Splendor (23 page)

Lots of “somebodies” had, least of all the doctors who performed the autopsy.

Lily’s death was nothing like one of the satisfying murders in Agatha Christie’s books; there was no single villain. Real life isn’t like that. There isn’t always someone to prosecute for a failed marriage, or a death, or a broken friendship. Real life is messy, and sometimes—very often—terrible. Fiction lies.

The truth was ugly, and complicated. I wanted to blame Gunner. And he
was
guilty…but so was I. And so were her parents, who indulged their children’s whims beyond reason, giving them so much that their kids felt the whole world was theirs for the taking.

And Lily was to blame, too.

Lily
had failed Lily. Maybe she’d been in self-destruct mode. Maybe if Gunner and his Ecstasy hadn’t happened along, something else would have, sooner or later.

I thought of a poem I’d once read. It was about a man everyone admired. One line said he “glittered when he walked.”

Lily had glittered when she’d walked.

But at the end of the poem, when the man everyone looked up to went home, he put a bullet in his head.

Maybe Lily was like that guy. Maybe she was looking for a way out.

I didn’t know.

But I
did
know one thing, right then.

I found my long silk scarf, the one Lily had brought me from San Francisco, and gently I wrapped it around the piglet, covering all the places it had been sliced, all the ways it had been broken. Then I laid the piglet in the shoe box and replaced the lid.

I stayed in my room for a long time. When I emerged, holding the box, my dad was still sitting at the table in the kitchen. He’d been waiting for me.

“I need to bury my piglet from Anatomy in the garden,” I said. “Near the koi pond.”

He didn’t ask me any questions. He just stood, folded his newspaper, and said, “I’ll find the shovel.”

I thought about arguing with him, insisting on doing this alone. But he was my father, after all. And he wanted to help me.

So I nodded mutely and headed down the stairs, the echo of his footsteps behind me. And I stood holding the box as he dug the grave, and he watched me lay it in the ground, and then together we covered it with dirt.

Then my father held me in his arms, and I cried, and cried, and cried.

Lily had been dead a week when Will returned to the island. I hadn’t gone back to school the day after I kidnapped my pig corpse and had basically spent the past three days in bed.

There should have been a funeral by now. It had been seven whole days. But when my dad had called Lily’s house, he’d hung up after just a few minutes, saying, “Oh. I see,” and looking disturbed.

“What is it?”

“They’ve decided not to have a service,” he said. “Jack said it would be too much for Laura to handle right now.”

“But…can they
do
that?”

“I don’t know, honey. Everyone grieves in their own way.” He looked like he could tell this wasn’t a satisfactory answer.

“But what will they do with…Lily? With her body?”

“They didn’t say.”

I’ve always thought the whole idea of closure was lame. No way can a ceremony make everything okay. Ronny’s service at our island cemetery certainly hadn’t brought me any solace. But the thought of
nothing
—no gathering at all—seemed wrong.

I guess Dad was starting to worry that I was looking way too much like Mom last year, because Saturday afternoon he kicked me out of the house and told me not to come home until dinnertime.

I wandered in and out of the little shops for a while, looking at refrigerator magnets and water bottles that said Catalina Island on the front and Made in China on the back. But pretty soon I realized that I was running into way too many people I didn’t want to see and I headed away from the storefronts.

Briefly, I considered visiting Lily’s parents, but the thought of being in the same room as Laura’s pain right now felt too scary. And though they’d said they didn’t blame me, it was hard to believe that could really be true.

I didn’t even want to go out to the stable.

Even the knowledge that Will’s plane had landed and that by now he must be making his way to the island didn’t elicit any real response in me. We still hadn’t talked since we’d parted at Sabine’s. The idea of seeking comfort from him, after the way I’d seen him in the alley that night…I didn’t know if it was possible anymore.

I was indifferent. Apathetic. Will could come to the island if he wanted to, though it seemed like a lot of money and time to spend when maybe we weren’t even really a couple anymore.

And though it was insignificant now, up against the hugeness of Lily’s death, the fact of my kiss with Gunner still existed.

A part of me was anxious for Will’s arrival, anyway. As I’d been thinking, my feet had taken me to the dock.

There was a while before his ferry would arrive. I bought a soda from the vending machine and found a place against a wall where I felt unobtrusive. I slid to sitting, my back against the wall, and drank my soda.

Almost automatically, I fell into the breathing that I’d practiced with Sabine, stretching my neck up, back to center, then left, center, right, center, down, center. And then I began to chant, looping together the sounds I had learned. I felt myself starting to leave my body in that way that had felt so good, so promising before.

I don’t know why. I don’t know what changed or snapped inside of me. But all of a sudden, mid-chant, on the edge of letting go, I was hit with a wave of panic. I didn’t
want
to go! I didn’t
want
to leave my body! I wanted to be grounded, right here, in this flesh, on this concrete dock, on this island, in this world.

I jumped up fast, knocking over my can of soda, and I stared ahead, wild-eyed, at nothing in particular, breathing deeply, not methodically or purposefully, but like I’d been underwater for a long time, and I rolled my head and stretched my arms, not in a prescribed pattern, but in a way that felt natural, and good, and
free.

I didn’t want to dull my senses, or sharpen my senses, or tune in or tune out to anything. I didn’t want to escape my pain. I didn’t want to avoid my truths. Some of them were painful; some of them were awful.

But they were
mine.

And then I could see Will’s ferry coming toward me, traveling much too slowly toward shore, and I knew then that I wanted Will, too. I wasn’t ambivalent at all. I was grateful that he was coming to the island.

Will was flawed. He was broken in some ways I couldn’t mend. But wasn’t everyone?

Lily hadn’t given up on me, that long winter of my mourning Ronny. Lily would never have given up on me, not ever, because she was my friend. No matter what.

I ran to the edge of the dock. I held my hand up to shade my eyes. I scanned the crowd, and though I couldn’t make out Will from this distance, I felt as though I could sense him reaching out to me across the sea.

A cold wind blew; clouds darkened the sky, and yet the sun still shined in its last brilliance before sunset. It was awful and miraculous how two things in direct opposition could exist in the same moment—the sun and the clouds; my anguish over Lily’s death and my sudden, searing joy in knowing that, once more, when I needed him, Will had come for me.

I
t wasn’t as if nothing bad had happened; it wasn’t as if things were just as they were before. But when Will stepped off the boat and embraced me, when I rested my forehead against his chest and breathed in the clean warm scent of him, I had a sensation of peace, of safety, of coming home.

We didn’t need to talk to know where we would go. We walked hand in hand to my house, but we didn’t go inside. Instead we climbed into the beat-up Volvo and headed out across the island, toward Two Harbors.

While we drove, the clouds overhead began to look more menacing, and by the time we’d reached Will’s cottage, the rain had come.

The front garden beyond the gate was covered with fallen leaves; the windows were shuttered. In the misty rain and half-dark of coming night, Will’s house looked abandoned, or maybe enchanted.

Will grabbed his duffel bag from the backseat. We hurried through the rain, bowing our heads as we ran toward the front door. But when we got to the porch Will stopped short.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “I didn’t bring my key.”

He began scanning the front of the house, looking for an open window, but I held up my key. “Remember?” I said. “I’ve got one.”

I pushed the key into the lock and turned it. The door swung open. We crossed the threshold and went inside.

The front room was cold and dark. Will set to building a fire, piling logs from the hearth and adding yellowed newspapers to help it catch more quickly. I turned on a couple of lights and then went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea.

After I’d filled the kettle and lit the flame beneath it, I searched in the cabinets for snacks.

There was an unopened tin of cookies, so I peeled back the foil and arranged some of them on a plate. Soon the water was boiling and I poured it into a teapot over the loose-leaf tea I’d found on a shelf near the kitchen sink.

Will had built a beautiful fire. We spread a blanket on the floor and sat together, drinking tea and watching the flames.

More than once the thought of the last fire I’d seen—the bonfire down at the beach—came to me. More than once I pushed it aside.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I shook my head. “I think I want to talk about the alley, though.”

Will took a sip of his tea, said nothing.

“Is that okay with you?”

“We can talk about anything you want.” He turned and smiled at me, but his eyes were sad.

“Okay.” But it was a long time before I said anything else. My tea had cooled to lukewarm when I finally said, “Will, do you know that I love you?”

He nodded.

He was going to say something, but I stopped him. “I’m not going to tell you what to do. I couldn’t, anyway. I know that. Just like no one could tell me what to do last winter, when you tried to save me but couldn’t. Only I could do that.”

Will was sitting very still, his green eyes watching me closely. The fire behind him crackled like a warning.

“But, Will, I know who I am. And I know this—I can’t love a killer. I
won’t
love a killer. That’s my truth.”

He looked troubled, and he didn’t hurry to speak. At last he said, “I’m not a killer, Scarlett. I don’t want to be.”

My shoulders were twisted in tension. I relaxed them. “I know you’re not, Will. But sometimes people do things they don’t mean to do. Things that aren’t
them,
really. But some things, once you’ve done them…make you into something else. Something you can’t unbecome.”

His expression was inscrutable. “You kissed that guy, didn’t you?”

I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything.

“You’re not changed, Scarlett. You’re not corrupted or bad. You’re still Scarlett. The girl I love.”

My lip started to tremble. My vision blurred. “I should have been better.” My voice came out in a broken whisper. “I should have been there for her.”

“You can’t save everyone.”

I half choked on a bitter laugh. “That’s funny, coming from you.” Except, of course, that it wasn’t funny. Not really.

“Let’s do something, Scarlett,” Will said. He put down his cup and slid closer to me until our folded knees were touching. He took my cup away and set it down. Then he entwined his fingers with mine, both hands, and held them up between us. “Let’s be here together,” he said. “Let’s save each other.”

We kissed then, the fire warming one side of our faces, the other sides pressed against the coming dark.

For the dark is always there—whether we feel it or not. It’s there, just to the other side of light. And fire can keep it away for only so long.

But lighting a fire is an act of hope. An act of defiance against the dark.

And so was what we did together that night, our bodies naked and wound together. I don’t think we saved each other; but we pushed away the darkness in the brilliant light of our fierce connection. We pushed it away and grabbed on tight to life, to each other.

Will stayed three days. He offered to stay longer, but I shook my head. He needed to get back to his life.

He twisted up his mouth kind of funny when I told him that, but he didn’t declare, sappily, that
I
was his life.

Because I wasn’t.

I was part of it, sure, and he was part of mine. But not all of it. And it was better that way.

We didn’t make any promises, though they floated between us, unsaid. But we kissed long, and deeply, and I think we told each other some of what we wished we could promise out loud with that kiss.

When his boat had dipped beyond the horizon—one instant still visible, and the next disappeared, as if by magic—I blinked hard and tried to recapture the image of it for one more moment.

But it was gone.

I had learned the year before that time passes. A stupid thing to say, but a deep and important truth.

It passes; it really does. In a way, I was glad in those first few weeks that I had already mourned Ronny; it prepared me for the painful disengagement I was now forced to go through with Lily.

I knew from experience that some part of my brain would still expect her to be alive, would respond to normal cues that had usually precipitated Lily—like the ring of my phone, the slamming of a locker door—as if Lily would really be there. Of course, she wasn’t.

It was like the phenomenon of ghost limbs, when an amputee feels emphatically and certainly that the foot no longer connected to his leg needs to be scratched.

The things we’ve depended on, the things that are part of us, they don’t go away easily. But I remembered this from before, with Ronny, so these moments at least didn’t catch me entirely unprepared.

My desires to push food, conversation, connections away were my ingrained responses to dealing with tragedy, so they came back. I couldn’t stop them from coming back, but I could observe them coolly and choose to refuse them.

In March, Sabine called me. Actually, she called me more than once between Lily’s death and the day I finally answered.

“Scarlett.” Her voice was full of empathy that I didn’t want to hear.

“Hey, Sabine. I’m sorry I haven’t returned your calls.” I didn’t lie and say I’d been busy.

“All of us are so sorry for your loss,” she said, “the whole family.”

“Thank you.”

“Scarlett,” she went on, “do you think you’d like to visit us again? I really think that focusing on your practice could help you heal.”

I cleared my throat. “Thanks, Sabine, but I think I’m going to take a break from all that.”

Her silence was intense. “A break?”

“Yeah. I think right now I’m going to be staying close to home.”

“I see. But, Scarlett, I really think you have a particular talent. A gift. With the right guidance—”

“Thanks, but I’m not so sure I want to develop that particular gift.”

She was baffled. “Why on earth not?”

Sabine had been good to me. She’d invited me into her home; she’d fed me and taught me things and bought me chai tea. So maybe I did owe her an explanation. “Sabine,” I said, “maybe I’ll come back to it later. But right now I want to finish high school. I want to watch my mare foal. I think I might want to learn to garden.”

“You know,” she said, trying once more, “an ecstatic practice can be part of all of those things. It can enrich those experiences, deepen them.”

“Maybe,” I said. “For now, though, I’m staying on the island. But thank you, Sabine, really. Thank you for helping me. I just need to stay here. Okay?”

She sighed. “Okay.”

Even though I didn’t want to follow Sabine in her ecstatic practice, I turned once more to Martin’s book. I returned to the Sefirot.

Slowly, carefully, I ran my finger along the spiderweb outline of the Tree of Life. Over and over again, I read the words.
Malchut. Yesod. Hod. Netzach. Gevurah. Chesed. Tiferet. Binah. Chochmah. Keter.

Kingdom. Foundation. Awe. Victory. Judgment. Loving-kindness. Balance. Knowledge. Wisdom. Crown.

I had built a foundation last year, a foundation of self-care born out of darkness, and it was to that foundation I turned now, in the wake of Lily’s death. Awe…I had experienced that sensation many times—more often in the past year or two than ever before. Victory I had tasted too, each time I earned an A, or nailed my lines for a play, and most recently, just a few weeks ago, when I had finally coaxed Traveler over the dreaded trot poles.

Judgment. I was good at that. I had judged myself, not kindly. I had judged my father, my mother, and Alice. I hadn’t spoken with them about my secret knowledge of Dad and Alice’s kiss—my judgment of it—which had become like a wedge between me and these people I loved, these people who loved me. That would have to stop.

Loving-kindness? Balance? Knowledge, wisdom, kingdom, and crown? Yes. I wanted to feel these things. I wanted to embody them.

I had read something at Martin’s house; it was in needlepoint and framed, hanging in his office.

A person without knowledge of his soul is not good.

One who moves hurriedly misses the mark
.

Proverbs 19:2

Maybe I’d been doing that by rushing my study of Kabbalah, by downing Sabine’s mystic egg and traveling away from my own home in my desire to learn, to change, to widen myself.

I wanted to return to basics. I didn’t want to be a mystic, or an oneiromancer, or a prodigy. I just wanted to be whole, as whole as I could be.

The rest of it would still be out there, if I wanted it later. For now, it could wait.

After March came April, and with it my eighteenth birthday and college acceptance—and rejection—letters. UCLA said yes; so did UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara. Berkeley said no thank you.

Dad insisted on taking me out to celebrate. I didn’t want to, but I could tell how much it meant to him, so we both got kind of dressed up (I wore my best jeans, he wore a collared shirt) and walked to the fancy seafood place on the waterfront.

He ordered shrimp scampi. I did too.

Our food came and we dug in.

Suddenly he said, “Remember what Ronny used to say about shrimp?”

I was mid-bite and I half coughed, half choked. We weren’t in the habit of bringing up Ronny. We tiptoed around the whole subject, each of us afraid of pulling off the other’s still-tender scabs of grief.

“Yeah.” My voice sounded normal. “He said they were glorified pill bugs.”

Dad laughed. “And he’d always say it just when someone was about to bite into one.” He waggled his eyebrows at me and then took a healthy bite of one of his shrimp.

I ate one of mine. “Ronny loved to ruin people’s dinners,” I said.

“Anything for a laugh,” Dad agreed. “Totally unscrupulous.”

“At least he was consistent.”

Dad nodded. “Consistently unscrupulous.”

“People loved him for it. He was the life of the party.”

“Like Lily,” Dad said. “She was like that, too.”

It was as if he had thrown down the gauntlet. And now it was my turn.

It hurt to say her name. It hurt so much, and I couldn’t keep back the tears. But I spoke it anyway. “Lily was the brightest, shiniest person I’ve ever known.”

Dad nodded. There were tears in his eyes, too, but he smiled. “Those costumes she’d put together every Halloween…” He shook his head and whistled. “Boy oh boy, did that girl like an audience!”