Sacred (34 page)

“People actually say ‘whoa’? I thought that was just something they said in the movies.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. Just try it. And squeeze him with your heels to get him to walk forward.”

Will did as I ordered, nudging Bojangles forward, then turning right, then left, then calling out a mighty “whoa” and pulling Bojangles to a stop.

“See?” I said. “You’re a natural. Just walk around some more while I get Delilah.”

Will looked pretty pleased with himself, maneuvering the horse around the arena, but after I’d mounted Delilah and we’d headed out on the trail, he looked a little less certain.

“You sure this horse won’t bolt?”

“Nah, you’re pretty safe with Bojangles,” I assured him.

We rode in silence for a while, Bojangles following amiably behind Delilah. It was nice, combining two of my favorite things—riding and being with Will. I was content to keep Delilah to a walk today; despite my bravado with Will, I was a little nervous about being on a horse again, even my mare.

After we’d been riding for about twenty minutes, Will said, “You know, my mom would have really liked this.”

My dream came back to me—the skeleton woman pulling me from the sand, then turning to dust in front of my eyes.

“Tell me about her.”

“Well, she was funny,” Will began. “Really funny. She was always coming up with these ridiculous puns, and she loved to play practical jokes. There was this one time when I was just a baby—my dad told me about it—when he came home from work and she was holding me in her arms, rocking me, you know, all wrapped up in a baby blanket, and then she asked my dad to hold me … only it wasn’t
me
in the blanket, it was a chicken—plucked and headless, ready for the oven—and when Dad peeled back the blanket and said, ‘Where’s the baby?’, she freaked out and ran for the oven, like she’d mixed us up, you know? Of course I was sleeping in my crib the whole time. Dad didn’t know whether to laugh or have my mom committed.”

I laughed, and Will laughed too, but I could tell he was thinking about something. After a few more minutes, he continued. “Actually, Dad told me that having her committed was always sort of on his mind. He wasn’t sure why she had these compulsions to go to all these dangerous places, interfere where she didn’t belong in other people’s problems. And, of course, she wasn’t
always
like that. It wasn’t until she got pregnant with me that it started for her.”

Though he rode right next to me, he was far away, lost in his thought.

“It’s strange how the pulling didn’t start for me until after Mom died,” he said at last. “Almost as if her abilities passed to me, like an inheritance.”

“Maybe …,” I said. “But I think it’s really strange how she didn’t feel pulled to crimes
until
she got pregnant with you.”

Will nodded. “Yeah. Maybe I gave her a virus when she got pregnant … like I was an infection.”

I shook my head. “You’re not an infection, Will. But it is like the two of you shared something important, something special.”

We rode a while longer, and then Will asked, “What about Ronny? Do you think your brother would have liked me?”

I laughed. “Probably not, if he knew how I feel about you. Ronny wasn’t a big fan of me being with boys.”

“How
do
you feel about me, Scarlett?” He grinned at me.

“I’m crazy about you,” I admitted. “You drive me crazy.”

Will whistled, long and low. “Then I’m a lucky guy,” he said.

I felt myself blushing. To change the subject, I said, “Other than how I feel about you, Ronny would have liked you a lot. He was pretty easygoing. He liked to hang out with his friends, and he loved to play soccer, but he was a reader like you. I’ll bet you two would have found a lot to talk about.”

“It would have been nice to know him.”

The sky was bright above our heads. It felt good to talk to someone about Ronny. This was the first time I’d really managed to have a conversation of any substantial length about him since he’d died. I could tell Will felt the same way about his mom; after a few minutes he said, “You know, my mom was always trying to get me and Dad out of the house more, out into nature. I’ve spent more time hiking in the last six months than in my whole life back east. She’d be happy seeing me here, riding with you.”

I remembered the skeleton woman from my dream; again I felt the touch of her bone hand. I thought too of Ronny. It seemed as though he was close, yet drifting softly away … and maybe this was okay. Maybe I could let him go. Maybe I could let him turn to dust. The wide world around me—the trail, the trees, the grass, the open sky—seemed to shimmer a little, or shift, and I felt my heart softening, relaxing, letting go. Next to me, Will seemed to feel it too, and when he looked across at me, his smile was so dear, so open and pure, that I could almost hear its song.

We reached the top of a hill and stopped the horses,
looking out onto the open ocean together. Each wave crested, beautiful in its moment, brilliant in its singularity, before it broke, rejoining the ocean, becoming part of the whole again. The waves weren’t lost … they were still there. We just couldn’t see them anymore.

TWENTY

T
he night before the play, Will invited me over for dinner. He drove the Jeep to collect me from my side of the island, and then took me back to his home.

Martin was there. When he heard us getting out of the Jeep, he came outside to greet us. “Ah, Scarlett returns,” he said, and he embraced me. He seemed genuinely glad to see me, but I was still kind of nervous. The last time I’d seen him, he hadn’t seemed to think too much of my relationship with his son.

He must have read the apprehension on my face, because he said, “I’m truly glad you’re here, Scarlett. Not only because you are special to my son, but also because I like having you around.” And then he patted my shoulder, as if everything that had passed between us before was completely dissolved now, and he disappeared back into his study.

Quietly, I wondered what had brought about his change
of heart. My accident, perhaps? Or the undeniable fact that Will looked so happy and well? I got the feeling that Martin wanted more than anything to keep his son healthy, and after that, happy. If it seemed to him that I was a detriment to those goals, then it was better if I was not around. If, on the other hand, I helped Will to be healthy and happy, then I was welcome.

This seemed a pretty cynical way to view Martin, that he was interested in me only as a means to his ends, but it struck me as true. Here was a man who had abandoned his home and career, moving his son across the country to an island where he thought he could be kept safe. How upset Martin must have been when it had all seemed useless, when even on this island Will had been pursued by his headaches and his compulsions.

I followed Will into the kitchen, which was busy with the sights and smells of his cooking. He had roasted meat for tacos, and he sat me down in front of a pile of tomatoes and onions to chop up for salsa.

Quoting from our play, he said, full of bluster, “You can’t possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It’s absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.” With a flourish and a bow, he handed me a chopping knife.

“Eloquently said.”

“Thank you.” He pulled up a stool across from me and set to work dismantling avocados: cutting them open, splitting them in two, discarding the pit, and spooning out the soft green flesh.

“You have the hands of a surgeon,” I said.

“I’ve thought about a career in medicine,” Will said. “But I’m also interested in this other major—Peace Studies.”

A silence fell across us, not an entirely comfortable one. Will was a year ahead of me in school—a senior. He’d be leaving in the fall for college. It seemed absurd to talk about this, as our relationship was still so fresh, but somehow it seemed that we’d known each other for a very long time … or so deeply that our hearts spoke the same language.

I knew he’d applied to universities all over the country. There was time, still, before he’d hear back from them. I didn’t intend to think too hard about what the future would bring.

We lost ourselves in preparing the salsa and the guacamole. Will had bragged that his tacos were absolutely amazing. I figured they’d better be, what with all the chopping it took to prepare them.

Not that I really minded. I was happy to be there, in the Cohens’ little cottage.

“Are you nervous about tomorrow night?” Will asked.

“Sort of,” I admitted. “I’ve never done a kissing scene in front of an audience before.”

Will lay down his knife and came around to my side of the table. “Maybe we should practice some more.”

But just as his lips were about to connect with mine, we heard Martin whistling as he crossed the front room on his way into the kitchen.

Will murmured something that sounded like a curse, sinking back onto his stool and picking up his knife again just before Martin entered the kitchen.

I wasn’t as smooth as Will; I couldn’t hide the flush on my cheeks as I bent over the tomatoes, chopping furiously. I felt Martin looking at me, but he said nothing as he poured himself a glass of iced tea from the pitcher in the refrigerator. He took a long sip, then asked, “So, son, what time is dinner?”

“Just gotta fry up the tortillas,” Will said, standing up and stretching as if he’d been in his seat the whole time. I didn’t think Martin was fooled, though.

Will retrieved the cooking oil from a cabinet near the stove and poured a long stream of it into a frying pan. A stack of white corn tortillas rested on a plate nearby.

Martin wandered back toward his study. I had finished chopping everything Will had set in front of me, and I combined it all in a large bowl and mixed it together. Then I settled in to watch Will fry the tortillas.

He had a system. After tying on an apron, he got his fingers wet in the sink, then flicked drops of water into the oil to see if it was hot enough. When it sizzled and popped, he lowered the first tortilla into it with prongs. After a few seconds, he flipped the tortilla over and folded it in half all in one motion, then flipped it again before transferring it to a paper towel–lined plate and sprinkling it with sea salt.

“Are you good at everything?” I asked.

He grinned. “Not everything,” he admitted. “I’ve been known to put pleasure ahead of responsibility—that’s what my dad says, anyway.”

“That seems hard to believe,” I said. “You seem pretty responsible to me.”

He flipped the last of the tortillas onto the paper towels. “I guess I am more so now than when I was a kid. But when
I wasn’t quite thirteen, I threw a fit to have my bar mitzvah scheduled a couple of weeks early so I could still make the big Boy Scouts campout that conflicted with it.”

I must have looked confused, because Will continued, “You’re not supposed to have a bar mitzvah until you’re thirteen. But the weekend of my thirteenth birthday was the campout, so I petitioned my rabbi to let me do my ceremony early. You know, so I wouldn’t miss the trip.”

“That sounds like a pretty good quality, the ability to argue your case,” I said.

He shrugged and placed the tortillas on the table. “Depends on how you look at it, I guess. My rabbi was pretty cool about it … we aren’t Orthodox or anything … but my dad was annoyed. He’s never been a real big fan of rule-breaking.”

“Well, if it was okay with the rabbi …”

“Anyway, it really doesn’t matter when the ceremony is. A boy isn’t considered a bar mitzvah—a full man, a member of the Jewish community—until he actually turns thirteen. The ceremony is just a rite of passage.”

“So you got to do the ceremony and go on the campout,” I said. “Sounds like a pretty good solution to me. The best of both worlds.”

Will shook his head. “No, I didn’t go on the campout. Just before I was supposed to leave—the day before my birthday, actually—we got in the car crash. I spent my thirteenth birthday mourning my mother.”

It felt to me like all the air had been sucked out of the room. There was a thought coming to me, but just barely; if
I sat very still, I had the feeling that I would come up with something.

“Scarlett?” Will asked.

I held up my hand to quiet him and closed my eyes. “Will,” I said, slowly, after a moment. “Tell me more about bar mitzvah.”

“What do you want to know?” He poured chips from a bag into a bowl, then sat down across from me and dug one into the guacamole.

“How does it work, exactly? Becoming a man?”

“Pretty straightforward, I guess. When a boy is thirteen years old, he’s a man. Bam. End of story. And as a man, he has rights—he gets to be involved in decisions at temple, he can marry”—Will wagged his eyebrows at me—“but he’s got responsibilities, too.”

“Like what?”

“Well, when he’s just a kid—a boy—it’s his parents’ responsibility to make sure that the kid follows Jewish law. It’s kind of like his parents are holding his jacket for him. When he turns thirteen, his parents help him into his jacket, and he’ll wear it for the rest of his life. He bears his own responsibility as part of the community, and he must uphold Jewish law, traditions, and ethics.”