Sacred (21 page)

A
nother day had ended, and still Will and I had not kissed. When Lily’s mother arrived to pick me up, honking impatiently curbside, I thought that Will might catch my lips with his own before I left.

We had been in his room, gathering up my books, and as he handed me my script, Will’s hand brushed a tendril of my hair behind my ear, and he stared at me intently, his green eyes looking deeply into mine.

I felt a shudder of anticipation, and I leaned in toward him, my eyes fluttering shut … but then Martin’s voice had boomed down the hallway, almost as if he could hear the chemistry between me and Will threatening to boil: “Well, Scarlett, sounds like your ride is here.… Such a pleasure to have you come and visit!”

At least he had called to me rather than just coming into Will’s room; when we emerged together, Will shouldering
my backpack, Martin’s eyes were knowing. He shook my hand solemnly and invited me to visit again soon.

I nodded dumbly, but managed to pull it together enough to mumble a cursory “Thank you for having me” before heading out the door.

Will walked me to the car, his hand on the small of my back so much less of him than I wanted to feel. I yearned to turn to him in the yard and throw my arms around his neck, tilting up my head toward his mouth … but instead I allowed him to open the passenger door for me and hand me my backpack.

“Thanks for taking her home, Mrs. Adams,” he said, a pillar of respectful politeness. “I’ll see you on Monday, okay, Scarlett?”

And then the door was closed, and Lily’s mom was stepping on the gas, and we were gone, though I still felt tethered to him, our connection winding out between us as the car crested the hill and the lights of Two Harbors disappeared.

At home, I didn’t mind that my parents’ door was shut, the muffled sounds of some news channel emitting from behind it, or that our kitchen was sterile and dark, blacked out. I’d wandered rather brainlessly into my room and flopped on my bed, dropping my backpack and kicking off my shoes.

In the darkness, I allowed myself the luxury of remembering the feel of Will’s hand on my back as he walked with me through his darkened yard. He had barely touched me, really, yet the sensation that had shot through me had been one of remarkable warmth, total connection.

I remembered the curve of his smile as we ran lines in his bedroom. I remembered the angle of his hand as he lifted his cup of wine to his lips. I remembered the thrill I felt at his laugh, his smile, his touch, the sound of him, the smell of him … I was a goner. That much was clear. Completely, utterly lost. A time before Will? Somehow, unthinkable. Unimaginable. I had been a different girl, or at least a different version of the girl I was becoming.

Who was this girl who lay on my bed? She felt … happy. Whole. Not like the shattered wreck I’d been all summer and most of the fall. Could love alone create this kind of change?

There it was. The word.
Love
. I had barely thought it before I knew it was the truth: I loved him. I loved Will Cohen, the strange, complicated boy who had somehow managed to come to me, to come to my island. I was no longer alone.

But as marvelous and as true as that was, there was something more. I was no longer alone, but also, I was no longer shattered. How had that come to be? A mirror, once broken, cannot be mended. Yet here I was. I was different than I had been, and I would never see the world in the same way I had Before Ronny Died. Then, it was as if nothing bad could touch me. Now, I knew better. Some of life was downright horrible.

But I was
alive
. I could
breathe
. Somehow, I was whole, if different.

I leaned over my bed and fished my hand underneath it. There it was, its metal spiral cold and wound tight, like a serpent: my yellow notebook.

I sat up and flipped on the nightstand light. For a long moment, I stared at the notebook’s cover. And then I opened it.

Not because I wanted to see what it contained, and certainly not because I had something more I wanted to add. But because it was true, and it was part of me.

I took my time. I read each page carefully. I saw now what I hadn’t seen before—I saw the weakness that had guided me for months, that had allowed me to take myself to pieces, and even more, I saw the almost unforgivable self-indulgence of it all.

Three figs, a slice of dry toast, and one piece of beef jerky? That is nowhere near enough food for a day! That’s not something to be proud of, to record and savor. That is sickness.

To take pleasure from my own deprivation … to whittle myself away chunk by chunk, to allow my body to become a dried-out husk—this is not what I would want for a friend, for a
dog
, let alone for myself.

This is not what Ronny would have wanted for me. And if my mother were well, if she could see me,
really
see me, then this would not be what she wanted for me either.

I flipped to the last pages I’d written on. I saw the smear of blood I’d left there. It had dried to an ugly shade of brown. What if that blood were inside me still? What if all the effort that I’d put into denying myself, into harming myself, I’d channeled instead into something else, something
better
?

The thought frightened me. Could I have made that choice? Was the life recorded in this notebook a record of
choices made? I knew in my heart that it was. And I knew I wanted to—
I needed to
—make a different choice. I just wasn’t sure how. But I knew where to begin.

The room where Will had stayed was vacant, like all the guest rooms. Its fireplace yawned at me, an open mouth. I aimed to feed it.

Gently, I peeled loose the letter Helena had sent and set it aside. Then, I tossed my yellow notebook into the fireplace and touched each corner with the flame from a match. I sat cross-legged in front of it and watched it burn.

It didn’t catch quickly; two of the corners blackened and smoked, threatening to go out, but I blew on them gently, encouraging the flames to spread.

And then the flames burst to life, and the heat seared my face, and my eyes filled with tears as I watched it burn and burn and burn, my crutch, my favorite friend, my enemy.

In the end, all that was left was the twisted spiral of metal, blackened and ugly on the fireplace grate, surrounded by ashes.

Sunday morning was cold and dry. The sky shone a particularly beautiful shade of blue, untouched by clouds. I felt jittery and nervous, as if I had drunk too much coffee, as if I were a yearling mare.

That’s what it was … I felt raw, almost newborn. The sky was too big, frightening in its vastness, and the day felt that way too. Too big. Too many possibilities.

I was scared. I wanted to change, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t just want to deny myself the pleasure of denial, of
hurting myself; somehow, this seemed like another layer of the same sickness. I wanted to not
want
to deny myself; I wanted to not
want
to hurt myself. Can you control your wants, your desires, or only your responses to them? I didn’t have the answers to these questions. But I thought I might know someone who did.

It was a perfect day for riding. The ground was dry; the breeze was cool. Delilah’s nostrils flared as we trotted down the path. She and I seemed to be of one mind; it didn’t seem that I turned her in the direction of the Isthmus, but we headed there together, admiring the colorful leaves on the autumnal trees, the cheerful chatter of a jay, the soothing solitude of the trail.

I had been riding for over ten years now, and my body seemed almost designed for the saddle. As I rode, I felt the familiar stretch of the muscles on the insides of my thighs, down the backs of my calves as I pushed my heels down in the stirrup irons. My back felt straight and strong, and I had the strange sensation of seeing myself as another might see me: I was young, and strong, and confident in the saddle.

Delilah, of course, didn’t know that Will Cohen lived on Olive Lane, but it seemed that I didn’t need to guide her head into the turn. I felt a little silly, riding a horse down a neighborhood street, but I felt too as if it was somehow right to be making this visit in this old-fashioned, deliberate way.

Behind the brown fence, bent over in a patch of dirt,
turning over the earth to prepare a bed for planting, knelt the person I had come to see.

“Rabbi Cohen,” I called. My heart raced with nerves.

He looked up from his work, brushing his graying curls from his forehead in a gesture made familiar to me by his son. “Scarlett.” He smiled up at me. “A pleasure to see you again.”

He rose, slightly awkwardly, as if his knees were giving him pain, and pulled his flowered gardening gloves off before reaching across the fence to stroke Delilah’s mane. I dismounted and pulled the reins over her head.

“What a lovely horse,” he said. Delilah stood very still while he petted her neck, her ears rotated forward toward him. “I’m afraid Will isn’t home, Scarlett. He’s gone off on one of his hikes today. I don’t expect him back until dinnertime.”

“That’s okay. Actually, I came to see you.” The words came out in a rush, and I felt myself flushing a deep red.

“Ah,” he said. “Well, I am home, and about ready for a break from my work. Would you like to come in for a cup of tea? And please, Scarlett, call me Martin.”

I let Delilah loose in the Cohens’ small backyard; it was well fenced, and, as Martin suggested to me, the grass could use a trim, a job Delilah seemed happy to take on. I pulled off her saddle and bridle and rested them on the back porch, then unlaced my boots and walked stocking-footed into the kitchen.

Martin had boiled a kettle of water and was steeping a pot of tea. He’d set out a little ceramic cow of cream, a pot
of sugar, two cups, and a red plate with cookies laid across it in twin rows.

“Thanks for talking with me,” I said. “I know I should have called, but …” My voice trailed off lamely.

“No, no, I am glad you came. My knees couldn’t have taken much more of that. I’ll never understand how the Catholics manage all that knee time!” His laughter filled the room and then cut suddenly short. “Oh, dear. You’re not Catholic, are you?”

I shook my head. “I’m not really anything,” I admitted.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Martin told me, pouring out two cups of the rich, fragrant tea. “On the contrary, you are a good deal more than you could possibly imagine.” He gazed at me in a way that I couldn’t decipher.

“That’s nice of you to say,” I demurred, “but what I meant is my family hasn’t ever really belonged to a religion.”

“Ah,” Martin said. He scooped an enormous spoonful of sugar into his tea, then poured in a satiny stream of cream. “A modern family.”

“I guess you could say that.”

Martin offered me the cream and sugar. My first impulse was to refuse them … but my impulses hadn’t done me much good lately, so instead I said “Thank you” and doctored up my tea just as Martin had done.

The cookies were gingersnaps. They were crisp and delicious. My tea was so hot that it burned my mouth slightly when I sipped it. The whole experience felt luxurious, and if I hadn’t been wound so tightly, I would probably have enjoyed it.

As it was, I didn’t quite know what to do with my hands, whether or not to cross my legs, how to hold my cup of tea. Martin held his in both hands, and I didn’t know if this was a Jewish thing or a rabbi thing or a politeness thing, so I did the same, just to be on the safe side.

After he’d finished about half of his tea, Martin pushed his cup slightly away and asked, “So. What can I do for you today, Scarlett?”

“I—I don’t know if you can do anything for me, Rabbi—Martin. But you seemed as good a place to start as anywhere else.” I worried this might sound disrespectful. “I don’t mean that how it sounds, really. I was just hoping to ask you for some advice.”

Maybe it was from years of practice, first as a rabbi and then as a college professor, but Martin was either genuinely interested in what I was going to say or he made an excellent show of it. He said nothing, but the warmth in his dark, deep brown, almost black eyes encouraged me. They looked both wise and full of humor. I forced myself to go on. “I’ve had a hard time, Martin, since my brother died last spring.”

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. Will told me about your loss. I’m sorry for you and your family.”

“Thank you.” I willed the tears in my eyes to recede. I didn’t want to get all gushy, I just wanted to power through. “I’ve started some … bad habits, I guess. I want to stop them. I’m not sure how.”

Martin nodded. He did not ask for details.

I sipped my tea, more because I didn’t know what to say than because I was still thirsty. Finally, I continued. “I don’t
know why,” I half whispered, “but my relationship with food has been pretty challenging lately.”

Martin smiled. “Food can be complicated,” he said. “Ever since Eve and Adam tasted the forbidden fruit, we humans have been challenged to find balance. Food can nurture, but it can also cause pain.”

Adam and Eve. Forbidden fruit. We were entering some uncomfortable territory, at least for me. “Do you really believe in all that? All that supernatural God stuff?” I blurted out, immediately horrified with myself. I’d just asked a
rabbi
if he believed in God!

But to my surprise, Martin didn’t look perturbed. “A good friend of mine, another rabbi, actually, is fond of saying that to be a Jew, all you have to do is believe in one god … or fewer.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. “I thought religions were all about God,” I said at last.

“Religions, perhaps. But Judaism is more than a religion. It’s a philosophy, a people, a shared history. In fact, there are branches of Judaism that interpret the idea of God as the manifestation of the best and highest of human potential, others who view the Bible as metaphorical rather than literal, whole groups of Jews that believe that the important facet of a god is not belief but the idea of awe … that the imagery of God and the Biblical stories can still inspire those among us who do not believe the stories to be factually true.”