“I’ve been working too hard. There’s one last snow on the way.” She smiled and took my hand. “We’ll steal off at the first flurries.”
When the snow finally came days later, I had fallen asleep under a pile of blankets. She woke me, white flakes gathering in her dark hair. “It’s time,” she whispered as quietly as the delicate susurrus through the pines. Speck and I meandered along familiar trails, taking care to be hidden, and waited at the edge of the forest nearest the library for dusk to arrive. The snowfall obscured the sun’s descent, and the headlights of the few cars on the road tricked us into going too soon. We squeezed into our space only to hear footfall overhead as the librarians began to close for the night. To stay warm and quiet, we huddled beneath a blanket, and she quickly fell asleep against me. The rhythm of her beating heart and respiration, and the heat from her skin, quickly lulled me to sleep, too, and we woke together in pitch black. She lit the lamps, and we went to our books.
Speck had been reading Flannery O’Connor, and I was wading in deep water with Wallace Stevens. But I could not concentrate on his abstractions, and instead stared at her between the lines. I had to tell her, but the words were inadequate, incomplete, and perhaps incomprehensible—and yet nothing else would do. She was my closest friend in the world, yet a greater desire for more had accompanied me around for years. I could not rationalize or explain it away for another moment. Speck was engrossed in The Violent Bear It Away. A bent arm propped up her head, and she was lying across the floor, her hair obscuring her face.
“Speck, I have something to tell you.”
“Just a moment. One more sentence.”
“Speck, if you could put down that book for a second.”
“Almost there.” She stuck her finger between the pages and closed the novel.
She looked at me, and in one second my mood swung from elation to fear. “I have been thinking for a long, long time, Speck, about you. I want to tell you how I feel.”
Her smile collapsed. Her eyes searched my relentless gaze. “Aniday,” she insisted.
“I have to tell you how—”
“Don’t.”
“Tell you, Speck, how much I—”
“Please, don’t, Henry.”
I stopped, opened my mouth to form the words, and stopped again. “What did you say?”
“I don’t know that I can hear that right now.”
“What did you call me?”
She covered her mouth, as if to recapture the escaped name.
“You called me Henry.” The whole story unraveled in an instant. “That’s me, I’m Henry. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”
“I’m so sorry, Aniday.”
“Henry. Not Aniday. Henry Day.”
“Henry Day. You weren’t supposed to know.”
The shock of the name made me forget what I had planned to tell her. Myriad thoughts and emotions competed in my mind. Images, solutions to assorted puzzles and riddles, and unanswered questions. She put down her book, crossed the room, and wound me in her embrace. For the longest time, she held on to me, rocking and soothing my fevered imagination with the lightest touch, caressing away the chaos.
And then she told me my story. The story told in these pages was all she could remember. She told me what she knew, and my recollections of dreams, visions, and encounters filled in the rest. She told me why they kept it all secret for so long. How it is better not to know who you really are. To forget the past. Erase the name. All this revealed in a patient and heavenly voice, until everything that could be answered was answered, no desire left unsatisfied. The candles burned out, we had talked so long, and into darkness the conversation lasted, and the last thing I remember is falling asleep in her arms.
I had a dream that we ran away that night, found a place to grow up together, became the woman and the man we were supposed to be. In the dream, she kissed my mouth, and her bare skin slid beneath my fingertips. A blackbird sang. But in the morning, she was not where I expected her to be. In our long friendship, she had never written a single word to me, but by my side, where she should have been, lay a note in her handwriting. Every letter is etched on my mind, and though I will not give it all away, at the end she wrote, “Goodbye, Henry Day.”
It was time for her to go. Speck is gone.
? CHAPTER 29 ?
The first time I saw him, I was too frightened to say anything and too awestruck to touch him. He was not a freak or a devil, but perfect in every way, a beautiful boy. After the long wait to meet him, I found myself overcome by the sudden change, not so much his physical presence, his arrival after being hidden away, but the change in me to something more sublimely human. Tess smiled at my confusion and the look in my eyes as I beheld him.