Gone, Gone, Gone(58)

We’re eternalized in the film. Forever kids. We are our forefathers today.

I kiss her, and her mouth tastes like wax and peppermint.

It’s not my first kiss, but it feels like it. Like I’m watching a movie of my first.

She pulls back, laughing. “Chase, you bit my lip.”

Or a blooper reel. “I did? Sorry.”

She giggles and turns, and I smell the powder on her cheek. I want to kiss her. I want to bake cookies with her. I want to watch her put on her makeup like I got to watch Claudia.

“Look.” She points to the top of the flume. “They’re going down.”

“Shannon looks terrified.”

“He’s just hoping Claudia will hold his hand.”

We watch Claudia and Shannon take the plunge, and I wrap my fingers around Bella’s palm.

“Chase.”

I look up from Camus. “Shh shh shh.” I jerk my head to Noah, crashed on top of his covers, shoes still on. “He’s asleep. And still, for once.” Noah’s always waking me up by thrashing around when he’s sleeping. It’s the worst.

Claudia tilts from one foot to the other, doing the same little dance that Gideon does. I close the paperback and say, “You’re supposed to be asleep, beautiful.”

“Mom and Dad are fighting.”

“Come on. Don’t let that worry you.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

I scoot over on my bed and she sits down, her nightgown pooling around her knees. She’s washed all the makeup off and she got sunburned today, so she looks like my little sister again. It’s something about winters and nighttimes that makes me remember how young Claudia is. It’s when she’s quiet. Her voice is old; she’s always confused for our mother on the phone.

“Is this Camus stuff really any good?” she asks.

“He definitely knew his summers.” I flip to one of my dog-eared pages. “‘Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.’”

She stares at me. “You can’t sleep with your eyes open.”

“You are so literal, Claude. Come on. Remember . . . you’ve got to remember. When Gid was still a baby, and Dad used to take me, you, and Noah and set us up on deck chairs on the balcony at night? Wrap us all up in sleeping bags and tell us stories? And we’d hear the waves come in and it would always be too bright to sleep—”

“Because of the stars?”

“Well, because Mom had all the lights on inside, walking Gideon up and down the hall so he’d shut up, but . . . yeah. The stars, too.”

Claudia sticks her head out my window. “I mean, I don’t know if they’re dripping exactly.”

“The sky’s dripping.”

She doesn’t speak for a minute, then says, “Oh.”

I tuck her under my arm and hold her for a while. She says, “I don’t really remember.”

“Well. You were young.”

“Don’t remember before Gideon.” She smiles. “Was I alive then?”

“I assure you that you were.”

“Your birthday’s in two days.”

“Oh, really? I didn’t know.”

She sticks out her tongue.

“Go back to bed,” I say. “Gideon will feel you walking around and get all upset.” Gid can tell the vibrations of our footsteps apart, and if he wakes up and realizes Claudia isn’t in bed where she’s supposed to be he is going to freak out. He hates when he wakes up and people aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Before he goes to bed every night, he takes an inventory of where we are, and if we drift, we have to be so quiet.

She kisses my cheek. “Night, Chase.”

“Night.”

“‘No love without a little innocence’” Noah says, completely still.

“I thought you were asleep. You’re so creepy.”

He shrugs. “So how was your lovely innocent night?”

“I kissed her.”

“What a man.” But he says it warmly. “How was it?”

My first thought is to relate it to soft-serve ice cream, but I can already hear Noah laughing at that. “It was nice.”

“God. God, really, it was nice?” He sounds so earnest that I think for a minute that he’s making fun of me. He props himself up on an elbow. “God, I f*cking miss when kisses were nice. I’m so jealous of people young enough to still have nice kisses.”

“Wait, kissing isn’t nice anymore?”

“No. It’s foreplay. Trust me, you get old enough, and everything is foreplay. Kissing is foreplay. Talking is foreplay. Holding hands is foreplay. I swear to God, Chase, I think at this point, sex would be foreplay.”

This would probably be a good time to ask if he and Melinda have really slept together, but I can’t make myself say the words. So I just say, “That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Sex is a to-do list where nothing gets crossed out.”

I find the passage Melinda quoted in my Camus book. “‘No love without a little innocence. Where was the innocence? Empires were tumbling down; nations and men were tearing at one another’s throats; our hands were soiled. Originally innocent without knowing it, we were now guilty without meaning to be: the mystery was increasing our knowledge. This is why, O mockery, we were concerned with morality. Weak and disabled, I was dreaming of virtue!’”