Lark (6 page)

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“I mean, is this what you do? Match a girl to a band, then ask her out when it comes to town?”

“No . . . ,” he says tentatively.

“Because if it is,” I sputter, “if this is what you do . . .”

“No,” he insists. “It isn’t what I do. I didn’t want to take anyone else to a concert. I wanted to take you.”

“Why?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer. Instead he pulls the belt of my coat so I fall into him, then he presses his lips against mine.

“Stop it,” I say, pushing him away.

He looks embarrassed and a little shocked. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I . . . I thought . . .”

“Wait,” I say. “Wait . . .”

I stand apart, thinking of Trevor and the strange mix of feelings I used to have around him. Feelings of being excited and dismissed, invited, then ignored. I didn’t want Trevor to touch me or see me. I didn’t want him to put his hand on me or sneak up on me when I was naked.

But Ian
, I tell myself,
is nothing like Trevor.
His eyes search mine, and I feel myself reaching up to him from the bottom of a well.

“Yes,” I say, “I do want you to kiss me.”

And he does, and the boundaries between us start to blur. I can feel his heart against mine, beating under our sweaters and coats while the wind swirls the night stars.

Chapter 18
Lark

It was past midnight, and the poor girl was still awake, sitting on the floor clutching a pillow, her ear to the wall. Her mom was on the phone, yelling at her dad, screaming that he’s ruined her life, and isn’t it great that he gets to start over with a new house and a new wife, and a new family. Even I was frightened by the bitterness in her voice.

I inched closer and put my hand on Nyetta’s shoulder. She turned around and shivered.

“You’re pale,” she said.

“I’m dead.”

“I know.”

Nyetta turned back to the wall. “My mom is so sad. I don’t know what to do.”

“Listen,” I say, “I need a favor.”

Chapter 19
Nyetta

April has given up asking about Lark. Now she wants to know all about the divorce and how it affected me, and if my parents used to fight. I tell her not really, which is the truth because I’ve decided not to lie about my family life. Only about my ghost life.

“But for a while my mother went crazy,” I say, then I go on to tell her how once my mom woke me up in the middle of the night and drove me to Hallie’s house to tell my dad to come home because the divorce wasn’t final. It was cold and she forgot my robe, and I was shivering when I rang the bell and waited on the step. My mother sat in the car with the motor running. I could see the silhouettes of my father and a woman sitting at a table through the window. I didn’t know Hallie then. She didn’t invite me inside. Instead she called my dad to the door, and he told me to tell my mom to take me home.

“Get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

So my mom drove home, then she sent me to bed, but I didn’t go to sleep. Instead I took out all my dolls from the closet and set them up like groups of sisters and mothers, aunts and daughters, in kitchens and schools and living rooms where they would read books and draw pictures or teach one another the alphabet or how to play an instrument. My entire room became their dollhouse. They slept under the armchair because that’s where it was dark. My desk was the music room and the second-floor study. The shoe boxes in the closet were kitchen counters. I drew knobs and rings on one to be the stove.

April puts down her pencil. “What your mother did was very unfair to you. You didn’t want to go to Hallie’s house at night. She did. And then she made you be the one to ask him to come home.”

“But I didn’t,” I said. “I couldn’t. I just stood there on the porch.”

“Do you feel guilty about not doing what your mother asked?”

“Kind of.”

“What she asked you to do was inappropriate. Adults shouldn’t tell their children to do things they can’t or won’t do for themselves.”

Why not?
I wonder. It seems to me parents do this all the time. They want their children to make them happy and proud. Lark’s parents wanted her to get a gymnastics scholarship to college because it was the next best thing to being in the Olympics. I could tell she felt sad she wasn’t good enough for that.

April interrupts me.

“Next time your mother or father, or any adult, asks you to do something that’s inappropriate, you can say no.”

Her advice floats by. I think about how serious Lark was. I wonder if it made her happy or sad to be like that. On the outside, she was happy, but some people keep things to themselves. Sometimes her knee hurt so bad, she limped.

April watches me the way you watch the weather change in the sky. “It can be difficult to learn how to say no,” she says. “We can practice next week.”

At night Lark decides to drop by for one of her visits. She’s dirty, like someone who’s been spending too much time outdoors. She’s not asking me to look at her wound anymore. Mostly she wants me to see how she’s turning into a tree. It’s sort of a guilt trip.

Little buds of leaves are growing between her fingers, and her hair is wild and full. She lowers her head, and I can see tiny strands of ivy growing out of her scalp.

“My heart is wood now,” she says mournfully.

“That doesn’t happen.”

“It has to me.”

“No,” I say. “You still have feelings.”

“Not really.”

“Then why are you here?”

She sighs. Tears cut through the dirt on her face. “You’re right,” she says. “I hate being dead.”

Poor Lark. She loved having a body. It was her favorite part of being alive. “I’ll try harder,” I tell her.

Lark brightens, then she starts to lift her dress, but I turn away.

“Look at me!” she yells, pulling at her hair and pushing up her sleeves. Her arms are rough and brown. “It’s happening! Right now!”

The door to my mother’s office creaks open. Her footsteps pound down the hallway.

“My mother’s coming,” I whisper.

Lark scowls back. “She can’t hear me.”

“Be quiet!” I whisper.

“I won’t! What’s the big deal about a stab wound? Don’t you realize what’s happening to me? Don’t you know that the only thing worse than what that man did to me is turning into a tree? You’re not worried about your mother. You’re putting me off because you’re a coward.”

“Stop!” I say.

“And you’re selfish! So what if you have a few more nightmares? I’m about to lose my body forever! I’m about to turn into a tree!”

But it’s too awful to see, too terrible to see the cut in her side, the place where the knife went in. I can’t do it without fainting or getting sick or so scared that I might never come back from being afraid.

“I can’t,” I say. “I will later. I promise. I want to help, but I can’t right now.”

Lark shakes her head. “Forget it. You had your chance. I’m never coming back here. I’m going to find someone else.”

Outside the wind picks up. It thrashes the trees and shrieks through the neighborhood. Shingles lift off roofs and gates clatter. Lark opens my window and slips out, legs first.

“Good-bye.”

The curtains billow and snap in a riot of anger and frost. A gust of cold wind blows into my face. When I open my eyes, she’s gone.

“Lark!” I lean out the window, calling after her. “Come back!”

The clouds break and a sleeting rain falls. I’m pelted in the face, and my wet nightgown sticks to my skin. The rain is so cold, it stings. I leap to the ground and run through the gate at the edge of my yard. Broken branches pull out the hem of my nightgown. Fir trees rattle their dry cones. I fall and pick myself up and run into the woods. Eyes flash in the dark, eyes of dead girls caught in trees.

“Little Night! Little Night!” they sing bitterly, mocking my name, hating me for failing Lark. “You’re too late. She’s like us now!”

The rain turns to ice. The sky collapses in snow. I cross the creek, cracking paper-thin ice, cutting my feet on sharp stones. Lark waits on the other side, so white she is almost blue.

“I’m here. I’m ready now,” I say. And I am. I’m tired of being afraid. I don’t want to be the one who fails her in the end.

I stretch out my hand. Before my eyes, her fingernails extend into thin roots that wrap around my wrist and pull me into her.

“Too late, too late, too late,” she says, sounding both mournful and pleased. I don’t know what she is now. Ghost or tree? Girl or wood?

I try to draw back my hand.

“Let me go,” I cry. I dig my heels into the cold earth and struggle against her.

Behind me I hear running footsteps and someone yelling. It’s my mother. She pulls me away from the tree, and I fall into her arms. I hear the panic in her voice as she tries to help me stand. Finally she scoops me in her arms and carries me home. The trees shake their branches at me. They would like to tangle my hair and scratch my skin. All Lark wanted was someone to see what happened to her, but I’m only a girl, too afraid to look.

MAN ARRESTED IN DEATH OF TEENAGER

MARCH 7: A 29-year-old man faces arraignment next week after his arrest for the murder of a 16-year-old girl whose body was found in a heavily wooded area of Potomac Overlook Park. Police say they arrested Stephen Blaire before noon yesterday at his Fairfax apartment on suspicion of first-degree murder in the death of Lark Austin.

She was declared missing on January 24 after disappearing after her gymnastics lesson. She was found two days later, beaten and stabbed and dead from exposure after the area’s first major snowstorm. Detectives have not yet revealed what led them to arrest Blaire.

Chapter 20
Eve

Under my window, men carry boxes from Lark’s house to a moving van parked in her driveway. They trundle out pictures and furniture wrapped in packing blankets. It makes me sick to think about someone else living there. Van Gogh wouldn’t want the Austins to sell their house. And if they did, he’d draw it at least a dozen times before they left. And then again after they left. But never once after the other people moved in.

Ian is in his nerdy glasses and a red thrift-shop wool sweater. He lies on my bed while I crosshatch the shutters. I’m scribbling, building up texture, defining boundaries of stucco and wood, trying to capture what I know before the new owners completely destroy it with some ghastly remodel. I’ve given Ian a reading assignment—Van Gogh’s letters to Theo, the ones where he writes about the colors of the soil, wheat, and sky, and how he has to buy more canvas right away so he can capture it all before the season changes.

Ian crosses an ankle over a knee. His mouth is slightly open because he’s concentrating. He is completely, utterly adorable.

“I love them,” he says. “But why do you? They’re all about color and you don’t paint. You only draw in black.”

I think about the paints in my father’s studio. Paints made of pigments and oils, egg yolk and minerals. Paints from England in little lead tubes. I remember squeezing out pearls of paint. The colors were so bright, they made my eyes vibrate.

“Color’s hard to manage.” I can’t say what scares me about the loss of clear lines, the blur of edges.

“But you love it,” Ian insists, holding up the book. It’s open to a detail of sunflowers against a bright yellow background. Petals spiral with brushstrokes of vermilion and orange. The stone I buried deep in my chest begins to cut its way to the surface.

My mom knocks on the door while I’m formulating a response. She carries an armload of whites.

“I’m feeling generous,” she says. “I’ll do yours, but only if you give them to me right now.”

It’s her third interruption since Ian arrived. She’s brought us a tray of sandwiches and grapes. She’s hovering, trying to help us make good decisions. I look through my hamper and hand her some clothes.

“By the way, “ she says on her way out, “the Austins are having a little gathering for Lark’s friends next week. They want her friends to choose something to remember her.”

“I’m not going,” I say. “I don’t want anything.”

“You might later,” she says.

“Mom, in case you didn’t notice, Lark and I weren’t friends anymore. We’ve barely talked since middle school.”

“Think of it as a gift,” she says. “Something her parents are offering you and something you can give them. Simply by being there.”

“You should go,” says Ian.

I glare at him.

“I’ll take you,” he offers.

My mom beams. “Thanks, Ian,” she says, and leaves without closing the door. A sock falls to the floor.

If it were another book he was reading, I’d pull it from Ian’s hands and hit him with it. But it’s Volume II of my Bulfinch edition of
The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh
, the one with the dark blue cover and the gold cypress tree on the spine. “Give me that,” I say. “Now.”

He complies. I place it gently on the floor. Then I sucker punch him in the upper arm, but he’s too fast for me. He flexes his biceps so it almost hurts me as much as it does him.

“OWWW!” he says.

“Traitor.”

“What do you mean, traitor? That’s a bit extreme.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“It’s polite,” he says. “It’s what you do when someone dies.”

He holds me tight, and I bury my face in his neck. He smells like frost and leaves and cold air. I can feel all types of bad choices coming on. Ian throws a leg over mine, then rolls me over in some kind of ninja move so that now he’s on top looking down at me. I see his rumpled black hair and white skin, his sapphire blue eyes. I keep staring, waiting, then he rolls me back over. He gets up and sits away from me, his back against the wall.

“Is something wrong?” he asks. “Are you okay when I get physical with you?”

Suddenly I’m cold. A voice inside says to say nothing, but words catch up and fight in my throat. The stone deep inside me tears through muscle and skin.

“I—I—I need to tell you something. . . .” And I do. Words stumble and fall out of me. Sounds of my mother doing the laundry float upstairs, punctuating the silence while I try to find words. I tell him about Trevor, how scared I was in the dressing room, how I tried to tell Lark, how my mom didn’t do anything once I finally told her.

“It’s like she didn’t get it. She didn’t get how it made me feel. She was focused on other things, like if he went inside me or not, or if she had to take me to the doctor.”

Ian looks at me, then away, resting his head behind clasped hands. It must be a burden to hear this.

“But I like when we’re physical,” I say. I’m shaking now. My breath cuts off so I can only whisper. “I do. I’m not always sure how to respond, but I like when we’re physical. And I want you to like me that way.”

Ian crosses the room and folds me into his arms. He kisses my hair while I lean into him. “Listen to me,” he says. “That Trevor guy is an asshole. He’s a child molester and a pervert. You’re with me now, and nothing like that can ever happen to you again.”