Furtively, I wipe my eyes. River is smiling, but behind it is a forlornness that keeps eluding me.
Then, as if to distract us both, he suddenly pulls the stick out of the pendant, and a deafening shrill fills my eardrums.Too loud!I quickly cover my ears. River laughs, and everyone turns toward us. He swiftly replaces the pin back into the housing, and the noise stops.
“Sorry, an accident,” he calls out in the direction of the information desk, where a burly security guard is looking over at us. The man nods at me.
I smile uneasily.
“Hey!” River grabs my shoulders and holds me at arm’s length in front of him. We look at each other, and theheyvibrates through my senses. It blows over my skin like a gentlebreeze and flies through my mind like dandelion umbrellas.Hey!
“I bought you something else.” He slides his hands delicately from my shoulders and pulls something out of his pants pocket. It’s a small, beautiful silver notebook with a penholder and a gold ballpoint pen. With a solemn smile, he places it in my hand. “For all the things you can’t say. For everything you want to ask me. For all your beautiful words.”
His words break something inside me, and the tears I was just able to hold back roll down my cheeks unhindered. Sometimes, I don’t understand anything. He talks about death and starry-night-eternal and not wanting any other promises last night. But then, why did he say he had to save me? And why this signal generator? If everything will be over soon anyway, why all this? Why is he so caring? Why does he want to fulfill my Big Five so badly if he wants to unreservedly die? Surely, he could do that now. Why is he giving me the book when all the words we write in it will soon be in the past, lost somewhere in a ravine between the fir trees, earth, and sky at the foot of the Lost Arrow Spire?
“Hey, Tucks. Everything’s okay.” River wipes away my tears with his thumbs and frames my face with his hands.
No, nothing is okay, and yet everything is okay if you just stay with me!
I swallow and look at him. His blond hair contrasts so starkly with the black of his shirt. Everything about him is so confusing, so mysterious. So heavy and so light. His confidently curved lips, his unfathomable eyes, his vulnerability that I can only imagine but that shines through every gesture.
Why does he want to die?
I have to ask him that. As soon as possible.
I place one hand on his chest while clutching the book with the other, and he pulls me into his arms as if kisses were theanswer. His lips are rough and hot, his tongue infinitely cool, but the kiss is like the last one on the river—dark night and dreamy blue. I lose myself. My heart is on fire. He makes me as sad as he makes me happy, and I have no idea what he’s looking for in this kiss, what he’s missing in it.
When he backs away at some point, his cool breath breaks on my forehead. I realize that a few older women are watching us. “We’re lucky,” River whispers down to me.
I look at him, confused.
“We’re lucky we’re not in Iowa.”
He twirls my hair. “Kissing that lasts longer than five minutes is forbidden there.”
He did it again. Something that moves him is erased with a casual remark. Something bizarre, meant to detract from him. But it’s there. I see it more and more clearly with each passing hour, and it awakens a terrible fear in me.
The fear that one day he will slip away from me. The fear of losing him to something he can’t tell me about. The fear that I will let him down despite my promise.
Why do you want to jump?I write in the book and hold it out to him.
I promised, he writes back.A long time ago.
Chapter 18
It’s incredible how many new questions one sentence can raise. Who did he make this promise to? This June? Is she his girlfriend or his sister? What girls should he not have, and for what reasons? Does this have anything to do with his promise?
I wanted to ask him so much more, but he just says, “Not now, Tucks,” and gives me a winning smile so that I can’t even be mad at him.
Now, I’m standing here with a blindfold on because the Craters of the Moon are supposed to be a surprise for me, leaving me feeling helpless and vulnerable. Unfortunately, I’m thinking about Ben Adams, the escaped prisoner, and how I’m a mute hostage who doesn’t know that she is one is actually perfect—for whatever. And maybe the place River called hell is also a prison, and these “friends” are his accomplices—or even family. Maybe River is his code name.
Basically, there’s nothing I haven’t considered about River. When I heard on the radio while I was shopping the other day that Asher Blackwell was no longer in the hospital, I even thought for a moment that River was the famous Demons ’N Saints singer and that the girls he wasn’t supposed to have werehis groupies. Maybe he has a contagious sexually transmitted disease. However, this idea also has something absolutely absurd about it. Neither Ben Adams nor Asher Blackwell would want to attract the public attention. Especially not Taylor Harden from the Desperados.
“We’re almost there.” River leads me over an uneven surface, and something crunches under my flip-flops like burnt coals. Otherwise, I don’t hear anything; it’s quiet like a church.
When River stops, I stand completely disoriented for a few breaths. I feel the heat on the top of my head and around me. It burns like the Saharan sun.
“Okay. I’ll take off your blindfold now.” He gently unties the knots, and I impatiently yank the cloth off my head.
I squint several times against the blazing sunlight until I can make out the dark lava desert.
