Splendor (15 page)

“I do,” I said.

“Then it’s a date.”

When I got home, my dad was out somewhere. We didn’t have any guests, so the place was empty and I took my time going up the two flights of stairs to our flat. In the kitchen I made myself a cup of tea and took a couple of cookies from the batch that Alice had dropped off the day before. She’d been doing that kind of thing a lot lately—bringing us food, offering to pick up supplies from the mainland when she went across. It was nice of her to want to help fill in the gap created by my mother’s absence.

I took the tea and cookies to my room and set them on my desk. Then I found one of the books I’d borrowed from Martin—
The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism.

I’d flipped around in the book a little bit, but mostly it had just sat by my bedside in the weeks since I’d brought it home. But today, after Mrs. Antoine’s lecture on dreams, I began to wonder what the Kabbalists had to say about dreaming.

My own dream—the one I’d had about Will, on the trail—seemed different from any other dream I’d had. In fact, it seemed too clear to even count as a dream. It had been more like a memory.

And it seemed there were others, before that one. Maybe if I cast my mind and searched for something that felt just past my reach, I’d pick up the translucent fishing line of memory that strung other dreams together.

I couldn’t do it. I knew there were more of them. I knew they were connected. But I didn’t know
what,
or
why,
or
how.

The book told me that dreams were considered “one-sixtieth of prophecy” and also “one-sixtieth of death.” According to the author, the sages of old believed that both prophecy and death “give a person access to the divine mind.”

The divine mind. Did he mean the mind of God?

For the rest of the week, Lily ignored me. She was really, really good at it. Kaitlyn Meyers had this ridiculous simper that made me ninety-eight percent sure she had been the one to tip off Lily about Gunner’s visit.

So I was pretty surprised when, on Friday afternoon, Connell slammed his tray down next to mine and said, “Hey, Red Vine. Lily’s still pissed over that text Andy sent her, huh?”

I turned to look at him. His wide face showed no hint of duplicity. “
Andy
texted her?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I guess after I told him that Gunner had gone over there, Andy thought Lily would want to know what was going on in her own house.”

Really, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Andy
had
always loved a juicy bit of gossip. Probably if he’d had Will’s number, he would have texted him, too.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It wasn’t a secret, anyway.”

“Su-ure,” Connell said, winking at me conspiratorially. “That’s what Gunner says, too. Still, though, even you’ve gotta admit that Gunn’s a pretty big step up from the Jew.”

I felt heat flush my face in anger. “Connell, you are such an asshole.”

He laughed. “Whatever.”

“I shouldn’t waste my breath explaining this to you,” I said, “but I’m not looking to ‘trade up,’ as you call it. Not that Gunner would
be
a step up.”

“More like a
floor
up,” he scoffed.

“You know, Connell, I’m beginning to wonder if maybe you’re a little bit jealous that Gunner wanted to hang out with me last weekend. Maybe
you’re
the one looking for a step up.”

“Whatever, Scar,” he said, but his ears were red, so I knew I’d embarrassed him. “See ya.” Then he spotted Gunner across the quad and loped off after him, abandoning his tray. I remembered how he’d seemed the night of Lily’s party—like an oversized goblin-dog. Even out of costume, the metaphor still seemed fitting.

There
was
something slavish, I guess, about the way Connell traipsed after Gunner. The way he’d followed after Andy, too, before Gunner showed up. Maybe some people are just born to be led.

I couldn’t put off the visit to my mother any longer, and with Lily still mad at me, the island felt smaller than usual, so the next day I caught the early ferry to the mainland. My mother was waiting for me when I got off, my backpack slung over my shoulder and the red scarf trailing behind me in the wind.

“Scarlett,” she said, and before I could really prepare myself for it she pulled me in, close and tight.

At first I held myself stiff, not really wanting her hug, but she didn’t let go. Finally I wound my arms around her waist and hugged her back.

She looked good, I admitted to myself as we drove away from the water and to her apartment. She’d cut her hair; it was a long bob now, with bangs, but it wasn’t a “mom” haircut. Cute.

The plan was that I would spend Saturday with her and then Sunday with Sabine. I wanted to go with her again to her prayer group.

My mom was dubious. “Who is this woman again? How do you know her?”

It was annoying, the way she seemed to feel that she still had a vote on whom I saw, on where I went, even though she’d checked out and moved on herself. But I didn’t want to fight with her. So I said, “She’s a friend of Will’s family, Mom. She’s a nice lady.”

“I’m sure she must be,” Mom said. There it was again, the same tone I’d heard in Lily’s voice, when she’d confronted me about Gunner’s visit, and earlier, when I’d been angry at Lily’s distress over her parents’ hovering.

“Mom,” I said, “are you jealous?”

“No,” she said quickly. Then, “Well. Maybe. A little.”

We were in her apartment, sitting by a big window in her kitchen. It had a view of Westwood. Outside, people hurried busily along, each in a separate bubble, many wearing earbuds, several walking and texting.

“It’s kind of funny that you’re jealous,” I said, “considering that you’re the one who left.”

It seemed that this was my week for saying painful things out loud. As with Will, it felt better to have said it.

She grimaced. “I left your father, Scarlett, not you.”

And there it was. The truth. She had left my father. At least it was out in the open now, like an oversized slug dumped onto the table between us.

“So needing to go back to work because business was slow on the island…”

“That wasn’t untrue, Scarlett. The only way we’ve been able to pay the mortgage since August is with the money I’ve been sending to your father. But it’s not all of it. You know that.”

Yes. I did. I just didn’t have the particulars.

“So what’s the rest of it?” I prodded.

“Have you spoken with your father?” she asked.

I shook my head. First my brother’s death, and then my mom leaving him—I didn’t want to be confronted by his pain.

“Your father is a good man,” Mom said, which I certainly didn’t need
her
to tell me. “Sometimes,” she added, “people have to make the best of what they have.”

“Are you talking about Dad?” I asked. “Or you?”

“Both of us,” she said. “
All
of us.”

“Well,” I said, looking around the kitchen, into the small neat living room with the one purple wall and the new furniture, “it looks like you’ve certainly been trying.”

Sabine picked me up early the next morning. Mom hugged me again before I left, and I tried to give her back some of the same warmth.

On the ride out to Laurel Canyon, I told Sabine about the dream I’d had. I wanted to hear what she thought of it. “It was like
I
was Will,” I said.

“Have you had similar dreams before?” She had listened intently as I described the dream to her, and she seemed amped up by it.

I shook my head, trying to remember. “I think so,” I said. “I feel like I can almost remember.…”

“When we’re together today,” Sabine suggested, “place your intention to remember. We will remember with you.”

“How can you remember
with
me?”

“We are all made of divinity, Scarlett. Each of us has within us, waiting to be found, a hidden spark of God.” Then she said, “Theosophical Kabbalah, as you know, is the study of the Sefirot, in which Martin is an expert. Ecstatic Kabbalah is an attempt to know God physically, and intimately. But there’s a third form, practical Kabbalah, that seeks to transform the world through our knowledge of God. The egg I prepared for you—that was an example of practical Kabbalah. There are many aspects of practical Kabbalah. One of them is oneiromancy. Have you heard that word before?”

I hadn’t.

“Oneiromancy is the practice of interpreting dreams to predict the future. I wonder if you might have a particular talent for it.”

I thought about that and remembered something else. “Once,” I said, “last year, when Will first told me about his mom and the car crash, I said something to Will.”

“What was it?” Her voice was eager.

“I told him it was a good thing that he was sitting behind the passenger’s seat, not the driver’s. But I don’t know how I knew that. Will hadn’t mentioned
where
he’d been sitting.”

“And now you tell me of this dream you’ve had, about Will. About seeing the world through his eyes.” Sabine’s excitement was palpable.

“It’s true,” I said.

“I wonder if these things are connected. If perhaps you and Will are connected in a way that makes itself clear to you in dreams.”

It was tempting to believe this. It sounded romantic, and exciting. Like Will and I were soul mates, woven together on some higher spiritual plane. But if that was true, then I wouldn’t have the hots for our creepy island visitor. Right?

M
r. McCormack stood at the front of the classroom. He wore a white lab coat over his polo and jeans. His usual loose, goofy expression was uncharacte
ristically sober. Next to him were two stacks of metal trays, each holding a plastic-wrapped shape.

From my seat in the second row of tables—next to Gunner, my lab partner—I had a good view of the packages but couldn’t clearly see what they contained. I could imagine, though.

“Before we begin,” Mr. McCormack said, “let’s have a little chat about respectful handling of the dead.”

Over the first two months of school, anatomy class had progressed from dissecting worms to frogs, and today we’d be meeting the fetal pigs that would carry us through the rest of the first semester. In the spring we’d focus on human physiology.

Lily wasn’t in this class (“Formaldehyde stains,” she’d said) or she would have been my lab partner. Each of us had gotten our own worm and frog, but I guess fetal pigs were more expensive. We had to share.

Mr. McCormack had spoken with us briefly about how to handle the worms and frogs, too, but as soon as he distributed the piglets, each looking waxy and under a sleeping enchantment beneath its plastic shroud, I understood why he’d made a bigger deal about it this time.

These were mammals. Their pale pink skin, sparse hair, and death grins seemed almost human.

At least there was nothing even remotely romantic about dissection. And Gunner was smart—he’d make a good partner. He’d missed worm dissection, but I couldn’t help but admire the clean incisions he’d made on his frog corpse. He didn’t hesitate, just gently placed the scalpel and sliced right in. Steady hands.

I was a little wary of what Lily would say when I told her that I’d been paired up with Gunner, but after the past weekend maybe she wouldn’t be too worried anymore.

I’d only been back from my visit to the mainland for about an hour when Lily texted that she was coming over. So at least the silent treatment hadn’t lasted long. I didn’t really know what kind of Lily to expect, but when she breezed into my room twenty minutes later it was like she’d never been upset with me at all.

“Guess who took me out on Saturday?” she sang happily.

He sat next to me at the lab table, waiting patiently for our specimen to be delivered.

“We went to the new little French place over by the casino,” she gushed.

He sliced cleanly through the plastic, sliding the little body onto the dissection tray.

“And when we got back to my house he walked me to the door and ohmygod, Scarlett, he is an
amazing
kisser.”

He held the limbs still as I tied them to the tray—first the left front leg, then the right, and then each hind leg in turn until the piglet lay spread and helplessly dead and exposed on the table.

“Congratulations,” he said, handing me the scalpel to make the first incision. “It’s a girl.”

But before we could begin cutting, we had to measure and examine the body. Mr. McCormack had distributed packets of papers along with the piglets, slapping them down on our lab tables with considerable heft.

I flipped through the packet, getting a feel for the main components of the assignment. We were to work in pairs, mostly at our own pace. Mr. McCormack would roam the classroom answering questions and assisting when necessary.

The first section of the packet dealt with the pig’s external anatomy. Our first task was to establish its age. I laid the scalpel aside and picked up the small measuring tape from our supply basket. It was wound into a spiral.

“Snout to rump,” I told Gunner. “We don’t include the tail.”

Our specimen was 21.2 centimeters long. Checking against the chart, I found that it was about one hundred days since fertilization. The chart terminated at one hundred fifteen days. Had the fetus’s mother lived just two more weeks, this animal would have been a piglet rather than a lab experiment. And she would have been a mother rather than a pile of bacon and pork chops. Neatly, I wrote
100
in the space Mr. McCormack had left on the worksheet for gestational age.

A row behind me and to the left, Jane Maple was making little sniveling sounds like she was trying to hold back tears. Her partner was Andy. I knew from experience that he didn’t deal well with crying girls.

“I’m glad I got partnered with you instead of Jane,” Gunner said conversationally as he rewound the measuring tape. “Some girls are quite emotional.”

“I have emotions.”

“Do you?” I heard—and ignored—the smile in his voice.

“Everyone does.”

“You have the whole wide range of them then: happiness, sadness, anger, jealousy.…” He trailed off, inviting reaction. I thought about him and Lily kissing on her front porch and shifted my attention deliberately to the dissection packet.

The next question asked us to mark whether our pig was male or female. I checked the appropriate box. Then, we were supposed to find another pair whose specimen was the opposite gender of ours so that we could compare. All of us would be responsible for knowing the reproductive structures of both sexes for the final exam.

I turned to Andy. “Male or female?”

“Male,” he said.

We took turns examining the piglets. Andy and Jane’s had all the male markers: a urogenital opening just behind the base of the umbilical cord; a penis, not yet fully formed but palpable under the skin; and scrotal sacs, two, just behind the hind legs. I watched as Andy examined the vulva of our piglet, making notes on his worksheet. Jane stared upward at the light fixtures.

“You’ll need to know all this for the test, Miss Maple,” Mr. McCormack said as he passed by.

“I think I might be sick,” she said.

“There’s a sink at the back of the class.” Mr. McCormack grinned, like this wasn’t the first time he’d seen one of his students turn green.

Jane hopped down from her stool and headed for the door instead. Mr. McCormack didn’t stop her.

“There’s always one,” he hummed.

Next on the worksheet was the digestive system. We’d examine the mouth and tongue and then begin making incisions to look inside. This piglet, I considered, probably wasn’t much smaller than Delilah’s foal. Delilah was five months along now. In a month I’d have to stop riding her, and already we’d slowed our work to gentle walks on the trail. Traveler—the horse I’d fallen from last winter—had become my more regular ride.

Right now, Delilah’s foal was about the size of a rabbit. According to my equine pregnancy book, her foal should have hair on its chin and muzzle. It had developed eyelids and eyelashes.

I thought about Delilah standing in her stall, munching on hay. Her coat had grown extra shiny during the pregnancy, most likely due to the corn oil I’d been adding to her feed over the past few weeks. Her hind end had dappled up beautifully. Her belly had begun to swell with life. Inside her, her baby lay warm and safe and wet, listening to the rhythm of her heartbeat.

I was looking at the specimen in the tray in front of me—cold, antiseptic, and dead—but I imagined Delilah’s foal, and it was as if I could hear the
whoosh, whoosh
of my mare’s heartbeat, and then I was remembering something else—a dream I’d had of a baby in the womb, listening to his mother’s heart, knowing warmth and safety.

The scalpel slipped from my hand. I heard the tinny sound of it hitting the edge of the metal tray. I stood and turned toward the door.

“Scarlett?” I heard Gunner’s voice behind me, but I didn’t answer.

“Funny,” Mr. McCormack said, as I pushed open the classroom door. “I wouldn’t have pegged Scarlett as the puking type.”

I needed air. Mechanically, I made my way down the empty hallway lined with lockers, past the other classrooms, and out the double doors at the end of the hallway. Of their own accord, my feet carried me to the tree where Will and I used to sit. My legs were shaking. I lowered myself to the ground and sat very still, waiting for more memories to surface.

They came.

I remembered the crushing press on my head, my chest, as I emerged from my mother, the feel of her warm hands on my body, the flash of fear as the beat of her heart faded and the happy comfort of its return as she laid me against her chest. The smile she gave me. The green of her eyes.

The green of her eyes.

My mother’s eyes were blue.

Will’s eyes were green. His mother’s had been green; I’d seen them in a picture. And in my dream. It seemed so clear now, as the images rushed back—Will in his mother, Will being born, Will in the car, behind his father’s seat, as his mother’s eyes connected with his in the rearview mirror before the crash that ended her life. Will coming to me on the trail. Will, Will, Will. He lived inside my dreams, coming to me as I slept, but more than that—I saw the world through his eyes. I became him.

Devekut.
It was a word I had read, more than once, as I studied Kabbalah. It meant to cleave to God—to become one with him—and it felt like what I had done, except with Will. In my sleep, deep in the night, I had somehow cleaved to Will.

In as intimate an act as sex, my consciousness had cleaved to his. I had seen inside his memories; I had felt inside his soul.

And I had no idea how this had happened to me, or why.

A breeze rustled the dried leaves; they rained down around me, brown and yellow. I watched one of them settle on the grass. Another breeze twisted it over onto its back and then it lay still.

Someone was coming. I heard footsteps, and a cheery whistle. Last year, I had imagined more than once that I could turn my head and find Ronny grinning at me, ambling toward me just as if nothing had changed, as if he’d never died. Those fantasies had faded as time marched further from his death. On this day, under the elm where I had once sat with Will, I found myself wishing that the footsteps I heard were my boyfriend’s.

Of course I knew they weren’t. Even before I turned to look, I knew who was coming for me—my lab partner, Gunner.

The breeze lifted and turned his dark blond hair, playing it across his brow and then sweeping it back again. His hands were in his trouser pockets; today he wore wide-wale corduroys in deep brown. He had on a chambray shirt, collarless, and over it a brown vest, unbuttoned, with fine gold threads woven through it. I had to hand it to him—Gunner Montgomery-Valentine was a snappy dresser.

He looked down distastefully at how I was sitting, cross-legged on the ground. Then he sighed as if resigning himself and squatted next to me, not quite lowering himself to the dirt.

He took a slim gold case from the pocket of his vest and shook free a dark brown cigarette. Before he spoke, he placed it between his lips, replaced the case, and retrieved a lighter, and brought the tiny flame to the cigarette, pulling on it until an ember glowed at his cigarette’s tip. Once his lighter was safely tucked back in his pocket, he settled his weight more comfortably on his heels.

I liked the smell of his clove cigarette. Hot and spicy, not gross like a regular cigarette, even though it was probably just as cancerous.

But why, exactly, did it turn me on to watch him? The way he held his cigarette—not between his index and middle finger, but instead the way people held a joint, with the index finger and the thumb, and in his left hand—bringing it to his mouth, inhaling deeply, then pulling it away, resting his wrist on his knee as he exhaled the plume of fragrant smoke. It was like he was consuming the spice and the fire…as if the smell of it, the taste of it sustained him, nourished him.