No, actually, he does not.
“I like this,” I said, tugging lightly on his tie.
“Picnics bring out the best in me.”
But it started raining around eleven that morning, so we decided to picnic in the sunroom instead of at the lake, where Silas had planned. Around noon, the storm picked up, and the rain that had begun as a slow drizzle whipped into a frenetic downpour. It was surreal to be in the sunroom—glass walls, glass ceiling—almost like being inside a colossal car wash. It was darker than it should be at noon, and colder too—although I wasn’t sure if it was from summer’s tilt toward autumn or from the storm itself. Silas found some tea lights in a kitchen drawer and placed them all around the sunroom, lighting all one hundred. The storm outside thrashed the trees in the yard, but indoors, the little flames blinked like cats’ eyes.
My legs looked tan against the polar bear fur on the floor, where we sat eating turkey and avocado sandwiches and cucumber salad. There were grapes and cheeses, and sparkling cider, which we drank from his parents’ champagne flutes.
“To Westlin Beck, on her birthday,” said Silas, toasting me. “May your year be full of delights and desserts. Oh, hey! I forgot!”
He had made chocolate-covered bacon.
“Sprinkled with sea salt,” he said proudly.
I was flabbergasted. “You . . . are my favorite person. Ever.” The sweet mixed with salty was exactly perfect. “You did all this yourself?”
“Mom helped a little before she and Laurel left this morning,” he admitted.
“Where did they go?”
“Minneapolis. To meet with some doctors about alternative medicine. Laurel doesn’t want to keep seeing her therapist. . . . I guess he keeps trying to find some childhood trauma as an explanation for it all—and Laurel kept saying no, no, no, no. This guy just thinks she’s buried it all.”
“That’s awful. Of the counselor, I mean.”
“Yeah. And Laurel’s not stupid—she told me how therapists can unintentionally ‘implant’ a false memory just by suggestion—so she said she wasn’t going to talk to someone who’d insist that her childhood had left some big scar or whatever.”
“She said that?” I asked. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Really kick-ass for someone so fragile.” I nodded. “I just think there is something broken in her mind. I wonder if there’s a tiny switch deep inside her—it would be the easiest thing to turn it on or off—but we’ve got to find it first.” Silas smiled sadly at me, his eyelashes so long they made him seem almost shy for a moment.
The rain was drumming on the roof so hard, so consistently. It was its own lovely music, in a way. We talked more about college and Donovan Trick’s forthcoming novel and the history class we’d share when school started in a few weeks—then we blew out the tea lights and retreated upstairs to watch WARegon Trail.
Trudy had sent a birthday card, which made me laugh but had a disappointing lack of news—Germaine brothers or otherwise. But sitting beside Silas in the den, I couldn’t bring myself to care about it too much. This was a lazy day, and I couldn’t have loved it more. No parents around to tell us we were rotting our brains, no Laurel around to remind us how broken life was. Just me, Silas, and some zombies. I rested my head against Silas’s shoulder and we watched the strong fathers protect their wives and children from the undead. I lifted my head and looked at him, his eyes glued to the television set, so intense. I leaned over and kissed him quickly on the cheek, then looked away, trying to lasso my grin. A moment later, he pounced.
“Trying to be stealthy, Miss Beck?” he asked. “You must have forgotten that I am a ninja. Bow to your sensei!”
I couldn’t stop laughing as I watched him remove his tie and wrap it around his forehead. The loose ends hung forward and brushed my ear as he leaned over and kissed me—it tasted like dark chocolate and apples. The screaming and gunfire from the television sounded a world away, Silas’s body covering mine like the most perfect armor. I suddenly realized why he liked WARegon Trail so much—he liked the idea of fighting an enemy you could see. He gave me a beaming Silas-grin as he said, “Let that be a warning to you, missy.”
“I liked that warning,” I admitted, so close to him that we were still sharing breath.
And he kissed me again, and it was the clumsiest and most beautiful kiss I could imagine because neither of us could stop grinning, our smiles as big as the sun when it bursts over the horizon.
That evening, after the rain stopped and it was dark, we stole away to Green Lake to swim, though the park was closed. The wind had blown the clouds away, and the moon felt small and distant. We splashed around as quietly as we could in the chilly water until our teeth were chattering and then we waded back to shore, climbed into the lifeguard stand as we had done before, and wrapped ourselves in a giant towel, wet shoulders pressed together, staring at the moon’s long reflection on the water, like an arrow pointing our direction.
“Did you read the Billy Collins poem about the planet with four moons?” Silas asked, his voice low and husky in the night air.
“Mmm, I can’t remember.” I leaned into him and kissed the freckles on his shoulder. He shivered.
“It’s good. Really good. But it ends on this depressing note about how there would be two lovers on a beach, and even though they were feeling so close, they were actually each looking at a different moon.” He pressed in closer to me.
I thought mostly of the feel of his skin against mine, but also about how—months before the Harts moved to Minnesota—August Arms had run a story on scientists’ suspicion that a second moon had once orbited Earth but had crashed into its twin, sticking there and creating the lunar highlands on the side of the moon we never see.
Silas looked at me, his eyes fierce with joy, and I couldn’t tell him about what I’d heard. He wouldn’t believe it anyway, I realized. He held the Genesis account of the “two great lights”—sun and moon—in his palm like a favorite storybook.
“I want to know God the way you do,” I said suddenly.
Silas nodded, sincere. “You want an august arm against the darkness,” he said. He slung an arm around my shoulder and kissed the top of my head. “I wrote a poem, because of our conversation the other day. Want to hear it? It’s—it’s just a draft, not done. I call it ‘Truest Anchor.’ Or maybe ‘Truest Pillar.’ ‘Truest Atlas?’ I—” He was nervous to share and babbling.
I put a finger over his lips. “Shhh,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”
He spoke soft and slow:
“The broken heart has
its own stark splendor.
“Everything in readiness:
curtain, heaven, hell, heel.
“War before victory.
Wounds before cure.
“Darkness destroyed
by the glory of dawn.”
It sounded like a secret in the night air, floating just above the lapping gunmetal waters. “I like it,” I said, my voice barely audible.
“Hmm?” he prodded, and it sounded like the tiny sound a bird makes.
“It’s okay, you think?” I asked. “To value brokenness, just for the fixing?”
“Hope so,” he said, “because I do.”
I thought of Sunday mornings: my dad sharing from the pulpit, the congregational hymns, the tiny wafers in a silver tray we passed down the aisles each week—for once, instead of seeming boring and expected, it all seemed sort of beautiful.
Silas’s faith covered him like a shield, rode on his brow like a crown.
And then, of course, there was Laurel, whose days were measured by how close she carried these absurd truths to her core: communion reminded her of what was real.
“‘Darkness destroyed by the glory of dawn,’” I said, seeing how the words felt on my lips. They felt like a story that belonged to me.
“What should I title it?” Silas asked quietly.
“How about just ‘Truest’?” I said. “And let that be it?”
&n
bsp; Then he kissed me and I knew he understood.
twenty-five
Silas and I brought the leftover chocolate-covered bacon to Gordon’s apartment the next day. Gordon sat in his rocker, nibbling on a piece, then after a pause pronounced us “geniuses of the modern world.”
“Just Silas,” I said. “It was his idea.”
“It was for West’s birthday. Eighteen years old.”
A frown flashed across Gordon’s face for a moment. “Eighteen?” he said, as if to himself.
Silas looked puzzled, but I took a guess at what Gordon was thinking. “Betsy’s older than I am,” I said softly to Gordon. “I think she’s in Spain.”
Abruptly he said, “She came back in May. Brought me a gift.” He pointed toward one of his bookshelves, at a long decorative wooden block etched with a quote: “A country without a memory is a country of madmen.” I hated the irony, since Gordon’s own memory had been slipping lately.
“That’s from Betsy?” I asked.
“It is,” he said. “She was studying language and philosophy and quite fell in love with George Santayana. It’s his quote.”
A country of madmen. I hated that it made me think of Laurel.
“Gordon,” I asked, “remember when we talked about Descartes?”
“I do, yes.”
Good.
“Can you tell us more about the dream argument? Or, actually, how to refute it?”
Silas looked serious suddenly, staring at Gordon with wide, hopeful eyes.
“Well, that’s interesting you’d ask,” Gordon said, sounding fully himself again as he spoke about a long-remembered subject. “Descartes, by the end of his Meditations, actually refutes it himself. Remember what I told you about the cogito—‘I think, therefore I am’? How you let doubt strip everything down to just that and then rebuild?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he never intended for someone to refuse to rebuild. For someone to get stuck at the dream-argument stage was never the point, you know. To claim a person is living a dream is a heavy, heavy claim for him or her to make.”
“Her,” said Silas, without explanation.
“Her,” Gordon repeated, so softly you could barely hear it. For a moment, he looked a little sad, and I knew that he had understood Silas’s comment correctly—that this conversation was not a hypothetical one. He pressed his lips together, let out a doleful sigh, and said, “Heavy claims need a lot of support, and there’s just not a lot available.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Are our senses sometimes deceived? Yes. But we shouldn’t take that too far; they don’t fail us often. It’s like refusing to use a seat belt because sometimes seat belts fail.”
“Yeah,” said Silas, “but what if you somehow can’t quit believing the seat belt will fail you? Even if you’ve never experienced that?”
“I don’t know, Silas,” said Gordon. “There are minds that hiccup sometimes—skip like an old record player. I don’t know how to right that needle.”
Silas frowned. “I don’t know about record players, but when my CD player skips, I usually just give it a smack, and it sorts itself out.”
I laughed, in spite of the conversation’s heavy tone. “Yeah,” I teased. “Why don’t you just slap Laur—her—when she gets stuck?”
Silas laughed and stuck out his tongue at me.
It made me laugh too, and I steered the conversation toward lighter topics, though my gaze kept drifting to the carved quote on the shelf, wondering if history could ever give Laurel roots the way it did Gordon.
Afterward, Silas and I returned to my house.
“What was up with Gordon today?” Silas asked as we abandoned our bikes beside the driveway.
I shrugged. “He’s getting old.”
“Getting?”
“Sometimes he confuses me with his great-granddaughter,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“Is it?” he asked.
Before I could answer, Elliot drove into my driveway and parked his parents’ minivan in front of us.
“Um . . . ,” said Silas. “What the . . . ?”
“What happened?” I asked as Elliot stepped out of the vehicle. Except for the windshield, the entire vehicle was covered in what looked like neon Post-it Notes.
“Someone pranked me,” Elliot admitted, the irritation in his voice thick and gruff. “Yesterday at some point. I think it was Tom Carver and that Tennant punk. And then it rained a shit ton. I wasn’t even supposed to take the van out of the garage while my parents were gone. They’d kill me. Oh. Happy belated birthday, West.” He kissed my cheek lightly, his eyes allowing no entrance to his thoughts. Silas noticed and laced his fingers through mine, drawing me close. It was silly, and for Elliot’s sake, I took a step away from Silas and toward the van.
“What happens when you . . . ,” I asked, reaching out and pulling off a damp Post-it. It left a sticky residue. “Damn.”
“Do you know what to do, West?” Elliot asked. “I thought maybe you’d seen this done before. Can you use Goo Gone?”
I shook my head. “Goo Gone is for household stuff. I read online somewhere that you have to use spray-on deodorant and attack each mark. It could get expensive.”
“I’ll pay for the materials, and I’ll help!” Elliot insisted. “It has to be done before one o’clock though. That’s when my parents get back.”
“West,” Silas said, a warning in his voice. “That’s less than two hours. We can’t possibly get it done in two hours.”
“We’ll call Whit,” I said. “And Marcy and Bridget. And Laurel can help too.”
“Yes, good!” said Elliot, eager.
“You two go buy the deodorant—remember, the spray-on kind—and I’ll get everyone else over here to start peeling off the Post-its,” I said.
The look they each gave me would have been hilarious in other circumstances—on Elliot, a look of mild shock; on Silas, skepticism. All because I had assigned them a task to do together. “Just do it,” I said, rolling my eyes. “And hurry!”
After they left, I called Whit and the girls, and everyone said they’d hurry over, except for Laurel, who was hesitant. She had barely stepped outside her house the whole summer—and each time she had, it had amounted to a crisis. “You know what,” I said, “you don’t have to come.”
“Whit will be there?” she asked.
I rolled my eyes again. “Yes, he’s already on his way.”
“All right,” she resolved. “I’m coming too.”
Bridget and Marcy arrived first, and together we peeled off all the Post-its. The damp ones came off easily enough, but the ones that had dried left behind bits of crusty paper, as if they’d been glued down. “I hope your idea works,” Marcy said to me, “otherwise, we’re not going to see Elliot until after graduation.”
Whit arrived just as Elliot and Silas were returning from Red Owl with supplies, and we all got to work. When Laurel arrived, Whit looked up and smiled.
Laurel had showered and come with her long hair still damp. She had used concealer under her eyes and had put on mascara and lip gloss, and she looked about a thousand times better than she had the other day when we’d searched the Mayhew attic. “Hey,” she said, and this comment was clearly directed to Whit and Whit alone.
“Hi,” he said, and she walked over to him and gave him a small, awkward hug.
“How did it go at your uncle’s?” she asked him. I had no idea what she was talking about. I saw Bridget and Marcy raise their eyebrows at each other.
The sun was high and bright in the sky, and we all worked silently. Elliot had obviously told the others about our breakup. We’d all been friends so long, it was like a mini divorce. Bridget and Marcy were Team Elliot, except Marcy liked Elliot, and Silas had secured his singlehood, so she alternately regarded Silas as a kitten killer or Jesus Christ. And then there was poor Whit—Whit, who had been friends with Elliot for years—but who had known me just as long; he’d be the child who had to cho
ose which parent to live with. Plus, he seemed to like Laurel, so that complicated matters further.
After about ten uncomfortable minutes, Silas started to quietly sing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a ridiculous choice. Bridget and Marcy gave each other half-amused looks. Elliot didn’t look up. Laurel started giggling.
Then Whit joined in. By the end, the two of them traded off high-pitched “Galileos,” and almost everyone was singing along except Elliot, who was working hard at the crusty spots of glue with deep intensity. Eventually, though, he grunted something.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“It’s not ‘scare a moose.’ It’s ‘Scaramouche.’”
“Scaramouche?” Silas repeated.
“Some clown character.”
Elliot went back to work, but Silas and I grinned at each other.
We followed this up with a wholehearted attempt at the WARegon Trail theme song and then a mockery of Chuck Justice’s latest single, after which Whit grabbed Laurel’s shoulders and planted a kiss on her lips. Silas’s mouth fell open, just a little. But Laurel looked so surprised—and so pleased.
“I think I am high on Right Guard,” I announced when we finally finished. The van looked so clean that Elliot decided to take it home via some back roads before returning it to the garage just to remove all suspicion. Whit, hat on backward and crooked grin on his face, asked Laurel if she wanted to go for a walk to the lake, and she agreed. Silas briefly pulled Whit aside before he and I snuck across the parking lot to the bell tower.
“So, I’ll go running with him. With Elliot, I mean,” Silas said to me as he followed me up the four flights. “If he ever wants to.”
I turned around suddenly. “Really?”
He bumped into me. “Yeah, Elliot’s not so bad.”
I frowned.
“Okay, okay, maybe he is,” Silas said, backing off. “Are you mad? You’re mad.”
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