“I’ve always loved her,” he said, sniffing. “Her leaving my mom and me was one of the hardest moments of my life.”
“She lived with you?” I asked.
“My whole life, until she realized ….” He shook his head.
I stepped toward him. “Until she realized what?”
“It doesn’t matter, not anymore,” he said, moving away from the railing. “Will you walk down to the pond with me? It’s my favorite place on your land.”
“It was one of my favorite places too, until—.” I stopped, realizing what I was about to say.
He sucked in his breath, his eyes turning bloodshot. “Until I moved in so close to it.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, feeling horrible.
He offered a sad, dejected smile, and left the porch, going toward the pond. I followed, feeling more awful with every step.
I spoke as we reached the flat boulder on the edge of the pond. “Sam’s not the only one who likes you being here. My grandma and sisters love having you around.”
Luca didn’t answer. Instead, he sat, and I did also. Frogs jumped into the water when they realized they were no longer alone. If we were there long enough, they’d eventually get used to our presence and crawl back to the edges of the pond.
We sat in silence, the wind rustling the leaves, sending down a cascade of red and yellow leaves onto the surface of the spring-fed pond. A bright orange leaf dropped onto Luca’s lap. He held it up, feeling its rough texture.
“What happened yesterday?” I asked. “Why did you pass out?”
He dangled the leaf over the pond … and released it. We watched it slowly drift down, landing softly on the water, producing the smallest of ripples.
“Aunt Sam told you,” he said, his voice robotic and insincere. “I hadn’t eaten.”
“She wasn’t telling the truth,” I said, my voice low. “Gigi told me the inn is haunted.” I wasn’t sure why that mattered or how it was connected to Luca. Somehow it was; I could feel it.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Luca said, peering out past the pond.
I watched him. He was lying, the same as Sam was. “You don’t believe that.”
He turned with a sorrowful expression. “But you do.”
There was pain in his voice that made me want to cry.
“I did,” I acknowledged.
“And now?” he said stoically.
I turned my eyes from his. “I’m not sure,” I said. “My grandmother can be a little odd sometimes. She never lies, but—”
“You don’t believe she’s as sane as you are.”
“I’m not sure what I believe.”
I picked up a twig, rolled its rough bark between my fingers, and tossed it into the pond. The ripples it made were no bigger than the ripples the leaf had created. The ripples gently pushed their way to the edge of the pond near where I sat.
I straightened my back. “I don’t want to believe her,” I said, acknowledging the truth.
Luca pulled his left foot toward his body, resting his elbow on the bent knee. “No,” he said, “I suppose if I had a choice, I’d choose not to believe her.”
“You don’t have a choice?”
He raised the corner of his mouth, making every part of me feel his sorrow.
“No,” he said, “I don’t have a choice.”
Twelve
The clouds came across the sky and blocked the sun, turning the bright spring water of the pond a dark shade of brown; it was merely an illusion. The water beneath the clouds was as clear as it always was.
“Evil is real to me,” Luca said calmly. “As real as you or this rock or this pond. I can’t deny its existence any more than I can deny my own.”
The hair on my arms went up as a surge of an emotion I couldn’t name rushed through me. “What do you mean, it’s real to you?” I asked, my voice trembling slightly.
“I mean, it’s real to me. I can feel it, smell it, taste it … see it. It’s real to me in every sense of the word.” He stared down at me as if daring me to stay, daring me not to run like the coward I was.
My mind spun but I did not move. I turned back to the pond. A bullfrog was cautiously making its way onto the muddy bank.
I believed in God, I believed in angels, I believed in evil in the theoretical sense, and certainly knew evil things happened. My mother and Luca’s mother were dead because of it. Jesus railed against evil and he won. In the end, evil is defeated. All these things I believed and even knew to be true. Did that mean evil existed in a tangible way? Could a place be haunted, as Gigi said? Could a place or maybe even a person actually contain evil? This is what I did not know; this is what I did not believe.
“Is that how you and your mom and Sam are the same?” I asked. “You can all feel evil?” I felt his eyes on me, but didn’t turn to face him. “I heard Sam tell Gigi you two and your mom were all the same.”
He turned from me. “Sam believes that,” he said.
I ran my fingers across the rock, small pebbles rolling beneath my touch.
“And maybe she’s right,” Luca said. “Maybe we all started out the same. Or maybe she and I are the same and my mom was different. My mom, in the end, wasn’t like us.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, watching him closely.
He inhaled audibly. “Evil repels me, and Sam says it does the same to her. It makes me sick. It’s like an invisible force fighting against every cell in my body. It didn’t do that to my mom.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
He turned to me and then away. “Because by the end, I couldn’t sit at the same table with her without fighting the urge to vomit,” he said, blinking away tears.
The wind brushed my cheeks and caused the leaves to release the drops of rain they were holding on to. The edges of the pond awoke with ripples as the raindrops fell into the water.
The bullfrog jumped into the pond. Swirls of mud came to the surface as he buried himself into the soft silt that would protect him from the pretend threat of raindrops.
Luca and I weren’t true friends. If he chose to never speak to me again, my life would not be all that different. If anything, it might be calmer. So I asked the question Sam said she’d never answer.
“Sam told Gigi your mom didn’t use her gifts the right way.” I paused, waiting for an angry response. None came.
Instead, his body slumped forward a little, as if he was too tired to hold his back straight. “No, she didn’t.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
He stared down at the pond for a long while. We were both so still that birds came to the edge of the pond, picking bugs and seed from the mud.
He shifted his body, the birds flew, startled we were not statues. “I think I might tell you someday, but not today.”
“You don’t trust me,” I said, not blaming him for his decision to keep things about his mother private.
“It’s more complicated than that, Siena. There’s a lot I don’t understand. A lot I don’t think my mom understood.”
The clouds moved, and the sun’s rays fell on us and the pond. Its bright light warmed my pale arms.