Sacred (28 page)

SIXTEEN

T
he time after the New Year is a paradox. It’s supposed to be all about a fresh start—eager resolution-makers counting calories conscientiously and eating leafy greens and trying to quit bad habits—but at the same time people are trying to start something, it’s the dead of winter.

This would be a pretty good reason to live in Australia; there, at least, New Year’s happens during summer. But on my island, New Year’s and January are cold and lonely times. Right after my scene with Will in the theater, this seemed fine by me.

Since the day on the stage, I had avoided Will as much as I could. Lily had returned to her former habit of appearing at my house before school with some sort of pastry or breakfast sandwich. I could tell she was worried that I was going to backslide and start shedding the pounds I’d put on over the last couple of months.

Truth was, I’d considered it. I remembered what Will had said: “It’s as if your body is the crime scene.”

Since I’d burned my yellow notebook, Will had gradually looked less and less pained … as if a burden had been lifted from him. I remembered what he’d revealed to me the night of the Halloween party, about the fishhook in his brain pulling him to the scenes of crimes. And I knew that if I was to refuse the breakfast sandwich that Lily offered me, or go even further—break my mirror and run a shard of its glass down my thigh or across my stomach—that Will would sense that decision, and he would come to me.

My body could be a crime scene again, anytime I chose to make it so. I could hurt myself. I could hurt Will if I wanted to.

But I didn’t want to.

I wanted to protect him from pain, even though he had hurt me terribly. And I didn’t want to hurt myself, either. I was sick of pain. So I chewed the egg and bread; I stayed at arm’s length from my mirror and blinked at my forlorn reflection.

I kept reading Martin’s book. Some of it I understood; much of it I didn’t, though as I read the words I felt pulled into their world of mystery, even if their meaning eluded me.

I came across a passage that discussed the purpose of practicing Kabbalah—“
The dedicated Kabbalist can come to see the face of God
”—but what I read next caused my breath to catch in my throat. “
The result of his practice can transform the Kabbalist; in a moment of divine contemplation, the Kabbalist can be shaken by an ecstatic flash of light, an experience that illuminates the body, bathing it in light, in lightning and thunder.
”

Here, I stopped reading. I remembered the force of Will’s touch on my hand, the press of his mouth. It was as if these words were written to describe the experience I’d had with Will—the electric charge, the shocking pleasure of his touch.

But remembering his kiss was painful. I got lost in the memory, and when I shook my head to return to my lonely room, the absence of him was too sharply focused, knifelike.

January wore on—a cold, wet, foggy month. Lily invited me to spend the weekend at her house, but she didn’t seem surprised when I turned her down. I didn’t want to be social; I wanted to be alone, all alone.

“That history paper is due,” I offered lamely for an excuse.

“Yeah, and next week it’ll be the science test, and I’ll bet after that you’ll have to memorize some poem for English.”

“Sorry if my homework is inconvenient for you, Lil,” I said. I heard the brittle undertone in my own voice.

“It’s not that I don’t get it, Scar,” said Lily, and I felt a coldness in my chest. I knew that she was about to say things that I didn’t want to hear. “I know how hard it’s been for you—Ronny dying. I can’t imagine what you’re going through, blah, blah, blah, and then Will dumping you obviously really blows too. But Scar—I miss my friend.”

Of course her “blah, blah, blah” was totally unnecessary, but I got the basic gist of her complaint. I had become a
lousy friend. I tuned out when she started to analyze the various possible implications of Josh Riddell’s gestures and comments (she’d started seeing him right after winter break), and clearly, I took more than I gave.

“Lil,” I said. “I know I suck right now. I’m sorry. I really am. I want to be better. But this is all I have.” I held out my empty hands, palms up.

She looked at them, then up at my face. “There’s nothing there, Scarlett.”

I shrugged.

She looked miserable. “I’ll just ask Kaitlyn, I guess.”

I groaned. “You wouldn’t.”

A smile. “Okay, maybe not Kaitlyn, but someone else. I’d rather have you.”

“I’m working on it, Lily. Really, I am.”

So that became my resolution: work on it. Only I wasn’t sure what “it” was, exactly. It occurred to me as I sat early one morning in the gazebo in our garden, wrapped in a blanket over my fleece pants and sweatshirt, that Martin’s book could help me.

Malchut
: The Kingdom of this world. The book said something I’d heard many times before: The greatest tree is contained within the tiniest seed, its potential latent until it germinates. What lay inside of me—what desires, what hopes, what possibilities?

What did I want? The answer seemed painfully obvious: I wanted Ronny to be alive and I wanted Will to want me in return.

I felt pitiful. What had happened to all the things I’d wanted
Before
Ronny Died and
before
Will had come to the island?

It was difficult to remember, as if I were looking through a thick, soupy fog.

I wanted to go to college. I wanted to travel the world. I wanted to breed Delilah and raise her foal.

And there was more: I wanted to go to France to meet the far-off second cousins I had heard about from my grandparents but had never met. I wanted to write a book one day, about something.

I wanted a career—maybe in medicine, maybe as a literature professor. I wanted to make my family proud.

How could it be that these desires had faded away? Was I really one of those mewling girls now, whose sun rises and sets on some boy?

Not that Will was just
some boy
, I admitted to myself begrudgingly. Even aside from his impossible ability to sense the future, he was absolutely amazing. He was unlike anyone else I knew … it was as if he’d somehow passed over the whole teenage thing, as if he transcended it.

Still, though, he wasn’t my universe.

I wandered back into the house. After the cold fogginess of the garden, our kitchen felt warm and almost tropical. I fished a new notebook out of the desk in the corner and flipped it open to the first page.

Its blankness was scary. The white lined paper seemed to issue a silent challenge. I pulled back a seat from the table and sat down.

What I Want
, I wrote neatly, deliberately, across the top.

Ronny
, my heart cried.
Will
.

I ignored it. Instead, I watched my hand write steadily:

Meaning

Happiness

To not be in pain

Family

Here my hand grew less steady. Family. Could we still be one? My mother was completely checked out. My father’s everything seemed tied up in my mother. And me? I didn’t know anymore. No longer a sister, not quite a daughter … where did that leave me?

I sighed and closed the notebook. It all seemed far, far too complicated, way out of my reach.

Malchut
. The Kingdom of this world. It was so much to grasp, the whole world. But if we are all God, and all of everything can be contained in the smallest seed, then it seemed to follow that my body must be full of unseen potential too. I had tried starving it; I had tried hurting it. These things had not brought me joy. I might as well try something else, something different.

If my mother was unable to mother me, and my father too distracted to take care of me, then I would become my own family. I would care for my body as if it was a sacred object—as if it was the whole of everything, as if I really believed it carried God within it.

And so I began new rituals, purposely this time. I set my
alarm clock an hour earlier than I needed, to five-thirty. When I woke, I wrapped myself in warm clothes and slipped from the house, winding my way down to the beach where I would sit, cocooned in a blanket, and watch the sun rise. Then I would stretch, bending myself in half and letting my hair split and fall over my shoulders to pool at my feet in the sand as I pressed my face into my knees. I practiced sitting very still and breathing slowly, in and out.

At home, I took long, hot showers, and I used the pricey shampoos and soaps I used to save for special occasions, and I tipped my face into the steamy water and concentrated on feeling each drop of water as it hit my skin. I took my time shaving my legs. I loofahed my elbows and heels. When I dried off, I paid attention to the nubby fabric of the towel, and I filled my lungs with the hot, moist air that stirred around me. I massaged fragrant oils and lotions into my skin, caressing myself gently.

In the kitchen, I ate simply, but well. Eggs, fresh bread, fruit.

I focused intently, deliberately, on doing things mindfully. When I girthed Traveler at the barn, I watched my fingers tighten the straps and work the metal hooks through the punched holes in the leather straps. When I pulled down the stirrup irons, I felt peculiarly satisfied when the metal reached the end of the leather.

When I braided my hair at night, I watched my fingers twisting the blond strands in the mirror, and I allowed myself to think the things we are told are vain
—My hair is so beautiful. I have pretty hands
.

And I kept reading. On the second of February, a Friday night, I was curled up in bed, the bedside table lamp glowing in the evening’s dimness. On page 142, I read: “
The Kabbalah tells us that there are people who walk among us, people with gifts the rest of us can only imagine. These people
—Tzaddikim—
are sages who have extraordinary levels of perception, some even able to see into the future or the past. Among these
Tzaddikim,
a very few have achieved
Ruach HaKodesh—
the ‘spirit of holiness,’ which is a state of the soul that makes prophecy possible. However, since the age of classical prophecy has passed, no one has achieved
Ruach HaKodesh.”

I blinked. The words seemed to move on the page in front of me. I read them again.
Tzaddikim. Ruach HaKodesh
. These didn’t even look like real words; they seemed to me as if from some made-up language.

But the meaning behind them felt eerily significant: There are people, though rare, who can see the future.

It was Will the book was describing. I knew so instantly. The book I held in my hands was speaking about the boy I loved—for I loved him still, even if he wanted nothing to do with me.

Early the next morning, I drove with Alice to the stable.

Delilah was still out of commission; the farrier had caught the flu and hadn’t made it out to the island yet. So it was Traveler I pulled from the barn; it was Traveler I saddled and bridled and rode out of the yard at a fast trot toward Two Harbors.

Behind me, I head Alice call, “You forgot your helmet!”

But I pretended not to hear her as I pressed Traveler forward with my heels, and I rounded the bend up the winding path, and I felt strong, and brave, and determined to find answers.

Thirty-eight Olive Lane was just as charming as I remembered. The winding plant in the picket fence had filled in even more since I’d last visited the house, the front porch looked neatly swept, and the house was quiet.

It could be that nobody was home. I didn’t know where Will was, or what his plans for the weekend might be. We barely spoke these days, other than at rehearsal, when we carried out the charade of being in love.

Truthfully, it was no charade for me, but saying my flirtatious, lilting lines into Will’s wary countenance took all my acting ability. What I really wanted to do was shake him, and wail my hurt and disappointment into his face, or press myself against him and
make
him want me again.

The plain little brown shingled house didn’t seem concerned with my angst. Its wide windows stared back at me, unblinking; its door did not open to tell me any secrets.

Traveler’s nostrils flared as he took in this new environment, and he did kind of a half hop in place that revealed his nerves.

I slid down from his back and pulled the reins over his head. Patting his neck, I told him what a good boy he was, and gradually he quieted.

I didn’t know what I had expected. Since discovering the term
—Tzaddikim
—the night before, I had felt such urgency
to go to Will’s house. I wanted to share with him what I had found.