Swoon 02 - Swear

  Dedication TK

  —You are so lovely in slumber.

  —Ha! Why, because I’m silent?

  —No, not at all. It’s a certain vulnerability you rarely display when awake.

  —Why did you wake me then?

  —I did not wake you.

  —So I’m dreaming?

  —Dreaming? Hardly. Dreams are for children.

  —Huh . . . I’ve heard of people talking in their sleep, but not conversing.

  —Ah, but you’re often surprised by your own abilities, the things you can do.

  —That’s true. Especially where you’re concerned.

  —For instance, did you know you could do this in your sleep?

  —No . . . no, I didn’t.

  —And what of this?

  —Oh, no. Oh, no . . .

  —And this . . . and this . . . and this . . .

  Part I

  The Garden

  I

  Love is blue. A clear cerulean when new. A bright, bold, true blue in its glorious throes. And when it hurts, as it inevitably will, love turns deep, dark, the color of a bad bruise. I know all about that deep, that dark—I’ve been dealing with it for a while now. One night of true bliss with the boy I love, and then he was gone. Had he found the peace eluding him for centuries? Or was his destiny null, void, blank, nothing? Don’t ask me. All I know is that what we shared—tumultuous as it often was—went beyond tangible presence. He left me, of his own accord or by some immutable force, but he’s with me. I feel him. On me. In me. Through and through me. That’s how I can handle it.

  Even though it hurts like hell. Literally. Our night was intense—naturally, he put his mark on me. There, along my inner thigh, storm-colored, tear-shaped. Only why won’t the blue bruise fade?

  Stroking soapy fingers across it in the shower, I fall back against the tile, his imprint still so tender and reaching all the way to my core.

  Six months later—as in now—the blue bruise remains.

  Like I said, I can deal. I’ve . . . adapted. Here it is, almost summer, and I’ll wear a skirt or shorts without a thought to my tarnished skin. At night, I’ll sleep, ignoring that stained aspect of my anatomy. Sure, sometimes, alone in bed I’ll press my hand there, and the pain is still the pain, except not exactly. Oh, and the nocturnal trysts, dreams that aren’t dreams, during which we chat . . . and stuff. Then there’s the after blow—the selfish ache of his absence—which kills. Only I have no control over any of it, or him. Sinclair Youngblood Powers. Boy turned ghost turned golem turned . . . who knows. My Sin.

  “Di-i-i-i-ce!”

  That would be Marsh. Shrieking. Except Marsh doesn’t shriek.

  So I dash from the backyard, where I’m tending tomato seedlings (crazy, I know, a city girl like me) to find a foot-high blaze snarling on the stove top and my best friend haplessly flailing a pot holder.

  “Marsh!” I hip-check her out of the way. “Fan the flames, why don’t you?” I find the lid to the pan, slam it over the orange plumes.

  Grease fires and such don’t faze me much these days. But Marsh, her eyes wide and brimming, cringes against the sink.

  “It’s out,” I state the obvious. Adding, soothingly, “No worries, Marsh. No harm done.” No harm, unless you’re the chicken cutlets she’s torched beyond recognition.

  She blinks back tears. Which is weird. I mean, the girl blew away her abusive father with his own Clint Eastwood special last fall, and having shouldered so much suffering at the hands of Daddy Demento, she doesn’t easily freak. I yank off my gardening gloves and put an arm around her.

  Instantly she crumples. “Oh, Dice . . .”

  “Marsh, come on, hush, okay?” I rub her back. “Nothing happened.”

  She sniffs, hard, and pulls herself together. I let go and watch her as she leans rigidly against the counter.

  “I must’ve got . . . distracted.” She presses a knuckle to the mauve-tinged half-moons under sleepless eyes. “I’m sorry, Dice. I ruined dinner.”

  I just shrug. Marsh and I have been housemates since right around New Year’s. She’d moved with her kid sisters into the new place, twenty miles away in Torrington, but the whole situation—with them, their mother, and New Pop—proved too tense. Living here, Marsh can graduate from Swonowa with our friends, still tend her beloved horses, work all summer to earn cash for vet tech school, and of course be close to her boyfriend, Crane, who openly and utterly adores her.

  The deal works both ways, though—it’s good for me having Marsh around. My parents rarely are. Daddy landed a role in a series that shoots in Toronto. (Ever see Officer Demon, that show about the vampire cop? Yeah, he’s the grumpy, overworked coroner.) And when circulation tanked at Momster’s magazine In Star, she got a new boss, this Brit who makes Simon Cowell look like the Dalai Lama; her hours are more insane than ever. Taking a four-hour train-then-cab ride or driving a rental from Manhattan to Swoon, C-T, is so not on her schedule these days. Marsh is my buttress against loneliness; and she really is—lapse into patricide aside—a regular girl: down-to-earth, no-nonsense, and so a healthy influence. Ordinary is my number one goal these days, normal my nirvana. So I say, “It’s not like your chicken supreme is so hot anyway.”

  It’s true. The division of labor here at 12 Daisy Lane is usually: cooking = me, cleaning = her. Guess I was lingering in the garden too long and she got hungry.

  Marsh sniffs again and slides her lank blond bangs. “Oh, shut up,” she says, and tries a smile.

  I try one back, though both smiles are weak. Something’s definitely up with her. Sitting at the table in the tiny dining area, I say, “You want to tell me what’s going on?” For a beat her eyes narrow, that look she gets when she thinks I’m playing psychic detective. The girl is still a little spooked by my so-called gift.

  I cock my head, press my lips. “It’s pretty obvious. You’re not the type to space out over a sauté pan.” Marsh sits opposite me, toys with the edge of a flea-market doily. “It’s Crane,” she says, her voice so thin it needs to be fed intravenously. “He dumped me.”

  “No, no, no, no.” This may be a crazy, unstable, screwed-up world, but if anything’s for sure in it, it’s that Crane Williams loves Kristin Marshall.

  “Well then, where is he?” she wants to know. “I haven’t seen him or heard from him in two days!”

  Two days? Impossible. Although . . . yeah, it was two days ago that Crane’s brother Duck called to cancel practice. They have this band, the Williams boys and another guy, Tosh Peters—basically a cover band plus two originals Crane wrote—and I’m kinda-sorta in it. On impulse I sang with them last week, and they’ve been bugging me to make it official. Strange, then, after I said I’d come to the next rehearsal, that they blew it off. “Two days. Huh.”

  “That’s right,” Marsh says. “And I keep going over it—what I said, what I did or didn’t do, to make him mad or . . .” I hate when girls do that, assume that whatever went wonky with their romance is some fault or failing on their part. Of course, Marsh hardly had stellar role models in the relationship department so I cut her some slack. I stand up. “Let’s go.”

  “Go—where?”

  “Their house. We’ll see if he’s home, and if not, we’ll get something out of Duck.” We call him Duck but the boy’s more magpie—you can’t shut him up.

  This seems to make sense to Marsh; she nods once, and we’re out the door.

  “Wait a sec.” I touch her wrist. “I’ll be right back.” A restored relic from the 1700s, our clapboard farmhouse could go up like tinder. I just want to double-check, make sure all the burners are off. Call me OCD—you dance with death enough times, you can’t be too careful. In the kitchen, though, everything’s cool. Very cool; too cool. You’d n
ever know by the temperature that we’d just beat down a blaze. Or by the smell. Not burnt chicken but . . . roses?

  There’s not a single rosebush on the property, but the scent is unmistakable, and unwelcome, snapping me back to the first and only funeral I ever had to attend. The church a sea of flowers, as you’d expect when someone so young and so beautiful so tragically dies. I see her now, my best friend since fourth grade, laid out in an open casket, her high-necked, long-sleeved gown demure, like nothing she’d ever be caught dead in. Now I’m giggling aloud, just as I did then—oh, the irony!—the giggles going headlong toward hysteria. Convulsively I laugh, I can’t help it—the smell of roses so powerful and the chill of the grave so close. Which makes no sense, no sense at all. Unless I’m about to—

  NO!

  I haul off and slap myself across the face so hard my eyeballs bounce. Effective. That slide into clairvoyant never-never land that I never-never want to experience again? Neatly avoided. Damn, who knew? One good self-inflicted blow can psyche out a psychic episode. I’ll have to remember that.

  II

  Rubbing my jaw, I go meet Marsh on the porch to find the redolence of roses replaced by that of French fries.

  “I need to copy your civics homework.” A “hello” would’ve been nice, a “please,” but my cousin Pen has forgotten such niceties. “Like the last three weeks’ worth. I seem to have fallen behind.”

  I’ll say. Considering how often Pen’s shown to class, I’d be surprised if she knew that civics is the study of citizenship and not Japanese cars. Now, graduation close enough to kiss, she’s playing catch-up. “Sure,” I say. “Just not right now.”

  “How come?” Pen pops three fries at a time. “Where are you going?”

  “Rehearsal,” I lie. Glancing at Marsh, I figure she might want to keep the Crane conundrum between us.

  “Ooh. Rehearsal.” Pen snorts, then juts her chin at Marsh.

  “So you’re in the band now? What do you play—skin flute?” I don’t want to smack her; I really don’t. When it comes to Pen, I practice patience. She’s been going through changes lately. The dedicated junk-food diet that’s added considerable poundage to her former cheerleader physique. The self-mutilated spiky mop that was once her cascade of shampoo-commercial hair. The well-adjusted It Girl who graciously took me into her social strata when I moved here a year ago has segued into this pastiche of nihilist, slacker, and all-around brat.

  Late-onset rebellion? Early-onset senility? No, Sinclair Youngblood Powers. There’s not a citizen of Swoon who didn’t fall under his sway in some way, Pen especially. What Sin did to Pen—the possession, the seduction—it wasn’t pretty. Yet in her warped way, she probably misses him almost as much as I do.

  Marsh, for the moment, ignores her.

  “I’ll drop the civics off when I get back.” Pen only lives across the road.

  Tilting her head lest one crispy remnant escape her greedy tube, Pen considers this. She chews, and swallows, and then says, “No.”

  “No? Yes: no. Look, I don’t want to be late.”

  “Not the stupid civics. I don’t care about the stupid civics.” Pen employs the meaty expanse between thumb and forefinger to wipe her mouth. “I want to come,” she says. “If Marsh can be in the band, so can I.”

  My cousin doesn’t share any familial tendency toward ESP, but she senses me wavering. She hasn’t hung out in a while.

  Deep down she might be jealous of how tight Marsh and I are now. Deeper down, she must be battling some demons—lost to the perky, naive person she used to be, at odds with the sullied femme-bot Sin turned her into, and completely clueless about how she might wind up.

  Marsh can sense my indecision too and tips the scales. “Let’s just go, okay?”

  Pen turns on her heel, her now ample ass switching with some of its old saucy flair. After all, she’s still Pen—just a pudgier, discontented version. “My car, if you please!” she says, and we take her rich-girl ride instead of Marsh’s hooptie.

  It’s a short drive from Daisy Lane to the Swoon town center, but Pen’s yammering makes it feel endless. “So tell me how you play the skin flute,” she taunts, locking eyes with Marsh in the rearview mirror. “Like this, right?” She jabs the inside of her cheek with her tongue.

  “Pen, just stop.” I don’t want to smack her. I don’t . . .

  “A real virtuoso!” She cackles, and leans on her horn to piss off the car she nearly smacks into.

  Sotto voce, Marsh goes weepy in the backseat, but Pen and I both hear her.

  “Nice, Pen,” I comment.

  “Don’t cry, you turd,” she says, though her face falls quickly from mischief to chagrin. “I was just teasing, Marsh, really! What the hell—”

  “You’re an idiot, that’s what,” I inform her.

  “Just tell her!” Marsh blubbers. “I don’t care! Call Channel 8 while you’re at it!”

  I swivel to check on her, slumped against the upholstery, then open Pen’s console for tissues. “Here.” I hand off a ball of drive-thru napkins.

  “Tell me what?” Pen insists.

  “Crane dumped me.”

  “Marsh, you don’t know that—”

  “He did! He did!” she moans.

  “Oh my God!” Pen echoes in sincere harmony. “Marsh, I’m so sorry—I am an idiot. Oh, Marsh!” The chorus of female dismay comes to an end at the Williamses’ driveway. The rambling stone manor house looms above us, beautiful, imperious, and old. And right in front, Crane’s Cutlass SS—not so old, but certainly vintage.

  Looks like Bruise Blue’s guitarist is home.

  III

  Argument in three accents: the nasal Boston bark of Paul Williams; the clipped yet wispy London lilt of his wife, Lillian; and the far-flung tones of their younger son, raised all over the world and quite accustomed to speaking his mind.

  “Hard work should make a man of him! Instead he gives up, runs away, the worthless, ungrateful—”

  “Please! I will not have you call Crane worthless! Simply because he doesn’t fit the mold you’d force him into. If he’s gone to find himself, I champion such courage.” It’s easy for us eavesdroppers to figure out the thrust of this fracas. The east wing of the house is under renovation, and Crane, having put off college, got pressed by his father into manual labor. As far as we knew, he was fine with it—at least he got to hang with Marsh and play music when he wasn’t pounding nails or mixing mortar.

  “Courage?! You—”

  “Stop! Cease! Desist!” Duck, shrilly. “I can’t stand your fighting, which doesn’t make a shred of sense anyway. If Crane’s gone off, why is his vehicle in the driveway?” Excellent point, but weaned on procedural detective dramas like I was, I know Crane could have ditched his sweet ride and hitched his way out on the Frontage Road.

  “And moreover”—Duck flings an arm in our direction—“why is his beloved in our foyer?” The Williams parents turn from the great hall to our trio of intruders.

  “Marsh! Darling!” Lillian Williams wafts regally our way, paisley caftan—a gift from some maharaja—and prematurely silver hair streaming. She insinuates herself between Pen and me to clutch Marsh against her bead-bedecked bosom. A clumsy maneuver for them both, Marsh being fashion-model tall and having to stoop for the embrace. Lillian then holds Marsh at arm’s length, peering into our girl’s eyes. “You do know where Crane is, don’t you? No! You needn’t say.” She hurls a look at her husband. “I know in my soul he’s on a journey, a journey he needs to take.” Back to Marsh now. “But if you could tell us something, anything, to set our minds at ease . . .”

  “I . . . um . . . ,” Marsh stammers desperately, then stops, settles for tears.

  “That’s it!” Paul Williams thunders. “I’m calling the police.”

  “Paul, don’t!” The boys’ mother flits toward him, feet bare, toe bells tinkling. “I’d know it, I’d feel it, if he’d come to harm, and you’ll only alienate him further . . .” Duck shoulders us out of the vau
lted foyer and through a passage that leads to the music studio; then, rethinking it, ushers us outside instead. Tucking his arm through Marsh’s, he steers us across the grounds. “Truly, you don’t know where he is?”

  “No,” she says. “What a selfish ninny I am! I’ve been a basket case thinking this was his way of breaking up with me.”

  “Tut-tut!” Yes, Duck actually says that. Think Oscar Wilde trapped in a beefy linebacker’s body. “That would never happen.”

  Marsh isn’t listening. “When all this time, he’s been . . . he’s. . .” She trails off.

  “When did you last see him?” I ask Duck.

  “After brunch on—”

  A piercing whistle—street-hustle, city-style—interrupts his reply. We stop in our tracks.

  “Yo!” The whistler waves, trots up, his nimbus of hair like coffee cotton candy. Tosh Peters. “Damn, Duck, your father does not like me, man.”

  Duck swats air. “To him, anyone over eighteen who’s not at university is an imbecile or a criminal and probably both.” This garners a consensus of sighs: parents and their unholy fixation with higher academia. Tosh’s folks, same deal—all aghast when he announced he’d be hooking up with an uncle to move to the wealthy boonies and open the region’s premiere Jamaican restaurant. “I hear that,” he says. And then he looks at me.

  I look back.

  Then he says, “Hey, Dice.” He also greets Marsh, but his eyes stay put.

  Which prompts a “Hey, Tosh. This is my cousin Pen” out of me.

  And Tosh says, “Hey, Ben.”

  This cracks me up, inappropriate as that may be. “Pen, not Ben,” I correct. “As in Penelope.”

  Blushing, a purplish tint invading his cheeks, he looks at my cousin for the first time. “Sorry about that, Pen-not-Ben.” He treats her to a frankly winning smile, straight teeth between lips like a split ripe plum. “Good to meet you.” Pen says, “Yeah,” and fixes her gaze somewhere under his left earlobe.

  “So, look, man, what’s up?” Tosh shifts on the balls of his feet, as though obeying a drum loop only he can hear. Vaguely I wonder if he’s like that all the time, perpetual motion in the shower, in bed. “Is this band on or off or what?” He taps Duck’s arm in an amiable way. “If it’s off, that’s cool, only you’ve had my Beatles anthology forever, dude, and Crane has my didgeridoo.” Okay, Tosh Peters is a tad self-involved. It takes him forever to size up the tension among us. “What, is something wrong?” he asks at last.