Splendor (20 page)

Will turned to me and asked, “Do you want a drink before we skate?”

I nodded and finished knotting my laces. Will gave me his hand to help me up. We headed for the snack bar, leaving Connell and Gunner standing by the benches.

I felt sick. There wasn’t a scenario that I could imagine in which I would have liked to see Will and Gunner face to face. But skating together, in the same packed rink, with the awful wail of a third-rate country singer over a bad sound system? Jesus.

We got a couple of sodas and stood watching the Zamboni turn its little circles in the skating rink. By now a long line of would-be skaters had formed around the arena, laces double-knotted, waiting for the Zamboni to leave the ice and the disembodied voice on the speaker to give them the go-ahead.

I could hear Will’s question—
So that’s him?
—but he didn’t voice it, and I didn’t answer. I drank my soda way too fast, triggering hiccups. This was just getting better and better.

Finally the ice was clear and the announcer invited the crowd into the rink. The crowd shuffle stepped through the gate and did its collective best not to fall. The country singer crooned once more. And the last thing I had any desire to do was ice-skate.

I looked over at Will to see if he might possibly feel the same way, but his mouth was set in a grim line. “Come on,” he said, taking my can and chucking it and his into the recycling container. “Let’s go have some fun.”

Somehow there was room on the crowded ice for two more of us, and Will and I joined the mob in its slow, counterclockwise turn around the rink. Up close, the country singer looked like she was having a blast, dancing along with her own music, occasionally clapping her hands and leaning into her microphone as if it was her lover.

I had to hand it to Will; he knew how to make the best of something. For even as I felt Gunner and Connell watching us, and even as I heard a few snide comments from Connell (“The Jew can’t skate any better than he can kiss”), Will held my hand and rubbed his thumb against my palm in that sweetly distracting way he had, and he sang along with the country song, and he even dipped me once, managing to keep us both on our feet.

After a while I forgot to keep track of where Gunner and Connell were on the ice, and I didn’t notice when it had been a while since Connell’s last disparaging remark, and when the lady started singing “Sweet Baby James,” I joined in, realizing only as the song reached its last poignant notes that I’d heard the song not only on the radio but in my dream, in the car where Will’s mother died.

“Scarlett?” Will’s voice came to me from far away. People skated by on both sides, but I was no longer moving, though it seemed the world spun around me. The woman sang, but it wasn’t her voice I heard; it was the voice on the car radio, crooning,
Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose, won’t you let me go down in my dreams?

The flash of green. The sound of metal crunching. The cold hard pressure of ice beneath me.

It was the cold that brought me to my senses. I had sunk to my knees on the ice and it had soaked through my jeans. Will knelt beside me. His face was anxious, his gaze, searching.

“Scarlett,” he said again, and helped me back to my feet. Together we made our way to the gate.

The singer had begun another song, and no one seemed to notice us at all. Connell and Gunner were gone. Will’s arm wound around my waist, supporting my weight, and we returned to the bench where we’d left our shoes. Will lowered me to the bench and then knelt at my feet, working free the knots in my laces and pulling off my skates. After we’d put our street shoes back on, Will returned the skates. It wasn’t until we had walked up the street to a nearby coffee place, ordered drinks, and sat across from each other holding them that Will finally said, “So, Scarlett, what happened back there?”

I had tried to tell him once before about my dreams, but he had been distracted by his own problems, and I don’t think what I had been saying had really sunk in. So I told him again, as I had told Sabine—about my visions of Will, first as a baby, then in the car, and of the day we’d met on the trail. He nodded and listened as I talked, but when I told him about my most recent dream—him running through a cityscape, leaving someone else behind, he looked confused.

“I don’t know what any of this means, Scarlett,” he said. “It’s possible that you just have a really great imagination, I guess. Did I ever mention to you what song was playing when we got in that accident?”

I shook my head.

“Then it must be something more. But that last dream you told me about…I don’t remember anything like that ever happening.”

For now I was happy just to focus on the other dreams, to sit face to face with Will and share with him the things I’d seen as I slept. The song on the ice had brought it all back.

I sipped my drink. There was something so soothing about a cup of tea: sweet and creamy, so hot I could take only the smallest of sips.

“I wonder what my dad would say,” Will said.

“I suppose we could ask him.”

“We will.”

I smiled. It felt better now, talking about my dreams together.

Will looked like he was about to say something else, and his hand reached out for mine, but then his head swiveled toward the window. My gaze followed; there was nothing to see, though, just a group of people walking by: two girls about my age laughing over something on one of their phones, and just behind them a father carrying his daughter—she looked about nine or ten—as she threw a tantrum.

Will stood up and started toward the door, abandoning his drink.

“Will?” I said, feeling eerily like we had traded roles in a scene we’d already run, it was so much like the way I’d zoned out and sunk down to the ice.

He pushed open the door and stepped outside. I caught up with him and grabbed his hand, squeezing it. He looked up the street, but it was empty; the people we’d seen through the window had all disappeared.

Just up ahead the door to a Chinese restaurant was swinging closed; Will strode toward it and pulled it open. At the counter, waiting for a table, were the two girls, still giggling over their phone. One of them, the blonde, grabbed the phone from her friend and typed something quickly into it.

“No way!” squealed her friend, but Will released the door, and it swung closed. I would never know what the girls had been laughing about.

Now Will walked more quickly, stopping briefly at the corner to peer to the left before pulling me to the right instead. The light was against us but no cars were coming, and as we reached the far curb Will broke into a run, weaving through the crowded street.

I could hear music from the pavilion where we’d skated; it was different now, radio music, loud and pounding through the speakers.

I ran, too, and tried once more to get his attention—“Will?”—but he didn’t even turn his head. I didn’t know where we were or where we were headed, but I was scared. The buildings lurched high above us, casting long stretchy shadows across the street like spiderwebs. Will turned a corner, then ran a stretch, then turned another corner. Behind us, I heard a siren’s wail and chills shot up my spine.

A sharp pain bit into my side; I was having trouble keeping up. Will kept running just as quickly, dodging in and out through the crowd. I stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk.

“Will,” I said again, but still he didn’t turn. Instead he squeezed my fingers, and then let go.

Once he’d dropped my hand I could see how much I’d been holding him back. He shot ahead now, doubling and then tripling the distance between us, and then he turned another corner and disappeared.

I slowed and stopped, panting, the stream of pedestrians splitting around me. I massaged the cramp in my side and stood, breathing heavily, but I couldn’t just let Will vanish like that, so I started walking again, then jogging.

The crowd thinned as I got farther from the pavilion and its surrounding streets. Soon there were just a few other people, and then I was alone.

The storefronts were all dark, but the windows were full of displays of dolls and strollers, monster trucks and stuffed animals.

This must be the Toy District,
I thought, but knowing that didn’t dispel the freaky sensation of being alone in the dark. I was starting to wonder if maybe I had missed a turn somewhere, if maybe Will had changed his mind and turned back for me, if maybe I should return to the spot he’d left me or go back to the coffee shop, even.

Then I heard a muffled cry up ahead, around the next corner, or in one of the shops off to my left. I stopped short and listened carefully, trying really hard to not make a sound.

And then I heard something else—a human voice, twisted in fury, a roar.

I knew that voice. It was Will’s.

I
stood perfectly still for one more moment. Then I went forward again, my legs shaky, my whole body, actually, trembling.

I didn’t know what I would find around that next corner. Whatever it would be, I knew it wasn’t good. Will had sounded vengeful, furious. Still, I couldn’t turn away.

It took me a minute to make sense of what I was seeing. There were two shapes in the night-dark alley, but three voices.

There was the sound of someone—a man—begging for mercy and sniveling in pain; there was a girl’s voice, crying; and there was Will, unleashing a string of curses, a tirade of anger in which the ferocious tone of his voice carried more meaning than the sum of his words.

The girl was folded into a ball against the far wall of the alley; she huddled as if she were in an earthquake drill, her head between her knees and her arms up over her head. Across from her, Will dominated the man, who was sprawled on the ground. Will’s whole energy seemed to have expanded, and he rained punches down on the man’s prone figure—his head, his chest—like a monster or an angered god.

I didn’t recognize the man—his face was swollen and bloody—but the girl…I remembered her pink Windbreaker from earlier. She’d been having a tantrum in her father’s arms, outside the coffee shop.

“Will!” I said, as if the recognition of the girl’s jacket had shaken me from paralysis. “Will, stop!” I yelled as I tried to grab his arm, before he delivered another blow to the girl’s father. But it was like he didn’t even feel me, as if I were invisible. His fist made contact with the man’s nose with a sickening crunch of cartilage, and fresh blood flowed in twin streams from the man’s nostrils.

I was yelling, clawing at Will to get him to stop, but it wasn’t until after he had stood and kicked the man twice, hard, in his gut that he turned to me.

Green fire lit his eyes. His expression—turbulent, passionate, rageful—transformed him into someone I didn’t know.

I’d seen a similar expression on his face last year, on the island, when he’d attacked Andy outside of the theater. His face had borne a trace of this same fury then, though not to this degree.

“What are you
doing,
Will?” I said. “You’re going to kill that girl’s father!”

“He’s not her father.” Will’s voice was steely.

I was confused. I looked at the girl, still huddled on the ground. Her crying had subsided and she seemed to be trying to disappear, as if sitting still enough would make her invisible.

And then I understood. The man wasn’t her father. The girl wasn’t his daughter.

“Oh, Will,” I said. “You saved her.”

He nodded grimly. The sirens I had heard earlier grew louder. They were searching for the girl.

Will looked around. “Get her out of here,” he said. It was an order, not a request. But I didn’t follow it.

“What are you going to do?” I was afraid, so afraid to hear the answer.

“Just get her out of here,” he said again. He sounded desperate this time, as the siren’s wail got closer.

“Are you going to…hurt him?” It was a ridiculous question; the man was already hurt. He lay moaning on the ground, clutching his stomach and curled up on his side.

“What do you think he was trying to do to
her
?” Will indicated the girl. She had pulled herself up to sitting and was wiping her nose on the sleeve of her jacket. Her hair was unkempt and there was a bruise forming high on her right cheek. “What do you think he’ll do to the next girl he gets ahold of?”

“But you saved her, you’re a hero! The cops are coming. Let’s flag them down. They’ll arrest him.”

I felt like I was trying to talk Will down, trying to convince him not to do something terrible.

But his eyes still glowed with angry fire. “Get the girl out of here,” he said again.

“No,” I whispered. “I won’t let you kill him.”

Will didn’t deny that had been his plan. “He’s vermin,” he spat. “You’re protecting
vermin
?”

“Will!”

“The world would be better without him, without people like him. I’d be doing everyone a favor.”

Maybe that was true; maybe the world would be a cleaner, better place if Will snuffed out this man’s life here, tonight. The thought sickened me. “But, Will, that’s not your call to make.”

“Maybe it is. Maybe it should be.”

I shook my head. “No. Don’t you see? If you kill him, then you’re a criminal, too.”

“An eye for an eye,” he said grimly.

“You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t I?”

We stared at each other, our gazes locked, neither of us willing to back down. I don’t know what would have happened next, if we’d stayed like that, just the two of us with the poor girl as our witness. But then the alley was flooded with the blinding lights of the police cruiser, and two cops got out, guns drawn, and the girl cried with relief as she stumbled toward them.

Will looked at me still as the officer yelled at us to put our hands behind our heads, and his eyes told me I had failed him.

The next hours were a blur. It didn’t take the officers long to sort out who was the good guy and who was the bad guy, and they led the girl’s assailant off in handcuffs. He didn’t fight them, and his eyes were so swollen that he had to be guided to the cruiser.

The girl explained that Will had shown up in the alley, that he had torn her from the man’s arms. After the cruiser had pulled away with the man in the back, the girl calmed down measurably.

“I tried to fight,” she said to the cop who’d stayed behind. “I kicked and yelled, but no one did anything. Until
he
came. He saved me.” She smiled at Will, a broad bright smile.

I
had seen her through the window. I had thought nothing of it.

Does that happen often? I wondered. How many cries for help go unnoticed?

“You roughed him up pretty bad,” said the cop, a young guy with cropped dark hair and a mustache. I thought at first that he was going to reprimand Will, maybe even charge him with assault, but then he held his fist up in the air for Will to bump.

Will looked at it for a second, then tapped it with his own fist. Dried blood crusted his knuckles.

Two more cop cars arrived, one of them carrying the girl’s parents. The woman pushed out of the cruiser almost before it had stopped, and the sight of her mother crumbled the girl again and she collapsed, sobbing, in her arms. The girl and her parents left in one of the cars, for the hospital or the police station, I didn’t know.

“We’re going to need your statement,” the young cop said to Will. He sounded apologetic, like he felt bad about inconveniencing him after all he’d already done.

“Sure, sure,” said Will.

“Yours too,” the policeman said to me. “Are you his girlfriend?”

Mutely, I nodded.

“Lucky girl to have such a brave guy,” he said. “
You’ll
never have anything to worry about, huh?”

The cop with the mustache drove us himself. Will told him where we’d left our car, and he took us to it. “It must be your lucky night,” he said, nodding to the broken meter. We climbed into the car and followed the cruiser to the station. He even turned on his whirling lights, which fractured and blurred, magnified by my unspilled tears.

Of course they called my mother. I was still seventeen—a minor. It was like a weird repeat of last spring, when my parents had come for me after the Long Beach fire.

But everything had changed since then. My mom came alone and was wearing heels and a frilly shirt. Date clothes.

And Martin wasn’t here, as he had been in the spring. Will, nearly nineteen, didn’t need a guardian.

Mom hugged me quickly, leaving a cloud of sweet perfume around me. “Scarlett, what happened?”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t fully know what had happened in that alley—to Will, to me.

“She’s okay, Mrs. Wenderoth,” Will said. “Scarlett’s not hurt.”

The mustachioed cop chimed in, “I’ll say! As long as she’s got that boyfriend, she won’t be, either.”

He seemed to have one line.

Will gave my mom the abbreviated version of the night’s events. She gasped and shook her head in all the right places. But I couldn’t get past wondering who she was so dressed up for. Where had she been when she’d gotten the call from the police station? Whom had she been with?

The officers interviewed each of us, and then we were free to leave. But not before each cop stood up to individually shake Will’s hand. Then one of them got the idea to take a group picture with the hero. No one seemed to notice when I opted out, heading toward the door.

No one but Will. He noticed, but said nothing.

My mom offered to take me home with her, to the apartment. Part of me wanted to go, to avoid being alone with Will, but then I wouldn’t get another chance to talk with him before his flight in the morning. And though she acted disappointed when I refused, she kissed me rather distractedly before hurrying off to her car.

I wondered if maybe she planned to resume her date.

Will and I didn’t talk much as we drove back to Sabine’s house. He asked me once if I was okay, and I nodded. I watched out the window as the stream of lights flashed by.

When we got back to Linnie Canal, Will hit the button on the garage door opener and we pulled into the garage. He cut the engine and the door closed behind us, but neither of us moved to leave the car. Any minute someone might come out to the garage. I had to ask the question that had been preying on me since the alley. I had to ask it now, while we were still alone.

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

Will’s jaw tensed. He stared straight ahead, hands gripping the wheel as if he was still driving. Finally he shook his head.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

“No,” he said. “But I should have. The only reason I haven’t yet is because I’m weak.”

“That’s insane, Will,” I said. “You haven’t killed anyone because you’re not like that.”

“I’m not so sure,” he answered. “I think I’d
like
to be like that.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

He laughed a little, probably at how certain I sounded. “You can never really know what’s going on in someone else’s heart,” he said. “But I know what I’ve seen. And some of the things I’ve seen…the people who were doing them, those people don’t deserve to live.”

The door into the house opened and a square of light illuminated the dark garage. Martin’s shape filled the doorway.

“Son?” he called.

Martin started the teakettle. Slumping into a kitchen chair, I thought about how different everything had been when I’d had my last cup of tea. Then, I had felt that I knew Will better than anyone. Since then, I’d seen parts of him I didn’t understand. Things I wish I could unsee. And since then, he’d warned me that I could never really know what was in his heart. Maybe he was right.

Of course Martin had known as soon as Will had gotten out of the car that something had happened; though Will had definitely dominated the fight with the man in the alley, he hadn’t escaped entirely unscathed. Aside from his bloodied knuckles, Will had an eye that was growing more purplish black by the minute. There were dark stains on his sweater, and the knees of his pants had been blackened by the asphalt. One was torn.

“Take a shower, son,” said Martin. “I’ll keep the kettle warm for you. Then we’ll talk.”

The rest of the household must have been asleep. That particular kind of quiet permeated the house, the quiet of peace and night. Martin was wearing his pajamas—striped flannel—and a plaid robe. On his feet were corduroy slippers. It didn’t look like he’d been woken by the sound of the garage door opening; a lamp was lit next to the kitchen, illuminating a stack of books and papers.

“I was planning for the new semester,” Martin said, following my gaze to the table. “We all try, don’t we, to plan the best we know how?”

In English this year, we were reading Steinbeck and the poetry of Robert Burns. “ ‘The best-laid schemes of mice and men…,’ ” I murmured.

“ ‘Often go awry,’ ” finished Martin. “So you know just what I mean.”

The kettle boiled. Martin placed tea bags in two cups and poured water over them. “Why don’t you tell me what happened, Scarlett?”