by Piper Lennox
Camille passes me another pastry from the tray between us. “Then let’s forget it. The rest of the night, we won’t even mention it.”
“I’ll eat to that.”
I hold up my pastry; Camille taps it with hers, crumbs raining onto the table.
And it’s now that the universe decides to remind me just how fantastic my luck really is.
“Fairfield?” One of the women at a table nearby raises her hand, like we’re in class, until Camille and I both turn. “Did you say Fairfield?”
“No.” I turn away and focus every last brain cell on the pastry in my hand.
“He did,” the woman tells another. “I swear, I heard him say it.”
“I. Don’t. Care.” This whisper is from a woman whose face we can’t see, seated with her back to us. “Let’s go.”
“Silas Fairfield,” another girl says, not like she’s asking me, but instead announcing it to the entire table. I make the mistake of looking up, instinctive, and all three of them gasp and laugh.
“Told you!”
“It is him. I knew it.”
“Excuse me,” I call over their cackles and hissing, “but how do you know my name?”
“From the news,” the first girl says, with an upward inflection, Valley-Girl style. “You’re suing Timothy Fairfield. Everyone knows.”
“I’m not suing anyone.” My heartbeat thrashes against my temples. “If you don’t mind, I’m on a date, so.”
I turn back to Camille, but she’s staring wide-eyed, mouth shut tight, at the blonde with her back to us.
“What?” I lean close, almost knocking over my water. “What’s wrong?”
Slowly, she takes her napkin off her lap, as though she’s ready to bolt. “I think,” she whispers, “that’s your sister.”
Caitlin-Anne Fairfield looks the same as always: pin-straight hair bleached the color of sand, flawless makeup, and a wardrobe straight out of Nordstrom. Her Tiffany necklace flashes in the light when she gets up and tells her friends to pay their bill; she’ll be waiting in the car.
“Cait, we haven’t even gotten our entrées yet,” one of them protests. They fake-whisper like we magically can’t hear them. “They’re almost done—he’ll leave soon.”
“Yep,” Silas says, twice as loud. “Trust me, this is about as much fun for me as it is for you.” He looks at me. “Can you go get Brynn so we can get the check?”
“It’s on her,” I remind him, gathering my stuff as fast as humanly possible without looking like we’re running away. I understand his eagerness to leave, but I also can’t stand the thought of Caitlin-Anne basically chasing us out. “She owed me a favor. One of many.”
“Good,” he breathes, shaking my coat and holding it for me. I find it sweet, even if his face is steeled and his arms look rigid.
We almost make it out issue-free. Caitlin-Anne ignores Silas as we scoot past, which from anyone else would be rude. From her, it’s a huge measure of civility.
At least, I thought it was.
“The news said he’s from Filigree,” we hear one of the girls say as we pass. “How did his mom even meet your dad?”
Silas keeps his eyes straight ahead, reaching out his hand to me to pull me through the café chairs and waiters crossing in front of us. I don’t take it. Against every piece of common sense in me, I stop to listen.
“Because she’s a slut. Couldn’t keep her hands to herself,” Caitlin-Anne whispers. It’s an actual one. But I still hear it.
And Silas does, too.
14
“Excuse me.” I pivot and put my hands on Camille’s shoulders to edge back by her. There’s a booth partition between us and Caitlin-Anne’s table. They all look up when I appear overtop it.
“How about you keep my mom’s name out of your fucking mouth?” I slap on my best Valley Girl voice. “That would be, like, really great?”
The other girls’ mouths hang open. Caitlin-Anne and I must have more than our last name in common, though, because she just cocks her eyebrow and stands, fingertips lined up perfectly on the table in front of her.
“Your mother,” she enunciates, “should have kept my dad’s name out of her mouth. And a whole lot more.”
I forget all about Camille, the fact we’re in a nice restaurant—everything except the fact that Caitlin-Anne is a girl and I can’t hit her, despite every nerve in my body coiled and ready to do so. My lungs feel like they’re collapsing into themselves, I’m breathing so hard.
Caitlin-Anne narrows her eyes and leans closer. “She knew my dad was married. Tell me what she did wasn’t wrong.”
My shoulders draw back. I’m silent.
“Exactly.” She sits back down and sips her drink, something cotton-candy pink in a martini glass, and stares through me.
“Silas.” Camille’s hand on my arm makes me flinch so hard, she starts. “Let’s just go,” she whispers, and keeps her eyes on mine until I let her take my hand and lead me away.
When we’re on the street, she lets out a long, thin breath. “I’m sorry. I swear, I’ve never seen her in there before.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. I mean, the nerve of her friends to do that, and—and for her to say that stuff about your mom—”
“She’s not totally wrong.” My laugh comes out strangled. I dig my keys from my pocket and unlock her door, holding it for her. She hesitates, then climbs in.
“Caitlin-Anne doesn’t know the whole story, though,” she offers. “Maybe Tim and Jeannie weren’t happy together. You said he told your mom he was getting separated, right?”
“You don’t have to sugarcoat it for me, Camille.” My hand runs across my stubble and drops to the steering wheel. It emits one sharp bleat into the dusk. “What my mom did was wrong. I’ve spent my entire life trying to forget it, but....” My voice catches. I don’t know on what, but I blame the anger, the same thing that twists my laugh into barbed wire. “But when you look in the mirror and realize you’re wrong, that your whole existence is the most fucked-up part about it—”
“Don’t say that, Silas. You didn’t do anything. It’s not like you asked to be born out of an affair. And you aren’t what’s wrong with it—your mom and Tim getting together, even though he was married: that’s what fucked up about it. They’re at fault. Not you.”
“Look,” I say, starting the car and cranking the heat when I notice her shivering, “it’s not like I have some existential crisis over the whole deal. I know I didn’t do anything. I’m just saying...it’s hard to love someone when, at the same time, you absolutely hate something they’ve done.”
“Maybe you should write your mom a letter, too.”
“I’m finished with letters.” I shove the shifter into Drive, shut my eyes, then put it back into Park. “So much for me being low-maintenance, huh?”
Her nod is promptly followed by laughter. “It’s okay, though. You’re going through some weird shit right now, that’s all. It’s not like this is your day-to-day life, right?”
“It is now, apparently.” My head flops against the back of the seat. “The more I chase down this whole Fairfield thing...the less and less I want to be one.”
“You’re nothing like them,” Camille says. Her voice is so stern and sure, I can’t help but look at her.
The engine growls. We stare at each other.
“This date can still be saved,” she says.
I shift back into Drive, pull into traffic, and go. I have no idea how she plans to transform tonight into anything less than the disaster it’s been so far. But I’ll still drive anywhere she tells me to.
“Nope. Sorry. No way in hell.”
I grab Silas’s hands and lean back towards the gate. “Come on, don’t be a baby. Look, it’s still daylight!”
“Barely.” He stabs his finger at the sun, which burns pale orange behind the trees. “Another twenty minutes, and we’re zombie food.”
He relents, but only enough so that I still have to dr
ag him along with my full weight. “The cemetery’s really beautiful, I promise. Sunset is the best time to be here. And all the history is cool.”
“This is an awful date idea, I hope you realize that.” He quickens his pace so that I stumble, catching me by the elbows while we laugh.
I lead him down the concrete path until it ends, turning into a cement stone path, then brick, the steps growing farther apart and more and more cracked, some embedded into the mud like sunken ships. Soon it’s nothing but a worn line through the grass, winding through gravestones and plaques set into the ground.
“You said this was a soldiers’ cemetery,” he reminds me, then points to a small headstone by the path. The dates are close together; the boy was only thirteen. “What’s the deal with this one, then?”
“He lied about his age to fight in the war. The story is that no one knew until he died, when one of his friends went to break the news to his mom. She thought he just ran away.”
“That’s horrible. His poor family.”
I nod and put my hands in my coat pockets; the wind is biting now, bounding over the hill and filling the cemetery. “His mom petitioned for him to be buried here instead of the family plot, though, because she wanted him to be buried like a real soldier. And the military agreed, because he’d fought like one.”
“Okay, that part is pretty cool. You get one point for History. But I’m still not seeing the ‘beauty’ aspect—all the statues and tombstones might be beautiful to some people, but I’m honestly creeped out right now.”
“What about this one?” I lead him to the cemetery’s largest statue, directly in the center. It’s a group of bronze horses, some reared back and kicking, others mid-charge. “They dedicated this one to all the warhorses who died in battle. Which was pretty much all of them. And most of them came from the same town. I think you’d recognize it.”
He bends down and squints, checking out the plaque in the dusk. “‘The Filigree Fighters,’” he reads, then offers a mild smirk. “Fair enough. You’re right: I like this one.”
We touch the muzzles of the horses in front. The bronze is shiny from oils and friction, so many people petting them over the years.
“My grandma used to breed and train horses,” he says, “out on her farm. They were fancy pedigree ones, though. The kind you ride for shows and jump over fences. She wanted me to learn, but I just wanted to bolt across her fields on them. I didn’t care about looking fancy—just going fast.”
“Does she still have them? That’d be cool, taking a professional horse out for a spin.”
Silas takes my hand as we go back to the path. I notice that he steps more carefully along the graves and markers than I do.
“No, she said she got too old to travel with them. That was her secret: she set up a website back before websites were easy to set up, had all the horses listed there, and then she’d deliver them in-person to people who ordered them. Made a killing. I don’t know why she ever stopped.”
“Traveling that much would wear on a person.”
“Well,” he says, laughing again, “that’s the thing—she travels more now than she ever did before. Right now she’s in Florida with this old lady group from her church, waiting out winter at the beach.”
“Tough life.”
“It is, isn’t it?” His smile dims when the path stops, opening to a clearing on top of the hill. It overlooks the entire cemetery. We turn and study the landscape, the stones and statues spilling down the hillside.
“It is kind of beautiful,” he says, “but still morbid.”
“A decent compromise. I bet I can change your mind completely, though.”
We sit at the edge of the clearing, against the fence stitching the perimeter of the cemetery. A few families and couples are out, along with a group of teenagers lying on a flannel blanket. Every now and then, someone twists to look at the sun, then back to face the stones.
“It looks like everyone’s waiting for something,” he whispers, “and I’m kind of scared to find out what.”
“Just wait. I promise, you’ll think this place is cool once you see it.”
Silas sighs skeptically, but settles in.
His phone rings a few minutes later. He digs it out of his pocket and checks the screen before ignoring it—but not before I catch the name.
“Your mom?” I pick some dead grass out from under my shoe. “Shouldn’t you answer?”
“No. It’s nothing important.” The edge in his voice is the same cold, tight ring it had in the restaurant with Caitlin-Anne.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I say softly, “but if you do…I’m here.”
He pushes his hair out of his eyes, hesitating. “It’s that stuff Tim said, about how my mom didn’t want him seeing me—that it was her decision, not his.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t true.”
Silas runs his tongue over his teeth. “But…what if it is? Because yeah, Tim seems like the type to try and cover his ass, throw anyone under the bus to do it...but he seemed to really mean it. And I do remember him being in my life, early on. At least, I think I do. Why would he have made the effort, if....”
He quiets, swallowing the rest of the words down. I watch him crack his knuckles against the insides of his arms as he folds them, then rest his head between two fence posts with a distance glaze in his eyes.
Somehow, I already know this look of his, even though I’ve only seen it a couple times: he’s mad, but mostly just upset that he’s mad.
“You really hate being angry with people, don’t you?”
I hold my breath when he looks at me, praying I won’t ruin this night. Or, rather, whatever this night could become. I brought him here hoping to make him forget it all: the Fairfields, all the family secrets and drama. But maybe it can’t be forgotten so easily. Maybe he needs to talk, even if he doesn’t want to.
“When you get angry...it seems like you feel guilty about it, like you hate feeling anything but happy. You hate having a contentious relationship with anyone.”
“Another good word, another good insult,” he mutters.
“It’s not an insult,” I assure him. “It’s just who you are. But you shouldn’t feel bad for having anger. It’s a normal emotion. It’d be unhealthy to never get mad at people.”
“Okay, I am mad. I’m mad at both of them.” He lets his hands hit the dirt with a thud. “But what’s the point? It all happened so long ago.”
“No. It started so long ago, before you were even born—and yet you’re still dealing with their mistakes. You’ve still had to suffer for what they did, and they can’t even give you a straight answer so you can find some peace with it?” My chest grows warmer the more I talk—the angrier I get for him. I take off my scarf and braid the tassels on the ends to steady my voice. “Anyway...I understand. Anyone would be angry. And I think you should let yourself feel that, guilt-free.”
Silas watches my fingers wind the strands together, silent. When I glance at him, though, he’s shifted his eyes to mine.
“It feels like I can’t trust anyone, by this point.”
The sudden contact of his hand, ice cold on my cheek, feels like a salve, not a shock.
“But I trust you,” he says. “Out of all the crazy shit that’s happened to me this week...I think that tops them all. That I feel like I can tell you everything, and believe every single thing you say, when I’ve only known you a few days.”
My heart stops, I’m sure of it. When Silas kisses me, the chill of the iron and the cool seep of soil flood my entire body.
But I don’t feel cold. Just alive. For once in my adult life, I’m not thinking of schedules or what I have to do in the next week, the next day, the next hour.
I’m only thinking of this one moment, cold and real and blooming before me. I never thought a kiss could leave me shivering and still feel electric.
“Look!” someone shouts. It’s a child with one of the families. Silas and I pull apart quickly, embarrassed, b
ut realize he wasn’t talking about us; everyone is twisted back to look past the fence, where the sun has lowered to the perfect spot.
Its rays catch inside every piece of colored glass in the tree just beyond the fence: handmade ornaments, spinning in the breeze; cut soda bottles, their labels long gone; and painted acrylic suncatchers from craft kits, most washed clean from the rain, almost every single piece cracked with time.
The light spreads as the minutes pass, and the swaths of color it casts on the ground grow longer, tumbling over all of us in the clearing. The children run around in circles and plant themselves in puddles of cobalt and bottle green. The teenagers snap selfies in the pool of amber light by a cherub statue, overgrown with ivy.
Silas flexes his hands in our patches of color: bright, sky blue and rose gold.
“People jump the fence and hang stuff in the tree,” I explain softly, “so that when the light hits it just right, you see all the colors in this one spot. It’s like this cool little tradition nobody really started. It just...happened.”
He grins and turns himself around, and I do the same. We watch the spinning glass and plastic in the tree grow brighter, when the sun is directly behind the tree, and then transform and dim when the sunset finishes.
“You win,” he whispers. “This definitely changed my mind.” A faint burst of green is still on his face, the light caught in his eyes. It makes me realize how much I don’t want him to leave. The last few days, I told myself Hillford was closer than it seemed. Now, I know anything but a phone call is too far away.
“Told you,” I manage, the cold getting to me again. I will myself to kiss him—to have another moment of blind bravery like I did on the bridge, the night we met.
And when the clearing empties, the cemetery as silent as it can be with wind blasting through the trees and stones, I do.
Silas accepts and kisses me back like he was waiting for it, all along. I climb into his lap and leave the cold ground behind, the collar of his coat bunched in my hands like I can’t stand the thought of letting him go.
