Watch for Me by Moonlight (14 page)

A PROMISE GIVEN

B
efore dawn, when he came into church from the rectory to get ready to say Mass, Father Gahagan found Meredith asleep in the second pew. Gently, he touched her shoulder and asked why she was here. Merry simply shook her head: How could she explain? Father sat down beside her. He asked if she had anything she wanted to talk over, if she was considering running away from home, or if there might be a spiritual need he could help her face. Merry sat up and touched her eyes, surprised at how tender they were, as though she had cried in her sleep. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. She wanted to cry out, “I have nothing but all the spiritual questions, every one of them, wrapped up in one person! And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if this life without Ben will ever feel anything but hollow.”

“Is it about a boy, Merry?” Father Gahagan asked.

Meredith smiled. “It is, Father. But not in any way you’d imagine. I haven’t done anything wrong except wish I could do something wrong.”

Father Gahagan laughed. “I think you share that with about 90 percent of the human race at any given time, Meredith.”

“And I’m losing someone, but not because he doesn’t want to stay with me,” Merry said.

“Do you want to make your confession or just talk?”

Meredith didn’t even know if she truly wanted to talk. She was willing to bet that she had more to say that Father Gahagan would want to hear than almost anyone who’d ever sat in his presence. But though, as a priest, evidence of the hereafter would validate his faith, he would be very hard-pressed to believe in Merry’s proof.

“Father, do you believe in heaven?” Merry asked. The priest looked surprised but then smiled. It wasn’t the question he had expected.

“Why absolutely. I have my doubts about hell. But I believe in the life of the world to come,” Father Gahagan said gently. “I don’t think I could be a priest if I didn’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t fear death. All of us do.”

“What if I don’t fear death?”

“Meredith, it’s not a way out of pain. Young people sometimes ...”

“I’m not suicidal, Father. I promise. I just wonder what the life hereafter would be like.”

The long creases that had been dimples when he was a boy deepened in Father Gahagan’s face. “Merry, whatever pain you feel now is temporary. Death is permanent. I can see by your face that you’re struggling. But stepping away from the lives we are given on Earth doesn’t solve anything. You’re a long way from heaven. And you’re also a long way from home. It’s nearly sunrise. We can talk more about this now or we can talk about it again. But I want to talk about it.”

“I’d rather wait until later, until I think it through. Do you mind?”

“Of course, Meredith. But if I trust you and keep this between us, you have to promise me one thing. And that is if you ever feel lost, you’ll come here again, just like you did tonight, only press the button behind the altar that rings my house—the gray one right up there behind the curtain. And I’ll come right away. You have to promise not to make any decisions about life and death before you talk to me.”

“I promise. I’ll do that. I don’t want to die, Father. It’s not that.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” he said, studying Meredith’s face. “Do your parents know where you are?” Meredith shook her head.” The priest paused. ”Go out and get into the car, and I will drive you home. Mrs. Peller is going out your way, and I said I’d drive her too. I’ll say Mass when I come back. I’m to do a funeral at ten this morning. It was supposed to be earlier, but it had to be postponed.”

I know,
Meredith thought. She sat up and pulled on her coat thoughtfully.

She wasn’t surprised to wake up alone on the wide oak bench.

Last night had been deep enough for both of them. Before following Father Gahagan, she knelt for a moment in silent prayer. When she sat back, she realized that she had awakened once during the night and that she hadn’t seen Ben then, either. She had not even expected to see Ben. Yet she had gone back to sleep, soothed, as though he were there, and felt his comforting presence all around her.

She felt his presence even now.

Why?

“I’m still concerned, Merry,” said the priest who had baptized all of the Brynn kids. Mrs. Peller the housekeeper had tucked herself into the backseat for a quick nap, smiling at Meredith before she quickly reached up and switched off her hearing aids. “Can you give me a hint?”

“Well, Father, it’s about my friend,” Merry began. On the way home, she told a story about a girl who might be in love with someone whom no one else understood. Father Gahagan had heard many variations of the same story and always counseled giving the passion time to even out. He also knew that Merry wasn’t talking about a friend.

Within ten minutes, they were in the Brynns’ driveway. The priest reiterated the vow he expected Merry to make. And again, easily, she gave her promise.

THE GOODBYE BOY

F
ortunately for Meredith, although her mother was loaded for bear when Merry stepped through the door, Campbell didn’t dare say a thing in front of the priest who came into the kitchen with Merry.

Father Gahagan put on his best pulpit voice and said, “Campbell, I know you must be upset and worried. But I want to say this. I found her lying in the pew as innocent as a lamb. Alone. I hope you take that into account. Young people sometimes need to sort things out in their own ways. She was safe. And we’ve had a long talk this morning.”

Campbell said, “Thank you for bringing her home.” As Father left, Merry’s mother turned to her. She said simply, “I called school to let them know you’ll both be late. You’ll go at noon. Let’s get moving. Take a nap if you can and then get dressed for the service at the cemetery.”

Carla was already there, playing in the living room with Owen, and Adam had gone to school.

Several hours later, after Mallory had commented on what a late movie her sister had gone to, Tim, Campbell, and the twins drove quietly to the cemetery, where there were a dozen cars parked along the road. Among them were their grandparents’ little SUV and Uncle Kevin’s snazzy BMW, which he called “my only vice.” Although the snow had melted (except in the shadowy crags of the ridges above) and the grass was beginning to poke through, there was still a small canopy set up and some wide flooring boards on which there were a few rows of folding chairs. Someone had also turned on a space heater with a power pack. An American flag lay over the coffin, and three young Army officers stood at attention some distance away.

When the twins walked down the path to join the others, Father Gahagan glanced at Meredith as though he had seen a ghost.

Then, clearing his throat, he began, “We are gathered here today to lay to rest one of our own sons, in the certainty of eternal rest and eternal peace. Our only comfort is that the ground that keeps him warm is the ground on which he played and laughed as a child....”

Merry glanced down the row and was immensely relieved to see Ben sitting in one of the empty chairs beside a pale, tall, painfully thin older woman. On her other side sat old Mr. Highland, whom Merry thought she recognized, but barely. But when the woman began to cry and sway, someone stepped forward from behind one of the thick lanes of evergreens that lined the walk at Mountain Rest Cemetery.

In a thick red woolen coat that had once been Aunt Kate’s, Merry recognized Sasha. Mrs. Highland turned her face into Sasha’s arm.

The priest’s words faded into a buzz as Merry’s mind took over. She examined the spire in the middle of the park-like grounds. It was made of some kind of smooth gray stuff—marble or granite. Merry had seen it a hundred times but never looked closely at it. Now she saw that it was a war memorial, carefully inscribed with the names of the dead soldiers of Ridgeline, back as far as the Civil War. The town names were familiar: Brent, Brynn, Carew, Everard, Massenger, Woolrich, Vaughn. There were still kids at Ridgeline with those names, and kids from Ridgeline with those names had died in every war. They were probably cousins of Drew, if not uncles or even aunts. One was Charlotte Vaughn. Drew’s older sister was named Charlotte, but this Charlotte had died in the 1980s.

“Who’s Charlotte Vaughn?” asked Mallory, as if reading Merry’s thoughts.

“Mrs. Vaughn’s cousin. She was a nurse in the Persian Gulf War,” Tim said. “Be quiet now.”

“You never told us.”

“It never came up,” Tim said.

The little Valentine tree that Mallory had seen in her dream was real and settled staunchly against the front of a small but elegantly carved marker. It read:

Benjamin Charles Highland
BELOVED SON
(1951-1969)
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay

“For Helene and Charles, the only comfort now is that their son lives on in his brother, in his namesake, in their hearts. As I told a young ... parishioner of mine just this morning, there is absolutely no doubt that Ben and his parents will meet again, at the gates of glory.”

There were prayers and a gentle word from the tall, blond man whom Mally and Drew had seen with her parents the other night at the game. He identified himself as David Highland. He said it had been years since he had come to Ridgeline, and he had forgotten how dear it was to him. He thanked so many of his old friends for coming here today. Growing serious, as if tackling a task that he couldn’t bear, he spoke of a little brother who had been a pest when he was young “but a pest I loved. I told him to leave me alone, and then I always looked back to make sure he was following me.” David Highland said he had believed all his life that if his little brother hadn’t followed him to a place where he should never have gone, Ben would be here today with his own children. In a trembling voice, the man concluded by saying that Ben had lived and died with honor—that honor was the standard by which Ben lived.

The soldiers stood then and presented their rifles. As they prepared to fire a salute, the old lady, whom Mallory knew now was the young woman in jeans from her dream, aged many years, stood up.

“Don’t you dare,” she said, in a strong voice much younger than her more wasted appearance. With clear but forceful dignity, she said, “Don’t you dare fire a gun over Benjamin’s grave. If it weren’t for your guns, both my sons would have spent their Christmases with me. Both my sons would have brought me their diplomas. I didn’t agree with David, but David was a grown man. Ben was not a man. He was a child.” She paused and drew a deep breath. Then she said to the Army honor guard, “I don’t disrespect you. You’re doing what you think is right. But I want Ben to lie in peace, not with the sounds of war as the last thing his spirit hears.”

And then Helene Highland fainted. Sasha and Mr. Highland held her close.

At a nod from the tall older brother, the honor guard raised their rifles and fired three sharp, impossibly loud cracks that seemed to shatter the air. Birds burst from the trees and fled in panic. Merry pressed her hands over her ears. Fighting hard against the spinning, the ground that seemed to draw her to it, the light that seemed to flood her head, using every trick she knew to stay present, Meredith fainted too.

FOR THIS ONE DAY

I
t’s from an old poem, that line on the grave,” Mallory told Drew. “I looked it up. His mother was an English teacher.”

“Who exactly? Whose mother?”

“Ben Highland,” Mallory said. It was after school on the day of the funeral, and Drew and Mallory were waiting in the hall for Meredith to finish practice. Mallory had a plan that could prove to her twin what she already knew—what she absolutely knew now to be true. She had told Drew about the sad drama at the funeral and about Meredith’s reaction. It had been their grandmother, Gwenny, who told everyone not to worry, that Merry would be fine in a moment.

“What does ‘betimes’ mean?” Drew asked. “What does it mean, ‘to slip betimes away?’”

“I would say it means before his time.”

“Okay, so ...”

“He’s dead,” Mallory said. “That’s why I can’t see him and she can. He died in a war, a long time ago. Merry’s big crush is dead.”

Drew sighed. “I hate it when you say that.”

They were waiting for Meredith in the hall at school. It was five in the evening and practice was over. But now, as March began to give way to April, the sky at evening went a silvery, metallic gray with a band of faded blue-jean blue. In Ridgeline, people looked up that day from their desks or their digging, from shaking out their rugs or shaking out bags of recycled paper, and thought, summer. Summer will come after all. Somehow, just the sight of the sun fighting to stay above the horizon lifted Mally’s spirits.

But then Mallory saw Merry approaching. Merry had chosen to go to practice despite the fact that she’d fainted at the funeral. Anything was better than facing their mother.

Mallory felt a moment of pity. It was going to be a rough day for her twin.

After the service, Campbell had said to Aunt Karin that Merry had fainted because she skipped breakfast. None too gently, she helped Meredith to the car, murmuring things about low blood sugar. Once inside their car, Campbell had given Merry a glance of double fury, which Meredith thought was impossibly unfair. Okay! There was going to be a reckoning about staying out all night. But how could you get mad at a person for fainting accidentally? Still, Mallory set her chin. She was determined to sort this Ben business out, here and now.

Watching her, Drew thought over Mallory’s plan, about which he had his own opinions. He tried to consider what he would do if Meredith were his own sister. It might be kinder not to force the issue—to just let be what would be. But he had to trust his girl. For him, Mallory was as dear to him as a sibling and also the most adorable girl on Earth. If he thought about a future with Mallory, and it occasionally crossed his mind, he knew he would have to come to grips not only with her stubbornness but with knowing the person he was with was the closest thing he would ever know to ... a witch. He would have to recognize that there would be things about Mally that only Meredith would ever know.

The future ... this was why people didn’t like thinking about it.

Now Mallory was on a mission. She’d sketched it in for him earlier and now was about to put it into practice. Although Drew didn’t want to know the details, Mallory insisted on telling him. That didn’t mean he wanted to witness Meredith’s pain. Thick as she could be sometimes, he cared for Merry, too.

“She has to see,” Mallory had told Drew when she caught up with him that day after lunch. “Here’s what I think. The school has all those basketball and football pictures in those little wooden frames going back to before my dad went to Ridgeline. If he really is from here, and he really ran cross-country, he’ll be in one of them.”

“I don’t want to know about it,” Drew had told Mally the previous night.

“And then she’ll have to face it.”

“What do you not get about the phrase ‘I don’t want to know’? I’m not interested in trying to convince your sister her boyfriend is dead.”

“They only meet at night.”

“Maybe he’s undead,” Drew suggested.

“Oh, you’re making this sound ridiculous! Everybody knows there are no ...
undead
dead people. That’s an entirely different thing from ghosts, Drew!”

“Pardon my mortal error. I’m only human. And this would be why I don’t want to know any more about it, Mall-or-y.”

“You never call me Mallory. You always call me Brynn.”

“I’m trying to get your attention.”

Mally said he never cooperated with her. But later, she texted an apology. It occurred to her what Drew had to put up with—what he had, in a sense, always had to put up with, from her. In a rush, the thought of Drew going away, and that it would be before another leaf on the ridge turned scarlet and fell, took root in Mallory and grew. It grew larger and it grew real. Suddenly, Mallory didn’t want to give up a second with the guy she’d seen every day of her life but had learned to love, it seemed, only yesterday. He was always there for her. And soon, he wouldn’t be. Who would pull her hair and call her Brynn?

“What are we doing?” Merry asked as she came up beside Drew and Mallory in the hall outside the locker rooms and gyms. “Why did you wait for me? I’ll have to tell Neely. She’s outside.”

“I told her. She already left. So you could ride home with us,” Mallory said. “Merry, look. There’s something you have to see.”

Slowly, following Mallory’s finger, Merry began to scan the walls where the team pictures hung, gradually leading Meredith to the right place. Even in the seventies, the track outfits looked bizarre compared to now. The only uniforms that hadn’t changed were the wrestlers, and they looked bizarre anyhow.

There.

There was the section devoted to cross-country. The grave said 1969, the year he died. Unless he died in school, in a car accident or something, he would have graduated at seventeen or eighteen that year. Mallory searched for 1968. There he was, his curly blond hair falling forward, down on one knee in front.

Ben Highland.

“’Ster,” said Mallory. “Look.”

Meredith stood on her toes. She grabbed the edge of the frame and pulled herself closer.

Then she whirled and took one running step before Mallory caught her.

“It’s his uncle or something,” Merry said.

“No it isn’t his uncle or something!” Mally said.

“But Ben was there too! How could he be there if it was him being buried? Well, prayed over anyhow? Merry’s fury mounted. “Why are you spying on him and me? Maybe the old Highlands are his grandparents. They’re old, old-old. Probably older than Grandma and Grandpa Brynn,” Merry stopped. “He does look just like him. But you have to admit it’s possible. Fathers and sons and nephews and cousins can look a lot alike when they’re young. And I would know, Mallory. I’ve seen ... you know what. And he isn’t one of them.”

“This is where I go get a juice,” said Drew.

“Okay. Okay,” Mallory agreed. “But that’s not what’s in my dreams. It’s the Ben you know. It’s his jacket, the one you described to me. I’ve seen him in that and in those old-fashioned tight jeans.” Meredith seemed to shrink right before her twin’s eyes into a small, crumpled being.

“Mallory, don’t. That could be his dad’s jacket. Handed down.”

“It could be,” Mally said. “But you know it isn’t.”

“So okay, say I do know. What if I want to be with him just until there is no more time?”

“Shhhh,” Mallory said. “I’m thinking. If he lied about his age and got in the Army ... people used to do that. Let me think.”

“I’m sick of your thinking. Listen to what I’m feeling, Mally. You always assume I’m nuts.”

“Oh, please. I don’t assume that anymore than you assume precisely the same thing about me, half the time when anything like this happens. Okay ... introduce me to him. Call Ben. Text him,” Mally challenged her twin.

Merry slid down the wall and sat on the floor. When Drew came back with two glass bottles of juice, she gratefully accepted one and took a long drink. Her thoughts were drumming, and what she needed to admit was the last thing she wanted to say. Finally, she said, “I can’t.”

“Why?”

Mallory knelt down next to her sister. As much as she wanted to clue her twin into the reality of her obsession, she could still feel the nearly physical pain that Meredith gave off, like a heat or a scent. It affected Mallory, too, deep in her stomach, where she felt something tender like a bruise.
How can I go on with this?
she thought. They were still only in school—the nauseous yellow walls and absurd bright-green scuffed lockers, the smell and press of love and fear and anxiety and socks. Why should Merry have to feel anything beyond the general horribleness of adolescence, which was already a rollercoaster of highs and lows, even for Mallory herself, who didn’t have Merry’s penchant for extremes?

“Why, Mer?” Mally asked again, more gently.

“He doesn’t have a cell phone.”

“What does he do all day?”

“I don’t know.”

“Merry ... this is what I mean. What seventeen-year-old guy doesn’t have a cell phone?”

Meredith couldn’t answer. At the movies the other night, before they went to the church, she noticed how people didn’t stare at Ben, cute as he was. They looked right through him. There was something strange. It wasn’t like the girl in the attic or the man with the accent. But it was “off.” Merry didn’t want to push him by asking why. He was already miserable. Was it really because she didn’t want to hurt him? Or because she didn’t want to know? If this was denial, she wanted to live there.

When she was with him, everything seemed to fall into place. It was entirely right and true and meant to be. When she wasn’t with him, doubts whirled around her stomach as though she were locked in a carnival ride and strapped in darkness. Love was supposed to make you joyous. But look at Romeo and Juliet ... one day of happiness.

But finally she said, “Mallory, Ben doesn’t seem to want to hang around with my friends. He avoids people I know. But I have to tell you that it wouldn’t matter to me what he is or isn’t. Did you hate Eden after you found out that she had a double life? She was your best friend. Did you reject her?”

“That’s different, Mer. Eden was there. Eden was a part of my life and your life. There was a chance to save her. You can’t save somebody who’s already gone.”

“Ben isn’t gone!”

“He might already be gone, but maybe he doesn’t know it, Meredith. Does that happen with ghosts? Do they forget to cross over or whatever?”

“I guess,” Meredith said. “I never met one who hadn’t crossed over. Mostly they come back to do what they were doing when they died. At least I think that.”

“Maybe that’s why he feels real to you. Maybe he doesn’t know how to pass over. How does it feel to kiss him?”

“We never have,” Meredith said softly. “He’s never even held my hand.” Mallory reached out and hugged her twin.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes. But it doesn’t change anything. Mally, you have me confused with you. I might still want to be with him. No matter what he is.” They stood for a moment as the light in the hall darkened with the spring twilight.

Mallory said, “No. That’s enough, Merry.”

Merry said, “Don’t push me.” Mallory stepped back, her eyes widening. Nothing that her twin had ever said had so fully excluded her, so entirely stepped outside the boundaries of their two-ness. It frightened Mallory into silence. Finally, Meredith said, “I know who would know. And I’m going to find out. By myself.”

Mallory didn’t say a word.

By the time Drew dropped them off, it was completely dark outside, and every light was on in the kitchen. The porch lights and even the leftover Christmas lights were blazing.

Her mother was waiting for Merry inside.

She was blazing too.