I’ve already done all that, been through all that. There’s too much of that happening already. No more Claude, go here. Claude, go there; goodbye, Claude, I never want to see you again. This will be me taking charge of my life again and deciding what I do and where I go when and where and how.
DAY 4
The general store is crowded with campers filling up the space with too-loud voices and sunburned bodies. I find a chair in the corner and wait for them to go, flipping through texts and social media. Wyatt, tanned and laughing, waterskiing at Whitewater State Park, swimming at the Municipool, drinking shots at Trent Dugan’s. He looks sun-kissed and happy, like someone in a movie. I think, He’ll be right at home in California.
Here’s a diatribe from Mara about the hymen company. Here’s Alannis with a hot lifeguard. Here’s Saz, who never puts her whole self in a picture. Instead she photographs different parts of her—hair, ear, chin, shoulder, elbow—depending on her mood. Her photos are almost always solo, just all the little pieces of Saz. But here’s a recent post of two foreheads, one dark, one fair, tilted together against a backdrop of sky as if they’re sharing secrets. The caption is one of my favorite quotes: And everything, absolutely everything, was there. Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine.
My heart moves into my throat and settles in as if this is its new home. I was the one who forced her to read Dandelion Wine. I was the one who wrote that quote in her last birthday card and told her it made me think of us when we first met, back when we were outsiders who hadn’t found our place.
I look up and the campers are gone. It’s just Terri and me.
I call Saz.
The phone rings and rings and rings. Just when it’s about to go to voice mail, she answers.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
A long time ago, after our first fight, we agreed we would always talk to each other, no matter how angry we were. No silent treatment, no ghosting.
She says, “I can’t really talk right now. Yvonne is here.” And then I hear Yvonne’s voice in the background.
I say, “That’s okay. I can’t talk either. A crowd of people just walked in and I can barely hear you.” I say it louder than I need to. Terri looks up from her book and frowns at me.
“I’ll talk to you later, then. Or maybe you should call Wyatt and talk to him.”
She hangs up on me. No I love you more than, no goodbye.
I sit staring at the phone. I’m still staring at it when a text comes through from—speak of the devil—Wyatt. Hey, beautiful, my family is going whitewater rafting in NC and I hope I can see you before then.
I think about writing him back. I start to, but I’m not sure what to say.
I’m pretty sure I won’t be home before your trip because I’m entombed on Godforsaken Island.
I wish I could kiss you. Although right now all I can think about is kissing Jeremiah Crew.
Sometimes at night I close my eyes and imagine you’re in my bed. When I’m not imagining Jeremiah Crew instead.
I delete every text because what’s the point? I’m trapped here for the summer and Wyatt Jones will probably be on his way to California by the time I’m back.
But there’s something else—there’s last night and Jeremiah Crew. There are all the things I told him and he told me. I’ve never done that with anyone other than Saz—essentially walked up to them and said, Here is me. All the messy, unattractive things that I keep locked up inside. Every last ugly, broken, complicated piece. And he didn’t bat an eye. He just opened his mouth and showed me some of his own messy pieces. And instead of running away, he kissed me.
* * *
—
In its 288 pages, The Joy of Sex contains a single page on virginity, which tells us that girls are less likely than boys to enjoy their first time and only a third of us will actually have a good experience. Which means that most of us are going to be extremely disappointed. But don’t worry, the book says—your literal first time doesn’t have to be the important one. Think of it more as a practice session, a technicality.
As much as I disagree with Dr. Alex Comfort on most things, I like the way he’s not putting a lot of expectation on a girl’s first time. When it happens, it can just be about checking off a milestone. Like getting your license or voting. It doesn’t have to be about anything more than that.
I walk back to Addy’s, pop on my headphones, and try to imagine it. For starters, there will definitely not be a barn. There will be music, of course, maybe something French. I scroll through my library and by some miracle I find a band called Cœur de Pirate, which is typical Saz. She’s always adding music to my phone that she wants me to hear. I press play and lose myself in the day and the melody. I close my eyes for a few seconds and just walk, feeling the sun on my face.
When a horn blasts behind me, I nearly fall off the road. A dusty black truck rolls up, engine idling. Jeremiah Crew sits behind the wheel, one arm resting on the open window. I take off my headphones.
He says, “Here’s the thing. I don’t want you getting too crazy about me, because I’m only here for the next few weeks.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I’m serious. Four weeks. Twenty-eight days. More than enough time.”
I say, “I’m only here for thirty-five days, and three of those are already gone. I’ll be fine.”
“So I don’t have to worry about you falling in love with me and getting your heart crushed?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m good.”
“I need you to be, like, one hundred and fifty percent sure. I mean…” He smiles, dimples and all, the whole nine yards. He points to himself like, See what you’re up against?
“I’d say I’m at least two hundred and fifty percent sure I’m not going to fall in love with you.”
“In that case, get in.”
* * *
—
We drive past Rosecroft, past the remaining outbuildings. Miah stops the truck in a grassy patch on the edge of the trees. He gathers a few things—bug spray, a flashlight, a pretty serious-looking camera with a faded brown strap, which he slings over one shoulder. He gets out, door slamming, so I get out, door slamming. Then he’s standing in front of me and this is the closest we’ve been since last night, but instead of kissing me, he aims the bug spray at my legs and arms and starts spraying.
“Seriously, Captain. They do have nature where you’re from, don’t they?”
“Not like this.”
He sprays until the can gives out. Then he tosses it into the truck and says, “Let’s go see more.”
I follow him deep into the woods. Sensible Claude, the one raised by two sensible parents, is going: You don’t even know this boy. Don’t go into the woods with him. This is the exact way horror movies start. A girl alone in the woods with a stranger. Never to be seen again.
But the Claude who sat on the beach last night with Jeremiah Crew, who spilled her soul and twelve gallons of tears, keeps walking.
I expect him to bring up the talking, the making out, but he doesn’t. Instead we wade through undergrowth and brush and I try not to think about ticks and snakes and all the other things that live here.
I swat at tree limbs and spiderwebs and horseflies. I step over poison ivy and duck under vines. Like a kid on a car ride, I want to ask, How much farther? But I don’t. He’s not talking, so I don’t either.
We’re a good ten minutes into our hike when we suddenly emerge from the woods. I blink like a mole under the glare of sun and sky. There are horses grazing, and beyond them, Rosecroft. Just down the road from the ruins, I can see the truck.
“Did we get lost?”
“No.”
“Then what was that?” I point to the woods. To the truck. To the woods again. “We went in a circle.”
“I said let’s go see more nature.”
<
br /> “Are you fucking kidding me?”
And then his hands are on my waist, on my hips, his fingers widespread and strong, so warm against my shirt that the warmth reaches into my skin. He pulls me to him and says, “I’m going to kiss you right now because I’ve been thinking about kissing you all morning. I’m telling you this because it’s going to be a fucking incredible kiss, so I want you to brace yourself. I know you promised me you wouldn’t fall in love, but I completely understand if that changes after this. I will now await your blessing.”
Before I can tell him exactly how full of himself he is, I say, “I’m not worried.”
“Is that a yes?”
“That’s a yes. But nothing’s going to change.”
“We’ll see.”
And then he kisses me. His lips are soft but firm, and I fall into them. There, underneath the sun, my brain goes light, my skin goes light, I go light. I am weightless. And then I slide my hands under his shirt, up his back, across the fine, taut muscles, and gently, so gently, run my nails up and down his skin. He’s not the only one in control here. I can feel him bend into me, and then I let him go.
He smiles down at me. I smile up at him.
“Still two hundred and fifty percent sure, Captain?” His voice is husky.
“Let’s make it three hundred.”
I walk off toward the NO TRESPASSING sign, pretending I’m not a little dizzy, a little breathless. I walk up the steps and then he passes me, leading us around the side of what used to be the house. He aims the camera at the ruins and takes a couple of shots. He studies the screen. Takes another shot. Studies the screen again. I catch up with him but I can’t help feeling as if I’m intruding on something—a dialogue between him and the camera.
I pretend to look around, but I’m really looking at him. He’s so different from Wyatt. He looks like he was born in the outdoors, maybe on the beach, wherever the sun is brightest. But, more than that, he’s direct, honest, and completely himself. My lips are burning, wanting more.
“We can get in there,” he says, hand shading his eyes. Before I can ask, Get in where? he’s picking his way through the overgrown grass to a set of stone steps that lead down into the ground. At the bottom is a crooked door that swings right open, and now we’re in the basement of Rosecroft, whole and standing, cooler than outside and lit only by the light coming through these narrow windows up at ground level.
I follow him, doing my best to see in the dark, trying to pick my way through this pitch-black maze, while he leads the way, bare feet and all, not caring what he steps on.
He says, “So, since you’re a Blackwood, I thought you might appreciate seeing the ancestral palace.”
“I’m not a Blackwood. This”—I wave my hands all around me—“isn’t me. I live in Mary Grove, Ohio, farm and factory town. My dad works at the college and my mom writes books and I babysit to earn enough money to buy lip balm.”
“Well, then consider it a crumbling memorial to dysfunctional family.”
“That’s more relatable.”
And he tells me how the only Blackwood son, Samuel Jr., oldest child of the great railroad magnate, moved with his wife, Tillie, from the family home in Virginia to the house his father built him, Rosecroft. How they had two daughters, my great-grandmother and Claudine. How Tillie was a midwife who delivered most of the babies on the island. How she got pregnant again, but there was a flu epidemic, and she became bedridden and lost the baby.
Tillie, I think. That was her name. Tillie Blackwood. I imagine her traveling this island delivering babies, and my image of Tillie Blackwood—just like my original image of her daughter—shifts a little. No more fainting couch and smelling salts, but someone with backbone.
There is something low-ceilinged and muffled about the acoustics down here that give his voice an end-of-the-world quality. “One morning, not long after, she shot herself through the heart in her bedroom closet.”
“Where did she get the gun?”
“It belonged to her husband. He felt so guilty over not being there when she died that he buried her in the front yard so he could see her grave from the house.”
Miah stops walking and we’re in what must be the middle of the basement, no windows, no light except what’s coming from his flashlight, but I can see that we are surrounded by relics of a life, spanning the decades. A steamer trunk, a rocking chair, an old umbrella, slats of wood, a stack of bricks, a lopsided hat rack. There’s a story for each one, probably long forgotten, and suddenly I want to know everything. Whose trunk was this, and how far did it travel? Who carried this umbrella? Who sat in this rocking chair? My mind is racing, cluttered with images and scenes.
“They say one night he dug up her grave and cut off a braid of her hair and then reburied her. Supposedly he carried the braid with him the rest of his life.” In the dim light, he studies me. “Obviously she had more hair than you do, Captain.” Miah reaches out and fingers the ends of it, and like that, I forget about Tillie and Claudine.
Kiss me again, I think.
For a second I believe he’s going to. Then his hand is gone and he’s leading us past another trunk, an old wardrobe, two little chairs, child-size. The light of his flashlight is bouncing ahead of us, illuminating dark corners and more buried treasure. All these things just abandoned here, as if the people who owned them fled in a hurry.
“Years later your great-great-aunt had her mother moved to the family cemetery so she could be laid to rest next to Sam.”
And now we’ve reached the end of the basement, and there’s light coming in again from narrow ground-level windows. And there, sitting by the chimney, is a rickety, old-fashioned baby carriage. The hood is intact except for a small tear in the fabric, but the basket part is missing, hollowed out, so that it’s really just a skeleton.
He’s telling me about Tillie’s ghost, that she loves jewelry, that he thought all ghost stories were bullshit until the second summer he lived here and the doorbell rang at his house over and over again between two and three a.m., no one there. “If you haven’t already, you’ll hear it—the screen doors here. I call it the island slam. They are loud. I go back to bed, and just as I start to drift off—slam.”
I’m trying to concentrate on the words, but as soon as he says them, they change into touch kiss feel skin naked.
He’s telling me about this bracelet thing his sisters made for him. He’s raising his hand so I can see it, a black braided cord looped a couple of times around his wrist. The words morph into See these hands? I want to touch you all over with them.
He’s telling me how, when he got up the morning after the doorbell, the bracelet was gone. How he discovered it on the other nightstand, the one on the opposite side of the bed. I’m only half listening, and then he says, “Now, here’s something you don’t know about me, Captain—I don’t ever move in my sleep. Like, the other side of the bed is still made because I don’t go over there.”
I completely miss the next thing he says because I’m now thinking of him lying in bed, probably naked, alone on his side, the other side still made. What is he trying to tell me? That he doesn’t have a girlfriend? That he’s not sleeping with anyone right now? Is this something he wants me to know?
I tell myself, Control your face, Claudine. And I stand there listening and nodding my head and hoping to God he can’t read minds.
“So there’s my bracelet on the other nightstand. Where I didn’t put it.” The other nightstand on the other side of the bed where no one is sleeping. “Two months later, I’m having dinner with Bram and Shirley up on the north end, and Bram says something about a ghost and a screen door slamming, and I’m like, wait a minute.”
And then he looks up, so I look up. There, propped against the wall, is a faded portrait of a young woman in a large oval frame. The woman is blond and lovely, dressed in blue, smiling brightly.
She’s not wearing a single piece of jewelry. Her only adornment is a crown of flowers in her hair. Just over her heart, there is a small tear in the canvas.
And suddenly I’m wholly and completely here in this basement.
“What’s your full name, Captain?”
It’s an effort to drag my eyes away from her. “Claudine Llewelyn Henry.”
His eyes are smiling and he’s looking into me. “Claudine Llewelyn Henry.” The way he says it. My name on his lips. And then he turns away and says to the portrait, “Claudine Llewelyn Henry, meet Tillie Donaldson Blackwood.”
Tillie beams down at me.
“They found the painting like that, with the rip in the canvas. Because supposedly it wasn’t the gunshot that killed her. It was a broken heart.”
“Over losing her baby?”
“Probably. Combined with losing her brother in a car accident and her mother to the flu, all in the same month.”
“How do you know all this?”
“My friend Shirley. Her grandmother Beatrice was the island storyteller.”
We are there for what feels like a long time. There’s something in me that wants to stay here, because there’s something in me that relates to the ruins and the ghosts, to Claudine, who haunted this place until her death, and to Tillie and her broken heart. Especially to Tillie and her broken heart, and the way her life changed in an instant—not once but three times—before she decided to end hers.
I turn at the sound of scratching and watch as Miah etches our initials into the brick. Not JC loves CH or vice versa, but there, side by side. I like the semi-permanence of it—the fact that our names will be there for as long as that brick exists. Like a time capsule. No matter where I go and what happens, we were here.
* * *
—
We’re back at the basement door, where we came in, and he pulls on the latch but it doesn’t give. I say, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Tillie locked us in here?”
Breathless Page 13
