Truest

by Jackie Lea Sommers

  “Seriously?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at me. “You’ve never dreamed that you woke up?”

  “Okay, fine,” I admitted. “But every night? Over and over, the same dream? Dreams are crazy! They aren’t real and . . . and . . . logical like this is, like real life is!”

  Laurel only looked sad. “West,” she said patiently, “when you’re dreaming, everything seems normal. Skating on grass or walking on the ceiling or playing Quidditch all seems normal while you’re dreaming. It’s when you wake up that you realize that it wasn’t.”

  “So?”

  “So, what if I wake up, and all these things I thought were normal—having a family, sleeping in a bed, drinking water—are actually bizarre?”

  “Drinking water—bizarre?”

  “Dreams feel normal when you’re in them.”

  Silas had told me that it was useless to argue with solipsism, that it would always win. I hunted around for a colander to strain the macaroni; Laurel got up, opened a cupboard, and pulled one out for me, then took butter and milk from the refrigerator.

  I prepared the pasta, mixing it all together as I said, “Okay, so I’ll admit to you that what you fear is possible. I’ll give you that. But it’s improbable. Do I get points for that one?”

  She smiled slightly as I handed her a bowl of steaming mac and cheese. “I don’t care about probabilities. If something were one-in-a-million, I would wonder if the one had found me. It’s the uncertainty that’s torture.”

  Why couldn’t I enter into her suffering? I spooned out a bowl for myself, looking hard at the spoon, the dish, not wanting to meet her eye. I thought back to that first day in the sunroom, when I’d seen the light go out of her eyes. Look at her, I berated myself. Would you at least look at her?

  I leaned back on the countertop, trying to seem casual, and looked across the island into those lost, sorrowful eyes. “Silas misses you,” I said.

  “I miss Silas every day,” she said softly. “It breaks my heart to look at him and think, You’re not real. I have imagined you. When I wake up from this, I will not have a twin.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “I know what you’re thinking, West,” Laurel continued. “And it’s true. There are so many things I would love about this life . . . so many things. This incredible house. My parents and how passionate they are about their work. I love that we met you this summer, love how happy you make Silas. I love the way I feel around Whit, and I want to know him so bad—I mean, I want to know every little thing about him. And Silas.” She pushed her spoon around in her bowl. “He’s the greatest person I have ever met. If I woke up and found I had a different brother, I would hate that other brother, just for not being Silas. I would honestly rather trade in real life for this dream, if it is a dream. I am that terrible of a person, West. I would trade in my real parents and real siblings for this dream family.”

  She was breaking my heart as I realized the truth of why her condition was so debilitating. “Laurel,” I said quietly but with force, “Silas is your real sibling. The only one you’ve got. And you’re pushing him away.”

  “Yeah, sometimes I seem to know that,” she said, “but I can’t . . . can’t hold on to it.”

  I said, “If you were dreaming, you couldn’t be having a conversation like this, right?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, what’s it called, meta-dreaming? That doesn’t happen, I don’t think.”

  Laurel frowned at me as if I were infantile. “Of course it does,” she said. “I’ve definitely had a dream within a dream—that’s what makes it so hard to determine how many layers down I am.”

  “Oh.”

  “The family stuff isn’t the worst part though,” she admitted. “Sometimes I wonder if I invented God, made the whole concept up. Then everything goes haywire—I wonder if maybe we’re puppets, or dolls in a dollhouse, and there’s this omnipotent being who is moving us around and making us interact. What if it turns out that the ultimate reality is that a child was in charge? Or what if we’re characters in a book? That would make the author a god. Or what if something evil is actually in control of the entire universe, only it has disguised itself as something good, and after we die we learn the truth that all good was actually defeated before the earth was ever made, and everything we ever took as virtuous was just evil in a mask?”

  “Laurel.”

  “Or what if there was actually—”

  “Laurel, stop. You can convince yourself of anything if you let yourself. You can’t let yourself.”

  She looked at me, wide-eyed, a little stunned. “Let? Oh, West. I wish it were that easy. Worrying about life-as-a-dream is difficult but not impossible. Worrying about a foundation that can’t hold the weight of your soul? That’s agony.” She swallowed hard and bit back tears. “It makes me wish I didn’t exist,” she whispered, and there was so much truth and devastation in the sound of it that I didn’t doubt her for one second. “Sometimes I just want oblivion.”

  The hair on my arms stood on end.

  “I’m tired,” she said suddenly and got up to return to her room.

  “Laurel, listen,” I said, following her out of the kitchen. She looked annoyed, and I almost backed down, but she had once said that socializing was good for her, even if she didn’t want to do it. “You shouldn’t be alone so much.”

  She paused on the stairs, considering me. “Okay, then,” she said. “Come with me to Papa and Oma’s house.”

  “For what?”

  “You know.”

  twenty-three

  The Mayhews lived in an old farmhouse, like Elliot’s, a little south of town. Lillian made Laurel tuck in her shirt and then launched into a lecture on why my dad ought to be preaching with the New King James translation, but Arty quietly ushered us away from her and showed us the stairs to the attic.

  “There’s a lot up there, Sweet Pea,” he told Laurel. “But you’re welcome to look. I’ve looked a little too—no doll, but I found some books you used to like. You should take them with you when you leave.”

  Laurel kissed his cheek. “That sounds great, Papa.”

  The attic was full of treasures: books and antique jewelry and a wooden rocking horse with yarn for its mane. Laurel found an old flapper hat made of lace and beading and put it on her head. She examined herself in a full-length mirror that was propped against one wall and, satisfied, sat down on a purple velvet sofa and pulled up a box. Determined to keep the conversation as far as possible from what we were searching for, I asked about Mark Whitby.

  “He’s gorgeous,” she said, pawing through the box. “Don’t you think he’s gorgeous?”

  “He’s Whit,” I said, a little flummoxed as I peered behind a wooden headboard. “I’ve known him since kindergarten.”

  “And you’ve never had a crush on him?”

  I shook my head. “No. Trudy did.”

  “Really?”

  “For like ten minutes.”

  Laurel laughed. “Tell me about him.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He’s the catcher on the baseball team, and he’s really funny and sorta dorky. Oh, and super sweet. Like, a lot of guys can be pricks sometimes, but he’s just a total sweetheart.”

  “That’s what I think too,” she said, tucking her feet beneath her on the sofa. I wondered if she and Whit had talked outside of the drive-in and the fireworks.

  Something about her voice made me almost think so.

  “He’s really close to his mom; they live out near Shaw with his little sister Jenna and his stepdad. Whit—his dad committed suicide when we were in eighth grade. The obituary in the town paper was really vague, but people knew. Everyone in town was talking about it for months.”

  “He told me that,” she muttered.

  I was shocked. Whit almost never talked about his dad. “When everyone was over for fireworks?” I asked dubiously.

  “Of course not!” she said, appalled. “We talk on the phone sometimes.”


  “Oh,” I said. “How did that happen?”

  “He stole my phone on the Fourth and put in his number, so I called him.”

  “Good for you!”

  Laurel looked embarrassed. “I sort of said, ‘Hey, it’s Laurel Hart. It was fun seeing you again. I really liked your khakis,’ and he said, ‘My khakis? My pants?’ all laughing and weirded out, you know, and I just begged, ‘Please don’t hang up.’”

  “I liked . . . your khakis?” I repeated, trying not to laugh.

  “I panicked, okay?” she said.

  “Well, he obviously didn’t hang up.”

  “No,” she said, smiling. “He didn’t.”

  “And he told you about his dad?”

  “Not in that first call.”

  I wondered how often they talked.

  Laurel said, “He told me about his dad’s drinking problem. He said there was this time when his dad was drunk at one of his baseball games and got escorted out, crying. He was so embarrassed—Whit, I mean.”

  I remembered similar scenes all too well—Mr. Whitby always weepy, Whit always embarrassed but too sweet to shame his dad in public. In fourth grade, our little group went to Whit’s house for his birthday, and his dad was drunk and mopey, and Whit was so humiliated. Trudy and I went outside to the trampoline while Elliot hung back and talked Whit through it. I had wondered if we should be inside with him, but Trudy said he’d feel worse.

  “He also told me about the car running in the garage.”

  “Yeah.”

  Laurel’s voice grew soft. “Whit said the worst part was that there was no note. Not that he was the one who found the body, not that his dad had been so happy just the night before—but that there was no note.”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew most of these details, but it had been a long time since I’d thought about them. Whit didn’t talk about it much—if at all. Well, maybe he did with Elliot, but not with me. I was glad he’d told Laurel. Each of them had such deep sadness; I wondered if sadness worked like magnets.

  Laurel continued, “That’s the most selfish thing I can imagine ever. Suicide, I mean.” She paused, thinking. “I suppose a lot of people probably think solipsism syndrome is about as bad.”

  I shifted uncomfortably and redirected the conversation. “Whit hit his growth spurt late. In kindergarten, Trudy and I thought of him as another one of our dolls. Even though he’s tall now, he was the shortest guy in our grade till like seventh grade. Can you picture him at five foot four?”

  Laurel grinned with affection. “I’d have to bend down to kiss him.”

  “You’ve kissed him?” I exclaimed.

  She laughed. “Not yet, silly. But I plan to.” She grinned wryly. “Silas has always been tall,” she mused. “He was at least six feet straight out of the womb.”

  We continued searching the attic for nearly an hour. There was no sign of a ballerina doll in a red dress. On the drive back to her house, I kept Laurel from wondering what that meant by reading the titles of the books her grandpa had sent home with her: The Talking Toothpaste, Blankets for Monsters, Vivien’s New Friend. She didn’t remember any of them.

  Back in the Harts’ den, we turned on WARegon Trail—I was getting used to the gore by now and had even developed a tiny crush on the show’s badass pioneering protagonist—but we had the volume way down so we could talk about TV shows and internet memes and the latest Chuck Justice song, “Ransom Avalanche,” which I knew because Libby blasted it from her room 24/7. Laurel grabbed Silas’s guitar and played her own cover of it—I didn’t even know she could play—and when dinnertime rolled around, we ordered out from Mikey’s, the only place in Green Lake that delivers. As always, the conversation seemed to come back to what I should study in college.

  “Clowning. For sure,” she said, poking a last French fry into ketchup. “Or actually, no—maybe waterfowl.”

  “How about puppetry?” I pretended to consider.

  “Absolutely not,” Silas said, suddenly appearing in the den doorway. “Friends don’t let friends major in puppetry.”

  “Even if I am a ‘bomb hottie’ with ‘hella junk in da trunk’?” I asked innocently.

  “‘Fo sho,’” he said. “You forgot ‘fo sho.’ Can’t say I never wrote a poem for you.”

  He sat down between me and Laurel on the couch, throwing an arm around each. “My two favorite girls. Oh! WARegon Trail! My two favorite, FAVORITE girls.” He turned the volume up.

  Silas’s college visit in the Twin Cities had gone great. “Their creative writing program is fantastic, West,” he said to me up on his roof that evening before the August Arms episode.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Most of the English professors there have published books, and they have this really cool literary magazine run by the students. And the campus is amazing—brick buildings a hundred years old, and they’re crawling with ivy. It’s on a lake—well, I guess pretty much everything in Minnesota is—but anyway, it has seven miles of lakeshore and its own island with a community garden. You really should check it out too. We . . . we could . . . go together.”

  By the way he was stammering, I knew that he meant we could go to college together and not just we could go visit the campus together. I liked that he was thinking of me so far in the future. Then again, college really wasn’t that far away—senior year was starting in a month, and I’d turn eighteen in just a few days.

  Even though I’d done my best to steer clear of the college conversation, I’d always imagined living in a dorm with Trudy on the same campus as Elliot—my little Green Lake world packed up and moved to wherever Elliot could get a scholarship. And now, Elliot was out of the picture and Trudy wanted to be roommates with Ami Nissweller at Tellham & freakin’ Barr. Each of them had incited panic in me this summer when they’d broached the topic.

  But with Silas . . . it would be a different adventure, but a good one. No panic there.

  “It was just an idea,” he said in a rush. “I don’t mean to tell you what to do. Forget I said anything.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I like that idea.”

  “Yeah?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I got some info for Laurel too,” he said. “They have a BFA in dance there. Mom and I asked the recruiter lots of questions, and it seems perfect for her.” When Silas paused, I heard the words he didn’t say: if only she were healthy again.

  “We had a good talk while you were gone,” I said.

  “About what?”

  I hesitated, knowing much of it would upset him. “Well, lots of things.”

  “West. Tell me. I want to know.”

  “She just has all these strange ideas about God—I can’t even remember them all. Like evil being disguised as good or that we’re in a puppet show. ‘How many layers in’ she is,” I added, using finger quotes. “Freaky stuff.”

  Silas let out a frustrated breath. “But I didn’t know she had all those crazy theories,” he said. “It’s more Descartes, that bastard. Is she really only seventeen? She drags those years around like they’re a backpack full of bricks.”

  On August Arms that evening, Sullivan Knox trod lightly through a story of seven Rwandan schoolchildren who had visions of the Virgin Mary, in which she showed the children a river of blood, people killing each other, and decapitated corpses.

  Years later, civil war broke out in Rwanda: a genocide. In one hundred days, an estimated one million people were killed—seven every minute—many beheaded with machetes and dumped into the Kagera River.

  “It was the vision, come true,” Sully said. “A river of blood, bodies without heads. Three of the Our Lady of Kibeho apparitions were later declared authentic by a local bishop.”

  “Do you believe it?” I asked Silas, not sure what to think.

  He shrugged, the flickering bonfire casting light and shadows across his face. “Maybe. I mean, I believe in the burning bush. But God speaks softly sometimes too.”

  “To you?”
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  “Maybe.”

  “What does he say?”

  Silas leaned backward and looked at me with narrowed eyes and a crooked grin. “I can’t tell if you’re making fun of me,” he said. “Are you?”

  Was I?

  I thought of the story he was referring to—God speaking to Moses from a bush blazing with fire that did not burn it up. I’d heard such stories a hundred times in Sunday school as a child: God as a pillar of cloud, the sun standing still, the Red Sea parting like a crowd before a king. Did I believe them? I hadn’t really thought about that question—what do I believe?—for so long. I’d just been limping along from Sunday to boring Sunday, doing my best to avoid encountering it all. Had I been creeping around corners to hide from Dad—or from God?

  “No,” I said. “I’m not making fun of you. What does he say?”

  Silas was quiet for a moment, an odd, lingering moment that made me wonder if I’d been too forward in asking a question like this so flippantly. But then that moment was over, and Silas looked at me. “He says to abide.”

  Again, I expected a shit storm when I got home that night, since I’d been given permission to check on Laurel but had then stayed out for the rest of the day, ignoring my parents’ calls as the day had gone dark. But my parents and Shea were already in bed. I knocked on Libby’s bedroom door.

  “Come in,” she said, and turned her music down. She was on her bed, paging reverently again through the magazine I’d given her.

  “Were Mom and Dad pissed that I didn’t come home right away?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “You’re not supposed to say ‘pissed.’”

  I rolled my eyes. “Were they?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did they mention it?”

  “I guess. Mom said something to Dad, and he said, ‘Well, she’s almost eighteen. Can you blame her?’ and Mom said, ‘I suppose.’”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “That’s good, right?” Libby asked, her finger marking a page.

  “Yeah,” I said, oddly disappointed. “Great.”

  twenty-four

  When I walked into Silas’s house on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, he handed me a bouquet of white calla lilies, then hooked a finger under the belt of my romper and pulled me toward him. “Westlin Beck,” he said, his forehead pressed against mine, “does your dad know you dressed like this today?”