Truest

by Jackie Lea Sommers

  When the pizzas were done, we sat around the table—such a rare occurrence that we’d had to clear Mom’s scrapbook supplies off the table to make room for us all—and Dad, at the head of the table, held out a hand to me on his left and Libs on his right, and said grace. He prayed for the food, and for Tim and Lolly Spencer, whose first baby was due any day now, and for the Hart family to know peace and feel God’s presence while Mr. Hart was gone this summer.

  At the “amen,” Dad squeezed my hand, and when my siblings practically dove into the pizza, he leaned over to me and said, “I asked everyone to pray at the local clergy meeting yesterday. Reverend Wright said he’d ask his elders to join him, and Father Ziebarth told me after dinner that he’d ask St. Hugh of Lincoln to intercede. Apparently, he is the patron saint of sick children.” He laughed a little and added, “I’ve never quite understood sainthood.”

  I scraped some leftover glue off the table with my thumbnail. “Thanks,” I said, and I hoped he knew how many other things I meant by that one word.

  After dinner, we set up Sorry! on the living room floor; Shea, sprawled eagerly across the floor, partnered up with Dad for yellow, I was red, Libby blue, Mom green. We had just started to draw cards and move our pawns when the telephone rang. My dad got up to answer the phone, even though Mom said, “Oh, Kerry, let it ring tonight.”

  All of us in the living room had gone completely silent as we heard Dad’s voice change. “When? Just then, really? Do they know any details yet? Yeah, I can be there in half an hour.” He rejoined us. “Bad news, crew,” he said. “Tim and Lolly’s baby was born an hour ago, but there’s something wrong with the baby. That was Tim; he wants me to come up to the hospital. I’ll be gone till late. Shea?”

  “Yeah?” my brother asked, looking up from his space on the floor.

  “It’s up to you to win it for our team.”

  Shea smiled at him, but it was weak, disappointed.

  “Wait, hold on,” I said, feeling anger bubbling under my skin like an illness. “You can’t just leave! We had plans.”

  “West, this is an emergency.”

  But having Dad leave family night felt like our own emergency.

  “Just stay,” I said. “Have Ed go instead.” But he was sliding on his shoes. “You’re leaving us—again.”

  Shea looked down at the board and said, “I don’t want to play anymore.”

  “Yeah, this game is boring,” said Libby, who had been excited to play only minutes earlier.

  “No, you two,” Mom said. “Come on, let’s finish this game.”

  “Dad?” I asked. My siblings and I all looked at him.

  He hesitated for a moment, and I honestly thought the look of our forlorn faces would be enough to make him stop, take off his shoes, call the associate pastor, and ask him to go instead. But he said, “Tim and Lolly are waiting for me. Sorry, guys.” Then he left, pulling the door closed behind him. We stared after him in silence.

  Shea grabbed the board and scattered the pieces. “I hate this game!” he shouted. He stormed away while Libby stared after him, wide-eyed.

  “Libby, can you go check on your brother?” Mom asked. “West, help me pick up this mess.”

  But my anger had gone nowhere; if anything, it had flared when I saw how upset my brother was. I erupted when Mom said, “West, honey? Don’t be upset; your dad’s a good man.”

  “I don’t understand you!” I hissed at her. “Of all of us, you should be the most upset! Dad is never here, and when he is, he has a headache. You’re practically a single parent. You’re his wife, not his servant, have you ever realized that?”

  “Westlin Beck,” she scolded, her eyes wide and flashing, “don’t you dare say those things about your father.”

  “Say what?” I sassed back. “The truth? It’s true that he’s never around. It’s true that he has shitty priorities.”

  “Do not use that language in this house, young lady,” she said, her voice harsh and dangerous, not like her usual throwaway comments on pseudo-profanity. I noticed that she hadn’t disagreed with me though; and yet, she would still defend him.

  “Fine,” I said. “Then I’ll leave.”

  I started walking toward the thumb of Heaton Ridge, calling Silas on the way, realizing only after he’d picked up that I was probably supposed to have called Elliot. “Hey!” Silas said, his voice eager. “Family night over already?”

  “Um, I guess you could say that, yeah,” I said. “Can you pick me up?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve got Papa’s pickup. Your house?”

  “I’m walking toward yours. You’ll see me on the way.”

  I had almost gotten to the bridge into Heaton Ridge when I saw the familiar Mayhew pickup, the headlights briefly blinding me. The truck shook a little as Silas braked, rolled down his window, and said, “Hey, pretty lady, want a lift?”

  Normally I’d have laughed, but I was still so pissed at my dad that I only managed a weak smile.

  “Uh-oh, what’s wrong?” he asked as I climbed into the passenger’s seat. “Where to?” he asked. “The lake?”

  “No. Let’s go out to the wind farm in Shaw. Remember how to get to Berry Acres? It’s near there.”

  We took skinny little back roads and then these terribly spooky paths through the cornfields until we were in the middle of the wind farm, this giant ridge outside Shaw that had about two hundred wind turbines on it. We couldn’t see the monstrous turbines turning their slow cartwheels in the dark, but we could see—all around us—one red light atop each one, all blinking in synchrony. Black—then red lights for miles—then back to black.

  “Totally creepy,” said Silas, rolling down the windows before turning the truck off and killing the lights. “Like we’re in the middle of an alien invasion.”

  “I kind of love it.” The whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of a nearby turbine was pressing cool night air through the vehicle.

  “Me too,” he said. “C’mon.” He opened his door, and I opened mine. In the bed of the truck, he spread out several blankets, and we sat on them, our backs against the cab of the truck, looking out on the wind farm. “Now are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

  I told him about Dad bailing on family night to go to the hospital, about Shea messing up the board game, about the look on Libby’s face, about what I’d said to my mom. And Silas just listened, his eyes fixed on me while I stared at the field.

  “Dads suck,” he surmised. “When mine left, I kinda felt like I had the shittier deal because yours was still here, but now I’m not so sure. Mine will come back, but your dad is here and gone at the same time.”

  “I think I’m gonna pierce my nose,” I said, looking up at the blinking monster above us. “To piss him off.”

  “You should pierce your nose if you really want to pierce your nose,” he said, the voice of reason, “but not just to piss him off.”

  I pursed my lips, thinking about tonight and about what I’d look like with a tiny diamond stud in my nose. “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Or get a trampy new swimsuit.”

  “That, yes,” Silas said. “I’m in wholehearted agreement. Definitely. Please do.”

  “Pervert,” I said as we both laughed.

  “Is there another kind of seventeen-year-old male?” he asked.

  “Gosh, I’m glad you’re here this summer,” I told him. “I’d be going crazy without you.”

  “Same,” he said. “At least soon you’ll have Trudy back too. But you’re all I’ve got.”

  “And Laurel,” I said.

  “I suppose. And Laurel,” he conceded.

  “I hope I still have Trudy in the fall,” I said. “On the Fourth, she seemed like a different person. Talking about going away for college and all about her new camp friends. It was like she’d forgotten about me. And she only stayed for like twenty-four hours. What’s with that? It was our one chance to see each other till the summer is over.”

  “Things with Trudy will be fine,” he said. “Everything w
ill be fine. You’ll see. The crux of the matter is that you two have history.”

  “History,” I repeated softly, thinking how Elliot and I had history too—and yet I was sitting in the bed of a pickup truck with Silas tonight.

  There was a long pause, silent except for the rushing air being pressed by the windmills, then Silas announced, “I love the word ‘crux.’ How could anyone not love that word?”

  I giggled.

  He continued, “The word even looks like what it is, like this important little block, this core.”

  “Mmm,” I said in agreement. “How about ‘cavalier’? Rolls right off your tongue.”

  “Applause,” he said.

  “Callous.”

  “Archaic.”

  “Valor,” I said. “Doesn’t it just make you want to storm a castle?” I pushed up my sleeve. “Look, I have goose bumps!”

  “Tell Elliot it’s over,” he said, his voice calm, steady.

  “What?” I said, my voice the opposite of his.

  “Tell him it’s over. It is, isn’t it?”

  Ahhh, so these were the answers I was giving him as I had kissed him back two nights ago; I was grateful for the upload.

  “What about Beth?”

  “I broke up with her last week; that’s why I went back to Fairbanks.”

  “You broke up with Beth,” I repeated, letting it sink in. My head was unspooling; my heart, an uncaged bird.

  “It wasn’t fun,” he admitted. “And even though I had no clue if anything would ever happen between you and me, I knew I had to do it.”

  Silas smirked as he added, “I gotta admit: when you went ballistic after I left, that was a shot in the arm for what I needed to do. I kept reading that text where you called me a bastard like it was a love letter begging me to hurry home.”

  We both laughed, silent laughter, the kind that is more in the eyes than the throat.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Silas, still smiling softly, reached out and touched my face. His finger traced a line down my cheek and rested on my jaw, and it felt like fireworks going off in my head. He whispered, “I’ve belonged to you since the second you showed up on my doorstep.”

  I pulled his hand away and looked at him. “You hated me when we first met! You looked like I’d just stolen your birthday.”

  “I mean it.” He had that wild, goofy grin on his face again.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “West.” He took my face in his hands, and this time I let him. “It’s true. I saw you, and I was yours.”

  “I don’t—”

  “The thing is, I didn’t want to be. I knew Dad was probably headed back to Fairbanks soon, and I had a ticket too. I wanted to be with Beth and Josh and the rest of my friends. Get as far away from Green Lake as I could. Convince my parents I should stay for senior year. Shhh . . . let me talk. But I was finished when I saw you. At first, I thought maybe I could just ignore it all and push you away.” He smiled, remembering. “And then you went for the bookcase, and I about lost it. Do you remember I left the room?”

  “When you came back, your hair was wet.”

  “I went and splashed frickin’ cold water on my face.”

  I laughed. “No way.”

  “Way. I had all these plans—Beth, Alaska, senior year—but you ruined them all. You destroyed my old plans and became my new plan.”

  Whoa.

  I thought of the night we had listened to August Arms on the lifeguard stand, when he’d talked so cryptically about Alaska. Unceremonious, ignoble, risky, necessary. It all made sense now.

  “I’m an idiot,” I said, laughing under my breath as all the puzzle pieces came together.

  “And I’m in love with you,” he said.

  “You’re what?”

  “In love with you. I love you.”

  “You love me?”

  This time he laughed. “Yeah, is it that hard to believe?”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I was a blurry line; how could brilliance love a blur? I stared at our feet stretching out before us in the bed of the truck, his so much longer than mine. I tried to process what he had just said. He loved me—and I was Elliot Thomas’s girlfriend. I had been friends with Elliot my whole life, had dated him for two years, and yet he and I had never said those words to each other. Silas and I were seventeen: Was that even old enough to know something like this? Was he being ridiculous? Were we both?

  “You call me on my shit,” he quietly explained. “You’re my favorite person to drag down the rabbit hole. Sometimes when you’re really into a book, you mouth the words as you read them. And you have a laugh you only use with me.”

  Bashfulness crept into his voice. “You’re everything I want, West. I feel like—I feel like if I was lost, you would know where to find me.” When he looked at me again, his eyes were shining with so much joy and affection and admiration that I thought his heart might reach out and pull me into him.

  I suddenly thought, I would. I would know where to find you. It was like a revelation, only with no choir of heavenly angels, just the blinking red lights of the monsters in the field.

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  Ahh, there was the Silas-grin! It broke like a giant whitecap over me, drowning me in the most perfect, incredible surf. He growled with pleasure and tackled me to the blanket-covered floor and kissed me so that I forgot about Dad and Mom and Trudy and Elliot and everything but him—Silas Hart, who loved me!—and the feel of his body pressed sweetly to mine.

  twenty-one

  The Spencer baby was fine, although born with sepsis, a bacterial infection, and needing a lumbar puncture and antibiotics. Dad stayed with Tim and Lolly till five in the morning, came home, showered, and walked over to the church to preach like normal. I was sure he’d spend that afternoon in bed, sleeping off a migraine.

  “West!” my mom shouted up the stairs. “You’re going to be late. Get a move on! I’ll see you in our row in twenty minutes. And after church we’ll have a talk about what time you got in last night, young lady. This is not a boardinghouse.”

  I made a face at the ceiling. “This is not a boardinghouse,” I repeated. When the front door closed, I sat up in bed, pulled back the curtain on my window, and watched Mom, Libs, and Shea walk across the parking lot toward the church building.

  I got up and threw on a pair of shorts, tossed my hair into a ponytail, and brushed my teeth, pausing to take one thing out of my desk drawer before I took the car up to St. Cloud. The mall was open, and I went to this piercing place, but since I wasn’t eighteen yet, they told me I needed to have a parent with me to get my nose pierced. My birthday was only a couple of weeks away, but it seemed like the fractiousness of the act would be meaningless if I waited till then. Maybe I didn’t want my nose pierced after all.

  The time on my phone told me it was almost the end of the service. I smiled a little as I thought about everyone asking where I was today, wondering what my parents would say. Would they throw me under the bus, say what a rude, disrespectful daughter I was last night? I doubted it. They wouldn’t want anyone in the congregation to know that the Beck family wasn’t perfect. I grinned a little in victory.

  I shopped for a while, picked up a magazine with Chuck Justice on the cover for Libby, then found a linen romper that my dad would hate. I bought it, handing over my hard-earned detailing cash as if I were defying not only my parents but the cashier as well.

  The service would be over now, and the phone calls would start coming soon.

  But there was only one.

  From Silas.

  “Hey, where are you?” he asked.

  “Not at church, that’s for sure,” I said.

  “Want to hang out?” he asked.

  “I have to make one stop first.”

  At the Thomas farm, it was Greg who led me through the barn, past the room that held the stainless-steel bulk tank, to a hay-lined pen where his brother was bottle-feeding a healthy-looking, energetic calf. Things had been awkw
ard between me and Elliot since the Fourth of July; in fact, we had talked only a couple of times, and both times had been brief and distant.

  I couldn’t believe I was doing this.

  “Greg, take over, will you?” Elliot said to his brother when he saw me, shoving the bottle at Greg’s chest.

  Greg started to whine, but Elliot gave him a look and he shut up quickly.

  It was loud in the barn. I’d been in here before, but I’d forgotten about the noise of so many cows, so many milking machines. I’d never minded the smell.

  Elliot stood, wiping his hands on his well-worn work jeans; his white T-shirt showed off his muscles, and his faded cap shaded his eyes—but not enough. His face was so sad, so disappointed; I’d have preferred his anger.

  “Was that calf Stevie?” I asked, trying to take away the awkwardness. “She can see again?”

  Elliot nodded.

  “You were right,” I babbled nervously. “That’s so great, so . . . wow. Good for you. She recovered, just like you said. That’s . . .”

  “Just do what you’re here to do, West,” he said. It wasn’t mean, not even impatient. Just like someone powerful who wanted the Band-Aid torn off quickly.

  “Elliot,” I said, and then started to cry.

  “I knew this was going to happen,” he muttered. “I knew it from the second you told me about watching that shit TV show over at his rich-ass house. Knew it when you let him touch you at the drive-in.”

  I hadn’t thought he’d noticed.

  “What about our plans, West?” he demanded, finally raising his voice. “This fall, when I get my car? Getting food after games and bowling and shopping around for colleges? And—oh, fuck—homecoming.” After a pause, he added, “You thought I’d be the busy one this summer, but you’re the one who’s never around.”

  I flinched—hadn’t I said the same of my dad just the night before? How was it possible to feel hurt and be hurtful without making that connection?

  “Was I such a shitty boyfriend? What did I do wrong?” he challenged.

  “Nothing,” I said, sniffling. “Elliot, you’re great. You’re the best. You’re everything—”

  “West, don’t,” he said. “Don’t. You loved the idea of me—but never me.”