Here I go. It takes so little to go back to all that. But I suppose that’s why I’m writing to you now. To be completely honest, it’s something Will suggested I do. To write to you without worrying about you reading the words. To just say what I feel without risking being held to any of it. He told me to do this months ago but every time I tried I couldn’t. But tonight feels different. Something about this place. And Will. I want with you what he has with his parents. It’s so uncomplicated with him! He just loves them and it’s so easy and affectionate between them. I want that but I don’t know how to get it. It’s like if I just let you off the hook for everything, I’ve betrayed myself. Or the self I was. And that’s when I get stuck. But as Will and I move ahead together, I’m feeling like it’s getting easier to let go of some of the stuff I’ve been hanging on to.
What I want to say is that I don’t want to go back to or stay stuck in the way things have been between us. Everything seems so delicate and brief and I don’t want us to be so apart anymore. I don’t know how to say any of this to you, which is why I am writing it down. I hope I give you this someday.
Love,
Lolly
Silas
He is pedaling as fast as he can out of town and toward home. He cannot shake the frightened look on her face, her voice yelling. He has imagined them meeting many times but never once the way it went tonight. When he’s pictured it, she is warm, comforting, tucking him into her large bosom and stroking his head. He has imagined her without her clothes, kissing his chest, holding his dick. He has imagined her cutting his dick off, too, to punish him, and throwing it in Indian Pond. He has imagined Lydia Morey every which way, but never how he saw her tonight. She was terrified, and maybe in one of his fantasies it would have turned him on, but this time it did just the opposite. It rattled him. Exposed her beyond the limited versions of her he’d been working with. This was not lonely or angry or lusty or grieving. This was human. And it’s much more than he can handle.
He turns off Tate Lane down a dirt road. Once he’s out of sight of passing cars, he jumps off the bike and let’s it crash to the ground. He unhooks the knapsack from his shoulders, the yellow canvas hardly visible. He cannot see his hands or fingers clearly, but he knows the surfaces and shapes of his stuff: Tupperware container, bowl, water bottle, bong, and lighter. He sloppily packs an untidy hit and lights it. He smokes it down and quickly packs and lights a second. The pot is a mix of some old stuff from Charlie and a few new buds he stole from a neighbor who hides his plants in plain sight along the back row of his vegetable garden. It’s a strong blend, and soon he feels a thick film rise between this moment and the last few hours. He regards it all now, dimly, as through a foggy snow globe, and for that he is grateful. He leans against a tree and sees Lydia’s face again. He can now slow the incident down and watch her eyebrows rise, her mouth widen as she yells at him. She’s covering her chest with her coat, but now that he’s in charge of the scene, he has her drop it and he looks down her low-scooped T-shirt as she bends to pick it up. Now the T-shirt is sweaty and soaked, and through the translucent cloth he sees pink skin, dark, wide nipples. The vision relaxes him, helps him shake off the feelings from before. He packs up his gear, zips the knapsack, and throws it over his shoulder. He walks his bike back to Tate Lane. Above him, the moon is nearly full and glows pink in the chilly night. Thin clouds inch slowly across the sky, and on the surface of the moon he begins to make out a face. At first it is a rough mask with uneven eyebrows and lopsided whiskers, the mouth and nose disfigured and huge. Then it comes alive. He knows this face. It’s the dragon he saw last May on his way home from June Reid’s house. Back then, his ruby wings and infinite tail filled the sky, but now they are invisible, cloaked in the blue-black night. Only the snout, the devil eyes, and the smoke pouring from its throat are visible. It’s him. He knows he is hallucinating, but still, his hands shake as he pulls his bike toward him. As he gets on, he hears something. A voice, a growl, a barking dog. He cannot tell. But in that noise he hears GO as clear and precise as anything he has ever heard. He begins to pedal and looks up at the moon. The dragon’s face is fully articulated: snout high, mouth wide. The eyes do not shift their gaze from him. He looks behind the moon and begins to see the outline of its mammoth body, the silhouette of its batlike wings etching the sky. He is in the middle of the road, pedaling slowly and looking up and behind him at the same time. When he starts to trace the ridges on its epic tail, the handlebars twist in his hands, the front tire jerks to the left, and the bike collapses onto the pavement. As he falls, landing on his side, he hears a crack underneath him, the loose arrangement of bong and Tupperware breaking his fall, and then the bong, he can feel as well as hear, breaking to bits. He sits in the road, checks his limbs to see that everything still works. He feels along his side and shoulders to make sure none of the glass has speared him. He can detect no serious injuries, but he’s scraped the skin off his palms, and the exposed flesh begins to sting. Sitting in the middle of the road, he dares to look up, and sure enough the dragon is beaming, amused, directly at him. What the fuck? What! he calls out, half crying from frustration and fear. GO? Go where? WHERE AM I SUPPOSED TO GO?
He is demanding answers from the enchanted arrangement of cloud and night and moon, but he knows where he has to go. He has not been back there since May when he ran across the lawn and up the driveway to the road. Fuck, he mumbles, pulling the bike from the road and wiping the loose asphalt from the cuts on his hands. He rides in the direction of home but passes Wildey Road, where he lives, and continues on Indian Pond. He refuses to look up at the night sky until he gets there, and as he passes the pond, he can see the pattern of blues and grays and blacks reflecting in the water. He cannot help but look, and the kaleidoscopic pattern shimmering there is both ominous and beautiful. Oncoming lights from up the road break the spell and he slows his bike until the car passes. By the time it does, he is beyond the church, and soon he is at the top of the driveway.
June
She knows now where this will end. Where the land runs out and there is only sea, and between the two, a room. The pages of the letter are tucked into the orange notebook that sits on top of the other two in the passenger seat next to her. At the Super 8, she read each word, again and then again, until the manager demanded she leave immediately or pay for another night. The handwriting was familiar, undeniably Lolly’s, but the words were not. They were from someone she only dimly remembered, from before she and Adam told Lolly they were divorcing. After that, Lolly was never as candid or open or as affectionate with June. She could see in the letter Lolly’s conflicted attempt to describe a future she had yet to occupy. She never got there, June thinks, remembering the cold exchange with Luke on the porch the night before the wedding. But she was trying. Wherever she’d been by the time she died, it was much closer than June knew. To be given a glimpse now was a bitter miracle, a ghostly caress that left more regret than solace.