Beautiful Darkness (15 page)

What had happened? I could've handled Lena's freak-out at the lake and feeling like she had to take off. But why him? Why the Caster boy with the Harley? How long had she been hanging out with him without telling me? And what did Ridley have to do with it?

I had never been this mad at her before. It was one thing to be attacked by someone you hated, but this was something else. This was the kind of hurt that could only be inflicted by someone you loved, who you thought loved you. It was sort of like being stabbed from the inside out.

“You okay, man?” Link slammed the driver's side door.

“No.” I looked down the long driveway ahead of us.

“Me neither.” Link tossed the key through the Fastback's open window, and we headed down the hill.

We hitched back to town, Link turning every few minutes to check the stretch of road behind us for a Harley. But I didn't think we'd see it. That particular Harley wouldn't be headed into town. For all I knew, it could be inside those gates already.

I didn't come down for dinner, which was my first mistake. My second was opening the black Converse shoe box. I shook it open, the contents spilling across my bed. A note Lena had written me on the back of a wrinkled Snickers wrapper, a ticket stub from the movie we saw on our first date, a faded receipt from the Dar-ee Keen, and a highlighted page ripped out of a book that had reminded me of her. It was the box where I stashed all our memories — my version of Lena's necklace. It didn't seem like the kind of thing a guy should do, so I didn't let on that I did it, not even to her.

I picked up the crumpled photo from the winter formal, taken the second before we were doused with liquid snow by my so-called friends. The picture was blurry, but we were captured in a kiss, so happy it was hard to look at now. Remembering that
night, even though I knew the next moment was going to be awful, it felt like part of me was still back there kissing her.

“Ethan Wate, is that you?”

I tried to shove everything back into the box when I heard my door opening, and the box fell, scattering everything onto the floor.

“You feelin’ all right?” Amma came into my room and sat at the foot of my bed. She hadn't done that since I'd had stomach flu in sixth grade. Not that she didn't love me. We just had things worked out in a way that didn't include sitting on beds.

“I'm tired, that's all.”

She looked at the mess on the floor. “You look lower than a catfish at the bottom a the river. And a perfectly good pork chop's lookin’ as sorry as you are, down in my kitchen. That's two kinds a sorry.” She leaned forward and brushed my brown hair out of my eyes. She was always after me to cut my hair.

“I know, I know. The eyes are the window to the soul, and I need a haircut.”

“You need a good sight more than a haircut.” She looked sad and grabbed my chin as if she could lift me up by it. Given the right circumstances, I bet she could. “You're not right.”

“I'm not?”

“You're not, and you're my boy, and it's my fault.”

“What do you mean?” I didn't understand and she didn't elaborate, which was generally how our conversations went.

“She's not right either, you know.” Amma spoke softly, looking out my window. “Not bein’ right isn't always somebody's fault. Sometimes it's just a fact, like the cards you pull.” With Amma, everything came down to fate, the cards in her tarot deck, the bones in the graveyard, the universe she could read.

“Yes, ma'am.”

She looked into my eyes, and I could see hers shining. “Sometimes things aren't what they seem, and even a Seer can't tell what's comin’.” She took my hand and dropped something into it. A red string with tiny beads knotted into it, one of her charms. “Tie it ’round your wrist.”

“Amma, guys don't wear bracelets.”

“Since when do I make jewelry? That's for women with too much time and not enough sense.” She yanked on her apron, straightening it. “A red string's a tie to the Otherworld, offers the kinda protection I can't. Go on, put it on.”

I knew better than to argue when Amma had that look on her face. It was a mixture of fear and sadness, and she wore it like a burden too heavy for her to carry. I held out my arm and let her tie the string around my wrist. Before I could say anything else, she was at my window, pouring a handful of salt from her apron pocket all along the sill.

“Everything's gonna be okay, Amma. Don't worry.”

Amma stopped in the doorway and looked back at me, rubbing the shine out of her eyes. “Been choppin’ onions all afternoon.”

Something wasn't right, like Amma said. But I had a feeling it wasn't me. “You know anything about a guy named John Breed?”

She stiffened. “Ethan Wate, don't you make me give that pork chop to Lucille.”

“No, ma'am.”

Amma knew something, and it wasn't good, and she wasn't talking. I knew it as sure as I knew her pork chop recipe, which didn't have a single onion in it.

6.14

I
f it was good enough for Melvil Dewey, it's good enough for me.” Marian winked at me as she pulled a stack of new books out of a cardboard box, sniffing deeply. There were books everywhere, in a circle around her almost up to her head.

Lucille was weaving through the towers of books, prowling for a lost cicada. Marian made an exception to the Gatlin County Library's no-pets rule since the place was full of books but empty of people. Only an idiot would be in the library on the first day of summer, or someone who needed a distraction. Someone who wasn't speaking to his girlfriend, or wasn't being spoken to by his girlfriend, or didn't know if he even still had one — all in the space of the two longest days of his life.

I still hadn't talked to Lena. I told myself it was because I was too angry, but that was one of those lies you tell when you're trying to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing.
The truth was, I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to ask the questions, and I was scared to hear the answers. Besides, I wasn't the one who ran off with some guy on a motorcycle.

“It's chaos. Dewey decimal is mocking you. I can't even find one almanac on the history of the moon's orbital pattern.” The voice from the stacks startled me.

“Now, Olivia …” Marian smiled to herself as she examined the bindings of the books in her hands. It was hard to believe she was old enough to be my mother. With not a streak of gray in her short hair, and not a wrinkle in her golden-brown skin, she didn't look more than thirty.

“Professor Ashcroft, this isn't 1876. Times do change.” It was a girl's voice. She had an accent — British, I think. I'd only heard people talk that way in James Bond movies.

“So has the Dewey decimal system. Twenty-two times, to be exact.” Marian shelved a stray book.

“What about the Library of Congress?” The voice sounded exasperated.

“Give me a hundred more years.”

“The Universal Decimal Classification?” Now irritated.

“This is South Carolina, not Belgium.”

“Perhaps the Harvard-Yenching system?”

“Nobody in this county speaks Chinese, Olivia.”

A blond, lanky girl poked her head out from behind the stacks. “Not true, Professor Ashcroft. At least, not for the summer holidays.”

“You speak Chinese?” I couldn't help myself. When Marian had mentioned her summer research assistant, she hadn't told me the girl would be a teenage version of herself. Except for the streaky, honey-colored hair, the pale skin, and the accent, they
could have been mother and daughter. Even at first glance, the girl had a vague degree of Marian-ness that was hard to describe and that you wouldn't find in anyone else in town.

The girl looked at me. “You don't?” She poked me in the ribs. “That was a joke. In my opinion, people in this country barely speak English.” She smiled and held out her hand. She was tall, but I was taller, and she looked up at me as if she was already confident we were great friends. “Olivia Durand. Liv, to my friends. You must be Ethan Wate, which I find hard to believe, actually. The way Professor Ashcroft talks about you, I was expecting more of a swashbuckler, with a bayonet.”

Marian laughed, and I turned red. “What has she been telling you?”

“Only that you're incredibly brilliant and brave and virtuous, quite the save-the-day sort. Every bit the son you would expect of the beloved Lila Evers Wate. And that you'll be my lowly assistant this summer, so I can boss you around all I like.” She smiled at me, and I blanked.

She was nothing like Lena, but nothing like the girls in Gatlin either. Which was in itself more than confusing. Everything she was wearing had a weathered look, from her faded jeans and the random bits of string and beads around her wrists, to her holey silver high-tops, held together with duct tape, and her ratty Pink Floyd T-shirt. She had a big, black plastic watch with crazy-looking dials on the face, caught between the bits of string. I was too embarrassed to say anything.

Marian swooped in to rescue me. “Don't mind Liv. She's teasing. ‘Even the gods love jokes,’ Ethan.”

“Plato. And stop showing off.” Liv laughed.

“I will.” Marian smiled, impressed.

“He's not laughing.” Liv pointed at me, suddenly serious. “‘Hollow laughter in marble halls.’ ”

“Shakespeare?” I looked at her.

Liv winked and yanked on her T-shirt. “Pink Floyd. I can see you've got a lot to learn.” A teenage Marian, and not at all what I expected when I signed on for a summer job in the library.

“Now, children.” Marian held out her hand, and I pulled her up from the floor. Even on a hot day like today, she still managed to look cool. Not a hair was out of place. Her patterned blouse rustled as she walked in front of me. “I'll leave the stacks to you, Olivia. I have a special project for Ethan in the archive.”

“Right, of course. The highly trained history student sorts out the stacks, while the unschooled slacker is promoted to the archive. How very American.” She rolled her eyes and picked up a box of books.

The archive hadn't changed since last month, when I came to ask Marian about a summer job but stayed to talk about Lena and my dad and Macon. She had been sympathetic, the way she always was. There were piles of old Civil War registries on the shelf above my mother's desk, and her collection of antique glass paperweights. A glistening, black sphere sat next to the misshapen clay apple I made for her in first grade. My mom's and Marian's books and notes were still stacked across the desk, over yellowed maps of Ravenwood and Greenbrier spread open on the tables. Every scribbled scrap of paper I saw made it feel like she was here. Even though everything in my life seemed to be going wrong, I always felt better in this place. It was like I was with my mom, and she was the one person who always knew how to fix things, or at least make me believe there was a way to fix them.