Beautiful Darkness

All That Remains

When I went to school the next day, I sat alone with Link and his four sloppy joes at the lunch table. While I ate my pizza, all I could think about was what Link said about Lena. He was right. She had changed, a little bit at a time, until I almost couldn't remember how things used to be. If I had anyone to talk to about it, I knew they would say to give her time. I also knew that was just something people said when there was nothing left to say and nothing you could do.

Lena wasn't coming out of it. She wasn't coming back to herself or to me. If anything, she was drifting farther away from me than anyone else. More and more, I couldn't reach her, not on the inside, not with Kelting or kissing or any of the other complicated or uncomplicated ways we used to touch. Now when I took her hand, all I could feel was the chill.

And when Emily Asher looked at me from across the lunchroom, there wasn't anything left but pity in her eyes. Once again, I was someone to feel sorry for. I wasn't Ethan Wate Whose Mamma Died Just Last Year. Now I was Ethan Wate Whose Girlfriend Went Psycho When Her Uncle Died. People knew there were complications, and they knew they hadn't seen Lena in school with me.

Even if they didn't like Lena, the miserable love to watch someone else's misery. I had just about cornered the market on miserable. I was worse than miserable, lower than a flattened sloppy joe left behind on a lunchroom tray. I was alone.

One morning about a week later, I kept hearing a strange sound, like a grating or a record scratching or a page tearing, in the back of my mind. I was in history class, and we were talking about the Reconstruction, which was the even more boring time after the Civil War when the United States had to put itself back together. In a Gatlin classroom, this chapter was even more embarrassing than it was depressing -- a reminder South Carolina had been a slave state and that we had been on the wrong side of right. We all knew it, but our ancestors had left us with a permanent F on the nation's moral report card. Cuts that run that deep leave scars, no matter what you try to do to heal them. Mr. Lee was still droning on, punctuating each sentence with a dramatic sigh.

I was trying not to listen, when I smelled something burning, maybe an overheating engine or a lighter. I looked around the room. It wasn't coming from Mr. Lee, the most frequent source of any horrible smell in my history class. No one else seemed to notice it.

The noise grew louder, into a confusing blur of crashing -- ripping, talking, yelling. Lena.

L?

No answer. Above the noise, I heard Lena mumbling lines of poetry, and not the kind you send someone for Valentine's Day.

Not waving but drowning ...

I recognized the poem, and it wasn't good. Lena reading Stevie Smith was only one step up from the darkest Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar kind of day. It was Lena's red flag, like Link listening to the Dead Kennedys or Amma chopping vegetables for spring rolls with her cleaver.

Hang on, L. I'm coming.

Something had changed, and before it could change back, I grabbed my books and took off running. I was out of the room before Mr. Lee's next sigh.

Reece wouldn't look at me when I walked through the door. She pointed to the stairs. Ryan, Lena's youngest cousin, was sitting on the bottom step with Boo, looking sad. When I tousled her hair, she held her finger to her lips. "Lena's having a nerve breakup. We're supposed to be quiet until Gramma and Mamma get home."

That was an understatement.

The door was open a crack, and when I pushed on it, the hinges creaked, like I was walking into a crime scene. It looked like the room had been tossed. The furniture was upside down or busted up or missing altogether. The entire room was covered with pages of books, pages torn and ripped and plastered all along the walls and ceiling and floor. Not a book was left on the shelf. It looked like a library had exploded. Some of the charred pages piled on the floor were still smoking. The only thing I didn't see was Lena.

L? Where are you?

I scanned the room. The wall over her bed wasn't covered with the remnants of the books Lena loved. It was covered in something else.

Nobody the dead man & Nobody the living

Nobody is giving in & Nobody is giving

Nobody hears me but just Nobody cares

Nobody fears me but Nobody just stares

Nobody belongs to me & Nobody remains

No Nobody knows Nothing

All that remains are remains

Nobody and Nobody. One of them was Macon, right? The dead man.

Who was the other? Me?

Was that who I was now, Nobody?

Did all guys have to work this hard to figure out their girlfriends? Untwisting the twisted poems written all over their walls in Sharpie or cracked plaster?

All that remains are remains.

I touched the wall, smearing away the word remains.

Because all that remained was not remains. There had to be more than that -- more to Lena and me, more to everything. It wasn't just Macon. My mom was gone, but as the last few months had shown, some part of her was with me. I had been thinking about her more and more.

Claim yourself. It had been my mom's message to Lena, written in the page numbers of books, scattered across the floor of her favorite room at Wate's Landing. Her message to me didn't have to be written anywhere, not in numbers or letters or even dreams.

Lena's floor looked a little like the study that day, books lying open all over the place. Except these books were missing their pages, which sent a different message altogether.

Pain and guilt. It was the second chapter of every book my Aunt Caroline had given me about the five stages of grief, or however many stages of grief people say there are. Lena had covered shock and denial, the first two, so I should've seen this one coming. For her, I guess it meant giving up one of the things she loved the most. Books.

At least, I hoped that's what it meant. I stepped carefully around the empty, burnt book jackets. I heard the muffled sobs before I saw her.

I opened the closet door. She was huddled in the darkness, hugging her knees to her chest.

It's okay, L.

She looked up at me, but I wasn't sure what she was seeing.

My books all sounded like him. I couldn't make them stop.

It doesn't matter. Everything's okay now.

I knew things wouldn't stay that way for long. Nothing was okay. Somewhere along the way between angry and scared and miserable, she had turned a corner. I knew from experience there was no turning back.

Gramma had finally intervened. Lena would be going back to school next week, like it or not. Her choice was school or the thing nobody said out loud. Blue Horizons, or whatever the Caster equivalent was. Until then, I was only allowed to see her when I dropped off her homework. I trudged all the way up to her house with a Stop & Steal bag's worth of meaningless worksheets and essay questions.

Why me? What did I do?

I guess I'm not supposed to be around anyone who gets me worked up. That's what Reece said.

I'm what gets you worked up?

I could feel something like a smile tugging at the back of my mind.

Of course you are. Just not the way they think.

When her bedroom door finally swung open, I dropped the sack and pulled her into my arms. It had only been a few days since I'd seen her in person, but I missed the smell of her hair, the lemons and rosemary. The familiar things. Today I couldn't smell it, though. I buried my face in her neck.

I missed you, too.

Lena looked up at me. She was wearing a black T-shirt and black tights, cut into all kinds of crazy slits up and down her legs. Her hair was squirming loose from the clasp at the back of her neck. Her necklace hung down, twisting on its chain. Her eyes were ringed with darkness that wasn't makeup. I was worried. But when I looked past her to her bedroom, I was even more worried.

Gramma had gotten her way. There was not a burnt book, not a thing out of place in the room. That was the problem. There wasn't one streak of Sharpie, not a poem, not a page anywhere in the room. Instead, the walls were covered with images, taped carefully in a row along the perimeter, as if they were some kind of fence trapping her inside.

Sacred. Sleeping. Beloved. Daughter.

They were photographs of headstones, taken so close that all I could make out was the rough stubble of the rock behind the chiseled words, and the words themselves.

Father. Joy. Despair. Eternal Rest.

"I didn't know you were into photography." I wondered what else I didn't know.

"I'm not, really." She looked embarrassed.

"They're great."

"It's supposed to be good for me. I have to prove to everyone that I know he's really gone."

"Yeah. My dad's supposed to keep a feelings journal now." As soon as I said it, I wished I could take it back. Comparing Lena to my dad couldn't be mistaken for a compliment, but she didn't seem to notice. I wondered how long she had been climbing around His Garden of Perpetual Peace with her camera, and how I had missed it.

Soldier. Sleeping. Through a glass, darkly.

I came to the last picture, the only one that didn't seem to belong with the rest. It was a motorcycle, a Harley leaning against a gravestone. The shiny chrome of the bike looked out of place next to the worn old stones. My heart started to pound as I looked at it. "What's this one?"

Lena dismissed it with a wave. "Some guy visiting a grave, I guess. He was just kind of ... there. I keep meaning to take it down, the lighting's terrible." She reached up past me, pulling the tacks out of the wall. When she reached the last one, the photo vanished, leaving nothing but four tiny holes in her black wall.

Aside from the images, the room was nearly empty, as if she'd packed up and gone to college somewhere. The bed was gone. The bookshelf and all the books were gone. The old chandelier we'd made swing so many times I had thought it would fall from the ceiling was gone. There was a futon on the floor, in the center of the room. Next to it was the tiny silver sparrow. Seeing it flooded my brain with memories from the funeral -- magnolias ripping out of the lawn, the same silver sparrow in her muddy palm.

"Everything looks so different." I tried not to think about the sparrow or the reason it would be next to her bed. The reason that had nothing to do with Macon.

"Well, you know. Spring cleaning. I had kind of trashed the place."

A few tattered books lay on the futon. Without thinking, I flipped one open -- until I realized I'd committed the worst of crimes. Though the outside was covered with an old, taped-up cover from a copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the inside wasn't a book at all. It was one of Lena's spiral notebooks, and I had opened it up right in front of her. Like it was nothing, or it was mine to read.

I realized something else. Most of the pages were blank.

The shock was almost as terrible as discovering the pages of my dad's gibberish when I had thought he was writing a novel. Lena carried a notebook around with her wherever she went. If she had stopped scribbling every fifth word into it, things were worse than I thought.

She was worse than I thought.

"Ethan! What are you doing?"

I pulled my hand away, and Lena grabbed the book.

"I'm sorry, L."

She was furious.

"I thought it was just a book. I mean, it looks like a book. I didn't think you would leave your notebook lying around where anyone could read it."

She wouldn't look at me, clutching the book to her chest.

"Why aren't you writing anymore? I thought you loved to write."

She rolled her eyes and opened the notebook to show me. "I do."

She fluttered the blank pages, and now they were covered with line upon line of tiny scribbled words, crossed out again and again, revised and rewritten and revisited a thousand times.

"You Charmed it?"

"I Shifted the words out of Mortal reality. Unless I choose to show them to someone, only a Caster can read them."

"That's brilliant. Since Reece, the person most likely to read it, happens to be one." Reece was as nosy as she was bossy.

"She doesn't need to. She can read everything in my face." It was true. As a Sybil, Reece could see your thoughts and secrets, even things you were planning to do, just by looking you in the eye. Which was why I generally avoided her.

"So, what's with all the secrecy?" I flopped down on Lena's futon. She sat next to me, balancing on her crisscrossed legs. Things were less comfortable than I was pretending they were.

"I don't know. I still feel like writing all the time. Maybe I just feel less like being understood, or less like I can be."

My jaw tightened. "By me."

"That's not what I meant."

"What other Mortals would be reading your notebook?"

"You don't understand."

"I think I do."

"Some of it, maybe."

"I would understand all of it if you'd let me."

"There's no letting, Ethan. I can't explain it."

"Let me see it." I held out my hand for her notebook.

She raised an eyebrow, handing it to me. "You won't be able to read it."

I opened it and looked at it. I didn't know if it was Lena, or the book itself, but the words appeared on the page in front of me slowly, one at a time. It wasn't one of Lena's poems, and it wasn't song lyrics. There weren't many words, just strange drawings, shapes and swirls snaking up and down the page like some collection of tribal designs.

At the bottom of the page, there was a list.

what i remember

mother

ethan

macon

hunting

the fire

the wind

the rain

the crypt

the me who is not me

the me who would kill

two bodies

the rain

the book

the ring

amma's charm

the moon

Lena grabbed the book out of my hand. There were a few more lines on the page, but I never got to read them. "Stop it!"

I looked at her. "What was that?"

"Nothing, it's private. You shouldn't have been able to see that."

"Then why could I?"

"I must have done the Verbum Celatum Cast wrong. The Hidden Word." She looked at me anxiously, her eyes softening. "It doesn't matter. I was trying to remember that night. The night Macon ... disappeared."

"Died, L. The night Macon died."

"I know he died. Of course he died. I just don't feel like talking about it."

"I know you're probably depressed. It's normal."

"What?"

"It's the next stage."

Lena's eyes flashed. "I know your mom died, and my uncle died. But I have my own stages of grief. This isn't my feelings journal. I'm not your dad, and I'm not you, Ethan. We aren't as much alike as you think."

We looked at each other in a way we hadn't in a long time, maybe ever. There was a nameless moment. I realized we'd been speaking out loud since I got there, without Kelting a word. For the first time, I didn't know what she was thinking, and it was pretty clear she didn't know how I felt either.

But then she did. She held out her arms and drew me into them because, for the first time, I was the one who was crying.

When I got home, all the lights were out, but I still didn't go inside. I sat down on the porch and watched the fireflies blinking in the dark. I didn't want to see anyone. I wanted to think, and I had a feeling Lena wouldn't be listening. There's something about sitting alone in the dark that reminds you how big the world really is, and how far apart we all are. The stars look like they're so close, you could reach out and touch them. But you can't. Sometimes things look a lot closer than they are.

I stared into the darkness for so long that I thought I saw something move by the old oak in our front yard. For a second, my pulse quickened. Most people in Gatlin didn't even lock their doors, but I knew there were plenty of things that could get past a deadbolt. I saw the air shift again, almost imperceptibly, like a heat wave. I realized it wasn't something trying to break into my house. It was something that had broken out from another one.

Lucille, the Sisters' cat. I could see her blue eyes shining in the darkness as she stalked onto the porch.

"I told everyone you'd find your way back to the house sooner or later. You just found the wrong house." Lucille cocked her head to the side. "You know the Sisters are never gonna let you off that clothesline again after this."

Lucille stared back at me as if she understood perfectly. As if she had known the consequences when she took off but, for whatever reason, she left anyway. A firefly blinked in front of me, and Lucille leaped off the step.

It flew higher, but that dumb cat kept reaching for it. She didn't seem to know how far away it really was. Like the stars. Like a lot of things.