Tom did not try to force a conversation. Each night he gave Benny a hug and said, “We can talk tomorrow if you want to.”
Nix came over on the third day. When Benny saw her standing on the other side of the garden gate, he just gave her a single small nod. She came in and sat down next to him.
“I didn’t know you were back,” she said.
Benny said nothing.
“Are you okay?”
Benny shrugged, but kept silent.
Nix sat with him for five hours and then went home.
Chong and Morgie came by with gloves and a ball, but Tom met them at the garden gate.
“What’s up with Benny?” Chong asked.
Tom sipped from a cup of water and squinted at sun-drowsy honeybees, hovering over the hedge. “He needs a little time, is all.”
“For what?” asked Morgie.
Tom didn’t answer. The three of them looked across to where Benny sat staring at the grass that curled around the edges of his sneakers.
“He just needs some time,” Tom repeated.
They went away.
Nix came again the next day. And the next.
On the sixth morning she brought a straw basket filled with blueberry muffins that were still hot from the oven. Benny accepted one, sniffed it, and ate it without comment.
A pair of crows landed on the fence, and Benny and Nix watched them for almost an hour.
Benny said, “I hate them.”
Nix nodded, knowing that the comment wasn’t about the crows or anything else they could see. She didn’t know who Benny meant, but she understood hate. Her mother was crippled by it. Nix could not remember a single day when her mother didn’t find some reason to curse Charlie Pink-eye or damn him to hell.
Benny bent and picked up a stone, and for a moment he looked at the crows, as if he was going to throw the rock at them, the way he and Morgie always did. Not to hurt the birds, but to scare a noise from them. Benny weighed the stone in his palm, then opened his fingers to let it tumble to the grass.
“What happened out there?” Nix said, asking the question that had hung burning in the air for a week.
It took Benny ten minutes to tell her about the Rot and Ruin. But Benny didn’t just talk about zoms. Instead he talked about three bounty hunters on a rocky cleft by a stream in the mountains. He spoke without emotion, almost monotone, but long before he was finished, Nix was crying. Benny’s eyes were hard and dry, as if all of his tears had been burned away by what he’d seen. Nix put her hand on Benny’s, and they sat like that for more than an hour after he was done, watching as the day grew older.
As they sat Nix waited for Benny to turn his hand, to take hers in his, to curl his fingers or thread them through hers. She had never felt closer to him, never believed in the possibility of
When the evening crickets began singing, Nix got up and went out through the garden gate. Benny had not said another word since he’d finished telling his tale. Nix really wasn’t sure that he knew she’d held his hand. Or that she’d left.
She cried all the way home. Quietly, to herself, without drama. Not because she had lost Benny, but because she now knew that she had never had him. She wept for the hurt that he owned, a hurt she could never hope to remove.
Benny sat outside until it was fully dark. Twice he looked at the garden gate, at the memory of Nix carefully opening it and closing it behind her. He ached. Not for her, but because she ached for him-and he could feel it now. He’d always known it was there, but now-somehow, for some indefinable reason-he could
He wanted a lot of things. But the world had changed, and when he had the chance to take her hand, he hadn’t.
Why not?
He knew that it had nothing to do with the oath. Or with friendship. He knew that much, but the rest of his mind was draped in weird shadows that blinded his inward eye. Nothing made sense anymore.
He could feel the heat of her touch on his hand even though she was now out of sight.
“Nix,” he said. But she was gone, and he had let her go.
He got up and slapped dirt from his jeans, then looked up at the yellow August moon that hung in the sky beyond the garden fence. It was the same moon, but it looked different now. He knew it always would.
14
THE FOLLOWING MORNING WAS COOL FOR THE FIRST DAY OF SEPTEMBER. Benny lay in bed and stared out the window at the dense white clouds stacked tall above the mountains. The air was moist with the promise of rain.
Benny was awake for more than an hour before he realized that he felt better. Not completely. Maybe not even a lot. Just… better.
It was the last week of summer break. School started next Monday, although with his new job, that would only be half days. He lay there, listening to the birds singing in the trees. Tom once told him that birds sing differently before and after a storm. Benny didn’t know if that was true, but he could understand why they would.
He got up, washed, dressed, and went downstairs for breakfast. Tom set out a plate of eggs for him, and Benny ate them all and then scavenged the frying pan for leftovers. They ate in silence almost to the last bite before Benny said, “Tom… the way you do it… Does anyone else do it that way? Closure, I mean.”
Tom sipped his coffee. “A few. Not many. There’s a husband-and-wife team up north in Haven. And there’s a guy named Church who does it in Freeland. No one else here in Mountainside.”
“Why not?”
Tom hesitated, then shrugged. “It takes longer.”
“No,” Benny said. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Sugarcoat it. If this is the way it is, if I’m going to have to be a part of it, don’t jerk me around. Don’t lie to me.”
Tom set down his cup of coffee and then nodded. “Okay. Most don’t do it this way, because it hurts too much. It’s too…” He fished for a word.
“Real?” Benny suggested.
“I guess so,” said Tom. He tasted the word. “‘Real.’ Yeah… that about says it.”
Benny nodded and ate the last piece of toast.
After a while Tom said, “If you’re going to do this with me-”
“I didn’t say I was. I said ‘if.’”
“So did I.
“Guns?”
“Hand to hand first,” Tom said. “And swords. Wooden swords in the beginning. We’ll start right after school.”
“Okay,” Benny said.
“Okay… what?”
“Okay.”
They didn’t speak again that morning.
