The Way We Bared Our Souls (5 page)

“I was going to teach her how to skate,” Kit said softly now from his diving board perch. “I’d finally convinced her to try it. The week she died.”

“Kit, I’d . . . I’m so sorry. I want to talk more about her, and I want you to know that I’m here for you always. I feel like a colossal jerk, but the thing is, I’m in a bit of a rush, in a deadline situation, you know? I need to find Thomas as soon as possible. Do you know where he is?”

“Oh yeah. Your mysterious quest for the mysterious Thomas. Well, um, it’s Friday so he’s probably helping with the sunset tour at the balloon field.”

Oh, right. Thomas’s adoptive parents ran a Christian-themed hot-air balloon business just south of downtown. It sounds crazy, but this isn’t so remarkable in Santa Fe. Everyone’s parents seem to have some wacky job or another. Luis LeBlanc’s mom sells meteorites in the plaza. Mrs. Laramie’s husband paints old RVs and fills them with scrap metal as installation art pieces. Then there are the bodice-rippers by Alex’s mom, which you can buy in airports all over the country. By comparison my parents’ careers are snore-inducingly normal, even though they flirt with death and fire every day.

“Okay, thanks,” I said. “I’ll try there.” I got up to leave. Kit just nodded and resumed staring, idly spinning the wheels on his skateboard. I felt bad leaving him like that, but I also knew that sometimes, when you were really missing someone, you just wanted to be alone with her absence.

“Listen, Kit,” I said, “if you ever want to talk. . . .”

“Talking doesn’t really help,” he said. For a split second I heard Jay’s voice in my head.
Four friends who are similarly suffering.
Maybe now wasn’t the time, maybe it would never be a good time, but I wondered about taking Kit to see Jay with me.

“Well, you know where I live,” I said. Kit showed a hint of a smile. He didn’t just know where I lived; he knew which first-floor bedroom I slept in. He used to wake me up some mornings before middle school by tapping on the window.

But now that seemed like an eternity ago. Now we were separated by much more than panes of glass.

AT PSALMS OVER SANTA FE,
the Dent family does a booming business at sunrise and sunset, when the local scenery is at its most picturesque. I was used to seeing the giant canvas balloons overhead when I fed the chickens in the morning or came home in the early evening from lady dates with Alex and Juanita. The structures made me think of massive sea creatures floating through the brine, like whales or giant squids. Oddly enough, I’d never actually seen the balloons land, only rise and sink.

I parked at the far end of the vast Psalms lot and sat in my car for a few minutes, trying to build up some nerve.
TranquiLo. Remember: no risk without reward.
No, that didn’t sound right. The opposite of that.
Lo contrario
.

Finally, I got out of my station wagon, bypassed the main office, and went straight for the balloon launch site. You didn’t have to worry about airfield security at Psalms, though it would be sort of funny to have to remove your shoes and go through a checkpoint before boarding the balloon basket. And then be asked to turn off all electronics upon takeoff and landing.

Settle down, space cadet. Sketch comedy is not your forte.

Thomas was at the periphery of the bald, bone-dry airfield, hunched over some kind of metal burner. In the center of the field Mr. Dent helped a group of middle-aged passengers weighed down with cameras board the basket of a half-inflated balloon designed to look like an ice cream cone dipped in rainbow sprinkles.

I have to admit, I was kind of jealous of these tourists. Even though I don’t lust for the Southwestern landscape, as so many flocks of visitors seem to, early September is by all accounts an ideal time to have a bird’s-eye view of the region. Monsoon season had just ended, and though we were still suffering from an unusually arid climate, the colors were beginning to change in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

I looked away from the Baskin-Robbins balloon to find that Thomas had stopped what he was doing and now had his gaze set squarely on me. He wore his customary uniform of Converse high-tops, a white V-neck T-shirt, and cutoff jean shorts. And of course the usual dark hoodie that hid his face at school.

When you say the war is over,
He wants to argue the point. . . .

I knew Thomas’s story partly from my mom, who went to the same church as his parents. The Dents used to travel worldwide as missionaries, but their hands were currently pretty full with one biological son and six other young children they’d adopted or were fostering. Not to mention the responsibilities of running the airborne ops at Psalms Over Santa Fe.

But Thomas seemed to be the exception to their happy family. He was the newest, and chronologically the oldest, addition to the Dent melting pot on de Gama Street, and as far as I could tell he hadn’t yet assimilated into the Smiling Grateful Children Club. Just two summers ago he’d been relocated to whitewashed Santa Fe from Liberia, where rumor was he’d been a child soldier in the Second Liberian Civil War. At school, people said that he’d killed people. Lots of people, maybe even his own parents.

I’d never heard Thomas talk about growing up in Africa. Actually, I thought, as I prepared to ask him the biggest favor of my life, I’d never even had a proper conversation with him. I only knew of his experience secondhand, through the rumor mill and my mother’s friends at St. Francis. At school Thomas kept quiet, aloof. He was jumpy in class, easily rattled by loud noises, as if his finger were still on the trigger. His body still seemed poised to dodge bullets or dive into ditches. Everyone (except maybe Kit Calhoun) was too terrified to ask him questions or even to stand too close to him in the cafeteria lunch line. Because he kept so silent, I guess everyone assumed the worst. That Thomas could snap at any moment, as if he had some machete muscle memory and might stab them with a cafeteria fork.

But what I first noticed about Thomas was how good-looking he was, especially on the one or two occasions I’d seen him smile. Like the first time I met him, sort of, when I found him standing alone by Agua de Water at the end of lunch period.

“Why do people throw away their money in the fountain?” he’d said as I walked by him
very
slowly.

“I guess because the hope of having their wishes fulfilled is worth more than their money,” I’d said. Then I’d pulled some change from my pocket and handed him the sole quarter in a constellation of pennies. “You try.”

That was the first time I saw his dimples, and the golden undertones that lit up his skin when he was thoughtful.

But none of my friends had ever mentioned Thomas’s beauty; their fear of his war-torn past pushed him right into the category of weird and undateable.

Which I guess is why I’d hesitated to tell my friends that I thought Thomas was hot. Like, smoldering hot. I worried that they might judge me strangely for it. That was my weakness. And I hadn’t told them about his poem that I’d found, about how much it had affected me. Ever since I read the poem, whenever Thomas walked into a room, I felt his energy more than ever. Like an electric charge. His eyes were usually downcast, and his body language made him all but unapproachable, but it seemed as if he hid universes beneath his skin. Galaxies. He didn’t radiate blandness like my ex-boyfriend, Jason Sibley, or Juanita’s boyfriend, Luis, or the other varsity guys at school. Thomas was different.

But I won’t lie. He scared me a little bit. But not for the reasons he scared everyone else. I was scared because his presence made me seek the same vital qualities I saw in him—even the painful ones—in myself. And perhaps I wasn’t ready to face them.

Or, now that I was on the verge of diagnosis, to lose them.

Over the last year, Thomas had started to make casual friends, and once in a while our social circles overlapped. He’d been to a couple of Weekends on Wednesdays, though he didn’t really chat with anyone and he usually left early, long before I’d get up the courage to talk to him. So why did I think I could summon the guts to speak to him one-on-one now?
Mano a mano
.
Tête-à-tête
. No, French didn’t put nearly the same positive spin on things as Spanish.

But it was way too late to backtrack now. Before I had a chance to bail, I was standing close enough to kiss him, staring at the cloud of dust my feet had thrown up.

“Hi, Thomas,” I said. He squinted, as though willing me to shrink into a bug or turn around and walk away, a thousand miles away. As he crouched over the burner with a faint shimmer of sweat on his forehead, I thought he’d never looked more handsome, or been more disconcerting.

“I, um, thought I’d find you here,” I said.

“Oh?” Thomas said, revealing no emotion, good or bad. He waited, still affectless, for me to continue. I shielded my eyes from the glare of the sun that seemed to penetrate my neurons themselves, causing a migraine. My vision blurred slightly, and my knees weakened like a wave had hit them. But there was no place to go but forward.

“Which of course begs the question,” I said, trying to fill the embarrassing silence, “of, um, why have I been looking for you?”

“You tell me,” Thomas said, keeping his eyes steady on me. “You never have before.”

He had me there. But in all fairness, Thomas didn’t exactly make himself easy to befriend. He always seemed light-years away. Which is precisely why I knew we could help each other.

“Well, did you ever think that maybe you’re sort of hard to talk to?” I said, smiling. “Like maybe you’re willfully intimidating?” Was I bordering on flirtation?

“Am I?” Thomas said, lighting the burner with such vigor that I could feel the heat on my bare legs.

“You’re just . . . you know. . . .” Suddenly this was coming out all wrong. I didn’t know how to finish. I didn’t have the words. How pathetic I must appear to him right now. I might as well be blind again, considering how much I was stumbling.

My eyes wandered to the people climbing into the generous scoop of balloon. For a second I wanted to trade places with any one of them, even if it meant changing schools, changing faces, changing histories. I just wanted to feel strong again, like I would remain whole until graduation.

“I see,” he said, solemnly fiddling with the balloon apparatus. Though his English was impeccable, his accent was slightly foreign—possibly French—and it made me melt a little.

Focus, Lo. You can do this.

“Listen, Thomas,” I said, regrouping. “The truth is . . . I have a proposal for you. And, well, I don’t know what you’re going to say. It’s kind of heavy.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“Well, it’s about this condition I have.”

“Condition?”

“Yeah.” I wanted to stall for time, but Thomas’s eyes were expectant, burning into me. There’d be no equivocating. “I just found out that I might be . . . sick. Like incurably, neurologically sick.” There. I’d said it. MS. My Strain. My Substance.
Mucho
Sorry.

For a millisecond Thomas seemed like he might be genuinely troubled. But then he knelt back down to the ground and began puttering with the burner once again. Moving on to the next task. This hurt my feelings.

“Hello?” I said. “Sick girl here.” Wait, I hadn’t meant to sound angry.

Thomas’s eyes had gone cold again. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“It was stupid of me to come,” I said, whirling around. So much for risks reaping rewards. I felt exhausted, hopeless. What had I been thinking? This wasn’t gorgeous, untouchable Thomas’s problem. This was mine alone. I couldn’t expect him, of all people, to care. The migraine began spreading down my spine, if that were even possible.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas said, making me slow down and stop. His voice was loud, clear, almost yearning. I turned around to face him again. He was still squatting in the dirt, not making eye contact, but he’d put down his tools.

Not me, of course.
I am not at war
Anymore. . . .

“About what, exactly?” I said.

“That I was callous. . . . That you’re sick. It’s just that . . . I’ve . . . seen too many people die. I can’t . . . get close. My instinct is to turn away when someone I like. . . .”

He trailed off, and I got confused. Someone he . . .
likes 
?
Was he referring to me? He didn’t even know me. How could he like me? We’d barely had a conversation. His life experience was so vastly different from mine. He was an ex–child soldier from Africa. I was an economically comfortable white chick with parents who still made me a basket full of jelly beans every Easter. I owned four Joni Mitchell records, for god’s sake. I could keep eight hula-hoops going at once. Thomas and I were the dictionary definition of “worlds apart.”

“I have a favor to ask you,” I said, gaining nerve and brushing aside Thomas’s confusing comment for now, though I feared I was still blushing from it. “But I don’t have much time to spare, so please be honest with me. And promise that you won’t do anything that you’re not one hundred percent comfortable with.”

Now it was Thomas’s turn to be confused. “I promise,” he said.

I took a deep breath. “I know you’ve been through a lot. The war, coming to the States, the adoption.”

Was I saying too much? Thomas’s face became forbidding, maybe even angry. It wasn’t really fair to know all these personal details about him secondhand. But I’d already warmed to my speech, so I kept going.

“You’ve got some things that probably weigh on you,” I continued. “Heavy things. And so do I, though probably . . . to a much lesser degree. So I’m just going to say it. Tomorrow there’s a ceremony in the desert that could maybe take . . . that weight . . . away. I’d be healed of my disease. Potentially. And you’d be, you know. . . .”

Truth was, I didn’t really know what Thomas would be released from after the ritual, because I didn’t know what exactly he was afflicted with now. I was confronting him out of the blue about his sorrows before he’d even shared them with me. Maybe now he never would. I lowered my head.

“Come here,” Thomas said. “I have something to show you.” He grabbed my hand and practically yanked me across the airfield toward an isolated red balloon. I looked around for Mr. Dent, but he was already high above our heads with the tourists. I’d been so absorbed in our conversation—in Thomas—that I hadn’t even noticed their ascent. Now Thomas and I were alone together in the field with this menacing red contraption.

“Get in,” he said.

Though earlier I’d been longing to go up in the air, these weren’t exactly ideal circumstances. I’d made Thomas angry, had triggered something in him. I didn’t truly know him, not beyond my own haphazard guesswork, and I couldn’t predict what he would do.

I sleep in a bed.
My new mom makes me a sandwich.
There are no machine guns at my disposal.
But that is me. Not him. . . .

“No thanks,” I said. “Maybe we could get coffee or something instead? Frozen yogurt?”

“Get in,” Thomas repeated, and this time the command had an almost military ring to it. I obeyed, climbing into the basket. He followed me inside, latching the short wicker door behind us. Then he lowered his black hood and turned on the burner. A long, jagged scar I’d never noticed before stood out prominently on the back of his neck.

“Thomas, what are you doing?” I was really starting to feel anxious now. It seemed as if my enigmatic classmate intended to launch us into the heavens. Thomas untied various ropes around the basket. When he got stuck on a particularly stubborn knot, he pulled a large hunting knife from his belt and sliced the rope clean through. Then he cranked the burner under the balloon, and I felt my body begin to lift off the ground. My stomach leapt the way it did in fast elevators. I wanted to grab for the ropes that Thomas was dropping one by one to the earth, but my hands had gone numb. I leaned into the corner of the basket to try to secure myself by my elbows in the shaky vessel as we jerked skyward.

“Consuelo Katherine McDonough,” Thomas said, “you don’t know what you’re asking me. You’re out of your depth here. You have no clue.”

I looked over the basket edge and saw the ground floating away. I closed my eyes. Could Mr. Dent see us? Would he and his passengers descend to save us?