The Silent Strength of Stones (6 page)

I blinked and the memory vanished. “Light likes me?”

“Maybe,” said Lauren.

Well, it was almost a hypothesis. Coming up with a test for this one would be harder than for the other one, but it would be fun to think about. I said, “This salt-between-us thing. Does that work just between you and me, or does it count for your whole family?”

“If you make a promise, does it bind your whole family?” she asked.

I imagined trying to get Pop to honor a promise I might make, like, say, being nice to Lauren, and knew it was stupid to even think of it. “Nope,” I said.

“Well, it does for my family, unless I forget to tell them. ’Bye.” She turned and ran up the hill, so quickly and silently she vanished like smoke.

“
Ruf
.”

I paused just before stepping from the woods into the parking lot behind Mabel’s, and glanced to the right.

“
Ruh
,” said the wolf, poking his muzzle out between bracken and thimbleberries.

I was already late to relieve Mariah. Pop was probably pitching a fit, and it wasn’t fair to Mariah to leave her there like a horseshoe stake. I thought that, and then I was squatting, holding out my hand to the wolf, who edged out of the brush and nosed my hand and wrist. When we had finished this greeting, I stroked his head. He pushed up and licked me on the face, and I hugged him, feeling very strange, pressing my face against his warm furry neck and smelling dog and a wilderness of crushed herbs and, faintly, manure. He stood still and tense in my embrace for a long moment, then said, “
Uff
.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, releasing him. The dream was alive in my mind. The wolf and I belonged to each other, and our whole purpose was to explore. We went places without fear, night or day. Even home. Pop might think twice if I had a wolf beside me.

Pop might think once and go grab his double-barreled shotgun.

“
Ruh
,” said the wolf, and licked my face again.

“If I hear you at night, if you hear me, you’re not going to come eat me, are you?”

He grinned wide, his tongue lolling between his icicle teeth. A chuckle of air huffed from his mouth.

“Easy for you to say,” I said. “I bet you’re not scared when you’re running around at night. Was that you howling last night? Who was with you?”

He closed his mouth and stared at me, then turned and vanished into the underbrush.

I felt strange. Abandoned and bereft, for the second time in ten minutes. Was it just ten minutes? I checked my watch. Mariah was going to kill me.

These summer people had turned things around.
I
was supposed to be the one watching everybody else in secrecy, and here they were, sneaking up on me, watching me when I didn’t even know they were there.

I hit the parking lot running, touched a finger to my face where the wolf had licked it. A wolf, an ultimate wild thing, had let me touch him. Had touched me back. I could put up with a lot for that moment.

“For that, you’re going to spend the evening doing inventory,” Pop said.

“We did inventory two weeks ago,” I said. We did it every quarter, and I hated it.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Pop. “You’re doing it not because it’s useful but because you need discipline, understand?”

“But—” But tonight was the dance. Friday night. My night off. I wasn’t sure if Willow would ever return from the place she had vanished to, but maybe, just maybe, she was real, and she was planning to stop by and pick me up. Paul might be at the dance—he usually went—and maybe I could find out if we were still friends. Maybe somebody else from Willow’s family would be there, too, and I could try to detect more about them. Maybe I could talk to Kristen ...

Maybe I was going to spend the night in the store, counting tubes of sunscreen and bottles of bug repellent.

“And while you’re doing it, you be thinking about common courtesy, good business, and keeping your word. I bought you that damned fancy watch for a reason.”

I stared into his eyes, then lowered my gaze to the floor. It was never a good idea to look Pop in the eye for very long.

“Now I have to get back to the motel. I heard a car pull up.” He stalked past me and out the door, leaving the sound of bells behind.

I closed up the store at five, as usual, and made dinner for me and granddad and Pop. We ate in silence.

After dinner cleanup I went back to the store and started counting things, making hash marks on a yellow legal pad. I had just finished totaling the candy bar rack when Willow tapped on the door’s window glass.

3. Conjuring Acts

I felt a clenching in my throat, and realized I had stopped breathing. I pulled in breath and looked at Willow through the smeared glass. She was completely visible. She had on a close-fitting red dress scooped low in front, with a full, frilly skirt that only came down to mid-thigh. Yellow Klamath weed sat like a twined halo on her dark head. It was a small flower I had never considered pretty before, but on her it glowed. Her eyes were only slightly more orange.

She looked like a wicked angel.

She smiled at me and rattled the doorknob. The door was locked. For a moment I just stood there, jaw dropped, and then I unlatched the door and let her in.

“You ready?” she said.

“I can’t,” I said, swallowed, and said, “go.”

“What?”

“I’m being punished. Gotta stay home and count stuff.”

“Punished? What for?” She walked to the counter, jumped or floated up, and sat there, her hands quiet in her lap.

“For taking a long lunch.” I turned away and counted decks of cards, foil bags of pipe tobacco, jars of pink salmon eggs. I glanced at her. She was still there.

She cocked her head, staring at the wooden floor. Her brow furrowed. “Do you work here every day?”

“I get half of Saturday off.” That had taken some real strong convincing. Weekends were our busiest times. Pop was still suspicious about why Saturday was my half day, and I thought maybe I should relax and let him pick some other day, like Wednesday. But there wasn’t as much going on around the lake most Wednesdays. Saturdays, people were always up to something interesting.

“Six other days of the week you’re in this store?” Willow asked.

“During the season. We open an hour later on Sunday, too. Oh, and at the moment, I get to take lunch, but that might change.”

“But—” She frowned.

“Sorry about our date,” I said.

She drifted down from the counter and wandered around the store as I counted lighters and packs of cigarettes and sticks of beef jerky. After a while, she said, “You’re counting. You’re counting what’s here? And you’re in here every single day?”

“Yep.”

“Then you already know what’s in the store.” She came toward me, reached up, and touched my forehead. The tips of her fingers were cool. “Write,” she said in her velvet voice.

I blinked and wrote, feeling four cold spots on my forehead and thinking about nothing at all. I flipped pages on the yellow legal pad and wrote more. My hand cramped, but I didn’t stop to shake it. Seven pages later I dropped the pad and pen and tried to flex my fingers. Man, they hurt.

Willow stopped touching me.

“Don’t do that,” I said. My voice shook. My fingers were twitching. Don’t do it? How had she done it? I had heard of hypnosis, but this was something else. The pain in my hand was real, and so were all the pages of scribbling. I looked at them because I didn’t want to look at her.

Maybe I did know everything that was in the store. I might have listed things we had lost to pilfering. Or maybe I knew about those too, and didn’t know I knew.

I could see me knowing everything. I couldn’t see her just kind of ordering me to make a list and me doing it. N-O. No.

“No” hadn’t gotten me anywhere with disappearing Lauren, either.

Something about this whole situation reminded me of my mother. Had she touched my forehead the way Willow had?

Willow took the pad from me and dropped it on the floor, then gripped my hands in hers, and smoothed her cool, callused thumbs down over my fingers and palms. My left hand was curled with cramp from holding the pen. She took it in both her hands and worked it with her fingers, stroking along the tensed muscles, pressing her thumb against my palm. Gradually her fingers warmed against mine. I felt very strange, standing there while she massaged my hand. I could smell her—a wild animal scent, crushed herbs, musky warmth, the tantalizing smell of clean, glossy hair. “I’m sorry, Nick,” she said, staring down at our hands. Her eyes drifted shut.

I closed my hand around one of hers. My fingers worked okay again. Willow sighed faintly and moved a little closer to me, and my arm slid around her shoulders without thought. Her warmth felt good against me. I remembered her standing in the water in the morning sun. I wanted to get really close to her and at the same time I wanted to stand there and not move because so far it hadn’t been a mistake, but once it turned into a mistake we’d never get back to here, where I could stand with her hand in mine, my arm around her, my cheek against her hair and her flowers, her breast nudging my chest, and all my ideas for what came next bright and untarnished.

She tilted her head back. Her eyes were still closed, but her mouth was coming closer to mine. Her lips looked soft, dark pink like the inside of a cherry, and her breath smelled of honey. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, about to dive off, without knowing what was waiting for me when I landed. Fear heightened my awareness; all I could see was her face. Each dark eyelash, each smooth curved dark hair in her eyebrows; a gentle lace of golden freckles across her nose and cheeks, almost too faint to notice. I heard the breath moving in and out of her, and the thought of that intimacy of air was almost unbearably exciting.

I closed my eyes and touched her lips with mine, and her lips touched back. Not like kissing Junie, who had been convinced sucking was important. A pressure, a softening, a moving pressure again, and the sweet taste of summer afternoon flowers. Heat and fear tremored through me. My pants were way too tight.

Her free hand came up and gripped my head. I couldn’t think. All there was was pressure and heat and taste, discomfort and excitement, and something building.

“Nick!” Pop’s voice.

One word, and I jerked, feeling as though I’d been dipped in liquid nitrogen. Everything inside switched from desire to panic. My eyes were open. I was staring down into Willow’s left eye, looking into an eternity of gold around a deep well of darkness, fuzzy because it was too close to focus on. For a moment Willow’s hand kept my head down, my lips against hers. Her strength scared me. Then she let go, and my head snapped up.

“Nick!” cried Pop again. “What are you doing?”

My face heated. I felt wobbly. What did he think I was doing? “Inventory,” I said. It came out hoarse and scratchy.

“You lie! You lie and lie! You lie to my face.”

Heat flushed my back. He was tearing me down in front of My Girl. I stooped and retrieved the legal pad, slapped it on the counter in front of him. “Inventory,” I said. My voice was so cool and distant it tasted like it didn’t belong to me. “I’ve finished.” I crossed my arms, tucking my hands into my armpits. Willow stood silent beside me.

He picked the pad up, his eyes wide, and flipped back through all the pages. After a moment’s study, he said, “But this takes both of us eight hours.” He turned a page, went over and opened the drawer where we kept spare sewing supplies. He counted needle packets, checked my list. His eyes narrowed as he glared at me.

“What?” I said. “Is it wrong?”

After a moment, he said, waving a five-pack of needles, “These are dusty.”

“You didn’t say to dust. You said to count.”

He counted spools of thread and checked my list. Willow leaned against me. She covered a small yawn with the back of her hand.

Pop glared at me again.

“I’m done,” I said, “and I’m taking Willow to the dance now.”

“You’re grounded!”

“Think twice,” I said. The words came from deep in my chest, in the voice of a stranger, dangerous and persuasive.

Pop blinked three times, then said, “See you later.”

The warm night smelled of lake bottom, dust, and trees. Somewhere in the distance a skunk had sprayed. Wind sent pine needles whispering against one another. Frogs chorused from the lake, and cricket calls punctuated the air from the roadside. Music left faint footprints on the air. From the motel building behind the store blue and pink neon flickered: VENTURE INN VACAN Y.

Willow laughed. It was like hearing a lark at midnight. She hooked her arm through mine and set off toward Parsley’s Hall, tracking music to its lair.

We had passed Mabel’s, Fortrey’s, the Lakeside Tavern, and Archie’s Boat Dock. I pulled Willow to a sudden stop in the darkness between two yard lights and listened. The music was louder now, almost masking the faintest of brushing and clicking sounds from behind us. I turned back.

The wolf was there, a dark shadow shape, his furred edges tipped with left-behind light. He lowered his head and hunched his shoulders. He looked completely wild and unapproachable. A growl spun in his throat.

“Evan!” Willow said.

Wind touched the damp on my forehead, chilling me, I squatted in the road and held my hand out to the wolf, wondering if night transformed him into some other kind of creature from the one I had touched and even hugged by sunlight.

After a moment he straightened and edged close enough to sniff my hand. “
Ruh
,” he said.

I leaned forward onto my knees and put my arms around him. “Thanks,” I whispered. “You scared me.”

“
Ruf!
” He broke free of my embrace. “
Uff
,” he said on a breath, hanging his head and peering sideways at Willow.

“Nick!” said Willow, her voice light with stifled laughter. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” I jumped up and dusted off my knees. I suddenly realized I was wearing dirty jeans and a dust-streaked black T-shirt with the logo of a valley country music station in white on the front. I had expected to spend the whole evening in the store counting things.