It’s unfair of me to ask when it will change nothing. But it’s been six years of wondering. Even now, as he skirts closer to sayingsomething, I still don’t know exactly what it is. I used to think maybe there was something growing between us different from our years of friendship…but then I committed my sin and he chose to leave. So I take a deep breath and ask, “What am I to you?”
The sun is in his eyes; he squints down at the grass. A smile curves his mouth—so sad I would give anything to retract the question. “It’s funny. Since the day I found you in the swamp, I’ve been trying to answer that question. I thought once that you might be the answer to the only prayer I ever made. Or my conscience—my heart, beating outside my body. Sometimes…” He swallows. “I think you’re a fistful of sand, and the tighter I clutch, the faster you spill. I don’t know, Ruth. You’re something I’ve never had a name for.”
He doesn’t know it, but once upon a time, I had the perfect name for him.
27
MAY, NINETEENYEARS OLD
“It’s dead,” Everett said, crouching to peer at the bird in the grass. It was beautiful and small: jewel-blue feathers and a snow-white belly, though the white was streaked with mud. A tree swallow. It lay there, one dark eye facing us. “Must’ve gotten attacked by something, or flown into a tree.”
“No.” I crouched beside it. “It’s still alive.” The way it lay, half-covered in dirt, made it look discarded. I willed it to live.
As if it heard my thoughts, the bird’s head swiveled. It opened its small beak in a silent cry.
“See!” I squeezed Ever’s arm.
“All right, all right. I think its wing’s damaged, though.” Gently, Ever lifted the bird and made a dark, cool basket of his T-shirt, placing the swallow inside. “Rescue’s closed on Sundays, but we can go first thing in the morning.” We’d pulled a lot of injured animals out of the swamp over the last year. Tenderhearted Mr. Wilkes who ran the makeshift clinic was probably the only other person in Bottom Springs who liked Ever. He looked at me, the bird cupped in his shirt. “Can you take her? I know you have the baptism, but I can’t let my dad find her.”
He didn’t need to say more. For months I’d tried to talk to Everett about what his father had done to him but he refused to say a word, asif his silence could simply erase the January day I’d found him broken in his living room. If I tried to bring it up, he’d close down, change the subject, or get frustrated, making me swear not to tell anyone, especially my father or the cops. Maybe burying it was what he needed to survive, but I’d spent so much time since I’d found him imagining his father hurting him again that the scenes had started to bleed into my dreams. All I wanted to do was the one thing he’d expressly forbidden me to do: march into the sheriff’s office and dispatch the deputies in to put Killian behind bars. It would be a horrible betrayal of Everett and his friendship, his agency, his trust in me, but wasn’t his safety worth it? In this instance, didn’t I know better than him?
These questions plagued me. So when I said, “Of course,” the two simple words wavered, wanting to be so much more.
Back home, I took advantage of the fact that my parents were still down at the shore, where they were setting up for the afternoon’s baptism, to sneak in the swallow. I’d learned from Everett and Mr. Wilkes what the bird needed, so I went right to my closet and pulled out an old boot box, shook out the contents, and stuffed it with towels, wrapping one around a hot-water bottle. After poking holes in the lid, I laid the swallow inside, taking care not to touch her more than necessary. It seemed counterintuitive to close her up in a box like a tomb, but Mr. Wilkes said birds needed it so they didn’t go into shock. Too much stimulation could make her tiny heart give out from fright.
I heard the front door open sooner than expected and ran with the box as gently as I could. My parents wouldn’t let me keep a dirty animal in the house—not to mention she was proof I’d been out in the swamp with Ever.
Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs as I tucked the box into my closet. “Shh,” I whispered. “Everything’s going to be okay. Just hang on for one night.”
“Ruth Sarah Cornier.” My mother’s sharp voice made me jump back from the closet, hitting my hip against the desk and knocking my book bag to the floor. The contents spilled everywhere.
She strode into the room. “If you’re not dressed and ready—” Her eyes lasered on the mess: pens, a printed syllabus for LSU’s History of Modern Philosophy course, andTwilight—bent, dog-eared, and splayed with the cover-up.
My mother looked at me. I found I couldn’t say a word, in such shock that the moment I’d feared for so long was actually happening.
She bent and picked up the book. “What’s this?”
My mouth opened but nothing came out. Seeing the book in her hand, it dawned on me for the first time that the cover ofTwilight—pale hands holding out an apple—was meant to evoke Eve tempting Adam to sin. My stomach sank as my mother turned the book over and read the back. I was living a nightmare.
“This,” she said slowly, “is that occult book I saw on the news. The girl who falls in love with a demon.”
I placed a shaking hand on my desk, trying to steady myself. “It’s just a book. Harmless.” But even I didn’t believe myself. It wasn’t just a book. It was how my heart had discovered hope.
My mother stared at it. “This is how the Devil recruits young girls. It’s brainwashing.”
I braced for it: screaming, hitting, excoriation. I was the Devil’s whore. An unrepentant sinner. She would shout for my father and he would bound up the stairs, push me to my knees, and beat me with the rattan cane until I sobbed my confessions.
But instead, my mother opened it and studied the title page. “‘ForEver and forever,’” she read, then looked up at me. “That doesn’t sound harmless. It sounds like you signing your life away.”
I flushed at her misreading. It was only a silly, idle scribble, based on that Tennyson poem Ever and I had recited to each other two years ago. “Mom—”
“This is going to make you want things.” There was a creeping realization to her voice. “It’s going to make you lustful and wanton.”
I started to counter, then stopped. It wasn’t entirely untrue.
She kept looking at that cover like it had hypnotized her. “You silly, silly girls.” Her lip curled. “You’re all so predictable. Wanting to light your lives on fire. I thought we’d raised you better.”
“It’s just a book,” I repeated, and held out my hands, palms up. “I’m being rebaptized today, remember? I stayed in Bottom Springs and I go to church every Sunday and I’ve never caused you”—I paused—“much trouble.”
