twelve
We never talk about that day again, but after that, she doesn’t flinch whenever I touch her. So I touch her every chance I get.
The rainy days are the best. I run over in the pouring rain to see if she’s come in spite of the weather–she’s always there. I take off my coat and hold it over both our heads and we crouch under the thickest tree branches and snuggle under it as water dribbles down our faces. I press myself against her, having a good excuse to keep my arm around her shoulders. I sometimes drop it down around her waist.
Back then I thought she didn’t notice, but I know better now. Of course she noticed, of course she did. She was always conscious about being near people, and she never wanted to be touched by anyone. But she let me.
She let me.
…
“We always hang out here in the woods,” she says one day.
I raise my eyebrows. “Risking expulsion from my school and who knows what else if your folks find out you’re sneaking out every day isn’t far enough for you?” I ask her.
She goes pale. Ok, I shouldn’t have said that—even though it’s constantly on my mind. The risk for her, I mean, not the risk for me.
“Where would you like to go?” I ask quickly, to cover my blunder.
“I haven’t been anywhere,” she says.
“If you could go to one place, what would it be?”
“A graveyard,” she replies at once and I spit out my water.
“You wanna what?”
“I read it in a book.”
“Oh, well, in that case… What kind of book was it?”
“ Anne of Windy Poplars ,” she replies. “It’s the second book in the Anne of Green Gables series,” she adds by way of explanation. As if that helps me at all.
“More information please? For those of us who are literature challenged?”
“Well, in the book, Anne walks around a cemetery, reading inscriptions on the tombs about people who died decades ago, and tries to imagine their stories based on what little is revealed on the stones. She mostly make things up.” Eden shrugs, as if she doesn’t care, but her eyes are glittering in excitement.
“Right,” I say, getting up. “Put my coat on.”
“And what will you wear?”
“You.” I grab her by the waist and lift her off her feet. She giggles and shrieks, and wiggles around. I spin us both until we get dizzy .
Her hair flies out of her braid and into my face, and I turn her around against my chest until our faces are inches apart. I am breathing heavily, but not because it’s any struggle to carry her like this. It’s because I’m trying so hard not to kiss her. And I’m losing. I lower my head over her lips, and she goes absolutely still in my arms. She goes limp, waiting for me.
Scared and excited at the same time.
Fire travels up my spine and explodes behind my mouth, making me feral.
“Does this Anna of yours,” I whisper in a voice hoarse with emotion and need, “get kissed in the books?”
“It’s Anne,” Eden whispers back. Her breaths are coming short and her chest is moving rapidly up and down. She is shaking like a leaf in my arms, and it takes all of my strength not to fold to the ground, holding her like a treasure, and kiss the perfect skin around her mouth. “With an ‘e’,” she adds, her eyes diluted, dazed. “And yes, she does. A lot.”
She opens her lips, and I do too, mirroring her. My hips thrust out to support her weight better as my hand slides up to the back of her neck, bringing her face close to my mouth. Our breaths mix, panting with want.
I am past the point of stopping. Every single part of me is burning for her, but every single brain cell I have left—two, tops—is screaming at me to stop. It’s too soon. She is not ready. I am not ready.
“Let’s go then,” I murmur, my voice choked, “by all means.”
I gently lower her to the ground, and she almost topples over as he knees buckle. I catch her and smile. I did that to her. It’s good to know I’m not the only one dying for her. My arm is securely around her waist; I won’t let her fall.
“You ok?” I ask.
Her cheeks have gone deliciously pink again as I help her regain her footing, and I swear, it almost undoes all my hard work of controlling myself. I have to look away or I will lose all sense of control. Utterly and completely.
“Yeah,” she gasps. “Tombstones. Let’s go.”
We walk the short distance to the old chapel, its steeple dusted with snow, the pavement crunching with salt under our boots. On the way, Eden gets so cold she can barely move, so I bundle her in my arms and get her inside a bookstore so that she can get warm before we go on .
She is looking at all the books with so much longing, barely daring to touch them, and I decide then and there to become a billionaire as soon as possible, so that I can buy her every single volume. Twice.
We stay in there for all of ten minutes, and I don’t kiss her.
I almost do. But I don’t. It’s the third time—and it’s too close to the second one.
I’m going to lose this battle, aren’t I?
No, I am not going to lose this battle.
We reach the cemetery at the back of the chapel; it’s ancient. It’s enclosed by a slender, black fence, which I jump, carrying Eden over. There are no marks on the snow—nobody visits here anymore, not to clean or to pay their respects. The dead are completely alone. All the tombstone inscriptions are all but erased with time—nothing left of them but small marks on the black marble slabs that used to be names, dates, words. Eden still tries to decipher them, in true ‘Anne of Green Gables’ fashion. We walk around a little, trying to warm ourselves. The sky is gray and empty, and it’s already getting dark even though it’s not even four yet.
“So does your dad allow you to books like that?” I ask her.
“Anne of Windy Poplars?”
“No, books about graveyards and kissing.”
“He doesn’t know the book includes k-kissing. It has a girl with red hair on the cover, so he thinks it’s a children’s book.”
She shivers, and I fold her into me to keep her warm. A crow croaks overhead, hidden somewhere among the tangle of bare branches.
“Red hair, you say?”
“It’s the prettiest hair color, don’t you think?”
I look at her shivering against my chest, wearing my coat that comes down to her toes.
“I don’t,” I reply and she goes all quiet and sullen.
I don’t know what I did here, why she went silent on me. (It will take me six years to find out).
“Tell me more about the books you read.” I need to get her talking again.
“I’m not allowed to watch too much TV or movies, but books… I can read anything I want. Dad buys me boxes and boxes of them. I make a list weekly. Well, I’m not allowed to read what he calls ‘racy’ books, but as long as the covers look innocent enough, he doesn’t check all the pages. He hates reading, and there are too many.”
“Pages? ”
“Books,” she replies.
“He doesn’t know then,” I say.
“Doesn’t know what?”
“That book are the most dangerous thing there is,” I reply, watching her.
She quickly moves on to a different tombstone. We squint at the rarity of a half-legible epigraph. It says: ‘Until we meet again on resurrection day.’
I hate it.
“I love it,” Eden says. “The idea of the ones who are gone coming back to life… it gives me hope.”
“It gives me the creeps,” I retort. “Also, it sounds stupid.”
“How does it sound stupid? Some people of faith believe in the day of resurrection.”
“Well, those people are na?ve at best and idiots at worst,” I say, sounding a little too bitter. But I can’t help it. Dad is not coming back. He is dead, and he’s staying dead.
“I think you have lost your faith,” Eden observes quietly.
“You think?”
“If you ever had any,” she adds.
“Oh, I did. At least my mom and dad did.” I consider her words carefully. ‘If you ever had any.’ It’s truer than she thinks. “I thought I had faith, too, by default. I lost it the day my dad died. As for hope… I think hope is evil.”
“I think hope is a saint,” Eden says dreamily.
My eyes snap to her face. I think that is the most beautiful sentence I have heard in my life.
“That’s lovely,” I tell her. “Do you believe in God?”
“I don’t know if ‘believe’ is the right word,” she replies. Our steps crunch on the hardened snow underfoot. “It’s more ‘afraid’. Terrified, actually.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “Why on earth are you terrified? God is someone you pray to when you’re in trouble… someone who is supposed to help you.”
Except He didn’t. So that’s why I stopped asking.
“Someone who punishes you,” Eden supplies, and a chill runs down my spine.
“Eden, no, don’t think like that… God, for those who have faith in Him, is supposed to be someone who loves you, who saves you, who….”
“Who counts all your sins,” she adds.
“What sins, Eden? You are perfect. ”
She looks at me, and there is so much guilt in her light brown eyes, I shiver.
“Let’s get out of here,” I murmur quickly and grab her hand, “this place is giving me the creeps. And not in a good way.”
She half-laughs at that, and I tighten my fingers around hers, letting her ground me to life and reason.
We walk silently back to town, our shoulders pressed against each other’s the whole time, and it’s just as well we don’t talk, because I couldn’t talk if I wanted to. All I can concentrate on are the words ‘hope is a saint, hope is a saint, saint hope’. I put music to them, and hum it so that I don’t forget by the time I’m in my room.
Then I think of her saying that she is afraid of God, and of me telling her I don’t believe in Him, that maybe I never did. My parents believed and lived according to their faith. But me? I just followed along, for their sake.
The day my dad died, I did not stop believing.
I stopped pretending–the effort was too much. Worthless, even.
But it was not then that I stopped believing. This faith had never been mine, so maybe I had never had any faith to lose. My dad’s love… I truly had that. That is what I really had. And I did not lose it when I lost him. Instead, it has grown.
It grows every day, even though we will never meet again. He is gone, but his love is constantly with me.
‘These things are unable to be lost: Love, faith, hope…’ These words, hidden somewhere deep in my memory. Love, faith, hope. One by one, I think about them.
Here is what I know about hope:
Hope is the worst monster and the best saint.
And I know now something about love I didn’t before: That I have not lost my dad’s love. He’s gone, but it has stayed. So maybe it’s true about love, that if can’t be lost.
But my faith that is suddenly gone? It had never been there to begin with. And on the way back home, that realization makes me sadder than I’ve felt in days.
…
In less than a year’s time, I will compose and write a song called Saint Hope . It will become a hit. Nearly every single person in America will be able to hum its melody—millions will memorize its lyrics.
And my heart will be completely hopeless every single time I sing it to my thousands of fans.
…
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Eden asks me a few days later.
I know she’s still thinking of the cemetery. I know our conversation stayed with her, as it stayed with me.
“Have you been reading Wuthering Heights more than the normal amount again?”
“What is the normal amount?” she asks.
“I don’t know. An amount that doesn’t make you want to get me to play Heathcliff to your Cathy,” I reply and she smiles.
“I would never force you to play Heathcliff.”
“Oh, good.”
“ I would play him. Have you seen how black my hair is?”
“It’s black all right,” I laugh.
“You’d be Cathy,” she says and I push her arm playfully. Touching her even slightly still gives me chills. No, not still. It’s getting worse. I can barely concentrate on breathing.
“Stop it.” My voice is gravelly.
“Just answer me,” she insists. “Do you think I’ll turn into a ghost once I die?”
“I literally have no idea. And I don’t intend to find out. I’ll keep you alive forever, just so that you will avoid Cathy’s fate,” I say. “Something, I may point out, that I will not avoid if you make me read her parts out loud again.”
But Eden is not laughing.
“Sometimes I think I may have already died and that I’m a ghost.” She is looking at the sky above the bare branches. “That’s why everything is so… It’s not real. It doesn’t feel real.”
“Hey. Hey!” I’m suddenly scared. A deep, icy-cold terror coils in my stomach, and it’s all I can do to breathe through it. I’m pulling her out of this right now, and we’re not ever going there again , I vow to myself. “Look at me. Look at me, Eden.” She does, but her eyes have this far-away look in them, as if she is not actually here. It scares me so much, I can barely get the words out. “You are alive, you are here. Listen to this. ”
I take her hand in mine, pull off her glove, and I brush my fingers against hers to warm them. I place her palm on her own heart. It’s beating fast, like a scared woodland creature’s.
“This is real,” I tell her. “I’m real. I’m here, and so are you.”
“I don’t feel real,” she whispers, her eyes wide, unseeing. “What if I am a ghost already?”
“Then haunt me,” I whisper back.
Her gaze is still unfocused. I realize somehow that whatever is torturing her is so much bigger than I can handle; I don’t know what to say to her. But I know that I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving her alone in this darkness that is trying to swallow her alive. I am useless, but I am staying.
“Haunt me,” I repeat helplessly.
“Now who is playing Heathcliff?” she replies with a ghost of a smile playing at her colorless lips, and the relief that washes over me is so huge my knees buckle. She’s come back to me. That’s all that matters.
“Haunt me,” I say again, because that’s the only thing that seemed to work. “I give you permission to haunt me.”
…
I will say it again to her in six years.
‘I hope I haunt you.’
I will be on a stage in front of thousands of people, and she will be leaving me standing there alone in the rain. And I will turn to her and shout over the clamor of the crowd: ‘I hope I haunt you.’
And she will reply: ‘ I hope you do.’