This was shocking. I didn’t ask a question, but I tilted toward him.
“And these things would make me cry,” Beck continued. “They used to make me cry all day long.”
I remembered thinking this was probably a lie. I could not imagine Beck crying. He was a rock. Even then, his fingers braced against the floor, he looked poised, sure, immutable.
“You don’t believe me? Ask Ulrik. He had to deal with it,” Beck said. “And so you know what I did with those sad things? I put them in boxes. I put the sad things in the boxes in my head, and I closed them up and I put tape on them and I stacked them up in the corner and threw a blanket over them.”
“Brain tape?” I suggested, with a little smirk. I was eight, after all.
Beck smiled, a weird private smile that, at the time, I didn’t understand. Now I knew it was relief at eliciting a joke from me, no matter how pitiful the joke was. “Yes, brain tape. And a brain blanket over the top. Now I don’t have to look at those sad things anymore. I could open those boxes sometime, I guess, if I wanted to, but mostly I just leave them sealed up.”
“How did you use the brain tape?”
“You have to imagine it. Imagine putting those sad things in the boxes and imagine taping it up with the brain tape. And imagine pushing them into the side of your brain, where you won’t trip over them when you’re thinking normally, and then toss a blanket over the top. Do you have sad things, Sam?”
I could see the dusty corner of my brain where the boxes sat. They were all wardrobe boxes, because those were the most interesting sort of boxes — tall enough to make houses with — and there were rolls and rolls of brain tape stacked on top. There were razors lying beside them, waiting to cut the boxes and me back open.
“Mom,” I whispered.
I wasn’t looking at Beck, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw him swallow.
“What else?” he asked, barely loud enough for me to hear.
“The water,” I said. I closed my eyes. I could see it, right there, and I had to force out the next word. “My …”
My fingers were on my scars.
Beck reached out a hand toward my shoulder, hesitant. When I didn’t move away, he put an arm around my back and I leaned against his chest, feeling small and eight and broken.
“Me,” I said.
Beck was silent for a long moment, hugging me. With my eyes closed, it seemed like his heartbeat through his wool sweater was the only thing in the world — and then he said, “Put everything in boxes but you, Sam. You we want to keep. Promise me you’ll stay out here with us.”
We sat like that for a long while, and when we stood up, all my sad things were in boxes, and Beck was my father.
Now, I went outside to the wide, ancient stump in the backyard, and I lay down on it so I could see the stars above me. Then I closed my eyes and slowly put my worries into boxes, one by one, sealing them up. Cole’s self-destruction in one, Tom Culpeper in another. Even Isabel’s voice got a box, because I just couldn’t deal with it right now.
With each box, I felt a little lighter, a little more able to breathe.
The one thing I couldn’t bring myself to put away was the sadness of missing Grace. That I kept. I deserved that. I’d earned it.
And then I just lay out there on the stump.
I had work in the morning, so I should have been sleeping, but I knew what would happen: Every time I closed my eyes, my legs would ache like I’d been running and my eyelids would twitch like they should be open and I’d remember that I needed to add names to the contacts in my cell phones and I’d think that really, one day, I should fold that load of laundry that I’d run a week ago.
Also, I’d think about how I really needed to talk to Cole.
The stump was wide enough in diameter that my legs only jutted over the side a foot or so; the tree — actually two of them grown together — must have been enormous when it had stood. It had black scars on it where Paul and Ulrik had used it as a base to set off fireworks. I used to count the age rings when I was younger. It had lived longer than any of us.
Overhead, the stars were wheeling and infinite, a complicated mobile made by giants. They pulled me amongst them, into space and memories. Lying on my back reminded me of being attacked by the wolves, long ago, when I’d been someone else. One moment I was alone, my morning and my life stretched out in front of me like frames in a film, each second only slightly different from the last. A miracle of seamless, unnoticed metamorphosis. And in the next moment, there were wolves.
I sighed. Overhead, satellites and planes moved effortlessly between the stars; a bank of clouds gestating lightning moved slowly in from the northwest. My mind flitted restlessly between the present — the ancient tree stump pressing sharply against my shoulder blades — and the past — my backpack crushed beneath me as the wolves pushed my body into a bank of snow left by the plow. My mother had armored me in a blue winter coat with white stripes on the arms and mittens too fluffy for finger movement.
In my memory, I couldn’t hear myself. I only saw my mouth moving and the stick limbs of my seven-year-old self beating at the wolves’ muzzles. I watched myself as if from outside my body, a blue and white coat trapped beneath a black wolf. Under its splayed paws, the garment looked insubstantial and empty, as if I had already vanished and left the trappings of my human life behind.
“Check this out, Ringo.”
My eyes flew open. It took me a moment to register Cole next to me, sitting cross-legged on the stump. He was a dark black shape against a sky made gray in comparison, holding my guitar like its frame was spiked.
He played a D major chord, badly, with lots of buzzing, and sang in his low, gritty voice, “I fell for her in summer” — an awkward chord change and a melodramatic tip to his words — “my lovely summer girl.”
My ears burned as I recognized my own lyrics.
“I found your CD.” Cole stared at the guitar neck for a very long time before he put his fingers down on another chord. He’d placed every finger wrong on the fret, however, so the sound was more percussive than melodic. He let out an amiable grunt of dismay, then looked at me. “When I was going through your car.”
I just shook my head.
“From blubber she is made, my lovely blubber girl,” Cole added, with another buzzing D chord. He said, in a congenial voice, “I think I might have ended up a lot like you, Ringo, if I’d been fed iced lattes from my mother’s tits and had werewolves reading me Victorian poetry for bedtime stories.” He caught my expression. “Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist.”
“They’re untwisted,” I replied. “Have you been drinking?”
“I believe,” he said, “that I’ve drunk everything in the house. So, no.”
“Why were you in my car?”
“Because you weren’t,” Cole said. He strummed the same chord. “Gets stuck in your head, did you notice? I’d love to spend a summer with my lovely summer girl but I’m never man enough for my ugly summer squirrel….”
I watched a plane crawl across the sky, lights flashing. I still remembered writing that song, the summer before I met Grace for real. It was one of those that came out in a hurry, everything at once, me curled over my guitar on the end of my bed, trying to fit chords to the lyrics before the melody was gone. Singing it in the shower to lodge it firmly in my memory. Humming it while I folded laundry downstairs, because I didn’t want Beck to hear me singing about a girl. All the while wanting the impossible, wanting what we all wanted: to outlast the summer.