I'd Give Anything(7)

Oh, my friend. The dishonesty is the least of it. For Avery, compared to the eighteen-year-old girl, the dishonesty will weigh exactly nothing.

Harris stared out into the yard, through which twilight had wound like a cat, smudging its edges, turning everything to shades of gray: blue smoke and dove and charcoal and ash. I looked, too, and Harris and I sat there together, our faces turned in the same direction and egg-pale in the dim light. If only we could turn back the clock, I thought and shivered. I tugged my jacket sleeves over my hands and tried to will late summer into the yard, fireflies like glitter in the hydrangeas, fragrance of rose and honeysuckle tingeing the evening air with the sweetest kind of ache.

“Maybe I’ll put in a pond,” said Harris, quietly. “A little one. Back in that blank spot between the two biggest trees. Put some of those big goldfish in it. And some underwater ferns or whatever they eat.”

I searched for the word and found it, clear and pretty, a single syllable, amber like a drop of honey.

“Koi,” I said.

I imagined that Harris was imagining it, too: the impossible brightness, the ribbony swimming, the whole pond shining like a newly minted penny dropped into our yard.

As if there were forgiveness in sunlight glancing off the backs of fish, hope in the color orange, magic in a pretty word. As if the addition of one more beautiful thing to our beautiful lives could save us.





Chapter Three




March 20, 1997

This is how I’ll tell this story to our children, mine and Gray’s: “Your mother fell in love with your father on the first day of spring.”

Beautiful. Beautiful, right?

Although, I have to say I also like the phrase “vernal equinox,” since it seems to connect our love with the orbit of the Earth, which strikes me as totally accurate. Picture the exact center of the sun directly above where we sat on that stone wall that runs like a seam through Brandywine Creek State Park, stitching wild meadow to green grass field. Picture that sun’s clean spring light catching in our eyelashes and hair and goldening all our edges. If I just invented the word “goldening,” it’s because I needed it. Maybe that’s how all words are invented: something new to the universe happens, and you have to christen it.

I fell in love in broad daylight. I fell in love in a crowd of people, with kites adorning the sky over our heads. One kite was shaped like a monarch butterfly, black and pumpkin-orange winging through the blue. One kite had rainbow streamers. One was diamond shaped and yellow with a crisscross and little red ponytail bows all down the tail, exactly like a kite in a picture book. I’ll tell our kids that, how the sky was full of pretty things held there by wind, how the sky was blue-iris blue.

CJ sat on the other side of Gray. Kirsten sat on the other side of me. Gray and I were in the middle, where we belonged.

I remember everything. I remember the exact moment.

In one hand, I held a thermos lid of hot chocolate. In my other hand, I held my long hair, twisted, to keep it from blowing into my face while I drank. My hands were cold.

“My hands are getting frostbite,” I said.

“Hardly,” said CJ. “It’s forty-eight degrees out.”

Kirsten leaned forward to glare across me and Gray at CJ.

“You can’t know that. You think that if you say ‘forty-eight’ instead of ‘fifty,’ we’ll all think you know. But you don’t.”

“You don’t know it’s not forty-eight,” observed CJ.

“What about wind chill? Does that forty-eight include wind chill?”

“Wind chill is crap.”

“Wind chill is not crap,” said Kirsten. “Every person who has ever been in wind knows that.”

“Wind chill is based on human perception, which varies, obviously. There is no universally accepted standard of measurement. It’s crap.”

“Do you have gloves?” said Gray.

“In my pockets,” I said.

Gray reached over, put his hand over mine, the one holding my hank of hair. Gray held on to my hair, wound it once around his hand, and I looked at his face. I’d seen that face a million times. I’d never seen that face before. I didn’t stop looking at him as I slid my hand out from under his and wrangled my right glove from my pocket. I didn’t stop looking when he reached out and with enormous carefulness, took my cup of hot chocolate. I did stop when I put my gloves on because my hands were suddenly confused and fumbling, and I couldn’t find my thumbholes. But by then it had already happened.

It wasn’t the fact that he did something nice for me. Because in the two and a half years we four had been friends, ever since the start of ninth grade, Gray had always done nice things, done them just like he did with my hair: automatically. It wasn’t even that he touched my hand, because he had to have done that before. All I know is that there it was: love. Love in the sunlight, in the colors of the kites, in Gray’s deep-set brown eyes, in the fuzziness of my gloves, and shining right out of Gray’s hands as they reached toward me, first one, then the other. And more than anywhere else, inside of me, like I was made of it. Love right down to my mitochondria.

I didn’t say it out loud or ask Gray if he felt it, too. I just said, “Thanks, Gray,” and his name was a sweetness in my mouth, and I took back my hot chocolate and my twist of hair.