The Silent Strength of Stones (7 page)

There was no actual dress code at the Friday night dances, but I had planned a better outfit when I still thought I was going—wanted to look good at my first dance of the summer. Who knew who might be there?

Though Willow didn’t seem to care how I was dressed, and it didn’t feel so important to impress Kristen anymore.

Willow said, “You were hugging Evan.”

“It wasn’t his idea. I just ...”

“Just what?” she said after a moment, her voice soft as warm chocolate.

“Just always wanted a dog,” I said before I could stop the words. I remembered looking out the door as the wolf vanished into the woods, and Granddad telling me a boy needed a dog.

“Evan’s not exactly a dog,” Willow said. Some of the dance had seeped out of her voice.

“I know that,” I said. “He’s wild, and he owns himself. Anyway, Pop would never let me have a pet.”

She slid her arm through mine again. We walked without words toward the hall. The wolf wisped along beside us. He licked my hand once, a brief damp contact, then darted a few feet away as if to pretend he hadn’t done it.

Cars were parked haphazardly all around Parsley’s Hall, staggering across grass and gravel parking space, huddled in under the skirts of trees. The night smelled of stale cigarette smoke and crushed grass. Orange lights on poles copper-edged the big summer leaves of maples, copper-sheathed the pine needles. Moths surfed the air currents near the lights. The hall’s open double doors spilled yellow light and bright music out into the road. Fiddles wailed, an amplified voice sang garbled words, and shoes shuffled on the rosin-dusted wooden dance floor. Beyond the small high curtained windows, shadows moved.

I took Willow’s hand. We both looked at Evan.

“
RooOoOOoo
,” he said softly, and faded off into the forest.

“Did you put a spell on him?” Willow said.

“What do you mean?”

“Evan hates everybody. He was so angry when the family sent us to live with these cousins, he’s been resisting everything ever since. How come he likes you?”

“Cousins,” I said, letting the word curl upward at the end into a question. I wanted to ask her about spells, Evan, everything she had just said, but decided to start small. I had thought maybe Lauren was Willow’s sister.

“Oh, I guess I haven’t explained any of that. I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to marry one of them.”

“What?”

“Probably Joshua. He’s only a year younger than I am. But there haven’t been any definite signs about it, not since the night Aunt Agatha threw the bones. And all that told us was that I belonged with this family for now. Joshua doesn’t even like me yet.”

“What?”

She looked up into my face and laughed, then pulled me along into the light coming from the open doors.

Friday night dances at Parsley’s Hall brought people out of the woodwork. The dances were the equivalent of a weekly newspaper; for locals, it was the best way to get news and to make news. Parsley scheduled a break in the middle of the evening for public service announcements, birthday and anniversary best wishes, and a raffle. Even though there was a private rec hall at Lacey’s, a lot of the Lacey’s guests came to the dances, and people from all the other rent-a-cabins or lodgings who were starved for entertainment came too. Musicians drove up from the valley and down from the hills to jam just for fun, but they always played danceable stuff with a strong beat, whether they played well or not. Kids came with their families, and old folks came with their spouses or alone. A coffee can with a slot cut in its lid stood by the door for donations for hall upkeep. Other than that, there was no charge.

The front hall was mostly dance floor, with benches along the side walls and a sound system set up at the far end in front of a stage nobody used except as a place to park instrument cases. The back room had long tables lined up and surrounded by unfolded metal chairs, and a kitchen complete with a counter where Parsley’s wife and sister sold fair to middling slices of pie for a dollar each and coffee from a twenty-five-gallon pot for fifty cents a Styrofoam cup. They also sold weak punch to younger people.

A lot of the musicians were old-timers from other states who had ended up here. Many of them were men. While they played music their wives sat in the back room playing cards and telling tales.

I’d been hearing the music here half my life. It had all been brand new to me when I was eight, just up from the valley, where Mom had listened to classical music and I had listened to rock like the kids I knew in school. At first I had thought this new music was strange, weird, and stupid. I had never heard any of the songs on radio or TV. Now they were more familiar to me than any other music, and there were enough different songs that they didn’t get old and irritating, just familiar and comfortable.

Jake was singing “Storms Never Last” when we stepped into the hall, and lots of couples were two-stepping around to it. Kristen, Paul, a dark-haired girl I’d never seen before, Jeremy, and the tennis-whites guy sat on the bench to the left, holding cups of something and talking with their heads together. Kristen’s parents were dancing with each other, and didn’t look as though they had even a bit of a buzz on. There was the usual assortment of women in blouses and frothy skirts and men in cowboy boots, jeans, belts with big buckles, cowboy shirts with embroidery on the yokes, and cowboy hats. Mabel had on her dancing sandals, which were studded with sparkly fake jewels. Then there were other people wearing jeans and tennis shoes, shorts and halter tops and sandals, relaxed and not out of place.

I wished I had washed before I’d left the store, but all in all Willow and I looked like we could belong if we wanted to. Jeremy glanced up, smiled, and beckoned us to join them. Clutching Willow’s hand, I edged around dancing couples and went over to him.

He, too, had done some growing during the winter. He was now tall enough to play basketball without embarrassment, and on him it looked good. “Hi, Nick,” he said. His voice had dropped and stabilized into a warm bass.

“Hi, Jeremy. This is Willow. Willow, Jeremy.”

His smile stretched wider as he took her hand. He wasn’t in any hurry to let go.

“Willow,” I said, after a minute during which her smile tightened, “this is Kristen, Paul—hi, Paul!—and who?”

Willow slipped her hand out of Jeremy’s. It looked like an effort.

“Ian,” said Kristen, waving at the big blond tennis-whites guy (actually in dark slacks and an alligator-emblem shirt at the moment), “and Megan,” gesturing toward the brunette, who looked relaxed and wore jeans and a green shirt. Kristen’s smile looked real. We shook hands all around. “Nice to meet you, Willow. Good to see you, Nick,” Kristen said.

“Thanks,” I said, feeling very conscious of how messy my clothes were and how pristine she looked, all in white. “Good to see you, too.” Then suddenly it was awkward. I had no more words for them, and they didn’t speak either.

“Let’s dance,” Willow said.

I straightened and looked toward the musicians. Holly Waggoner stepped up to the microphone, fiddle tucked into the crook between her chin and shoulder. I grinned. She had taken some second and third places in the state fiddling contests.

“’Scuse us,” I said, and led Willow away from the others. I slid my arm around her waist and took her right hand in mine. Holly played “Chinese Breakdown” with verve and style.

Willow, it developed, did not know how to dance at all. I could feel from the way she swayed in my embrace that she understood rhythm, but she didn’t seem to know what to do with her feet, and she put her left hand first over my arm, then gripped my arm, as if afraid I would let go of her. “Rest your hand on my shoulder,” I whispered. She did. Her fingers were kind of tight. She kept glancing around, looking at what other people were doing and trying to imitate them. Since the tune was a fast one, I wondered if we wouldn’t be better off sitting this one out, or at least heading outside to practice where we could still hear music but not be seen.

Willow muttered something in her velvet voice, and suddenly we were dancing just fine, her steps matching mine with a prescience that was eerie. I felt peculiar, as if I had four legs, four arms, two hearts, and an imperative: music was the brain that governed my actions. So I didn’t really need to think; but I felt sweat on my forehead, upper lip, back, and the back of my neck, and as we danced heat generated in my chest until I was sucking in breaths to try to blow the fire out.

When the tune ended I rubbed my forehead on the arm of my T-shirt, even though Willow’s and my fingers were still intertwined. “Don’t do that,” I said, my voice ragged.

“What?” She stared at me, wide-eyed. All around us couples were breaking up, walking to the side, matching with others, wandering off for punch, and we still stood in dance pose, attached to each other, encircling each other. I felt fear flare through her, a cold creeping fire where the one in me had been hot.

“Don’t,” I said. Now that we were standing still, the fire in me was settling to embers. “Don’t ... let go. Let go.”

She stared up into my face, unblinking, the fear in her flashing to panic.

“Willow.” Our hearts were beating fast, matching rhythms, mine speeding as hers raced. “Stop it,” I said, putting an edge into my voice. Her head jerked, and then the connection broke and I could breathe again. I drew in heavy drafts of air as I felt my muscles relaxing. Willow closed her eyes tight and turned her head away as if waiting for a slap.

I tightened my arm around her, dropped our hands, and led her out of the hall, across the road, beyond the lamplight into the darkness of the trees; closer to the lake. “You’ve got to stop doing that,” I said, sitting us down on a low maple branch. Her face and arms were paler than the leaf-shadowed darkness. She was warm beside me.

“Doing what,” she said in a toneless voice.

“Making me do stuff without asking.” I had said it out loud. I couldn’t think of any other explanation for what had happened. I’d go with this one until something knocked it out of the running. It might not make logical sense, but it made internal sense.

Besides, I could sort of almost remember a few times Mom had stared into my eyes and then shared her heartbeat with me. I couldn’t remember why.

“What are you talking about.” Willow sounded like a robot.

“Willow!” I gave her a little shake. “I’ll teach you to dance. I’ll write down a list. Just ask.”

“What,” she said. She stared straight ahead, though I was beside her.

I pressed fingers against the pulse at her wrist, trying to feel her heartbeat again, trying to feel mine, relieved that the heat had died, wanting the connection. Had it hurt her to break it? “Look, I liked being hooked to you, but it was making me breathe funny,” I said.

“What?” She sounded a little more awake.

“And I don’t really understand it,” I said. “Maybe if I knew more about it, it wouldn’t scare me.”

“Nick?” she said after a moment.

“What?”

“I’m not supposed to do things like that. That’s why my parents sent me away. I’m not supposed to
kilianish
, to
fetchkva
—to hook to—I’m not—especially not with—they’re going to lock me up. I’m sorry, Nick. I’m really sorry.”

She was going to get grounded? For reasons that didn’t make much sense to me—what had happened was between us, wasn’t it? “Look, it’s not like I’m going to tell anybody. What would I say?” I focused on the pulse at her wrist. Her heart was still beating too fast.

“I’m not supposed to do it. I’m not supposed to own boys, even though I have a special, secret reason for it. Mom and Dad explained to me that it’s wrong, even though my cousins at home kept doing it, even though our teacher told us to do it. Uncle Bennet and Aunt Elissa explained it to me. That’s why Mom and Dad sent me to them. Uncle Bennet and Aunt Elissa think it’s awful to own other people. I even understand that it is. I’m not supposed to do it, and I don’t want to do it anymore, and I start to do it anyway.”

I swallowed. “Own boys?”

“Own people. It’s the best—it’s the most—it—” She shook her head. “That’s wrong. That’s wrong. Oh, Nick.”

“Own people ...” I said, thinking about my mother and my father. My mother had made me feel like I was a part of her. My father seemed to think I belonged to him. I wasn’t sure either of them was wrong.

“I ...” she said, “I need to learn not to want to.” Her pulse was slowing under my fingers. “Or unlearn how to do it. Some lessons I was just too good at.” She took my hand and stroked the rough callus on her thumb’s outer edge along my palm and down my fingers, one at a time. “Some urges are hard to fight. I am so totally tempted to own you, Nick.”

A sliver of ice zipped down my spine. Some part of me wondered: what would that be like? If I did what she wanted—danced when she wished, wrote when and what she wished, followed her and served her in ways pleasant and uncomfortable? “No,” I said, my shoulders twitching. Though really wouldn’t it be more interesting to do what Willow wanted than what my father wanted? The demands were sure to be different.

“Well, I won’t,” she said. She raised my hand to her mouth and pressed a kiss into my palm. “I won’t own you. If I even started the procedure that makes you mine, my aunt and uncle would release you and punish me. I’m trying not to do anything to you. But then I get scared, and I’m not sure how to not start the
kilianishkya
. I’ve never just tried to ... to know somebody without putting the pulling-threads into the
veshka ..
.. You seem so calm about all this. As if you understand it.”

“No,” I whispered. If I waited until I understood everything, I might go crazy before I got there. Too many weird things had happened already today. What else could possibly happen?

I thought of the longing I had for the wolf dog, my wish that we could be traveling companions. But that wasn’t the same. I didn’t want to own him. I just wanted us to be very good friends. He would care about me and I would care about him and we would take care of each other.

“I want you,” Willow murmured. “I want you.”