“Not as a writer,” Wade pipes up. Brynn looks exasperated. “She was a famous environmentalist. An arborist, too. Trees,” he clarifies, when Brynn shoots him a look. “She has over two hundred species of trees on her land. She asked to be buried here, on her own property.”
Owen is transformed by shadows into a stranger. The wind lifts the hairs on the back of my neck. “Summer didn’t tell me what to do when I got here. Just that she thought Return to Lovelorn should go home.”
Even though it isn’t cold, I wrap my arms around my waist. Feel the ribs and the space between them. Body, tissue, blood, bone. All of it so easily damaged.
“What did you do?” Brynn’s voice is loud in the silence.
Owen doesn’t seem to have heard. He’s already starting across the gravel, toward a second path, this one winding not toward the house but into a thick copse of trees, these with leaves that look almost jointed, like fingers.
“Come on,” he says. “She’s back here.”
We go single file down a path that winds deep into the trees. It feels like maneuvering through the dark of a backstage, surrounded on both sides by the rustle of tall curtains. Brynn and Abby hold their cell phones like torches, lighting up the sweep of vaulted branches; the ribbed undersides of leaves crowding overhead; the ghost-white look of the grass and the occasional placard staked in the ground, reminding visitors not to litter or stating the scientific name of the various species of trees. Magnolia stellata. Acer griseum. Names like magic spells, like songs written in a different language.
And as we walk, a strange feeling comes back to me. A change—in the air, in the texture of the dark—and a rhythm that emerges from the nonsense pattern of cricket song and the faint susurration of the leaves in the wind. Lovelorn, it says. Lovelorn.
My lungs ache as though with cold. Every breath feels thin and dangerous. And then, just as I’m about to say go back, Owen says, “Here it is,” and the trees relax their grip on the land, leaving us on a long, open stretch of lawn that runs down toward the beach. I hadn’t realized how close we were to the water: a silver-flecked expanse disrupted by a strip of dark and rangy islands.
There are a half-dozen picnic tables set up near the tree line and a stone seawall dividing the grass from the beach. A stone angel, darkened by weather, stands guard over the lawn. Even before we cross the lawn and Wade crouches to light up the inscription at its base, I know that this is it: Georgia C. Wells’s final resting place.
Wade reads:
“The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God’s Heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.”
“Dorothy Frances Gurney,” he finishes.
For a minute we just stand there, looking out over the water. The ocean is calm tonight and crawls soundlessly over the gravel on the beach. The moon cuts itself into tiny slivers on the waves.
“Not a bad place to be dead,” Abby says. “You know, relatively speaking.”
Owen hoists himself up onto the stone wall. For a second he stands there, silhouetted, his hair silvered by the moon, and I think that he too could be an angel—wingless, bound to earth. Then, without a word, he drops.
We all crowd forward to the wall, leaning over to see the way the land abruptly drops away, as if someone has just excavated it with a giant scoop.
This side of the seawall is six, maybe eight feet tall. In places it has been shored up with netting. Owen has landed between the rocks that go tumbling down toward the beach, splintering slowly into smaller and smaller bits until they’re sucked into the waves to become sand.
“What are you doing?” Brynn whispers, even though there’s no one around to hear us. But it feels wrong to shout over somebody’s grave. I remember how Summer used to tell us to hold our breath when the bus went past the Episcopal church on Carol and its narrow yard, brown with churned-up mud and patchy grass and the accidental look of its crooked graves. She said that the dead were always angry and the sound of breathing infuriated them with jealousy, that they would come for us in our sleep if we weren’t careful. And now she’s buried there among the other tumbledown gravestones, in a cheap casket her foster parents picked out, cinched and stitched and stuffed into clothing she would have hated.
Another vengeful spirit. Another soldier for the angry dead.
Owen doesn’t answer. He’s still picking his way between the rocks, some as large as golf carts, moving parallel to the seawall. For a moment he disappears in the shadows. Then he reappears, pedaling up one side of an enormous rock, keeping low and using his hands for purchase, until he reaches a surface beaten flat by the wind and can stand.
“Owen!” Brynn tries again to get his attention, but he ignores her.
Now he’s feeling along the seawall, like a blind person trying to get his bearings in a new room, working his fingers through the bright orange netting that’s doing its best to girdle the wall in place. In places whole chunks of the wall are missing, gap-toothed black spaces crusted with lichen and moss. Other portions of the wall have been recently rebuilt. The stone is newer, a flat gray that reflects the moon. I wonder how many years it will take before the wind and the ocean swallow the whole thing.
Owen has gotten an arm through the netting. From here, it looks like the wall has his arm to the elbow and is sucking on him like a bone. Slowly, as he works it, one of the larger stones shimmies outward. A final grunt, and then he crouches, freeing something from beneath the tight foot of the netting. With his shoulder, he shoves the stone back into place.
Then he drops down to the beach and darts toward us through the shadows, tucking the plastic-wrapped object under his arm like a football. He has to find a new way up to us. The rocks, knuckled against one another, form a rudimentary staircase. Even so, he has a hard time getting back over the wall.
“Here.” He passes up a small box, straitjacketed in plastic and duct tape, before heaving himself over the wall, teetering for a second on his stomach with his legs still dangling over the beach before Wade gives him a hand. He sits up, breathing hard, his face sheened with sweat, his black eye worse than ever. “Go ahead,” he says. “Open it.”
I kneel in the grass. The plastic is wet and slicked with dirt. A beetle tracks ponderously across its surface. I flick it into the grass. My fingers are clumsy and I realize they’re shaking.
“Let me.” Brynn shoves me aside. We’ve all gone quiet. Even the wind has disappeared. There’s no sound at all but the tape protesting as she pries it loose, revealing the lockbox, the secret that Owen spent five years protecting. Even Brynn hesitates before she thumbs the latches loose.
Inside, the pages have been rolled and bent to fit the box. They are, miraculously, dry. For a second, I imagine they still smell faintly of apple shampoo. Brynn loosens the whole bundle of them—dozens and dozens of pages—smoothing them out on a thigh.
Under the moonlight, the title page plays tricks with the eye and seems itself to be glowing.
Return to Lovelorn, it says.
Summer was walking alone in the arena because her friends were lame and ditched her. The tournament was over. When no one was around, the arena seemed much bigger. Like a big, empty eggshell. There were still massive bloodstains everywhere in the dirt.
And then she heard a voice. A whisper, really.
“Don’t be afraid.”
She spun around, totally freaked, because obviously whenever someone tells you not to be afraid, well . . . it never works. For a second she didn’t see anyone. Then she saw a flicker, and she blinked, and she saw a shadow like a single brush of dark paint.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the Shadow said. It was smaller than Summer expected. Friendlier, too.
—From Return to Lovelorn by Summer Marks
Brynn
Now
“Coffee,” I say, shoving my mug across the floor toward Mia. “More coffee. I would get up myself,” I add when she shoots me a lo
ok, “but that seems tiring.”
“There is no more coffee,” she says, pointedly taking a sip of her decaf green tea. Decaf. The single worst word in the English language. “You went through the last of it.”
“Coffee!” I say again, pounding a fist on the floor. “Coffee!”
Owen sighs, climbs to his feet, and stretches. Mia pretends not to be looking at the waistband of his boxers, which is briefly visible, and I look at her so she knows she’s been busted. “I’ll make a run to 7-Eleven,” he says. “I could use some coffee myself. Or some rocket fuel.”
It’s nearly three a.m., an hour since we made it back to Vermont and set up camp in Owen’s living room. That’s what it feels like—like we should be reviewing military strategy or staging a coup on a foreign dictator. Papers litter the floor and surfaces, pinned in place by random objects: a picture frame, an iPhone, a pair of cheap sunglasses. Well-thumbed stacks sport new Post-it notes. Owen’s been staring at the same few pages for the last hour, and Abby’s been making notes in a spiral notebook. Wade has been counting how often the Shadow shows up. Mia’s been trying to organize pages based on who wrote what, a nearly impossible task, since half of it is a jumble of all our ideas combined. I’ve been working on getting the world’s worst headache, reading through pages of material Summer wrote—or at least, we thought she wrote—and never showed us, all of it signed with only her name. Cups and mugs everywhere, an empty bottle of soda, overturned, balled-up napkins and the powdered dregs of chips in an empty bowl.
Wade stands up too, releasing a mini avalanche of crumbs. “I’ll come along for the ride,” he says. “I could use a break.”
“I’ll come too.” Mia gets quickly to her feet, deliberately avoiding my eyes. Stupid. It’s obvious she’s still half in love with Owen. Every time they’re close, she freezes, as if he’s an electric fence and she’s worried about getting zapped.
That’s the thing about hearts. They don’t get put back together, not really. They just get patched. But the damage is still there.
“Stay,” I tell her, thumping the floor. “Let the boys have a joyride.”
“I want some air,” she says, still not looking at me. Stubborn. Mulish. Or like a pony, all skinny arms and legs and jutting lip, determined to have her way.
That’s the thing I always admired about Mia. Mute little Mia. I never heard her say a word until Summer moved to town. She talked to Owen, sure, but since Owen was such a nutter butter back then, I stayed well clear of him, too. And Mia was so shy she would burn up if you even looked at her the wrong way.
But deep down, I always suspected she was the strongest of any of us. Like in the way she stood up to Summer. The way she refused to laugh when Summer started in on Mr. Haggard for being gay or a pervert. Summer turned me to string, tangled me up. I forgave her everything, did everything for her, twisted and twisted trying to turn her into something she could never be. But Mia would stand there, arms crossed, staring at the ground and frowning slightly, even when Summer laid into her or played nice, trying to get Mia back on her side. Eventually Mia would give in, sure, but not like I did. I could tell it made Summer nervous, too, that you could never really know what Mia was thinking, that she had her own ideas.
It was the same with Owen. Mia had something that was hers, and she just held on to it, even though everyone said Owen was a freak and would wind up becoming a criminal. But Mia was so loyal, and Summer didn’t get it, couldn’t get it.
So Summer had to take it away.
“Don’t worry,” Owen says. “We’ll make sure she doesn’t run away.”
“Whatever you say.” I don’t like looking at Owen’s stupid swollen eggplant eye because then I start to feel sorry for him. Even if he didn’t kill Summer, he nearly killed Mia. That’s what heartbreak feels like: a little death. “We’ll hold down the fort.”
Everything in Owen’s house is oversize: the rooms, the furniture, even the sounds, which echo in the emptiness. Footsteps are mini explosions. The front door wheezes open again and closes with a whoompf. Funny how much quieter it is once the others are gone, even though we haven’t been talking. Too quiet. It makes me miss the weird crammed corners of my house, the way the furniture looks like people leaning in to each other at a party, trying to tell secrets.
I can even hear the noise of Abby’s pen across the paper. Scratch scratch. I mentally track the distance between us. One, two, three, four, five feet. A lot of sleek polished wood, like a golden tongue. I imagine for no reason crawling over and sitting right down next to her.
“You’re staring at me,” she says.
“No, I’m not.” Quickly, I pretend to be studying the table behind her instead.
She looks down again, continues making chicken-scratch notes. “Go on,” she adds after a beat. “I know what you were thinking. So just say it.”
Now I do stare at her. “What are you talking about?”
“You want to ask me why I’m so fat, right?” she says—casually, like it doesn’t matter. “You want to know why I don’t even try and change.”
She’s dead wrong. I wasn’t going to ask. Not even close.
I was going to say I like the way she rolls her lips toward her nose when she’s distracted.
I was going to say I like her bangs and how they look like someone cut them by lining them up to a ruler.
But there’s no way I’m saying either of those things out loud. I didn’t even mean to think them. So I say nothing.
“My body wants to be fat,” she continues impatiently, as if we’re mid-argument already and she’s cutting me off. “Why bother hating something you can’t change?”
“That’s stupid,” I say automatically. “You can change. Everyone can change.”
“Really?” She gives me a flat-out you’re an idiot stare. “Like you can change who you are? Like you can stop being so scared?”
That makes the anger click on, a little flame in my chest. “I’m not scared,” I say. “I’m not scared of anything.”
She gives me the look again. “Uh-huh. That’s why the drugs and the drinking. That’s why the rehab. Because you’re so good at facing up to reality. Because you’re so brave.” She shakes her head. “You’re scared. You’re hiding.”
This brings the flame a little higher, a little hotter, so I can feel it burning behind my cheeks. She’s right, of course. Maybe not about the drugs or drinking, but about why I’ve stayed in rehab, why I’ve been desperate to go back, why I’ve been avoiding my mom and sister, too. “Well, you’re scared too,” I fire back. “You’re hiding too.”
“Hiding?” She snorts, gesturing to her outfit: the taffeta skirt, the crazy shoes. “I don’t think so.”
“Sure you are.” I’m picking up steam now. “You hide behind your weirdo outfits and your makeup tutorials and your loudmouth everything. So no one will have to look at you. So no one will have to see you.”
I don’t even plan on saying the words until they’re out of my mouth. Abby blinks, as if I’ve spit on her, and I know then that I’m right. Abruptly, the flame goes out with a little fizzle and I’m left swallowing the taste of ash. I want to apologize, but I’m not sure how.
The worst is that she doesn’t get angry. She studies her hands in her lap—plump, heart-shaped, and soft, with nails the color of watermelon. I think of kissing them one by one and then shove the image out of my mind. She’s not even my type. She’s not even a lesbian, as far as I know.
“I don’t know how to be anything else,” Abby says, looking up at me again. “I’ve never been anything but too fat. Ever.”
It isn’t any of my exes that come to mind but Summer, Summer hovering somewhere around the ceiling, maybe exhaled by the pages, her blond hair transformed by the lights into an angel’s halo, but her lips curled back into a sneer. Chubby chaser. Freak parade. Dyke.
“You’re not too fat,” I say. My voice sounds overloud. Like I’m shouting.
And maybe I am, partly. Shouting at Summer to shut
up. To leave me alone. To leave Abby alone.
She isn’t yours to break, Summer.
“You don’t have to say that.” Abby cracks a smile.
“I’m serious,” I say. What’s shocking is that in that moment, I realize I am. “You aren’t too anything. You’re just fine. You’re . . . good.”
Long seconds of silence. Summer, wherever she is, holds her breath. Finally, Abby smiles.
“Wow,” she says. “I guess you’re not a total bitch after all.”
I roll my eyes. Just like that, all the awkwardness between us is gone. “Stop. I’m blushing.”
“Hey, check it out.” She scoots over to me, closing the onetwothreefourfive feet of distance. Leaning forward so our shoulders touch and I get a nice shivery feeling. Like eating ice cream with a really cold spoon. She flips open her notebook and shows me what she’s been working on: a two-columned list, with Return to Lovelorn characters and places in the left-hand column. The right-hand column is mostly empty, except that she’s written football stadium next to arena and Mrs. Marston next to the giantess Marzipan.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I want to keep track of all the real people you guys wrote about,” she says. “The real places, too. Maybe we’ll see a pattern.”
“Some of the characters we didn’t make up,” I say. “Some of them we took from the first book.” I point to Gregor, the thief, and Arandelle, the fairy, and she crosses them off her list.
“What about Brenn, the fierce knight who takes off everyone’s heads in the tournament?” She looks up. All smirk and smile. Lashes midnight-black and lips a vivid bloodred. “Sounds like someone I know.”
Broken Things Page 18
