In time, we found our way to the center of the maze, and after finding our way back out, we picked our own strawberries, a whole bucket for five dollars, sampling from the field as we picked. Before we left, we stopped at the gift shop, which smelled of donuts and sugar, to buy a loaf of homemade bread and apple butter, then we took the bread, butter, and our bucket of berries to the Green Lake beach, where we sat on the sand as we ate, watching kids splash in the water.
Outside the buoys, there were some swans on the lake, along with five tiny cygnets, little cinereous fluff balls the color of smoke with beaks that looked like pencil lead. Silas nodded toward them and said, “A lamentation of swans.”
The adults were so serene with their long, graceful necks and sharp black beaks, their feathers shockingly white against the gray-green water. They looked like floating lotus blossoms.
I nodded, eating a strawberry. “Have you wondered why it’s called that?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Actually, I’ve looked it up online.”
“Find anything?”
“Just bits and pieces that I’m putting together myself. Nothing authoritative.” I loved that he used that word. “Like, for example, you’ve heard the term ‘swan song’?”
“Yeah, like what you sing if you get kicked off a talent show on TV?”
“Yeah. Supposedly, it has to do with the idea that the most beautiful song a swan sings is the one before it dies. I guess Socrates said something like that once upon a time, I don’t know.”
“Hmmm,” I murmured, letting the sweetness of the strawberry rest on my tongue.
“There’s this song by Orlando Gibbons,” he said, pulling it up on his phone, then reading the lyrics:
“The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approach’d, unlock’d her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sang her first and last, and sang no more.
Farewell, all joys; O Death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.
“And Billy Collins has a poem about swans too, and he says the swans are the true geniuses because they’re beautiful and brutal and know how to fly. That’s Laurel, don’t you think?” asked Silas. “She’s the swan. She figured out how to be both beautiful and brutal.”
“But not to fly,” I whispered, thinking actually of how beautiful Silas was, how badly I wanted to touch him, to push his hair out of his eyes. “Stop it,” I told him—and myself. “This is your day, and that’s the second time you’ve brought up Laurel. Back in the car. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
At Legacy House, I knocked on Gordon’s door, and when he opened it—dark glasses on—I said immediately, “Gordon, it’s West. I have a friend with me.”
His smile lit up his face. “Westie!” he said. “Come in, come in! Pasan, jóvenes. And whom have you brought along?”
“Gordon, this is Silas,” I said, taking one of Gordon’s hands and guiding it to Silas’s, where they shook. “He’s my new business partner. His family moved into the old Griggs house last month.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” said Silas.
Gordon smiled. “Not as pleased as I am. Come in; sit down. You two smell good, como la playa. Fresh water and wind. Westie, you taking care of that book of poems you borrowed?”
“Oh. It’s in your barrister,” I reminded him. “I brought it back a little while ago.”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
Silas’s eyes widened at the sight of Gordon’s home library as we followed Gordon into his living room. He sat in his rocker, packed his pipe, dropped the match into the jar of water, and said, “Tell me about yourself, Silas. What business are you in?” Silas looked at me questioningly, but I only smiled and nodded toward Gordon, urging him to answer.
“Well, sir, I guess I’m in the business of writing bad poetry.”
Gordon was obviously delighted.
“He’s just too hard on himself,” I insisted. “He’s a rock star.”
“I am a rock star, and my Les Paul is metaphor,” Silas joked.
“See, even that was a metaphor,” I said.
“A meta-metaphor,” he said.
All three of us laughed, Gordon the hardest.
Gordon chimed in, “You know, a truly bad poet wouldn’t know his poems were bad.”
“That’s a good point, sir,” said Silas, smiling. “Are you a poet yourself? Looks like you’ve got quite a library here.”
“I’m an historian, son,” he answered with a smile. “‘History is still in large measure poetry to me.’”
“I like that,” Silas said.
“I wish it were mine,” Gordon confessed. “That’s actually a quote from Jacob Burckhardt, a Swiss historian. Robert Penn Warren said, ‘If poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live.’”
I thought through today’s scenes: the library, Berry Acres, Legacy House. All stories.
“It’s why we like August Arms,” I surmised. “Silas has been listening too, Gordon.”
“‘Stories are our most august arms against the darkness,’” he quoted. “Please tell me you’re a fan of Donovan Trick.”
“Absolutely. Well, half fan, half bitter.”
“As any true writer should be,” said Gordon, satisfied. Then to me, he said, “Westie, he sounds handsome.”
I blushed, but Silas laughed aloud and said, “Oh, I’m stunning. West can’t keep her hands off me.” That made me burst out laughing. “In fact, sir, she keeps trying to kiss me right now, even here in your living room.”
My jaw dropped. You’re crazy, I mouthed. Out loud, I said, “Gordon, you can’t believe a word he says.”
Silas took his cue from Gordon’s hearty laughter and persisted, “Ouch! Sorry, sir, she was just nibbling on my ear and bit down a little too hard. Easy, girl.”
“I am horrified, for the record,” I said, laughing but appalled. You’re in trouble later, I mouthed very clearly to Silas, who shrugged and mouthed back, Good.
“Oh, young love,” said Gordon, and I was too embarrassed to look at Silas to gauge his reaction, too confused to refute Gordon. “So, how’s your family liking Green Lake? Is it just you and your parents, Silas?”
It came out of my mouth instinctively, protectively: “He’s an only child.” This time I did look at Silas—who was staring at the carpet, chewing thoughtfully on the inside of his mouth. I hadn’t realized just how difficult it would be to keep Laurel out of the day’s conversations. Just one day, I thought. I want just one day for Silas.
I changed the topic. “Gordon, tell us about what you’re reading these days.”
“Oh, I’m just finishing up Narnia again,” he said. “At the part where the ground is taken from beneath their feet and they compare it to a black sun or dry water. That part gets me every time. It’s like free fall. It’s how I felt after Mavis died.”
Silas ran a nervous hand through his hair.
I asked, “And what does dry water taste like?”
Gordon “looked” at me through those dark glasses, his face soft, and he said, “It’s just an illusion, Westie. There is no dry water for one who loves God. No black suns either.”
His words nudged at a memory in the back of my mind. “Gordon,” I said, “remember the week of August Arms that was all about dreams?”
He looked confused, something I rarely saw on his face. As an historian, Gordon’s memory was like a living, breathing thing.
“Back in January, I think?” I prompted. “There was an episode about a philosopher and some dream-argument thing.”
“Ahhh,” said Gordon, finally recalling. “René Descartes.”
Silas looked interested.
Gordon summarized, “If dreams and reality share common features, then how do I know I’m not dreaming now?” He chuckled a little. “A massive existential topic folded into a compact statement like origami.”
�
��I’m not much of a philosopher,” I admitted, glancing at Silas and catching his eye. “I never understood why he thought it was so important to go there—you know, to take it that far.”
“Well,” said Gordon, now in his professorial element, “he was trying to establish doubt. Universal doubt. You know his famous statement, ‘I think, therefore I am’?”
“Heard of it.”
“It was all en route to arriving at that point, which we call the ‘cogito’: to doubt absolutely everything except that if you can think, then you must exist. If you strip things down and start at square one with the cogito, then your philosophy—however you rebuild it—isn’t connected to tradition.”
“But is that a good thing?” I asked doubtfully. “I’m not so sure.”
Gordon grinned with pride. “And you say you’re not a philosopher.”
Gordon insisted we stay for dinner. The three of us made hamburgers and salad, and Silas ran out to the car to bring in what was left of our strawberries. It was fascinating to cook with a blind person—Gordon definitely had his own system. All his spices had Braille labels on them, and he used oven mitts when he was anywhere near the stove top. Silas and I were instructed to describe things in the iron frying pan and on the plates according to the face of a clock—“There’s a burger at two o’clock, six o’clock, and ten o’clock” or the like. When Gordon got out a knife to slice a tomato, Silas offered to help, but Gordon grinned and said, “Watch me,” then sliced it perfectly.
“You learn tricks,” he said. “It’s actually easier for me to cook alone than with someone, since sometimes they forget to tell me if they’ve opened a drawer or something.” Silas, looking guilty, used his hip to push in the silverware drawer he’d left open. “I heard that,” said Gordon, grinning.
Gordon had a can of whipped cream that we ate with the strawberries for dessert. “Mavis used to make homemade whipped cream,” he said. “It was perfect. I’ve tried to make it, but if you whip for just a little too long, it starts to turn into butter. It’s one of the few things I have never quite managed to conquer without my sight.” Gordon smiled at us. “So where are you off to next?”
Silas looked at me. “I’m afraid that’s classified information,” I said.
Silas complained, “I tell ya, Gordon. The girl is crazy.”
“But didn’t you know?” Gordon responded. “That’s the best kind.”
Back in the car, Silas said, “You never told me.”
“Never told you what?” I asked, waiting for him to buckle his seat belt.
“That you have your own personal Dumbledore.”
We both laughed, then rolled the windows down as we drove. Silas stuck his hand out the window, letting it surf on the wind.
I didn’t mention the tiny slipups I’d seen lately from Gordon: calling me the wrong name, misplacing his poetry book, forgetting an August Arms episode from just six months ago. I told myself it wasn’t a big deal. My mom always called me “Shea-Libby-Westlin-whichever-one-you-are.” Junior year, Trudy lost her chemistry book every other day. And Dad was so preoccupied with the church congregation that he forgot about things all the time.
I just wasn’t accustomed to the confused one being Gordon.
Beside me, Silas shifted in his seat as he realized the trajectory of my car. “Your house? We’re done?” He sounded disappointed.
“No,” I answered, even as I pulled into my driveway and parked, “and no.” I reached in front of him and took the book out of the glove compartment. “Come with me.”
Without a word, we snuck across the parking lot and into the church. My heart was pounding as I made last-minute arguments with myself over sharing my bell-tower secret, but my feet marched straight to the unmarked door and unlocked it.
Silas was in awe the entire four-flight climb. I went first, and he followed close behind. He was so much taller than I was that our heads were level even when I was two steps above his. “No one else has a key?” he asked.
Stopping, I turned around and found myself looking right into his excited, dark eyes. “I have one, and I think maybe Joe, our maintenance guy, might have one too. But no one comes up here. Listen, you can’t tell anyone I have that key, okay? I’ve never even taken Trudy up here.”
“How about Elliot?” he asked.
“Nope.”
At the top, Silas walked to the nearest open belfry window and gazed out over the town. The sun was low in the west, flirting with the idea of setting as Jody Perkins rode by on his lawn mower, waving to our neighbors.
Lights from the street below made it so we could just barely see one another inside the tower, but it was dark enough to feel dangerous, mysterious. I turned on the camping lantern in the middle of the small area, and warm amber light spread softly from it. Then, sitting backward on the ledge of the barred window, I opened the book. “Over there,” I said, indicating the air mattress that lined the adjacent wall. “I’ll read.”
“This one,” Silas requested, marking a page with his finger, then sat down and leaned his head back against the stone wall. “Please.”
So I read:
“since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
“wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
“my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
“we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
“And death i think is no parenthesis”
Silence for a moment. My head felt a little foggy. What was I thinking? What was I doing—here, in the bell tower, with Silas Hart?
Then, “Thank you,” he said, his voice low, husky, on the edge of breaking. He was quiet again, and I heard his breathing. “I feel spoiled.”
Still in the window ledge, I said, “Nah. It was, you know, okay to spend the day with you.” I shrugged, teasing him with over-the-top nonchalance. “I mean, you’ll do.”
“Oh, is that right?” he said, and he rose to his feet and joined me on my side of the tower. Silas stood smiling before me, at my eye level even though I was perched in the window, my legs dangling on either side of him. Then he put his hands, warm and soft, on the bare skin above my knees. The light from the lantern outlined his features, and his eyelashes cast tiny shadows across his cheek. “I’ll do?” His voice was playful and gentle and low.
There was a frenetic bass drum inside me, in my neck, in my ears. I swallowed. “Mmm, yes, actually I think you’ll do quite nicely,” I rambled, thinking how small my voice sounded in the dim tower. He was so close, and he smelled like clean straw and fresh air. I had this vague idea that I should be protesting, that I should not be fanning the tiny flame in me.
But when Silas cupped my face in his hands, his thumbs along my jawline, and leaned in so close that our breath mingled, that flickering flame blazed into a full-on fire. “You’re incredible, Westlin Beck. Do you know that?” he whispered, then quoted the poem, “‘Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.’”
From somewhere inside me, I whispered back a challenge: “Prove it.”
And then he kissed me—soft, sweet, seeking—and there was only room in my thoughts for one boy, this boy: Silas Hart, whose kiss was exploding my heart from a bud into a blossom with such alacrity that I marveled I could be so full without bursting. His mouth was asking questions without words, and I hoped I was answering them, even though I didn’t know the answers.
Silas leaned his forehead against mine and looked into my eyes. “That,” he whispered, “is how you should be kissed.”
And I had to agree.
twenty
I drove Silas home after the bell-towe
r kiss, noticing as I drove that he was scribbling something on a piece of paper, after which he slid the paper into the E. E. Cummings book and asked, “Can I take this? I’ll return it myself.”
“Sure,” I said. “What’d you just put in there?”
“Not much,” he said. “Sometimes when I really like a book, I put a note to the next reader in it before it goes back on the shelf.”
“Can I read it?” I asked, reaching for the book.
“No, you may not,” he said, grinning and holding it out of my reach. I kept my eyes on the road while I grinned back and leaned as far as I could into his space.
He kissed my cheek, refusing to relinquish the book, and even though the kiss was tiny and quick compared to earlier that evening, it still made my stomach flip. “What are you doing on Saturday night?” he asked. “I want to hang out with you.”
I gave up on the book. “That sounds great.”
But no. We had family night on Saturday evening—and it had been my idea.
I tried to be present with my family—instead of thinking continuously of Silas, his face leaning toward mine in the bell tower, his breath sweet like strawberries and cream—as Mom mixed and rolled out the dough for two huge, cookie-pan-sized pizzas. Or of Elliot, my boyfriend, whom I hadn’t seen since he’d accused me of something that was turning out to be true.
My stomach roiled, and it had nothing to do with hunger, even as we all added our toppings to various parts of the dough, extra cheese for me, a mountain of pepperoni for Shea, pineapple on Dad’s and Libby’s. The radio was playing Frankie Valli, and Mom and Libby replaced Dad’s name for “Sherry.” They howled, “Ker-er-rry, can you come out tonight?” Dad rolled his eyes, and Shea giggled, and I looked around at my happy family and thought about how long it had been since we’d done anything like this. I cared less about seeming cool after spending the summer with a goof like Silas.
Oh, Silas.
Oh, Elliot.
Oh, Silas.
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