49. Salt and Damp Earth
SALT AND DAMP EARTH
ASHER
I f it was a diary, it didn’t belong to Lev. The delicate, slanted script inside bore no relation to Lev’s bold, artistic scrawl.
Lev,
I miss you desperately.
I can’t eat, I can hardly sleep, but I can write and so I will. First, I tried writing you a letter, but then how would I send it?
Wouldn’t it be romantic if we wrote letters in notebooks and swapped them like we did when we were younger? I’ll give this one to you when I return to Lichenmoor .
If I return.
Silas
Lev,
Do you know what I miss the most, Levvy? Not your touch, surprisingly enough.
I miss the safety of being known. Because you see me. All of me. You understand that I’m a row of dominoes that have started to fall and I keep racing to add another domino in front, knowing the next one will fall, and the next and the next.
All my life I didn’t know why I kept racing to add another domino, why I didn’t let the last one fall. But then I met you, and now each new day is for you.
If I think too long on it, I’ll cry, and I know you hate when I cry, so I suppose I’ll end this here.
Silas
Asher felt like he’d just met the man behind the statue.
“What happened to you?” he asked Silas again, in the empty room so full of him.
He flipped the page. Silas wrote every day, adding dominoes for Lev like he’d said.
Some entries were short:
Lev,
Last night it rained and I dreamed I was at Lichenmoor. I could scarcely get out of bed. I wish I never woke up .
My only motivation? Avoiding Sister Agatha’s ire.
Silas
Other entries contained poems, some of them surprisingly good. Others, a moody teenager’s attempt at being profound. His tone grew more dreary with each page turned.
Lev,
I no longer like the color orange.
Or the cinnamon sprinkled on my toast.
When I go outside I don’t look up.
A single salt crystal tastes like the ocean on your lips.
Everything reminds me of you.
Silas
Hello Snake,
Mum visited today.
I refused to speak to her. I wish she’d died instead of my father. She said I was being melodramatic when I informed her.
Of course I’m melodramatic. I’m a poet! Where do you think I learned it from?
Next, she shared the most delightful revelation that she found one of your letters in my room. I didn’t believe her until she showed it to me .
She spent the rest of the visit praying for my tarnished soul. Next time I’ll pretend I’m a good Catholic boy, if only to avoid the headache.
I’m told you’re doing well without me. Mum says you’ve moved on, and I should too. Again, I didn’t believe her, but she anticipated that too and brought news clippings.
Rugby team captain. Lauded for your new art series. Photographed all across university with heiresses more in line with your breeding than me.
Of course my hag of a mum thinks I’d actually believe you’d moved on to women, and that if I learned you were behaving so sensibly, I’d outgrow this silly little phase too.
But that’s not how it works, Mummy. Sexual orientation isn’t something I can solve with piety and a rosary. I have as much power to choose who I love as I have power to return to Lichenmoor. None.
Then there’s you, Brother. You think you have no choice but to be perfect, but you’re simply too afraid to choose me.
Perhaps if you weren’t doing so well, Father would try harder to bring me home.
I resent you for that too, for mattering more to him than me, for being born by him, for having a life outside of me when the only thing I have is you .
I just have one question:
Did you move on?
Please tell me how. I’d like to move on too.
Silas
Silas’s next entry came a week later. He’d broken his daily streak.
Lev,
The sisters have taken issue with me. Maybe God told them I’m hell-bound. More likely Mum.
Beating me over the head with a bible has done little to cleanse my soul, and I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent on my knees with my rosary to no avail.
Instead of praying, I bite my tongue until it bleeds, and when the bleeding stops, I bite again.
Silas
Lev,
For the first time in my life, I don’t want to write.
It’s like my words no longer belong to me.
Every line is clumsy as if someone
turned my prose into mockery.
God has deemed me unworthy.
And now I’ve lost my poetry.
Yes, Levvy, I know that rhymed,
but that’s the point I’m trying to make.
Rhyming doesn’t turn tangled words into poetry.
Silas
Lev,
Without you, life is starved of all meaning. You were the only star in my wretched solar system, and now I’m lost in an endless black abyss, and I fucking hate astronomy and overwrought cliches, but as I’ve said, my words have left me.
Like you did.
Silas
Lev,
Mum visited again, and when she saw how skeletal I’ve become she threatened to have me institutionalized.
I can’t go back there.
Good thing she didn’t see the cuts I’ve been carving.
Don’t worry. I’ll be careful. I leave my marks where only you can see.
You’re disappointed. I know. You’ll be so angry when you find the fresh scars over my old ones. If you care to look at all.
Silas
Lev,
I hate you for showing me what I was missing, for giving me what I now can’t live without.
There’s a beam over my bed. Sometimes I look at it and think all I’d have to do is sling a rope around it and leap.
I think I’ll try to run away first.
Silas
Lev,
I didn’t make it far. I didn’t have change for the phone booth, or coins for the bus toll.
The sisters delight in doling out my punishment. Yardsticks on knuckles. Caning and the like.
Who gave them the authority? God?
I could overpower them.
Would it be melodramatic if I strangled them with my rosary?
Silas
Lev,
I don’t know what I expected. Instead of dying, I panicked, and kicked the lamp off of my night stand, just before my bedsheet-rope broke.
The sisters were mad about the lamp I’d broken. They made me kneel on the broken glass, but they couldn’t break me.
Losing you did that.
Silas
Each page became harder to turn. Heavier. Like the paper pulp had been laced with lead.
Why had Lev saved this? Why were the pages so worn? Why was Lev punishing himself?
Lev,
I refused to kneel for my last punishment. Sister Agatha beat me but I wouldn’t bend. She was furious.
The victory was intoxicating. I’d finally stopped letting things happen and made them happen instead.
But that didn’t last long. Never underestimate Sister Agatha.
I hate you so much.
I’ve already opened my chest, wrenched my ribs apart, and showed you what hurt. You know why I don’t believe in God, why I can’t step foot in Lichenmoor’s church.
I’ve been banished here because of you. And now you’ve just moved on?
There’s a small statue of the Virgin Mary on Sister Agatha’s desk. I think I might bludgeon her to death with it.
Don’t worry. I won’t actually do that, but only because I have to see you again, even if I have to wait until I’m seventeen.
Even if I hate you.
Silas
Lev,
This time when Mum visited I told her I’d changed. Satan no longer slithered through my veins. Then I asked if I could leave.
She said she’d pray for me.
I found a shard of glass under my bed from when I’d been made to kneel after my failed suicide attempt.
Almost as if God has given me His blessing.
Silas
Lev,
You didn’t visit me at the hospital.
I suspect Father didn’t want you to know, lest it distract you on the rugby pitch or steer you off course from your perfect future.
But I still hate you for not coming for me. Why haven’t you come for me?
Silas
Lev,
I wish you would have called sooner, but apparently it takes two suicide attempts for my mum to let us talk.
Silas
Lev,
Father called. Not mine, of course since he’s dead. Yours.
I’m to pack my bags, but I won’t until he gets here, and I won’t believe I’m coming home until I step foot in Lichenmoor’s foyer.
I won’t even let myself remember the scent of salt and damp earth, the taste of the ocean, the wind howling across the moor.
Even if I come home, I don’t think I’ll ever feel at home again.
Anywhere.
I’m disposable. Sent away and forgotten. I could spend a night, a week, a month at Lichenmoor only to be put out with the rubbish bins.
What if you don’t want me anymore? What if you never did?
I’m afraid there’s no happy ending for us. Or at least not for me. You, however, will land on your feet, just like you always do.
I should destroy this notebook, but instead I think I’ll give it to you, so you know everything I’ve been through because I loved you.
I suffered while we were apart.
Did you?
Silas
Asher returned the notebook to the trunk. When had he started crying? He wiped his cheeks with the inside of his hoodie and looked around the room, almost expecting him to be there.
Silas.
The man who’d left his mark on every inch of Lev’s heart, who, even in death, felt so alive, Asher almost heard him breathing in the silence. Or maybe Lev had poured so much of his own soul into resurrecting the lover he’d lost that he’d left a sentient presence like a poltergeist.
Asher stood before the cold statue. The rungs of his ribs stuck out too much, even on a frame as lithe as Silas’s was, and his fae-like features had taken on a sinister sharpness, his large eyes too sunken and owlish. Had the tips of his lips been curled into a smirk before?
Lightning flashed and the resultant thunder shot chills down Asher’s spine. He felt dizzy, the air stifling.
Asher was overcome with the strangest compulsion to kneel at the statue’s feet and weep. He wanted to atone, to trade his life for Silas’s own, to give Lev the man he’d lost, the man who’d survived so much.
He pressed his palm against Silas’s hand, smaller than his own. How many times had Lev done the same, wishing the hand he held was warm? He said goodbye to the multitudes Silas had once contained, goodbye to the shards of Lev’s heart trapped inside his art.
Dust stung his eyes again. He sniffed. Fine. Maybe it wasn’t the dust.
Asher closed the door on Silas and locked it, knowing he’d never know Lev as well as Silas had, and Lev would never love him as much as he’d loved Silas, knowing a lock would never keep Silas out.