Off Season (15 page)

“That’s my fault,” Jon said softly.

“No,” I said, looking up at him. “It’s mine. I just plain forgot about Cecie. I wanted to be with you.”

He swallowed a great mouthful of buttered bread and grinned at me. “Me too,” he said.

“Is all that over now that your dad’s back?” I said.

“No. I’m not going to let it be over. I’ll play tennis with him, but I’m going to see you, too, and there’s no way he can stop me.”

“He could make you go home.”

“Well, he can’t make my mother go home. So it just ain’t going to happen. She loves it here. She’s not about to leave. She said so. She may seem a little . . . ditzy at times, but she’s tough when she needs to be.”

“You were crying this afternoon, weren’t you?” I said. In this enabling moonlight I felt that I could say anything to him.

“Yeah,” he said, so softly I could barely hear him. “I just got so . . . mad at him. I wanted to yell ‘You can make me play tennis till we both drop dead, but you still won’t get Sib back. Don’t you see that? Don’t you see
me
?’”

“Did you say it?”

“No. It was the first time I’d ever really wanted to, and that scared me. I wanted—I wanted to talk to your dad.

“He said that there’d come a time when I’d feel like I could talk to Dad, and it would be a great thing for both of us, but he didn’t think the time had come yet. He said that there was an awful lot for my dad to get used to, and it was starting now, and that things might get worse before they got better, but they
would
get better. I asked him how he knew that, and he said he’d been both a kid and a dad, and as it turned out, being a dad was better than being a kid. That for him it was the best thing in the world. Your father is fantastic, Lilly. I wish he was mine.”

“But . . .”

“I know. If he was we wouldn’t be sitting here. Not like this.”

Before I could say “Like what?” there was a stir among the adults up on the terrace, and we heard the booming voice of Canon Davenport, followed by the sweet, tired treble of his wife. All my muscles tensed. I hadn’t noticed that the Davenports were not here. I had not even noticed that Peaches was absent.

“. . . all the godforsaken way down to Freeport for it,” the canon boomed.

“Well, it was a pretty ride.” Mrs. Davenport sighed. “And Peaches had her heart set on it. I think it will be fun for the children. She says she got it especially for Jon.”

“I’m sure he’ll be very glad to hear that,” I heard Jon’s mother say formally.

“Where is Jon?” Peaches’ trill cut the soft envelope of moonlight. “I want to show it to him right now.”

“Let’s have some dinner first, darling,” her grandmother began.

“No. Now.”

“Oh, God.” Jon breathed wearily and got to his feet. “Let’s get out of here.”

I got up too, and took his outstretched hand. Such a big hand. Warm.

“Where are we going?”

He thought for a moment, and then pointed to the uppermost cliff of Mr. Forshee’s headland. It shone in the moonlight like marble, or snow. “Up there.”

Still holding hands, we ran, crouched over like marauding Indians, through the outer rim of the circle of light from the house and the lanterns, down onto our beach, all but covered now with the soft-breathing sea, and along it to where the cliff’s wild underbrush began and the headland cast its black shadow. We stopped for a moment, breathing hard, and then we began to climb.

Jon reached the top ahead of me, and held out his hand. I took it and stood looking up at him for a moment. He seemed lined with cold fire; the white moonlight ran over him like wild honey. I smiled. When I had first seen him, it seemed as though he had just stepped out of the sun. Now he was newly moon-born.

I told him what I had been thinking. He grinned at me.

“Just wait till you see me coming out of a poolroom or a bar. I bet I look good in neon.”

“You’ll never go in places like that,” I said, sitting down and leaning back against a smooth-worn boulder left there more than ten million years before. It had a slight concavity that fit my back and head nearly perfectly. I sat back in the flood of the moon and looked at Jon, who sat beside me. The last glacier had left him a seat, too. At that moment we reigned over heaven and earth.

“I might,” he said. “I’m going a million places besides tennis courts when I’m on my own. I’ll see every one of the seven wonders of the world. I’m going to run the Boston Marathon, swim the Bosporus, and walk the Silk Road. I might even check out up there.” He gestured at the moon.

“Have you got room for two?” I said, feeling uneasy. He had made no mention of me in his journeys.

“Well, sure,” he said, looking at me seriously. “I mean us.”

Something inside me swelled with joy. Something else took one step back, whimpering “Wait a minute.” Aloud, I said nothing.

The moonlight was an elemental force that pressed upon us until we lay back on the rock, much as we had lain side by side in the blueberry barrens on Caterpillar Hill that afternoon. It seemed right, the only thing to do up here where the entire world burned silver, from the small mountain that was Blue Hill in the west to the sweep up to the Camden Hills and the entire open sea beyond them in the east. I did not want to stand up in the face of all that. It felt like—what was the word my father had used a night or so ago, talking about Jon’s father?—hubris. This was no night and no place for hubris. This was a night for awe.

It was cold on the cliff. I had the fancy that the moon was pouring her cold radiance directly through us. Shivering, I burrowed against Jon’s shoulder, and he put his arm around me. Wherever our skin touched there was heat.

We lay in silence for a while, and then I said, “Your father doesn’t like me. I heard your mother talking to mine, and she was telling Mom what he said about you being around girls, and especially around me. I don’t understand that, Jon. I’ve hardly ever even spoken to him.”

He sighed, a long sigh.

“He doesn’t dislike you, Lilly. He’s afraid of you.”

“
Afraid
of me?” The idea seemed incredible to me, almost laughable.

“Yeah. You’re a leader. People just naturally follow you, at least kids do. He’s seen that. It scares him. He doesn’t want me around anyone who takes me away from—”

“Tennis?” I said.

“Yeah. Tennis and—the life he’s got planned for me. You know, Eaglebrook and then Deerfield and Yale and the right clubs and the right kind of friends.” He paused. “The right kind of girls.”

“What kind are they?” I whispered, knowing that whatever they were, I was not and never would be one of them.

“Well, smart, nice girls from the right families and the right schools, girls who are respectful and charming to their elders and never get into trouble of any kind and get to be deb of the year and marry the right kind of boy and have the big house and showplace gardens and the right kind of children. Two, preferably. Never more than three. And the kids go to the right nursery and preschools and prep schools and so on . . . into eternity, I guess.”

“Pretty girls?”

“Oh, yeah, that helps. Blond, with long hair and headbands and pearl necklaces their grandmothers gave them. Blue eyes.” He grinned over at me. “Good at one or two sports, preferably tennis. But of course not too good. Just enough to give me what he calls a good game.”

I lay back in the crook of his arm, silenced by the recitation. Then I said, “I don’t fit any of that. None of it. I guess he’s afraid you’re hanging around with the second string.”

“No. He’s afraid I’m going to do more than hang around you. He’s afraid I’m going to—oh, marry you, I guess. That would be a disaster, in his book. That would make me . . . not Sib.”

In my mind the word
marry
ran to and fro wringing its hands.

“When do you think he’s going to realize you’re not Sib?” I said.

“When I marry you, I guess.”

“Jon,” I said faintly.

“Well, we are, aren’t we? Going to get married sometime or other? I thought you knew that.”

“I didn’t—well, I guess maybe I did, Jon. I don’t know how to think about being married and I certainly don’t know how to think about having kids. I’m still a kid myself. You are, too.”

“No,” he said, looking at me. I could feel his eyes inside me, in the marrow of my bones. “We’re not kids. I’ve always known that. The others are kids. We’re not.”

I turned my face into his shoulder, out of the light of the consuming moon, the great moon that made changelings of people who, only a week before, had been kids but were no more. He put both arms around me and pulled me against him. I felt the warmth of his long body in every molecule, every atom.

“Have you ever had a boyfriend?” he asked, into my wind-tangled hair.

“I . . . don’t think so,” I said doubtfully. “I mean, Peter is my friend, even though he’s a jerk, and Ben and Joby—”

“No, I mean a boyfriend. Somebody you liked a lot, or maybe even loved.”

“No,” I whispered, feeling somehow ashamed, as if I had failed a crucial test. And then, “Have you ever had a girlfriend?”

“Well, a couple of times, I guess. I mean, they were girls I kissed in the movies and stuff like that.”

He did not go on. Kissed and stuff like that. What stuff?

“Are they . . . is one of them still your girlfriend?”

“Of course not,” he said, into my hair again. “I wouldn’t be here if one was, would I?”

I did not know how to respond. I did not know the etiquette of having girlfriends. Or boyfriends, for that matter. My crowd at home talked endlessly of love affairs and passion and the sweetness of forbidden lust, but in truth we knew only what we could imagine, which was not much, or what we had read in books, which none of us would have dared to do or even think of doing.

“So what happened to them?” I said. It was something I thought I should know, so as to avoid making the same missteps and losing him. The way ahead, the years to come with Jon, seemed so fraught with perils and land mines and dos and don’ts that I simply lay against his shoulder in despair. I would never get it right. I would never learn all the rules.

“I don’t really know,” he said slowly. “They just . . . didn’t change. They were both just the kind of girls my dad approved of, pretty and from—you know—good families, and shoo-ins to be Junior Leaguers and debutantes and all that, but they were just the same on the day we broke up as the day we met. I just got the feeling that if I got hooked up with one of them she’d never change, and I knew I would. It didn’t seem like much of a life to me. My dad was really pissed when I broke up with the last one. Barbara. Buffy, everybody called her. You’d have thought I’d left her at the altar, or something. God, I was barely twelve then.”

“Do you think I’ll change?” I mumbled into his sweater. It was the one he had worn when he first met me, on the day we sailed over to Sunderson’s Island and saw the ospreys. Scratchy, damp, smelling of saltwater and wood smoke and something else that I knew now to be Jon himself. Jon’s flesh. It felt wonderful, safe. Like home.

“Lilly, you change practically every day I’m with you. It’s one of the things I . . . like about you.”

I knew he meant to say “love.” I was glad he had not. It seemed a delicate and endearing thing to do, to know that even if I felt love I could not yet make my mouth say it.

“Have you ever kissed anybody?” he asked, this time into my neck, which flamed so red I knew his mouth would feel its heat.

“No,” I answered. And then, wanting suddenly to be totally honest with him even though it embarrassed me beyond words, I said, “Well, at home we used to practice kissing our arms, and once Cecie and I tried kissing each other, but it felt awful. It felt like you ought to swish out your mouth and then spit. And we didn’t know where to put our noses.”

He laughed, and then, very gently, very slowly, turned my head to his and bent and touched his lips to mine. For a moment, just touched. It felt . . . it felt like slow fire, slipping into my mouth and down into the middle of me. He lifted his head and looked down at me, and I reached up and pulled his face down to mine, my hands tangled in his hair. It was like holding the color yellow.

The next kiss was not slow. Soft and deep, but not slow. I could feel myself sliding away, following my breath into his mouth and beyond. There was no question where to put my nose. None at all. There were no more questions about anything.

“I’m going to tell.”

It was a soft hiss, like that of a snake. One you had not seen in the long grass and had stepped on. My blood ran frost cold even before I broke away from Jon and looked up at her.

Peaches Davenport stood there in the moonlight, the moon striking fire from some kind of little stones sewn into her violet dress and at her ears. The dress was stained from her scramble up the cliff, and her lavender shoes, with tiny high heels and bows, were ruined.

“You’re doing the nasty and I’m going to tell.” The hiss gave way to furious shrillness.

“My grandpa said you go to hell if you do the nasty before you get married, and you-all sure don’t look married to me. You just look nasty.”

I could not speak.

Jon could.

“Get out of here, Peaches,” he said in a slow, cold voice I had never heard. “Get on out of here before I throw your prissy little ass off this cliff.”

She turned abruptly, jerkily, like a malevolent marionette, and began to pick her way back down the cliff through the underbrush.

“You said ‘ass’ and you were doing the nasty,” she shrilled at us. There were outraged tears in her voice. “And the minute I get back down I’m going to tell.”

She did.

CHAPTER 7

I
never knew how she did it; precisely what she said, or to whom. Jon and I, frozen in disbelief and fury, didn’t move until we heard both our mothers calling us from the bottom of the headland to come down. Their voices were tight and calm. The only other sounds were the unmistakable rustles and murmurings of people leaving a place and Peaches’ treble shrieking. Precisely what she was shrieking I never really knew. My mother told me later that she had not wanted to go home when her outraged grandparents attempted to take her.