Haunting
I was going to call Zane.
The feeder was full. The bully with the crooked tail feather had come twice since yesterday, and I had watched it both times from the bench in my father’s plaid blanket without feeling bad for the bird at all.
Just watching. Just existing in the same air as something beautiful without needing to hold it or name it or keep it at a distance.
I was watching it without punishing myself. That was new.
Zane had been ten minutes away for five days.
I was going to call him and tell him to come home.
Not to the colonial house. Home, to the blue apartment, where the paint was pale and the radiator still made its train sound despite the wrench and the kitchen smelled like us instead of ghosts and absence.
I was going to tell him I was ready to stop being alone.
That the alone had done what it needed to do, and what it needed to do was apparently leave me standing on my dead father’s porch at dusk filling a hummingbird feeder for the second day in a row, understanding something about choosing to stay that I hadn’t been able to learn any other way. But alone had done its purpose.
I thought about hummingbirds.
I thought about what I had written in my head a thousand times, since the first time I sat on this porch, watched them, and felt bad for them, the beautiful evasive things.
The fact that they keep their distance and we cannot stop reaching anyway.
I had spent twenty-one years being that.
Being the thing that kept its distance and was loved more fiercely for it, watched more hungrily, wanted more desperately because it was so hard to get close.
I have always been watched like a hummingbird.
It was the only form of being seen that I had ever known.
But Zane did not watch me the way I watched the hummingbirds.
I understood that now. He did not stand at a distance and desire me more for being rare.
He never needed me to be elusive to find me worth watching.
He had just. Stayed. Moved around me because he chose to, not because the distance made him hunger.
He had never once looked at me the way I looked at these birds, full of doom and pity and the knowledge that one press of a thumb against their wings would finish them.
He had never once looked at me like I was a body of water that he could rest in, that he could lie back in my depth and let the salt make him feel weightless. He looked at me like I was inside the water, drowning and he did not want me to drown anymore. Zane knew I was not the Dead Sea.
Just like I knew the girl in the photograph.
She had not been the Dead Sea. She had not been the hummingbird, the rarity, the beautiful dangerous evasive thing.
She had just been a girl in a yellow dress, too happy to be a metaphor, too ordinary to be a myth.
And someone had looked at her, not with longing or pity or the specific hunger that comes from something keeping its distance, but with the plain, uncomplicated thought: keep her.
Maybe I had never been the Dead Sea. I had only been a girl who learned to call herself that because it was easier than believing she deserved to be kept. And I think Zane had always known that, even when I did not. Especially when I did not.
I had my phone in my hand. I was going to call him.
Then, there was a knock. I did not know the sound of his knocking.
That seems like a small thing, except it is not, because Zane rarely had to knock on a door that held me behind it.
Zane counted down. Zane announced himself.
Zane gave me the architecture of his arrival, so I was never startled by it.
He had promised once to do that forever.
I set the phone down on the bench. Something cold moved through me that had nothing to do with the evening air.
He was standing on the other side of the front door when I opened it.
His jacket was open. His hair was wrong, the unsettled kind that came from running his hands through it without realizing he was doing it.
He had an envelope in his hand, held loosely, like he had forgotten it was there.
His face was doing something I was not familiar with.
Zane was confused. Not uncertain, not worried, not cautious or trying to untangle the knot of depressing thoughts I handed him.
He was not doing the careful math he always did.
The Zane I knew was never confused in my presence, or at least, had never shown it.
Zane always arrived with a map; always knew which way the wind was blowing before I felt it on my skin.
He looked at me, and the confusion shifted into something else, something cracked and searching.
And he said: “Did you know Henry?”
I did not understand the question. I did not have to do the math in my head because there were no equations to solve.
“Zane,” I said, and my voice came out steady even though something in my chest had started to run extremely fast. “What? What’s—”
“Did you know him?” His voice was not raised.
It was worse than raised. It was the voice he used when he was holding something together that was already in pieces.
Zane was not standing at the door of his grief, checking the temperature with the back of his hand, and deciding whether to enter.
There was no door, right now. Zane was in the room with the flames and he was standing still.
“You know I didn’t know Henry,” I reminded him. My eyes were straining from how hard I was looking at him, trying to understand what was going on. Zane knew this. Zane knew this so clearly that I was starting to wonder if he had hit his head and lost his own memory.
“Hm,” Zane hummed out, not gently. Like he had caught me in a lie. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. But how many people named Seren do you know? Because I haven’t met any other than you. Not at Hawkings, not in West Bridge or North Haven, nowhere. Just you.”
The way Zane was speaking made my skin rise. There was anger in it, and the anger was directed at me. That was not something Zane did.
“Come inside,” I said quietly, ignoring his questions. I held the door open, I could feel the way my eyes were narrowed, just like Zane’s. But mine were not from anger, like his. It was from concern.
Zane walked past me, walking straight into the kitchen without looking back, without wondering if I would follow him. He stood at the kitchen island, two hands against the black stone like he was bracing himself.
“Zane,” I said, because he had not spoken and the silence was starting to turn to ice that burned me. “Why are you asking me that? What is going on?”
“Because I was clearing out my old room, my parents want to make it an office. I was going through my old desk, deciding what to keep, and I found this.” He held up the envelope.
“Henry’s parents sent it. I don’t remember when.
A long time ago. Maybe a year after he died.
It was in a stack of things I never opened because I was—” He stopped.
His jaw worked. “I never opened it. I didn’t want to read whatever they had to say. But I opened it tonight.”
I looked at the envelope. I looked at his face. “I don’t know Henry,” I said.
Which wasn’t entirely true and wasn’t entirely false, because the name lived in my life as a shape without content, the sixth chair, the ghost in Zane’s suitcase, the name that was spoken low in a room by the people who had loved him, by people who now loved me.
“You do,” Zane said, and the crack in his voice widened.
“You do, Seren, because your name is in the letter. Your name. He wrote about you. You did know him and you are lying to me.” He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth for a second, one second, and then dropped it.
“You’re still lying to me. Why didn’t you tell me you knew him? Why did you keep that from me?”
“Zane.” I reached for his arm. “I don’t understand what you’re saying. I don’t know Henry. I have never met Henry. You know that. Please, Zane. You know that.”
He looked at me, the inventory he always did, reading for the truth that lived behind what I said.
Whatever he found made something in his face shift, the accusation turning into something more frightened.
Like he held hope I would reveal the truth to him, and there would be a reason that explained everything.
But I did not, and when I did not, it looked like that hurt him.
“Read it,” he said quietly, and held the envelope out.
I took it. My hands were steady, which surprised me.
I pulled the pages out, unfolded them, and started at the beginning.
It took me a second to realize what I was holding.
The paper was creased, the lines permanent in the worn paper.
It felt stale like a book at the library that is never read, like it had stayed somewhere for years without any eyes on it.
This was not just a journal entry or something he had mindlessly written. This was a note. The note.
I looked back up at Zane before I read it, understanding the frantic pain in his eyes.
His eyes were red; they were not wet now but I could tell they had been flooded.
He looked like his pain was so intense it had turned physical.
I knew that feeling. My chest turned into lead knowing exactly how he felt, and Zane feeling it pulled at me in a way that made my heart bleed for him.
“Read it,” he repeated. The impatience was obvious.
After a second more of staring into his eyes, I nodded.
I glanced down at the paper. Zane was in pain and it was valid and justified.
Pain makes people not see things clearly.
I knew that, too. I braced myself to read Henry’s note, ready to see what was tricking Zane’s mind and preparing myself to clear the confusion for him.
I knew how easily the mind can deceive you.
To: Everyone.