Page 110 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
“No, that’s not what I…”
At the stereo, Clarence pressedplayon the wedding CD. The first notes of “Come On Eileen” echoed through the cabin.
He jogged back over. “Bit of an odd song choice for a wedding, no?”
“Taz is nothing if not odd,” Karma said without looking at Clarence. She was still staring at me. “Eliot, you didn’t build the Fort with Henry.”
“Yes, I did,” I said.
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did. We built it together. It took all summer.”
Her voice, when she spoke, was softer than usual. “Eliot, that’s impossible.”
What the hell was she talking about? She didn’t evenknowabout the Fort back when I—whenwe—were building it. It was just Henry and me. Just us. Our little secret.
Right?
Taz poked his head inside. “Everyone ready to go?”
I should’ve been readying myself to walk, but I couldn’t. I was somewhere else. Stuck eleven years in the past. “No, it isn’t impossible,” I said, as much to myself as to Karma. “I remember. I remember yelling at him to slow down every time we ran out there. I remember digging chunks of dirt out of the ground with our bare hands and pinning up the tarp and…” The room blurred. The cabin was already pretty fuzzy, probably due to the fact that I had skipped both breakfast and lunch, but now it started to spin. A ring of light gathered at the edge of my vision. “And…and…” I put myhead into my hands, forgetting they held a bouquet. Rose petals gagged the inside of my nostrils.
“Eliot.”
“I built the Fort with Henry,” I said into the bouquet. “I know I did. We built the Fort and then we sat inside it and listened to white-throated sparrows. We did.”
“Eliot.”
I lowered the bouquet slowly. Karma’s face emerged from behind its petals: first the blunt bangs, then the shiny forehead, then the eyes. Sad, drooping eyes.
“You built the Fort alone,” she said, “the summer Henry passed.”
Silence.
I breathed out. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No, Ididn’t. That’s not possible.”
“Come On Eileen” ended. “Mrs.Robinson” began—the official cue to begin the procession. At the front of the line, Taz’s high school friends pushed back the curtain. Clarence tucked a flask into his jacket and straightened his lapel. “Another odd song choice. What kind of marriage are they expecting here, exactly?”
Karma ignored him. “It is possible. You worked on it all summer. Said it was a matter of ‘life and death.’ You used that exact phrase.” She laughed. “Little Eliot. So serious, right from the start. I tried to correct your grammar, to tell you it’s lifeordeath, but you looked at me like I was insane. ‘No, Karma,’ you said. ‘You can’t have one without the other.’ ”
The patch of forehead above my eye started to throb.
“God only knows where you heardthatphrase. You were only—nine? Ten? I asked Mom and Dad if they thought I should go out there and check on you, make sure you weren’t building a bomb or something. They told me not to worry. ‘Everyone grieves differently,’ they said, ‘if this is what she needs to do, let her do it.’ ”
“That’s not true.”
“It is.”
“That’snot true.”
But the more I thought about it, the less certain I became. I’d never been able to trust my own eyes. Eyes filter through the mind, and my mind shows me only what it wants to see. And what it wants is almost never the truth. A noise somewhere between a gasp and a groan bubbled up my throat. I muffled it with the thorny pillowcase of roses.
“Eliot?”
