Chapter 9: The End of August

Before the End of August

I don’t tell people this story often, and I certainly don’t tell them about the whole night. Everything that happened sits with me in different parts of my soul, a place for the tragedy that we witnessed and escaped, a place for the eight of us, in a circle on the grass, laughing at the things we did in middle school, a place for me and Ralphie looking up at the moon in a house without a roof, a place for the silo and its secrets that we were cut off from after that night, the tumult of the next few weeks making it easier to focus on getting ready for college than to open up a mystery from the past. 

Ralphie checked on me the next day, but it was Jenna and Lydia and me who needed to be together, who couldn’t stay apart. Jenna picked us up in her car and we drove the opposite way of the silo and the construction site, down the roads toward the suburbs closer to the city, to a downtown near a train station with a coffee shop patio where we wouldn’t know anyone else. 

We sat down with our drinks, all of us too young to realize that caffeine on top of adrenaline was a bad idea. Lydia pulled out the photographs from the silo and put them near me on the table. 

“What should we do with these?” She pushed them toward me. 

I looked at them, Lacey Linden, smiling at me with her tennis racquet, her arm swooped around a friend at her side.

“I’m not going back there,” Jenna remarked. “I like it in my mind the way it was. Maybe someday, but for now, I just want to leave it where it is.”

“I’m good with that,” Lydia agreed, and I shuffled through the pictures again, trying to decide if I agreed too. I wanted to go back, to trace the lines up the silo walls again, to look out over the lawn where the tennis court had been, to pull the brick out of place again and finger the jewelry box that might have been pillaged or that might have aided Lacey Linden’s escape. 

I wasn’t ready to be cut off from the silo yet, but I wasn’t going back alone. 

“Maybe someday,” I conceded to Jenna. Had Lacey Linden seen worse than what I had just seen last night? Was it better that the lodge had burned down and the silo was half-gone? Were the half-built houses better than a gangster’s hideout?

I stacked the photographs in my hands and placed them between the cards in my wallet, careful not to let the edges crinkle. The next block over, a city-bound train pulled into the station and the lights on the guardrails flashed and fell.

“Are you ready for that?” Lydia motioned to Jenna. “To be a city person taking the train places?”

Jenna looked over at the commuters rushing to catch the morning train. “Eh, posers,” she said. “Suburban wannabes. I’ll be a real city person.” 

I could see Jenna’s footsteps ahead of her, classes at the downtown campus, likely transferring to a branch of the store in the city to keep working. Shelves stocked and books read and soon Jay would be a distant memory of a bad summer before she went away. 

Lydia was spinning her straw through her whipped cream, thinking about her school coming soon, or maybe Box, or maybe last night, or maybe all three at once. The straw cut through the frothy film, and the last of her coffee disappeared into it, leaving the bottom of the cup empty. I couldn’t see what was next for her, and I don’t think she knew what would happen yet either. 

The three of us sat in the morning sun with our drinks, letting our bodies stick to the grids of the iron chairs. Trains came and left. The barriers flashed and lowered, and I had the sensation again of being a tiny sea creature, tossed along the sand under a giant wave, one that ignored the storms and loss that were happening down here, well beneath the surface, but just as real as anything happening above.

I don’t remember leaving or walking away or driving home that morning. I only remember the late August sun pushing over us slowly, as we stubbornly sat between what seemed like the end of summer and what was surely the next era of our lives. 

✷

Before I left for college, I returned the history book to the library, and I tucked the photographs of Lacey Linden inside. I wouldn’t be the one to accept library returns anymore, and Mr. Fleet would handle it until someone new was hired. Meticulous librarian that he was, I knew that he would find the photographs. He might even realize that they came from me. But by the time he did, I would be in a different state, in a new dorm room, pinning primary-colored posters over bare white walls, learning the names and hometowns of people who weren’t my friends yet. 

✷

Before we could leave for school, Zachary insisted on one last event, a social gathering to be everything the night at the construction site wasn’t, especially since he hadn’t been able to be there. 

Bonfire at Zachary’s, the word went around. And on an August night a week after the construction site party, we found ourselves around a bonfire in Zachary’s backyard, the firelight dancing across our faces before getting lost in the long rectangles of white light coming from the sliding doors of the house. 

Devi and Box were going to make it work, they were determined. And by extension, the rest of us would stay connected too. “So,” Jenna asked him as we sat in our circle, passing around sticks for s’mores, “Is this for the last time?” 

“Most definitely not,” Box responded. “You can’t shake me. This isn’t for the last time. Maybe until next time?” 

“It’s definitely not the last time for me,” Lydia said meaningfully, then she looked at the perfectly toasted marshmallow at the end of her stick. “I plan to eat s’mores for the rest of my life. Promise.” She pulled the marshmallow off the end of the spear and popped it in her mouth, swooning. 

I sat on a hard bench pulled up to the flames, my feet resting on the bricks around the edge. In the fire before me, my marshmallow crackled and charred. I lifted the stick back and pulled off the crispy outside shell. 

Ralphie, sitting next to me, watched me pop it into my mouth. “You have no patience, do you?” 

“Not for marshmallows, no.” And I plunged the remaining white center back into the flames to char another coat. 

Ralphie and I had seen each other almost every day in the last week, first because of the police reports, but then to check in on each other, though we didn’t need that excuse anymore. We hadn’t told anyone what had happened in the empty house. Any attempt to describe it would have undercut its meaning, might have downplayed how the night ended. I preferred to keep it there, between ourselves, inventing another start to whatever this was for the future, a beginning that didn’t end in so tragic a night, a beginning that the two of us could hold secret between ourselves, without anyone else knowing better, without anyone else knowing how beautiful the night sky looked from the second floor of a house with no roof. 

I finished my marshmallow and set my stick to the side, placing my hand next to Ralphie’s on the bench. 

Zachary insisted on hearing everything about the party from the week before. “I can’t believe I missed it,” he said after each new detail was revealed. 

The story of the party had become legend already, with versions of the night being blown in every possible direction. There were games of spin the bottle in the house where the gun went off. There were gangsters waiting down every side street. There were hard drugs being done off of the racing stripes of cars. There were police just waiting for something to happen, and it was all a set up from the beginning. Everyone else had run off the other direction, through Beco’s backyard, and most of them didn’t hear about what happened until word got around the next day.

Those of us who had seen what had happened had talked throughout the week, each of us adding another detail to the story, wanting to keep it in the bounds of what was true, all of us knowing that adding to it wouldn’t make it anything but fable. Devi had responded to the night by being even more over the top. I had responded by combing every news site after the rest of my family went to sleep at night, waking up early to read the next day’s newspaper before my dad could grab it off the driveway. I returned to the case every few months while I was away at college, untangling it for the rest of my life. I didn’t know it then, but I learned later that Ralphie had gone back to the site after that night, leaving a bunch of flowers he had bought at the grocery store near the house where it had happened, a tribute to what he couldn’t change, and maybe an apology for the parts of the night he didn’t want to. 

“I can’t believe I wasn’t there,” Zachary was saying as his mom popped out of the back doors with more bars of chocolate from the store. 

“I got some peanut butter cups too, because I thought that could be fun in a s’more.” She left a bag of candy on the picnic table, and we shouted our thanks as she disappeared back into the house. 

Peter and Cocoa missed the bonfire, and it seemed that out of all of us that Cocoa was the most shaken by what had happened. Eduardo had stopped bothering her after that night, and I think that she and Peter were glad to find new habits for themselves, away from the rest of us, away from what had happened in high school. I saw them together, a few years later, riding their bikes down a side street when I visited home. They wouldn’t have recognized my car, so I didn’t stop to say anything, but I watched them turn a corner in my rearview mirror, and Cocoa looked happy. 

On my other side, in a lower chair next to the bench, Jenna broke open the next bag of marshmallows. She tossed one over the fire to Devi. “Good catch,” she said, as Devi popped it in her mouth. “Wait, you’re not even going to roast it?”

“Why do I need ashes on my sugar? I like my sugar pure. No soot.” Box caught the next marshmallow and let his roast to a perfect golden brown. Zachary roasted three at a time, and the bottom one overheated and fell into the flames. 

The talk circled between marshmallows and college plans. Our countdowns for leaving had moved into single digits, not weeks but days. When the days seemed too few, the conversation would revert back to memories of school, of bad assemblies and rainy field trips. We took turns renumbering each of the superlatives for the grade, giving awards out to teachers who deserved them more than students. 

“He should have gotten Best Hair,” Lydia remarked about our drama teacher who notoriously wore a toupee. 

“I would give Mrs. P. the Talks Most, Says Least award. She never stopped talking, even when it was way too much information.” We giggled remembering the health teacher’s inability to separate her personal experience from her class.

“I would still give you Third Most Successful.” Devi placed an invisible trophy in my hand, and I returned one to her, ignoring what she had actually won and choosing to honor her with Most Efficient Eater of Marshmallows. Jenna and Lydia bestowed fake crowns on each other for their awards, and Box and Ralphie threw their arms around each other’s shoulders, pretending to weep with joy. 

The night air was getting colder. Above us, the moon was clouded over, only peeking out for moments in a restless night sky. Someone threw another marshmallow into the fire, and its squat form melted and incinerated in a quick burst of flames. My eyes followed the fire and smoke upward, a single column of light lifting up into the night sky, burning a hole through the center of the map above me, just like in the silo. Or perhaps lighting the way to the rest of the map, the lines I had only begun tracing. 

✷

Jenna left for school first. She was the closest, so she would be home soon, but when she came back the next weekend to do laundry, Lydia would be gone. 

I would be last, piling my belongings into my parents’ car the day after Jenna came home from her first week of classes. I barely remember our goodbyes, because we knew they were only temporary, and we held onto that after we broke off our goodbye hug. 

My parents were driving me to school, and the day we left it was raining, a light but determined rain, covering the car windows with condensation, leaving a splash of mud behind the tires as we pulled out of the driveway to leave. 

Our route took us up the main road, past the grocery store where, just two weeks before, Ralphie and I had called the police from the office phone inside. As we drove down the road where Lydia and Jenna and I had argued and circled and turned around in the early summer, looking for the entrance to the construction site that eventually became our escape, I raised my head from the corner of the window. I looked out, as if I could crane my neck high enough to see past the grocery store and over the treetops, to something that no one else could see.

There, beyond the store and the bands of remaining forest, were houses that had never been lived in and streets that had never been used. Somewhere among them, there was a tennis court that had been used and forgotten and a silo that had been used and ruined and made useful again. Our fingerprints would remain on that place, just as Lacey Linden’s had before us. The box, placed carefully back in the wall, felt as much ours now as it did hers. My thoughts had barely reached the silo, and the treetops were already behind us, the road ahead of us slick with rain, pulling my focus back to where I was going instead of where I had been. 

Years later, we would speculate if the silo was still there. We would drive through the completed subdivision and think that these houses were in the wrong order, that this couldn’t be the same place. On late nights when I couldn’t sleep, I would look at aerial maps online, wondering if anything remained of the silo within the treetops, zooming in as close as I could, but still not wanting to know. 

I leave that all in my memory now, and I prefer to keep it there. The lines I began tracing in the silo have formed a map up into the sky beyond what I imagined. What was cut off for Lydia has been replaced by better things, and Jenna has healed and healed others, bit by bit. We sometimes joke that the silo never existed and we must have made it up. But even if it hadn’t existed, we knew it was real.

We kept the secret of the silo safe, not a place for inmates or for criminals, but a place where we found ourselves, one last time, before we left home and began the rest of our lives. It was a place where we left secrets. Where we knew that if anything happened, we could find our insurance there, not missing jewelry and a burned down lodge, but a memory shared, that we would hold onto when the rest was forgotten. 

We didn’t need to return to the silo to check for jewelry that wasn’t there, just like we didn’t need to return to the construction site to check for a body that was scooped away by the police the same night it fell. We couldn’t turn back time to the beginning of the summer any more than we could turn it back to middle school or to the beginning of our lives. 

I remember that summer not as one of transition, but as something final. All transition is just a version of finality. We like to think that we are finished when we are at rest, but rest is often like the winter, where the seeds inside are latent, waiting to break open and grow. No, it is the transition when we are most concluded, a pinpoint in our individual lives saying that we were like that, there, then. 

We were lying on the grass outside the school on that beautiful day in late spring as a relationship came to a needed end. We were standing there on that tennis court, facing a camera or a friend, wondering what it would be like to break away from this familiar place. We were looking up, into the sky, when the stars and jetliners crisscrossed overhead, as we traced the lines of the walls back down to our own hands and feet, our own hands ready to create, our own feet ready to run.

It was there, as we finished the season, looking ahead for another to begin, that we were final. We were awaiting what was next, poised in transition, and conclusion was our only comfort even as we knew that what we had would change again, and where we had been would remain behind, changing without us.

✷