He looked at me when he said that, but he had to know better than to worry for even a second that I’d take that as some kind of jab. I knew well enough how close Conner’s family was.
“I have an older brother named Ryan who goes to Berkeley, so I’m the only kid at home,” he said. “Oh, and I do not have a girlfriend, either, no matter what Jack says about me. And me and Jack talked it over, and we decided to come to school in Kent this year, too. Okay, Nickie’s turn.”
I already knew what she’d say. Her name was Nickie Stromberg, and her father worked for a shipping firm located in Stockholm, where the family kept a second home. “I have a younger brother, Ander. He’s fifteen and plays football. He’s very funny, and I know you would like him,” she said. “I really hope you both come to England for your studies this year, as I believe I am really taken by one of you.”
Nickie turned red when Conner asked, “Which one?”
Her hand brushed along my thigh and stayed there. It made me crazy. I’ll admit it, I was positive that I wanted to have sex with her more than anything else on my mind at that exact moment. And when her hand moved toward my crotch, I figured something out, too, about Jack and sex: that I didn’t want to be the same kind of asshole that Mike Heath was to Amy and me.
“There’s one more biography I could tell,” I said. Nickie’s hand was curled under my leg, and I didn’t want anyone to get any ideas about leaving the restaurant. My voice shook, and I tried to think of anything other than Nickie’s hand. “It’s a ghost story, about a kid who lived in California in the 1880s. His name was Seth Mansfield.”
Forty-Four
SETH’S STORY [3]
In the summer of the year 1885, Uncle Teddy showed up one sweltering morning, walking past the farm like he knew where he was going, heading in the direction of town. It was just past breakfast, and I sat on the steps of the porch, watching while Hannah threw scraps to the chickens, when I saw him standing there, holding a bundle under his arm, like he was waiting for one of us to invite him up to the house. Davey had been working at the mill, and Pa was already gone out to tend to our cows. And I must have been in a particularly guilt-ridden mood that day, because, at first, I swore my eyes saw Uncle Teddy as the Devil himself, and I believed he was on his way right up to the farmhouse to confront me and Hannah about our wickedness.
He raised his hand and said, “Hello, children!”
Hannah set her bucket down at my feet. “I’ll get Ma.”
“I’ll go down and just see if I can’t make him keep walking.”
“Seth,” she scolded, and patted the top of my head when she brushed past me and disappeared into the house.
By the time I was fourteen years of age, I only knew two things that I believed were absolute and immutable truths: that Hannah and I loved each other; and that one day we would live together as husband and wife. She believed it, too, and we’d sneak away frequently and hide in the woods, or up in the haymow of Pa’s barn, and talk about it. And afterwards, we’d fondle each other and kiss with our mouths open, slipping our hands inside one another’s clothing and getting dangerously close, at times, to doing the thing we both knew young folk our age shouldn’t ever get caught doing.
I tried to make myself pure, to be good, and I knew it was wrong what me and Hannah did together, but every waking moment—and most of my dreams, too—were consumed by my fantasies concerning the next time we could be alone together.
Davey was eighteen then, and he knew well enough what his sister and I were doing, but he loved us both enough to keep a watchful eye out for Ma. All of us felt desperately guilty most of the time about that.
I tried reasoning about the consequences of what came to be an uncontrollable attraction between Hannah and me. There were times when I was convinced that Pa and Ma would welcome our union, but mostly—and especially on those occasions when Hannah and I would sit as brother and sister, ordered and neat in the pew of the church: Pa, Ma, Davey, Hannah, and me—I felt wicked and sinful for ever having such thoughts.
But then I felt even guiltier, in many ways, when the old minister fell ill and died at the end of winter, because it left Necker’s Mill without a preacher, and it left me feeling relieved and unscrutinized by the Lord at least one day every week.
Uncle Teddy put his bag down next to his foot when he saw me coming down.
“What a fine-looking boy!” He smiled, and held out his hand for me to shake, but it was no proper handshake as I learned it. Uncle Teddy’s was soft and wet, and I detected the sides of my mouth turning downward as I considered my degree of repulsion.
“I am the Reverend Theodore Markoe,” he said. “Folks have always called me Uncle Teddy, though. Tell me, son, am I far from Necker’s Mill?”
“Not far enough,” I said, and thought I’d best reform my opinion of the man, since I could hear Hannah and Ma coming down the walk from the house.
And before I knew it, Ma was having me carry Uncle Teddy’s bag up to the house so she could fix him breakfast, saying it would be an unkindness to allow a minister to walk all that distance in such heat without first giving him a proper meal. So she’d promised him that she’d see if Pa or Davey wouldn’t be able to carry him the rest of his journey with our buckboard.
It wasn’t difficult for the folks who lived around the mill to adjust to Uncle Teddy’s Preterism. It was a popular version of Christianity in many communities across America at the time and, in many ways, added to a collective sense of relief in the minds of all us sinners that, as Uncle Teddy promised, “All things have been accomplished,” and we were truly living in the glory days of heaven.
At least, I believed that was true every time I’d sneak off with Hannah.
The best I could do was put up with it, though, for there was no arguing with Ma and Pa about my intentions whenever Sundays came around. Davey set the best example of endurance when it came to sitting still in church, and instructed me at a young age how to concentrate on other distracting things, like hunting or fishing. But I will admit that I looked forward to the prayers most of all, because that’s when we would all hold hands, which meant I got to touch Hannah’s lovely fingers.
Hannah was every bit as wayward and corrupt in her thoughts as I. In the spring of that year, we’d celebrated my fourteenth birthday, as always, on the same day that Pa found me asleep in a muddy thicket of weeds. It was anyone’s guess how old I truly was, but the Mansfields decided it was so that I should be one year younger than Hannah on account of my scrawniness that day when Ma stripped me of the only garment I had on my body, sized me up, and gave me my first bath in the well. Still, by the time I was fourteen, I was half a head taller than Ma herself, and everything imaginable had begun changing about my outward features.
So it was on a day about a month after the preacher, Uncle Teddy, showed up at our front steps, that Davey and I had gone swimming in the river before supper, which was the only way we’d tolerate washing ourselves in summers due to the discomforting coolness of the water in the well house. Hannah had stolen away from the house and stayed hidden in the trees on the shore spying on us, which was daring and wicked of her since, naturally, neither Davey nor I had on the first stitch of clothing.
“David Ewan Mansfield!” she called out, sounding so commanding when she’d use our entire names. “Get your clothes on and get yourself up to the house. Ma’s wanting you.”
Davey stood next to me in the river, both of us up to our necks in the cool green water.
“What’s she want me for?”
“I didn’t ask her that!”
We started in for the shore and I hollered, “Hannah, turn your face.”
“She didn’t ask for you, only Davey.”
Davey whispered under his breath, “Damn.”
And that was a shocking thing for me to hear him say, so maybe, after all, it was a good thing in the long run that Uncle Teddy did show up to minister to us.
Once Davey had slipped into his britches, he dejecte
dly slung the rest of his clothes over one shoulder and disappeared among the reeds that lined our footpath from the shore.
I heard Hannah there, laughing.
“Davey’s going to be ireful with me, Seth. Ma ain’t even home at all.”
“That’s a wicked turn, Hannah. What’d you do that to Davey for?”
“’Cause I wanted to see you by myself.” And she stepped out from behind the trees where she’d been hiding.
“Well,” I said. “Do you want to come in the water?”
“No. You come out.”
“Well, then turn your head.”
“No.”
“Then I ain’t coming out,” I said.
Hannah turned around and sat in the grass, and I watched her while she patiently waited for me to get my britches fastened.
“There,” I said. “You can look at me.”
Hannah held out her hand, and when I grabbed on to it, she pulled me down to sit beside her.
I sat there and just looked at her kind face, listening to the sleepy sounds of the water. I knew, unquestionably, that there was nobody in this world that I could ever feel closer to, or believe was more beautiful than Hannah as she sat there under the summer sky.
“What are you looking at?” she said.
I closed my eyes. “Do you think it’s true, what Uncle Teddy says, that this is the final world? The world of all glory?”
“As long as you’re here, Seth, I don’t care to think about other days, not before nor after.”
“Do you ever feel bad, Hannah?”
“Why? Do you?”
“Not about loving you. But I’m scared sometimes.”
“I get lonesome for these times we can sit together, Seth.”
I brushed her hair back from her face, and she blushed when I kissed her.
“I love you, Hannah.”
She’d brought a book from the house, and she read to me as I lay on the grass and watched her, lulled by the beauty of her voice.
“Do you remember where we last read?”
“The March,” I answered.
“The March of Miles Standish,” she said, and found the passage inside her book.
After a long moment, Hannah stopped reading and looked at me. “We’ve already read this, Seth.”
I smiled and touched her hand. “I like this part. The part with the Indians.”
“I expect we’ll never get to the wedding if we keep reading the passages regarding fighting and killing.”
“Whose wedding?”
“Ours,” she said. “Or might be mine and Brett Whitmore’s if you don’t beat him to it.”
Like her Ma, Hannah enjoyed teasing Davey and me; and everyone knew how fond the Whitmore boy was of my Hannah.
“Brett Whitmore would make a fine husband,” I teased back.
Hannah laughed and put her hand flat on my bare chest. At that instant, I was overcome by my frailty in her regard, and I pulled her onto me and, madly, found her mouth with my tongue.
That afternoon, there in the grass beside the river, Hannah and I did the thing we should never have done, the act we both recognized was inevitable. Afterwards, I stood behind her on the bank and watched while she squatted low at the water’s edge with her skirt pulled up past her knees and washed between her legs.
“Did I hurt you?”
“A little bit.”
“I’m sorry, Hannah.”
“Don’t be, Seth. I love you too much.”
“I’m sorry.”
And I was so consumed by my guilt and shame later that when we returned to the farmhouse I said nothing to her, but went directly to my room and prayed for both of us. I lied to Ma that I was feverish, and stayed in bed until the house was completely at rest. I bundled what clothes I could carry and stuffed them into a pillowcase, and I left the Mansfields’ in the middle of that very night, convinced that if I stayed another day, I could only bring ruin to the family that loved me as one of their own.
I remember in the dark as I walked alone on the road, how I’d looked up and witnessed the fiercest display of the Perseids, and convinced myself that heaven itself wept tears of mourning for me and Hannah, and for my black soul.
In time, Ma and Hannah had become so distressed that Davey came looking for me.
A kid named Whitmore.
And I knew, remembered how Seth and I were connected.
“That’s a lovely story, Jack,” Rachel said. Her eyes gleamed in the dim candlelight.
“Very romantic,” Nickie agreed. “Where is it from?”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
Conner kicked my shin under the table. “He’s joking around,” he said. “It’s just a common legend in the area where we grew up.”
“Do they ever finally get to be together?” Nickie asked.
“Seth ran away to a city called Napa,” I said. “Davey did find him there about four months later, in the wintertime.”
“Come on, now,” Conner said. “I think it’s time for us to go dancing or something. Jack can save his bedtime stories for…well, bedtime.”
Then he laughed.
I patted Nickie’s hand. “I’ll tell you more later.”
“Promise?” she said.
“I do promise.”
Forty-Five
We went dancing at a club after dinner, and by the time we got back into the hotel room, at two in the morning, we were all sweating and tired.
Nickie held my hand on the way home. We’d walked along the promenade and she rested her head on my shoulder and quietly asked me to tell her what was scaring me—why I was still afraid.
Well, it’s like this, Nickie. He did something to my brain, and now I’m fucked up.
And I tried not to be ashamed, was glad for the quiet and the darkness, and I told her everything I could remember about those days up until I’d made it back to Conner’s house. I even told her about how I believed I’d deserved it, and I’d even tried hurting myself afterwards, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about how Freddie died.
Jack killed Freddie Horvath.
It wasn’t about me, it was about Conner. I didn’t need to drag him into this. Everything Conner had ever done, it seemed, he’d done for me; so the least I could do was just shut up about my best friend.
Nickie stopped walking. She sighed. The night was cool and I could just faintly hear the break of waves on the beach.
“What if I’m not the help you need?” she asked.
“It’s not about that, Nickie.”
“What happens if nobody can help you?”
She sounded frightened.
So I lied to her. “I’ll get better.”
Conner and Rachel were ahead of us. He stood, smiling, leaning against the open door of the hotel room as Nickie and I kissed one last time in the hallway.
And then everything kind of crashed into Jack all at once.
It was easy enough for me to keep my mind off things as long as we were out in the music and diversions of Blackpool, but as soon as the door shut us inside that quiet room, Jack felt panic setting in. I was scared about undressing in front of the girls, and that maybe I was driving Nickie away from me and there was nothing I could do about it. I knew Conner expected me to give the glasses to him. I worried, too, if Seth was going to start making noises. And I tried, unsuccessfully, to shut out those images that flashed from the other side of the Marbury lens: Griffin running in fear, crying for my help, and seeing Freddie Horvath was there, like he was waiting for me, hunting.
The distance, the gap, between here and there was narrowing into nothing.
Frustrated, I didn’t say anything. I pulled a blanket and pillow from the “boys’ bed” and threw them on the floor beneath the window.
“You can have the bed, Con. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
Shaking, terrified, keeping my eyes down like the act somehow made me invisible, I stripped down to my underwear as quickly as I could, before Conner even had a chance to say anythin
g; then I wound myself up in my covers.
“Are you sure, Jack?”
“No worries, dude. I’m so tired, I could sleep in the tub again.”
I shouldn’t have said that.
I tried to pretend that I wasn’t watching her, but I just couldn’t take my eyes off Nickie as she slid her long slender legs out of her jeans and lifted her sweater over her head, standing there, right above me, wearing only a bra and panties.
Conner was completely unfazed by it, and casually tossed his clothes down onto the floor before swinging his legs up onto the bed. “Remember what we talked about, Jack. We can take care of it in the morning. Right?”
Of course I knew what he meant.
The glasses.
“Yeah. We will. Good night, Con. Good night, everyone. I had a great time tonight.”
“Me too,” Rachel said. “I especially liked your stories, Jack.”
“Yes. You are beautiful.” Nickie dropped down onto her knees beside me and told me good night. She put her mouth to mine, and it was the first time that Jack’s tongue had ever tasted a girl’s. And I knew that if she’d kissed me for about one second more that I would have completely lost control.
She flicked out the lights, but I silently watched the paleness of her legs, and Rachel’s, too, as they climbed up into their bed. My heart was pounding so hard. Jack had never felt like this about another person. It was frightening. It was exciting.
I heard Conner’s heavy breathing. He fell asleep as soon as the lights went out.
But as tired as I was, I still couldn’t sleep. It was impossible for me to slow my mind down for one second from its back-and-forth bouncing: from Nickie to Conner to those goddamned glasses. And I wanted to get up from the floor so bad, so I could just dig them out of my pack and go back to Marbury, but I couldn’t do that to Conner, I decided. Or, maybe it was just that I was a coward, and knew he’d only find out and get pissed off at me again.