Splendor (5 page)

We walked along the road for a little ways; then a trail broke off on our right. I knew this trail well—it was one of my favorite routes to take with Delilah. We turned together toward the more private path without speaking. When the trail narrowed so it was too tight for us to walk side by side, Will stretched his arm behind him to keep his hold on my hand. A moment later the trail widened again, opening onto a small field.

All around us were trees and grass and the bright blue sky. Will turned to me, and I to him, and when we kissed the fire that sprang up between us was undeniable, as certain as the sun and just as hot.

Together we sank into the grass, together we knelt in something that felt as close to a prayer as anything I had ever known—our bodies turned in toward each other’s, the long press of Will’s chest against mine.

And when he lay me down in the meadow and pushed his body to mine, I welcomed the weight of him. The ground was hard beneath me, not comfortable at all—later I would find a darkening bruise on the small of my back where a rock had been—but I didn’t shift my weight.

His hands—at last!—pulled my T-shirt up from the waistband of my jeans, and his fingers splayed against my rib cage, tracing little lines against my skin, threatening to drive me mad.

Every inch of my body felt alive. I would have said yes to anything. Of that I am sure.

But when Will broke the kiss, his face just inches away from mine, he didn’t ask me a question. Instead he said, “Scarlett, I want you to know that I love you.”

This was the first time he’d said that to me. I smiled at him and tilted my mouth up for another kiss. “I love you too,” I murmured, straining toward him.

Will didn’t kiss me again, not right away. He shifted up to sitting, pulling me with him.

I didn’t want to sit up; I didn’t want to untangle our limbs and talk. Not even about love.

But Will’s face was serious, and what he said next forced me to listen. “I think you saved me last year, Scarlett.”

I laughed. “I don’t think so, Will. That’s not how I remember things.”

“But it’s true. Scarlett, you helped me see that I have a choice—there’s always a choice. Right now, I want to choose this”—he lowered his head to my neck, tracing kisses along my collarbone in a way that raised goose bumps on my skin—“but I’m not sure you want to choose it, too.”

“Will,” I said, “stop talking.”

He laughed a little, and I pulled him on top of me as I lay back down.

Ahh. The press of him—the luxurious weight of his body stretched against the length of mine. This time the thrust of his hips was unmistakable. I felt a tingle of fear mixed with desire in the pit of my belly, and lower. There was mystery there, in the masculine hardness of him, and perhaps danger, too.

Will sensed me stiffen a little in his arms. “Are you okay?”

“Just nervous,” I admitted. “Aren’t you?”

He didn’t answer right away, and in the gap of his silence I was struck by a realization. “You’ve done this before?”

I had rarely seen Will at a loss for words. He was now. His mouth opened, then closed. His fingers loosened from my side.

I don’t know how to name the mix of emotions I felt. Surprised, I guess, and hurt…and embarrassed, too. I pushed hard on his chest and he shifted enough for me to slide out from underneath him.

“Tell me,” I said.

He nodded. “It was last summer, before we came to the island.”

The jealousy I felt was all-consuming. Rageful. Fire-bright and hot. But even in the midst of it a tiny voice asked me what right I had to be angry. Will was talking about a time before he even knew I existed.

“Who was she?”

He sighed and sat up, running his fingers through his hair. “Are you sure you want to talk about this?”

I wasn’t sure about anything—not anymore. The island was so quiet, the air stifling and still. “If we hurry,” I said as I got up, “we can still get you to the one-thirty ferry.”

Will tried twice to engage me in conversation—once on the trail, again in the car. Both times I shook him off and retreated into silence. After that he stopped trying. I could feel him getting angry next to me as we neared town. Good.

The dock was a madhouse as it always was: streams of tourists with kids disembarked from the ferry, and a long winding line of more tourists hauled their bags, waiting to board.

Will’s duffel bag was heavy, but he yanked it out of the back of the Volvo easily, probably fueled by his irritation with me. And though I was mad, swallowing back the bilious feeling of betrayal, I couldn’t bring myself to watch from the car as Will joined the line of people. So I followed miserably as he walked to the ticket booth and then followed the crowd waiting for the ferry to depart.

Will’s jaw was tensed and he looked miserable too. Our last day together. Could it have gone more wrong?

Already it was after one o’clock. Soon he’d board the ferry. I could have kicked myself for wasting our last hours together consumed with jealousy.

“Will.”

He looked at me. His gaze softened. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. I’ll tell you now, if you want.”

I shook my head. That wasn’t how I wanted to remember our last minutes together, with Will telling me all about the other girl he’d slept with. “Maybe another time. Now let’s just be here together.”

The crowded dock was worlds away from the private trail, but I tried to content myself by holding Will’s hand, feeling his warmth beside me.

“I’ll call you every day,” he promised.

“Write me letters,” I said. “Long romantic ones.”

Will laughed. “Okay. We’ll write letters. But I’ll call, too.”

Too soon the boat’s horn sounded, announcing that it was time to board. The sun high above our heads stared down unblinking as I lost myself one last time in Will’s embrace. And then he walked down the gangplank and onto the ship.

When he disappeared into the boat’s cabin I felt a moment of panic. Would I see him again? Was he gone from me already? But then he appeared on the stern, pushing through the flood of passengers to get to the very back of the boat, closest to the dock. He raised his hand to wave to me and then stretched his arm out, as if he could span the distance between us. And as the boat pulled away, as Will grew smaller and smaller and finally disappeared, I felt the presence of him still, both coming like a wave from the ocean and radiating, too, from somewhere within me. As if wherever Will went—no matter how far—he was forever present, braided with some part of my soul, parts of us tangled up together, intractably.

Was this how love felt?

The time came when the world constricted around him, grasping him tightly, then too tightly, and he didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay even though the world had grown too small, or he too big for it—but some choices are not ours, his first lesson, and he was squeezed and pushed. The weight of the world seemed to be collapsing upon him, the pressure almost too much to bear. The beat, his constant friend and companion, faded farther and farther away. Then a new sensation—a touch on the top of his head. As he slipped away from his universe, his arms unbound, the freedom was overwhelming and terribly frightening.

The cold emptiness of the air was painful against his skin, and he flailed in it. The sound of his own cry startled him, redoubling his fear. Then hands passed him into arms and a warmed blanket tented over him. At last, he heard it again, though this time muffled, as if hidden behind a wall—his companion, the beat he loved. And he felt the warmth of bare skin against his body; it was different than the wetness and the warmth of before—but it was good. And he opened his eyes and looked up into other eyes, green and so full of love, and he knew he was seeing the world that he’d come from, and he stretched up his hand as best he could to touch her cheek.

A
t last, Lily forgave me. It took her until the end of the first week of school. She’d done a really good job of punishing me, especially for someone whose family I doubt had ever subjected her to a bout of the silent treatment.

School started on the Tuesday after Labor Day. The first three days Lily went out of her way to show me exactly how she felt. She even went so far as to request a locker change so that we wouldn’t be right next to each other anymore. The vice principal, Mr. Steiner, told her to stop being so dramatic.

I don’t know many people who can flounce and prance as well as Lily. The way she was acting reminded me of a song my mom used to sing to me when I was acting bratty as a child:

There was a little girl

Who had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very, very good,

But when she was bad, she was horrid.

“My hair is straight,” I’d always answer.

But Lily’s wasn’t. Her lovely dark hair fell in ringlets, so she fit the verse perfectly. The day of her temper tantrum over the locker, I found myself humming the song all afternoon.

Part of Lily’s charm was her willingness to take fashion risks. The first two days of school she wore wooden clogs—actual
wooden clogs
that she must have picked up in Amsterdam. And even though she wouldn’t let me get close enough to compliment her, I had to admire her panache. On Wednesday she paired her clogs with white knee-highs—thick woolen ones—and a little dress with a flared skirt and a white bodice that proudly displayed two of Lily’s best features.

But Friday, Lily showed up to school late, after first period had already ended. I was just coming out of English class when I saw her arguing with Mr. Steiner in the hallway outside of the main office.

She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. On anyone else this might not have been noteworthy; on Lily, it meant that something was majorly wrong. Her curls were extra wild, not even glossed with their usual pomade.

“I know school started an hour ago, Mr. Steiner,” she said, “and I would have been here on time, but I had terrible cramps. It’s my menses, you know. Some months are just really hard.”

Mr. Steiner began stuttering something I couldn’t make out from my position outside of the classroom, but the tone of his voice and the sudden tenseness in his shoulders made it pretty obvious that he was uncomfortable discussing the intimacies of Lily Adams’s female cycle.

“Just be sure you have a note next time,” he blustered before walking into the office, shutting the door firmly behind him.

Lily caught my eye and winked. Ah, a patented Lily wink. How I’d missed them.

At lunch, Lily slid next to me with her tray as if nothing had happened between us. I handed her half my sandwich and she pushed across two of her four Oreos.

“So Adrian is officially a toad,” she said, biting into the sandwich half. “Mmm, pastrami!”

“Glad you like it. What happened with Adrian?”

“More like what
didn’t
happen. Did you know that the turd ignored my friend request on Facebook?”

Of course I didn’t know this—Lily hadn’t spoken two words to me since the night of the party. But I felt it might be better to let that particular comment go unsaid.

“That’s terrible. Has he called you or anything?”

She shook her head, curls bouncing vehemently. “Not once. Not
once
!” She tore into the sandwich, chewing and swallowing. “I burned the stupid shoes,” she added. “Poof!”

“Probably for the best. You were bound to twist an ankle in those things eventually.”

“Maybe
you
would,” she scoffed. “I’ve never yet met a pair of shoes I can’t master. But it was, you know, symbolic.”

I kept my face straight and nodded. “Very powerful symbolism.”

And just like that, Lily Adams was my best friend again.

“So what about Will?” Lily asked later, as we headed out of school after the last bell.

“Well, he writes, and he calls, and he texts.” I felt like I was walking a delicate line. I wanted to open up to Lily, but at the same time talking about Will—about our relationship—felt too tender. He’d been gone from the island for over a week now. A week and three days.

I thought about him more times every day than I cared to admit. Upon waking, always. And sometimes in the early morning, in the quiet of my room, soft light filtering through the gauzy curtains, I would be overwhelmed by an almost palpable sensation that Will was with me—right there, just out of my reach.

“So what do you think? Are you guys going to stay together?”

This was exactly the question I’d avoided asking myself—probably because I didn’t want to acknowledge any doubts.

When Will had chosen Yale, he and I had decided not to have “the talk.” The one about the future. It seemed silly. I just turned seventeen in April, and Will was only a year older.

The way I felt about him—and the way I hoped he felt about me—those seemed like forever feelings. But then, I’d
never
have thought my parents would ever split up…and now they were separated by an ocean.

Maybe that was a little dramatic. I mean, Catalina is only twenty-two miles from the mainland, so the body of water isn’t vast. But it seemed true that an ocean of emotions divided my parents now.

After my riding accident last year, it seemed for a while that everything would be better. Lots had broken in each of us with Ronny’s death, but much had healed, too, in the year since that terrible phone call. And I’d gained strength I hadn’t known I’d had.

I figured my parents’ marriage would be like that, too. Different, maybe, but still solid. And though my mom made a good show of things after I was thrown from Traveler—finally leaving her self-imposed isolation in her bedroom, tossing out the sleeping pills and working through the shakes—ultimately I guess she just wasn’t as mended as I had thought.

And so she flew away. Away from the island, from her pain, from her marriage…and from me.

If she could leave her kid behind, who’s to say that Will couldn’t leave me, too?

“I hope so, Lil,” I said. “I sure do miss him.”

She nodded, thoughtful. “Well, at least the dating pool around here improved while I was away. It looks like Brandon Becker’s been eating his Wheaties.” She gave him one of her smiles as he crossed in front of us on the school’s front lawn.

He smiled back, but Katie Ellis, who had a death grip on his right hand, shot daggers at us.

“So you wanna come over?”

Tempting. Lily’s place had always been my second home. But I shook my head. “Can’t. The vet’s coming out today to check on Delilah.”

“I still think it’s creepy—artificial horse insemination? Gross.”

I shrugged. “Sometimes life is gross, Lil.”

She laughed. “You’re telling me.”

If Lily had seen the procedure that the vet, Dr. Rhonda, used to determine if Delilah was pregnant, she would have had something to say, for sure. Dr. Rhonda—a young vet, one of those girls who was probably tormented in high school for her lack of fashion sense (she actually wore a
bolero
) and her single-minded focus on her goal of becoming a large-animal vet—was practically jumping up and down as she explained the ultrasound equipment to me.

“This is the perfect time to do the ultrasound, if your mare is in foal. When did you do the insemination? Early July?”

I nodded.

“Perfect. Today’s the ninth of September, which makes her approximately sixty-five days along. That is, if she’s pregnant.”

“I think she is,” I said. “She seems a little different.”

“Different how?”

“Oh, I don’t know…softer, I guess. Not quite as high-strung, maybe.”

“That could all be in your head. You want her to be in foal, so you could be seeing things that aren’t really there.”

This set my teeth on edge. I knew my own mare. I wasn’t stupid.

Dr. Rhonda must have seen my jaw tense, because she laughed. “Sorry, Scarlett, it’s just that I see it all the time. People often see what they
want
to see instead of what’s really there. But we’ll know in a minute.”

She had set up the ultrasound machine near the crossties where I’d brought Delilah. It looked like a small TV monitor, or an older-model computer, with about a ten-inch screen. Attached to it was a long thin cord, and at the end of the cord was a probe.

“We insert that into your mare’s rectum,” said Dr. Rhonda. “It will allow us to see a heartbeat and the placenta, and if we’re lucky we’ll be able to determine the gender.”

Aside from the part about shoving the probe into my mare’s rectum, this was exciting news. “Really? This soon?”

Dr. Rhonda grinned at me. “Isn’t technology amazing?”

I was admittedly a little weirded out when she squirted some clear jelly on the tip of the probe and made her way around to the rear of my mare, but Delilah didn’t seem to mind as long as her nose was dipped into the bucket of A&M I’d set in front of her.

“Well, you were right,” Dr. Rhonda said. “There’s the fetus.”

And on the screen, there it was—a little lump of something that magically looked like a tiny, tiny horse, with a frantically fluttering dot right near the center of it.

Life. Right there, on the screen—and in my mare.

“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s the baby? And that flutter there”—I poked my finger at the screen—“that’s the heartbeat?”

“Sure is.” She pressed some keys and took several still images for measurements. “He looks healthy. Everything is just the way it should be.”

“He?”

“Yep.” Dr. Rhonda zoomed in on the foal and an arrow appeared on the screen. “See there? That’s his penis.”

“Wow.”

“Pretty incredible. It—he—is about two, two and a half inches long. About the size of a hamster. But he’s hairless still. And look—he has tiny little hooves.”

We stood side by side and gazed at the images of the tiny foal on the black-and-white monitor. Then Delilah cleaned out the bucket, stomped loudly, and shook her head.

Dr. Rhonda laughed. “She’s done with us, I guess. I’ll print you out a copy of these pictures.”

She removed the probe and cleaned it, then snapped off her gloves inside out. I watched her movements carefully. I liked how respectful she was with my mare; she wasn’t rough at all, like the farrier could be. She loved her job. That was obvious. She spoke to the horses like I did, as if she expected them to answer.

“So have you given any thought to what you might want to study when you go off to college?”

I shrugged. “I used to think I’d study literature,” I said, “or acting. But lately…maybe medicine?”

“You’d be great!” Dr. Rhonda had that encouraging, eager tone that adults get when someone mentions an interest in their career. “Veterinary medicine?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe I’d like to study the brain.”

Dr. Rhonda nodded. “Your brother died from an aneurysm, didn’t he?”

I felt the sting of tears but managed to blink them back. “Grade six cerebral aneurysm.” My voice sounded surprisingly even.

She shook her head. “Such a loss.”

Dr. Rhonda attached a little printer to the ultrasound machine, and a long roll of images emerged from it. She handed them to me. “Take good care of them.”

She may have meant the pictures, or she may have meant Delilah and her foal. It was strange that the plural pronoun now applied.

“I will. Is there anything I need to do differently? You know, like special feed or exercise restrictions?”

“Not for now. Just keep feeding her what she’s been getting and make sure she always has access to fresh water. Later—in the last four months or so, her last trimester—you’ll need to start thinking about adding in some extra calories and calcium.”

“And I can keep riding her, right?”

“You’d better. She’s perfectly healthy, just pregnant. She’ll slow down a bit as she gets heavier.”

Dr. Rhonda packed the ultrasound machine and the printer carefully into a foam-lined case, then stroked Delilah’s muzzle before she headed out.