The Telling (7 page)

“Lana?” Willa calls. The boy and girl on the bench blink at me expectantly. The remains of a picnic are at their feet. A date in progress.

“Sorry,” I mutter. I spin to retrace my steps. Willa's elbows are on the roof of her car; she frowns, watching me. “I thought I knew him,” I say, with a casual toss of my hair. I open the Prius's passenger door. My arm shakes. I drop into the seat and try to appear neutral as she climbs behind the wheel.

This does not happen to me. I do not see Ben in crowds at the beach. I do not catch the tail end of his laugh in the movie theater. I do not glimpse his shadow slipping around corners. And it isn't for lack of trying. I look for him on the deck of passing sailboats and in the clouds threaded in the trees on the ridge opposite our house. I look for his name spelled out in the pebbles of our driveway. I look for his profile in the bark of trees. He's never there.

Willa accelerates past the couple on the bench. The boy has next to nothing in common with Ben. His features didn't blur to resemble Ben's. He didn't gesture in a Ben-ish way. He
was
Ben. This leaves me feeling
unreliable. I crack the window and let the breeze dry out my eyeballs.

We pass the grassy square and the amphitheater where bands play on Sunday nights. Then the historic cinema that features foreign films. Kids at school mostly go there to make out and for this truffle-and-sea-salt popcorn that's practically world famous. I had my first-ever date there with our school's math decathlon team captain. Theo had shaggy blond hair and dopey, sweet eyes. We dated for three months during my freshman year. He ate lunch in the one hundred hall at school, which is just one removed from the quad and its populars. Willa and I ate in the library with a rotating population of study groups. Theo and I shared a handful of closed-mouth kisses, and I liked the way his bangs swooped over his forehead, almost in his crescent eyes. Then he opened his mouth during a kiss and I got a mouthful of burp-flavored saliva. I didn't like him enough for that. He wasn't who I wanted to be kissing anyway.

Although I am usually nauseated recalling Theo's slippery tongue, tonight it helps to think of ordinary things.

I look left in time to see a single teardrop slide down Willa's cheek. “Willa?” I strain against the seat belt to take in her whole face.

“Just don't, okay?” she says. “Wait to talk to me tomorrow.”

“Are you okay?”

“Rosalind-effing-Franklin, Lana, just don't.” She slaps the steering wheel. Her eyes flick to mine, and she must see my bewilderment because she adds softly, “Rosalind Franklin basically discovered what human DNA looks like. You should know that one.”

A sheepish smile from me. Willa's always used her idols rather than curse words. As a kid, Willa would tell me, “I'll know I've made it when people start taking my name in vain.”

“I'm just so tired and I don't want to say something I'll regret,” she says. “I want to get home and talk to my mom about what happened tonight, before she hears it from someone else and I'm in thirty more kinds of trouble that I didn't call her and that I was with
those
kids.” Willa's mother is our school's principal; Principal Owen is not so affectionately called Gant High's P.O., as in
parole officer
. Although I've convinced Willa to hang out with the core a bunch this summer, Willa is increasingly worried that her mom is going to realize just how much time she's spending with the kids P.O. refers to as “fast.” It's probably only because we have so many years built up of never getting into trouble that Willa's been able to fly under the radar the last four weeks.

My wanting to go to parties and Willa's reluctance and sometimes refusal to go hasn't caused a rift between us, because although Willa and I have been bests since the sixth grade, we were never the kind of inseparable girls who did each other's pedicures and shared a sleeping bag. Plus, I had Ben.

When we were younger, Ben and I invited Willa on adventures. P.O. rarely let her come, because Dad and Diane weren't there to supervise.
Supervision
was always a big deal for Willa's mom and not a priority at the McBrook house.

“Willa—”

“Tomorrow.” She gives me a grave sideways look as the Prius glides soundlessly up the driveway. I add wait-until-tomorrow to the wait-and-see of earlier. Their comfort and optimistic promise carry me into my house. Basel, Ben's tabby cat, meets me at the front door and runs figure eights around my ankles as I double- and then triple-check that I've set the house alarm.

Although she's the last person I want to think about as I get ready for bed, I can't stop seeing Maggie's glowing figure on the dark rocks of the spring. In death she looked like the powerful villain I knew she was.

During those twenty-eight days when I let sadness swallow me up, I also let guilt in. How hadn't I seen what Maggie was capable of? I'd thought she was ordinary, nothing more than an alternative girl who liked thinking she was original but was actually a cliché. She wore safety pins in her ears rather than earrings. She had mostly wannabe-hippie friends, and when she wasn't with Ben, she hung out with the kids who thought they were all political and enlightened because they wore hemp jewelry and ate pot brownies at reggae shows in the city. She scribbled all over her clothing in Wite-Out and Sharpie:
M + B
, or
MAGGIE MCBROOK
, or
B+M 4EVER
. She wasn't subtle.

Ben was the first boyfriend she kept longer than a few months. Before him she'd mostly dated older guys, the kind who hung out in their cars behind the school tennis courts, waiting to sell kids
substances
in paper bags. Maggie's exploits were the kind that pinched-nose cheerleaders thought were outrageous, even though they weren't different from what their football-playing boyfriends got up to.

Most of all, Maggie was jealous. If Maggie saw Ben talking to a girl in school, she'd rush up and chase the girl off and then get into a yelling match with Ben. If Maggie suspected Ben was getting texts or calls from girls, his phone would disappear. During their senior year Ben stopped going to parties with Maggie at all because they'd had so many blowups.

I don't get why Ben put up with it. He'd say,
She's passionate
or
I don't mind fighting
or
She hates Gant as much as I do
. That was it. They
railed on Gant together. She had an outsider's perspective too. She could roll her eyes and go on about the beastly waterfront houses. The only difference was that Ben lived in one of them.

Ben and I would glide into the harbor after a day on the
Mira
and he'd shout, mock emphatically, “
Gant
, the idyllic island where the millionaires of Seattle flock with their 2.4 kids, labradoodles, and trophy wives. Gant, where shit doesn't stink and bullshit is recyclable, where everyone gets to be white, rich, and an asshole.” It was theatrical and true.

Ben probably hated himself a little for it. There he was, on the deck of a
sailboat
, complaining to his cashmere-clad stepsister about the kids at school who only got jobs driving carts at the course because they were bored. We didn't have jobs, period. I heard Maggie call Ben a hypocrite a bunch of times.

If I hadn't been so busy being jealous in the way only a younger sibling can be, maybe I would have seen some indication of what Maggie was capable of. Tonight that guilt gnaws at my stomach. Ben and Maggie graduated one year and two months ago. I go over and over that time, trying to find the clues, the foreshadowing.

It isn't there, or I can't see it.

They graduated. Maggie got a job at an old people's home near her house. Ben took a gap year because he wasn't sure about college—where to go, what to study, or even if it was for him. When it came down to it, Ben was as desperate to escape as I was. Not just Gant, though. Ben wanted to escape the neatly laid road at his feet. College. Job. Someday a family and house in a place like Gant.

As a freshman he'd liked this perky blonde in the Amigos Club, and because of her, he'd gone with them on a trip to dig a well in
Guatemala. He departed home talking only about how hot she was. When he came back, it wasn't about her any longer. He saw Gant in a new harsh light. He went on two more trips like that during high school, and he wanted to return to Guatemala after graduation. He wanted to spend his whole gap year digging wells and volunteering on a village farm. He probably would have spent forever there if our parents had approved.

Diane went pale and left the room whenever Ben talked about traveling after graduation, so it fell to Dad to try and talk him out of it. “What's the matter with studying abroad at university?” Dad intoned. “I'll send you and Lana to Paris to visit the Louvre if you want another stamp in your passport. But Central America? To dig a hole and plant some beans?”

Dad and Diane wanted Ben to find himself at college,
like a normal kid
, on the campus of Dad's alma mater. But Ben was stubborn and wouldn't give up on the idea. The difference between where he'd been in Central America and where we lived was big. The comparison made us look like jerks with our flavored bottled water and designer wellies. I remember the day after he got home from that first trip, he stood stock-still in front of our open refrigerator. “There's brie in the cheese drawer,” I said, watching his back, “baguettes in the pantry.”

He turned at me abruptly; he looked angry. “It's hard to worry about landfills or where your trash ends up floating when you have a million flavors of bottled water to choose from.” Up until then, Ben had been smitten with Gant. He saw only the forests, sound, hiking trails, and beaches. We had our adventures. Then: the freshman trip. The change in Ben was immediate. Gant's magic had been washed away.

So when Dad refused to pay for the time abroad after graduation, Ben valeted cars at the club and worked at the farmers' market, selling organic preserves for Swisher Farm. It took six months to earn enough to leave for three months. Ben and Maggie dated off and on for those months, and they were bad ones. There were loud public fights.

Maggie was furious that Ben didn't want her to come to Central America. They weren't speaking when I dropped Ben off at the airport on March 1. At some point between March 1 and June 3, when I picked Ben up, he'd decided to end it with her for good. He was through with Maggie. He'd rethought college and he was ready to do what Dad and Diane hoped he would. He drove over and broke it off with Maggie that very night, right before his welcome-home dinner.

It wasn't the first time. Depending on your source, Maggie and Ben had broken up twelve or fifteen times. But this time was different. It would stick. Ben hadn't spoken to her once in the three months he'd been gone. She must have known she was losing him. I heard the desperation and anger in her voice when she showed up the night Ben was murdered. See, unlike the police, I don't suspect Maggie of only arranging to have a friend ready to take Ben's wallet and car. I think she wanted to hurt him. Why else did she drive us away? Why didn't she leap from the car and stop it from going too far? If she knew the man, she could have saved Ben.

I may feel guilty that I didn't see Maggie coming, but for the first time since Ben, I don't feel as though he's completely lost. Before Ben died, our house always felt full. Days at home meant Ben and me on the window seat in my bedroom, taking turns reading aloud; scouring for summer provisions to stock the
Mira
's aluminum chest; abreast on the couch in the media room, sharing the same perspective
of the movie on the projection screen. Ben had a theory about that. He thought that most people see the world too differently to love each other, and that a lot of that difference is perspective. If we sat side by side, then we'd at least perceive things in the same way. It was literal and silly and maybe a little profound, too.

While Ben was in Guatemala the house was quiet, but not empty. Why would it have been? Ben was coming home. He wrote e-mails from his hostel's computer. Ben was out there, far away in a different country, making noise that I could pretend to hear.

Since Ben's death our house has been quiet
and
empty. Not tonight. I almost hear the grinding of the pipes from Ben showering in his bathroom. I feel the tremors from the bass of his speakers. It's easy to imagine Dad and Diane in the kitchen, sipping espresso and talking about their days. It's a wonderful and pathetic game of pretend. It leaves me warm and sick to my stomach.

Basel senses it too. He paces in the hallway, even after I'm in bed, duvet up to my chin. It's as if he thinks there's a chance that Ben is arriving home tonight and he's waiting like he hasn't in weeks.

P
eople wear sadness like they wear hats.” Dad's latte is steaming and he pushes a mug full of the white, frothy mountain of a cappuccino toward the chair next to him at the table after I say good morning. I sit and wrap my hands around the warm ceramic. “You slept late. How are you feeling?” He regards me over the rim of his mug as he takes a sip.

I stare at the soft peaks of the foam. “I've been better and worse.”

Dad's eyes narrow as he takes me in, checking for parts more broken than I'm letting on. He eases his glasses off once he's satisfied that I'm okay. He doesn't have a clue what to look for. “I'm glad you called me when you got home last night, Bumblebee. And that you're letting me support you through this . . . strange turn of events.” He briefly covers my wrist with his hand.

Everything Dad says is loaded. By making a general statement about sadness and hats, he's initiating a conversation about
my
sadness. By telling me he's happy that I'm letting him “support” me “through this”, the subtext is that I refused to talk to him when we
lost Ben. I was inconsolable. Why let Dad or anyone else waste their time trying to console me?