This is the kind of story where Nolan nods as if to say he agrees, that he is a co-acknowledger of this too-big feeling, and leans forward to gently place his palm against my cheek.
“I want you to know everything,” he says. “Everything and anything you want. You can open anything, ask anything. I’ll answer, I swear. These”—he moves his hand from my cheek to gesture at the shelves—“contain the outlines for Orman, and stories from when I was in junior high and didn’t know what I was doing. Diaries and notes and things that probably don’t even make sense to me anymore.” He’s talking so quickly that I’m having a hard time believing he knows exactly what he’s saying.
And I realize he has probably wanted somebody to know everything for a very long time, craved an intimacy with somebody new, somebody who is not Alex or Valerie, who might understand a fraction of his new existence.
I decide to start at the beginning, because even though beginnings can be intimidating, I’ve begun to rather like them. I gently pry the first journal out of the first shelf and sit on the hardwood floor to read. Nolan paces back and forth like a dog circling his bed and finally sits across from me, leaning against the blank wall, a front row seat to my examinations.
The journal I hold is one of many bound in leather, this one decorated with a large tree with intricate limbs stretching toward a brown leather sky. Roots curl downward from the trunk and wrap themselves around the silver clasp that binds the book closed. I flick it open with my thumb and turn to the first thick page. At first, it seems terribly underwhelming: a long list of names in different languages in an adolescent scrawl, their meanings scribbled at the sides. School notes, or glorified doodles. But the word Orman catches my eye and I gasp.
“Orman.” I breathe the word like it is precious, and I suppose to me it is.
“The very first time I wrote it,” he says, “I was probably about ten. Avery was begging for a story about the trees that grow around here—she swore they whispered her name—and Emily wanted ‘something pretty’ to play pretend. I was already dabbling in writing stupid short stories, so I thought I’d try and write something big to impress them.”
“I guess it worked.” I laugh.
There is only a tinge of sadness to his smile. “I guess it did.”
“You loved them a lot, didn’t you?” I ask.
“Of course. I do. They are my sisters.”
Neither of us acknowledges his choice of present tense. I bend my head back over the journal, trying to appear casual while flipping through the first inklings of what would someday become the phenomenon of Orman.
“Did you really know about the tree knights so early on?” I ask.
“I knew what they did, but they weren’t all female until later on, when I started to develop the world—building to fit an actual story structure rather than just a bunch of made-up games and plots we acted out. They were always meant to be guardians, though. That much I knew.”
When I finish skimming the first journal, I move on to the next, which proves to be completely unrelated to Orman and is rather the half-scribbled thoughts of a young boy with too many hormones.
“Please say you did not tell this Rebecca Wise girl that you thought her breasts were more beautiful than mountain peaks,” I say. “Please. I need to know this information before I can continue to live.”
Nolan has the decency to blush a shade of red that rivals my own.
“We never spoke,” he said. “Unless you count the time she handed me my pencil when I dropped it by her locker in the hallway.”
“According to page three, you do count it, because it’s written about here in great detail.”
“Oh, God,” Nolan says into his hands. “I take it back. You don’t have to read everything.”
“Oh, but I do! It’s my duty as the first person allowed in here. It’s for posterity, Nolan. Somebody deserves to know what the great N. E. Endsley thought about Rebecca Wise and…” I pause, my finger scanning down the page. “Jessica Rabbit?”
Despite his red hue, Nolan stares me down. “You have to admit, Jessica Rabbit is hot.”
“I do not. I mean, if you’re into unrealistic animated hourglass portrayals of women … rabbits? Was she supposed to be a rabbit?”
“She married Roger Rabbit; she’s a human,” Nolan says defensively.
“Like that makes it better.”
“Whatever. Can’t you just skip to the next journal?”
“Fine, but only because we can’t possibly read every single one of these. Do you have any you would recommend? Like maybe one that is a little less wet dream and a little more substance?”
Nolan stands in front of the case, fingers tapping against his full bottom lip, and now I’m thinking of kissing him. Will there be more before I leave? And is it fair to him or me that I want there to be another?
My first kiss was with Greg Peterson, during homeroom our fifth-grade year, on a dare, and we both got sent to the nurse’s office for a lecture because whooping cough was going around. It was a dare I had taken willingly, because I had a crush on Greg, but I was more disappointed in the kiss than in the whooping cough I got a week later.
I thought maybe I was going to be someone who would rather read than kiss.
But just as I didn’t really understand death until Jenna, I never fully appreciated the appeal of kissing until Nolan roused a longing in me that I couldn’t name. I used to think that love interests falling into each other’s arms in stories sounded disorderly and … kind of boring.
But there’s nothing boring about kissing Nolan Endsley.
When he turns back to me with a journal—a regular black spiral—I try not to look like I was checking him out the way he checked out poor Rebecca Wise of the mountainous boobs, or that I am disappointed in the plainness of the journal.
“This one,” Nolan says.
It’s another diary, from an older Nolan Endsley. Each entry is meticulously headed with the date and the time it was written, and the handwriting is so sharp and orderly that I imagine it would prick my finger to touch.
“The first bits aren’t important,” he says. “It’s around July thirty-first that you’ll want to start reading.”
I know what I’m going to find, but I’m still not fully prepared when I read the first line: “They are dead.”
I jerk my head up, but Nolan is looking down at his hands, lacing his fingers together and apart unseeingly.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
He looks at me. “I am,” he says.
So I read.
They are dead. Avery and Emily are dead. They are dead. Dead. Dead. Everything hurts. My heart actually literally hurts. I thought it was a heart attack, but Val says it’s not physical pain like that, and it feels like it, but it’s not. It’s not like the cut on my arm from where Mom clawed at me when she heard. Her hands were manicured. She was getting a manicure and I was supposed to watch them. She told me she was getting a manicure and told me before we left the house, “Look after them, Nolan.” Like I haven’t always looked after them. Like I needed to be told.
Oh God, oh God, oh God. They’re dead. I saw them. I wasn’t supposed to. Alex tried to hold me back, but he’s smaller than I am and I’m big and stupid, so I went and looked when they pulled them out of the water. They looked like drowned corpses in a horror movie, cold and blue and cold. But how? They were here a few hours ago?
Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. My fault. Dead.
It hurts. I want them to be here and I want them to come into my room and tell me it’s a joke. I want them to jump on Alex and wake him up.
Alex is sleeping on the floor. He says he’s not leaving me. He says it’s not my fault.
Dad got home an hour ago. He was still wearing his tie and suit from the meeting and I came downstairs to see him. I don’t know why, but I wanted to know what he would say. He told me everything was okay, that it wasn’t my fault, that we would be okay. But I heard him and Mom shouting at each other and then I ran bac
k up to my room.
Dead.
Emily asked me today if I would take her to the bookstore, if I would read to her again. I told her no, that I had something to do, that she should go play with Avery and I would see them tonight.
But it’s tonight. They’re not here.
Help, help, help.
Help. Dead.
I wish I were dead.
The last word is streaked across the page, the pen going in a straight line to nowhere as if the hand of the writer were jerked. I look up, crying, and Nolan looks like he is remembering how crying feels, without actually doing it.
“Alexander,” he says simply. “He woke up and saw what I was writing and took the pen from my hand and told me it wasn’t my fault. That even if it was, I owed it to my sisters to live.”
I wipe my nose on my arm. “And you listened.”
“Sort of. I took it to mean that it was my curse to keep on living, my punishment.” He snorts. “At least he made it feel that way. Especially when he crawled into the twin bed with me because I ‘couldn’t be trusted alone.’”
And because I’m sitting inside his heart and he wants me to know, I feel compelled to ask, even if I’m not sure I want to know the answer, “Do you still feel that way? Like it’s a punishment?”
“No.” His eyes drop to my lips. “It’s a privilege.”
I put the journal back in its place and move to find another. “Show me something else,” I say.
I read entry after entry about his parents. His father had left what remained of his family after Avery and Emily were gone, but Nolan saw more of him because the court ordered they spend time together every other weekend. Nolan didn’t care for the stuffy business suit he saw. Nolan’s mother, unlike mine, flourished in her independence and spent hours each week on excessive grooming, socializing, and—thanks to a hefty divorce settlement—shopping. She is painted with Nolan’s words as an unsympathetic, flat character from a fairy tale, a wicked mother who cares little for the heir to the family throne. But she comes up so often, his every interaction with her recorded, that I wonder if he knows he has written his longing into the sentences that claim he does not miss or need her.
An entry from a little under a year ago details their interaction when he turned eighteen and bought the Endsleys’ summer home in Lochbrook.
Mom sent a sealed note via her realtor. Why the woman hasn’t learned how to text or email, I don’t know. “If you want to purchase the furnishings, I can send my assistant over to determine a reasonable price.” I bet the money from Dad has run out already and she’ll force me to haggle with some nameless assistant for my childhood bedspread, Emily’s picture books, and Avery’s soccer ball.
“Show me something happy,” I say, when I can bear the weight no longer. “Something good.”
“Something that doesn’t suck?” He smiles. As I’ve read, he’s been thumbing through journals on his own, and he looks no worse for wear. I wonder if it’s easier for him to relive fragments of memory with me nearby. I hope so.
He hands me another leather-bound journal, this one with a dangling cord wrapped tightly around its middle.
“What is this?” I ask.
“Something good,” he says.
The handwriting inside is legible, but only just. I begin to read the first entry, which is undated and sideways on the page in another childish scrawl.
Today we went to Orman. Orman is Turkish for forest. I read it in a book. I also read a book about a mouse and his mouse friends. It was weird and the mouse had a weird name. Em and A liked Orman. I made it up. They want to go again tomorrow. For lunch I ate sandwiches but Em cried because she wanted my ham sandwich instead of her cheese sandwich so we traded. Avery was mad because I found out aviary means bird cage. I read it in a book. She said she doesn’t want to be in a cage. Em cried because she thought Avery would be in a cage but then she forgot and finished her sandwich.
I’m giggling, and the feeling is so foreign that it makes my stomach feel as if I’ve drunk an entire carbonated beverage in one gulp.
“That’s not the good part.” Nolan leans over to flip a few pages. “Start on the top of this one.”
Mrs. S says I can call her Valerie. Mrs. S owns the bookstore. Mama doesn’t care if we go to the bookstore by ourselves. We have to hold hands when we go alone. Mama drops us off and says she’ll be back in an hour. Valerie feeds us green potato chips that she says are vegetable chips but they are really just potato chips. She makes us wipe our hands so we don’t get crumbs on the books. The room with the lighthouse and the mountain is my favorite. Em and A said it is where Orman lives. I told them they were right. They think I am the King of Orman. I think they are right.
“Wait,” I say. “The Orman room was there before Orman?”
Nolan nods, smiling as he reads his childhood writing upside down. “Yeah. Orman wouldn’t be what it is if not for Val and this store.”
“Or Avery and Emily,” I say.
He nods, a sad but not too sad smile on his lips. “Yes.”
I delight in this moment in Nolan Endsley’s heart, with the history of Orman and him open in my hands. I let it overlap with thoughts of Jenna and her insistence on buying perfectly formed books. I think about how my dad used to read to me every night before I fell asleep. I marvel at two little girls and a barely older boy playing pretend on sandy beaches beneath a shimmering sun and in the cool shelter of an extraordinary bookstore. And I slowly start to populate the bleak world with things that make life worth living.
When I’m done rebuilding the world, it is made up of love, the loss of it and the finding of it. It is the finding, the possibility of discovering more that I love in this lifetime and not wasting time on things I don’t, that makes me grapple for my cell phone before I can change my mind.
When Nolan looks at me questioningly, I say, “Can you give me a minute alone? There’s something I need to do.”
He scrutinizes me, my phone lit up and ready to call Mark, and smiles.
“I’ll go make sure Wally isn’t causing mass destruction. Don’t forget to put the carpet back when you leave.”
He stops halfway up the ladder, the thread between us pulling my gaze to his.
“Amelia?”
“Yeah?”
“Good luck.”
He waits perched at the top of the ladder, his head tilted as he listens intently, before he decides the coast is clear and scuttles to open the door and push the rug out of the way in a single practiced move. There is absolutely no way he’s never been caught.
I wait until I hear him slide the carpet back over the door and then I swiftly call Mark, before I can overthink it or a clever wind can intervene.
Mark answers on the first ring.
“Amelia, is everything all right? Can you get to the airport okay? Are you hurt?”
I wish the compass rug were here to fiddle with. I pleat the denim of my jeans between my fingers instead.
“No, I’m fine. I just … I wanted to see if you could talk.”
“I’m a little busy right now. Can we chat tonight, when we pick you up from the airport? I’ve got a client here and—”
“I don’t want the scholarship,” I blurt out, scrunching up my eyes. “I … I mean, I don’t want to be a professor. At least, not of English. I think. I don’t know what I want to do at all.”
I hear muffled voices, Mark apologizing to whatever client is in the room with him, and the sound of a heavy door closing.
He’ll understand. Mark will be warm and concerned. He’ll help me find a way to explain to Trisha.
“Amelia, what is the meaning of this?”
His voice is a hiss, a serpent in my new garden, and my stomach drops. I’ve never heard Mr. Williams’s voice rise above mild irritation. It seems silly, but I thought him incapable of anger, like it wasn’t in his chemical makeup.
I was wrong.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. This time I’m not apologizing for Jenna’s death
but for my own perplexities, my inability to choose a path that is smart and safe and secure. I need to explain why I’ve changed my mind, but how do you explain clever winds and invisible whales to lawyers in suits?
“It’s not what I want,” I say.
“You want to major in something different?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “I don’t know if I want to go to Montana at all.”
Silence.
“Jenna would want you in school as planned. This is nonsensical. Amelia, what else can you do?” His voice rises until it fills up all the phone lines between Dallas and Lochbrook. It is a large lump of sound working its way through wires, startling birds and small children gazing out car windows, even though I know cell phones don’t use wires.
“I don’t know,” I say again, my earlier resolve vanishing. “I don’t … I’m not sure. Maybe photography? I was thinking maybe I could start out at a community college. Figure out what it is I want to do.”
“That is not a suitable course of action. That will not help you get into the finest graduate schools in the country. Community college is a place for retirees to take computer lessons and for kids who weren’t accepted into schools like the one you will be attending. Is that what you want? To waste all of your intellect and precious time?”
I’m floundering in his sea of words, hands clawing at the waves and trying to find air to breathe. “No,” I say. “That’s not what I want.”
I want to say he’s wrong about community college and ask what’s so wrong with figuring out what I want to do and what I’m good at before I spend thousands of his dollars on a degree I might not even like.
I want to tell him that I don’t know what I’m doing, that Jenna was the smart, efficient one, not me.
My lungs are out of air, but Mark’s aren’t.
“Amelia,” he says, keeping his voice calm and level, if strained. “You have suffered a terrible tragedy at a very young age. You are understandably distraught. Trisha and I understand better than anyone how close you two were.” Jenna’s dad has started crying, and I’m left to drown in his tears as well as his words. I want to tug the thread between Nolan and me as hard as I can, but Mark keeps talking. “Go to school like you planned, like Jenna wanted. You should have everything you need to lead a successful life. We will help you. Do you understand?”
Amelia Unabridged Page 21
