I'd Give Anything(16)
“She’s beautiful,” said Avery, her voice tight and small. “Everybody thinks so.”
Because I didn’t know what to say, I reached out and took Avery’s glossy bowed head between my hands.
“She’s a senior at St. Michael’s. She runs track, and she was at that debate competition last summer. I follow her on social media. She’s beautiful.”
“It doesn’t matter, honey. Except that it probably has something to do with why Dale jumped to the wrong conclusion.”
Then, she said, in that same tiny heartrending, shrink-wrapped voice, “Do you think Dad thought she was?”
I kissed the top of her head. I had never wanted to lie to anyone so much.
“Dad is kind of a distracted guy. He doesn’t always notice what other people notice,” I said. God knows it was true.
“Still,” she said. “Do you?”
I lifted her hair and pulled the silken weight of it over one of her shoulders and began to braid. There was a voice I used—low, slow, cadenced, chant-like—on those car rides or when Avery would lie next to me in the middle of the night, her brain jangling with frightening thoughts. I used it now.
“When you were little, like three years old, right after we’d moved into this house, I would take you to the playground, and, oh my gosh, you loved it. It was fenced in with a gate that shut, so the kids could roam around by themselves, and you adored that freedom. You’d climb and dig in the sand and go inside the playhouse or you would lie belly-down on one of the big swings. There were so many kids, but I always knew right where you were, even when I was talking to other moms. I just knew. And then one weekend, your dad asked to take you by himself, and I didn’t really want him to. Because of the way he’s distracted, always in a bit of a fog. I was afraid he wouldn’t keep track of you. But I didn’t want to say no. So he put you in the wagon and pulled you to the playground, and after I was pretty sure you two must have gotten there, I ran over and sidled up to the playground, outside the fence, and hid behind a tree. And you know what I saw?”
Her eyes met mine. “What?”
“You climbing up the jungle gym with great big Dad climbing right behind you. I saw other parents watching him, but he didn’t notice. All he noticed was you. And he ducked into the playhouse even though he barely fit through the door. It was like Gulliver’s Travels. He even sat in the sandbox.”
Avery smiled. “He probably took up the whole sandbox,” she said.
“He loves you so much.”
It wasn’t an answer to her question about whether her father thought Cressida Wall was beautiful. I knew it, and I knew she knew it, but I set before her the one thing I recognized at that moment—at that moment and for all time—to be absolutely true about Harris McCue, the best, most basic fact of him. Avery might’ve gotten mad or walked out or demanded an answer to her question, but she didn’t. Neither did she say, “I love him, too.” But she let my sentence rest there between us, and then her teeth released her thumbnail, and she said, in the tone of someone agreeing to perform a task or do a favor, the tone of someone who has decided: “Okay.”
Chapter Five
June 15, 1997
Tonight, at the Quaker burial ground, Trevor said, “I hate her,” and even though he’d said it before and had even yelled directly at her, in the meanest possible voice, like someone spitting in someone’s face, “I hate you!” more times than I could count, sometimes sticking in a “fucking” or a “bitch” or both, I never believed he really meant it until tonight.
I was lying on my back on the grass between two gravestones with Trevor nearby lying on his back between two others. The humidity and the city lights had thrown a veil over the sky, but you could still see some stars, white and dissolving, and I was about to say something about how weird it was to think that the stars were always up there, even in the daytime, how brighter lights just trick us into thinking they’re gone, when Trevor said it, not loud but hard and ugly, like an ax blow: I hate her.
Right away, I imagined all those Quaker souls in their little gauze bonnets and plain dresses and black suits—our friends, is how I thought of them, our guardian angels—hearing the venom in my brother’s voice. I imagined the whisper of their skirts and coats as they drew back from us, all their inner lights startled and fluttering like candle flames in a breeze.
He doesn’t mean it, I wanted to tell them.
Except that I know Trev better than anyone and I think he did.
Sitting here now, in my room, at three in the morning, feeling like the only awake person in the universe, I’m trying to figure out exactly why I think he meant it, about what made this time different. It could be because of the place, the burial ground. I can’t remember Trevor ever saying those words in that place before. Usually, no matter how boiling mad we are when we sneak out of our house, our fury spends itself on the ride over, as we whoosh soundlessly past lines of parked cars, past storefronts and row houses with their awning-shaded windows like sleepy eyes, so that by the time we’re leaning our bikes against the low wrought-iron burial-ground fence and tugging open the gate, which is always unlocked, we are mostly emptied of it. We rarely bring up whatever it was that sent us reeling out the door and instead talk about other things—school, our friends, books, whether or not pure good or pure evil exists, whether or not we believe in God—or we don’t talk at all, just sit inside a loose, comfy pocket of shared silence.