden.”
“And you feel intense all of a sudden.”
The pressure of her grip lightens, but she doesn’t let go. I now bear some responsibility for keeping our hands together.
“You’re giving me such an adrenaline rush,” she says, “I can’t help it. I’m always thinking about you, and we haven’t actually been in each other’s presence all that much, so now that we’re here, it’s just . . . intense for me.”
“You don’t think that’s weird? It disturbed you before.”
“I’m still disturbed. It’s just that I’m kind of accepting it.”
“Acceptance isn’t a reason for being together. It would be better if you liked me.”
“I do like you.”
“If you loved me, then.”
“Maybe I do. I’ve never felt this way about anyone. Don’t people write songs about how love just overwhelms them when they don’t necessarily want it to? I’m overwhelmed by you. But I’m not sure anymore that’s a bad thing.”
“You don’t know me enough to love me, Kylie.”
“You’d be surprised what I know. It’s like I sent out a little Kylie spy to study you, and she came back with all your secrets.”
This comes so close to the reality of the situation that I wonder just how much she does know about everything. I clear the lump rising in my throat. “What secrets would those be?”<
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She blushes. Not just a little pink-cheeked thing but a full-blown scarlet. Her eyes sweep back and forth between mine again. Only, instead of the sensation of being searched, I get the sensation of being told, like she’s trying to convince me of what she knows.
She lets go of my hand and pushes my shirt sleeve up as far as it will go, exposing the scars on my arm, scars no one but a doctor has ever seen in the real world. Her fingers caress the skin, easing over the unevenness like it isn’t there. She pulls the sleeve down and slides both hands up under my shirt. Only, instead of caressing the old burns, she gives my chest a couple of light taps with her fingertip and leans in to kiss the spot.
I let her do this, even though I cringe that she’s chosen to acknowledge the damaged part of me. I search for the romance in her touch, for the evidence that she’s with me because she wants to be, not because the merging has made her do it. Her hands are warm. Her fingers slide away from what’s scarred and around to my shoulder blades. She pulls me against her. Her chest rises with a breath and presses against my chest, and my hands rather clumsily reach for her lower back.
This is a body I know well but am suddenly unsure how to navigate. A subtle variation in the way she moves makes everything new. I pull up the bottom of her shirt so my hands can rest on bare skin. She seems to like that, so I draw her a little closer and hold her bones and curves against me. We part just enough for our mouths to meet, and plunge into a storm of kiss after kiss. This Kylie is not as practiced as the other, but her passion is more arousing than the other Kylie’s skill. We shuffle slowly forward, kissing and moving hands until Kylie’s backed against a boulder. She pulls up my shirt and wrestles it over my head, exposing the story of my burns. I hesitate before pulling off her shirt. This is a public sanctuary, and I don’t want her exposed where someone might stumble upon us. Although I’m sure she’d prefer otherwise, I leave the shirt on and instead slide hands under it to unclasp and loosen her bra. She responds by kissing me harder, and I’m suddenly afraid of where this is going to lead.
Her hands keep moving, and for someone who hasn’t actually been my girlfriend for three years, she knows all the right places to touch. I’m on fire. We move against the boulders, and I’ve given up the sense of sight for the sense of contact. All I feel is Kylie, her fingertips, her mouth, her hands exploring me, my hands exploring her, my mouth full of her. Breathing is hard, she’s moving so fast, and although this feels so exponentially good, little alarms keep ringing in my head. This is not what Kylie would want to do if things weren’t all messed up.
“Kylie.”
Her hands slide to the waistband of my jeans.
“Kylie.”
Our mouths lose contact as she reaches for the button holding my jeans together.
“Kylie, stop.”
She hesitates, fingers on the button. Her lips purse in an expression of impatience. For a second I think she’s angry at me, her cheeks are so red.
“I’m doing it wrong,” she says.
It takes a great deal of self-control to keep talking instead of kissing her again. “If only that were the problem.”
“What’s the problem, then?” She unfastens the button, and I have to lay my hands on hers to make her stop moving.
“I’m worried about you.”
She blinks. Once. Her strange flare of passion sputters, and the red in her face deepens. “I shouldn’t have done this.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t want her to feel bad, but I really don’t want her doing something she’ll regret later, even though it might be too late for that. I cup a hand under her chin and pull our lips back together, softly this time, hoping I’m not making everything worse. Gently, so gently, we kiss again. And again. Kylie relaxes, and I feel much better about this than the frenzy she was moments ago. Our lips caress cheeks, ears, necks. Our hands slide along each other’s skin, but a boundary has been set at the waistline, and I no longer fear we’ll end up going too far to find our way back.
I never quite give up an ear cocked for the danger of someone discovering us, but the trees and birds disappear into my rush of being with Kylie like this, and I don’t hear them again until the sun has moved and we’ve sunk to the ground, side by side.
The rock is cold on my bare back, so I reach over and grab my shirt. Kylie fusses with her own clothes to put them aright. We end up sitting against a boulder, knees up, the sides of our bodies touching. Kylie leans her head back against the boulder, eyes to the cloudless sky. I want more than anything in the world to know what she’s thinking, because I need her to tell me what to think about this.
The birds have scattered into the treetops. The seed supply has remained in the baggie, and they’ve given up. Still they chirp in the distance and flit from branch to branch. From where we sit, we can’t see the pond, only our stone patio ringed by boulders, like we’re sitting inside the tip of a tiny, extinct volcano.
“I’m afraid of what you think of me now,” Kylie says.
“It’s a little hard to think at the moment.” It is. My body is still trying to cool down.
If she were the other Kylie, we would just sit here and be. She would lay her head on my shoulder.
But a familiar intimacy like that doesn’t fit with this Kylie.
She brushes some dirt off her knee. “You’re not glad.”
Is that true? I think it is. I’m not happy that this happened, but I don’t regret it either. It felt good and real and important. Just not necessarily beautiful.
“I’m not not glad,” I say, hoping she doesn’t take that as in insult. “Now we know something about each other we didn’t know before.” This all started with her claim that she had a little Kylie spy feeding her my secrets, so maybe that wasn’t the best thing to say. I lean my head back against the boulder along with her. The sky really is the perfect shade of blue. “If there is a next time, though, a candlelight dinner should probably come first.”
She makes a laugh-ish sound. “Maybe.”
We watch a scattering of chickadees skip through the branches for a bit, before I think it’s time to move along. “Do you want to finish the trail around the pond or head straight back?” I ask.
“I think I’d like to finish the loop, if that’s okay,” she says.
“Then there’s a tree I want to show you.”
I take her hand and lead her down from the rockery. Her grip is casual now, loose enough to be more friendly than amorous, and I’m relieved. We finish the loop, pausing for a few minutes at the hollow tree I used to hide in as a kid. We clatter along the boardwalks skirting the pond and feed the birds again as we ascend the hill back to the parking lot.
After she drops me at Uncle Joey’s house, I wave from the doorway, wondering what emotions she’ll indulge when she gets home. It’s when she’s alone that the pressure seems to build in her, and when she sees me, she releases it. I hope what we’ve just done will ease her burden, at least for the rest of the day.
I wish she could love me for real. It seems like each day she gets a little closer to that point. Is Tess right that the only way she can reach it is to merge with the made-up Kylie? Do I really want to do that to her? If I don’t, will she stay all mixed up forever? A mixed-up love and a merged love aren’t the same thing as real love, and neither is fair for Kylie.
CHAPTER 20
I SHOWER OFF THE SCENE from the rockery and put on some clean clothes. For the millionth time in the last few days, I’m desperate to talk to someone. About Kylie. About world-making. About everything. I could really use a mom and dad right now.
I sit on my bed, calling out to Tess every few seconds. She, at least, knows about my world-making, even if she doesn’t show much sympathy for my Kylie dilemma. I suspect a heart-to-heart with her won’t end up with either answers or reassurance, but I’d still suck it up and talk to her if she’d show. She doesn’t.
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nbsp; I’ve kept Uncle Joey out of the loop for so long, I can’t imagine going to him, but I creep down the stairs anyway to see if the light is on in his bedroom. He’s home. I could walk right up to his door and begin the conversation, but I just can’t think of the words to start.
There’s always Kylie. A choice of two Kylies, both of whom are affected by all this. Both of whom deserve answers as much as I do. The problem is, I just can’t bring myself to reveal my treachery yet.
I need to be in motion, and since I’m freshly dressed, I won’t go for a run. Instead I fish my keys out of the kitchen drawer and get into my pristine, twice-driven, shiny red car. It still smells like new. The odometer reads sixty-one miles. It starts with a roar and almost drives itself out of the driveway.
I travel aimlessly through the streets of Pennington, passing landmarks like Lacy Pastry and Pine Street Cemetery, hardly noticing them. Fate guides my driving where it will.
I find myself downtown, a few blocks west of Main Street. I pull into a space in a small parking lot and cut the ignition. My car’s engine is pretty smooth, but the silence is strong when the engine stops.
Before me stands a church, Auntie Carrie’s church. The one Uncle Joey converted to and shared with me for a couple of Easters. The one in which they would have raised the child my aunt was carrying when she died. The idea to come here occurred to me only when I reached downtown, but now that I’m here, I’m afraid to go inside. Too many mysteries behind those doors, mysteries of a faith I don’t understand or possess. I don’t get why people go to church.
But I get the need to talk to God. I did it so much when I was eight years old. I’d lie in bed staring at the ceiling. Mostly I feared I was talking to myself, but the idea that someone might possibly be listening, that someone who could intervene in matters of death might take pity on me, gave me comfort. Praying was an excuse to dissipate my sorrow into the air, as well as a way to make my sorrow have meaning because God was someone I could blame.