The Best I Could (34 page)

He slid his hands into his pockets. “A summer
fling.”

A smile played with my lips. “A really weird
one.”

He glanced down at me, waving his hand,
offering me the stage. “So your point is, oh immortal one?”

The teasing play on my name kept the moment
light, letting me slip into the words, the moment. “That maybe
that’s all this should be, huh? Us. The summer.”

Eli kicked at the dirt below us, and then
stopped in his tracks. “Maybe you’re right. So what does that leave
us with?”

“Sex. I want that.”

“Just sex?”

“And friendship.”

“You don’t think what we have could be the
beginning of something?” he asked seriously. “I’m not saying love.
I’m just saying … maybe the slide into it. All relationships begin
somewhere.” Leaning forward, he grinned at me. “You’re scared
shitless, roof girl.”

Yeah, I am.

“You don’t have to mock me.”

Getting in front of me, he started to walk
backwards. “Oh, I’m not mocking. I’m all for a sexual summer fling.
Friendship, too. I’m just saying that when you start to really
examine it, maybe you should ask yourself where the attraction ends
and everything else begins.”

“You two going to crawl all night or join
us?” Jonathan shouted. “I see the pond and the boathouse.”

We hurried to catch up, Eli’s words ringing
through my head. My body was hungry. For him. For pain. For
clarity. And I was trying to stuff it all down my throat at the
same time. Quickly, because deep down I agreed with Deena. It was
just a matter of time before my card was pulled, and I wanted to
experience it all. The verbal back and forth with Eli, the stolen
heated embraces, the cutting … I was drowning in the sensations.
Some of them good. Some of them bad.

My gaze found his face to discover him
staring at me in the darkness.

“Ready for a treasure hunt?” he asked,
somehow making it sound sexual when digging inside a boathouse had
nothing to do with sex.

“Eli?”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s find out what kind of douche you were
at fourteen.”

Shadows jumped at us, trees rustling.
Fireflies winking. A pond glistening with moonlight. Heat, water
lapping, and four people exhaling into the night.

Eli

Tansy was scared.

I knew when she pulled away from me at the
burger joint that she was beginning to question what she was
doing—with me and with herself. She was the kind of person who
complicated things, her emotions gridlocking together.

“You guys get to go in first,” Deena said
firmly. “Because, you know, snakes.”

“Spiders,” Tansy added.

Deena scrunched her nose. “Raccoons.”

Tansy grinned. “Skunks.”

Jonathan glanced at me.
“Now,
I’m
beginning
to question this whole thing.”

Brushing past them, I held my hand out to
Jonathan. “Let me see your cell phone.”

“What about yours?”

“You know I rarely carry it. That shit causes
too many complications in my life.”

“Less girls and less time in trouble, and it
wouldn’t.” Sulking, Jonathan slapped the phone into my hand.

Finding his flashlight app, I clicked it on,
the glare running up the side of a small wooden building on the
edge of the pond, the back end of it sitting in the woods, the
front end of it hovering just at the edge of the water. The door
hung on its hinges, the dark abyss behind it glaring at us.

Biceps straining, I pushed at the door,
knowing from experience that it would stick. It had been old back
when my grandmother was alive, belonging to whoever owned the
property before, but now it looked ancient. Weather and time wasn’t
kind to some structures.

“Maybe we shouldn’t go in,” Jonathan said
suddenly.

The door moved, and I pressed harder,
grunting when it gave way. “Afraid, Jon? Or worried about what we
may find?”

“The latter, I think,” he replied.

Pointing the flashlight into the room, I
found it the way we’d left it. No boats. Only an old table, a ring
of chairs, scattered leaves, stacked boxes, and old furniture.

The stairs leading to the door had rotted, so
I jumped, catching myself with my arms. Climbing the rest of the
way inside, I lowered my hand, offering it to Tansy, who stood
behind me.

With my height, the climb had been nothing,
but I had to lift Tansy in, pulling her until she fell against me.
Dust fanned out around us, poofing into the air where we
landed.

She sneezed.

Tiny feet skittered across wood.

“Are those rats?” she hissed.

Jonathan lifted himself into the building,
followed by Deena, her hand wrapped around his forearm.

“As long as they’re running, we’re good,” I
said, chuckling. “Means they’re more afraid of us than we are of
them.”

Swinging the flashlight around, I stared at
the interior.

“God, the trouble we used to get into back
here,” Jonathan said. “Poor Heather. As the only girl, we were
always giving her hell.”

“Good times,” I mumbled, stepping toward the
boxes against the wall. “Do you remember where you hid your
stuff?”

Tansy joined me, glancing over my
shoulder.

Jonathan went to a box next to me. Lifting
the flaps, he peered into it. “Light?”

I handed him the phone, and he laughed,
pulling a magazine free of the box. An old issue of Playboy.

“Eli!” they all said together.

“What? You think I hid that?” I asked
innocently. “It couldn’t have been Jonathan? Ten is a good curious
age, you know.”

Tansy laughed. “Give it up, roof boy.”

Taking the phone back from Jonathan, I held
it near the ground behind the boxes. There, paint chipped and
faded, a small piece of it nibbled by mice, was the boat I’d
hidden.

Tugging it free, I curled my fingers around
the wood.

“Pops helped you make that, didn’t he?”
Jonathan asked. “For some Boy Scouts competition or something.”

“Not Boy Scouts. It was a contest they had on
the coast. For kids. The boat had to be a certain size, couldn’t
sink, and needed to be creative.”

Deena squinted at it. “You went with
simple.”

The boat was blue with two
white pinstripes, the word
Max
in white calligraphy.

“Max?” Tansy whispered, as if speaking the
word louder would somehow destroy the moment.

I smiled. “The boy from the
book
Where the Wild Things are.
I was going to be him. Only I wanted to live with
the beasts rather than come back.”

Jonathan grunted. “A grouchy thing even
then.”

Putting the boat down, I handed the phone to
Jonathan. “Maybe so.”

Back and forth, we passed the light, digging
in boxes, looking under furniture, and sifting through leaves.

A pile of things gathered in the middle of
the room. A yo-yo with a Captain America sticker on it, a rubber
spider because who wouldn’t want to find one of those in a dark
building in the middle of the night, a doll with old makeup still
staining her face, a half finished puzzle of a unicorn, a stack of
comics, and an old photo album.

Tansy flipped through the album, stopped on a
page, and laughed. Turning it toward us, she pointed at a picture
of me and Jonathan sitting in the bathtub naked. I was five years
old, and he was a year old.

“Bathtub pictures are one of those hall of
shame things that should be burned,” I said, laughing.

“Along with old school photos,” Tansy
agreed.

Deena glanced around the room. “It must have
been fun, getting to spend time here.”

“It wasn’t bad,” Jonathan admitted. “It was
the only time we were all together. Heather and Eli stayed with
Pops all year round, but I had to go home to Dad afterwards, so I
enjoyed being here when I could.”

“How old were you when Pops bought the
orchard?” Tansy asked, looking at us.

“Eleven,” I answered.

Jonathan glanced at the door. “Seven.”

“We stayed here the two years Grams fought
the cancer, and then we went back to Atlanta, only coming back in
the summer. Eventually, we stopped altogether,” I added.

Deena went to the door and stared out over
the pond.

Tansy glanced at Jonathan’s phone and
straightened. “We need to get back.”

Together, we left, a much quieter group than
we’d been when we parked at the edge of the field.

“We didn’t do much when we were younger,”
Deena said suddenly. “The occasional trip to the mountains, but
mostly …” She shrugged.

“Just couldn’t afford it?” Jonathan
asked.

“No,” Tansy answered softly, “we had the
money. Mom and Dad just liked spending vacations alone. The two of
them.”

“That’s not a bad thing,” I pointed out.

Deena scowled. “Depends on how you look at
it. It wasn’t that they took an occasional weekend away. They
preferred to be alone.”

“They loved us,” Tansy said quickly, throwing
her sister a look. “They just loved each other more.”

Jonathan glanced at his phone. “Okay, now
you’re making me feel like shit for being mad at my dad. He’s
always put me first.”

His remark brought a smile to our faces
because you couldn’t hate Jonathan for his childhood. Envy him,
maybe. Hate him? Not a chance.

Deena nudged him. “Daddy’s boy, huh?’

Tansy flashed him a smile.

We came up on the car, the red black in the
night, the dirt road washed out behind it. Like a black and white
photograph.

“Thanks for tonight,” Tansy murmured,
climbing in.

Deena followed. “Keep the windows down,” she
pleaded.

Despite her request, Deena didn’t scream on
the way home.

Glancing in the backseat, I found the sisters
being stolen by the wind, turning them into wild medusas. Looking
at them, I realized they would have fit in better in Max’s world,
in the forest full of wild things.

I was just the boy in the boat, sailing to
the island and then home again.

Tansy

Being with Eli and Jonathan was a funny
thing. This whole other look at life. Not at what it was like to be
rich, but what it was like to be a part of this vivid, really cool
family.

At the same time, it was also this window
into madness. I had once thought my father was mad. Maybe he was,
but then death can fool people into thinking they’re mad. I think
that’s what happened with my father. Death did something to our
family. It immortalized my mother, and in so doing, stole my
father’s life.

With Eli’s family, it wasn’t death hovering
over them, it was Ivy Lockston’s flirtation with
unpredictability.

That night, after our trek to the boathouse,
Deena and I returned to our grandmother’s house not much different
than we’d been when we left. Calmer and more accepting, but not
different. We still had our fears and our pain.

The difference was in the way we acted with
each other, the occasional smiles, animated descriptions of the
night with Nana, and the hugs, albeit awkward ones.

Dad’s death was still too new, our
immortalized mother still hanging over us, too heavy a blanket to
shed overnight, but we were pulling strings loose and that was a
start.

The biggest upset after the boathouse trek
were the things my grandmother had lying on the kitchen bar when we
came in; my scissors, bandages, antiseptics, and ointments.

“This feels good?” my grandmother asked me
later, after Deena had retired for the night. Skepticism swam in
her eyes.

I wanted to get angry over Hetty’s intrusion,
the burning rage gathering in my chest, but I tamped it down
because I’d been the one to invite her into it.

My cheeks heated. “It hurts,” I admitted.
“But, weirdly, it also feels like freedom.”

She studied me, and it was like the lights
suddenly switched on. “Everything is moving too fast, isn’t it?”
she asked.

Leaning against the bar, I stared at the
scissors. “Yeah.”

She watched me, watched the way I stared at
the blades, and said, “I’m not going to be able to get you to stop,
am I?” She sighed. “But I’ll find someone you can talk to. Maybe
get those names from Eli.” Reaching for me, she grasped my hand.
“Just promise me you’ll try.”

My gaze caught hers, the promise sitting in
my stare. Something told me that Nana used to be a harder woman,
overprotective, and harder to compromise with before all of the
death in our family. That was another thing death changed …
personality.

Words drained out of us, we retreated to our
rooms.

Dad’s death, our rush into the country, an
unexpected whirlwind romance that came out of nowhere, and striking
realizations … it all made me dizzy, drunk on ten days of grief,
need, and distraction. Drunk on death and life and pain.

Suddenly, all I wanted was sex. Right or
wrong, the need was just there. Maybe it was because I knew how it
felt, how good it could be. It hadn’t been terrible with Jeff, my
intensity aside, because sex was kind of like death and life all
rolled into one. It made me feel, good or bad, shutting all of my
problems down before they roared back to life again afterward.

Desperation was a terrible thing. A beast
that pushed me into a corner, and then suddenly decided to sit
obediently, forcing me to look at it.

It was late, past midnight, and the house had
been quiet for hours.

Quickly, before I could talk myself out of
it, before I could list all of the reasons why this was a mistake,
I snuck out of the house, keys in hand, climbed into the van, and
then left.

Headlights off, I pulled the vehicle into a
side street, clearing the road my grandmother lived on, and even
then I kept glancing into the rearview mirror expecting to find
flashing blue lights knowing there was the possibility someone
could have heard the engine turning over. Deena slept like the
dead, but I still didn’t know my grandmother’s sleep patterns.