“You and Eliza look pretty good in there,” Will says.
“Thanks.” I glance at him and smile. I’m tired of nursing my grudge against him for liking Eliza, and it’s nice just to be near him, talking again. He seems to relax, too, realizing that I’m done with freezing him out. A gust of wind sweeps my hood back and finds the uncovered skin at the base of my neck, but it is devoid of chill.
“Can I ask you a question?” Will plunges his hands into his pockets. “What is it that you and Miles are always saying to each other? Something about Finland?”
“Finland?” I look at him, confused.
He adds, “Or Finnish words?”
It takes me a moment to put it together, and when I do, I start to laugh. I laugh and laugh until my stomach hurts, harder than I have in ages, and probably harder than I should, but I always feel a little lightheaded around him anyway.
When I’m able to speak again, I wipe away a tear. “You think they teach us Finnish in Gardner?”
“All right, rag on me all you want.” He rubs the back of his head, the line of hair that fades into his neck. His hair is short again. He must have just cut it. I like it best when it’s starting to grow out, a week away from the way it looks now.
“It’s called the finishing word,” I explain. “Finishing—?like last, final. It’s just a silly game we used to play with my mother. Sort of a bridge she invented between her interests and mine. She liked puzzles, and I liked words. So if you were able to come up with just the right word for a situation or a person, it was like fitting in the finishing piece of a puzzle.”
“The game applies to people, too?” He cocks his head. “Does that mean that I have a Finnish word?”
Yes, I think. It is captivating. Considerate. Unattainable. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
He flashes the crooked tooth at me, and a thrill shoots up my back and out into my fingertips.
“My mother used to make the winner a crown out of dandelions,” I say, twisting my tingling fingers out together in front of me. “I had a perpetual yellow stain on my forehead two summers ago. Basically, I won so much that it made me a loser.”
His laugh materializes into a puff of air. He clears his throat. “Do you miss it? Gardner, I mean?”
I think of Cass’s attic nook. Mother in the garden. How horrible the quiet was after she was gone. “I miss what it used to be.”
“I think about what it would be like to leave here sometimes.” Will makes it sound like a confession. “More than sometimes. Not for forever or anything. Just to see what else there is. We used to go places when I was younger. The coast. The mountains. And that time my mother took me to visit you in Gardner.” He exhales. “But we leave here less and less now. It gets harder, I guess, with each Disappearance.”
He shrugs. The snow swirls around us. I don’t say anything. I let the silence build between us so that he will keep talking.
“At the strangest moments, even when I’m racing on the water, I find myself worrying about everything I haven’t seen yet,” he says. “Because who knows what will go next? The taste of food? The sight of all colors, beyond just our paints and pens? Living here is like being inside a ticking bomb.”
His eyes are a dark, marbled blue. His voice carves into the air with a sudden edge. I nod, encouraging him to continue. “If I had a fortune,” he says, “I’d rather spend it traveling the world than building a big house or having a lot of things. I’d rather build memories instead. Because those are the things you carry with you always, everywhere, things that can’t be destroyed or taken.” His face flushes with something more than cold.
I want to tell him I’ve never heard someone else’s thoughts come so close to my own. To reach for his hand, intertwine our fingers. Instead, my breath billows out, white and soft. “Yes” is all I manage.
“But it’s kind of nice to have a dream to chase,” he says. “Something to look forward to, I guess.”
I nod. “Better than always looking back.”
“So are you chasing something, then?”
I think of Mother’s past, how its branches always seem to be reaching up to touch my own future.
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe something I’m not sure I want to catch.”
“How intriguing.” He turns to face me, teasing now. “Maybe your Finnish word should be guarded.”
“I prefer reticent,” I say. I lean toward him, closing the distance between us to say something in his ear.
“You like a good chase, do you, William Cliffton?”
He nods, his right eyebrow raising. His eyes have returned to their regular blue.
“Then why don’t you catch me?” I ask, digging my boots into the powder beneath our feet. “Variants are cheating!” I add, taking off.
I can hardly believe my own boldness. Especially when I see Will’s smile just starting to bloom behind the sprays of my pure, white snow.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Date: 1/13/1942
Bird: European White Stork
Chicks unhappy with the provisions of their parents will abandon them and try to sneak into another nest.
I rent a small abandoned cabin with a cellar in Sheffield for my experiments. I line my pockets with money from the robberies Phineas sets up; then I travel to Sheffield and watch the cages teem with mice bodies, hating the way they shudder and whimper, the way their nails catch in the cage wire. I’m glad no one witnesses my first attempt at extraction. Jumping and sweating like a faint-hearted coward.
They’re just mice, I tell myself, and hold the first one, squirming and soft, as I pick the spot to insert my needle. But I save one mouse. I name her Vala. She climbs the length of my arm and nestles into the space below my ear. I like the soft warmth of her, the feel of her tiny breath and beating heart.
I return home after a week with a bag packed full of my failures. I throw the dead mice from the cliff for the birds to pick apart. Then I join Phineas on the porch as evening falls, and I ask, “Where were you when you realized the scents had gone?”
“I’m not really sure.” He sits back. Puffs on a cigar until he is engulfed in a wispy cloud. “It all happened around the same time. Losing your mother. Becoming a father. I was in such a daze. Heartbroken, acting sloppy and careless. The cops caught up with me not long after.” He snorts. “Not being able to smell in prison wasn’t much of a curse.”
He is quiet for a long time. “They took me away when you were just a baby,” he says, “and I knew you might not even want to know me. But I was always planning to come back for you.”