I slip closer and say, “I know you did.”
Like frost, she melts.
TWELVE
Willa
Grey listened.
That’s what he had going for him; he listened and didn’t argue with me. I followed him to the lighthouse, and we sat in chairs that weren’t there last time. The music boxes quivered around us. I was afraid they might start playing on their own.
It felt like confession, telling him everything in my head. Every place where I could have stopped. Changed my mind. Every bad decision that added up to Levi breathing his last on the wharf. Right then, nothing else mattered, not the stuff that happened before or everything that came after.
I said everything out loud. Finally, all of it, even down to wishing Dad hadn’t quit smoking. I didn’t know how much that bothered me, until I said it out loud. My lips burned, and I looked up at Grey.
“You think I coulda said something useful,” I told him. “I froze up. In all the ways that count, Levi was alone. He died alone.”
“I suppose he did,” Grey said. He sat quietly, watching me. Waiting.
It unnerved me when nothing else came out. He didn’t try to comfort me, and I had nothing else to say. Silence spread inside me. I was tired of myself, hashing it all out. Standing, I looked for the staircase—I knew I’d seen one. It was a lighthouse; it had to have one. “So you live here?”
Rising, Grey touched my shoulder, turning me like he knew exactly what I wanted to see. And he did, because when I came all the way around, the staircase was there, spiraling up and away.
My breath sputtered; it was impossible. But it didn’t feel like a hallucination anymore. Not a dream or a break from reality. It was another place, for sure. But not an imaginary one.
“Let me give you the tour.”
He took the rail and started upstairs. He was something to look at from the front or the back. But from behind I saw the marble smoothness of his neck. It was stone white, his silvery hair restrained with a ribbon just a shade darker. His clothes were crisp, that collar looking starched as anything.
And I had touched him. He had shape, and weight—not warmth, not really. But he felt real enough. Just cut out of translucent silk.
“This is my library,” he said.
It was smaller than the room below, but rich. Lamps with stained-glass shades glowed, casting two circles of light that met in the middle. A leather chair gleamed, but it was the chaise that looked like somebody used it. The upholstery was shiny in places, covered by a crumpled blanket.
Books filled the walls, just like music boxes did in the room below. Some—a lot—were the old-fashioned, leather kind. The ones with thick spines and gold bands. But underneath the railed ladder, a whole section was paperbacks. Cheap and battered, they smelled sharp when I touched one.
Casually, Grey trailed his fingers along the hardcovers. “I have a fondness for dime novels.”
A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes and Motor Girls on the Coast. Yeah, he did. When Grandpa Washburn passed, I’d carried four or five boxes of books just like these to the donation pile. It was a weird connection to make. I had to stop, pushing The Liberty Boys of ’76 back onto the shelf. “How old are you?”
Opening a fat, black volume, Grey smiled. “If I say seventeen, will you ask me how long?” Ghostly brows dancing, he raised the book he was holding so I could see the cover. White hands clasped a red apple.
I stared at him. “Are you for real?”
Amusement played on his face. It lifted the curve of his brows and the curl of his lips. He approached me, closing his finger in the middle of the book. “One hundred seventeen, more or less. I’ve been dead for the last hundred, so I can’t accurately account for them.”
I took Twilight from him, turning it over. It was the real thing. It had a signature in the front, looping across the title page. It made no sense at all. Waving it at him, I asked, “You get to the bookstore real regular?”
“No. I can’t leave the island.”
“Then where’d you get this?”
It wasn’t right, something real and new being here. I looked at the shelves again, and yeah, he had his dime novels and the fancy leather classics. But other sections bristled with brand-new books. He had The Hunger Games and Freedom, right next to a copy of The Devil in the White City and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Slipping his hands into his pockets, Grey came to stand beside me. His shoulder brushed mine, and he slipped Middlesex from the shelf. His fingers drifted through it, pale ghosts on the pages. “I can have anything I want, Willa.”
It sounded like a curse the way he said it. Like it was a knife pushed between bone and dragged hard through his fleshy parts. Shivering, I put the book down and considered him. “How?”
“I ask for it.”
Grey gestured at the stairs, which were suddenly present again. Tucking the book beneath his arm, he started up and just expected me to follow. So I stood at the bottom and waited for him to turn around.
“Maybe you could answer me without all the cryptic woo-la-la?”
“Before I go to bed at night,” he said, then leaned against the rail, interrupting himself. “Forgive me for skipping my bedchamber. I wouldn’t feel right accepting female callers there.”
Impatient, I leaned against the rail on my end too. I was fed up. If he was real, he was gonna be real. He was the one who talked all big about being completely honest with each other. Lifting my chin, I said, “Whatever, Grey. You were saying?”
“I think about what I want, and in the morning, it’s on my breakfast plate. I often wish for music-box parts. But sometimes I ask for something new to read. Sometimes today’s newspaper. Once, I asked for a way to see the world beyond the island. I expected a telescope.”
“What did you get?” I asked.
“The Internet.” He gestured at a desk that hadn’t been there a moment before. A laptop gleamed there, a thousand times nicer than the beat-up desktop my whole family shared.
I found myself walking toward him. “How’s that working out for you?”
“Not well,” he admitted. Holding his elbow out, he waited for me to take it. Then he glided up the stairs with me, his feet barely making a sound. “When I turn it on, it displays newspapers and nothing more. There’s war everywhere. Homicides in Baltimore. Missing children, State Fair disasters, a woman who’s grown the state’s largest pumpkin . . .”
Flooded with realization, I said, “It only shows you the news. A way to see the world outside the island.”
“Precisely.”
Grey pushed open a hatch, and wind swept over us. Cold and strong, it tried to keep us from climbing onto the beacon platform. We pushed back, and I caught my breath. I was surrounded by the sea. It was green and endless, stretching in every direction.
There was nothing between me and the ocean but air. Nothing split my vision of it. For a screwed-up second, I wondered what would happen if I dived into it. If I’d hit the water and turn into foam.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Grey said. Even when he stood away from me, his voice got close.
“I love this.” Then, before he got any ideas, I added, “The water. This is most of the world, you know. From space, it’s sea and more sea, with a little bit of land to break it up.”