Truest (19 page)

The Mayhews lived in an old farmhouse, like Elliot's, a little south of town. Lillian made Laurel tuck in her shirt and then launched into a lecture on why my dad ought to be preaching with the New King James translation, but Arty quietly ushered us away from her and showed us the stairs to the attic.

“There's a lot up there, Sweet Pea,” he told Laurel. “But you're welcome to look. I've looked a little too—no doll, but I found some books you used to like. You should take them with you when you leave.”

Laurel kissed his cheek. “That sounds great, Papa.”

The attic was full of treasures: books and antique jewelry and a wooden rocking horse with yarn for its mane. Laurel found an old flapper hat made of lace and beading and put it on her head. She examined herself in a full-length mirror
that was propped against one wall and, satisfied, sat down on a purple velvet sofa and pulled up a box. Determined to keep the conversation as far as possible from what we were searching for, I asked about Mark Whitby.

“He's
gorgeous
,” she said, pawing through the box. “Don't you think he's gorgeous?”

“He's
Whit
,” I said, a little flummoxed as I peered behind a wooden headboard. “I've known him since kindergarten.”

“And you've never had a crush on him?”

I shook my head. “No. Trudy did.”

“Really?”

“For like ten minutes.”

Laurel laughed. “Tell me about him.”

“I don't know,” I said. “He's the catcher on the baseball team, and he's really funny and sorta dorky. Oh, and super sweet. Like, a lot of guys can be pricks sometimes, but he's just a total sweetheart.”

“That's what I think too,” she said, tucking her feet beneath her on the sofa. I wondered if she and Whit had talked outside of the drive-in and the fireworks.

Something about her voice made me almost think so.

“He's really close to his mom; they live out near Shaw with his little sister Jenna and his stepdad. Whit—his dad committed suicide when we were in eighth grade. The obituary in the town paper was really vague, but people knew. Everyone in town was talking about it for months.”

“He told me that,” she muttered.

I was shocked. Whit almost never talked about his dad. “When everyone was over for fireworks?” I asked dubiously.

“Of course not!” she said, appalled. “We talk on the phone sometimes.”

“Oh,” I said. “How did that happen?”

“He stole my phone on the Fourth and put in his number, so I called him.”

“Good for you!”

Laurel looked embarrassed. “I sort of said, ‘Hey, it's Laurel Hart. It was fun seeing you again. I really liked your khakis,' and he said, ‘My khakis? My
pants?'
all laughing and weirded out, you know, and I just begged, ‘Please don't hang up.'”

“I liked . . . your
khakis
?” I repeated, trying not to laugh.

“I panicked, okay?” she said.

“Well, he obviously didn't hang up.”

“No,” she said, smiling. “He didn't.”

“And he told you about his dad?”

“Not in that first call.”

I wondered how often they talked.

Laurel said, “He told me about his dad's drinking problem. He said there was this time when his dad was drunk at one of his baseball games and got escorted out, crying. He was so embarrassed—Whit, I mean.”

I remembered similar scenes all too well—Mr. Whitby always weepy, Whit always embarrassed but too sweet to shame
his dad in public. In fourth grade, our little group went to Whit's house for his birthday, and his dad was drunk and mopey, and Whit was so humiliated. Trudy and I went outside to the trampoline while Elliot hung back and talked Whit through it. I had wondered if we should be inside with him, but Trudy said he'd feel worse.

“He also told me about the car running in the garage.”

“Yeah.”

Laurel's voice grew soft. “Whit said the worst part was that there was no note. Not that he was the one who found the body, not that his dad had been so happy just the night before—but that there was no note.”

I didn't say anything. I knew most of these details, but it had been a long time since I'd thought about them. Whit didn't talk about it much—if at all. Well, maybe he did with Elliot, but not with me. I was glad he'd told Laurel. Each of them had such deep sadness; I wondered if sadness worked like magnets.

Laurel continued, “That's the most selfish thing I can imagine ever. Suicide, I mean.” She paused, thinking. “I suppose a lot of people probably think solipsism syndrome is about as bad.”

I shifted uncomfortably and redirected the conversation. “Whit hit his growth spurt late. In kindergarten, Trudy and I thought of him as another one of our dolls. Even though he's tall now, he was the shortest guy in our grade till like seventh grade. Can you picture him at five foot four?”

Laurel grinned with affection. “I'd have to bend down to kiss him.”

“
You've kissed him?
” I exclaimed.

She laughed. “Not
yet
, silly. But I plan to.” She grinned wryly. “Silas has always been tall,” she mused. “He was at least six feet straight out of the womb.”

We continued searching the attic for nearly an hour. There was no sign of a ballerina doll in a red dress. On the drive back to her house, I kept Laurel from wondering what that meant by reading the titles of the books her grandpa had sent home with her:
The Talking Toothpaste, Blankets for Monsters, Vivien's New Friend.
She didn't remember any of them.

Back in the Harts' den, we turned on
WARegon Trail
—I was getting used to the gore by now and had even developed a tiny crush on the show's badass pioneering protagonist—but we had the volume way down so we could talk about TV shows and internet memes and the latest Chuck Justice song, “Ransom Avalanche,” which I knew because Libby blasted it from her room 24/7. Laurel grabbed Silas's guitar and played her own cover of it—I didn't even know she could play—and when dinnertime rolled around, we ordered out from Mikey's, the only place in Green Lake that delivers. As always, the conversation seemed to come back to what I should study in college.

“Clowning. For sure,” she said, poking a last French fry into ketchup. “Or actually, no—maybe waterfowl.”

“How about puppetry?” I pretended to consider.

“Absolutely not,” Silas said, suddenly appearing in the den doorway. “Friends don't let friends major in puppetry.”

“Even if I am a ‘bomb hottie' with ‘hella junk in da trunk'?” I asked innocently.

“‘Fo sho,'” he said. “You forgot ‘fo sho.' Can't say I never wrote a poem for you.”

He sat down between me and Laurel on the couch, throwing an arm around each. “My two favorite girls. Oh!
WARegon Trail
! My two
favorite
, FAVORITE girls.” He turned the volume up.

Silas's college visit in the Twin Cities had gone great. “Their creative writing program is fantastic, West,” he said to me up on his roof that evening before the
August Arms
episode.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Most of the English professors there have published books, and they have this really cool literary magazine run by the students. And the campus is amazing—brick buildings a hundred years old, and they're crawling with ivy. It's on a lake—well, I guess pretty much everything in Minnesota is—but anyway, it has seven miles of lakeshore and its own island with a community garden. You really should check it out too. We . . . we could . . . go together.”

By the way he was stammering, I knew that he meant
we could go to college together
and not just
we could go visit the campus
together.
I liked that he was thinking of me so far in the future. Then again, college really wasn't that far away—senior year was starting in a month, and I'd turn eighteen in just a few days.

Even though I'd done my best to steer clear of the college conversation, I'd always imagined living in a dorm with Trudy on the same campus as Elliot—my little Green Lake world packed up and moved to wherever Elliot could get a scholarship. And now, Elliot was out of the picture and Trudy wanted to be roommates with Ami Nissweller at Tellham & freakin' Barr. Each of them had incited panic in me this summer when they'd broached the topic.

But with Silas . . . it would be a different adventure, but a good one. No panic there.

“It was just an idea,” he said in a rush. “I don't mean to tell you what to do. Forget I said anything.”

“It's okay,” I said. “I like that idea.”

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I got some info for Laurel too,” he said. “They have a BFA in dance there. Mom and I asked the recruiter lots of questions, and it seems perfect for her.” When Silas paused, I heard the words he didn't say:
if only she were healthy again.

“We had a good talk while you were gone,” I said.

“About what?”

I hesitated, knowing much of it would upset him. “Well, lots of things.”

“West. Tell me. I want to know.”

“She just has all these strange ideas about God—I can't even remember them all. Like evil being disguised as good or that we're in a puppet show. ‘How many layers in' she is,” I added, using finger quotes. “Freaky stuff.”

Silas let out a frustrated breath. “But I didn't know she had all those crazy theories,” he said. “It's more Descartes, that bastard. Is she really only seventeen? She drags those years around like they're a backpack full of bricks.”

On
August Arms
that evening, Sullivan Knox trod lightly through a story of seven Rwandan schoolchildren who had visions of the Virgin Mary, in which she showed the children a river of blood, people killing each other, and decapitated corpses.

Years later, civil war broke out in Rwanda: a genocide. In one hundred days, an estimated one million people were killed—seven every
minute
—many beheaded with machetes and dumped into the Kagera River.

“It was the vision, come true,” Sully said. “A river of blood, bodies without heads. Three of the Our Lady of Kibeho apparitions were later declared authentic by a local bishop.”

“Do you believe it?” I asked Silas, not sure what to think.

He shrugged, the flickering bonfire casting light and shadows across his face. “Maybe. I mean, I believe in the burning bush. But God speaks softly sometimes too.”

“To you?”

“Maybe.”

“What does he say?”

Silas leaned backward and looked at me with narrowed eyes and a crooked grin. “I can't tell if you're making fun of me,” he said. “Are you?”

Was I?

I thought of the story he was referring to—God speaking to Moses from a bush blazing with fire that did not burn it up. I'd heard such stories a hundred times in Sunday school as a child: God as a pillar of cloud, the sun standing still, the Red Sea parting like a crowd before a king. Did I believe them? I hadn't really thought about that question—what do I believe?—for so long. I'd just been limping along from Sunday to boring Sunday, doing my best to avoid encountering it all. Had I been creeping around corners to hide from Dad—or from God?

“No,” I said. “I'm not making fun of you. What does he say?”

Silas was quiet for a moment, an odd, lingering moment that made me wonder if I'd been too forward in asking a question like this so flippantly. But then that moment was over, and Silas looked at me. “He says to abide.”

Again, I expected a shit storm when I got home that night, since I'd been given permission to check on Laurel but had then stayed out for the rest of the day, ignoring my parents' calls as the day had gone dark. But my parents and Shea were
already in bed. I knocked on Libby's bedroom door.

“Come in,” she said, and turned her music down. She was on her bed, paging reverently again through the magazine I'd given her.

“Were Mom and Dad pissed that I didn't come home right away?”

She wrinkled her nose. “You're not supposed to say ‘pissed.'”

I rolled my eyes. “Were they?”

“I don't think so.”

“Did they mention it?”

“I guess. Mom said something to Dad, and he said, ‘Well, she's almost eighteen. Can you blame her?' and Mom said, ‘I suppose.'”

“Oh,” I said.

“That's good, right?” Libby asked, her finger marking a page.

“Yeah,” I said, oddly disappointed. “Great.”

When I walked into Silas's house on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, he handed me a bouquet of white calla lilies, then hooked a finger under the belt of my romper and pulled me toward him. “Westlin Beck,” he said, his forehead pressed against mine, “does your dad know you dressed like this today?”

No, actually, he does not.

“I like this,” I said, tugging lightly on his tie.

“Picnics bring out the best in me.”

But it started raining around eleven that morning, so we decided to picnic in the sunroom instead of at the lake, where Silas had planned. Around noon, the storm picked up, and the rain that had begun as a slow drizzle whipped into a frenetic downpour. It was surreal to be in the sunroom—glass walls, glass ceiling—almost like being inside a colossal car wash. It
was darker than it should be at noon, and colder too—although I wasn't sure if it was from summer's tilt toward autumn or from the storm itself. Silas found some tea lights in a kitchen drawer and placed them all around the sunroom, lighting all one hundred. The storm outside thrashed the trees in the yard, but indoors, the little flames blinked like cats' eyes.

My legs looked tan against the polar bear fur on the floor, where we sat eating turkey and avocado sandwiches and cucumber salad. There were grapes and cheeses, and sparkling cider, which we drank from his parents' champagne flutes.

“To Westlin Beck, on her birthday,” said Silas, toasting me. “May your year be full of delights and desserts. Oh, hey! I forgot!”

He had made chocolate-covered
bacon.

“Sprinkled with sea salt,” he said proudly.

I was flabbergasted. “You . . . are my favorite person. Ever.” The sweet mixed with salty was exactly perfect. “You did all this yourself?”

“Mom helped a little before she and Laurel left this morning,” he admitted.

“Where did they go?”

“Minneapolis. To meet with some doctors about alternative medicine. Laurel doesn't want to keep seeing her therapist. . . . I guess he keeps trying to find some childhood trauma as an explanation for it all—and Laurel kept saying no, no, no, no. This guy just thinks she's buried it all.”

“That's awful. Of the counselor, I mean.”

“Yeah. And Laurel's not stupid—she told me how therapists can unintentionally ‘implant' a false memory just by suggestion—so she said she wasn't going to talk to someone who'd
insist
that her childhood had left some big scar or whatever.”

“She said that?” I asked. “Wow.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Really kick-ass for someone so fragile.” I nodded. “I just think there is something broken in her mind. I wonder if there's a tiny switch deep inside her—it would be the easiest thing to turn it on or off—but we've got to
find
it first.” Silas smiled sadly at me, his eyelashes so long they made him seem almost shy for a moment.

The rain was drumming on the roof so hard, so consistently. It was its own lovely music, in a way. We talked more about college and Donovan Trick's forthcoming novel and the history class we'd share when school started in a few weeks—then we blew out the tea lights and retreated upstairs to watch
WARegon Trail.

Trudy had sent a birthday card, which made me laugh but had a disappointing lack of news—Germaine brothers or otherwise. But sitting beside Silas in the den, I couldn't bring myself to care about it too much. This was a lazy day, and I couldn't have loved it more. No parents around to tell us we were rotting our brains, no Laurel around to remind us how broken life was. Just me, Silas, and some zombies. I rested my head against Silas's shoulder and we watched the strong fathers
protect their wives and children from the undead. I lifted my head and looked at him, his eyes glued to the television set, so intense. I leaned over and kissed him quickly on the cheek, then looked away, trying to lasso my grin. A moment later, he pounced.

“Trying to be stealthy, Miss Beck?” he asked. “You must have forgotten that I am a ninja. Bow to your sensei!”

I couldn't stop laughing as I watched him remove his tie and wrap it around his forehead. The loose ends hung forward and brushed my ear as he leaned over and kissed me—it tasted like dark chocolate and apples. The screaming and gunfire from the television sounded a world away, Silas's body covering mine like the most perfect armor. I suddenly realized why he liked
WARegon Trail
so much—he liked the idea of fighting an enemy you could
see.
He gave me a beaming Silas-grin as he said, “Let that be a warning to you, missy.”

“I liked that warning,” I admitted, so close to him that we were still sharing breath.

And he kissed me again, and it was the clumsiest and most beautiful kiss I could imagine because neither of us could stop grinning, our smiles as big as the sun when it bursts over the horizon.

That evening, after the rain stopped and it was dark, we stole away to Green Lake to swim, though the park was closed. The wind had blown the clouds away, and the moon felt small and
distant. We splashed around as quietly as we could in the chilly water until our teeth were chattering and then we waded back to shore, climbed into the lifeguard stand as we had done before, and wrapped ourselves in a giant towel, wet shoulders pressed together, staring at the moon's long reflection on the water, like an arrow pointing our direction.

“Did you read the Billy Collins poem about the planet with four moons?” Silas asked, his voice low and husky in the night air.

“Mmm, I can't remember.” I leaned into him and kissed the freckles on his shoulder. He shivered.

“It's good. Really good. But it ends on this depressing note about how there would be two lovers on a beach, and even though they were feeling so close, they were actually each looking at a different moon.” He pressed in closer to me.

I thought mostly of the feel of his skin against mine, but also about how—months before the Harts moved to Minnesota—
August Arms
had run a story on scientists' suspicion that a second moon had once orbited Earth but had crashed into its twin, sticking there and creating the lunar highlands on the side of the moon we never see.

Silas looked at me, his eyes fierce with joy, and I couldn't tell him about what I'd heard. He wouldn't believe it anyway, I realized. He held the Genesis account of the “two great lights”—sun and moon—in his palm like a favorite storybook.

“I want to know God the way you do,” I said suddenly.

Silas nodded, sincere. “You want an august arm against the darkness,” he said. He slung an arm around my shoulder and kissed the top of my head. “I wrote a poem, because of our conversation the other day. Want to hear it? It's—it's just a draft, not done. I call it ‘Truest Anchor.' Or maybe ‘Truest Pillar.' ‘Truest Atlas?' I—” He was nervous to share and babbling.

I put a finger over his lips. “Shhh,” I said. “Let's hear it.”

He spoke soft and slow:

“
The broken heart has

its own stark splendor.

“
Everything in readiness:

curtain, heaven, hell, heel.

“
War before victory.

Wounds before cure.

“
Darkness destroyed

by the glory of dawn.
”

It sounded like a secret in the night air, floating just above the lapping gunmetal waters. “I like it,” I said, my voice barely audible.

“Hmm?” he prodded, and it sounded like the tiny sound a bird makes.

“It's okay, you think?” I asked. “To value brokenness, just for the fixing?”

“Hope so,” he said, “because I do.”

I thought of Sunday mornings: my dad sharing from the pulpit, the congregational hymns, the tiny wafers in a silver tray we passed down the aisles each week—for once, instead of seeming boring and expected, it all seemed sort of beautiful.

Silas's faith covered him like a shield, rode on his brow like a crown.

And then, of course, there was Laurel, whose days were measured by how close she carried these absurd truths to her core: communion reminded her of what was
real.

“‘Darkness destroyed by the glory of dawn,'” I said, seeing how the words felt on my lips. They felt like a story that belonged to me.

“What should I title it?” Silas asked quietly.

“How about just ‘Truest'?” I said. “And let that be it?”

Then he kissed me and I knew he understood.