Play of Light

by Debra Doxer

  “No. Frogs would be too tame for Survivor.” I waited, but he just looked out over the water. Feeling victorious, I pushed my hair behind my ears and grinned at him. “I’m taking the fact that you won’t answer as a no. I get a point.”

  Looking outraged, he said, “I had a pet frog, okay? His name was Fred. It’s like you’re asking me if I would eat Fred.”

  I burst out laughing, wondering if he was being serious.

  “Would you eat frogs’ legs?” he asked.

  I wrinkled my nose. “No way. So do I win?”

  “You get your point. But the game’s not over yet,” he grumbled. I knew he was pretending to be a sore loser. His lips were twitching as he hid a smile. “Next time I’ll come up with something you wouldn’t dare do.”

  “Good luck with that.” I smirked.

  After that day, I constantly wondered what he was going to come up with. But it was a moot point because over the cold months that followed, I didn’t talk to Spencer at all. It was a bitter winter. No one went outside much, and Dad insisted on driving Emma and me to school when the temperature dropped below thirty, but I’d listen for Spencer’s name in Emma’s conversations when she was in her room on the phone. What I learned was that Emma had moved on to Tyler, an older boy who approached her in the cafeteria one day, and I heard more than I ever wanted to know about what they did together in the janitor’s closet. Spencer was apparently old news. News that wasn’t worth talking about anymore.

  Worried about Spencer, I’d look out toward his house each night and note when his light was on or off. I got to know his schedule. He stayed up late, well past midnight. Then early in the morning, I’d see him trudging down the street, braced against the cold in his ski hat and black wool coat, walking Astro or walking to school. Several times I schemed of ways to run into him, but I never followed through, knowing he’d probably see through any lame excuse I came up with.

  His uncle’s name continued to fill the kitchen when Emma and I were supposed to be sleeping. Colorful words would follow it. My father swore sometimes, but I never knew how much until I eavesdropped on conversations about Jackson Pierce.

  By the time spring came around, we were all stir-crazy. The first day the wind died down and the temperature shot above fifty, I ran out and waited at the dunes, leaning back against the cool, damp sand, watching the road. But Spencer didn’t show up, not that day, or any of the warm days that followed.

  Worry for him was my first reaction, but then Emma finally mentioned him on the phone again, gossiping about how Spencer had broken up with his summer girlfriend and asked out Heather, a senior girl. Despite Emma’s relationship with Tyler, she spoke about how she was angry that Spencer had been back on the market and she’d missed her window of opportunity with him.

  Emma and I had something in common then. I sank down onto my bed that afternoon and realized that if Spencer was asking out girls, then he was doing just fine. My feelings became a confused jumble of heartache and relief. I hoped this meant things were better at home for him. Maybe that was why I hadn’t seen him. If everything in his life was good, he had no reason to come talk to me at the dunes any longer. But if we were really friends, he should have turned up at least once to tell me, knowing I’d be worried for him.

  When it came down to it, I knew nothing for sure about Spencer, only gossip. So like a pathetic fool, I continued to look for him each day, knowing I’d forgive him immediately when he finally appeared. I even imagined the apologies and excuses he’d give me. He’d had too much homework. He’d gotten a job. His new girlfriend wouldn’t like him talking to me.

  I kind of liked that last one. I liked the idea that his girlfriend might be jealous of his friendship with me. My imagination was in overdrive, giving him excuses, trying not to feel the hurt I knew was unfounded. In truth, Spencer didn’t owe me an explanation. He owed me nothing at all.

  “Would you ever play hooky, Sarah Smile?”

  This was asked by Spencer after he stepped out from behind the shrubbery that lined the front yard of a house that was two blocks from school. Riley had been out all week with bronchitis, and I was walking to school alone again.

  My eyes were like saucers. I hadn’t seen him in so long, my heart pumped harder and my nerves jumped at how good he looked in his black coat and worn jeans. It took a moment for me to regain my senses and place a hand on my hip while I slanted my head at him.

  Play it cool. Don’t show him how hurt you are. Don’t act like a complete moron.

  “That would depend,” I managed to reply.

  “On what?”

  “On what I was doing instead.” I was really thinking that I’d never skipped school before, but I’d start now if he asked me to. And at the same time, I was hating myself a little because he’d disappeared for months without a word, and I wanted to be angry with him. But I wasn’t. I was too happy to see him.

  He folded his arms and looked down at me with a mischievous grin. “What if you had the option of going to a place dedicated to the thing you loved most?”

  I squinted my eyes at him, thinking. The thing I loved most?

  Spencer shook his head as if I were the densest person on earth. “You would suck as a detective. I’m talking about art. A place dedicated to art.”

  My eyes widened at the thought as my face lit up with a smile. The playing-it-cool thing wasn’t working at all.

  He chuckled at me. “Would you play hooky to go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston?”

  I hesitated. Something in his expression made me think that this question might be more than just a game. “Is this another hypothetical dare?”

  “It doesn’t have to be. I have enough bus fare for the both of us if you want to go with me.”

  I gaped at him. “Skip school and go into Boston with you? Today? Are you serious?”

  Spencer’s lips flattened into a straight line. “Too much for you, right? Too bad for a good girl like you.”

  His tone had turned serious all of a sudden. It felt like he was insulting me.

  Then he leaned in close and said, “I dare you.”

  That did it. Those were the magic words. “I would go. Right now,” I said firmly, surprising him. He didn’t know how many times Emma had dared me to do things, and I prided myself on never saying no.

  He stared at me as if he was weighing my honesty. I began to fear he’d changed his mind when his dark brown eyes looked directly into mine. “Then let’s go,” he said. He leaned down toward me again and added, “Right now.”

  Then he took my hand, something he’d never done before, and I felt myself falling for him all over again, right there on the sidewalk, two blocks from the school I wouldn’t be attending today. With all my attention focused on the place where our hands met, we walked the half mile into town and caught the bus that would take us into South Station in Boston.

  The ride was an hour and a half of me sitting right beside Spencer. As the budding trees passed by the window in a blur, my insides were a churning mess. I was with Spencer. Yay! But I was skipping school, and my parents would flip out when they found out. Not yay at all. The exact opposite of yay.

  But no matter the punishment, it would be worth it, because despite my nerve-induced stomachache, I’d never been as thrilled and excited as I was at that moment. Spencer asked me to go along with him. He wanted to be with me today. We were going to spend the whole day together away from South Seaport and in the city. I felt so grown-up, and I was with the boy everyone wanted to be with. But he was with me, and he wasn’t what they all thought. I knew him in a way they didn’t. Any girl would envy me right now.

  “You’ve never been to the museum, right?” he asked, drawing my attention from his reflection in the window to the real thing beside me in all its swoon-worthy goodness.

  I shook my head. “My dad promised to take me a bunch of times, but something always came up.”

  “I’ve been there a lot,” he said evenly.

  “You have?�
� For some reason, that surprised me. It seemed like he was too cool to do something as nerdy as going to a museum.

  He nodded, brushing the hair back from his forehead. “My mother took me. She loved going there.”

  “Your mother liked art?” I asked, shifting my body toward him and wondering why he’d never mentioned that before.

  “Yeah,” he said softly with a half smile. “She really liked this one painting on the second floor. There’s a bench right in front of it, and we’d sit together and look at it. I’m not sure why she liked it so much. It’s sort of depressing, actually. It’s of a woman sitting in front of a girl, she may be the girl’s mother, I’m not sure. But the woman is crying because she has to say good-bye, and the girl in the painting doesn’t give a shit. Her face is calm, and she’s looking off across the room. She couldn’t care less that this woman is sobbing.”

  Spencer blinked a few times and cleared his throat. “I think my mother knew she was dying,” he said as his gaze shifted down to his hands clasped in his lap. “She never told me, though. She always said she was fine.”

  His jaw tightened as I sat perfectly still listening, understanding that he was telling me something important.

  “I keep picturing the girl in the painting and wondering what my mom thought of her.” He sat back in the seat, but kept his eyes down. “Maybe she saw us in that painting. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t care when she was gone, and that’s what made her stare at it for so long. She was afraid I wouldn’t miss her.”

  “No, Spencer,” I said, placing my hand on his arm.

  He squeezed his eyes closed. “Why didn’t I ask her? I don’t know how many times we looked at that painting together, and I never asked her one fucking question about it. I think I was afraid to ask.” He pulled his arm into his body, causing my hand to fall away. “Anyway,” he said, his voice deliberately casual now. “I’ll show it to you. You’ll see what I mean.”

  Glancing at my hand, hovering in the air where his arm used to be, I lowered it onto the seat and tried not to feel slighted by the push and pull of his personality. I wondered what his mother died of and why she wouldn’t have been honest with him. But it didn’t matter. She was still gone and he was hurting in so many ways because of that.

  It was then that I realized we were probably going to the museum because he wanted to, and not because it was the thing I loved most. He wanted to look at that painting again. I was anxious to see it too. If his mother really knew she was dying, I felt anger for this woman I’d never met. I thought of what Riley said that first day we all walked to school together about his parents not having a will. If Jackson Pierce was their closest relative, they should have realized what would happen to Spencer if they both passed away. They should have taken better care of him.

  When we got to South Station, Spencer knew exactly which trains would take us to the museum. So we took the red line and then changed to the green line, heading toward Northeastern University. Besides never playing hooky before, I’d never taken the T either. I’d only been to Boston a few times, and each time my mom and dad got completely lost driving around, trying to find their way through all the narrow one-way streets.

  The T stop was right in front of the museum. The building itself nearly overwhelmed me before we even got inside with its huge pillars and sculptures lining the front entrance. Once we walked through the main doors, it was unusually quiet with each sound echoing off the high ceilings. Inside, the architecture was an intricate combination of old and new with arches and glass everywhere. My body hummed with excitement as we approached a long hallway lined with huge paintings.

  When I lagged behind to study them, Spencer said, “We’ll come back and see everything. I promise. I want to take you upstairs first.”

  He seemed so anxious to get there that I tore myself away from the landscape I was looking at and kept pace with him as he ascended the white marble steps to the place that obviously held memories for him.

  I watched him speed up through a corridor and then pause, walking slower as he approached a small alcove. That must be it, I thought, as he inched forward, his gaze pinned to the gold-framed painting that was mostly hidden from my view behind his broad shoulders. As he moved toward the red leather bench, I came up beside him. He tried to turn his head away from me, but I could see his eyes becoming glassy. I hadn’t really looked at the painting yet as I sat down. Once I was settled, I bravely reached my hand out to him.

  He released a breath when he saw my gesture. His tense shoulders relaxed as he put his hand in mine and sat down beside me. I squeezed his fingers and finally turned my attention to the painting on the wall. There was a small gold plate beside it. It read THE DAY BEFORE PARTING BY JOZEF ISRAËLS.

  First, I took in the darkness of the scene. The entire background was shrouded in black, but the two lone figures seemed to have a spotlight on them. Spencer was right. The woman seemed distraught at possibly losing the child sitting before her, a girl who was staring straight ahead expressionless. But I didn’t see what he did, and suddenly I suspected why his mother hadn’t told him how sick she was. Spencer was wrong.

  “The mother is being selfless,” I said. “The girl doesn’t know what’s going to happen. The mother isn’t telling her to spare her the pain. She doesn’t want to upset her because she loves her and that’s what mothers do. They do what they think is best for their children.”

  Beside me, Spencer was silent, just looking at it. I had no idea what was going on in his head until he asked, “Even though she never showed it, you think that’s what she was feeling?” He pointed a finger toward the woman.

  Just because I called myself an artist, I wasn’t an art expert, and I didn’t know what to think about Spencer’s mother possibly knowing she would die and not preparing him for it, but I knew what I saw and I wanted him to know it too. “Maybe she kept it from you because she wanted to protect you. She locked it up inside and swallowed her feelings. She loved you, and she knew you loved her. I can see how much you loved her so I know she saw it too.”

  He shifted restlessly on the bench. “But we’ll never know what she was thinking because she’s gone and she didn’t tell me. She feels nothing now, and I’m the one who’s supposed to swallow it. But maybe I’m not as strong as she was, and it’s swallowing me instead.” Spencer turned and directed his intense gaze at me. “It’s not fucking fair.”

  I couldn’t move as his words slammed into me. He stood abruptly and walked back in the direction of the stairwell. But I didn’t follow. He’d given me a glimpse of the darkness he felt every day, and I didn’t know what to do with it or how to make it better for him. Deep down, I knew I couldn’t make it better. It was the worst feeling I’d ever had.

  When I finally caught up to Spencer a little later, he’d completely snapped out of it, as if he’d pulled a switch and the bright, happy Spencer came on. He showed me paintings by Van Gogh and Rembrandt. We saw works by Claude Monet too.

  After that, we walked through a room with real mummies and Egyptian artifacts. Spencer even tried to scare me while I was staring at a mummy’s face. He snuck up on me and poked me in the ribs, causing me to screech since I was already creeped out by the hollow eye sockets. Then he laughed when a museum guard came in and gave me a stern lecture about respecting the artifacts. But I could barely manage a smile. Spencer was faking his good mood. I couldn’t pretend not to know that. For all I knew, every time he smiled, it was an act.

  Swallowed. That’s how he felt, swallowed up by sadness.

  The ride back on the bus was quiet. Spencer looked drained, and I felt the same way. We got home just after school let out. When Spencer left me at the corner of our two streets, for the first time that day, I worried about what I would face when I walked through my front door.

  But there was nothing. Apparently the school hadn’t called my parents. They knew nothing of the day that had made such an impression on me. It was a day I would never forget.

  The next morn
ing started with Dad grumbling about being on traffic detail downtown all day. He had on his blue uniform, but he’d left the top button of his shirt undone.

  “We don’t have spring anymore,” he said to us at breakfast. “We go right from shoveling snow to sweltering in the heat. What happened to spring?”

  “It’s always like this,” my mother replied. “And you complain every year.”

  There was supposed to be record heat that afternoon, nearly ninety degrees, which never happened in April, and Dad would have to stand in that heat wearing his long-sleeved uniform and most likely one of those ugly neon-yellow vests.

  I spent most of breakfast hiding yawns because I’d hardly slept last night, thinking about the museum and all that Spencer had told me. Such darkness lived inside him, and I felt the need to tell someone more than I ever had before. If I couldn’t help Spencer, maybe someone else could.

  I’d been working up the courage to tell my parents that Spencer’s uncle was hurting him. I almost said something when I saw Dad start to get up from the table. But then Emma came dashing through the kitchen on her way to school. She had on the shortest shorts I’d ever seen, and while Mom and Dad’s eyes narrowed at how much leg she was showing, they held their tongues. Lately Emma was more trouble than not. They knew if they said anything or even thought of asking her to change her outfit, she’d go nuclear on them, and it was obvious by their wary expressions that no one was up for that today.

  After hurriedly finishing my breakfast so I could walk out with Dad, I tried to start the conversation then, but he was distracted, not really listening, and Riley was already outside waiting for me. Dad waved good-bye to us as he drove off in his police cruiser, and I composed what I wanted to say all the way to school. Tonight I would tell them what was happening to Spencer. I couldn’t keep quiet one day more, even if Spencer ended up hating me for it. He needed help. If I didn’t get it for him, no one would.