The Telling (40 page)

The note I wrote Ben is waiting in my hiding place, along with the rosary Detective Sweeny never collected from me. The rosary was one of many dangling threads she and Ward left loose and flapping. I told the police that the rosary appeared shortened when I checked after Ford was found. There were frowns and under-their-breath words traded by the adults around me. Dad's been cryptic, but I've gotten the impression that the detectives were under a lot of pressure to close the murder investigations. Poisonings, stabbings, and hangings aren't great for Gant's reputation, and everyone is determined to put these events behind them, shrug them off like the flaky, dead skin of a sunburn. No one wanted to ask why or how or even if Fitzgerald Moore used my great-great-grandmother's rosary. It was easier to cast me as confused and unreliable.

Newspaper headlines—the ones I've seen on Dad's desk—focus on a sick man and his breakdown. Some even refer to him as a vagrant, as if Skitzy-Fitzy didn't live in Gant as much as the rest of us. I want to turn the rosary in even if I worry that my fingerprints are all they'll find and they'll have that much more reason to think I'm a poor, traumatized girl, manufacturing conflicting evidence. I don't want the burden of any more secrets to keep. And I need to destroy the note I wrote Ben, toss it into the bonfire, and feel that thread between Ben and me burn.

The stone stairs are slick with mist. There's music floating to me
across the harbor. It echoes, and the notes become dissonant and jarring. At the lower level I cut around the fire pit. I keep the memories of all our nights spent here from creeping up. Being in that dream state where I can remember things so acutely it's close to reliving them won't help me. The Ben who I thought I knew as well as I knew myself was a figment of my imagination. All those nights we huddled around the flames would have been perfect nights for him to tell me the story of a small boy who fled his home with his mother.

My fingers jab at the cold, dry rock of my hidey-spot. A web tickles my pinkie finger just as it nudges the paper and rosary. I retrieve my hand and wipe away the spiderweb stuck to my knuckle. I unfold the note to make certain that a spider isn't hiding inside.

You swore on summer.

My words look up at me, and under them, in Ben's handwriting:

Come escape with me.

The clanging guitar chords are louder; the singer's soprano is piercing. I stagger for the stairs. My legs shake, causing my right foot to miss. My left foot loses traction on the slick rock, and I grab for the banister. My weight jolts through my arm and my knees strike the stone. I veer hard to the left, my temple colliding with a boulder on the hill. I hiss at the pain. I see shimmery white stars twinkling. After one, two, three tries I replace the treads of both my shoes on the staircase.

The pain radiates through my neck and down my spine as I hike
for the terrace. I move through the house, the front door, over the lawn. I drop the car remote, bend, and catch myself pitching forward as the ground tilts under me. I retrieve it and hit the button that pops the trunk.

Eyes screwed up, I rub them with my fists. At last I open them. My head throbs and I wince, checking that I'm not bleeding. I wonder if I imagined the second line on the note because of the injury. Then I'm holding the note out, seeing that the words are still there. The fall came
after
. The trunk is nothing but a dark, empty mouth. A gaping, black ghoul's gullet. The army-green chest labeled
Summer Provisions
that we lugged aboard the
Mira
is gone.

Come escape with me.

I
shouldn't be driving. My reflexes are sluggish; brain signals muddling instructions. I flip on the blinker ten seconds after a lane change. I speed up rather than brake at a yellow light. The operations necessary to use the Bluetooth to call Willa have left me. I am one thought:
Get to where we dock the
Mira.

I screech into the parking lot for boat owners. It's mostly empty. It's just past nine, and the air around the lampposts is swarming with white, papery moths. They're the kind with fat bodies that thud into you and then swerve away unharmed. Bubble lights are inset in the planks of the dock, lighting it from either side. My feet pound over the weather-grayed wood. Fragments of thought race by: senior year beginning in three days; I'm excited to see Josh and Carolynn tonight; I could have blacked out in a PTSD haze, forged Ben's handwriting, and removed the summer provisions chest from my trunk.

I list the contents of the missing chest to bring order to my head: two aluminum foil balls from our turkey avocado sandwiches; one bag of unopened salt-and-vinegar potato chips; two empty bottles of root beer; one empty can of actual beer; a set of mini waterproof
speakers; a flare gun kit; a seagull's feather; and two rain slickers.

The
Mira
's stall is in the lane farthest from the lot. I follow the dock jutting out a few hundred feet from land. I haven't been here for more than two months. The
Mira
was like Swisher Spring in that she was ours. How wrong that she could exist in a world where Ben didn't. I pass the last vessel before her and stop short. The
Mira
's there with her white sails tied down, pinstripe siding, weather-beaten cabin door, and strands of white lights on the mast left over from Christmas.

I drop my eyes and stare at the puddle of light I'm standing at the center of, cast by the lamppost at my back. I want it to be a portal to another world, one where things are set right, where Ben is alive. I would slip into this alternate reality and never come back. The wind picks up and the lamppost creaks; the circle of light moves with it. I'm working up the courage to climb aboard, to search for the summer provisions chest, even though it can't be here. Nothing seems quite real, and truthfully, I've forgotten how to tell what is. The bleached wood under my feet begins to resemble stone. Crickets chirp from the bank of grass separating the dock and the parking lot. The wind slips past me, rushing to arrive somewhere.

I sense him in the pit of my stomach. I raise my head dreamily. Coming out of the cabin door of the
Mira
is an apparition.

“I knew you'd find me.” I catch the barest whisper from the ghost.

I stride forward, pick up speed, slow. I'm not more than five feet from the
Mira's
bow. I must have hit my head hard. But Ben's figure isn't vaporous, about to be blown away by the harbor's next gale. The breeze whooshes in at that moment, and the boy stays solid. A faded mariner's cap is pulled low over his eyes; the wispy gold hair that
used to curl around his ears has been sheared off. His sweatshirt sleeves are scrunched up to his elbows, and his hands are sunk to his knuckles in his front jean pockets. His square chin is set, and I can make out the faint crescent scar at its center from the
Mira
's boom splitting it years ago.

I touch my scraped temple to see how much blood I've lost. It's only sticky.

“You aren't real,” I tell him.

He removes the cap and passes his hand over his buzzed head. He cocks a sly eyebrow. “No?” He draws out the single syllable, molten. “What am I, then?”

I go to say
magic
, but I don't believe that anymore. Ben was the opposite of magic. He was all smoke and mirrors. “My hallucination.”

He scratches the back of his head and says, mock gravely, “I see. Do you hallucinate me often?”

“Lately, yes.” I am not ashamed admitting it. “For a while I was sure you were a ghost and on the island.”

He flashes that flirtatious smile that I was never on the receiving end of. “You want to come aboard and tell me what I was doing in all those hallucinations of yours?”

I frown. This wasn't our way. We didn't flirt. He didn't use that self-assured smirk, calibrated perfectly to get out of trouble, on me. If I were dreaming, projecting Ben on the sky, it wouldn't be this version. It would be
my
Ben. It would be Ben whose stories and ideas connected with the darkest and lightest places in me; who smiled a conspirator's grin; and who I beat at most Scrabble games and diving contests. This Ben is delivering a line and a wink. He's an imposter, a con artist.

He's supposed to be dead, but this Ben is
alive
.

I catapult over the bow. I collide with his chest and throw my arms around his shoulders. My feet shuffle between his shoes to get closer. I attach myself like June and the Grim Reaper are coming to drag him back to death if I don't. Ben's arms move around my waist, and I hide my face between his shoulder and collar. A rough sob disappears into his chest. He absorbs it. He turns it into a smile. He smells of wind and salt, and he's impossibly solid.

“It will be over soon.
Shhh
.” He rocks back on his heels and lifts me to my tiptoes. “It's okay. I've got you.” His hand curves at the base of my neck. My heart knocks louder and faster.

I pull back. Ben's gray eyes are quick to mine. Clouds pass over the moon and a stormy cast of light flickers on his cheeks. I want to be that light. I want to be bright and liquid slipping over his skin. I want this to be cosmic intervention. Ben was brought back to life or only half murdered, and he was sent to the
Mira
to wait for me. Out of nowhere, completely unbidden, I hear my mother's words in my head,
Perception is nine-tenths of everything, even the truth, Lana.
She never acknowledged that things are rarely what they seem.

Ben's palms cup my face. He thumbs away a tear. “I read about Winnie in the paper. ‘Suspected Environmental Activists Free Eagle from Captivity.' Jesus, you freed that fucking eagle for me just like I always wanted to do, didn't you?”

I nod. Ben recognized it as a message. “You're here,” I say, testing it out. I brush his light-touched cheek.

He holds my hand in place as his eyes dart up the dock. “I have an explanation for everything,” he says, suddenly urgent. “I have a story to tell you.” A hint of a smile on his lips at those words—the
ones that used to fill me with anticipation but now only bring on dread. “We need to leave before someone spots us.”

He takes my hand from his cheek and we walk to the controls of the inboard engine in the cockpit. He flips the switch, and the gentle puttering joins the crickets. The mainsail and the jib-stay remain tied down, and the engine revs as we accelerate backward. I dig my fingers into the cockpit seat. My eyes are glued to Ben. I am a bursting heart and an unbound smile. I don't trust that he won't disappear.

Ben shifts gears and we taxi in the direction of the sound. This is my golden, opinionated, storytelling Ben, and he's carrying us away. I can't stop thinking, though. Here he is, on the
Mira
, two days after Fitzgerald Moore was arrested. Two days after I visited Calm Coast to learn about his hateful grandfather.

Ben is dead. Bled out. Splattered all over the highway. Yet here he is. I used to be so careful touching him. What would he think? Who might be watching? I resisted, and then Ben vanished—dead,
I thought
. I lace my fingers with his. I squeeze until our bones pinch. Until it hurts. My fingers brush his wrist, his forearm, and disappear up his sleeve. My left shoe kisses his right shoe. We are ankle to ankle, knee to knee, hip to hip.

My thoughts shoulder in a queue in my head. They demand to be considered. How is this possible? Was Ben half murdered? If anyone could survive, it would be Ben. Were his injuries not as serious as the police thought? Was it someone else's blood? But that's impossible, because his DNA was in it. It was Ben's. All of it.

We cut through the water fast. I close my eyes to keep the sea spray from stinging. The memory of that night last winter comes blasting in with the wind. Ben on the lower terrace asking me how
I could stand it; how I let
them
get away with it. He promised that someday he'd do something and that he'd come back to Gant only for me. He swore on summer.

I try to be only a bursting heart and relief that Ben is here. I try so effing hard that my eyes leak. I have Ben and he has me and what does anything else matter? What does it matter that everyone thinks he's dead? The uneasiness fades. My thoughts lapse. There's only Ben,
alive
.

He's vigilant as he checks that no boats are following. He tugs his hat on and looks down at me to wink. A flutter in my chest. The sky is stormy, its gray clouds rippled with the look of squiggly brains, and I wonder what the sky thinks of us. Does the sky wonder where we're headed like I do?

We travel north, the lights of Seattle at our right, and the sound flowing into the Pacific sixty miles northwest of us. A few more miles and we weave between uninhabited bits of land and sparsely populated coastline to the east. Ben veers west until we follow the shore of a small feral island we've explored before. He cuts the engine.

“I know this place,” I say, holding the railing and squinting at the pebbled shore.

Ben's shoulder rests against mine. “We camped here two years ago. We picked wild blueberries and I drank too much and ants got into the marshmallows.”

I laugh. “You caught a salmon, and neither of us wanted to scale or gut it, so we let it go. We needed those marshmallows for dinner.” I breathe him in with the sea air.

“It was cold at night and your teeth chattered. We didn't have a tent.” He faces me. “We were back to back. I couldn't sleep.” His
fingers brush my hair from my shoulder. “I almost told you to crawl into my sleeping bag. What would you have said?”

“I would have pretended I was asleep.” The cockpit feels very small. The edge of the stern and the slapping water are three feet away. Ben fills the universe, so of course he crowds the boat. I look toward the island. It's a state park with no houses, just a parking lot, a boat dock, a ramp, and a thin bridge connecting it to the mainland. I chew my lip. “Where have you been?” He doesn't answer. “The police said you lost fifty percent of your blood.
Five pints
,” I whisper. I touch my bottom lip. “Your blood was in my mouth. It was
everywhere
.”