CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO #2
His eyes pinched tight, then a brilliant smile gave him away.
“I did, after looking forever. It was different shades of blue mixed together.” He cupped his hands, a phantom holding another thing with no real form.
“My mom cried and said I worked hard to find something good hidden in all this sand.” He pushed his hands out and away.
“And around so many sharp things—rocks and piles of driftwood.”
My breathing came out measured and half-formed. Hadn’t Tía Viv said essentially the same thing?
“Grandpa said the float could remind me that I could find hope no matter what.”
Knowing Penn now, I could’ve sworn he’d never forgotten.
Fortified, we followed the shoreline, expanding our game of hide-and-seek.
Low-slung clouds were breaking apart, weaving bits of sunlight through.
Our search turned silent. I was listing memories and noting keywords to record later in the brown notebook.
I hoped Penn was sifting through more details.
Like enchanted watches and Bearberry Cabin woodpeckers, treasure came when I wasn’t looking. It wasn’t hidden in a log hovel or buried under fronds of beach grass. Color flashed in the midmorning light. A sunrise twinkle inside a well of sand.
I didn’t alert Penn at first, but I slowed until I was only gaining inches, my gaze sharpening. Red. The float was red.
He saw it too, but he didn’t rush ahead either. Instead, he got as close to me as his twisted physics allowed, his eyes like twin blue moons.
“It’s what we wanted,” I finally said. “Why am I scared to pick it up?” The boy beside me was nineteen and thirteen. Here and gone.
Instead of urging me forward, he laughed from the pit of his belly and shook his head with wonder.
“What’s that for?”
“You’re more scared of a harmless chunk of red glass than you were of me randomly appearing in your bedroom and—”
“Penn.”
“Your hand can go right through me, and you can’t even—”
“That’s it,” I said. I knew what he was doing. And I was the one laughing when I reached my hand over the curved red lip of the float. He’d trotted up behind me, waiting.
“What? No,” I managed helplessly, drawing my treasure closer. Broken. My glass float was broken in half. Ragged shards poked from the inner edge.
“Oh man. I’m sorry,” Penn said, a frown sagging through his entire face. “I wanted you to be able to take something cool home.”
To remember him. To remember us and days like this.
“What does this mean?” I asked.
“That glass breaks,” he said, soft and grated. “It doesn’t have to mean more than that. It was outside hanging out with rocks and wind and wood.”
“I need to sit.” My insides had pulled tight, limbs awkward and heavy.
Both temples pulsed, and my arm ached as if to outdo the pain.
My cheeks and lips were dry from the wind, the sand and salt.
I found a thick cord of driftwood and slumped onto a smooth spot.
Before anyone else could’ve thought to move, Penn was simply next to me and close.
I cradled the glass like a bird with a broken wing. “It could be worse, right? At least I got half a float. It looks just like my kind of hope.” Shattered. The jagged ends of promises and wishes.
“No, Sylvie.” Seconds ticked into moments. When I didn’t respond, he reached out toward the red shard. “Don’t shut down on me.”
Why shouldn’t I? That was a move I could always count on. Even the gentle hand that had stopped inches away from me was something I couldn’t hold. “It’s fine,” I said. One, two, set. “Give me a minute, and we can go explore—”
“Only a minute? Trying to set some kind of world record for moving on?”
“Trying not to care so much.”
“By pushing stuff away,” he challenged. “Standard procedure, right? You move past the hard stuff instead of dealing with it.”
I swallowed hard; my throat was scratched and achy. “You’re not talking about the glass.”
“We’re not.” Every part of him edged closely this time. The bend of his knees, the determined reach of his arms and hands. His expression was as boundless as the sea.
My chest cracked wide open. And I realized it didn’t matter that his hold was hollow. He still held so much of me. Timeless. Tragic. But for now, and at least for the next few minutes, he wasn’t letting go. “I hate how well you know me,” I admitted. “As much as I don’t hate it.”
“Come on. I more than know you. I—”
“Don’t say it, please,” I whispered as time slowed to a death crawl, forcing me to live every second of us and this as if it were a lifetime. The red glass winked from my hand—half a declaration. Half a heart.
“Syl,” he said, “you refuse to take off a dangerous watch because it means I’ll go forever. You’ve given up your whole summer to help me. You choose to turn that crown again and again. To bring me here, to you. If that’s not caring, what is it?”
Foolish. “I do care about you. So, so much. I couldn’t stop it. But I let myself want the one person the universe said I can’t have.” I dashed my free hand above the sharpest edge. “That’s the broken, beautiful thing. And when you leave, it will be my problem to deal with.”
A broken, beautiful smile. “By pushing me aside. By forgetting me.”
As impossible as parting the Pacific at our feet. “I’d forget my own name before yours.”
He softened, made a breathy sound. “All this talk about moving on—it would be easier for me to move on if I knew you’d at least try to be happy. Find someone who . . . I just want you to be happy.”
I wanted to clap back, hard and fast, about him putting this burden on me. But I fell into the anguish storming inside his eyes. “Please, Penn,” I said, my words strained. “Don’t ask me to be that girl. Not yet. I just can’t . . . I can’t make that promise.”
“Thought you might say that,” he said, dipping his finger into the center of the half globe.
“Yeah. So here we are.”
He gave a firm nod. “Look, it’s not that I don’t understand you wanting to put up your guard.
The memory is fresh, but it seems like I essentially did the same thing with my dad.
He did reach out eventually, but I refused to go see him.
I had to protect myself. He didn’t push.
Then I found out he suffered from depression. ”
Now that was a memory.
“None of us knew. That was part of why he left. He was too ashamed at first, which I get. But I was his kid, you know? And just when I was doing better with everything, it was like I was starting back at square one, and I had to figure out who I was again. Who we were.”
Prickles branched up from my fingertips. “Do you remember if you ever did see him? Before you . . .” I couldn’t say it. Had either of them known it would be another goodbye?
Penn looked out as one wave rolled in, then two. “I keep getting stuck on this one image. Fireworks. I know that sounds weird.” “Fourth of July fireworks?”
“The Fourth was a big deal in my family. We always threw a big neighborhood barbecue and watched fireworks together. I think . . . yeah, he showed up. I wasn’t ready, and I ran off. I can’t remember any more. I remember the place, though—Skinner Butte. A big lookout in the Willamette Valley.”
Skinner Butte? I swallowed hard. “That’s where I’d planned to go on the Fourth. Do you think your family lives nearby? It’s near that lake. The fairgrounds.”
He stood abruptly, squinting from more than the arrowing sunlight. A few moments later he pivoted, caught almost starstruck in another flood of memory—I knew it. I knew him. Eras passed before he rubbed at his eyes and refocused, but no sense of clarity was left across his face.
“What happened?” I asked as my stomach turned. “What did you remember?”
“I . . . Oh my God” was all he could get out for two beats, then three, before he blanched whiter than clean sand and new snow, marking him more ghostly than ever. “There were no Fourth of July fireworks at Skinner Butte this year. Because of a wildfire.”
Chills swarmed across my chest. “But I never told you . . . How do you know that?”
The next part happened because I moved too fast without paying attention. I’d become too comfortable with the destroyed glass float.
“Shit!” he cried, seeing me, seeing it.
In the panic, the reckless rush of getting up and over to Penn, my hand had slipped, whisking across a razor-sharp edge.
All at once, the broken float was in the sand, and my left hand was shaking. Red oozed in a slash mark along my palm, index finger to wrist.
The atmosphere was muffled; the waves were stealth creepers in slow motion; the birds and gleeful squeals of children floated in thick cotton. My ears clogged. A thick haze dropped over my pupils.
Penn was staring at the blood, haunted. Helpless. Words rolled out under his breath, but I couldn’t make out a single syllable.
I had no concept of the amount of time that passed before I finally heard my name. By the third “Sylvie,” I jerked into the present. Blood was oozing down my forearm. And Penn was as everywhere as possible, which was never enough.
“Listen, it’s okay,” he said. “You have bandages in the truck, right?”
I nodded. “I swear it wasn’t the watch that did this, Penn. I was careless. Don’t ask me to take it off,” I begged. It still wasn’t time. It just wasn’t.
“Shh, I’m not. That . . . It doesn’t matter now. I wish I could help you. You might really need stitches this time.” He surveyed our immediate surroundings. “We have to find something to stop the blood.”
White-hot fear lodged into the base of my spine, and my head powered on. I always had tissues—courtesy of one Cuban mother and her constant reminders. I unzipped my belt bag and pulled out a wad.
“That’s it,” he said, closing in even more when I winced from the pressure. “I know, Syl. It’s starting to hurt like a bitch, yeah?”
I nodded and managed to slow the bleeding, my heart cracking a little when he repeated the same tender motion he’d given to the cut on my other forearm. His lips shot gentle warmth into my fingertips, then my damp forehead.
“What’s going on?” I asked as he pulled back. Something was different—the kind that felt like everything.
“Right now, you need to get back to the cabin and take care of your hand.”
“You’re not coming with me? You can tell me on the way.”
He shook his head, frowning. “I only have a few minutes left. Maybe less.” His eyes rimmed with another shade of red. “Listen to me. Don’t do any more searching until I come back. Don’t look for me.”
Don’t look for him? A hundred versions of “why” rushed over my face.
He held up his hand. “I’m asking for this one thing. Please wait for me.”
“I don’t like this,” I said, sounding like a little kid again, begging my parents for a different summer. “You know something. What if you don’t come back?”
“I will.”
How? How could he be so sure?
“Unless you take that watch off.”
I wouldn’t for two more days.