Harmless

by Dana Reinhardt

  Lielielielielie. Truthtruthtruthtruthtruth.

  I didn't. I couldn't. He would hate me. He would hate me for sitting across from him day after day, coffee cup after coffee cup, letting him talk about Emma and what could be bothering her when all along I knew.

  Lies destroy you.

  I wanted only one thing. I wanted Silas. I wanted to be alone somewhere in a room with him and have his strong arms around me and I wanted to hear him tell me that he loved me, and once I heard him say that to me, I could come clean because when you love somebody you can forgive them for the terrible things they do.

  Silas said it was too nice a day to spend breathing the recycled air of the Greek Corner. Did I want to go somewhere we could sit outside?

  I wanted to go anywhere he was. Anywhere we could be together. It didn't have to be alone somewhere in a room. Outside was good. Outside was open and free and there was no way of telling what might happen if we were alone outside.

  We drove north. The river gets wider up north and the other side of it becomes harder to see. We sat under a tree behind a historic home where a former vice president or someone who signed the Declaration of Independence once lived. The truth is I wasn't sure who he was, except that he was someone important enough that the place where he used to eat and sleep and go to the bathroom was now somewhere you had to pay five dollars to enter.

  I wondered if David Allen had gone by here on his way to Kapachuck. At night the people in dark green vests and gold nameplates who take your five dollars would have been home in their own houses with their own families, sleeping in their own beds. This house would have been empty, but it would have been locked. Alarmed against people exactly like David Allen. Maybe he came here anyway. Maybe he slept on the porch. Or maybe he slept right here, under this tree where we were sitting, with its view of the widening river.

  We hadn't said a word to each other since we got out of the car. We just sat there, alone by the river, breathing the air and watching the water. I thought about how rivers play tricks on you. You think you're looking at something you've looked at countless times, but really, you're seeing something entirely new. Rivers are always moving, always changing from one second to the next. What you remember seeing the last time you stared at the river, even what you saw just before you blinked your eyes, isn't there anymore. Something new has come to replace it, and what you saw before is gone forever.

  Silas was sitting with his back against the tree trunk. Some pine needles had fallen in his hair and I leaned over to brush them off. He jerked away from me and his hands flew up to his head.

  I held the pine needles in my outstretched palm, to show him what I was doing touching him like that.

  He smiled. “Hey,” he said. “I put those there on purpose. I'm going for the outdoorsy look.”

  “Well, I'm sorry to say it doesn't suit you.”

  He picked up an acorn and threw it at me. I ducked. He threw another one.

  I was laughing. “Stop it. That's so not fair. I may not look it, but I'm actually very sensitive. I bruise easily.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I certainly don't mean to bruise you.”

  He shifted away from the tree and lay flat on his back. His head was inches from my outstretched legs. He put his hands over his eyes and rubbed them.

  “Oh God,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I'm a wreck.”

  I moved closer and before I knew what I was doing, or more accurately, before there was time for me to talk myself out of what I knew I was doing, I lifted his head and put it in my lap. He made a move to pull away, but I started stroking his hair, and he seemed to just surrender to this. He kept his eyes closed. I used a little bit of nail to scratch his scalp as I ran my fingers from his forehead to the back of his neck. If he'd been a cat, I'm pretty sure this would have been the moment he'd have started to purr.

  “How can you be a wreck? You're Silas Calhoun.”

  “So?”

  “So, you're Silas Calhoun. You're perfect.”

  “If I'm so perfect then why am I here, twenty miles away from the lake where all my friends are celebrating our high school graduation, lying with my head in the lap of my messed-up little sister's best friend?”

  He opened his eyes and looked up at me, and again, before I could stop myself, I leaned forward. I let go of every thought in my head, and I tumbled into him.

  Anna

  When Mom came knocking on my door she was the last person in the world I felt like talking to. I wasn't sure when this hap-pened. I used to love spending time with Mom, but these days I just wanted to get as far away from her as possible, which wasn't easy to do in our smaller-than-normal house. She always came to me with this open, pleading look like Let's talk about something important and sometimes I just wanted to smack that look right off her face.

  I was in a bad mood. Mariah was freaking out. Detective Stevens was coming around here during his time off asking all kinds of questions that made it pretty clear he didn't believe our story. And to top it off, Tobey had canceled our plans to hang out that weekend.

  sK8teR817: sorry

  sK8teR817: cant be there

  That's the problem with IM. You don't get a real chance to look someone in the eye and ask “Why?” What did he have to do that was more important than spending time with me? Couldn't we rearrange our plans? Find some other time to be together? Did he even like me anymore? Had he ever?

  All he seemed to want to do was bombard me with questions about what happened down at the river and questions about David Allen and questions about Detective Stevens's questions. Questions all the time. But no real questions about me. Or us.

  Mom knocked again. I wanted to be alone. Everyone seemed to want something from me. Tobey. Mariah. Detective Stevens. And now Mom. I couldn't just tell her to go away. I was still Anna Banana on the outside. When it came to Mom and Dad, I was still the good girl. Nice and polite. Never causing trouble.

  She came in and sat at the edge of my bed. This was one of the reasons I'd always wanted siblings: to take some of the pressure off. With siblings, Mom wouldn't always be looking to have one of her “meaningful” conversations with me. If I had siblings then maybe I could mess up sometimes and still look pretty good by comparison.

  My annoyance with Mom started to take shape. Why had she lied to me about my almost-siblings? Why had she told me that they didn't want more children when this wasn't true? They tried and tried and: nothing. Two miscarriages. I didn't fill them with all the love they could ever possibly imagine. They wanted more. And she'd lied about it.

  “Hi, honey.”

  “Hi.”

  “Don't you think it's time to come out of your room? You've been in here most of the day. If you don't have any plans maybe we could catch a movie or something.”

  “Whatever happened to my Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “I used to have them, and then one day they were gone.”

  “I'm sure I don't really know.”

  “I'm sure you do.”

  She narrowed her eyes and studied me. She moved closer and grabbed hold of my bare foot. “What's this really about?”

  I pulled my foot away. “This is about my brother and sister. The children you hid from me.”

  “I'm not following you.”

  “When I told you I wanted a sibling you told me that you and Dad decided you didn't want any more children, that I filled you with as much love as you could imagine. And then later you told me you had two miscarriages.”

  “Anna, we already talked about this. You were too young then. You wouldn't have understood what a miscarriage was. I told you when you were old enough to understand.”

  “But it was a lie.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “And sometimes it's okay to tell lies?”

  “Yes, sometimes it is okay to tell lies.”

  So this was where I was going. I didn't even know it until I got there
. I needed Mom to let me off the hook. Mariah wouldn't. Tobey wouldn't. Detective Stevens wouldn't. But good old Mom. She was as reliable as ever. She was always there for me. She was there when I came home from school and when I got the flu and when I needed to be let off the hook. Why was I so angry with her? I loved her. I loved her and her face with her meaningful looks.

  She had reclaimed my foot and was rubbing it. It felt really nice.

  “But you know, Anna, it wasn't a total lie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the part about you filling us with as much love as we could possibly imagine. That was and has always been the absolute truth.”

  I didn't say anything. I willed every part of me into the hard, round ball of my foot where her hands were applying just the right amount of pressure.

  “You've done nothing but amaze us at every turn. You're smart and good and kind and intuitive. You know how to make the right decisions. You make us proud every day.”

  And with that, I was back, hanging on the hook.

  This was an impossible situation. The walls were coming down around me, but still, I couldn't imagine telling the truth. Not now. It was too late. How could I tell Mom and Dad what we'd done? It would ruin everything. It would ruin their image of me; it would ruin every thought they'd ever had about who I was. It would be another death. Another loss. Another miscarriage.

  Emma

  On the Monday before graduation Silas took me out for breakfast. At this point, classes were just a formality for seniors, and Silas was attending them sporadically, which was very un-Silas-like. I had third and fourth period free. He said he thought I looked like I could use a breakfast burrito from the mall. We'd been coming to the mall for breakfast burritos since we'd moved up here. Spicy for Silas. Mild for me. They come with greasy potatoes.

  I hadn't spent any time with Silas in weeks. There was so much stuff going on for seniors, all kinds of parties and events that were strictly “Seniors Only,” so Silas wasn't around much lately. He said he wanted to hang out and find some time to talk. Judging from the serious look on his face, I figured it had something to do with Dad and his car-ride confession.

  We were sitting in the food court in front of Benny's Bur-ritos when I saw him. Again. This time there was no tall girl with short brown hair and knocking hips. And this time, when he saw me, he started walking toward me.

  I remembered telling Anna about how that night with Owen was like a black hole. A void. A place where everything gets lost. I would have given anything, right at that moment, with Owen walking toward me, to vanish into a black hole. But the problem was this: it turns out there is no such thing as a black hole.

  Time can be reversed. That's a basic tenet of quantum physics. The theory goes something like: Because the universe is infinite, nothing ever ends or disappears, and therefore in-formation can always be retrieved and reconstructed. Through the retrieval and reconstruction of information, you can put the pieces back together and understand the past.

  The black hole used to be the exception to the rule until recently, when Dr. Stephen Hawking came out against his own thirty-year-old theory about black holes, conceding that there's no such thing as a real void.

  There is no place in the universe where things can disap-pear for good. Time can always be reversed.

  “Hi,” he said.

  Silas looked at me with that Who the hell is this guy? look you would expect from a protective older brother. Especially when the guy who's coming over to talk to your sister is tall with big strong arms and sleepy green eyes.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Can we talk for a minute?”

  I stood up quickly and almost fell flat on my face because I tried to push my chair back as I stood, forgetting it was bolted to the floor. “I'll be right back,” I said to Silas, and then, “It's fine, Si. Don't worry.”

  I followed Owen through the food court. He was even taller than I remembered. I had to take two steps for every one of his. We weaved in and out of tables piled high with half-eaten left-behind breakfasts.

  He pushed open the door to the outside and held it. A wave of hot air slammed into me. I took a seat on an empty wooden bench covered with the carved initials of young lovers who probably didn't even know each other anymore. Owen sat down next to me and now we were on more even territory. I didn't have to look up to see his face; it was right at sleepy green eye level.

  He stared at me for a minute, but I wasn't going to be the first to fill the silence. I couldn't even figure out how I'd gotten here.

  “Emma. I wanted to tell you that I'm sorry. I wanted to tell you that on the night of the march, but I didn't have a chance. I'm sorry about what happened to you and I can't help but feel like it's my fault.”

  How had I gotten here? Time can be reversed: I'd weaved in and out of the food court tables with their bolted-down chairs. I'd come to spend time with my brother with the serious look on his face. I'd taken a drive with my father, marched through the streets of my town, pulled some stuffing out of Ms. Malachy's orange couch, lost my friends. I'd gone to a party and gotten a call from my mother, Where are you, Emma, I'd gone to a party before that one where I had sex with Owen on an itchy floral couch.

  He was sorry.

  I heard the sounds of slamming doors, car engines starting and voices filled with laughter. People who'd come to enjoy another day at the mall. The sunlight was blinding me. I bent forward and put my face in my palms and tried to get some quiet and clarity in my spinning head. It started coming to me. Information slowly seeping back out of the black hole.

  That night. It wasn't me. I wasn't that person. I wasn't ready to have sex with anyone. I wasn't ready to have sex with someone I didn't know. It was wrong. I didn't want it to hap-pen. And it happened anyway.

  “Emma. Are you okay?”

  I kept my face in my hands and shook my head.

  “I'm sorry,” he said again. And then: “I should have driven you home that night. I shouldn't have let Brian drop you down by the river when it was dark. If I'd driven you home none of this would have happened. That guy wouldn't have attacked you.”

  “He didn't.”

  “What?”

  “He didn't attack me.”

  “I don't understand.”

  I stood up. “I need to find my brother,” I said, and I ran away.

  I told Silas that I needed him to take me back to school now. I was crying. He asked me over and over what was wrong, who was that guy, what did he do to me. He said he'd kill him. I said just take me back to school. Please. I needed to see Ms. Malachy.

  She wasn't in her office and Silas sat outside in the hallway with me, rubbing my back while I wept, waiting for her to return. He'd given up asking me what was wrong about halfway through the drive from the mall to campus.

  He wanted to come in with me but Ms. Malachy said he should return to his classes. He finally gave in and walked away, with his head hanging low.

  “Something is upsetting you,” she said.

  Even in my current state, even as I was bursting with information, newly retrieved from the depths of me, I still thought she had an annoying way of stating the obvious.

  “I saw him. I saw Owen.”

  “And …”

  “And I didn't want to have sex. I wasn't ready.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Did he rape you?”

  “I don't know.”

  How did I get here? Time can be reversed: I went to a party. I was terrible at Quarters. He was cute and he was a senior and he paid attention to me. I went along with it. I had too much to drink. I wasn't thinking clearly. I never said no.

  “I don't think so,” I said.

  She came out from behind her desk and sat next to me on the couch. She didn't put her arms around me or touch me at all, which was what I feared she might do when I saw her coming toward me.

  “What a hard time you've had this year, Emma. It's a wonder how well you've hel
d it together. Between this and the incident by the river …”

  “He didn't do it.”

  “Owen?”

  “No, David Allen.”

  “What?”

  “We made it all up. It was a lie. There was nobody down at the river that night. We were at a party.”

  My tears had stopped. I knew the seriousness of what I'd just revealed to Ms. Malachy, and the consequences a revelation like that might bring. But at the same time, the black hole was emptied and the endless expanse of white nothingness inside me suddenly had a horizon; it had a shape I could hold on to. Time was starting to tick forward again.

  “Emma,” she said. “Do you know what it is you've done?”

  That was the simplest and yet the most complicated question in the universe.

  We talked for the rest of the morning, sitting side by side on the couch. Retrieving and reconstructing information: Dad and his student. Owen and me. Elinor Clements. David Allen. Anna. Mariah.

  When we were done, we picked up the phone and called my dad, and then we called Detective Stevens.

  Mariah

  Sometimes things happen. Things happen even when you don't intend them to happen. Maybe at the beginning you had good intentions, or no intentions, or intentions you thought were harmless, but before you knew it things got out of your control.

  This is what I told Silas that day beside the river when he tried pushing me away, when he tried telling me that he couldn't do this.

  Sometimes things take on a life of their own. You become powerless. There is nothing you can do to stop certain things from happening.

  I fell into him. We rolled around in the grass and the pine needles and the acorns. Our bodies pressing into each other. I was aware of nothing but how he smelled and tasted and of how surprisingly smooth his skin was. But now he was sitting up and staring at me. He had that red-cheeked look of someone who has just awakened, slightly dazed, from a long hard nap.

  “This is wrong.”

  I could feel his breath on my face. Warm. Like the breeze from the river.

  “You're fourteen.”