Page 6 of We Were Liars

SUMMER FIFTEEN I arrived a week later than the others. Dad had left us, and Mummy and I had all that shopping to do, consulting the decorator and everything.

Johnny and Mirren met us at the dock, pink in the cheeks and full of summer plans. They were staging a family tennis tournament and had bookmarked ice cream recipes. We would go sailing, build bonfires.

The littles swarmed and yelled like always. The aunts smiled chilly smiles. After the bustle of arrival, everyone went to Clairmont for cocktail hour.

I went to Red Gate, looking for Gat. Red Gate is a much smaller house than Clairmont, but it still has four bedrooms up top. It’s where Johnny, Gat, and Will lived with Aunt Carrie—plus Ed, when he was there, which wasn’t often.

I walked to the kitchen door and looked through the screen. Gat didn’t see me at first. He was standing at the counter wearing a worn gray T-shirt and jeans. His shoulders were broader than I remembered.

He untied a dried flower from where it hung upside down on a ribbon in the window over the sink. The flower was a beach rose, pink and loosely constructed, the kind that grows along the Beechwood perimeter.

Gat, my Gat. He had picked me a rose from our favorite walking place. He had hung it to dry and waited for me to arrive on the island so he could give it to me.

I had kissed an unimportant boy or three by now.

I had lost my dad.

I had come here to this island from a house of tears and falsehood

and I saw Gat,

and I saw that rose in his hand,

and in that one moment, with the sunlight from the window shining in on him,

the apples on the kitchen counter,

the smell of wood and ocean in the air,

I did call it love.

It was love, and it hit me so hard I leaned against the screen door that still stood between us, just to stay vertical.

I wanted to touch him like he was a bunny, a kitten, something so special and soft your fingertips can’t leave it alone.

The universe was good because he was in it.

I loved the hole in his jeans and the dirt on his bare feet and the scab on his elbow and the scar that laced through one eyebrow. Gat, my Gat.

As I stood there, staring, he put the rose in an envelope. He searched for a pen, banging drawers open and shut, found one in his own pocket, and wrote.

I didn’t realize he was writing an address until he pulled a roll of stamps from a kitchen drawer.

Gat stamped the envelope. Wrote a return address.

It wasn’t for me.

I left the Red Gate door before he saw me and ran down to the perimeter. I watched the darkening sky, alone.

I tore all the roses off a single sad bush and threw them, one after the other, into the angry sea.