Authors: Kristen Selleck
“Yes
I do!” Rachel argued. “You’re the guest. Sorry about all this. You probably
thought you’d get to sleep in Seth’s room, but mom and dad are reallllly
old-fashioned about things like that.”
“Oh
no!” Chloe argued quickly, “No, that’s fine. I wouldn’t want- I…it’s… I’m fine
this way.”
Rachel
dropped onto the bed, drew her legs up and sat yoga-style.
“So
I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff I want to ask, of course,” she began.
Chloe
swallowed audibly. She was saved by the banging of a suitcase being dragged up
the stairs.
“Oh
hey, there’s Seth,” she exclaimed. Chloe backed towards the doorway and peered
desperately into the hall.
Seth
was hauling both their suitcases up the stairs, one on top of the other, and
had a backpack slung over each shoulder.
“You
show her around?” Seth called to his sister.
“No,”
Rachel said with attitude.
“It’s
because she’s extremely rude,” Seth explained, dropping their bags in the
hallway. “Okay, this is Maggie’s room-” he tapped the door frame across the
hall from Rachel’s. Chloe peeked inside. It was a tower-like room, lined with
windows. An oak framed full-sized bed with a large patchwork quilt was pushed
against the only straight wall. Strands of white twinkle lights wound around
the exposed rafters of the cylindrical roof illuminating a dragonfly mobile and
a long set of wind chimes with fairies. One framed poster hung on the wall.
It was of Einstein standing at a chalkboard. There was a quote underneath him,
but it was too small to read from the doorway.
“Used
to be my room, but I up and left for college, so I lost my claim on it,” Seth
explained. “And this is Bea’s-” he pointed to the door next to Rachel’s.
Bea’s room looked like a flower garden. There was a mural hand-painted on one
wall, depicting huge, strange-looking flowers of all colors. She had green
curtains over her window and they were held back with loops of fake vines.
“That’s
the bathroom-” he nodded toward a door on the other side of the stairway. “And
here’s me…”
She
followed him to the door in the far corner on the other side of the stairs.
Seth’s room was comparatively blank. White walls…no curtains…just a lot of
cardboard boxes and hockey equipment lying around, and a white bed with large
pink daisies painted across the headboard. Chloe laughed out loud.
“Nice…nice
bed there,” she giggled.
“You
should see his My Little Pony collection,” Rachel said, coming up behind them.
“Yeah,
yeah, you guys are pretty funny. It’s Maggie’s bed. When she moved into my
room, she thought her old bed looked too childish, so she took mine,” Seth
shrugged. “It is pretty though, isn’t it?”
Both
girls laughed, as Seth picked up his backpack and hurled it inside.
“Alright,
let’s get going,” he said to Chloe.
“Already?”
Rachel whined. “You’ve been home five minutes, where are you going?”
“Thought
I’d take Chloe over to the Isle before it gets dark,” he said.
Rachel
rolled her eyes and wandered back to her room.
“Hope
she brought her boots,” she said over her shoulder.
Downstairs,
James Maird was in the living room, trying to start a fire in the old stone
fireplace. Seth grinned as he watched his Dad attempt to jam flaming wads of
newspaper under a stack of logs. Each time, the flames seemed to burn only the
newspaper and then fizzle away.
“Try
a blow torch Dad,” Seth suggested.
His
Dad jumped at the sound of his voice and then threw his hands up comically.
“Blow
torch, sure. Hey, where do you guys think you’re going?” he asked.
Seth
was already handing Chloe her coat, and yanking another for himself off the
coat tree.
“The
Isle, just for a bit,” Seth said.
“Your
Mom’s cooking. Since we have a guest, we’re actually going to get fed,” James
reminded him stoically.
“I
heard that!” snapped Seth’s mom, coming down the hallway. “Alright, dress
warm. Do you need gloves? We have so many gloves! Most of them don’t match.
And a hat, you have a hat?”
“I
have the one you made,” Chloe said, pulling it out of her coat pocket and
holding it up meekly.
“Does
it fit okay? I had to guess,” Agnes worried.
“I
love it, fits perfect. It’s a very nice hat,” Chloe gushed.
“Alright,
so…gloves, hat, here’s a scarf-” she pulled down a purple wool scarf off the
coat tree and wrapped it loosely around Chloe’s neck. “Boots…” she continued,
checking Chloe off. “Okay, you’re good. Don’t be long, and Seth, don’t forget
to call Mike, he’s already home and he called last night. Have fun, kids.”
Chloe
crunched through the snow, following Seth behind the house. Halfway between
the empty dock and the house was a metal pole barn. Seth jangled a set of keys
until he found the one he wanted, unlocked a rusty padlock and slid open the
door. It was full of shovels, rakes, hoses, lawnmower, tools, bikes, all the
sort of things one would expect to find in a pole barn, but, parked dead center
one next to the other next to the other, were three black snowmobiles.
“Do
you want to drive one or ride behind me?” he asked.
“Ride
behind!” Chloe answered quickly.
He
tossed her a helmet, and backed a snowmobile out while she tried to figure out
how to adjust the chin strap. He ended up having to do it for her.
As
soon as she laced her gloved fingers across his stomach, he throttled the sled
and they whizzed off, around the pole barn and down a frozen slope to the
snow-crusted beach.
She
kept her eyes closed for the first few minutes, squeezing him as tight as she
could through the thick padding of his coat. When she opened them, they were
still racing down the empty winter beach. Where the lake met the shore, a
curving, unbroken line of ice made strange, sculpted-looking forms. On her
other side, tall pines, and occasionally the backs of other houses blocked the
longview. There were other snowmobile tracks. In fact, the traffic had been
so heavy that it packed the snow down to hard white ice.
The
beach ended, and they zipped upward onto hard land. To their left, the ground
fell steeply down to the water, exposing red rock. They shot past a sign that
announced “Presque Isle Park”, and into a deeply forested lane that might have
been a walking trail in the summer. It was carpeted in clean unbroken snow, no
other tracks marred the surface.
Deep
into the woods, she felt the sled slow. He pulled off the trail, and drove
until the trees became too dense. When he cut the engine, the silence in the
woods was almost too loud.
Chloe
let go and stretched her fingers a couple of times. She had been holding tight
enough to restrict the blood flow and her hands tingled.
Seth
set his helmet on the seat, and held out his hand for hers. Snow crunched
under their feet, while the white-coated branches above filtered out the
already dying light. Seth was walking quickly, with a purpose. She wondered
what the point of hurrying was. Ahead, the dim light of the forest gave way to
the bright, warmer hues of a true dusk. Chloe decided it had to be the beach
again. When they got to the clearing, she gasped.
The
solid ground stopped just past the trees. It seemed to have broken off in
chunks and pieces, like something shook it apart. A tiny rock-strewn beach was
sheltered on either side by cliff walls, and the sun was sinking towards the
distant point where the lake met the sky. The icy water lapped the frosted
shore gently.
“Oh
this is…” Chloe breathed.
“Amazing,
yeah,” Seth agreed.
Tugging
on her hand, he led her closer to the water, stopping to brush the snow off of
a long, flat-toped stone. Chloe sat next to him, wrapping her arms around her
legs as she watched the sun edge closer and closer to the water. The sky
seemed enormous. Far over the water it burned yellow and orange, streaming
into a flaming pink. Directly overhead the pink was fading to daytime blue.
Behind the trees, the blue deepened to violet and then to almost black. A few
stars already winked in the painted sky, the lake reflected the colors, broken
into gentle waves which sparked and shimmered gold where the setting sun
touched them.
When
the last crescent of orange sun slipped under the waves, Chloe let out her
breath in a long sigh.
“It’s
beautiful here,” she smiled sadly. Seth was watching her, and might have been
for a long time.
“Yeah,”
he agreed. “It’s a good place to grow up, a good place to be outdoors. When I
was little, and I wasn’t in school, I was outside from sun-up to sundown. It
gets inside you, the water…the woods, like the outside is in the very center of
me.”
Chloe
nodded. If you opened her up, dark things would flap away. Free of their
captivity, black hard nasty things would skitter into the shadows, afraid of
the light, of this she was sure.
“Nothing’s
perfect though, not even my childhood,” he mused, staring out at the water, the
violet black of night was chasing the sun towards the water. It would be true
night soon.
“Pretty
near perfect,” Chloe suggested. “Your family is…well, they’re great, really.”
“Yeah,”
Seth nodded. He was staring over the water with a distracted frown.
“What?”
Chloe smiled up at him.
“When
I was a kid, Mike and I used to come out here a lot,” he said.
“He’s
been your friend a long time,” Chloe said.
“Yeah,
he has. My best friend though, was his cousin Billy. He lived right down the
road from us, back when we used to live in town.” .
“Does
he still live around here?” she asked.
“No.
He…well, he died, a couple of years ago,” Seth shrugged.
“Oh,
I’m sorry.”
Seth’s
forehead wrinkled when he frowned.
“We
went to Birch Harbor together. He roomed with me freshman year. We were
always together, all the time. He didn‘t seem depressed, he didn‘t seem any
different than he ever had. I don‘t know why it happened, why he did it. Mike
and I were away, for a road game. When I came back, I…I went into our room…and
I thought that he was sleeping, and when I…” Seth cleared his throat and
frowned again, thinking, remembering probably. “He took a couple of bottles of
pills, and went to bed…and never got up again.”
“I’m
so sorry,” Chloe whispered.
“After
that, I didn’t go to school for awhile. I went home. I thought it was
something I could wake up from. Like one day, I would wake up and it wouldn’t
have happened. I would see him walking up the driveway and I would go outside
and tell him that I had a crazy dream about him. It took a long time for me to
realize I wasn’t going to wake up. When I went back to school, I thought
everyone was staring at me. I thought they were all wondering how I could have
failed him. How I didn‘t know he was going to do it. I was sure they were all
blaming me, for leaving him alone,” Seth said slowly.
Chloe
shivered in her thick coat. She knew that feeling. Eyes followed her down the
long high school corridors for years, always looking, judging. She wrapped his
arm around herself and squeezed closer to him.
“I
got over it. Mike did too. No one becomes an adult with a clean slate though
Clo, not really. No one I ever met at least. You didn’t step out of a 1950’s
sitcom. Neither did I. I just want you to know that you don’t have to hide
things from me.” He wrapped his other arm around her, pulling her closer
still.
Tell
him something
, she thought.
You have to give him something, some small
thing that’s real about you
.
“My
dad died,” Chloe admitted. “A couple of years ago, he died. I didn’t know him
or anything, so it wasn’t like it was sad. He left when I was a baby. Him and
my mom argued all the time, my sisters told me about it. He couldn’t keep a
job, I think he drank a lot too. He didn’t want another kid, he told my mom he
didn’t want another one. She didn’t plan me, I just, I just…happened. I was
the straw that broke his back, I guess. He left. They got divorced.”
“Who
told you that he left because he didn’t want you…your mother?” Seth asked
quietly.