Sacred (26 page)

I felt beautiful under Will’s gaze, I felt brave and strong and sexy in Lily’s water-blue dress, and I felt my smile bright on my face. I felt
happy
, and alive.

It was after midnight when Will and I walked home through the sleepy village of Avalon. His jacket was thrown across my shoulders. The petals of my orchid were beginning to wilt, though the flower’s fragrance was just as heady.

We were quiet together, which felt nice after the thrumming music of the dance, and Will’s hand held mine again, his thumb doing its distracting thing against my palm.

We got to my house and I turned the key in its lock. Then we were inside, together, and the house was quiet. Daddy had left a light on upstairs, and at the end of the hall I could
see a light glowing in the Yellow Room, but here in the foyer it was all shadowy and private.

I turned to Will and wrapped my arms around his neck, his jacket falling to the floor behind me. His fingers were strong and warm on my back, and the hunger of his kiss matched mine.

I kissed him again and again, pressing my body against him, stepping so close that our legs tangled together and I lost my balance, Will’s arms all that kept me upright.

“Scarlett,” he murmured into my neck as he kissed a path along my throat, and one of his hands found the pins in my hair and pulled them free, and my hair fell loose around us.

I was dizzy with the heat of his kiss, the feel of his hands on my hair, on my back, on the silk-smooth fabric of my dress. I wanted to feel more of him. I wanted him to feel more of me.

It was Will who ended our kiss, pulling away just a fraction of an inch and breathing raggedly. “You should go upstairs,” he told me, his voice rough, but he dipped his mouth back to my throat and kissed me again, then again.

“Why?” I half moaned in response.

This time he stepped back a little farther, brushing his hair away from his face and trying to control his breathing. “Because your father is trusting me in his house,” he said at last. “I don’t need a speech like the one Jack gave tonight to know what’s right.”

“But I thought you felt … pulled to my body,” I replied, only half joking, closing the distance between us and tipping back my head for another kiss.

Will obliged, tracing his tongue along my bottom lip and
tightening his grip at my waist, bunching the fabric of my dress in his hands as if he were going to rip it free of my body. And I knew he could if he chose to, that the thin fabric would shred in his hands, and I stood perfectly still, hoping that he would do it.

But Will managed to even his breaths, and slowly, gently, he released the handfuls of silk and stepped away. “Good night, Scarlett,” he said, stooping to pick up his jacket from where it had fallen. “Thank you for being my date.”

He kissed me once more, lightly, and his hand touched the wave of my hair, following its length down to my waist. He sighed then, and said again “Good night” before walking down the hallway, toward the light in the Yellow Room.

My heart felt so fragile, as if it might collapse into a million pieces, and though I tried to convince myself that he wasn’t going anywhere, just to the end of the hallway, it seemed instead like he was going somewhere far, far away, where I could not reach him.

Alone now, in the shadows of midnight, I brought my wrist to my face and breathed deeply of the orchid’s sweet scent, and I wondered what would become of me now.

FIFTEEN

A
ll too soon, Will was gone from the island. Only temporarily, I tried to tell myself, but it really did feel like he would never return. I had the orchid from my corsage by which to measure time; I placed it in a little pink vase on my bureau and watched each day as its waxy white petals softened and lost their luster.

Lily was gone too, a separation that ordinarily would have been difficult but was made easier to bear by its comparison to the heavier loss of Will. As I had predicted, his kiss had sealed me to him in some way that I didn’t fully understand. It felt, with him away from the island, that some vital part of me was gone too, and as I went about my business—working at the stable, rehearsing my lines for the play, trying my best to keep house—I did so at a deficit. I felt delicate, like the Venetian unicorn in my window I’d come to love, shot through with such beauty given to me by Will’s kiss, but also
hovering on the precipice of shattering into uncountable fragments.

My role of Cecily Cardew seemed deliciously inconsequential. Like a Persian cat, bred to look good but never expected to really
do
anything, Cecily is a lovely, clever girl who enjoys the idea of love and doesn’t take anything too seriously.

I said her lines down by the pond where Will and I had kissed, and I imagined him across from me, wittily snapping back Algernon’s responses.

There’s a scene at the beginning of the play’s second act, before Algernon comes to the country manor, and Cecily and her governess, Miss Prism, are speaking about writing. Cecily tells Miss Prism, “I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn’t write them down, I should probably forget all about them.”

I thought about my own secret diary, reduced to ashes in the fireplace of the Yellow Room, and I felt a desire to record some new secrets of my own. Unlike Cecily’s, my secrets had not been wonderful, but I had loved them all the same, and missed them achingly.

How could that be? Why would I miss the pain and denial I had inflicted on myself? Alone, and bored, and anxious about our first Christmas without Ronny, I found it difficult to keep from returning to my old habits. I forced myself to eat but took little pleasure from it.

I wondered, as I had the day I drank tea with Martin, if it was possible to make yourself stop wanting something. You can deny yourself what is bad for you, sure, just as I had
become an expert at denying myself what was good … but I had still not found a way to shift my mind away from the desire to do myself harm. Was this new way of being just a permutation of my old habits?

What was more, did it matter?

I remembered something Ronny had said to me when I was little, just seven or so. He’d gone to a sleepover with some of his soccer buddies, and they’d watched a series of horror movies. When he came home, he bragged to me about having seen them, of course, and I told my parents that
I
wanted to see them too.

But Ronny was adamant that I shouldn’t. “Don’t do it, Scar,” he said to me. “Once those pictures are in your head, you can’t ever take them out again.”

Was my struggle with food, with denial and pain, much the same? I never had watched the horror movies Ronny had warned me against, yet I’d still managed to fill my head with ugliness.

I guess that’s what innocence lost is.

There were good things, though, also crowding my brain: the feel of Will’s thumb brushing my palm, back and forth; the touch of his lips to mine; the particular sensation of his hair in my hands as we kissed and kissed and kissed.…

Still, as the first week of winter break ended, and I watched my orchid fading, it felt that those images were losing the battle against my darker inclinations.

To compound my sulky mood, Delilah threw a shoe and couldn’t be ridden until the farrier could make it out to the
island, which he wouldn’t be able to do until after the New Year.

Delilah seemed as irritated by this turn of events as I was, and she picked up the bad habit of rocking back and forth against the door of her stall, bowing out the door with her weight.

So I continued to work with Traveler, though I decided to wait a while before bringing out the trot poles again. By Christmas Eve day, Traveler seemed secure enough under the saddle to venture out a bit on the trail—not far, I promised Alice, and I’d keep him to a walk,
and
I’d be sure to run him hard in the arena before we left to get all his jiggies out.

It was a cold day. I had a thermal on underneath my sweater and a down vest over that. I wore my jeans and zipped my leather chaps over them to cut the wind. I chased Traveler in the arena, stiff in all my layers, until he’d gotten all his bucks out, and then I tacked him up.

“Wear a helmet,” Alice called as I prepared to mount.

Groan. I hated wearing a helmet. Usually Alice let me slide, but I could see her point. It was Traveler’s first time on the trail and all. So I strapped the hateful black helmet to my head, smashing my ponytail to the nape of my neck.

“Okay, boy,” I said, patting his fire-red mane. “Let’s do this thing.”

Traveler moved to walk toward the arena out of habit, but I turned his head the other way, toward the trailhead. His ears perked up, and I felt his steps grow springier, as if he sensed adventure ahead.

“Don’t get too excited,” I told him. “Just a little nature stroll.”

I kept him on a short rein. He was a good horse, but there was no sense in taking any chances. His nostrils flared at all the new smells, and once he spooked a little when a bird flew unexpectedly out of a bush in front of us, but he calmed down quickly.

We were only on the trail for about twenty minutes, and when we turned back into the open area in front of the barn, I saw Alice peering anxiously out the window, looking for us. She ducked her head back after she saw me, as if she didn’t want me to know she’d been watching.

But I didn’t mind; it felt nice to know that someone was keeping an eye on me, that someone would miss me if I didn’t come home.

Back on our street, I looked at the Christmas lights strung up and down our block. Our house was the only one without lights, and as evening rolled around, ours would look like a tooth knocked out of an otherwise smiling mouth.

Mom hadn’t wanted to celebrate Christmas at all this year, but after a hushed argument I heard through their bedroom door—shut almost all the time—Dad emerged and suggested that we keep our celebration simple. No tree or stockings, just a nice meal and a few gifts.

I could see that he felt terrible about this, but it had sounded fine with me, at the time. What did I need, anyway? Nothing that comes in boxes.

But now Christmas Eve was here, and suddenly it wasn’t okay not to have all the traditions. Yes, Ronny was dead. That wasn’t changing, whether or not we had a tree.

We were an artificial-tree family. Most of the families
on the island were, for obvious reasons. So our tree, already woven with tiny white lights, was just a matter of a trip down to the basement.

Dad was at the store, getting food for tomorrow’s dinner, and Mom was in her room—of course. I found the box under a layer of dust and managed to haul it up the stairs by myself, though I did bang my shin pretty hard against the water heater.

I had never put the tree together. That was always Ronny’s job. But how hard could it be? I fitted the three pieces together and managed to stand the whole contraption in the base, then bent layer after layer of fake plastic pine branches into place before plugging it in.

It was a little crooked, so I pulled and tugged until it seemed straight. Then I returned to the basement and found the ornament boxes. They were dusty too; I burst into a sneezing fit as I made three trips up the stairs to the great room, where the tree waited for me.

Inside one of the boxes, I found the Christmas CD that we had listened to every year for as long as I could remember. I slid it into the CD player and pressed Play. “Blue Christmas” filled the room, Elvis Presley’s voice mournful.

Appropriate
, I thought, almost laughing. And I dug into the boxes.

When my dad stumbled in an hour later, his arms loaded with groceries, he found me sitting in front of the decorated tree staring up at the twinkling lights, listening to the last song on the CD—“I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”

He dropped the bags at his feet and blinked, staring at
the tree. And then the last strains of the song played, so poignant: “I’ll be home for Christmas … if only in my dreams.”

He sat down next to me on the floor. The CD spun for a moment, then stopped. The room was heavy with silence.

I saw my father’s shoulders shaking as he cried, watching the ornaments illuminated and shaded as the lights blinked, on, off, on, off.

The tree read like a story of my childhood: old, half-crumbled flour-and-water ornaments Ronny and I had made in preschool, yearly ornaments sent by our grandparents in Northern California, each adorned with our name and the year. There was an ornament that a family who had stayed with us two summers ago had sent to us: it was a group of four Christmas geese, each with a differently colored scarf, and our names—John, Olivia, Ronny, and Scarlett—written in script beneath them.

No one had sent us ornaments this year.

Poor Daddy.

I hesitated a moment, then rested my head on his shoulder. Daddy put his arm across my back and rested his chin on the top of my head.

The room softened into night, and the tree was lovely.

I spent the evening alone in my room. I heard a TV show reverberating through the wall that separated my bedroom from my parents’.