Page 46 of Kill Your Darlings

that her voice was becoming lost to him. He knew it was a beautiful voice—everything about her was beautiful—but found he

couldn’t really remember the specifics of it.

He wondered if she were thinking of him today as well.

He knew that half birthdays weren’t really a thing, except that they had talked about it together exactly one year ago.

Where had they been when they’d had that conversation?

Or had it been on the phone? A wave of sadness rolled over Thom, a feeling that life was speeding up and moving too quickly and all his happiness was now in the past. He clenched his jaw, thinking that he might cry, but nothing happened.

Maybe his life’s tragedy was going to be that he’d met his soul mate when he was fourteen, and now he was doomed to a lifetime of never finding her again.

Why hadn’t she written him? He knew that he’d told her that she shouldn’t, but she knew his address.

She even knew his phone number. Maybe she’d forgotten him.

Maybe she was with some other boy now, a thought he tried very hard to keep out of his head.

The nubby blanket was making him sweat, so he stood up, swiped away the orange pine needles that clung to both him and the

blanket, and walked back through the woods to his house, occasionally breaking into a run because of the cloud of mosquitoes

that was amassing behind him. Back in the kitchen his mom glanced at the blanket in his arms and asked him if he’d been reading

in the woods. “Just thinking,” he said, and she knew enough not to ask him what he was thinking about.

Instead, his mother said, “Did you remember that Mrs.Burke asked you to go swimming at their pool this afternoon?”

He had remembered. The Burkes were two houses down; they had four kids, a senior girl named Kathleen, two middle boys named

Kevin and Carter, and a girl that was Thom’s age named Kristen. The two girls were okay, but Thom kind of hated the boys,

who were always dunking each other in the pool or talking about bra sizes or how you could know the color of a girl’s pubes

by looking at her eyebrows. But the pool was pretty nice, and Thom had been harboring a strange fantasy for a while, one in

which he confessed to Kristen, the girl his age, all about how he was in love with Wendy Eastman, who’d left town and broken

his heart. He created conversations between the two of them in his head. She would ask him questions about their romance,

and he’d tell her all about it. Sometimes, in these fantasies, he would show her the place in the woods where he had sex with

Wendy, and Kristen would kiss him, tell him she wanted to have sex as well but understood he could never truly love her.

“Thom, did you remember?” his mother asked again. He thought he’d answered her but supposed he hadn’t.

“Yeah, I’ll go,” he said.

He wasn’t the only kid who had been invited to the Burkes’ pool that day. There were about ten teens and preteens, and the Burkes had a few of the parents over as well, although the adults were on the patio drinking tall cocktails.

Thom kept to the deep end, where Kathleen and two of her friends bumped back and forth on floats. Kevin and Carter were in

the shallow end, blasting each other with water guns and farting under the water. It was hard to imagine they were basically

his age. Later in the afternoon, after drying off, and getting a Hawaiian Punch from Mrs.Burke, Thom got a chance to talk

with Kristen, telling her it was his half birthday.

“Is that a thing?” she said.

“Yeah, it’s exactly six months from my birthday.”

“No, I know what a half birthday is, I just didn’t know it was something that people celebrate.”

“Oh, yeah,” Thom said. “No, I don’t celebrate it. I mean, no one gives me cake or a present or anything. It’s just that I

thought of it. In six months I’ll be seventeen.”

“You’re so old,” Kristen said, and made a face.

Thom decided not to tell her about Wendy, and wondered why he’d ever even considered it. What happened with Wendy was the

most important thing in his life, and he didn’t need to share it. Instead, he asked Kristen if her brothers were always creeps,

and while she talked, he looked at her summer-freckled skin and her thin, reddish eyebrows, and wondered if it were true what

her brothers had told him about pubic hair.

iii

One week before school started again, Rose came and woke Wendy up by sitting gently on her bed. As soon as Wendy looked at

her mother’s face, composed and serious, Wendy knew that her life was about to change.

“What is it?” she said.

“It’s about your father,” Rose said. “Alan’s already up, so why don’t you get out of bed, as well. Get dressed and come straight

down to the kitchen.”

“What happened?”

“Get dressed and come straight down to the kitchen.”

When she walked down the hallway that led to the open living room/kitchen, she could hear her mother talking on the phone.

By the time she reached her brother, sitting on one of the kitchen stools, her mother was hanging up the phone. When Alan

looked at her, she could tell that he already knew what had happened.

“The police and ambulance are on their way,” Rose said. “Your father took a bath last night and it looks like he drowned.

I just found him this morning.”

“Is he dead?”

“He is, Wendy.”

“He’s in the house right now?” Her voice sounded hysterical even in her own head.

“Yes, but they’ll come and get him. If you want to go somewhere else this morning, I’d understand but I’m going to stick here.”

“I’ll stay here too,” Alan said.

“Are you sure he’s dead?”

“He has no pulse, Wendy, and he’s cold.”

Wendy stayed, but she went outside and sat on one of the two swings on the old rusty swing set that was in the backyard when

they’d moved in. Police came, and then an ambulance, but they both left without taking her father’s body. Alan walked outside

to see Wendy and told her that someone from a funeral home was going to come and get the body.

“Did you look at it?”

“Look at Dad’s body?”

“Yeah.”

“I did. You don’t want to see it, Wendy.”

“What happened?”

“He passed out and then drowned.” Then, in a louder voice, Alan said, “He was a fucking pathetic drunk and he got what was

coming to him. Sorry, Wendy, but...” He turned around and Wendy could tell by the way his shoulders were moving that he

was crying.

She went into the house, expecting to see her mother in the kitchen, but she wasn’t there. She stood still, listening, suddenly

convinced that her father would amble through the house, alive again. Where was her mother? Probably in the bedroom, lying

down. Wendy decided to go look at her father’s body in the tub, maybe not close up, but there was still this part of her that

didn’t really believe he was gone. She needed to see him.

When she reached the bathroom door, it was slightly ajar, and she put her hand against the door to push it open. But then

she saw her mother kneeling by the tub, her knees on the shaggy pink bath mat, her hands on the edge of the yellow tub. From

Wendy’s angle she couldn’t see her father’s body. Only her mother, who looked as though she were praying. Wendy, frozen, just

watched. And then her mother spoke, looking down into the tub. Her voice was quiet, but Wendy was pretty sure she could make

out the words. Her mother said, “I’m sorry, darling. I had no choice. The old you would have understood.”

Wendy backed quietly away from the door and went back outside to the yard. She stood still for a while, just going over her

mother’s words in her mind, searching for a way to feel about them. Eventually, a long, dark car came from the morgue. Wendy

didn’t see the body being moved from the house to the hearse, but Alan came and told her that their father was no longer in

there.

They’d only been living in the town of Tabernash for a year, but Rose arranged a service, and some of Frank Eastman’s new friends came, along with a number of churchgoers, who maybe only came for the free buffet after the service.

The only person to fly in was her father’s brother, George.

He came for only one day and stayed at a local hotel.

Before leaving he’d given Wendy a hundred-dollar bill, and she thought that she’d probably never see him again.

After the funeral Alan went to visit his new girlfriend, the daughter of his boss, at the horse stables, and Wendy took a

walk with her mother. She could feel her mother’s tension on the walk, and Wendy waited for her mother to tell her what she’d

done. To confess.

“Have you thought about if you want to finish out this school year here in Tabernash?” her mother said.

“It doesn’t make any difference to me. But Alan will want to stay.”

“Yeah, I thought we’d stay for him. It’s his senior year. And then maybe we’d all move somewhere new, or you and I will. It’s

not like you kids aren’t used to moving.”

“Where did you want to go, Mom?”

“You probably don’t remember, but when you were about five, we all spent a summer in Lander, Wyoming. Your father’s friend

Nate Rutherford was living there at the time and he offered your dad a job at his hardware store.”

“I remember Wyoming.”

“Do you really?”

“We lived in a log cabin, like in Little House on the Prairie .”

“Right. Sort of. Anyway, the point of the story is that I thought Lander was the prettiest place I’d ever been, and maybe

we could move back there. I can work, and you can finish school, and if Alan decides to come along, there will be plenty of

horse ranches for him to work at.”

“He’s pretty into Deidre. I doubt he’ll leave.”

“Well, that will be up to him. But you’d come, right?”

“Of course. It sounds nice,” Wendy said.

“Hopefully, you’ll have a better year next year than this one has been.”

It took Wendy a moment to realize that her mother was not just talking about her father, but also about her time in California.

“Can’t be worse,” Wendy said, then, to change the subject, quickly added, “Maybe you’ll find a new husband in Wyoming?”

Her mother laughed, and said, “I’m done with husbands. But I think I would like a dog.”

“Are you sad that Dad died?” Wendy found herself saying.

Her mother laughed, said, “Oh, honey. Of course I’m sad. You don’t think I am?”

“I don’t know. I guess I know you’re sad but maybe, also, things weren’t so great between the two of you.”

They had turned around at the elementary school, empty on a Saturday, and begun to walk back. Her mother said, “Well, his

life wasn’t going well for him. You knew that, right?”

“I know that he drank too much.”

“He did. That was the biggest part of it. He couldn’t hold a job, and sometimes I worried about what he might do when he’d

had too much to drink.”

They were silent for a moment and Wendy wondered if she was supposed to say something, but then her mom continued: “I want

you to have good thoughts about him going forward. He was good to you and Alan when you were young. Sometimes people are only

good for part of their lives, and then they move on. Or we move on without them.”

“I know,” Wendy said.

“The happiest people are the ones who are able to forget the past. Don’t be sentimental about people, I guess is what I’m

saying.”

Back at the house, Wendy went to her room.

She thought of writing another letter she wouldn’t send to Thom, but decided against it.

What she really wanted to say in that letter was that maybe her mom had somehow been responsible for her father’s death.

It was what she’d been thinking about since hearing her mother in the bathroom.

Did she hold his head under when he was drunk?

Or maybe she just let him drown? Maybe that was all there was to it.

But even though she had these thoughts, she didn’t plan on writing them down.

Never. Somehow she knew that what her mother did, she did for Wendy more than anyone else.

And Wendy knew she would never do anything now to hurt her mother.

So she decided to not write a letter to Thom. Besides, they weren’t letters to him anyway. They were to a pretend version

of him, or maybe they were just letters to her future self. She picked up her pen and wrote the word “POEM” at the top of

a blank page in her notebook in all caps. Underneath she wrote, “By Wendy Eastman.” Somewhere between her previous obsession

with the poetry anthology she’d stolen from her old school in New Hampshire, a book called Pictures That Storm Inside My Head , and her new obsession with Edgar Allan Poe, Wendy had decided that she might like to write poetry herself. She didn’t know

what those poems would be like, only that it was a way of writing about yourself without writing about yourself. Or something

like that. She’d decided to give it a try.