Truest

by Jackie Lea Sommers

“That doesn’t sound good.”

  “No. And bastards on the movie forums were discussing this quantum mechanics bullshit that’s got her wondering if the universe is always splitting and there are all these different realities.” He paused, really upset. “Then she started crying—like, really crying. Bent-over-on-the-floor crying. Mom came in and tried to help. I was standing over them, watching it all go down like I was looking into a hamster cage. I am just so sick of this shit. West—” I heard something in the background, as if one of his parents had just poked their head into his room. “I’ve gotta go,” he said. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, wishing I were at his house, if not for Laurel then at least for Silas.

  I sat on the steps alone, expecting my family to be home soon. I wondered about the methods Laurel had researched in the early-morning hours. Hypnotism. Would something like that really work? I didn’t know anything about it. It sounded kinda hokey to me, but what if it could honestly make Laurel forget about ideas that were preying on her? Then again, even if it did make her forget, it would be up to the rest of us to keep her from ever rediscovering, wouldn’t it? Silas and I couldn’t even protect her from a drive-in movie last night; there was no way we could keep her safe. The answer was to somehow unlock Laurel’s mind.

  It all seemed so impossible.

  I pictured her on the floor of their den, huddled over as if she had stomach cramps while her mother tried to calm her down and her brother stared at the whole scene in frozen horror. The return of the banshee. I felt terrible for Silas; I could go the rest of my life without hearing those screams again.

  “Whatcha doing, kiddo?” Mom asked as she and my siblings climbed the front steps.

  “Just thinking,” I said. “Is Dad on his way?” I wondered how much Glen and Teresa had told him about Laurel’s condition.

  “Oh, he’s off again, heading over to the hospital with the Talcotts. Miriam Talcott—you know, Tony and Janie’s grandma?—isn’t expected to make it much longer, and Dan and Monica asked your dad to come to the hospital and be with the family.”

  If Mrs. Talcott died today, we virtually wouldn’t see Dad for the next week or so—first, there’d be the “last rites” or whatever it was that he did alongside deathbeds; then, comforting the family; then, planning and executing the funeral; and after that, a head-splitting migraine that would leave him cooped up in my parents’ bedroom for twenty-four hours. After all that, he’d be behind on planning his sermon, so he’d practically live in the office all of Saturday just to get ready for Sunday morning. “This blows,” I said, and then, “I know, I know. Don’t say ‘blows.’”

  “Your dad’s a good man,” Mom said, parroting the rest of the town. “Come inside, all right? Lunch is in the Crock-Pot.”

  “Five minutes,” I promised.

  It was a month into summer and I’d hardly seen my dad.

  Was it my fault? Sure, I’d been busy—but I thought of all the times I had sought him out, stopped by his office, asked Mom where he was or when he’d come home, and I realized that, no, he was the busy one.

  It hadn’t been this way when I was younger. When Libby was a baby, and before Shea was born, my dad used to come into my bedroom every night, read to me, and listen to me say my prayers, which usually amounted to saying “God bless” everyone I knew even a tiny bit.

  There was this one book I especially loved because of its tiny pictures, and Dad read it using different voices. Wink & Wallace Do the Waltz—about a girl named Wink, who was hosting a dance, and about her father Sir Wallace, who had to fight through forest and fence and fire and flood to get to the party to dance with his daughter.

  Mom thought it would give me nightmares, reading about disastrous obstructions before bed, but it never did—I loved the way Sir Wallace was so brave and so persistent to get to his daughter. When Dad started calling me Wink, I was quietly thrilled. It always made me think my dad would do anything to get to me. A couple of times he even let me get out of bed and stand on his feet, and together we’d “waltz” around the room till Mom would whisper up the stairs, “Kerry! It’s way past her bedtime!”

  So I’d snuggle under the covers, and he’d rub my back while he told me stories. Stories about his childhood and the trouble that he and his best friend Tommy D would get in to, about the animals that Grandpa Paul had on the farm where Dad grew up, about how he’d met Mom, about their first dates. He stayed until I fell asleep.

  And even after Shea was born, we still reserved Saturday nights for our family. We’d play Mouse Trap or Cootie or watch a movie, make pizza or stovetop popcorn. I loved those nights, when the five of us were cozy in our little parsonage and we got Dad all to ourselves.

  It occurred to me now as I sat outside my house that I couldn’t even remember the last time Dad was in my room—those nights when he’d read me stories and rub my back felt like another lifetime. Was it Dad’s fault? Was it mine, for whining about family nights and being a typical moody teenager? Was it really anyone’s fault?

  My heart was a heavy, wet sponge in my chest, one I needed my dad to wring out.

  My dad: busy, absent, distracted—a good man.

  Elliot called that afternoon. “Shit,” I muttered when I saw his number show up. I’d forgotten to call him back.

  “Hi,” I said, almost flinching at what I knew was going to be an uncomfortable conversation. Then, hearing how abrasive my voice was, I overcompensated with a cheery “How’s your day?”

  “Hey,” said Elliot, his voice flat. “Can we talk, West?”

  “Of course,” I said. “About?”

  “You know what. That asshole hijacked our date, and then you left with him! I felt like an idiot sitting through that movie.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Are you?” He didn’t sound angry—only hurt—and that made me feel worse.

  “Yes.”

  Elliot was quiet for a while, then said, “This sucks. This summer, I mean. It just fucking sucks. I feel like . . . like everyone was busy, so you found new friends.”

  What could I say? It was mostly true. “Did you want me to sit inside and read all summer? Spend every day at the beach listening to Marcy and Bridget gossip?”

  “Yes,” he said honestly. “I guess I did.” After a moment, he said, “I hate being the jackass. It’s who people expect me to be. Like being able to catch a football means I’m allowed to treat people like shit—”

  “You’re not a jackass.”

  “—and I hate that. So I’m not going to tell you to stop hanging out with him, because I don’t want to be that guy, you know? But I just want you to know I felt like shit when you left last night.”

  I breathed in deeply and let it all out in a noisy exhalation. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” he asked, and I couldn’t tell if he was clarifying what I’d said or if he was stunned by my noncommittal response.

  “I’m sorry,” I amended. “Look, I can’t really explain it, but something was wrong with Laurel last night, and I wanted to make sure she’d be okay.”

  Elliot was quiet for moment. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t press for any details, for which I was grateful.

  “I really like the Harts,” I continued, “and I want you to like them too. Let’s get the whole group together again. The Fourth of July. Trudy will be home; the camp staff gets it off. We can watch fireworks from the roof of the old Griggs place. I know Mr. and Mrs. Hart won’t mind. What do you think?”

  “I’d rather it would be just me and you,” he said.

  “On their roof?” I teased.

  “Anywhere,” he said, and it was supposed to sound like a joke, and it was so far from a joke, and we both knew it, so Elliot rushed to say, “That sounds good. Fourth of july. I’m in. If that’s what you want.”

  “That’s what I want,” I said.

  That evening, I was reading and trying to avoid Libby and Shea as they raced around t
he house, when Silas called. “I have to get out of here,” he said. “Can I come over?”

  “My siblings are the most annoying creatures on this earth,” I said doubtfully, hearing a high-pitched squeal from one of them and then something being knocked over. Dad had brought home these stupid paper dolls for Libby, somehow failing to realize that, at twelve, she was way too old for them, and she and Shea had been chasing each other around with them all night.

  “Honestly, I can’t imagine that any sibling is more frustrating than my own right now.” His voice sounded so tired—as if it were dragging suitcases of defeat. I wondered at which point over the last few weeks I had learned the nuances of his voice. The sheer exhaustion I heard made me wish that I could save him.

  “Ugh, family,” I said. “Listen, come pick me up. We’ll go somewhere else.”

  “Okay, bring the radio.”

  “I will.”

  “Leaving now.”

  I assumed that he’d text me from the driveway, but fewer than five minutes later, he was knocking on my bedroom door as he pushed it open.

  “You can’t be in here,” I told him right away, half because my room was its usual messy hovel, half because those really were the rules.

  “Your parents sent me up,” he said.

  “They—they did?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Weird. Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Your room smells like you,” he said.

  “Dirty pillow and dusty shelves?”

  He laughed. “No,” he said. “Like black cherries and book pages. And molasses.”

  “Molasses?”

  “Brown sugar, maybe.” He closed his eyes, breathed in deeply, and confirmed, “Yup, brown sugar.”

  Just outside my open door, Libby tore after Shea with a paper doll in each hand, past my room and down the stairs. We followed them down.

  “Going out!” I shouted from where I stood by the front door.

  Mom was lost in her scrapbooking and said absently, “All right, have fun!” Dad was reading the newspaper, home for once.

  Shea suddenly braked, and Libby slammed into him. “Are you the new Elliot?” he asked Silas.

  Libby’s eyes were as wide as I imagined my own were. Mom and Dad looked up.

  “Because that’d be okay, if you are,” Shea added.

  I was tongue-tied, but Silas didn’t miss a beat. “Sure am.” He picked my brother up under the armpits, tossed him into the air, then tucked Shea under his arm like a human-sized football. He ran across the living room with a stiff arm like the Heisman pose and shouted, “Touchdown!” in the “end zone.” Then he looked at Libby. “Should I spike the ball?”

  She nodded, grinning, but Shea was screaming in delight, “Nooooooo!”

  Silas pretended to spike Shea into the ground and then, from behind Shea, held up each of my brother’s hands in a victory celebration.

  Libby and Shea were laughing; my mom was laughing too. My dad looked pleased—and maybe a little confused.

  “We’ve gotta go,” I said before Shea—or my dad—could ask any more questions. Silas waved to my family as we left.

  We drove to the Green Lake beach, even though it was closed after sundown. Silas parked in the empty lot, and we got out of the car and walked to the lifeguard stand, me scrambling to keep up with Silas’s long strides. In spite of the tiny intermission with my family, I hadn’t forgotten the reason we were at the beach: things were bad at the old Griggs house. His frustration made him fast.

  He climbed up first and then helped me, before pulling his sweatshirt hood over his head and leaning back. The wooden stand, painted white, was like a caricature of a chair, the seat so huge that even Silas’s long legs barely hung over the end. “Your brother and sister are fun,” he said, then admitted, “It’s like the freaking apocalypse at my house. My grandparents have been there all day, and Mom’s on edge. And Dad—well, it’s not good.”

  I sat beside him, knees pulled up to my chest. A light from the parking lot shone on us, and Silas groaned to see it was a cop car’s headlights. “It’s okay,” I said to Silas, waving to the police officer. “Sgt. Kirkwood is Trudy’s dad. He’d let me get away with anything short of murder.” The squad car drove away silently.

  “I am not used to this small-town thing yet,” Silas murmured. “Is it time for your show?”

  “You don’t want to talk?”

  “We will. I don’t want you to miss your show. Besides, I feel about a thousand times better already just being away from home and with you.” In the dark, and with his hood up, I couldn’t see his face, but a thrill went through me. I felt powerful, like some sort of human talisman. I wanted to push his hood back, cup his face in my hands so that he had to look me in the eyes, and tell him, I will stay as long as you need.

  Instead, I pulled the radio from my pocket and we listened to August Arms. Tonight’s stories were about the search for another dimension, theories on the JFK assassination, and a hypothetical roller coaster designed to kill its passengers. The show’s host explained how a PhD candidate at a London art school created an art concept for a coaster with seven consecutive loops that inflict an intense gravitational force on the passengers that starved the brain of oxygen.

  Silas turned the radio off. “That makes me sick,” he said, leaning back again. “Hypothetical shit. Why do people spend so much time thinking about ridiculous things?”

  “I don’t know. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s not the show. I just—” We sat in the dark, quiet for a while, and then Silas said, “My dad got an offer from UA–Fairbanks to go back to teach an eight-week summer session, and he told them before that he wasn’t sure, but now . . . well, I guess he’s gonna do it. He tried to pass it off as some great opportunity, but I can tell he just wants to get away. Especially after today.”

  “That’s terrible!” I said, shocked. “He’s leaving?”

  “I mean, it’s been on the table all summer—actually, since before we left. We already had the tickets even. The timing just”—he sighed—“really, really sucks. Now, when Laurel’s so messed up. And it’s just . . . unceremonious.”

  It was a weird choice of words, but seeing as he was the human thesaurus, I let it go.

  “And ignoble. And risky. And necessary.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, confused. “Um, are we still talking about your dad leaving?”

  Silas put his hands to his face and rubbed at his eyes as if he was exhausted—or gearing up for war. Green Lake was smooth as black ice in front of us. All the way across the lake we noticed Silas’s neighbors in Heaton Ridge, or rather, their yard lights, which were perfectly reflected in the dark, still waters. Silas exhaled deeply, pressed his lips together, then looked at me and said, “So, what do you want, Westlin Beck?”

  “From you?” I asked.

  He laughed. “From life. From the universe. Everyone has some deep-seated desire, don’t they? What’s yours?”

  “Oh.” Silas’s question made my blurry outline appear like a strange fog. “I guess I want to go to college and get a good job. Get married someday.”

  “Do you?” he asked.

  This time I laughed. “Uh, yes. Was that answer not good enough for you, Mr. Hart?”

  He shrugged. “I just don’t think that’s it, that’s all. I mean, sure, you might want those things—a lot of people do—but I don’t think they’re your real passion.”

  My mind raced, looking for a place to land—a passion, a real passion. “I don’t know,” I conceded. “I have no goals. My life is so—unremarkable.”

  He looked at me suddenly, frowning hard. “Okay, false,” he said.

  “No, it’s true,” I said. “I have no solid outlines.” I hoped he would know what I meant, because I wasn’t sure I could describe it to him. “I’m undefined.”

  “I can define you,” he said. “Or start to, at least.”

  “Oh, you can, can you?” I teased. “Well, let’s hear it, Hart.”
/>
  He pulled his hood off now and treated me to that grin of his—the one that made me want to take flight, the one that felt like a storm cell was raging in my chest, thunder and lightning and hurricane-strength winds and all.

  The one that left me so, so confused.

  I needed Trudy to come sort me out. Something. Someone.

  “Let’s see. Westlin Beck,” he said, “you’re hilarious, and you like quirky, vintage humor, and you’re so brilliant it’s actually intimidating. You’re jealous that every person in Green Lake gets your dad’s attention before you do.”

  “Is it that—”

  “Shh, don’t interrupt. You’d do anything for a friend, and you’re fascinated by words because there’s nothing you love more than a good story—though I think we disagree on what makes a story great, a capital-S Story, you know? I’m still untangling it all, to be honest, but knots intrigue me. I mean, you’re this incredible contradiction, but you’re not undefined.”

  How did he—? An incredible contradiction? Flustered, I asked, “And what do you want?”

  He didn’t hesitate: “I want Laurel to be happy. I want to not care if Laurel’s happy.”

  “But she’s not,” I whispered.

  “And I do,” he added, as the sky came close to hear us breathe.

  fifteen

  Elliot called when I was already in bed that night. “Do you think I’m a contradiction?” I asked him. “An incredible contradiction,” Silas had said. “Knots intrigue me.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Like, that I’m complicated.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Is that something you like about me?” I prompted. I smelled my pillow, then some strands of my hair—did I really smell like black cherries and book pages? Maybe. The brown sugar smell was from my soap.

  “I like everything about you,” he said.

  “You’re sweet,” I said, yawning.

  “Did someone say you’re complicated?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Was it Hart?”

  I was quiet. I knew that bringing up Silas would only make Elliot mad. “No,” I lied. “It was Libby.” I rolled my eyes at my stupid choice: yeah, my twelve-year-old sister would totally be using words like “contradiction.”