Summerlost

by Ally Condie

  Meg trusted me.

  Leo trusted me.

  And I stole from them.

  Everything made sense. If Lisette had given the ring to anyone, as a gift or to keep it safe, it would have been her best friend. Maybe Lisette knew Roger was coming to the hotel that night. Maybe he wanted the ring back. Maybe Lisette asked Meg to keep it for that night, or for a while, or forever.

  Or maybe Meg stole it, in which case she was in the wrong too.

  I put the ring on the windowsill. It looked so small. I touched my finger to each of the three pale stones. They felt cold and smooth.

  My heart pounded faster and faster. Would Lisette take it? Would Leo?

  And then I realized that I hoped she wouldn’t.

  I didn’t want the person leaving things to be Lisette’s ghost, or even Leo.

  I wanted it to be Ben.

  When I let myself realize this—my deepest most important wish—it hurt, how much I wanted it. It hurt, how much I hoped.

  Breathe, I reminded myself. Beat.

  And my lungs did and my heart did and I hoped.

  Let it be Ben.

  I opened the window a crack. The wind came in but it didn’t move the ring.

  I decided I would stay up all night to see what happened.

  I didn’t have anywhere to go in the morning, anyway. The tour was finished. I’d been fired from concessions. And I couldn’t go back to the costume shop after taking the ring. Everything was over.

  The night was shadows and wind and the smell of a storm on the way, a night for crying until the tears were gone but the ache was left. A night for imagining that you could step out onto the windowsill and say hello to the dark, say I am sad and have the wind say I know. You could say I am alive and the trees would sigh back We are too. You could whisper I am alone and everything ends and the stars in the sky would answer We understand. Or maybe it’s ghosts telling you all these things, saying We know, we’re alone too, we understand how everything and nothing ends.

  I was almost asleep when I saw him. When I heard the wind and opened my eyes and there was a boy, a kid, standing at the windowsill holding the ring.

  Ben, I said, with my mouth. Ben, my heart beat. Right there. Messy hair. Pajamas. Face that looked gray because there was no light. Was he real or a ghost?

  I didn’t care.

  He looked at the ring.

  And then I noticed Ben’s hand, the other one not holding the ring. He had a spoon, a wooden cooking spoon. He was not flicking it back and forth. As I watched, he set it on the windowsill.

  Ben, I said louder.

  “Cedar?” Ben said, with Miles’s voice. He sounded scared.

  Why would Ben use Miles’s voice?

  “It’s me,” he said. “Cedar, it’s Miles.”

  “What?” I said.

  And then he flicked on the light and I knew. It was Miles. Not Ben.

  Of course it was. Of course that’s who it had been all along.

  “Where did you get this?” Miles asked. He opened his hand and held out the ring.

  I didn’t answer.

  “You have to take it back,” Miles said. “It looks fancy.”

  “Back where?” I asked, which was a stupid thing to say.

  “Back where you got it,” Miles said. He stood over me. He looked tall. He looked like Ben, a little.

  The storm outside picked up, pushing the trees to and fro. I heard a smack of scattered raindrops against the window.

  “You’re the one who’s been leaving things on the windowsill,” I said.

  Not Lisette.

  Not Leo.

  Not Ben.

  Miles nodded. “I’m sorry if I scared you. Usually you don’t wake up.” He looked worried, his eyes searching mine. I’d called him Ben.

  “All the things you leave,” I said. I stopped. “It’s all stuff Ben would have liked.”

  “Yeah,” Miles said. He glanced over at the spoon. “And you left me that lollipop. He liked lollipops.”

  Right.

  “So why leave those things for me?” I asked.

  “Because I kept seeing stuff he would like,” Miles said, “and I didn’t know who else to give it to.”

  I scooted over in the bed. “Come here,” I said. I didn’t sit up, but Miles sank down next to me. He was eight and I was twelve and we were too old to snuggle like kids but we did anyway. I put my arms around him and buried my face in the back of his hair and he smelled like Miles, Ben’s brother. Sweat and strawberry shampoo and clean pajamas.

  The wind made a low, deep sound, one that went through my bones and every board of the house. The clouds moved and the moon came back.

  And then, almost in slow motion, an enormous dark shadow went past my window.

  The tree, I thought, as it creaked and ached and my heart pounded. The tree is coming down.

  Some of its branches scratched, and I swear I saw a vulture going down with the tree, terror in the bird’s glinting eyes. And then a bigger branch came in, right through the window. The diamonds, dark, shattered all over the floor.

  Miles and I both jumped up.

  I stood there dazed for a second, and then I remembered my mom working down on the deck.

  “Mom,” I said, and I ran down the stairs as fast as I could, Miles right behind me. My heart hit against my rib cage, my feet slammed on the steps. I shoved open the back door against the rain and the wind.

  All I could see were branches and splintered wood. The vultures circled above us, agitated, swooping down. “Get away!” I screamed at them, and I ran out into the rain and broken branches and slippery leaves. Was she under the tree? The whole world was a forest. How could one tree be so enormous?

  “Cedar,” Miles said, and his voice was a sob.

  “Stay back, Miles,” I said. “Stay back.”

  And then I heard my mother’s voice.

  At first I didn’t understand. I thought it was in the leaves. I thought she was under the tree. I started grabbing at the wet branches. But then she called out, “Cedar!” louder, and I turned around, and she was coming toward me, the back door open, spilling light, Miles with her.

  “It’s all right,” she said, “I wasn’t outside. I went down to the basement to get more sandpaper.”

  One of the vultures came down and landed near the top of the fallen tree. It had crushed the shed. The vulture hopped around, upset. My mother shone her flashlight on the ground. “Oh no,” she said. “They’d been nesting in here.”

  The shed had come apart almost perfectly along the beam, and we could see inside, where they’d built their nest. My mom shone her flashlight on the knotty nest, on the eggs. They were light purple and cream colored, spotted dark.

  Every egg was broken. I could see a fluff of feathers and a shimmer of slime on one of them.

  “No,” Miles said. “No, no, no.”

  My mom put her arms around us both and we went back inside.

  Things happen fast. A car hits another car, a tree comes down, an egg breaks and a bird dies. Leaves lie on the ground gathering rain instead of lifting up in the sky and turning in the wind.

  3.

  The three of us waited in the kitchen for the fire department and animal rescue to show up. My mom had called them both and then made us hot chocolate. Miles took his to the front room to watch for the rescuers. “They said for us not to touch the birds,” Mom said.

  I didn’t want to talk about the baby vultures. I knew there was nothing anyone could do to help them. “I’m sorry about the deck,” I said to my mom.

  “I wanted to prove to myself,” Mom said, “that I could do this one thing on my own.”

  I understood. The deck was something my dad would have done. Not her. She could make stuff and fix things in the house and grow plants in the garden and mow
lawns, but building a deck was something new.

  “I learned all these things,” she said. “How to measure and sand and saw. And it didn’t even matter.”

  “It’s the stupid storm,” I said. “It would have been fine without the storm.”

  But I knew, and she knew, that I was lying.

  “No,” my mom said. “It wasn’t working before the storm, either.” She was crying. “It’s not working, is it?”

  She’d never said that before. I didn’t know how to answer. Because it didn’t work the same without my dad and Ben. No matter how hard we tried.

  Lights flashed through the front window. “The fire department’s here,” Miles said. “And some of the neighbors are coming out too.”

  My mom left her mug at the table and went to the door with him.

  This summer I’d been spending a lot of time on other people’s deaths. Harley’s. Lisette’s. But somehow it had helped me feel alive. Because they weren’t my deaths. The ones that were my own were too hard to face.

  I heard voices outside. People had come over to help us. Flashlights flickered around, all over the backyard. I heard Leo’s dad talking, and then Leo came in through the front door. His hair stuck up everywhere from sleeping. He had on sweatpants and a T-shirt. I put my head down on the table.

  Leo sat down next to me, the chair squeaking across the hardwood floor as he pulled it closer. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Is something else wrong besides the tree?”

  I didn’t do anything. Just sat there with my head down. I couldn’t even cry.

  “I want to help you,” he said. He sounded like he might be crying. “I’m your friend.”

  But I couldn’t tell him.

  I couldn’t tell anyone.

  I never, ever wanted Ben to be dead.

  But sometimes I wanted him gone.

  And then he was.

  4.

  All morning long the saws hummed, cutting the tree into small enough chunks to haul away. Animal rescue hadn’t been able to do anything about the nest. The vultures swung out in the sky and circled, their home gone, their eggs ruined. I saw the birds settle once in the trees by Leo’s house and I watched, hoping they’d stay there, but they took to the sky again not long after.

  I didn’t see where they came to rest after that because I had asked my mom to take me back to the costume shop. I kept glancing over at her, at her sunglasses, the rings she still wore on her wedding finger. One diamond ring, one gold band, both from my dad. She was in the right place at the right time last night, safe inside when the tree came down.

  One thing different—an extra piece of sandpaper outside when she needed it, the tree falling a bit sooner—and she would be gone. One thing different—hitting a red light instead of a green one on the way to the freeway, choosing another errand to run that day—and my dad and Ben would still be here.

  It’s not right that something so big, your entire life, depends on a million tiny things.

  The Costume Hall was full of assistants dressing mannequins, but I couldn’t find Meg. “She’s downstairs,” Emily said. “Will you tell her I need Juliet’s cape? Not the one from this year, the one from the production starring Hannah Crowe.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t know if I’d have a chance to tell Meg anything once I’d given back the ring.

  And then I realized, looking around, that they hadn’t gotten to Lisette’s costume yet. Maybe Meg wouldn’t know the ring was missing. Maybe I could slip it back into the box.

  But when I saw Meg there, bent over a costume she was repairing, her shoulders hunched, she looked old, because I couldn’t see her eyes. And I thought about how Lisette and Ben and my dad would never be old. About how I might be old someday. About how Meg had lived a long time without her friend.

  I came up close and put the ring on the table in front of her. “I took this,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  Meg looked at the ring and then up at me. “From the box for the Costume Hall display?” she asked, and I nodded.

  “Why?” she asked.

  Because I thought the ghost of your friend might come to my window.

  Because what I really hoped was that my brother would appear. I thought he might like it. The weight, the stones.

  “Leo and I noticed that she wore it in her final performance,” I said. “We knew it was her ring, not the festival’s, because we knew it was the one from Roger Marin. And Leo looked at the police report from the night she died and the police didn’t list the ring among her personal possessions. It was a mystery.”

  “A mystery,” Meg said. “And you wanted to be part of it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “And I’m sorry about the tour. I know I shouldn’t have done that either. I know you’re probably mad at me because Lisette was your friend.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not mad about the tour. ”

  Meg pushed back from her table, where she’d been leaning over something that looked like chain mail, shiny and gilded and silver. “I need to get out,” she said. “I’m going to ruin my eyes trying to repair that armor. Come with me.” She picked up the ring and put it in her pocket.

  I followed her out into the hall. Past WIGS and MAKEUP. Up the stairs and out into the front of the building by the fountain. We stopped there, and Meg gestured for me to sit down on a bench with her. I did. The bench had a small plaque on it that said THIS BENCH WAS GIFTED TO THE FESTIVAL BY AN ANONYMOUS DONOR.

  DONOR. The words made me think of Ben, and the letter from the family of the other boy.

  It felt like everything was named after someone, or was made possible by someone else. Fountains. Benches. Eyes.

  “Is there something you want to talk to me about?” Meg said. “Something you want to ask me?”

  What was Lisette like? How do you keep going when you miss someone so much? How do you stand getting old? Why are we all going to die?

  I said something else instead. “My friend Leo and I really want to see the tunnels before they tear down the theater. Could you let us go in them?”

  “Lisette’s ghost doesn’t walk those tunnels,” Meg said. “Not in the way you think, anyway. You won’t see her there unless you knew her. Unless you saw her there when she was alive. Laughing. Serious. Getting ready to go onstage or coming off it or talking to everyone in the tunnel. Then she’d be all too easy to picture.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  We both watched the fountain for a moment. Meg wasn’t crying but her voice had that sound voices get when you’re sad and achy, too dry for tears.

  I didn’t know if I should keep pushing. But I had to. Because Leo wasn’t going to see Barnaby Chesterfield in London, so he should at least get to see the secret tunnels of his hometown theater before they were lost for good.

  “I don’t really want to see the tunnels because of Lisette,” I said at last. “I want to see them because of Leo.”

  “Leo,” Meg said. “Your friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re asking me to do this favor for you even though you stole a ring and gave a tour about my friend.”

  “I brought the ring back,” I said. It was all I could think of besides I’m sorry, which I had said so many times.

  Meg kept studying me.

  “Also, I sorted a lot of buttons.”

  Meg stood up and brushed off the seat of her pants. “Come back to the shop tonight,” she said. “Late. After the play ends and they’ve had time to put things away. Let’s say midnight. I’ll see what I can do.”

  5.

  Meg let me use her phone before my mom came to pick me up from volunteering. Meg didn’t ask me who I was going to call and I didn’t tell her.

  I’d never called Leo’s number before, but I knew it from the flyers we’d put in the programs. I prayed he’d pick up.

 
“Hello?” said a guy. An older guy. Zach.

  “Zach, it’s Cedar,” I said. “Can I talk to Leo?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” Zach said. “Don’t take it personally. Leo’s not allowed to use the phone for anything right now due to his poor decisions. I’m the enforcer while our parents aren’t home.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Silence for a minute. I could hear noise in the background.

  “He’s recording this terrible show called Times of Our Seasons, ” Zach said, “and he’s got Jeremy and me hooked on it. Tell me again how this girl got buried alive?”

  “Well,” I said, “she fell in love with Rowan. That’s the guy that her archenemy, Celeste, is also in love with. Celeste wanted Harley gone. First Celeste tried to get Harley a job in a different state so that she’d move. Then Celeste hired a handsome man to try to get Harley to fall in love with him instead, and what ended up happening was that the guy fell for Harley and Harley remained faithful and committed to Rowan and the other guy gave all the money back to Celeste and said he couldn’t be a part of this anymore and that Harley and Rowan had a love that only death could divide. And, you know, things kind of went from there.”

  “As they do,” Zach said.

  “Yeah.”

  Neither of us said anything. Now I could make out the voice of the bad twin in the background. I wondered if Leo knew Zach was talking to me.

  “I can’t let you talk to Leo,” Zach said, “but I could give him a message.”

  “Um,” I said.

  “I can be trusted,” Zach said. “I’m no Celeste.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t know what else to do. “Could you tell Leo to meet me tonight at midnight at the corner by my house and to bring his bike and a flashlight and wear all black?”

  “I could,” Zach said. “But what are you doing?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” I said, “but it’s safe. I swear.”

  “It sounded cool until you told me it was safe.”

  “Zach, come on,” I said. “Please.”