Tell No One

“She’s waiting for you,” he repeated, turning away from me. “By the tree.” Without warning, he sprinted into the woods, darting through the brush like a deer. I stood there and watched him vanish in the thicket.

The tree.

I ran then. Branches whipped my face. I didn’t care. My legs begged me to let up. I paid them no heed. My lungs protested. I told them to toughen up. When I finally made the right at the semi-phallic rock and rounded the path’s corner, the tree was still there. I moved closer and felt my eyes start to well up.

Our carved initials—E.P. + D.B.—had darkened with age. So, too, had the thirteen lines we had carved out. I stared for a moment, and then I reached out and tentatively touched the grooves. Not of the initials. Not of the thirteen lines. My fingers traced down the eight fresh lines, still white and still sticky from sap.

Then I heard her say, “I know you think it’s goofy.”

My heart exploded. I turned behind me. And there she was.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I just stared at her face. That beautiful face. And those eyes. I felt as though I were falling, plummeting down a dark shaft. Her face was thinner, her Yankee cheekbones more pronounced, and I don’t think I had ever seen anything so perfect in all my life.

I reminded myself of the teasing dreams then—the nocturnal moments of escape when I would hold her in my arms and stroke her face and all the while feel myself being pulled away, knowing even as I had been bathing in the bliss that it was not real, that soon I’d be flung back into the waking world. The fear that this might be more of the same engulfed me, crushing the wind out of my lungs.

Elizabeth seemed to read what I was thinking and nodded as if to say “Yeah, this is real.” She took a tentative step toward me. I could barely breathe, but I managed to shake my head and point at the carved lines and say, “I think it’s romantic.”

She muffled a sob with her hand and sprinted toward me. I opened my arms and she jumped in. I held her. I held her as tight as I could. My eyes squeezed shut. I smelled the lilac and cinnamon in her hair. She buried her face into my chest and sobbed. We gripped and regripped. She still … fit. The contours, the grooves of our bodies needed no adjusting. I cupped the back of her head. Her hair was shorter, but the texture hadn’t changed. I could feel her shaking and I’m sure she could feel the same emanating from me.

Our first kiss was exquisite and familiar and frighteningly desperate, two people who’d finally reached the surface after misjudging the depth of the water. The years began to melt away, winter giving way to spring. So many emotions ricocheted through me. I didn’t sort through them or try to figure them out. I just let it all happen.

She lifted her head and looked into my eyes and I couldn’t move. “I’m sorry,” she said, and I thought my heart would shatter all over again.

I held her. I held her, and I wondered if I would ever risk letting her go. “Just don’t leave me again,” I said.

“Never.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” she said.

We kept the embrace. I pressed against the wonder of her skin. I touched the muscles in her back. I kissed the swan neck. I even looked up to the heavens as I just held on. How? I wondered. How could this not be another cruel joke? How could she still be alive and back with me?

I didn’t care. I just wanted it to be real. I wanted it to last.

But even as I held her against me, the sound of the cell phone, like something from my teasing dreams, started pulling me away. For a moment, I debated not answering it, but with all that had happened, that wasn’t really an option. Loved ones had been left lying in our wake. We couldn’t just abandon them. We both knew that. Still keeping one arm around Elizabeth—I’d be damned if I was ever going to let her go—I put the phone to my ear and said hello.

It was Tyrese. And as he spoke, I could feel it all start to slip away.

44

We parked in the abandoned lot at Riker Hill Elementary School and cut across the grounds, holding hands. Even in the dark, I could see that very little had changed from the days when Elizabeth and I had frolicked here. The pediatrician in me couldn’t help but notice the new safety features. The swing set had stronger chains and harnessed seats now. Soft mulch was spread thickly under the jungle gyms in case a kid fell. But the kickball field, the soccer field, the blacktop with its painted-on hopscotch and four-square courts—they were all the same as when we were kids.

We walked past the window of Miss Sobel’s second-grade class, but it was so long ago now that I think neither of us felt more than a ripple of nostalgia. We ducked into the woods, still hand in hand. Neither one of us had taken the path in twenty years, but we still knew the way. Ten minutes later, we were in Elizabeth’s backyard on Goodhart Road. I turned to her. She stared at her childhood house with moist eyes.

“Your mother never knew?” I asked her.

She shook her head. She turned to me. I nodded and slowly let go of her hand.

“Are you sure about this?” she asked.

“No choice,” I said.

I didn’t give her a chance to argue. I stepped away and headed for the house. When I reached the sliding glass door, I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered in. No sign of Hoyt. I tried the back door. It was unlocked. I turned the knob and went inside. No one was there. I was about to head out when I saw a light snap on in the garage. I went through the kitchen and into the laundry room. I opened the door to the garage slowly.

Hoyt Parker sat in the front seat of his Buick Skylark. The engine was off. He had a drink in his hand. When I opened the door, he lifted his gun. Then, seeing me, he lowered it back to his side. I took the two steps down to the cement and reached for the passenger door handle. The car was unlocked. I opened the door and slid in next to him.

“What do you want, Beck?” There was the slur of drink in his speech.

I made a production of settling back in the seat. “Tell Griffin Scope to release the boy,” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied without an iota of conviction.

“Graft, payola, on the take. Choose your own term, Hoyt. I know the truth now.”

“You don’t know shit.”

“That night at the lake,” I said. “When you helped convince Elizabeth not to go to the police.”

“We talked about that already.”

“But now I’m curious, Hoyt. What were you really afraid of—that they’d kill her or that you’d be arrested too?”