The Telling (29 page)

“Car did me a huge favor,” Josh says. “If she hadn't sent me over to you, then I wouldn't have gotten to know you. I just wanted to be honest, because I worried she or Becca might tell you. Full disclosure.” He looks pleased at being mature.

I look toward the others. The bonfire burns bright, and the four of them move around it like they're pagans in a ritual ceremony for the goddess of fire. “I really like you, Josh. I liked kissing you.”

“Hey”—he grips my hand—“school's about to start, and I don't want you to feel pressured. We can be friends or more. We can wait to figure it out when things aren't so . . . intense.”

Treading down the spiraling stairs of the lighthouse, I can't help but sink into myself, to the truth. I go way, way back in time.

How did I let it get so bad? How didn't I stomp out that flicker of hope each time it stretched? I was inexperienced and silly. I was dreamy. Ben didn't help keep my feet on the ground. After I heard those whispers freshman year, which I didn't realize originated from the lie Becca told, I was awkward with Ben. My hands were gigantic swinging at my side. I couldn't find a place where they wouldn't accidentally brush his. I weaved when I walked beside him—how close was too close? My brain was swollen with words, and I'd fish out all the wrong ones. I'd blush out of nowhere.

Winter break of freshman year made it worse. Once a month, Gant's foreign cinema shows movies in English. We went. That wasn't weird. We both loved stories, so we were obvious movie freaks. We walked out of the theater, side by side, and Ben threw his arm over my shoulders. I ducked to restore the space between us.

“What's your deal?” he asked, stopping in the middle of the
crowd filtering out of the theater around us and making a divergent stream of moviegoers.

“Most step-siblings aren't all touchy-feely,” I said quietly. My eyes darted over the crowd. Was someone from school observing us? “What will people think if we act like that?”

He laughed full-throated, head back and mouth open like he planned to swallow the universe. “Who gives a shit? I love you.” He replaced his arm, and then added right into my ear so that his lips made contact with my skin, “And fuck everybody else.”

When he said that, two things happened. The awkwardness making my hands too big for my body, the anxiety over what I was wearing, how careful I was to keep a foot away in public, vanished for the night. I had Ben and Ben had me and fuck everybody else. It returned first thing Monday morning. This would happen a lot. We would be carefree and easy on the
Mira
, or at home, or at Swisher Spring, but the instant we weren't alone anymore, I would get caught up in wondering how others perceived us.

The second thing occurred because of that sentence—
I love you
—spoken in his voice as molten as the inside of a golden marshmallow. It was the first and last time Ben said it to me; the solitary time we talked about what we felt outside of our secret language of summer.

Hearing it made all the rumors and glares worth enduring, because I loved Ben way more than I was supposed to.

And tonight, on the gallery deck of the lighthouse, while Josh's lips were on mine, I realized that I still do. Even if Ben is a vengeful force, a mere residue of the boy he used to be, it doesn't change anything. It should. I know.

As we join the others, Becca produces more schnapps from a long-forgotten flask at the bottom of her purse, and the others drain it. I don't want a sip because I can taste Josh's ChapStick. Then I grow sick and guilty thinking that Ben is somewhere and I shouldn't be holding on to this souvenir from kissing Josh. I apply my own strawberry lip balm to stop tasting Josh's. The rest of the night is like this: I teeter between giddiness over Josh liking me and hoping that Ben is on our island, waiting for me.

What happens once I sneak inside my house hours later isn't such a big leap. I stop in the kitchen to pull a tablet of paper and pen out of a drawer. The pen hesitates, and then it's all so painfully clear. A memory of a long-ago night roars in, and I know just what to write.

It was weeks before Ben left for Guatemala. Middle of the night at the fire pit. I was blathering on about not wanting to go to winter ball.
Catatonically boring,
I declared it. I might have slathered it on too thick, because I was self-conscious that Ben suspected the real reason I refused to go. I had no friends who'd be there. Girls would ask coyly where my date was—or, not so coyly, if Ben was showing up later.

Ben was quiet for a long time, and then he said, “How can you stand it? How can you let them get away with it?”

I started. “Who get away with what?”

He waited. Like usual he blinked first, looked to his hands, which were impaling a marshmallow on a roasting stick, and he said, “No one and nothing specific.” He shrugged. “I just mean Gant. I'm just griping about Gant. Again. Like usual.”

I laughed, light-headed with relief. “You won't always have to live here.”

“I know. But what about you?” His marshmallow caught fire, and
he blew to extinguish it. He was always putting them directly into the flames.

“I won't live here forever either. I'll move for college.”

“Gant's more a state of mind than a place,” Ben said.

I inspected the golden flesh of my marshmallow. “How so?”

He tossed his roasting stick with the charred remains into the blaze. “It's thinking that you need flavored water and two-hundred-dollar jeans and that you need to give a shit what people think about you.”

I offered him the marshmallow at the end of my stick. He popped it into his mouth. “You're wearing designer jeans.”

He chewed the gooey morsel. “I know.” He frowned. “I'm a hypocrite.” I tried to laugh it off. His expression grew more serious. “Really, Lana. I'm the worst of them. I hate this place's obliviousness. I hate that I like grape-flavored water. I hate that I drive a car Cal bought me. I hate that I might go off to college and be just like the rest of them in a few years. I hate that you're not like you used to be. Someday it'll be different. I'll get off my ass and I'll do something and never come back.”

“Don't say that. You'll come back for me.” I was being silly and dense, focused mostly on readjusting a log in the pit to keep the fire going so I didn't have to respond to what he said about who I used to be. I pretended I hadn't heard him emphasize those words more than the rest.

“Of course I will. I'll always come back for you.”

I smiled at him. “Swear it.”

“I swear on summer.” The muscle of his jaw twitched. He looked so determined.

“You'll only be in Guatemala for three months.”

“A lot of crap can happen in three months. Will you be okay?”

I smiled to cover up my nerves. “Sure I will. I'm Lana the shark.”

“Lana the brave,” he said. I didn't imagine the ironic twist in his voice.

I shake the memory off on the trip to the lower terrace. The harbor is silent, the wind holding its breath. I deposit the note in our hiding spot. Short of shouting his name, letting it travel across the water, I can't think of a better way to get a message to him. I believe he'll find the paper, somehow, wherever he is,
whatever
he is. And he'll read it or sense what I wrote, and he'll know that I've put it together: He's come back for
me
.

You swore on summer.

I go to bed, memories of Ben amassing and flashing through my head. When will he reveal that he's still here and that he's fighting for me?

There are sirens the next morning. My first thought is that we've been caught. There were security cameras at the museum. Our break-in was recorded. Duncan's parents couldn't save us all with their influence; Duncan didn't keep his promise to protect us. Or worse, the police were tipped off about the rosary in my secret place, and they're coming to arrest me for Maggie and Ford.

The minutes tick on. The doorbell doesn't sound. My room is sun heated as I pull on shorts and flip-flops. The clock reads eleven thirty a.m., later than I've slept in weeks. I band my hair into a ponytail as I plod downstairs. Dad is long gone for work. Basel paces in the foyer, his
angry yowls coming almost as fast and loud as the sirens that haven't stopped. I sweep him away with my foot and open the front door. The only way I can explain my lack of urgency is this: Josh kissed me last night; I know what his lips taste like; still, I thought of Ben.

Across the street, at the base of the grassy, tree-seamed slope, there are unmarked black sedans. Detectives. It's Tuesday and most of our neighbors are at work, but a few men and women stand as spectators on porches and verandas, coffee mugs held to their chests, slippers on their feet, as they peer at the commotion on Becca's front lawn. I walk outside just as Josh's Jeep shrieks to a stop next to Carolynn's car. He leaves it double-parked. He doesn't even close the driver's-side door. He cuts a direct path up the lawn, hurdles a border of hedges, and tramps through vines, their thorny stems dragging at his jeans. Carolynn is a heap on her knees at the yard's crest. She's between Rusty and Duncan. I feel for my house keys on the table by the door and automatically close and lock it behind me.

I drift toward Becca's house, flip-flops crunching grass under me, sun scorching my bare shoulders. Summer's last stand.

Becca's mom is in the middle of her driveway, supported by two EMTs carrying her to an ambulance. Her sheer stockings catch along the cobblestones. I reach the edge of Becca's lawn fast. Must have jogged.

Josh is crouched, arms wrapped around Carolynn. Her edges blur as she trembles. I hop over a border of sharp, sparkly black rocks between Becca's lawn and her neighbor's. It's the river of tar from one of Ben's stories. A village lives along a river of fetid, boiling tar, and a faceless creature in a long white robe appears at night to coax children from their beds. It has talons rather than hands, and it holds the kids under the bubbling river until they stop thrashing, until their skin's
boiled off and a layer of tar has taken its place. Lana the brave ends the creature as it did its victims.

No.
See what's here, in front of me.

The sun is hot on my scalp.

Good, that's real.

There's not a cloud or a drop of blue in the sky. It's colorless, a blank canvas on top of us. Carolynn groans and buckles into Josh. He curves around her. “They won't take her down,” she says. Her words are as formless as her posture. Josh hooks her hair behind her ear. She smacks his hand away and then whimpers pathetically. She wants sympathy; she can't stomach it. Her knees shuffle under her as she struggles up on them.

Duncan tries to steady her, but she slaps at his arms wildly. “I don't need help. Becca does.” Duncan kneels and holds his arms out, even as she beats them away. She lifts a bit, her legs as unsteady as her voice, and collapses. Her head thuds to Duncan's shoulder like a rock dropping to the bottom of the spring. It stays there.

“She drank too much schnapps this one night and she went on that rotten slide . . . she got rusty splinters in her butt.” Carolynn covers her mouth to muffle a cry. “Her front door wasn't even locked—she
never
remembers to bolt the effing door. I went inside. I kept thinking, why is it such a pigsty in here? What's on the ground? Then I saw the swing set.” It takes me a second to realize that Carolynn's switched from talking about that drunken night to this morning, where Becca is somewhere
they
won't take her down from.

“It's sick. It's fucking sick,” Duncan says. His hand strokes Carolynn's hair, smoothing it down her shoulder. Her eyes flutter shut. I look away. It feels like spying.

Rusty kicks the grass. “I can't see my first kiss hanging like that. She was . . . God, she was such a freaking sweetheart.” He winds his fingers in his curls and yanks.

“
She is
, not was,” Josh insists. His voice recedes behind me.

I reach the others and continue on. Something is very wrong.
Swing set
and
rusted slide
and
hanging
and
Becca
. I pause at the porch. There's a Fourth of July banner left in the window and wilted herbs in a planter box, and I wonder how I didn't notice either yesterday. How have these little details escaped me? I glance down. The orangey-gold object at my feet stops time, and the current moment unfolds in the endless way a complex origami creature does.

I am in time-suspended space with the beak of a blackbird.

It's the missing piece from yesterday's pageant of dead animals. This beak is as slender as a pair of tweezers, two inches in length, and hooked at the tip. Its base, where it was severed from the bird's head, is a ring of red pulp and black feather. I swallow. This token on the welcome mat appears just for me. It's plucked from our stories and left to beckon me inside.

A warm brush of skin on my arm. Willa is beside me.

“Where did you come from?” I ask, feeling only half awake.

Willa stares at the beak. “Josh texted me. I drove over. Take my hand,” she adds, and it seems like the best idea, so I do.

There's a cluster of police, squared shoulders turned to us, talking off to the left in the house. They don't notice two silent girls. I keep one eye on the ground for the severed beaks. On the kitchen floor there's a clot of three, and then one a foot later, and then two a yard beyond that. “What are you two doing? This is a crime scene,” a male officer, frown dimpling his chin, tells us.

He moves to block our progress and reaches to spin me around. “Ward and Sweeny,” I say.

“They asked you in here? To give a statement?”

I nod, lying. Willa's hand tightens on mine. “They're outside.” The officer jerks his thumb to the terrace. His wiry brows quirk up as he adds, “But maybe you should wait. You girls shouldn't see that.”