Amelia Unabridged

by Ashley Schumacher

  Nolan looks out at the horizon when he asks, “Why wouldn’t you say no? Because of the money?”

  “I mean, partly, I guess,” I say. “I—my mom—we can’t afford college. But … I don’t know. I’ve never been sure of what I want to do, so I might as well do this, right?”

  “No. Tell them thanks but no thanks and figure out what it is you want,” Nolan says. Like it’s obvious. Like it wouldn’t be ripping out the Williamses’ hearts and squashing them for sport.

  “Oh, okay,” I say, sarcasm and bitterness leaking into my voice. “And you can call your publisher and tell them you’re ready to publish the third Orman book.”

  Nolan stands back like I’ve slapped him.

  “That’s different,” he says. “It’s not so simple.”

  “Why not?” I turn the stone over and over in my hand, and as it dries, the little sunbursts disappear.

  “You know it’s different.”

  “I know it’s hard for you because you’re not sure what you want to do yet. It’s obvious you’re not ready to move forward with Orman. Well, it’s the same for me, Nolan. The exact same thing.”

  “But it’s not,” he says. “You are letting Jenna call the shots when you should be the one deciding.”

  “Jenna is dead,” I say. The last word comes out hard. It’s my turn to be hurt. “She can’t tell me what to do anymore.”

  “That’s a half-truth and you know it,” Nolan says. “The dead can hold more sway than the living.”

  I flinch but don’t answer. Agitated, he turns, sloshing back through the water to the shore and his discarded sneakers. I don’t follow, even when he stops and crooks his arm, waiting for me to take it.

  When I don’t move, he turns his head.

  “Come on, Amelia.”

  “I’m not Wally,” I protest. “I don’t come when called.”

  He rolls his eyes at me, smiling softly, with apology. The line between us pulls from where it has been sagging in the water.

  “Amelia, come with me. There’s something I need to show you. Let me…” He takes a step toward me, extending his hand. “Let me take you to Orman.”

  I want to take his hand and follow him to whatever magical place inspired my favorite books, but what if it wrecks me? What if it makes the manacles feel even tighter than they already are? I have what I came for, his memory about Jenna. Maybe that should be enough. I shouldn’t ask about Orman or the 101st copy. Maybe it was all just a means to get me here, Jenna pulling strings from … wherever she is. I should cut my losses before I grow even more attached to a person that I’m going to lose.

  “I’m leaving soon,” I tell him, hating myself for every word. “I have to go back to Texas. In the fall, I’ll go to Montana. After that, graduate school. There’s no room for you in their plan, Nolan. That is how this”—I gesture between us—“ends. It doesn’t matter what movies we saw, what fake school we went to, what stupid pictures we drew. At the end of the week, I’m going away, and you’ll stay here, and we should stop this before we get hurt.”

  Nolan watches me, his eyes falling to the erratic rise and fall of my chest, to my hands clenched at my sides. He crosses to me in three easy strides and waits for me to look up into his remarkably calm eyes before he speaks.

  “We’ve already been hurt,” he murmurs, slowly reaching out to take my hand, to lead me from the lake. “What’s one more scar?”

  I don’t realize until we’re halfway to town that his fear of water seemed to vanish when he was beside me.

  chapter twelve

  The high afternoon sun slows the town to a crawl. We walk past shop owners flipping BACK SOON signs and locking front doors, nap-ready children being tugged behind their parents, and other teens drifting into the quiet coffee shops with live musicians singing through scratchy speakers.

  When I finally loop my arm through the crook of Nolan’s elbow, he brings his hand up to cover mine. Even with our arms linked, I have trouble keeping up with him as we head to the other side of town, past Val’s, farther than I’ve ever been in Lochbrook. When we come to a small hill covered with trees pressed tightly together, we are forced to drop arms to navigate them.

  Eventually, we come to a low iron fence. It’s as if the dead and their memories might walk out if some sort of barrier weren’t erected to keep them in.

  Orman is in a graveyard?

  I used to like cemeteries. I liked the pristine grass, uniform and almost fake in its perfection. I liked the solemnness laced with serenity, perfect for reflection or brooding or simply remembering that life has its hard limits.

  I hate them now. They make me think of cold and loss, and somehow each gravestone has become not one of many but an individual story with its own queue of mourners.

  This is why I stop. Nolan has to give me a gentle tug on the arm to coax my feet back into movement.

  “It’s okay,” he says. I’m not sure which of us he is trying to reassure. “Please?”

  It’s his please that pushes me through the low, open gate, and for once I am glad that Jenna—or what’s left of her physical shell—is not here.

  But who is?

  We crunch through soggy leaves, wet from yesterday’s rain, and past a mix of terribly old and bitterly new headstones. I read the names as we go and can’t keep myself from saying a silent prayer for those left behind, even if the death date is a century before my time. The train station of my mind is filled with errant, disconnected engines that speed past the loading platform. Can you inherit grief like you inherit eye color? I wonder how many people came to these funerals. I wonder if there’s anything left of the casket or the person in there. I wonder if there’s anyone left who remembers Jane Smith or Daniel Folks.

  Somewhere nearby, I hear a chorus of high, tinkling wind chimes. The sound grows louder as Nolan stops in front of another iron gate. It quarters off the far left corner of the cemetery. A mini forest of trees that have not been cut down to make room for more bodies stands within. This gate is locked and much higher than the low gate through which we entered. Nolan takes a key on a long silver chain from beneath his shirt and fits it into the padlock, the gate creeping open with a cheerful, almost welcoming whine.

  We stand at the mouth of the gate, me confused and terrified about whose grave I’m about to see, while also trying not to think of Jenna and her grave and her deadness. Nolan puts the silver chain back over his head and reaches down, linking his fingers through mine.

  “Okay?” he asks.

  I look down at our joined hands, turning them from side to side with the movement of my wrist.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  And somehow it is.

  Through the heavy green trees, the branches just barely grazing our arms, we walk side by side for the few steps it takes to reach the small clearing. From here, I could almost imagine a wide forest spreading out around us, endless and dark and enchanting. The chimes play their haunted melodies, smiling at our joined hands.

  My breath catches when I see the two smoothed hunks of petrified wood nestled between twin cedar trees, each natural headstone bearing a small metal plaque. They feel like Orman, blissfully new while unmistakably old. Their purpose is enough to make my insides roll into a ball, but at Nolan’s urging, I release his hand and fall forward to my knees to read the words aloud.

  “Emily Jane Endsley and Avery Juniper Endsley. Together in life and death.”

  The birth dates are separated by a handful of years, but the date after each dash is the same.

  Sisters. Nolan Endsley had younger sisters. And they died on the same day. “Everyone thinks I came up with Orman in high school, which is partly true,” Nolan begins. “Most of it came from before, though, when my sisters and I were little. I made up stories for them, worlds. Orman was their favorite.”

  I continue to rack my brain for any whisper of siblings in interviews or internet ramblings and find nothing. Nolan shakes his head at my expression.

  “They’re no
t mentioned anywhere,” he says. “Anywhere. Dad made sure of that.”

  “But why?” I ask. My brain is scrambling for an answer. Maybe there is bad blood between him and his family, now that he has taken the stories he made for his dead sisters and turned them into gold.

  Nolan sighs, and I recognize the slight shake in his breath for what it is: the piteous, defeated sound of grief.

  “They’re dead.” It’s all but a whisper. And then, impossibly quieter: “It’s my fault.”

  Dead means something new when death has touched you. Before Jenna died, the death of other people seemed like a sad story that didn’t ever quite reach my heart. Death was inevitable, natural in its unnaturalness.

  Death was for other people.

  But as I watch the first hint of a tear nestle in the corner of Nolan’s eye, I feel the ground beneath us give way, my own tides of grief rising up to meet his.

  I suddenly feel impossibly old. But I force myself to look at the stones, at Nolan, and the evidence of our artificial history, which we created to justify a relationship that feels much older than a couple of days, and I make myself stand in the waves.

  “We summered here as a family,” Nolan says, staring at the stones. His eyes are glazed, unseeing. “The blue house was our vacation home—I bought it from my mom with the money from my first book. Every year my mom, dad, me, Emily, and Avery came here. Dad would fly back and forth to New York for meetings and Mom would spend time in town, so the three of us would be left alone a lot.”

  He pauses, his eyes refocusing and turning back to me. “It’s safe here, obviously.” He laughs a little huff of air, completely devoid of mirth. “I mean, the crime rate hovers somewhere around zero percent. I don’t want to make it sound like they put us in danger. Besides, we loved it.

  “Except, I was supposed to watch them,” he says. “Every summer, we vacationed here. Every summer, I was supposed to keep an eye on them. But I was fourteen and stubborn and pimply and I liked the girl who worked at the ice cream shop, so I told Emily and Avery they were old enough to go to the water alone. I told them to go and to check back in later. They begged me to come, especially Emily, who was always afraid of everything. They never came back.”

  He moves to sit on the ground next to me, our hands finding each other through the fog of our thoughts and the ominous presence of Jenna and his sisters. He shivers and clenches his eyes shut.

  “I looked everywhere,” he says. “I went to the beach and to the house. I went to all our favorite spots in town, with Alex. He came to help me after I rushed into the store crying. When we couldn’t find them, Alex got Val and we drove in her car and looked and looked. Val took me to the police station. They asked if I knew where the girls had last gone. I didn’t, but I guessed that, maybe without anyone telling them not to, they went to the alcove and tried to swim there. We were never allowed, because of the riptides. And that’s exactly what happened.”

  A long pause ensues. The wind chimes cry through the trees and the leaves rustle their discontent. Behind Nolan’s eyes, a pack of wolves descends on a lost squirrel. The squirrel does not struggle as it is ripped apart. It thinks this is the way of things. It thinks it deserves this fate.

  “After, all Dad was worried about was keeping it out of the press. No articles in the paper, no nightly news coverage. I hated him for it—strolling around in his rumpled suit, yelling into his phone—but I think it was just something for him to do. I think he still does it, you know? That’s why he never stops working, so he doesn’t have to think about the girls or me.” A pause. “It’s my fault,” Nolan repeats.

  I want to say this isn’t his fault, death waits for no person and comes whenever it pleases, but I don’t contradict him. Sometimes the best way to absolve the guilty is to let them feel the weight of their culpability, no matter how untrue.

  “When Jenna died,” I say, voice quivering, “I thought that was my fault, too. She offered to take me. The Williamses wanted to pay for me to go to Ireland with her to study abroad. They’re so generous, but I didn’t want any more of their charity than I had already taken. It was too much, too perfect, and not meant for me. I said no and no and no until they stopped asking. And I can’t help but think I could have changed something if I were there, like I could have thrown myself over her so we would both survive the crash. Or I could have stopped her from getting into the car in the first place by convincing her to try a different snack food from every place in town or something, instead. I could have changed the outcome.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Nolan says. “You weren’t even in the country. How could it be your fault?”

  “Nolan, you are not a current,” I say. “A sulking, determined force of nature, sure, but you are not the current that killed your sisters.”

  “But I am,” he says. “I could have prevented it.”

  “You don’t know that,” I argue.

  “Of course I do! I was supposed to be watching them, but I had better things to do, so they died.” His voice flickers between outrage and fear, sadness and despair.

  “We can’t die in their stead,” I say, tears muddling my voice. I’m on my hands and knees, facing him, pleading with him, with myself. “We can’t. No matter how much we want to or how much easier it would be, we can’t take their places. We have to learn to live like this, Nolan. For their sake. And for ours.”

  We’re both breathing hard, our rising voices fusing with the sound of the chimes, a distressed, clanging noise that causes the whales to forget to rise to the surface for air.

  Sorry doesn’t help. And there is nothing you can say to someone who is hurting to make them feel better. Jenna is not here, and neither are Emily and Avery, and words—no matter how eloquent or pleading—will not bring them back.

  Instead I say, “You sent them to Orman, didn’t you?”

  It clicks together like the easiest of children’s puzzles, with a space for each distinct shape cut out in a slab of wood. Emily and Avery were transformed into Emmeline and Ainsley and swept off in a magic boat to Orman.

  “I did,” Nolan says, so quietly I almost can’t hear him above the wind chimes.

  “So when Jenna found you…” I trail off. I don’t need to finish.

  “It was the water,” he says. “It’s always the water. I looked out the window at the Pacific and could see them playing in the waves. It—” He stops, taking a deep breath. “It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen them drown, but it doesn’t ever get easier, that part of it. I saw them get pulled under and disappear. And, like my therapist told me to, I let myself see them rise up together, inside the magical canoe from Orman as it broke the waves, sailing out to sea. But this time the canoe broke beneath them and they drowned again. Twice in less than five minutes.”

  I rub his wrist with my thumb. There’s nothing to say.

  “The only thing I could think, standing at that window, was how I was about to give away the last parts of them I have, the last story, the last everything. I would have to say good-bye to Orman, but also good-bye to them. I couldn’t visit them in the forests or castles again, couldn’t drop in when I felt lonely or sad or … or…” He releases another huff of angry air. “God, aren’t authors supposed to have all the words?” He tries to force a laugh, but it comes out more like a sob.

  “Broken?” I offered. “You couldn’t go to them when you felt broken anymore.”

  He nods, a short decisive tick. “Yes, Amelia. Broken.”

  We sit together in brokenness for a while. The wind chimes are tugging at my vocal cords, asking me to speak, and like all those years ago when Jenna found me outside of Downtown Books, I say the first thing that comes to mind.

  “Jenna wanted me to be an English professor,” I say. “She had it all planned. Like, on a poster board and everything. We would go to the same schools, take the same electives and basic classes together.… She labeled it ‘The Master Plan’ and kept it in her room, where anyone could see.”

  Nolan lean
s forward, running a hand along Emily’s stone. “And you don’t want to be a professor?”

  I bunch my knees to my chest and lightly bang my forehead against them. “I don’t know,” I mumble. “I have no idea.”

  “So, don’t,” he says. “Be something else. Be whatever you want to be.”

  “But how am I supposed to know what that is? Everyone else seems to know already. They’re premed or engineering majors or marine biologists or something with an actual title. I just want to read books or take pictures or find the world’s best ham sandwich.… How can any of those things be made into a career?”

  Nolan is silent, his free hand now stroking Avery’s stone. “There are a hundred thousand ways to tell a story,” he begins. “Medical students help people live longer and continue their own stories. Engineering majors tell a story of technology that goes back to cavemen with rocks and sticks. Marine biologists piece together shreds of plot until they know where whales sleep at night and where fish live in coral reefs. Everything is a story, not just writing. You need to find the story that means something to you, a story you like telling.”

  He falls silent again, the wind and chimes kicking up in a melancholy symphony that sounds like a heart breaking. I try to take my hand back to move windblown hair out of my eyes, but Nolan tightens his grip before quickly releasing it, like he doesn’t want to let go.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t mean to do that.”

  I leave my hand in his, using the other to rid my sight of hair.

  I’m crying. I think I’ve cried more in the last month than I have the entire rest of my life. Maybe if Jenna were here, she would change her mind. Maybe if she knew I would be alone, she would tell me to forge my own path.

  I am trying to hold it all in my head when Nolan says, “You’re the only person outside of Lochbrook who knows about the girls. We managed to keep it from the press, even after the books became popular and reporters came to poke around, but only because Val has everyone scared shitless.”