Something unexpected happened in the weeks following my enforced separation from Gus: I did not grieve. I worried about him, certainly, especially when my father reported that he was again confined to his room except for piano practice, and that harrowing shrieks shook the Farrows’ house, but I missed him far less than I might have expected. Instead I felt an inexplicable lightness that, in retrospect, is not inexplicable at all: an airy freedom, a billowing beneath my feet.
In fact, I was happy.
Oh, if I had heeded the firefly signaling of my own heart, could it have saved me? Or would he only have murdered me sooner? Was there ever a right time for a final break with Gus Farrow?
As for the Skelleys, it was only a few days before I found Thomas sitting with his back against a maple tree at the edge of our yard. His arms were so tight around his knees that it looked as if he were afraid his legs might run away without him. At the sight of that bony, colorless boy, I felt a gentleness that answered his own, and I went and sat beside him in silence. I’d learned that it was best to give him time, to let him speak when the words came to him.
“There was a dead hummingbird under the roses,” he said at last, very softly. “I thought of that song, from the séance. Why should the beautiful die, remember? The bird was as beautiful as any person could ever be, but no one seems to think that the beauty of small creatures should earn their spirits immortality.”
“Maybe it’s enough that beauty itself is immortal,” I said. “That it goes on without any individual person, or any particular hummingbird.” I felt an intimation of a distant horizon, a world where people and birds alike were long gone. But beauty endured there, of that I had no doubt, in a million unthinkable permutations.
We sat for another minute, not looking at each other. Eye contact was never easy for him.
“I saved its feathers for you,” he said. “To show you under the microscope. When you can visit us again. I know—you’re interested in iridescence.”
The significance of this speech did not escape me. “Will I be able to visit again?”
He didn’t answer immediately, only picked up a maple leaf of deepest crimson and examined it. Then: “My father thinks so. He says Gertrude Farrow seems to care for his opinion.”
I understood, and my heart surged with gratitude. How close I had come to spoiling everything in a fit of vindictive rage, when in fact I needed only to be patient, and trust in my friends!
“It’s very good of your father to intervene on my behalf. I was afraid Mrs. Farrow might have influenced him against me.”
“Of course not. He thinks of you as—that is, he knows the difference. Between Mrs. Farrow and you. Between your reasons and hers.”
Thomas managed to imbue these simple words with a whole spectrum of meanings, and with a loyalty so pure I would have liked to kiss his cheek.
“He wishes you hadn’t taken the books,” Thomas added, staring at his knees. “When you knew Gus Farrow must be lying about them. But he understands why you did.”
It was not lost on me that Thomas was expressing his own feelings under cover of his father’s. He rose to his feet and stood there awkwardly, then stretched out a hand to help me up. It left us standing closer than our wont.
“Tell him I’m grateful for his understanding,” I said, which fell somewhat short of contrition. “And that I miss studying with both of you very much.”
And here Thomas met my eyes for just a moment, and flashed me a smile as sweet and beautiful as the passing life of any fragile thing. Oh, Thomas was no one’s dashing imaginary lover; he was not remotely handsome, not ambitious, not bold.
He was something more than all those qualities combined.
Allow me to offer an observation. It’s one that you in particular should heed, my dreadful reader: any fantasized beloved is an expression, a projection of one’s self. Even our wildest imaginings are still caught in our own confines, and to love such imaginings means to love the self, the self, the self again, in endlessly refracting solipsism.
To love another person, you must love what you cannot imagine.