His father turned to him. “We?”
“Why don’t you come home with me?” he had asked Carly during one of their first afternoons together.
She had shaken her head.
“Why not? I’m sure my dad wouldn’t mind.”
“I think we should keep all this just between us,” she had said. “I don’t think you should tell your father anything about me. It can be our little secret.”
“All right,” he said, a little hesitantly, not really understanding. “But why — ”
“He just wouldn’t understand.”
“Who’s we?”
How much to say? How much to reveal?
“Just Carly.” He went to the cupboard and brought down two plates and two bowls and started setting the table.
“Who’s Carly? Is she someone from school?”
“No, I think she lives on one of the big farms. She dresses like the girls who go to that other school.”
It was a good answer: his father seemed to relax a little bit. He turned back to the stove, stirred the pot of soup.
“Is she out there all the time with you?”
He knew instinctively not to let his guard down. “Most days, I guess.” He knew better than to tell his father about how she was always waiting for him, or about the places she had shown him. Or about what had happened that afternoon.
His father nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “I wish you had mentioned her sooner.”
Brian paused in the cutlery drawer. “Why?”
He sighed and turned off the stove. “It might have . . . Your mom and I, we worry about you. I know how much you like it back there, and I know how much you like being alone, but it makes me feel better to know you’re not always on your own.”
Brian allowed himself to relax. It felt like a storm has passed, that he had wiggled his way out from his father’s anger. As he set the cutlery by the plates, he felt his smile returning. He tried to contain it, but couldn’t. The feelings were just too big.
She had kissed him.
That was why he had been late.
They had been saying goodbye at the forest’s edge when she had leaned in and brushed her lips against his. Her lips had been dry, and when she stepped back she had looked away, down at her feet.
“What — ” He couldn’t even put the question together, his mind speeding in small concentric circles, his heart vibrating wildly in his chest.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly, still looking at the ground. “I didn’t mean to . . .”
“No,” he stopped her. “No, I . . .”
“It’s just that — ” She looked up at him, her head still angled toward the ground, her eyes almost hidden by the fall of her hair. “It’s just — ”
“It’s okay.” His face was hot.
“I just like you. An awful lot. And I hate it when you have to go. I miss you.” Her words came in whispered bursts, as if she had to steel herself for every phrase.
“You . . . like me?”
She had nodded, looking up at him slowly, shyly.
His father was staring at him strangely from across the table, and Brian felt the stretch of his smile pulling at the corners of his mouth.
“Good soup, Dad,” he said, trying to draw his attention away.
They sat side by side on the fallen log. Brian was keenly aware of how close she was to him, how near her hand, resting on her leg, was to his own.
“It’s hard for me when you have to go,” she said, looking toward the scrim of undergrowth that separated the worlds of forests and fields. “I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.” Until that moment, he wouldn’t have really been able to label his feelings. He hadn’t realized that his thinking of her, his wanting to be with her, the empty space within himself when he was away from her, had a name.
He knew about missing someone, of course. Since his mother had gone, he had missed her every day. But this was different. Stronger. Sharper.
“I don’t like having to leave.”
She turned to look at him, her eyes the pale green of a spring leaf. Without thinking, he reached out and took her hand, entwining his fingers through hers. Looking into her eyes, he was surprised to see her need there. He had thought, until that moment, that he was the only one who felt the absence of someone so deeply, that he was alone in missing someone so much it physically ached.
“I talked to your mom on the phone today,” his father said, scraping his spoon along the bottom of his mostly empty bowl. “We talked a long time.”
Something in his father’s voice made Brian look up. “About what?”
“About you,” his father said, setting the spoon down. “About the fall.”
“What about the fall?”
“Your mom . . . your mom and I, like I said, we’re a bit worried. About you. About how much time you’re spending on your own. We think . . . we think it might be best if you tried going to school in the city next year.”
“No!” he cried out sharply, before he knew he was doing it.
His father nodded. “I know this is a bit of a surprise, but we’ve been talking about it.”
“You never talked to me.”
“There’s a lot of programs you can do after school, a lot of opportunities that Henderson just doesn’t have.”
“But . . .”
“And it’s not right away. You’ll finish up this year here, and we’ll get you moved over the summer. I figure you can come home every weekend if you want.”
“What if I don’t want to go at all?”
“Brian, it’s — ”
“What if I want to stay here?”
“Your mom and I — ”
“I don’t want to go!”
His father sighed. “Let’s not get into a fight about this, all right? When you’re there next week, I think you’ll see — ”
“Next week?”
“Spring break,” his father explained. “You’re spending the week with your mom. She thought it might be a good chance . . .”
“Next week?”
“We’ve talked about this.”
“Right.” He vaguely remembered them talking about it, looking at the calendar, how excited his mom had been about it during the last weekend at her apartment in the city.
But that had all been before he met Carly.
The thought of her tightened his stomach into a hard ball.
“When is she coming to pick me up?” he asked.
“Sunday afternoon. And she said she’d bring you back around dinnertime the next Sunday, so you’ll have a full week.”
Brian nodded and looked down at his bowl, unable to even think of having another bite.
“I know it’s a lot, Brian. But I think — ”
“Can I be excused?”
His father seemed to deflate. “Yeah. Clear your dishes.”
For a moment, just before Brian turned away, a look of sadness flashed across his father’s face, an expression he tried to hide.
He doesn’t want me to go. He thinks I don’t want to go because I’ll miss him.
The thought cut through Brian, forcing him to look again at his father, to see the deep sadness just under his skin, the dark behind his eyes.
He didn’t like seeing that sadness, that weakness, in his father. He didn’t like knowing that he had done something to put it there, that the mere thought of his absence was enough to hurt him.
Missing him.
He didn’t like admitting to himself that he hadn’t even considered his father when he thought of having to move to the city.
All he had thought about was Carly.
Missing her.
The lights were still off in Brian’s room. Jeff could hardly see Diane in the spill of the work lights through the curtains. She was curled on her side on Brian’s bed, her knees pulled in tight to her chest. She faced away from the door, toward the window.
Her breathing was deep and regular.
Jeff crept into the room, silent,
trying not to disturb her.
He stood behind the bed. Through the window he could see the wall of the shop, the slow, gentle spread of the field, and the wall of darkness that was the forest behind.
He sat down carefully at the foot of the bed.
There is no lonelier sound than the deep, calm, in and out of another’s breath beside you, nothing that can make you feel quite so distant, quite so removed.
He had once taken comfort in Diane’s breathing next to him, the calm regularity of it providing solace and reassurance in the darkest hours of the night.
When had that changed? When had that sound started to make him feel so crushingly alone?
“He’s not coming back, is he?” she asked quietly, in a voice that was strong and clear but still bore the echo of tears.
The sound startled him. “I thought you were asleep.”
“No.”
The silence, the space between them, was deep and wide. He wanted to cross it, to reach out to touch her, but he no longer knew her. And he couldn’t bear to have her pull away from him.
“I’ve been lying here, listening to them outside. I hear their voices, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. They’re not going to find him.”
“Don’t say that.”
In another time, she would have rolled on her back, or to face him. They would have looked into one another’s eyes, found a way to comfort each other.
But she remained on her side, facing away.
“They’ll find him,” Jeff said, but as he spoke, he realized that he didn’t believe the words himself.
The sun was bright and warm, but the air was cool and smelled of the sea. Was Brian imagining it, or did he hear the faint sound of waves in the distance?
He followed Carly down the steep slope, his pack bouncing occasionally off moss-covered rocks and damp tree trunks. He kept one eye on the terrain around him and one eye on Carly. She was a fair ways ahead, moving over the rough ground with a light ease and grace, a natural comfort Brian envied. This was her world: she fit into it as naturally as the birdsong in the air, as the spongy, mossy ground under his feet.
Could he ever be as comfortable here? Would he get to a point where he could seem to float between obstacles, to step gracefully between worlds?
Every so often she would stop and look back at him, smiling broadly, encouragingly. There was no impatience, no sense that he was holding her back or that she was waiting for him. Looking at her, someone would think she had all the time in the world.
“We’re almost there,” she called.
“Where?” he called back, steadying himself with a thin tree trunk.
“You’ll see.”
He thought these were the most wonderful words someone had ever said to him, and Carly said them all the time. You’ll see. Spending time with her was a world of surprises through every copse of trees, through every stand of brush, in every clearing. It was a world of wonders that she revealed to him in every moment.
And she herself was one of those wonders.
You’ll see.
She was waiting for him in a small clearing. The sound of waves was louder here, the smell of salt and spray sharp and intoxicating.
She looked at him coyly, but didn’t say anything.
He stepped toward her slowly.
“Look,” she said, stepping to one side to reveal the most beautiful plant he had ever seen.
It was pure white, shimmering and almost translucent, so bright it almost hurt his eyes. It had no leaves, only a thick white stem and a number of small white flowers. I was clearly a plant, but just barely.
It looked like something out of a dream.
Brian stepped forward, crouched in the loamy softness as he bent to examine the plant.
“What is this?” He leaned in close to study the texture of the stem, the flower, afraid to touch it.
“It has a lot of different names,” she said, leaning in with him. “Some people call it the coast orchid, or the albino orchid.” Her voice was a whisper. “I call it the death rose.”
“Why?”
“Because it lives off the dead.” When he looked at her, she was looking at the plant, but he knew she had been looking at him a moment before. “It has no leaves because it never sees the sun. It grows in the shadows, and takes its strength from the rot and decay of the earth around it. It grows from the dead.”
“Like a fungus,” he whispered.
“Sort of.”
Without looking away from the plant, Brian pulled off his pack and unzipped it.
“It won’t be in your guide,” she said, just as he curled his fingers around the book’s spine to pull it out.
“Why not?”
“To most of the world, the death rose doesn’t exist. It grows in only three places, three of these tiny valleys just off the coast where it can drink the moisture out of the air, where it can consume the past through its roots.”
“But people must know about it.”
She nodded. “People do. But those few who have seen it know they have been in the presence of something extraordinary, something profound. Something that transcends classification. Something that just is.”
She looked at him as she spoke.
He released his grip on the book and let the bag fall to the cool, damp earth.
She smiled.
“Probably no more than a hundred people have seen this flower in the last century,” she said.
“It’s amazing.”
“There are others,” she started, and he looked at her. “Other secret places like this. Plants and animals you won’t find in any book. Places you won’t find on any map.”
Their eyes met, and he didn’t look away.
“There’s a flower, an African orchid, that only blooms one night every seven years. It is believed that if you pick this flower and give it to your heart’s true love before the sun rises, it will never die, and your love will be the stuff of legends.”
Her eyes stayed on his, rich and green and bottomless.
“And there’s a forest of trees so tall” — she stopped, as if she couldn’t believe it herself — “that they make the tallest trees near your house seem like twigs.”
He watched her mouth as she formed the words, her eyes as she seemed to drift into the stories she told.
“You could spend a lifetime — many lifetimes — discovering the wonders of this world all around you.”
Yes, he admitted to himself, at last. I could.
Joe Phelps manned the Communications Centre in the Search and Rescue truck. The crackling of radio signals and distant voices were the only sounds in the still yard, just touched with the first light of dawn.
Jeff set the mug he was carrying on the desktop beside Joe. “I thought you could use this.”
Joe tugged off the headphones he was wearing. “Thanks, Jeff,” he said, and he looked like he was about to say something else but turned away, directing his attention back to his switches and knobs.
It took Jeff a moment. “It’s all right, Joe. I’m not out here trying to get information from you or anything. I know you’ll let us know if there’s any news.”
The relief on Joe’s face was palpable.
“I just thought you might like some coffee. It’s been a long night.” He stepped back, took a sip from his own mug. The sun was starting to rise and the world was grey, a mist clinging to the lows of the field.
Joe seemed almost chagrined. “Yeah. Thanks for . . . for the coffee.”
Jeff shook his head as if to dismiss it. “I was coming out anyhow. I’m gonna . . . I’m just gonna take a walk up — ” He couldn’t bring himself to say the words. “Just up to the edge.”
“Sure.” Jeff turned away, then back as Joe added, “We’ll let you know. As soon as we know something. We’ll find him.”
Jeff looked at him for a long moment, then turned away, without speaking.
He walked only to the grassy verge edging the west field. He could have walked
straight up the drive, past the shop and the old barn and behind it, where the track ended at the forest’s edge. It was the most direct route.
But that didn’t feel right. Something drove him away from the yard, through the field to the edge of the wood.
Was it the picture of himself? Some memory he couldn’t consciously grasp?
For whatever reason, he was sure this was the path that Brian had taken, that he was following in his son’s footsteps.
The way his son had been following in his.
Like father, like son.
As the sun crested over the mountains, the dew on the grass shone silver, a wet, shining carpet leading inexorably into the darkness.
He stopped at the point where the grass met the brown of the forest floor. Under the spread of the trees, the light disappeared, and the night still felt almost full.
He had to steel himself to step across the dividing line into the forest.
Once under the trees, it took Jeff’s eyes a moment to adjust, vague shapes gradually shifting and congealing into forms: stumps and bushes, a fallen log, a stand of trilliums. The clearing was familiar.
As was the girl who stepped soundlessly into the clearing from the dense brush.
“Carly?” he whispered, as if afraid she might take flight.
She smiled. “I didn’t think you’d remember.”
“I didn’t,” he said.
But now he did.
Without warning, he remembered it all.
The weight of the fishing rod on his shoulder, the tackle box in his pack. The smell of the forest, fresh and green, in his nose, his clothes, his skin. The taste of the trout he had caught with her in the tumble-rocked mountain stream, its sweetness, and the bracing cold of the water they had drunk. The feel of her hand in his. The stars so bright in the sky the night they had spent in the woods, the Northern Lights dancing above them.
He had never seen the Northern Lights again.
And he remembered crying, feeling something rent from him, a tugging at his heart that left him gasping for breath.
He remembered her asking —
“I asked if you wanted to stay with me,” she said.
Did she sound sad, even a little? Jeff thought so.
The World More Full of Weeping Page 5