The Reaping of Norah Bentley (26 page)

And then I saw it: a guitar, over in the corner and safely tucked away out of the sunlight. The second I started towards it to get a closer look, though, I realized it wasn’t just
a
guitar; at first I didn’t believe what I was seeing, was sure there was no way that could be what I thought it was. But I recognized that classic, figure-eight-shaped body, the scalloped headstock and the ebony bridge and fingerboard—how many pictures had my dad showed me of it? This was one of the guitars he always said he was going to own someday. Someday when he was rich and had a couple thousand dollars to burn.

I knelt down beside the stand, still awestruck. “This is an N-20,” I said, not taking my eyes off it.

“I thought it might be a good distraction for you.”

“…This all looks original,” I said, lightly running my fingers across the spruce top. “What year?”

“Made in 1970,” he said.

“That’s what I thought. Martin only produced like a hundred of these that year— how in the world did you get one?”

“It was my mom’s,” he said. “She gave it to me on my last birthday.”

“I didn’t even know you played.”

“I don’t, really,” he said, picking the guitar up and offering it to me. “Not like you, anyway.”

It was so beautiful I was almost afraid to touch it, but there was no way I was going to give up the opportunity. So with timid fingers I reached for it, took a firm grip on the base of the neck, pulled it into my arms and cradled it against me. My fingers slid out over the long neck, pressed each of the nylon strings down, one-by-one, and then I pulled them away, strummed it openly.

“Still in-tune,” I said, closing my eyes and letting my thoughts fade into the guitar’s rich, smooth voice.

“I try to keep it that way,” Eli said. “I know how to do that much with it, at least.”

I nodded, opened my eyes and went back to looking it over, still not believing how relatively perfect its condition was. I could feel Eli’s eyes on me, watching me with maybe the same infatuation, and it made me nervous all of sudden, to be in his room and so centered in his attention. So I looked up and said,

“I can try and teach you to do more than that with it, if you want.”

“You can try,” he said, without taking his eyes off me. “But I’ll go ahead and warn you—I’m pretty much a hopeless case when it comes to music.”

“You just haven’t had the right teacher,” I said, handing him the guitar. He took it, walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Alright then.” He pulled the guitar up and rested it against his knee, nodded to the space beside him. “Come teach me,” he said.

I had to give my head a little shake to try and keep the scene from sliding out of focus, to keep my head from spinning so that I could cross the room without tripping over myself. I didn’t think that guitar could look any better. But now that he was holding it, it was like the guitar
I’d
held had just been some cheap reproduction—just a glimpse of what it could be, what it was supposed to be.

“Are you sure you don’t know what you’re doing?” I asked. “You look pretty much like a natural holding it.”

He shrugged. I put my hands on his relaxed shoulders, determined to focus on the lesson. “You just need to sit up a little straighter,” I said. From his shoulders, my hand traveled down his strumming arm, and I pressed my fingers delicately against his wrist. “And you need to relax your wrist a little,” I said.

He laughed; a hitch of sound that was more breath than anything. “You make relaxing kind of difficult,” he said. “Especially when you’re so close like this.”

“Sorry.”

“You definitely don’t need to apologize.”

I blushed, and after that I tried not to touch him any more than I had to; I just pointed to the strings he needed to hold down, tried to show him how to position his fingers by moving mine around the invisible neck of my air guitar.

He copied my every movement faithfully, but in the end, he was right—he was pretty terrible at guitar. Adorably terrible, but terrible just the same. After about fifteen minutes, any of the seriousness we’d had when we started was gone, and he was just randomly hitting strings to see how much he could make me laugh, or cringe, or both.

“I told you I was hopeless,” he said with a crooked smile, after a particularly painful note made me bury my face in my hands to try and stifle my laughter.

“Yeah, but you’re not even trying anymore.” I smiled, reached for his fingers on the fret board, and positioned them for an ‘A’ chord. “Here,” I said. “Last chord for now—this one’s easy.”

Just the thought of our skin touching was enough to send fire coursing through me, and it wasn’t until that initial warmth faded that I realized how cold his fingers actually were to the touch.

I drew my hand back slowly, and without the support of it, his started to slip. He jerked it back up before it managed to fall all the way down to his side. But then he tried to position it back between the frets, and it became obvious he was having a hard time. His hands were searching, sliding; his fingers didn’t seem to be able to push the strings even partway down. No wonder he couldn’t play any of these chords worth crap.

I put my hand back over his, held it still. “Why are you so cold?” I asked.

He answered only by getting very slowly to his feet and taking the guitar back over to its stand.

It wasn’t until he started walking back toward me that the first, real tremor of fear surged through me. Because that was when I saw it settling in his eyes: that vague, unfocused look. The same look he’d worn that morning in the park, but somehow it was even worse now; maybe just because it was juxtaposed with the perfection of this past half-hour—a painful jolt back into reality.

“Are you okay?” I asked, getting to my feet. For a second I thought he hadn’t heard me, but then his head dropped forward in what I think was a nod.

“I think I’m going to have to go, soon,” he said without looking at me.

That surge of fear took a more commanding hold on my heart.

“…You should, then,” I said quietly. I didn’t want him to; I would have given anything to keep him there with me. But it would have been easier if he left—I couldn’t stand seeing him hurt like this. “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I can walk myself home.”

He looked up at me, his eyes half-shut like he was waiting for them to get used to the light. “No,” he said, climbing back onto the bed. “No, I don’t want to go just yet. I just need to sit down for a minute.”

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked. I hated feeling so helpless. “Anything you need?”

He leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes, the ghost of a smile crossing his lips for just a second. Then his face—his whole body—went very still, and he said,

“Just you,” he said. “You make it easier to stay.”

I still felt completely and utterly useless, but I crawled toward him anyway, picked up his arm and put it around me while I curled up against him.

“Better?” I asked.

“Much.”

Even talking seemed to take a lot of effort from him, so I didn’t say much after that; I even tried to quiet my breathing, steady my heartbeat so that it wouldn’t disturb him. I couldn’t stop the shaking, though. From the fear, from the cold that numbed his skin. After I apologized for a particularly violent shiver, the life came back to him for a second and he reached down to the foot of the bed, grabbed a blanket and pulled it over me. He tucked it around me, and then inched his icy body away, so that only his face was still close to me on the pillow.

His eyes were closed, his nose almost touching mine. After he’d rested for several deep breaths, he reached over and took my hand, held it through the velvety blanket. His head lifted up, just a little, just enough to lightly kiss me on the lips before falling back into the pillow. Then his eyes blinked open, and he whispered,

“I love you.”

For a minute, I just stared into his eyes, forgetting all about the cold, forgetting all the realities that kept trying to crush us. Because the only reality, the only truth, I’d ever needed was right there. I wanted to think it could
always
be right there; I was afraid to blink, afraid that if I closed my eyes for even a second, it might all disappear. So I just kept staring, even after he closed his eyes again.

I wanted to say those words back to him. To shout them, whisper them, sing them. I told myself that the reason I didn’t was because I didn’t want to disturb him. And besides, he had to know I loved him too, right? Right? I didn’t need to say it out loud.

But the truth was, I couldn’t say it out loud. I was too scared. Of love, of death. Of what was going to happen to him. To us. He was in love with me, then and now—it’s what saved my life. But if he knew I loved him back then he would stay for sure, he would deny Sam up until the very end. Whatever it cost him.

So what was I supposed to do?

Outside, the wind started to pick up. The long branches of one of the willow trees scratched and slid across the window. Orange light poured in through the window, a piece of the setting sun that spilled over Eli’s tired face. He didn’t seem to notice it, but I grabbed an extra pillow anyway and propped it up on the other side of him, protecting him from the harsh glow. It might have been a trick of the light, of that glow, but lying there he almost looked translucent. Like he was fading, right in front of me.

“There has to be a way to keep you here. To keep you safe…” I whispered. But I don’t think he heard me; not over the wind rattling the windows. Not over the terrified thumping of my heart.

The next day, school passed in a blur of silence, of lectures and pop quizzes and a car ride home that I didn’t even remember. When I finally made it to the safety of my room that afternoon, Eli was there waiting for me, lazily reclining in the beanbag chair next to my bed with the TV remote balanced on his chest. His eyes were half-shut, but he still looked a lot more lively than he did in his room yesterday—especially when he noticed me standing in the doorway, and that easy smile I loved so much came back to his face. He sat up, and the remote fell to his lap. He didn’t seem to notice though, didn’t take his eyes off me.

“How was school?”

“I don’t remember,” I answered honestly, dropping my stuff in a pile by the door. I leaned against it until I heard the
click
of it completely shutting.

“That good, huh?”

“It might have been the best day of my life,” I said. “But I didn’t notice.”

He walked over to me, a bemused smile on his face, and reached up and brushed the back of his hand against my cheek. It felt deliciously cool, just like his lips against the same stretch of skin a second later; not the deathly cold that had taken over his body yesterday, but the refreshingly mild chill of a summer rain. I could almost smell it—the cool raindrops falling and searing the hot pavement—and it brought me back for just a moment, to when I was just a kid who lived for summer vacation, who ran barefoot through streets and woods and splashed through the deepest puddles without worrying about what was at the bottom. Back to simpler times. Without all the pain and confusion of now, which all came hurdling back at me with Eli’s next words:

“And how are your friends?”

“Oh, they’re just great,” I said. “Never better. We’re all getting along just fine.”

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were being sarcastic.”

“Me? Never.” I shook my head, and a weak cough passed through my dry lips. I had a sudden urge to bang my head against the wall in defeated frustration; since Eli was standing directly in front of me, though, I just banged it against his chest a couple times instead. It wasn’t quite as hard as the wall, but it was close—and required less effort on my part. But after about the fifth time it hit him, he placed his hands firmly on my shoulders and took a step back, so when my head fell forward again, it was into thin air.

“So how about tonight?” he said. His voice was all business, and it was kind of irritating. “Still going to Wilmington, right?”

I made a face. “Yeah, about that...” I shrugged out of his grip, walked over and flopped down face-first on my bed, grabbed a pillow and burrowed underneath it. I heard the muffled sound of him following me, the creak of bedsprings a second later as he sat down beside me and reached for the pillow, tried to pull it off my head.

“Give me the pillow, Norah.”

I clenched my fingers over the satiny pillowcase and buried my face further in the mattress. “Nope.”

“Give me the pillow.”

“No.”

He gave a few more half-hearted tugs, but then let go. I thought he’d given up, but then suddenly his arms were around my waist. He picked me up, and in one quick motion rolled me over—together with the pillow I was still hanging on to— so I was on my back, staring up at his grinning face through narrowed eyes. I was trying to look angry, but when I spoke, I found myself fighting a smile.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t like not being able to see your face,” he said.