Truest (15 page)

I nodded, thinking that maybe I understood her for once. Untethered: isn't that how I felt half the time, as if I was fading away into obscurity? I knew it was different, but it still made my heart warm toward her. I wanted to hold her hand again, like I had in the pickup.

“My body is starting to recover its full weight now though. But I'm scared to move too much. I don't want to disturb anything,” she said.

“It's getting late,” I said. “Just get some sleep, Laurel. You need rest.”

Silas touched two fingers to his chest, his Hart2Hart symbol. Seeing it felt like eavesdropping. “Have a sweet dream, Laur,” he said, pulling the blanket over his sister.

He and I stood up to leave, and as we walked to the door, Laurel murmured, “I am.”

Her words hit Silas in the back like bullets. I saw it myself, the pain on his face as if he'd been struck.

I followed Silas into the hallway. I headed for the stairs, but Silas took my wrist and redirected me back toward the den. I had this wild and crazy thought that he was going to kiss me, but as soon as he closed the door to the den, his head fell back against it, then he slid down the length of the door and sat there on the floor, looking so terribly sad. “West?” he said, miserably.

“Yeah?” I was thinking about the condoms in my pocket.
Focus
, I told myself.

He tapped my ankle with his toe. “This is going to kill me, I think. Or her, I don't know.”

“Oh, Silas.” I hated the pity in my voice. I wanted so desperately to ask him about earlier tonight, but I told myself,
Not everything is about you.

“In the East, it's called ‘Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly.'”

“What is?”

“The dream argument. Hutton's Paradox. Laurel's world.” He was silent for a time, then, “This Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly, and when he woke up, he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had just dreamed that he was a butterfly, or if he was a butterfly who had just started dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher.”

“It's fascinating,” I said.

“It's
bullshit
,” he said. “I hate it. I hate it—SO—MUCH.” He looked up at me. “West, I would seriously love to have just one day where I didn't think about solipsism . . . or depression . . . or”—he whispered—“. . . or even Laurel. Am I a monster?”

He looked so completely broken. I knew in that moment that tonight wasn't the right time to ask about what had happened between us on the roof.

I held out my hand to him and pulled him back to his feet. “No, of course not,” I said, deciding then and there that I would give him a day like that, and soon.

“Hey, kiddo,” Dad said that Sunday after the fireworks, knocking lightly on my bedroom door. He poked his head into my room, where I was engrossed in a novel I'd borrowed from Silas. “I'm taking communion over to Laurel Hart, if you want to join me.”

“Yeah, sure.”

In the car on the way there, we were quiet, and the silence hurt.

I said, “Did you know that Mr. Hart moved back to Alaska?”

“For
eight weeks
,” he said, as if correcting me. “You say it like he abandoned the family, West.”

“Well, he kind of did,” I insisted. “Laurel isn't doing well
at all
, and he just took off.”

“From what I understand, Laurel is rarely doing well.”

“That makes it okay then? For a dad to just split?”

“I didn't say that, West.”

I groused in the passenger seat, not entirely sure what I was upset about. Did I want my dad to say that Mr. Hart owed it to his daughter to be near her? I stared out the window: Did I believe that was true? If I were a parent, would I give up all my hobbies and endeavors to nurse my child to health? Yes, I thought. Yes, I would. A parent's number-one duty is to be accessible, to be there.

I looked over at my dad. He was handsome, but the lines around his eyes were more pronounced and his hair was graying around his ears. I wondered when that had started. Even his eyebrows were like salt and pepper. Suddenly, this brief drive together felt like the most important thing I'd done all summer, as if it needed to have an outcome.

“Remember our old family nights?” I broached. “We haven't done that in forever—since Shea was in kindergarten probably. How about Friday night? We'll make homemade pizza and play games, okay?”

Dad glanced over at me, a little surprised. “I thought you were the one who said family nights were—and I quote—‘lamer than the compulsory badminton unit in gym,'” he said.

I laughed, even though inside I was cringing. “Well, I'm not saying it now. It's been way too long since the five of us have spent time together. You're Mr. Green Lake or something.”
I wanted it to sound like a compliment, but it was tinged too deeply with accusation. I put a smile on my face and tried again: “I just think it would be really fun to have a family night. Like old times.”

He looked at me again, a quizzical smile on his face, as if he was trying to tell if I was kidding.

“So how about it then? Friday night?” My voice was still so blazingly cheerful. I wondered if he could hear the masked pleading in my voice.

“Friday I have a dinner meeting with the local clergy.”

I huffed out an irritated breath. “Fine, never mind.”

The silence threatened to swallow us whole. I leaned my head against the car window and stared ahead at the bridge to Heaton Ridge.

“I think I'm free Saturday, though,” he ventured.

I grinned and turned to face him. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I'll talk to Mom about the pizza.”

We had to wait for another vehicle to exit Heaton Ridge before we could cross the bridge into it, since recent construction had brought it down to one lane. Metal poles and bright orange netting lined each side.

“You be careful when you bike out here, Wink. Tell Silas the same,” he said.

“And Laurel,” I added.

After a pause, my dad agreed, “Yes. And Laurel.” But he was
only mollifying me—we both knew Laurel wouldn't be biking anywhere this summer.

At the Hart home, I flung the screen door open and made to walk right in, but Dad held me back. “When you're with me, you ring the doorbell,” he said. I grinned wryly and pushed the button.

Teresa answered the door. “Hi, you two! Westlin, didn't I say you could just let yourself in here?”

I smirked at my dad. “Is Silas around?” I asked.

“Upstairs.”

Silas's bedroom door was open, but he wasn't inside. I moved to head toward the roof to see if he was up there, but I was caught by the sight of his sloppily made bed, a copy of
Runner's World
lying there, along with his patriotic unicorn T-shirt, laid out with great care, and his open notebook.

His poetry.

I paused for only a second, listening for his footsteps, before I stepped over to the bed. Just looking felt like such an invasion of privacy; I wouldn't allow myself to actually touch it, flip the page. But I
had
to take a look, just one look.

The page it was open to read:

Huh.

It seemed clearly about Laurel . . . didn't it? It referenced a “she” and a “you”—was it a letter? To whom? About Laurel?
You are exactly what she needs; still, she doesn't seem to see it.
Could it be a letter to a former boyfriend of Laurel's? My mind reached for an explanation.
I don't exactly know what she thinks about you.

Footsteps in the hallway made me step away from the notebook, a little flushed as Silas came into his room.

“Knock, knock?” I said, smiling.

“Hey!” He grinned. “Was that you who rang the doorbell? What for?”

“Dad,” I said, watching him as he walked to his bed, slipping the Moleskine into his back pocket before sitting down. I felt jumpy and awkward around him. In the days since the fireworks-hand-holding incident, neither of us had brought it up. I knew I should.

I kept thinking of Elliot's accusations that night, the way he had hissed, “You're choosing
him
.” The hurt in his eyes. Elliot and I had been friends since kindergarten, and this was how I treated him? I felt ashamed.

But then Silas asked, “So, what's this week look like?” and his business talk snapped me into reality.

“We have detailings tomorrow and Wednesday,” I said. “And keep Thursday open, okay? I have a surprise.”

“Okay.” He looked at me suspiciously, then suddenly
smiled and said, “I hope it's that you bought all the *NSYNC marionettes on eBay, and we're going to film a horror movie with them. Or that we're going to set up a lemonade stand in an elevator. Or that we're going to tear a hole in the time-space continuum.”

“All of the above,” I said, feigning defeat. “So much for the surprise.”

“How did it go with Laurel?” I asked Dad on the drive home.

“She was pretty quiet,” he admitted.

“Can you help her, Dad?”

I was staring out the window, and he was quiet for so long that I looked over at him.

“I can pray,” he said. “I'll ask others to pray at our local clergy meeting on Friday—I won't share her name, of course, but I think it would be appropriate to ask them to pray for a sick young lady in our community.” He nodded, as if making plans. “Call me crazy, but it looked like the bread and cup made all the difference in her day.”

“That's the point, right?”

“Yes, West, I suppose it is.”

On Thursday, Silas showed up at my place freshly showered and in a T-shirt demanding “MORE COWBELL” in block lettering. “I call dibs on Justin Timberlake,” he teased.

“Silas Hart,” I said, “I have planned for you a worry-free day, a day with no discussions about solipsism syndrome, depression, or siblings.” I held out my hand, palm up. “Worries, please.”

Silas grinned and pretended to deposit a huge weight into my hand. I slouched under the “heft” of it, then walked to the garbage can, which was outside for collection, and pretended to drop it in. I rubbed my hands together, dusting them off. “I want to show you some of my favorite places around here. Are you up for it?”

“Anywhere,” he said, and it made me think of Elliot saying the same thing so recently.

We took my family's car to City Hall and walked around the small library, really just two rooms full of books. I stuck close to his side, waging a civil war with my emotions as I thought about the week before. But it had been dark and there had been fireworks—maybe he'd gotten a little carried away and was now embarrassed and avoiding the topic.

It was a new experience to visit the library with Silas along. Every section of the library was like its own island, one Silas had explored in the past and was now showing to me—even though, in reality, it should have been the other way around, since this was his first visit here. He started in fantasy, pointing out titles and introducing me to authors—and then we moved into young-adult fiction . . . through the classics. I noticed that he did what I liked to do—run my fingers against the spines until I found one I wanted to take a closer look at.

The sound of a summer reading program came from one room over, a horde of kids and one enthusiastic adult chanting, “Chicka chicka boom boom, will there be enough room?” but the library itself was silent except for Silas, finding book after book that he'd already read, telling me lines and characters he loved, sometimes discovering we shared favorites.

“Here,” he said, pulling a book of poems by E. E. Cummings off the shelf, “I'll show you something.” He checked the table of contents, flipped open to the right page, marked a place with his finger, and handed it to me.

I read the line aloud: “‘Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.'”

Silas's eyes were shining. “I still think I've never read anything better than that. The morning I first read it, I went into some kind of shock,” he said. “I hadn't known anything could be so . . . delicate and flabbergasting at the same time. It's the line that made me want to write.” Just like when he'd whispered to me before the fireworks, this moment felt intimate. I loved knowing this tiny but important part of his history. I wanted to know it all.

Stop it. You have a boyfriend.

“Do I ever get to read anything you've written?” I asked him.

“What? Me?”

“Yes, you, silly!” I shoved him playfully in the arm.

He blushed. “I'm just a beginner. I haven't written anything so great as all this.” He gestured, indicating the shelf of poetry.

“I'd like to read it. Someday, promise?”

“Yeah, sure. Someday,” he agreed, voice as soft and deep as a purr. And I didn't care about how far away “someday” was because I was guaranteed to know Silas Hart at least as long.

We checked out the poetry book with my library card, and back in my car, I put it in the glove compartment. “Next up, we're headed to Berry Acres in Shaw, just north of here.”

“What's at Berry Acres?”

“What's
not?
”

Berry Acres was a family-owned farm with free hayrides, a petting zoo, and a straw bale maze. I knew that Silas, who had not grown up in a farming community like I had, would be charmed by the puppy-sized baby goats butting their little heads against his leg, by the ponies who would lick feed from his hand, the chickens pecking around his feet. We rode a wagon around the farm, the person driving the tractor pointing out the fields of apple trees and pumpkins that weren't ripe yet, the fields of raspberries and strawberries that were. The whole place smelled of trodden strawberry guts, quality hay, inoffensive manure mixed with straw, and homemade bread.

We took our time ambling through the shade of the giant bales stacked eight feet high. “They redo the maze every summer,” I told him, “and in October, they make it ‘haunted' and all these parents from some Shaw booster club dress up as chain-saw murderers and deranged clowns and zombie scarecrows. My dad took me there for the first time when I was ten, and I cried.” Silas laughed. “Whit makes us all go every year, and I'm not kidding—I still get terrified. It's ridiculous.”

Silas said, “My friend Josh back in Fairbanks would make our group of friends go to Starvation Gulch at the university every September—the students build these ginormous wooden bonfires”—he demonstrated, spreading his hands out wide—“and they burn them all at once. It's one of the oldest traditions at the school.”

“Think you'll go there?” I asked as we peered down an open but dead-end lane and turned around.

“UAF?” he asked. “Doubt it. I mean, I don't know, but I think Mom and Dad are planning to stay in Minnesota for good, or at least for a long while now. Mom likes being back in Green Lake, I can tell.”

“And what do you think of it?” I asked.

“I like it,” he said. “It's different. It's weird that everyone already knows my mom and that people don't lock their doors or cars, but I don't hate it. The people are really nice, and I'm really glad Laurel and I got to meet you.” Another dead end, and we turned around and took another direction.

“Well, I'm glad you're here too,” I said awkwardly.

“And why is that?” he asked, this slight, barely there flirtation in his question.

I blushed. “You know,” I said, leaning back against one of the straw bales, “for all the help with detailing.”

He bit back a smile. “Right,” he said. “So glad I could help.”

This time I reached to shove him in the arm, but he caught my wrist, smiled down at me, and as the straw poked into my back, I thought, He's going to kiss me! And then a group of a dozen three-year-olds and their day-care leaders came around the corner, and the moment was gone.

In time, we found our way to the center of the maze, and after finding our way back out, we picked our own strawberries, a whole bucket for five dollars, sampling from the field as
we picked. Before we left, we stopped at the gift shop, which smelled of donuts and sugar, to buy a loaf of homemade bread and apple butter, then we took the bread, butter, and our bucket of berries to the Green Lake beach, where we sat on the sand as we ate, watching kids splash in the water.

Outside the buoys, there were some swans on the lake, along with five tiny cygnets, little cinereous fluff balls the color of smoke with beaks that looked like pencil lead. Silas nodded toward them and said, “A lamentation of swans.”

The adults were so serene with their long, graceful necks and sharp black beaks, their feathers shockingly white against the gray-green water. They looked like floating lotus blossoms.

I nodded, eating a strawberry. “Have you wondered why it's called that?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Actually, I've looked it up online.”

“Find anything?”

“Just bits and pieces that I'm putting together myself. Nothing authoritative.” I loved that he used that word. “Like, for example, you've heard the term ‘swan song'?”

“Yeah, like what you sing if you get kicked off a talent show on TV?”

“Yeah. Supposedly, it has to do with the idea that the most beautiful song a swan sings is the one before it dies. I guess Socrates said something like that once upon a time, I don't know.”

“Hmmm,” I murmured, letting the sweetness of the
strawberry rest on my tongue.

“There's this song by Orlando Gibbons,” he said, pulling it up on his phone, then reading the lyrics:

“
The silver swan, who living had no note
,

When death approach'd, unlock'd her silent throat;

Leaning her breast against the reedy shore
,

Thus sang her first and last, and sang no more.

Farewell, all joys; O Death, come close mine eyes;

More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.

“And Billy Collins has a poem about swans too, and he says the swans are the true geniuses because they're beautiful and brutal and know how to fly. That's Laurel, don't you think?” asked Silas. “She's the swan. She figured out how to be both beautiful and brutal.”

“But not to fly,” I whispered, thinking actually of how beautiful
Silas
was, how badly I wanted to touch him, to push his hair out of his eyes. “Stop it,” I told him—and myself. “This is your day, and that's the second time you've brought up Laurel. Back in the car. There's someone I want you to meet.”

At Legacy House, I knocked on Gordon's door, and when he opened it—dark glasses on—I said immediately, “Gordon, it's West. I have a friend with me.”

His smile lit up his face. “Westie!” he said. “Come in, come in!
Pasan, jóvenes.
And whom have you brought along?”

“Gordon, this is Silas,” I said, taking one of Gordon's hands and guiding it to Silas's, where they shook. “He's my
new business partner. His family moved into the old Griggs house last month.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” said Silas.

Gordon smiled. “Not as pleased as I am. Come in; sit down. You two smell good,
como la playa.
Fresh water and wind. Westie, you taking care of that book of poems you borrowed?”

“Oh. It's in your barrister,” I reminded him. “I brought it back a little while ago.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

Silas's eyes widened at the sight of Gordon's home library as we followed Gordon into his living room. He sat in his rocker, packed his pipe, dropped the match into the jar of water, and said, “Tell me about yourself, Silas. What business are you in?” Silas looked at me questioningly, but I only smiled and nodded toward Gordon, urging him to answer.

“Well, sir, I guess I'm in the business of writing bad poetry.”

Gordon was obviously delighted.

“He's just too hard on himself,” I insisted. “He's a rock star.”

“I am a rock star, and my Les Paul is metaphor,” Silas joked.

“See, even
that
was a metaphor,” I said.

“A meta-metaphor,” he said.

All three of us laughed, Gordon the hardest.

Gordon chimed in, “You know, a truly bad poet wouldn't know his poems were bad.”

“That's a good point, sir,” said Silas, smiling. “Are you a poet yourself? Looks like you've got quite a library here.”

“I'm an historian, son,” he answered with a smile. “‘History is still in large measure poetry to me.'”

“I like that,” Silas said.

“I wish it were mine,” Gordon confessed. “That's actually a quote from Jacob Burckhardt, a Swiss historian. Robert Penn Warren said, ‘If poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live.'”

I thought through today's scenes: the library, Berry Acres, Legacy House. All stories.

“It's why we like
August Arms
,” I surmised. “Silas has been listening too, Gordon.”

“‘Stories are our most august arms against the darkness,'” he quoted. “Please tell me you're a fan of Donovan Trick.”

“Absolutely. Well, half fan, half bitter.”

“As any true writer should be,” said Gordon, satisfied. Then to me, he said, “Westie, he sounds handsome.”

I blushed, but Silas laughed aloud and said, “Oh, I'm stunning. West can't keep her hands off me.” That made me burst out laughing. “In fact, sir, she keeps trying to kiss me right now, even here in your living room.”

My jaw dropped.
You're crazy
, I mouthed. Out loud, I said, “Gordon, you can't believe a word he says.”

Silas took his cue from Gordon's hearty laughter and persisted, “Ouch! Sorry, sir, she was just nibbling on my ear and bit down a little too hard. Easy, girl.”

“I am horrified, for the record,” I said, laughing but
appalled.
You're in trouble later
, I mouthed very clearly to Silas, who shrugged and mouthed back,
Good.

“Oh, young love,” said Gordon, and I was too embarrassed to look at Silas to gauge his reaction, too confused to refute Gordon. “So, how's your family liking Green Lake? Is it just you and your parents, Silas?”

It came out of my mouth instinctively, protectively: “He's an only child.” This time I did look at Silas—who was staring at the carpet, chewing thoughtfully on the inside of his mouth. I hadn't realized just how difficult it would be to keep Laurel out of the day's conversations. Just one day, I thought. I want just one day for Silas.

I changed the topic. “Gordon, tell us about what you're reading these days.”

“Oh, I'm just finishing up
Narnia
again,” he said. “At the part where the ground is taken from beneath their feet and they compare it to a black sun or dry water. That part gets me every time. It's like free fall. It's how I felt after Mavis died.”

Silas ran a nervous hand through his hair.

I asked, “And what does dry water taste like?”

Gordon “looked” at me through those dark glasses, his face soft, and he said, “It's just an illusion, Westie. There is no dry water for one who loves God. No black suns either.”

His words nudged at a memory in the back of my mind. “Gordon,” I said, “remember the week of
August Arms
that was all about dreams?”

He looked confused, something I rarely saw on his face. As an historian, Gordon's memory was like a living, breathing thing.