Splendor (16 page)

Maybe it was because every action he took seemed so sensual, so pleasure-filled; he smoked because he wanted to, without considering the implications or worrying about the future cost of this decision. At least, that was how it seemed. And he was unapologetic about it.

He never asked anyone around him, “Do you mind if I smoke?” Gunner didn’t seem particularly concerned about offending.

I guess I was watching him too closely, because Gunner shifted his attention from middle distance to my face. For a moment I felt lost in his marbled gaze, like I was falling, like I had lost all sense of direction, actually—falling or flying or sitting still, I couldn’t tell.

“Would you like one?”

I shook my head. “I don’t smoke.”

“How do you know? Have you ever tried?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve never smoked anything.”

But suddenly I wanted to—not because I wanted the cigarette, but because I wanted his kiss. His lips. His hot breath, spicy and wrong.

Instead I held out my hand and took his brown cigarette, ignoring his smirk and bringing it to my mouth, wrapping my lips around its tip and pulling gently, bringing its hot dry fragrance into my lungs.

I don’t know what I expected. What I got, though, was a flaming pain in my chest as the smoke filled me. I thrust the cigarette back at Gunner as a coughing fit overwhelmed me.

He didn’t laugh at me, I’ll give him that, though the smirk he continued to wear was bad enough. “Not for everyone.”

When I’d recovered enough to speak, I said, “Why on earth would you
choose
to smoke those things?”

He shrugged. “I like the burn of them,” he said. “I like the way they hurt.” He turned his gaze on me again. “But I don’t suppose you could understand that, a good girl like you.”

My eyes flitted down to the crescent smile-scar on my left wrist and an image of myself—cold, empty, hollowed out—flashed through my mind.

Maybe he read my thoughts on my face, maybe he saw me glance to my scar, because he raised an eyebrow and mused softly, “Or, perhaps, you can.”

“No,” I lied. “I can’t understand that. It seems like an awful waste of time.”

Gunner saw through my lie, I could tell by the amused tilt of his lips, but he didn’t call me on it. Instead, as if he believed me, he said, “Yes, Lily told me that you’re not a lot of fun when it comes to parties.”

Betrayed. That’s what I felt. Lily was
talking
about me to this guy?

“I guess I’m not,” I said. “I’m pretty dull, really. So what are you doing out here?”

“Checking on my lab partner,” he said. “I don’t want to fail the assignment, after all.”

“You couldn’t care less about an assignment.”

He laughed. “Astute,” he said. “I guess I’m curious—what could have gotten you all worked up like that? You’re made of tougher stuff than Jane, I’d wager. Not like you to run off.”

He’d smoked his cigarette down to a nub and ground it into the dirt by his shoe.

I didn’t feel like confiding in Gunner. “I guess the formaldehyde was making me dizzy.”

“Bollocks.”

“Is that even a word?”

“Indeed it is. Roughly translated into American English, it means ‘bullshit.’ ”

“Ah.” I couldn’t help myself—I liked his wry sense of humor, his ironic, jaded perceptions. “Well, I guess you’ll just have to live with the mystery.”

“You won’t tell me?”

I shook my head. Share with
Gunner
my revelation that I seemed somehow connected to Will through my dreams? Absolutely no way.

“Well, can I hazard a guess?”

“Sounds entertaining. Be my guest.”

“Hmm…” He rocked gently on his heels, thinking. “Well, there was a corpse in front of you. A room full of them, actually, tiny little corpses. And Lily told me that your brother died a year or so ago.…”

Had they spent their whole date talking about me?

“So perhaps the little piglets turned your attention to your brother. Also dead.”

I had come a long way, I noticed, as if I were an impartial observer. Gunner was talking about Ronny, about his death, and his cavalier attitude, though irritating, didn’t make me physically ill. So that was something.

“I wasn’t thinking about Ronny.”

“Hmm…,” he said. “The boyfriend, then. Away at college…Yale, is it?”

“Let me guess. Lily again?”

“A veritable fount of information.”

Somehow the conversation had turned to Will, though I hadn’t brought it there. “Actually,” I said, “I was thinking about my horse. She’s pregnant.”

“A pregnant horse and a dead piglet. Interesting. You
are
complex, aren’t you, Scar?”

“No more so than anyone else, I guess.”

“That is most likely true. But your particular complexities interest me.”

“Why?”

“
That
is a very good question.”

I waited for his answer. It was easy to pretend that we weren’t at school, that the bell to announce the end of this period wasn’t due to ring in a few minutes, that nothing we said or did under this tree was part of our real life.

“There is something about your energy,” he said at last. “Something about you that seems to speak to me. To call to me.”

It was tempting to lose myself in the romantic idea of Gunner’s words, but ultimately, they were meaningless. This tree, this moment in time, was not isolated from the rest of my life, from the people I loved. Everything, and all of it, was connected. The things I did mattered. If I let myself fall into Gunner’s marbled eye, that would matter. It would resonate. Even if no one saw me do it.

From the distance, I heard the harsh call of the school bell. I stood and wiped the dirt from the back of my jeans. “I’m not
calling
to you, Gunner,” I said. My voice was even as I looked down into his eyes, looking up at me. “I’m just a girl, and I have a boyfriend.”

Then I walked back toward the building. Behind me, I heard the flick of Gunner’s lighter. And I took a deep breath, inhaling the sweet scent of his next cigarette.

Usually on Mondays, I headed straight to the stable after school. Alice had consistently been my ride until this year, but as Dad had gotten more comfortable with my driving, I had begun taking the old Volvo. If I’d driven directly from school (where I’d parked the car that morning, packed with my riding clothes and boots), maybe another month would have gone by without my discovering Dad’s secret. Or maybe longer. Maybe I could have avoided it forever.

But the car wouldn’t start. The battery was dead; it took me only a minute to realize that I’d left the headlights running and they’d slowly, silently drained the battery.

The jumper cables weren’t in the trunk, and somehow no one else seemed to have a set, either. Dad didn’t answer my call—it went straight to voice mail, which meant his phone was either off or dead—so I decided to walk home and find him.

He wasn’t on the main floor; he wasn’t in any of the guest rooms. I made my way to our flat on the third floor, but I knew before I walked through it that he wasn’t there, either. The space had that strange, particular sensation of emptiness. Even so, I poked my head into the kitchen and his bedroom and tapped on the bathroom door. My bedroom door, at the end of the hall, was open, but before I headed there to set down my backpack, I found my hand on the doorknob of Ronny’s room. I hadn’t really intended to put it there, and as I watched with strange fascination, my hand twisted the knob and pushed open the door.

I hovered on the threshold. Inside, the curtains were pulled; the room was in shadow. Then my hand reached into the room, found the wall switch, and flipped it.

It had been a year and a half since I’d last stepped into Ronny’s bedroom. At first, as I took a cautious step across the threshold, I wondered if I would be able to breathe. But my lungs filled just the same, though the weight I had felt on my chest in the long months after Ronny’s death threatened to descend upon me again.

I was a girl with a dead brother. For the rest of my life, this would be true. There was nothing I could do to change it. Dead was dead, whether or not I entered Ronny’s room, whether or not I visited his grave…which I hadn’t done since the day we buried him.

Ronny’s room didn’t smell like Ronny, but this didn’t surprise me. Even before his death his room had already become a shade of its former self; most of his time had been spent on the mainland in his dorm room, so he’d taken all his favorite possessions with him. They’d been returned, of course, but we’d just stacked the boxes inside the room and no one had touched them since.

I blinked and took another step. There. That was far enough. The blue-and-white quilt was pulled up over the pillows on his bed. There was the oversized armchair Mom had wanted to throw out, which Ronny had appropriated for himself. One side of it had been clawed by a cat we’d had, Applesauce. She was dead, too, of natural causes, having lived a long and happy life; it was her death that prompted Mom to redo the great room. Applesauce had had a thing for clawing the furniture. With her out of the way, Mom decided it was safe at last to buy nice things.

Maybe I would look through the boxes, I mused. There must be some stuff in there that I would want to take with me when I went off to college in the fall. I was almost done with my applications—I was applying all over California, nowhere far because I knew my parents couldn’t afford out-of-state tuition.

But not today.

It was good to know that I could handle Ronny’s room. And I decided that it was past time that I visit his grave. Maybe Dad would go with me.

I switched off the light and stepped back into the hallway, closing the door quietly, listening for the click as it shut.

My own room was cold—I’d opened the window that morning to see what the weather might be like and hadn’t shut it when I’d left. Quickly, I crossed to the window and reached for the sash to push it closed. But when I saw movement in the garden, I froze. There was my father, sitting on the bench next to the koi pond, the pond he’d dug with Ronny, just beyond our gazebo.

I often saw him sitting there. It had become his private space in the time Since Ronny Died, a place where he went to think, to stir the water slowly with a stick, to gaze into the evening—but on this day, he was not alone.

Next to him was Alice. They sat close, with their heads together as if they were discussing something serious. A fleeting thought passed through my mind that they must be talking about me. I was, after all, their common interest.

But as their faces closed the distance between them, as my father dipped his head down toward Alice and she tilted her face up to him, as his hand buried itself in the brown wings of her hair and he clutched her close, tight up against his body, and as a little sound like a whimper came from my heart, it occurred to me that maybe they had something other than me at the forefront of their minds.

I
stepped back from the window. I left my room. I made my way down the two flights of stairs on quiet cat feet and closed the front door as gently as I could. Then I ran. I ran and ran, not caring where my feet took me as long as it was
away.

I tripped over a slab of concrete that had been displaced by a tree root, falling hard and skinning my hand. The pain of it was sharp and welcome. Pulling myself back to standing I went on, walking fast now rather than running, watching blood pulse up to the surface of my palm where the skin had been shredded by the rough concrete.

First Ronny, dead. Then my mother, AWOL. And now Dad—kissing Alice, a friend, a married woman.

I strode quickly up my street, the ocean behind me. At first I was just trying to put distance between myself and what I’d seen from my bedroom window, but after a while it became clear that I was heading to the graveyard.

The curved iron gate of the cemetery was closed but not latched. The graveyard was built on a hill, so it had been terraced into two sections. Ronny was buried on the lower terrace. I entered through the gate at the top of the cemetery, as far from Ronny’s grave as I could get.

I stood there breathing quietly for a few minutes, trying to calm down. I knelt and passed my hand along the damp grass. My palm felt better. Standing again, I made my way over to the head of the cemetery, where there was a verse inscribed onto a large piece of bronze framed by rocks. I remembered having read it on the day of Ronny’s funeral. It was a fragment of Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King.

I read it again now:

BUT NOW FAREWELL

I AM GOING A LONG WAY…

TO THE ISLAND-VALLEY OF AVALON:

WHERE FALLS NOT HAIL

OR RAIN OR ANY SNOW

NOR EVER WIND BLOWS LOUDLY:

BUT IT LIES

DEEP MEADOW’D, HAPPY, FAIR

WITH ORCHARD LAWNS

AND BOWERY HOLLOWS CROWN’D

WITH SUMMER SEA

WHERE I WILL HEAL ME

OF MY GRIEVOUS WOUND.

When I had last stood in this spot, I hadn’t found solace in the words, though I’m sure that had been the hope of whoever had chosen the poem.

I’d tried to imagine Ronny, his spirit, his soul, arriving after death to some more perfect version of our Avalon, an Avalon deep meadow’d, happy and fair. I’d tried to imagine him healing from his grievous wound. I’d stood at this plaque wishing fiercely, willing to barter away
anything
if only Ronny could be returned to us.

This time, though, I could look at the poem more dispassionately, analytically, even as the vision of my dad and Alice beat against the backs of my eyes. And this time I was struck not by the images the poem painted but rather by the placement of the specific words.

One line stood out in a way I hadn’t seen before:

BUT IT LIES

Grammatically, these words should be connected to those beneath them:

BUT IT LIES DEEP MEADOW’D, HAPPY, FAIR

They weren’t. Those three little words comprised their own line. Maybe Tennyson had placed them that way. I didn’t think so, though; I would bet money that it was the engraver who’d chosen to set them on a line of their own. It could have been a matter of convenience, to break the phrase into two groups of words.

Reading that line, my hand stinging, though not nearly as much as my heart, I saw a message, not hidden at all, terribly obvious and searingly true—
BUT IT LIES.
All of it, everything lies—the promise of a happy, safe escape after death, the promise of family.

So ugly, the truth: the image of my father and Alice, the particular shade of my mother’s purple wall, the memory of Ronny’s freshly dug grave.

I turned away from the plaque and wiped angrily at my eyes. Then, because I was already there and already in pain, I descended to the lower terrace and found my brother’s grave.

In the third grade, my teacher, Mrs. Flannigan, had taken us on a field trip to this cemetery. We’d made grave rubbings of some of the oldest headstones. The one that had most fascinated me belonged to a girl from another time, a girl who had died at just seven years old.

Her headstone was made of chalky, crumbling white marble. It looked a lot like the fake headstones we’d used to decorate Lily’s front yard at Halloween, except this one marked the bones of a long-dead girl.
MARY EDITH AULL,
declared the neat printing on the headstone.
DEC. 18, 1912–JAN. 19, 1920
.

A lamb was carved into the marble, and across the top of the headstone were the words
OUR DARLING
.

Ronny was buried not far from Mary Edith Aull. His grave marker was the modern kind: a flat rectangle of brass set into the grass. Though it looked different from hers, the particulars were pretty similar. There was his name—Ronald Jonathan Wenderoth—and the dates of his birth and death. Beneath these facts was the inscription
LOVING SON AND BROTHER.

He was someone’s darling, too.

All of us are, until we aren’t anymore.

I stood next to his grave. The last time I had been here, there had been a gaping hole in the ground, a coffin set inside it, and I had thrown in a handful of dirt. My father had thrown one in, too, but my mother couldn’t bring herself to do it. That, I understood. To rain dirt down upon your child’s body…to know that was
the end
of the baby you’d birthed, the child you’d kissed and consoled, the young man you’d cheered and rooted for—and that his body was in the ground in a box in a suit.… It sickened me, thinking of it.

But it wasn’t so bad here, now. There were squirrels; there were birds. If you could ignore the bodies decomposing beneath your feet, the cemetery might make a pretty sweet picnic spot.

Some people talk to their dead. Some people visit their graves and put fresh flowers on them, and little Christmas trees in the winter and heart-shaped balloons on Valentine’s Day. Personally, I found this nauseating.

Dead is dead. Balloons don’t fix dead.

As the week progressed, Gunner and I took our piglet cadaver to pieces. We made a great team; he watched as I cut down the length of her abdomen and then made two lateral incisions to create a flap that we peeled back to peer into the abdominal cavity. Together we examined the liver, stomach, gallbladder, and pancreas. We explored the large intestine, the small intestine, the rectum.

I watched as Gunner took the piglet’s hind legs in his glove-encased hands and cracked the pelvic bone, splaying her legs even wider apart so we could more clearly see her reproductive organs. There were ovaries; there was a uterus.

We took notes and dutifully filled out our packet. Mr. McCormack held up our work more than once as an example. Behind us, Jane Maple grew by degrees indifferent to the death before her. One day, she squealed with delight upon properly identifying the aortic arch as she held her piglet’s tiny heart in her hand.

As we worked I trained my thoughts carefully away from visions of my father kissing Alice, and from Gunner kissing Lily. I focused on the pale lips of our piglet and concentrated on the work in front of me.

And I counted the days until the weekend. At last Friday arrived. I managed to avoid my father most of the evening, and on Saturday I locked myself in my room, trying desperately to focus on studying.

I hadn’t really spoken with my dad all week; he’d written off my disconnection to midterms and college applications. I’d been fine with that assumption. And I didn’t even really tell him my weekend plans, just left a note for him before I headed to the ferry Saturday evening. The note was vague enough to let him assume I would be staying with my mother, but I hadn’t called to tell her I was coming to the mainland, and I had no intentions of seeing her this weekend.

It was to Sabine’s house that I was headed. I was done with my own family for a while.

Finally the ferry was full and we pulled away from the dock. I stood at the bow of the boat, itchy to get away from the island as quickly as possible. Even the length of the ferry felt like a welcome relief from the island’s shore. As the boat shifted out of the harbor and onto the open ocean, the cold wind cut through my layers of clothing and I shivered. But I didn’t cross my arms over my chest; I let them hang at my sides as the wind assaulted me. It wasn’t a pretty day. The mottled gray-blue sky recalled to me Gunner’s eyes, and I felt glad to be leaving him behind, too, and Lily.

I looked back over my shoulder at the island shrinking behind us and remembered again the Agatha Christie book in which, one by one, each character perished on a vacation island. Philip Lombard was the second-to-last to die. I remembered the poem’s last lines:

One little Indian boy left all alone;

He went out and hanged himself

And then there were none.

In Christie’s book, the “he” who hanged himself was a “she”—Vera Claythorne. It was a stupid poem—
alone
and
none
didn’t really rhyme—and it was a stupid ending. She shouldn’t have killed herself. She should have signaled for help and gotten her ass off the island. She should have
survived.

I was not Vera Claythorne.

When I got to the Rabinovich house on Linnie Canal, I found Ziva in the yard. She was sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs, surrounded by a voluminous quilt, head tilted down into the pages of a book. Behind her, the house was full of sounds: I heard Ari’s screech and Daniel’s answering yell; they were either murdering each other or playing another video game. There was music, too, something classical.

Ziva seemed to register none of this; the book had all of her attention.

“What are you reading?” I asked, after I had stood quietly next to her for a minute, waiting for her to look up.

Without raising her eyes, Ziva replied,
“Black Beauty.”

“I’ve read that,” I said. “Did you know I have a horse?”

“Mm-hmm,” she said, turning a page. “Will told me.”

“Do you like horses?”

“Not particularly.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. Don’t all girls like horses?

“I like books,” she said. Then she looked up at me. “My mom’s inside,” she added, clearly an invitation for me to move along.

I took the hint. “Thanks.”

The sounds and smells of a full household—the warmth of the lit fire, the sizzle of fat on the stove top as David began dinner—were bittersweet. I joined in, though, with a cheery “Hey, everyone,” and Ari even paused his game to come across the room and give me a bare-chested hug.

The next morning, David took the kids to their cousins’ house for a birthday party.

“There’d better be a piñata,” Ari grumbled as his father pulled a shirt over his head and herded him out the door.

Sabine and I went for a walk on the beach. Venice’s boardwalk was a totally different experience than Catalina’s; at home we had a small row of tourist shops mixed in with restaurants. It felt a little old-fashioned. Benign.

Not so Venice. Even early as it was, the boardwalk was crowded: tourists snapping pictures with their phones; hopeful rap musicians clamping their headphones over your ears, imploring you to listen to their tunes, then buy their CDs; stoned girls no older than me in hip-slung skirts and triangle-top bikinis, holding out their hands dispassionately for spare change. Across the boardwalk was Muscle Beach, a square of asphalt dotted with weight-lifting equipment and surrounded by chain-link fence. Two men—one mahogany-skinned and completely bald, about forty years old, the other well into his eighties and weathered so his skin looked like beef jerky, both dressed in little more than underwear and tennis shoes—lifted weights to the complete indifference of the passing crowd.

We stopped at a little coffee shop and Sabine bought us each a chai tea. Then she led me away from the boardwalk and down toward the water. Sipping our hot, fragrant drinks, we sank side by side into the sand and looked out at the ocean.