Also by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Have You Seen Luis Velez?
Just After Midnight
Heaven Adjacent
The Wake Up
Allie and Bea
Say Goodbye for Now
Leaving Blythe River
Ask Him Why
Worthy
The Language of Hoofbeats
Pay It Forward: Young Readers Edition
Take Me with You
Paw It Forward
365 Days of Gratitude: Photos from a Beautiful World
Where We Belong
Subway Dancer and Other Stories
Walk Me Home
Always Chloe and Other Stories
The Long, Steep Path: Everyday Inspiration from the Author of Pay It Forward
How to Be a Writer in the E-Age: A Self-Help Guide
When You Were Older
Don’t Let Me Go
Jumpstart the World
Second Hand Heart
When I Found You
Diary of a Witness
The Day I Killed James
Chasing Windmills
The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance
Love in the Present Tense
Becoming Chloe
Walter’s Purple Heart
Electric God/The Hardest Part of Love
Pay It Forward
Earthquake Weather and Other Stories
Funerals for Horses
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Catherine Ryan Hyde, Trustee, of the Catherine Ryan Hyde Revocable Trust created under that certain declaration dated September 27, 1999.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542042406 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542042402 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542042383 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542042380 (paperback)
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
First edition
CONTENTS
PART ONE: THEN
Chapter One The Tipping Day
Chapter Two Also a Day of Big Changes
Chapter Three Any Family
Chapter Four The Lady
Chapter Five You Know Now. That’s Too Bad.
Chapter Six Asking for a Friend
Chapter Seven I’m Alive
Chapter Eight The Key
Chapter Nine The Belonging
Chapter Ten Pebbles and Contempt
Chapter Eleven The Dark and Uneven Path
Chapter Twelve That’s Not Him
Chapter Thirteen Picking Up Stuff
Chapter Fourteen My Name Is Roy And . . .
Chapter Fifteen What Might Be Coming Next
Chapter Sixteen Promises and Repayments
Chapter Seventeen Tell Them Your Story
Chapter Eighteen Worth
PART TWO: PRESENT DAY
Chapter Nineteen All You
STAY BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART ONE: THEN
SUMMER 1969
Chapter One
The Tipping Day
Is it just me, or does everybody have a day in their life like the one I’m about to retell? I’m talking about those days that act like a fulcrum between everything that came before and your brand-new life after.
It feels a little something like this: When I was a kid, I used to like to bust a move on the playground. Boy stuff, I suppose. I’d run up to the teeter-totter and jump on the “down” seat. The one that was resting in the dirt. Then I’d trot up to the middle—the part that sits safely on the bar. And then, when I kept going, I’d hit the spot where my weight would tip the thing. You know it’s there, you anticipate it. You slow your step just a little bit, knowing it’s soon and you’re about to find it. There’s a delicious little moment of fear in there, but it’s manageable. Next thing you know, you’re being dropped safely back to the dirt, but on the other side.
This day was something like that.
It was the summer of 1969. I was fourteen.
The day started with a letter from my brother Roy. I was always first to the mailbox, and for just that reason. As soon as I saw that airmail envelope with the APO return address—his name scribbled above it: PFC Leroy Painter—I felt like there was open space in my chest, a lightness for a change. It was always that way.
I carried it into the house.
My parents were fighting again.
Except, really . . . I don’t even know why I say “again.” It was almost more like a “still.” That’s not to say they literally fought twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. My dad went to work on the weekdays, and, let’s face it, everybody has to sleep. But it was Saturday morning. They were home, and they were awake, so they were fighting.
I carried the letter upstairs to my room and tried to read it.
It started the way Roy always started his letters to me: “Hey buddy.”
He’d called me Luke all my life, ever since I was born. But the previous summer I’d decided I was Lucas. I was going to go by Lucas, always, and I insisted. I guess it was meant to be a signal to the world that I’d grown up and I wanted to be recognized for it. I think it was a hard change for Roy to make. I’m not saying he didn’t want to call me what I wanted to be called—he wasn’t that kind of brother. I just think it didn’t roll off his tongue yet.
So . . . buddy.
Then I tried to read the rest.
I’d gotten letters from him before with censor marks. Or whatever you call them. Standing here now I’d call them redactions, but I didn’t know that word at the time. Once or twice I’d gotten letters from him with heavy black bars over a line or two, like somebody had taken a black marker and wiped out a few of my brother’s precious words home to me. Well . . . not even “like.” That’s what had happened.
But this letter took redaction into a whole new universe.
I couldn’t make it out. I didn’t know what he was trying to say to me, because too much of it was black. Gone.
It started with complaints about the flies and mosquitoes, especially when he was trying to eat. And then it went off in this really serious direction.
“I know this is kind of upsetting,” it said, “and I’m sorry if it’s too much to put on you.” Redaction. “We rolled into . . .” Redaction. “They were our boys. Americans. And their bodies were . . .” Long redaction. “. . . in the trees, upside down . . .”
Pretty much from there down it was a sea of black.
Right up until the last line: “You just can’t unsee a thing like that.”
My stomach tingled and buzzed, thinking about what might be under those black bars. I tried and tried to piece the narrative together in my brain, but there was just too much missing. The army hadn’t left me enough puzzle pieces.
Meanwhile my parents were still fighting downstairs, and it was taking a toll on my mental state. A sudden crash made me jump. Somebody had thrown something breakable. A plate or a vase. Probably my mom. My dad didn’t have to throw things. He had the weight advantage. He was stronger.
I stared more intensely at the letter. As though that had been the problem all along:
I just wasn’t looking hard enough. But there was nothing left to piece together.
It reminded me—kind of suddenly, the way a disjointed thought will hit you out of nowhere—of our late family dog, Weasel. He’d had this cancerous growth on his back leg. The vet had operated twice, but he couldn’t get it all. Finally he said he couldn’t do a third operation because there wouldn’t be enough left to stitch together. Amazingly, Weasel’s story had a happy ending. His body got the best of the cancer, and we don’t know how. He just flipped and pinned the damn tumor with his immune system, and lived to pass away peacefully of old age.
I wasn’t sure enough that my brother Roy would have a happy ending. Not with all those bullets flying around. A couple of months earlier he’d told me one had whizzed by so close to his ear that the air of its passing left a tickle he couldn’t seem to shake.
I dropped the letter suddenly, having reached a breaking point with the noise of the fight. It had been there all along. I had pushed it away. It had pushed back in. Over and over. At that moment I lost it. Lost my temper, my cool. All sense of reason. I decided it was the noise that was keeping me from being able to comprehend what Roy was trying to tell me.
It wasn’t, of course. But it was damned irritating. It was also the soundtrack to my young life.
I stomped out of my room and over to the railing, where I stood on the landing and shouted down at them with all the voice I could muster.
“Hey!”
Silence.
My mom’s face appeared, staring up at me.
“What?” she asked. Irritated. “Your father and I are trying to work something out.”
Ha! I thought—and wanted to say. You never work things out. If screaming ever worked anything out, the two of you would understand each other perfectly by now.
“I can’t . . . ,” I began. But the thought stalled along the track to wherever it was going. “I’m trying to . . .”
But in that moment my anger abandoned me. Just all at once like that. I felt deflated. Because it struck me that I could have all the silence in the world and still not know what Roy wanted so badly to share with me.
“What?” she barked, tired of waiting.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m going over to Connor’s.”
Connor’s mother answered the door.
Mrs. Barnes was a woman who had been completely abandoned by color. My own mom wore bright red skirts or neon yellow blouses, as if she wanted to shock herself—and maybe everybody else—into remembering she was alive. Connor’s mom must’ve wanted us to forget. Her clothes were some kind of grayish tan, not all that different from her skin tone, which was not all that different from her long hair worn pulled back into a wide ponytail. It reminded me of the old photographs passed down from my great-grandmother, taken in the days of sepia tone. Except I honestly think the sepia was a stronger color.
She never smiled. I don’t mean not ever in her life, because how could I know that? But in front of me, never. And she never looked up or met my eyes. She seemed to be speaking to the doormat as she greeted me.
“Lucas.”
I honestly wondered how she knew without looking.
She said my name as though it was a good thing that I’d come. But if she was happy to see me, her face didn’t know about it.
“Come in,” she said. “I’ll tell Connor you’re here.”
I followed her down the front hallway toward the stairs.
A long table lined the hall on my right side, decorated with bowls of pine cones and green fir tree boughs. Just for a second I reached out to run my finger along it, the way I did at home.
Then I remembered there was no dust.
In my house there was always a layer of dust on the furniture, and I was obsessed with leaving my mark in it. Maybe partly as a way of proving I had been there. Maybe as a message to my mom that it wouldn’t kill her to pick up a rag or a feather duster now and then. But the Barneses’ house was relentlessly clean.
My mind filled with a sudden image. There was something heaped on all those surfaces, but it wasn’t dust. It was invisible. And it made dust look good in comparison. It was . . . I couldn’t quite get a bead on it at the time, and I’m still not sure I’ll choose the right word. Anxiety? Desperation?
I pictured myself picking up some kind of spreading tool, like one of those wide putty knives, and smoothing off the top of the ugly heaps. Or making them thicker in one place or thinner in another. It was just a weird fictional image in my head, but I also think it was some kind of red flag for how real that negative energy felt to me.
I shivered once and shrugged the thoughts away.
Just as we passed the living room, I saw Connor’s father. He was sitting in a stuffed wing chair with his head leaned back. He had a folded hand towel over his eyes, and on top of it sat a round, pleated ice bag. All the curtains were closed. Even the light in that house, what there was of it, seemed to be no color at all.
“Does he know you’re coming?” Mrs. Barnes asked, knocking me back into the moment.
“Um. No. I just decided.”
There probably should have been more to the sentence than that. But there wasn’t.
“Connor?” she called as we climbed the stairs, her voice high and shrill.
Connor opened the door to his room and stuck his head out. And I felt this huge relief. As if I’d been down behind enemy lines and he was the first guy I’d seen wearing the right uniform. His face softened when he saw me. He must have been relieved, too. But I wasn’t entirely sure why. Or maybe I knew, but I just didn’t have the words for it at the time.
We sat in chairs by his bedroom window, looking out over the front yard and the street. We had our feet up on the windowsill, but we’d kicked off our sneakers so only our socks touched the paint. Mrs. Barnes would’ve had a fit if we’d left footprints on the sill.
I watched him read the letter from Roy. Or, anyway, he was staring at it. There wasn’t much there to read.
He was holding the paper with one hand, his other hand brushing over the top of his hair. It was buzzed—cut so short that it stuck up on top. He seemed to want to play with the fact that he could touch the blunt tips of all those hairs.
We were both wearing jeans and gray crew socks, but his legs were much smaller and more compact than mine. It made me feel rangy and a little awkward. Though, to be honest, I’d begun admiring my own body by that age. Not in any creepy way—just liking the muscles in my thighs and upper arms, and the way I could see my own ribs, but with a sheet of muscle across them, when I stood in front of the mirror.
I was staring at our legs because I didn’t want to stare at the letter, or stare at Connor while he stared at the letter.
“Hmm,” he said.
“‘Hmm,’ what?”
“Sounds like he was trying to tell you he saw something bad.”
“Yeah, but what?”
“No idea.”
“So I’ll just never know?”
“I don’t know, Lucas. Maybe you will. Maybe he’ll tell you in person.”
It was a weird thing to say, and I almost called him out on it. Like, “Right, I’ll just happen to be in Hanoi or Da Nang, and I’ll bump into Roy on a street corner.” He hadn’t meant that, of course. He’d probably meant when Roy came home. But even that sent my brain in a lot of bad directions, because I was beginning to worry that Roy might not be coming home. Not everybody’s brother was making it back. But there was no way I was going to talk about that out loud.
We didn’t say anything for a long minute, and I was bowled over by the silence. Not our silence, the silence in the house in general. I wasn’t used to that.
“It’s so quiet,” I said, my voice a near whisper so as not to ruin it.
“I know,” he said. “I hate it.”
“How can you hate it? It’s wonderful. You’ve been to my house. This is so much better than my parents and all that yelling.”
“At least they’re willing to say thing
s out loud to each other.”
“Yeah, but so loud.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. It wasn’t funny. I could almost laugh at my parents and their battles. Sometimes. But the distance between Connor’s parents was the worst thing in his life. It was killing him, and I was beginning to see it. I just had no idea what to do to help.
I took the conversation in a whole different direction.
“You just been sitting here all day like this?”
“Pretty much,” he said. His voice sounded weighted, like a person carrying too much heavy stuff all at once.
“What do you do when you sit here? Think?”
“Not really,” he said.
“Just sit?”
“Pretty much.”
It didn’t sound like a good sign. It sounded like something I should save him from. If I was a good friend. Which I hoped I was.
“Let’s go somewhere,” I said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Anywhere. Let’s go do something.”
A pause. As I sat it out, I already knew the answer. And why the answer was what it was.
“Nah. I should stay here.”
Connor was afraid to leave his parents alone any more than absolutely necessary. It was something we had never talked about out loud. I doubt it was an actual, logical reason. I don’t think he believed any specific real-world thing would happen while he was gone. It was more of a feeling. Like there was so much unhappiness in that house, and it hurt to look at it, but he didn’t quite dare look away. Like he had to be right here worrying about it to hold the whole situation together. I’m not sure I would have been able to put it into words at the time, and if I had, it wouldn’t have been those words. But I knew it.
“You can go, though,” he added. “I understand.”
So I did. I left him and saved myself. I feel bad about that, but I did.
When Connor’s house didn’t work—and it generally didn’t—I would go out alone into the woods behind my house. Well, behind everybody’s house. This whole little town of Ashby is backed up by undeveloped forest land. It’s dense and hilly up there, and the ground is uneven. It wasn’t someplace where anyone was interested in building a house.
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