Everafter (Kissed by an Angel) (8 page)

It was close enough to walk.

“DRAW THAT,” PHILIP INSTRUCTED WILL. “IVY WEARING
sea tinsel.”

Beth glanced up and smiled. “I like that description.”

Ivy fingered the pile of dark, papery sea grass that Philip had artfully arranged on her head. “I assume I’m the bad guy in this story.”

“Yup,” Will said, his pencil moving swiftly. “But I’ll change the nose, and no one will recognize you.”

Beth laughed. Her own pencil had been moving fast since they’d spread their towels on the beach. From where
Ivy sat, it looked like poems rather than stories, but Beth framed her notebook with her body, making it hard for someone else to read.

Ivy’s mother, stepfather, and Philip had arrived at noon, and Ivy had joined them after work. They had set up camp behind the dunes, on the long spit of land that was the end of Nauset Beach, facing Nauset Harbor rather than the ocean. It was low tide, with the mud flats exposed, their wet surface shimmering with blue sky and clouds, reflecting the perfect summer day. Aunt Cindy had armed Philip with sand rakes and a wire basket for clamming, with the promise to show him how to make “chowda.”

“Ready, champ?” Andrew asked, picking up the rakes.

Ivy’s mother and stepfather had just returned from a walk—holding hands—which made Ivy smile. Beth gazed at them for a moment, then scribbled madly, perhaps something about love after forty.

“Don’t forget the basket, Philip,” Andrew said.

Ivy watched her stepfather and brother stroll side by side toward the flats. “Philip walks like Andrew.”

Her mother, after much arranging, settled into her sand chair. “I know.”

“How does that happen? They don’t have the same body structure.”

Her mother smiled. “It’s love, not birth, that makes a child.”

An hour later, Ivy tried her hand at clamming, and Philip was eager to teach her how. She heard in his instructions an echo of Andrew.

“Go easy. Feel the ridge? Spread your fingers like this. That’s the way.”

Ivy smiled at the little-boy version of the soft huskiness of Andrew’s voice.

“Dig with your fingers on each side. Ease it out,” Philip told her.

Hands coated with black sand, Ivy held up her trophy.

Philip raised a triumphant fist, something Andrew didn’t do.

When the basket was full of clams, Andrew and her mother carried it back to the inn. Ivy and Philip paddled about in the tandem kayak. Philip, rowing in the front, sang like a drunken pirate, then scrunched down and laid his head back, staring straight up at the sky. “It’s so deep,” he said.

Ivy glanced upward and smiled. She had always thought of the sky as high, but she liked imagining it as deep, another ocean.

Philip dropped his arm over the side of the kayak. Sunlight, reflecting off the water, danced on his smooth cheek. “I wish I knew how far away heaven really is.”

“Why?”

“So I’d know how long it takes for Tristan to go back and forth.”

Ivy stopped paddling. “What?”

“So I can be home the next time he visits.”

She caught her oar just before it slipped into the water. “What do you mean, ‘the next time’?”

“I think—I’m pretty sure—he came to our house while we were away.”

“Because?” Ivy asked.

“He missed me.”

She laughed lightly, but her heart was beating fast. “He can’t help but miss you, Philip. I meant, what makes you think he was at our house? Tristan went on to the Light, remember?”

“Well, that’s what we
said
,” her brother replied. “But it’s likely we were wrong.”

It’s likely
—another Andrewism.

“Mark Teixeira was moved,” Philip went on. “On my baseball rug, the bases were loaded, and Mark Teixeira was up at bat.”

Philip was talking about his baseball cards. Ivy had watched Tristan move the cards around the bases and had told him that Philip never forgot where he left his players.

“Someone made Mark hit a grand slam. Tristan would do that.”

Ivy let the boat drift. Should she tell Philip the truth?
For herself, knowing that Tristan was here with them outweighed all the risks created by that knowledge. But what was better for her brother?

“Couldn’t Lacey have done it?”

“No, she thinks baseball’s boring. I wish that Tristan had waited till I got back.” Philip sighed. “Sometimes I talk to him, even though he doesn’t answer. I still miss him. A lot. Do you?”

Ivy’s throat felt tight, keeping her from answering right away.

Philip sat straight up and turned to look at her. “You don’t?”

“Every day I’m not with him, I miss him,” Ivy said.

“Why did God take him away?”

“God didn’t,” she replied firmly. “Gregory did.”

“Then why did God let it happen?”

“I don’t know, Philip.”

“Neither does Dad.”

They were three-quarters of the way across the harbor—so close, Tristan could have come out on the deck and waved to them. It would help Tristan to see Philip. And Philip had always been able to keep her secrets when they were living in the same house as Gregory.

“Did you tell Dad that you think Tristan came to our house?”

Philip shook his head. “Some things you can’t say to other people. Dad would probably freak out if I told him Lacey likes to sit in his recliner. After she leaves, I always have to push it back in.”

Ivy laughed out loud, but tears were in her eyes.

“Lacey said you’re friends with that guy from the hospital.”

“Luke,” Ivy responded. “What else did Lacey say?”

“That he’s hiding from the police, but he didn’t really hurt anybody. Is she right?”

Ivy heard the trace of worry in her brother’s voice. “Absolutely right. I’m trying to help him.”

“Why?”

“Because I care about him.”

Philip frowned. “More than you care about Will?”

“
Different
than the way I care about Will.”

“Different than the way you care about
Tristan
?”

This kid didn’t miss much. “More like the way I care about Tristan.”

Philip looked over his shoulder at her, appraising her with a long, surprisingly adult gaze. All that he had been through had made him wiser than his years, Ivy thought. Her heart rather than her head made the decision: She paddled toward the opposite shoreline.

“Where we going?” Philip asked.

“To see a friend.”

“Luke?”

“That’s right.” She’d leave it to Tristan to tell Philip who he was.

Philip was silent while they towed the kayak onto the narrow strip of sandy shore and walked a roundabout route to the house. When they were ten feet from the front door, hidden from the street by a cluster of bushes, Ivy whistled a melody from
Carousel.
Philip listened as she whistled the song twice, his eyes wide with curiosity. A brass latch turned, operated from the inside, and the main door fell inward about an inch.

Ivy glanced toward the street, then whispered to Philip, “Walk like we come here all the time.”

She entered first and Tristan’s arms encircled her.

“I’ve brought someone to see you, Luke,” Ivy said, letting Tristan know she hadn’t revealed his identity.

Tristan let go of her. His face lit up. “Philip!”

Philip looked him up and down, his lips pressed together—measuring “Luke” against two very high standards, the Tristan he had known and Will.

Tristan smiled at him. “Do you remember me? From the hospital.”

“Yes.” Philip’s answer was clipped.

Tristan reached into his jeans pocket, then stretched out his hand. In his palm lay Philip’s angel coin. “You gave me this. I’m never without it.”

Philip’s eyes dropped to the gold coin. “I thought you needed it.”

“You were right.”

Philip began to reach for it, then withdrew his hand.

After a long silence, Tristan asked uncertainly, “Do you want it back?”

“I want
Ivy
to have it.”

Ivy saw the flicker of hurt pass over Tristan’s face, though he covered it up quickly. She wanted to tell him that Philip saw him as an intruder taking Tristan’s place in her heart. “Philip and I were just talking about Tristan,” she said, “how much he misses him, how he still talks to him even though Tristan doesn’t answer.”

Tristan nodded, then handed Ivy the coin.

“Let’s sit down,” she said. “You still have that great movie in the VCR?”

“Oh, yeah,” Tristan replied, his eyes still on Philip, “and I discovered four others. Got a whole Lacey Lovett film fest.”

“You have Lacey’s movies?” Philip asked.

“Right this way,” he said, leading them back to the family room. “You have a favorite?”

“I’ve only seen one,” Philip replied. “A friend pinched it for me.”

Pinched.
Philip was a word sponge, Ivy decided. He’d probably picked up that expression from his friend Lacey and didn’t know it meant stealing.

They sat on the sofa in front of the big-screen TV, Philip sticking close to Ivy, Tristan sitting down on the other side of her. He reached for a stack of DVDs and handed them to Philip, who sorted through them, reading the descriptions on the backs.

Tristan couldn’t take his eyes off Philip, and Ivy realized he had missed her brother as much as her brother had missed him. When Tristan finally glanced at Ivy, she read the question in his haunted eyes.
Tell him?

“It’s up to you,” she whispered.

Tristan swallowed hard and looked away. Ivy wondered if he was afraid of Philip’s reaction. Tristan knew he was Philip’s hero. Did he imagine that Philip would love him less because he no longer had angel powers?

“Where’s
The Revenge of the Zombie Soccer Mom
?” Philip asked, opening the empty plastic case.

“In the player. Want to watch some of it? Lacey Lovett is the soccer mom’s daughter—and growing up just like her.”

“Sounds good,” Philip said enthusiastically, then, as if catching himself at being friendly, added coolly, “I guess so. Doesn’t matter to me.”

At the hospital, before Tristan remembered who he was, Philip had been instinctively drawn to him. Ivy was hoping that Philip would now perceive some sign of Tristan inside Luke; it would reassure Tristan that the same soul was still shining within him. But that wasn’t going to happen, she
thought, not as long as Philip saw this stranger as competition for the Tristan he had loved so.

“It was just getting interesting,” Tristan told Philip, clicking on the remote.

While the frames of horror, so bizarre they were comical, flitted across the screen, Ivy saw a different set of scenes: Philip and Tristan on the floor of her music room, playing checkers; Tristan wearing a party hat as Philip’s guest of honor at his family birthday dinner; Tristan and Philip in tuxes, the first time they met.

At the wedding reception for Andrew and her mother, both of them had slipped away to the kitchen storeroom. Tristan, having showered the bridal party with a tray of fresh vegetables, had been fired from his job as server, and was waiting for his friend, who was still working. Philip, upset, afraid, wanting no part of his new life with Andrew and Gregory, had found the same hiding place. When Ivy pulled open the storeroom door in search of Philip, there was the big sports hero from school, the famous Tristan Carruthers, entertaining her brother—unbelievably—by wearing salad greens on his head and olives on his teeth, a stalk of celery protruding from each ear, a shrimp tail stuck in his nostril.

Ivy laughed to herself.

“What the heck?” Tristan exclaimed, pointing to the big screen and the strange thing emerging from a movie
sewer to stalk zombie Lacey. “What’s that supposed to be?”

Philip, forgetting his coolness, chortled. “He’s not very scary.”

“Looks like someone fertilized him,” Tristan said.

Philip nodded. “Looks like dead celery’s growing out of his ears.”

“Got a salad on his head.”

“Shrimp sticking out of his nose,” Philip added.

“Gross,” said Ivy.

“Some black olives—” Tristan began.

“On his teeth,” Philip interjected quickly.

Ivy felt her brother shifting in his seat next to her, leaning forward, looking across her to Tristan. Tristan turned his head slightly to the right. The profile was Luke’s, but the memory, the boyish humor, was someone else’s.

Philip got up and stood in front of Tristan. Bending forward, he peered into Tristan’s eyes as if he was trying to see beneath the surface of a pond.

Tristan gazed back at him steadily. At last he spoke. “I’ve been wondering what inning it was when Mark Teixeira hit the grand slam.”

“Tristan!” Philip said softly, breathing the name like a prayer.

Tristan nodded.

“Tristan!” Philip’s face was alight with wonder.

“Hey, buddy.” Tristan’s voice shook. “I’ve missed you. Still beating people at checkers?”

Philip broke into a grin. “Not anymore. I’m learning chess.”

“Chess! No! Now I’ll never win!” Tristan exclaimed. “Unless, of course, Lacey helps me cheat.”

Ivy’s brother laughed as if this was the funniest joke in the world. Tristan laughed with him, then laughed harder when Philip forced his own chuckle to sound deep.

Tristan put his arms around Philip. Philip hugged him tightly and squeezed his eyes shut, but Ivy saw the tear escape down her little brother’s cheek.

TRISTAN HADN’T REALIZED HOW RAW HE’D FEEL
when seeing Philip again. Philip talked about a million miles per hour—summer camp, California, his year in school since Tristan had left. Finally, the question Tristan had expected and dreaded was asked: “How come you came back as another person?”

“We’re not sure,” Ivy said quickly, covering for him.

“I fell,” Tristan replied, then told Philip exactly what had happened.

Afterward Philip sat quietly for a very long minute, as if thinking things through. “It was because you love Ivy. Me too.”

“You too? No kidding!” Tristan quipped.

“I would have kissed her and brought her back to life.”

Tristan almost cried: Philip’s understanding felt like forgiveness.

He saw Ivy quickly wipe the corner of her eye, then she rose to her feet. “Philip, we have to go. Remember, if anybody asks, we were just exploring. No one can know Tristan—
or Luke
—is here.”