by Joe Hill
“No. I know,” Ig said. “Just, I wouldn’t feel right selling it to you.”
“Well. You can’t keep giving me things either. If you were going to sell it, how much would you want? I’ve got a little money saved up from tips on the magazine sales.”
Or you could borrow a twenty from your mama, Ig thought, in an almost sly, silky voice that he hardly recognized as his own.
“I don’t want your money,” Ig said. “But I’ll trade you.”
“For what?”
“For that,” Ig said, and nodded at the cross.
There. It was said. Ig’s next breath held in his lungs, a hot, chlorine-flavored capsule of oxygen, chemical and strange. Lee had saved his life, pulled him out of the river when he was unconscious and pounded the air back into him, and Ig was ready to give back, felt he owed Lee anything and everything—except for this. She had signaled him, not Lee. Ig understood there was no right in bargaining with Lee like this, no moral defense, no way to sell it to himself as the act of a decent person. No sooner had he asked for the cross back than he felt a kind of shriveling inside; he had always thought of himself as the good guy in his own story, the clear hero. But the good guy wouldn’t do this. Maybe some things were more important than being the good guy, though.
Lee stared, a slight half smile pulling at the corners of his lips. Ig felt a blaze of heat in his face and was not entirely sorry, was glad to be embarrassed for her. He said, “I know this is coming out of nowhere, but I think I have a crush on her. I would’ve said something earlier, but I didn’t want to be in your way.”
Without hesitation Lee reached behind his neck and undid the clasp. “All you ever had to do was ask. It’s yours. It was always yours. You found it, not me. All I did was fix it. And if it gets you in with her, I’m glad to fix that, too.”
“I thought she was your sort of thing, though. You aren’t—”
Lee waved a hand through the air. “Going to compete with a friend over some girl whose name I don’t know. All the stuff you’ve given me, all the CDs? Even if they mostly sucked, I appreciate it. I’m not an ungrateful person, Ig. You ever see her again, you’re all over it. I’m behind you all the way. I don’t think she’s coming back, though.”
“She is,” Ig said softly.
Lee looked at him.
The truth had come out before Ig could help himself. He had to know that Lee didn’t care, because they were friends now. Were going to be friends for the rest of their lives.
When Lee didn’t speak—just floated there with that half smile on his long, narrow face—Ig went on, “I met someone who knows her. She wasn’t there last Sunday because her family is moving up from Rhode Island and they had to go back and get the rest of their stuff.”
Lee finished removing the cross and tossed it lightly to Ig, who caught it when it hit the water.
“Go get her, tiger,” Lee said. “You’re the one who found that thing, and for whatever reason she didn’t seem to take a shine to me. Besides. I have all I can handle in the lady department these days. Glenna came over to see me yesterday, to tell me about the car at Gary’s, and while she was over, she took the whole thing in her mouth. Only for a minute. But she did it.” Lee beamed—the smile of a child with a new balloon. “What a fucking slut, huh?”
“That’s awesome,” Ig said, and smiled weakly.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
IG SAW MERRIN WILLIAMS and then pretended he hadn’t: no easy task, his heart leaping inside him, throwing itself into his rib cage like an angry drunk assaulting the bars of his holding cell. He had thought of this moment not just every day but nearly every hour of every day, since he had last seen her, and it was almost too much for his nervous system, was overloading the grid. She wore cream-colored linen slacks and a white blouse with the sleeves folded back, and her hair was loose this time, and she looked right at him as he came up the aisle with his family, but he pretended not to see her.
Lee and his father came in a few minutes before the service began and settled into a pew on Ig’s side, close to the front. Lee turned his head and gave her a long look, up and down. She didn’t seem to notice, was gazing intently at Ig. After Lee had finished inspecting her, he peered back over his shoulder, to look at Ig himself from under heavy-lidded eyes. He shook his head in mock disapproval before pivoting away.
Merrin stared at Iggy for the entire first five minutes of the service, and in all that time he did not once look at her directly. He clenched his hands together, his palms slick with sweat, and kept his eyes fixed on Father Mould.
She didn’t give up staring at him until Father Mould said, “Let us pray.” She slid off the pew to kneel and put her hands together, and that was when Ig slipped the cross out of his pocket. He held it in the cup of his hand, found some sunshine, and pointed it at her. A spectral golden cross of light drifted over her cheekbone and struck the corner of her eye. She blinked the first time he flashed her with it, flinched the second time, and looked back at him the third time. He held the piece steady, so a golden cross of pure light burned in the center of his hand and its reflection shone on her cheek. She regarded him with unexpected solemnity, the radio operator in a war movie, receiving a life-or-death signal from a comrade-in-arms.
Slowly and deliberately, he tilted it this way and that, flashing the Morse-code message he had memorized over the course of the last week. It felt important to get it exactly right, and he handled the cross as if it were a thimbleful of nitroglycerin. When the message was complete, he held her gaze for a moment longer and then closed his hand around the cross and looked away again, his heart slamming so loudly he felt sure his father must be able to hear it, kneeling next to him. But his father was praying over his hands, his eyes closed.
Ig Perrish and Merrin Williams took care not to look at each other again throughout the rest of the service. Or, to be more exact, they did not look into each other’s face, although he was conscious of her watching him from the corner of her eye, as he watched her, enjoying the way she stood to sing, with her shoulders back. Her hair burned in the daylight.
Father Mould blessed them all and bade them to love one another, which was precisely Ig’s goal. As people began to file out, Ig remained where he was, his father’s hand on his shoulder, as always. Merrin Williams stepped into the aisle, her own father behind her, and Ig expected her to stop and thank him for rescuing her cross, but she did not even look at him. Instead she stared back and up at her father, chatting with him as they went out. Ig opened his mouth to speak to her—and then his gaze was drawn to her left hand, her index finger extended to point behind her, back toward her pew. It was such a casual gesture she could’ve just been swinging her arm, but Ig was sure she was telling him where to wait for her.
When the aisle was clear, Ig stepped out and aside, to let his father and mother and brother go on ahead. But instead of following them, he turned and walked toward the altar and the chancel. When his mother shot a look at him, he pointed in the direction of the back hall, where there was a restroom. You could only pretend you needed to tie your shoe so many times. She went on, her hand on Terry’s arm. Terry was looking back at Ig with narrow-eyed suspicion but allowed himself to be marched away.
Ig hung out in the shadowy back hall that led to Father Mould’s office, watching for her. She returned soon enough, and by then the church was practically empty. She looked around the nave but didn’t see him, and he remained in the darkness, watching her. She walked to the altar of repose and lit a candle and crossed herself and knelt and prayed. Her hair fell to hide her face, and so Ig did not think she saw him as he started forward. He did not feel as if he was walking toward her at all. His legs were not his own. It was more like being carried, as if he were on the shopping cart again; there was that same giddy but nauseating feeling of plunge in his stomach, of dropping off the very edge of the world, of sweet risk.
He did not interrupt her until she lifted her head and looked up.
“Hey,” he said as
she rose. “I found your cross. You left it. I was worried when I didn’t see you last Sunday that I wouldn’t have a chance to give it back.” He was already holding it out to her.
She tugged the cross and its slender chain of gold from his hand and held it in hers.
“You fixed it.”
“No,” Ig said. “My friend Lee Tourneau fixed it. He’s good at fixing things.”
“Oh,” she said. “Tell him I said thanks.”
“You can tell him yourself if he’s still around. He goes to this church, too.”
“Will you put it on?” she asked. She turned her back to him and lifted her hair and bent her head forward, to show him the white nape of her neck.
Ig smoothed his palms across his chest to dry them and then opened the necklace and gently pulled it around her throat. He hoped she wouldn’t see that his hands were shaking.
“You met Lee, you know,” Ig said, so he’d have something to say. “He was sitting behind you the day it broke.”
“That kid? He tried to put it back on me after it snapped. I thought he was going to strangle me with it.”
“I’m not strangling you, am I?” Ig asked.
“No,” she said.
He was having trouble linking the clasp to the chain. It was his nervous hands. She waited patiently.
“Who were you lighting a candle for?” Ig asked.
“My sister.”
“You have a sister?” Ig asked.
“Not anymore,” she said in a clipped, emotionless sort of way, and Ig felt a sick twinge, knew he shouldn’t have asked.
“Did you figure out the message?” he blurted, feeling an urgent need to move the conversation to something else.
“What message?”
“The message I was flashing you. In Morse code. You know Morse code, don’t you?”
She laughed—an unexpectedly rowdy sound that almost caused Ig to drop the necklace. In the next moment, his fingers discovered what to do, and he fastened the chain around her throat. She turned. It was a shock how close she was standing. If he lifted his hands, they would be on her hips.
“No. I went to Girl Scouts a couple times, but I quit before we got to anything interesting. Besides, I already know everything I need to know about camping. My father was in the Forest Service. What were you signaling me?”
She flustered him. He had planned this whole conversation in advance, with great care, working out everything she’d ask and every smooth reply he’d give her, but it was all gone now.
“But weren’t you flashing something to me?” he asked. “The other day?”
She laughed again. “I was just seeing how long I could flash you in the eyes before you figured out where it was coming from. What message did you think I was sending you?”
But Ig couldn’t answer her. His windpipe was bunching up again, and there was a dreadful suffusion of heat in his face, and for the first time he realized how ridiculous it was to have imagined she had been signaling anything, let alone what he had talked himself into believing—that she was flashing the word “us.” No girl in the world would’ve signaled such thing to a boy she had never spoken to before. It was obvious, now that he looked at it straight on.
“I was saying, ‘This is yours,’” Ig told her at last, deciding that the only safe thing to do was to ignore the question she had just asked him. Furthermore, this was a lie, although it sounded true. He had been signaling her a single short word as well. The word had been “yes.”
“Thanks, Iggy,” she said.
“How do you know my name?” he asked, and was surprised at the way her face suddenly colored.
“I asked someone,” she said. “I forget why, I—”
“And you’re Merrin.”
She stared, her eyes questioning, surprised.
“I asked someone,” he said.
She looked at the doors. “My parents are probably waiting.”
“Okay,” he said.
By the time they reached the atrium, he had found out they were both in first-period English together, that her house was on Clapham Street, and that her mother had signed her up to be a volunteer at the blood drive the church was holding at the end of the month. Ig was working the blood drive, too.
“I didn’t see you on the sign-up sheet,” she said. They walked three more steps before it occurred to Ig that this meant she had looked for his name on the sheet. He glanced over and saw her smiling enigmatically to herself.
When they came through the doors, the sunshine was so bright that for a moment Ig couldn’t see anything through the harsh glare. He saw a dark blur rushing at him and lifted his hands and caught a football. As his vision cleared, he saw his brother and Lee Tourneau and some other boys—even Eric Hannity—and Father Mould fanning out across the grass, and Mould was shouting, “Ig, right here!” His parents were standing with Merrin’s parents, Derrick Perrish and Merrin’s father talking cheerfully, as if their families had been friends for years. Merrin’s mother, a thin woman with a pinched colorless mouth, was shading her eyes with one hand and smiling at her daughter in a pained sort of way. The day smelled of hot tarmac, sun-baked cars, and fresh-cut lawn. Ig, who was not at all athletically inclined, cocked back his arm and threw the football with a perfect tight spin on it, and it cut through the air and dropped right into Father Mould’s big, calloused hands. Mould lifted it over his head, running across the green lawn in his black short-sleeved shirt and white collar.
Football lasted for most of half an hour, fathers and sons and Father chasing one another across the grass. Lee was drafted as a quarterback; he wasn’t much of an athlete either, but he looked the part, falling back to go long with that look of perfect, almost icy calm on his face, his tie tossed over one shoulder. Merrin kicked off her shoes and played, the only girl among them. Her mother said, “Merrin Williams, you’ll get grass stains on your pants and we’ll never get them out,” but her father waved his hand in the air and said, “Let her have some fun.” It was supposed to be touch football, but Merrin threw Ig down on every play, diving at his feet, until it was a gag that cracked everyone up—Ig wiped out by this sixteen-year-old girl built like a blade of grass. No one thought it was funnier, or enjoyed it more, than Ig himself, who went out of his way to give her chances to cream him.
“You should drop your butt on the ground as soon as they snap the ball,” she said, the fifth or sixth time she wiped him out. “’Cause I can do this all day. You know that? What’s funny?” Because he was laughing.
She was kneeling over him, her red hair tickling his nose. She smelled of lemons and mint. The necklace hung from her throat, flashing at him again, transmitting a message of almost unbearable pleasure.
“Nothing,” he said. “I think I’m reading you loud and clear.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
FOR ALL THE REST of the summer, they had a habit of wandering into each other. When Ig went with his mother to the supermarket, Merrin was there with her mother, and they wound up walking together, drifting along a few feet behind their parents. Merrin got a bag of cherries, and they shared it while they walked.
“Isn’t this shoplifting?” Ig asked.
“We can’t get in trouble if we eat the evidence,” she said, and spit a pit into her hand and then handed it to him. She gave him all her pits, calmly expecting him to get rid of them, which he did by putting them in his pocket. When he got home, there was a sweet-smelling wet lump the size of a baby’s fist in his jeans.
And when the Jag had to go into Masters Auto for an inspection, Ig tagged along with his father, because he knew by then that Merrin’s dad worked there. Ig had no reason to believe that Merrin would be at the dealership as well, on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, but she was, sitting on her father’s desk, swinging her feet back and forth, as if waiting for him, impatient for him to arrive. They got orange sodas from the vending machine and stood talking in a back hallway, under buzzing fluorescent lights. She told him she was hiking out to Queen’s Face the next
day, with her father. Ig said the path went right behind his house, and she asked if he would walk up with them. Her lips were stained orange from the soda. It was no work to be together. It was the most natural thing in the world.
It was natural to include Lee also. He kept things from getting too serious. He invited himself along for the walk up Queen’s Face, said he wanted to check it out for mountain-boarding trails. He forgot to bring the board, though.
On the climb up, Merrin grabbed the collar of her T-shirt and pulled it away from her chest, twitching it back and forth to fan herself and mock-panting from the heat. “You guys ever jump in the river?” Merrin asked, pointing at the Knowles through the trees. It wound through dense forest in the valley below, a black snake with a back of brilliantly glittering scales.
“Ig jumps in all the time,” Lee said, and Ig laughed. Merrin gave them both a puzzled, narrow-eyed look, but Ig only shook his head. Lee went on, “Tell you what, though. Ig’s pool is a lot nicer. When are you going to have her over swimming?”
Ig’s face prickled with heat at the suggestion. He had fantasized just that thing, many times—Merrin in a bikini—but whenever he came close to asking her, his breath failed him.
They talked about her sister, Regan, just once in those first weeks. Ig asked why they had moved up from Rhode Island, and Merrin said with a shrug, “My parents were really depressed after Regan died, and my mother grew up here, her whole family is here. And home didn’t feel right anymore. Without Regan in it.”
Regan had died at twenty of a rare and particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. It took just four months to kill her.
“Must’ve been awful,” Ig murmured, a moronic generality but the only thing that felt safe. “I can’t imagine how I’d feel if Terry died. He’s my best friend.”