The Summer That Melted Everything

  The rest of the country seemed to have forgotten about Sal and our heat wave, which was a fine relief to us, though Dad and the sheriff were still conducting their own investigation with more theories, more guesses, more places for pushpins to go and lines to be drawn.

  I suppose I hoped they wouldn’t find out where he came from. He had become my best friend. What boy is ever ready to lose that? It’s not like Sal wanted to go back to wherever it was he came from. No boy who wants to go back calls another woman Mom or another man Dad. He doesn’t call the place he’s come from hell and the place he’s at heaven.

  His stories, his language, his way of manner said a child is not here, and yet there the child would poke its head. When he ran giddy to the tree house. When he sat up all night, telling me ghost stories in the dark, trying to deepen his voice to mystery over the light of the flashlight under his chin. When he wanted to learn how to play the piano in the living room. Or baseball or Mario Bros. Mom taught him the piano. Me and Grand taught him the rest.

  There was a boy at home. He just wasn’t ready to say it yet. And maybe he was afraid. I mean, it was the devil who’d been invited in the first place. Maybe he was afraid that being the devil was the only way he could stay.

  Being the devil made him a target, but it also meant he had a power he didn’t have when he was just a boy. People looked at him, listened to what he said. Being the devil made him important. Made him visible. And isn’t that the biggest tragedy of all? When a boy has to be the devil in order to be significant?

  It’s not like anyone was coming looking for him. No mother showed up on our doorstep. No father either. Major newspapers from all over the country wrote at least once about him and various media outlets from TV reported on him in their local broadcasts, yet no one came saying they’d been looking for him and that he was theirs. No one came saying they wanted him back. Maybe if they had come and said that, he would’ve went with them. It was their not coming that kept his staying.

  After bursting the balloons, we walked down the lane. When we came upon the Delmar house, Dresden stood up against the oak. I noticed her face right off.

  She watched us approach over her book, Lord of the Flies. When I asked what was on her face, she answered it was makeup. In truth, it was construction paper, cut, trimmed, and taped into blush, lipstick, and purple eye shadow with long black lashes. The most unflattering was the pair of arching black lines placed over her own faint brows, giving her a sort of exaggerated madness.

  She sighed like we were bothering her as she returned to her book and began to circle words.

  “Why do you do that every day?” Sal asked.

  “One should write in their diary every day.” She flipped through the pages, showing how circling a word here and there made sentences like, Today was not so bad, and I hate my leg.

  “I’m no writer, but still I want to record my days. And books have given me all the words I need. I just go through and take the ones that belong to me for the day. I like having my life entwined with literature’s great tales. It makes me more—” She closed her eyes and found the word. “—significant.”

  I tried not to stare at that leg. I couldn’t see much of it. She wore a long, flowing dress, one of her many muted floral ones that went below her ankles, but the leg’s silhouette was still there. Its unbending form and black flat, which went against the bareness of her other foot.

  “There’s a pool in the backyard.” Her frizzy hair stuck out as if it too had its own life to seize. “You guys could go for a swim.”

  We walked around the house, which was a large whitewashed brick, the white fading in places to the rusty tinge beneath. It had green shutters and green trim that matched the green bushes of the rose garden.

  The heat would not prevent Alvernine’s roses from blooming. When the sun’s rays were too much, she would shade the roses by setting up tents, the kind used for parties and events. She would drape the bushes with dampened blankets to regulate their temperature, and she used fans, reaching from the house by extension cord, to keep them cool.

  Each rose was so perfect and just like the next, they were almost unreal. Like they were machine printed. A garden of wallpapered walls. Later, we would come to learn Alvernine had been siphoning water from the forgotten artesian well at the top of the hill to keep her roses hydrated.

  If found out, the well would’ve been seized by the town, and Alvernine would’ve paid a fine for breaking regulation. Worst to her, the town would’ve stopped her use of the well, and her roses would’ve died like most of the gardens in Breathed.

  We still had our cannas, but only because Mom insisted we still water them, which we did so by driving to the river and bucketing it up, though the river too was getting low.

  There by the rose garden was a sweeping inground pool with a diving board. Sal was looking down into its clear, clean water as he asked if he could go into the house. He had to use the bathroom, he said.

  Dresden looked at the back door and frowned. “Mother doesn’t like … strangers in the house.”

  “Is she home now?” I asked.

  “No, she’ll be gone for the day, but still—”

  “Please.” Sal stepped closer to her.

  “All right. It’s, um, just through the back door there and … Well, here, I’ll just show you.”

  With them in the house, I went over to the edge of the pool, where I dipped my toe in. The pool had been filled in late spring, before the water regulations would’ve made such a thing impossible.

  “You can get in if you want.”

  Dresden was back and looking at my bare chest. I couldn’t tell if she approved or not. It’s hard to be shirtless in front of a girl who may wish you weren’t.

  The summer had tanned her usually pale skin and given her freckles their own sort of triumph.

  “You can swim, can’t you?” She laid her pen and book down on top of the patio table. “Mother will be upset if you drown in her pool.”

  “I can swim.” I headed toward the diving board but stopped when she asked if Sal was a nice boy.

  “Whatcha mean?”

  “I mean is he nice?”

  “I’m nice.”

  Her sweat wet the edges of the construction paper. Even the heat was trying to undress the clown. She certainly didn’t look like Dresden, the girl who in her simple beauty could make two boys give her the wind.

  I brushed by her, feeling her on the back of my hand. Sometimes the briefest touch is the one that lasts the longest.

  “Wanna swim with me, Dresden?”

  “I think I might drown with you.” She said it softly, the way someone may speak of floating instead of sinking.

  “I wouldn’t let you drown.”

  “I don’t think you’d be able to help it, Fielding.”

  I told myself she was wrong. That there was no reason for that sadness in her voice, because no one would ever drown with me. I would be enough to save them all, I said to myself, feeling confident in that great, big lie.

  “And what if you swim with Sal?” I asked. “Would ya drown with him too?”

  “Girls don’t drown with boys like Sal. They live eternity with them.”

  I walked by her, didn’t brush her again, though. I returned to the diving board, not realizing I had said her name until she said mine.

  “Yes, Fielding?”

  The splashes of my cannonball reached her, but she didn’t shriek like other girls would’ve. She just stood there, a wetter girl than the one before.

  I followed the cannonball with a few laps. By that time, Sal had come back, apologizing for taking so long. I climbed out of the pool, my jeans shorts hanging low from the water, the denim’s heavy fray splotched and matted against my legs.

  “Why don’t you take your sweater off, Dresden?” Sal looked at the sweater as if he hated it.

  “I’m not that hot.”

  I could’ve laughed at her, at her sweaty forehead and hair plastered to the nape of her neck
like an attack.

  “You’re burning up.” Sal spoke like the soft spot of a hard truth. “And all because you’re trying to cover the bruises she gave you.”

  “How do you know about the bruises?” She asked in a whisper.

  Sal bit his lip with the fear all boys have of the girl they love. “I read your diary. One of them anyways. I didn’t have to use the bathroom. I found your room. I went to the shelf and picked a book at random. Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski. A lot of beatings for you to circle in that.”

  “God, don’t you know anything about girls? You should never read what is still their secret. You … you…” She attacked him with slaps. I tried to break it up but got slapped myself, the happening like getting blood drawn by a thorn.

  “I want you to leave this instant. Both of you.” She stomped her good foot the way all girls are prone to do at least once in their lives.

  He reached for her, but she backed away from him.

  “Get away from me.” She took a deep breath as if building the courage to say, “I hate you.”

  Hate, that all-too-willing pallbearer of love, that all-too-eager shovel piling the dirt over the lover’s head until the funeral is over only a second after it’s started. The boy can go nowhere near happiness when the girl he loves is not willing to go there with him. He may grow up, borrow a tuxedo, a sunrise, a tropical honeymoon, but they’ll never be his without her. She was his truth, his wisdom, and he was stupid without her. Just an idiot with a dumb life.

  He stood there teetering, knowing full well that without her, it would be the cliff all the time. He tried once more to reach for her.

  “I’m sorry, Dresden Delmar.”

  “I don’t care if you are sorry. I want you to leave, and I never want to see you again.”

  “All right,” he whispered.

  I don’t even think he realized he was walking until we were almost around the corner of the house. It was her shouting for us to stop that made him jump as if being sparked back to life.

  “I didn’t really want you to go. You just … surprised me, reading my diary like that.” She kept her eyes on the ground in front of her. “I wasn’t prepared to be revealed like that. I’m sorry I yelled at you. I don’t hate you. Not really.”

  He smiled, and I think the whole world knew it. “Will you do something for me, Dresden Delmar? Take off your sweater.”

  “Oh, please. If I take it off—”

  “You won’t be able to pretend anymore,” he finished her sentence. “Pretend that your mother loves you.”

  “She does love me. You just don’t understand.”

  “Every bruise you’ve ever had, every sharp shade of purple, blue, black, I’ve had it too. We have had the same boss of pain, we have asked the same question, over and over again, What have I done to deserve this?

  “There is no lack of understanding between the two of us. We’ve been part of the same crash this entire time. We just had yet to meet and pull each other from the wreckage. When you take your sweater off and reveal, it is not to reveal you alone, it is to reveal our shared selves. The purpling, black whorls something we can make fine together.”

  She was quiet as she watched a small yellow butterfly flutter past. As it landed on a rose, she began to unbutton the cardigan as she said, “I’ve never shown anyone, not even her, and she’s the one who gave them to me.”

  “Her who?” I asked.

  “Mother.”

  She slipped off the cardigan, revealing her strapless dress and her lay of freckles like a beautiful spray of mud. There with the freckles were the bruises. Flat as bruises are, yet piled upon her like things to weigh her, to make her buried beneath blues and violets and colors less terrible than the things they make.

  She dropped the sweater to the ground. I walked around to see more bruises at the top of her back.

  “Dresden?” I looked away because sometimes you see too much for just two eyes. “You said you haven’t even shown your mom, but if she gave them to you, wouldn’t she know about them already?”

  “She only hits me when she’s had too much to drink. I don’t think she remembers when she’s sober. I always make sure to be covered up so she doesn’t have to remember. She wants me to wear long dresses anyways, because of the leg.”

  “I think I should tell my dad. He’s a lawyer, ya know, and—”

  “Don’t you dare, Fielding Bliss.” She sounded so mature saying my full name.

  “All right, geez.” I looked up at the sky and the God who should’ve done better. “Why does she hit you, Dresden?”

  “I guess because I’m not as perfect as her roses. Everything must be as perfect as those roses. You’ve seen Mother. Is there or has there ever been anyone more perfect than she? It must be a great pain to her. To have everything so beautiful but me.

  “Sometimes, I’ll look at the bruises and see petals. I’ll see roses. And then I’m no longer sad. How can I be? When my mother has given me nothing but flowers.”

  Dresden was a girl too in love with her mother ever to see the monster of her. She needed help, so I said as simply as I could, “Your mom’s a bitch.”

  “She isn’t. And I’d like it if you never call her that again, Fielding.”

  That whole time, Sal had been quietly staring at her bruises, like a boy too well depressed to be able to say something large enough. I knew the way he saw her then would be the way he would fight never to see her as again. From that moment on, she had the shield in him. She had the boy who would turn into a man for her and be the one her mother would never be strong enough to go against.

  “I could turn your bruises into real roses.” He went to the patio table to pick up the pair of scissors and roll of tape left there from when Dresden was putting on her construction paper makeup. With a glance around the garden, he went toward the bush of roses so lavender they were almost certainly blue.

  “What is the name of these?” He cupped one of the roses in his hand—so large, it eclipsed his palm. “Do you know?”

  “I know all of my mother’s roses.” She stood so close by his side that the bottom of her dress blew across his calves. “This one is Blue Girl.”

  He quickly cut the stem of the one he held.

  “Mother will kill me,” she said in a hushed gasp.

  “Isn’t she doing that already?” He looked at the bruises. His frown never greater than when he looked upon them. “Let me make the hurt into every other happiness possible. Let me make you the infinity of the roses, instead of the life with the bruises.”

  She allowed him to cut the bush nearly empty, the roses piling in severed beauty at his feet. He laid down the scissors and asked if she could tie up her hair. She took the hair clip from off the patio table to hold her curls and frizz up in a bun.

  And then he began. Rose after rose, taped to her flesh by their short stems. Always directly over a bruise, and always carefully, as he knew bruises and their business well.

  By the end of it, she was left with roses upon both her arms, a cluster on her chest, and a scattering on her back. When he went to better the bruises on her legs, she stopped him from pulling up the billowy skirt of her dress.

  “Let me cut the dress shorter and—”

  “No.” She rubbed the leg through the dress.

  “We don’t care ’bout it bein’ fake,” I said.

  “I do. It’s hideous.”

  “It’s a marvel,” Sal corrected her. “Look all around this world. A tree loses a branch, no one replaces it. An angel loses his wings, and he’ll never have another pair.” He turned and showed her his scars. “But a girl loses her leg, and somebody gives her a new one. In this world where so few things are given, how can you not be in awe at what you’ve got?”

  She took a few steps away from us, her eyes slowly widening as if through thought she was coming to defy her own gnawing doubt that she was not something special. When she let the dress slip free from between her fingers, I could see a sort of echo inside her. B
road and far, a glowing thing to flick back the shadows of her own self-hate.

  “I didn’t lose my leg.” She whispered as if what she was saying were too fragile for anything more than a hush. “I never had one to lose. Still, I like what you say. Hand me those, will you?”

  She held her hand out for the scissors, and as soon as Sal gave them, she gathered up the bottom of her dress and began to cut through its pale blue cotton. Thinking it too long after the first cut, she made a second and a third even, bringing the hem to above her gently freckled knees.

  “I’ve never worn anything so short.” She giggled as if it came from the very small of her back.

  Sal took the scissors from her to cut the remaining roses from the bush. These he would gently and softly tape to her legs.

  The sun is hot and the boy is nervous as he moves his hand up the girl’s legs, toward the thighs that already know his name by heart.

  “Sal,” she whispered, “my Sal,” while I, nobody’s Fielding, stood close enough to know I was forgotten.

  “Did you know it’s my birthday?” She grabbed Sal’s hand. “And this is the best gift ever.”

  “Sal, you swimmin’?” I spoke, if only to remind myself I still existed.

  “You go ahead, Fielding.” He let Dresden lead him to the bench amongst the roses.

  I tried to splash some water their way as I jumped from the diving board. Failing, I hung on the side of the pool, watching the two of them share the same smile as he leaned in and smelled the roses on her chest.

  I dived under the water, nearly swam the length of the pool on that one breath. When I resurfaced, I heard Dresden talking about her construction paper makeup.

  “Mother would be angry if I got into her makeup. I do it for her. Try to be prettier. I thought I’d put on some makeup and try to be prettier. She blames me, you know. For Father leaving. She says he left because of my leg.

  “She hates my leg. She hates that I won’t be able to follow in her ballet footsteps. She says I’ll never be asked to dance. I think that’s the worst thing to tell a girl. That she’ll never dance.”