Truest (17 page)

“You're what?”

“In love with you. I love you.”

“You
love
me?”

This time he laughed. “Yeah, is it that hard to believe?”

“Yeah, maybe.” I was a blurry line; how could brilliance love a blur? I stared at our feet stretching out before us in the bed of the truck, his so much longer than mine. I tried to process what he had just said. He loved me—and I was Elliot Thomas's girlfriend. I had been friends with Elliot my whole
life, had dated him for two years, and yet he and I had never said those words to each other. Silas and I were seventeen: Was that even old enough to know something like this? Was he being ridiculous? Were we both?

“You call me on my shit,” he quietly explained. “You're my favorite person to drag down the rabbit hole. Sometimes when you're really into a book, you mouth the words as you read them. And you have a laugh you
only
use with me.”

Bashfulness crept into his voice. “You're everything I want, West. I feel like—I feel like if I was lost, you would know where to find me.” When he looked at me again, his eyes were shining with so much joy and affection and admiration that I thought his heart might reach out and pull me into him.

I suddenly thought,
I would. I
would
know where to find you.
It was like a revelation, only with no choir of heavenly angels, just the blinking red lights of the monsters in the field.

“I love you, too,” I said.

Ahh, there was the Silas-grin! It broke like a giant whitecap over me, drowning me in the most perfect, incredible surf. He growled with pleasure and tackled me to the blanket-covered floor and kissed me so that I forgot about Dad and Mom and Trudy and Elliot and everything but
him
—Silas Hart, who
loved
me!—and the feel of his body pressed sweetly to mine.

The Spencer baby was fine, although born with sepsis, a bacterial infection, and needing a lumbar puncture and antibiotics. Dad stayed with Tim and Lolly till five in the morning, came home, showered, and walked over to the church to preach like normal. I was sure he'd spend that afternoon in bed, sleeping off a migraine.

“West!” my mom shouted up the stairs. “You're going to be late. Get a move on! I'll see you in our row in twenty minutes. And after church we'll have a talk about what time you got in last night, young lady. This is not a boardinghouse.”

I made a face at the ceiling.
“This is not a boardinghouse,”
I repeated. When the front door closed, I sat up in bed, pulled back the curtain on my window, and watched Mom, Libs, and Shea walk across the parking lot toward the church building.

I got up and threw on a pair of shorts, tossed my hair into a ponytail, and brushed my teeth, pausing to take one thing out of my desk drawer before I took the car up to St. Cloud. The mall was open, and I went to this piercing place, but since I wasn't eighteen yet, they told me I needed to have a parent with me to get my nose pierced. My birthday was only a couple of weeks away, but it seemed like the fractiousness of the act would be meaningless if I waited till then. Maybe I didn't want my nose pierced after all.

The time on my phone told me it was almost the end of the service. I smiled a little as I thought about everyone asking where I was today, wondering what my parents would say. Would they throw me under the bus, say what a rude, disrespectful daughter I was last night? I doubted it. They wouldn't want anyone in the congregation to know that the Beck family wasn't perfect. I grinned a little in victory.

I shopped for a while, picked up a magazine with Chuck Justice on the cover for Libby, then found a linen romper that my dad would hate. I bought it, handing over my hard-earned detailing cash as if I were defying not only my parents but the cashier as well.

The service would be over now, and the phone calls would start coming soon.

But there was only one.

From Silas.

“Hey, where are you?” he asked.

“Not at church, that's for sure,” I said.

“Want to hang out?” he asked.

“I have to make one stop first.”

At the Thomas farm, it was Greg who led me through the barn, past the room that held the stainless-steel bulk tank, to a hay-lined pen where his brother was bottle-feeding a healthy-looking, energetic calf. Things had been awkward between me and Elliot since the Fourth of July; in fact, we had talked only a couple of times, and both times had been brief and distant.

I couldn't believe I was doing this.

“Greg, take over, will you?” Elliot said to his brother when he saw me, shoving the bottle at Greg's chest.

Greg started to whine, but Elliot gave him a look and he shut up quickly.

It was loud in the barn. I'd been in here before, but I'd forgotten about the noise of so many cows, so many milking machines. I'd never minded the smell.

Elliot stood, wiping his hands on his well-worn work jeans; his white T-shirt showed off his muscles, and his faded cap shaded his eyes—but not enough. His face was so sad, so disappointed; I'd have preferred his anger.

“Was that calf Stevie?” I asked, trying to take away the awkwardness. “She can see again?”

Elliot nodded.

“You were right,” I babbled nervously. “That's so great,
so . . . wow. Good for you. She recovered, just like you said. That's . . .”

“Just do what you're here to do, West,” he said. It wasn't mean, not even impatient. Just like someone powerful who wanted the Band-Aid torn off quickly.

“Elliot,” I said, and then started to cry.

“I knew this was going to happen,” he muttered. “I knew it from the second you told me about watching that shit TV show over at his rich-ass house. Knew it when you let him touch you at the drive-in.”

I hadn't thought he'd noticed.

“What about our plans, West?” he demanded, finally raising his voice. “This fall, when I get my car? Getting food after games and bowling and shopping around for colleges? And—oh,
fuck—homecoming
.” After a pause, he added, “You thought
I'd
be the busy one this summer, but
you're
the one who's never around.”

I flinched—hadn't I said the same of my dad just the night before? How was it possible to feel hurt
and
be hurtful without making that connection?

“Was I such a shitty boyfriend? What did I do wrong?” he challenged.

“Nothing,” I said, sniffling. “Elliot, you're great. You're the
best
. You're everything—”

“West, don't,” he said. “Don't. You loved the idea of me—but never me.”

“How can you
say
that? We've been friends our whole lives.”

“Yeah, and you only realized how big the world was this summer.” Elliot looked over his shoulder at some indeterminate next project. “I have to get going,” he muttered.

I swallowed hard and nodded, still crying.

In my pocket, I fiddled with the cheap ring from our second-grade “wedding.” It felt so dramatic and ridiculous to give it back to him, the way I'd planned. He walked away first, then I left and tossed it in a trash bin on my way out.

I was in the car leaving when Lorelei and Laney came rushing out of the house to greet me, but I—I just couldn't . . . so I wiped away my tears, plastered on a smile, and waved to them as I drove away.

My heart felt lighter and lighter the closer I got to Heaton Ridge.

At the old Griggs house, I took the stairs two at a time, burst into Silas's room, and crossed the room quickly to where he was messing with his stereo. “Wh—” he started to ask, but I cut him off with a kiss.

“What was that for?” he asked, looking a little dazed. “Not that you need a . . .”

“I broke up with Elliot,” I said, and Silas literally swept me off my feet and smothered my neck with dorky, slobbery-sounding kisses that made me laugh as he carried me,
newlywed-style, across the hall into the den.

“I wish you'd be a little more excited,” I teased as he collapsed onto the couch with me on his lap. I put my arms around his neck, pressed my forehead to his. It felt so good to be here with him, Elliot already feeling further and further away. I kissed him again. “Distract me, okay?”

“You are in luck, Miss Beck,” he said, then reached under one of the couch pillows and, with a flourish, produced a VHS tape.

He had found a documentary about an eighties boy band, New Kids on the Block, at a recent garage sale and then bought an old VCR at the same sale just so that we could watch it. We spent the next hour figuring out how to hook everything up, and once we had, he decided we needed to learn the ridiculous dance in one of the music videos. We laughed like kindergarteners while we attempted this, and even pulled Laurel into the den to help us with the choreography, which she learned easily after watching the music video only once. It was hilarious to watch her try to teach Silas, who was hopeless at dancing.

“I am so growing a rattail,” said Silas, pretending to admire Jordan Knight's.

“Like hell you are,” I said, and all three of us laughed: big, goofy laughs that felt like they had been sitting in our stomachs for years.

Laurel's smile was real—more authentic than anything I'd seen from her all summer. Silas took her hand and twirled her
around, while I reveled in this moment enough for the three of us.

After dinner, still with hours before sunset, Silas and I headed into town and up into the bell tower. The breeze through the belfry windows carried the scent of fresh-mown grass. For once, Jody Perkins was using his mower to actually mow. I told Silas, “Laurel needs to eat. She looks like a ghost.” I sat on the air mattress, back against the tower wall, and Silas lay on his back, his head in my lap, book in his hands.

“I know,” he said, putting his book down momentarily. “She's worse than ever since the fireworks. Sometimes she won't even answer me when I ask a direct question. She skipped therapy last week. Mom doesn't know what to do. I overheard her fighting with Dad about it on the phone.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. There didn't seem to be anything else to say about it.

“I keep thinking of what Gordon said about black suns being an illusion. Remember?”

“Mmm-hmmm.” The sun was coming through the belfry windows in streaks, and it was all I could do to keep myself from tracing his eyebrows, his nose, his lips with my fingers. I wondered what he would do if I did. He loves me, I reminded myself, and lightly touched his face. He closed his eyes.

“At first I thought Gordon had to be wrong,” he said. “I mean, Laurel loves God and still has a black sun. But—no. I
mean, even her black sun is an illusion,
sincerely
an illusion.”

“She just hasn't figured that out yet,” I said.

“Exactly!” Silas sat up then, surprising me. He moved so that he was sitting beside me, then settled his hand along the inside of my leg, tucking a few fingers up gently under the cuff of my shorts. No complaints from me. “You know, I want to believe—I
think
I believe—that God is in control of everything,” he said.

I ran my fingers over his arm and was pleased to see the hair stand up there. I didn't know I had that kind of power over him. “Even over the bad things?” I asked. “Like death? Disease?”

“Yes.”

“And catastrophe?”

“Yeah.”

“Solipsism syndrome?”

The pause was brief. “I think so. Yes.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It might sound dumb,” he said. “I don't think I've ever said it out loud before.”

“That's okay. It's just me.”

Silas paused; then he took my hand in this strange way, as if he were someone so much older, about to impart the hardships of the world to me. “I'm a writer,” he said.

“You don't say,” I teased him.

He smiled a little and squeezed my hand. “Writers know
that the climax comes before the resolution.” He was quiet for a second, then said, “Not just in fiction, either, West, but in real life too. How many times has the
worst
thing turned out to be necessary? Or even the
best
? Rescue wears masks, you know. It's why people say it's darkest before the dawn. Sometimes things take a long time to make sense. Could be years and years—or only a weekend. Or they might
never
make sense. But that doesn't mean you stop trusting that the world is being rescued.”

It was a lot to take in. “I can't decide if I feel happy or sad,” I finally said.

“Feel both,” Silas replied. “But remember that rescue stories are the best kind. If you look around at the world, it seems pretty clear that God favors redemption over perfection.”

I thought of Laurel in the den earlier this summer, frantically struggling through the same ideas that Silas now cracked open like a cool can of iced tea.

“It's not that easy,” I said. “I mean, I get what you're saying—but it's uncomfortable, you know? Like, how do you gift-wrap that and give it to the kid whose
grandma
just died?” I thought of the families from church Dad had been helping this summer.

“No, you're right,” Silas said. “It's not easy. At all. It's not a very
pretty
present. Some people might even think it sucks. But I think it's
true
, and solid ground doesn't suck.”

Laurel. The night of the fireworks. Her bed some sort of ballast.

I had been looking at my hand in his, but now I looked into his eyes, which were sad and savage. I couldn't help but think back to his first Sunday in church.

It is well with my soul.

Maybe . . . maybe all anyone ever really needed was that solid ground, scaffolding that would hold long enough for you to really see the questions that crowded around you like fog. The solid ground wasn't the answer—not exactly—but it substituted for one.

“Rescue stories are the best kind?” I said, or maybe asked.

“It's like bedrock,” he admitted.

Silas let go of my hand and reached for a deck of cards he'd brought along, shuffled them, and handed me half. It was a
WARegon Trail
set, which made me grin. “Slapjack,” he instructed.

I moved to sit across from him, and we started flipping cards over. Seven, king, two, six.

“I'm going on a college visit,” Silas said, “with my mom. On Tuesday.” He seemed apologetic.

“Are you not excited or what?” I asked.

“No, I am,” he said, unconvincingly.

“Then what?” I asked.
SLAP!
went my hand onto the deck of cards. His hand came down on mine a millisecond too late.

“Damn!” he said. “You're so fast!”

“Then what?” I pressed.

We flipped through the cards so quickly: ace, four, queen.
Silas said, “Laurel and I started kindergarten together, middle school, high school. I mean, durr, we're twins. It'll be weird to go to college without her.”

Jack. Silas slammed his hand down on it, but I had completely missed it, staring at him, confused. “What do you mean, ‘without her'?”

He looked at me. Those deep brown eyes, his pursed lips. “West, she's barely left her room this month. She couldn't handle college—she can barely handle life.”

“But she'll get better,” I insisted. “I mean, you guys left Alaska and everything.” I needed him to believe that. I wasn't sure I could handle that job alone. “Right?” I said.

He was quiet for a moment. “Sure, West. Yes.”

A conversation on the sidewalk below the tower distracted us, though we couldn't make out the words. The light had shifted since we'd arrived. “Wow, a college visit,” I said, as if it was only now hitting me. “I'm behind the eight ball. Pick me a major, would you?”