Kat
When I find him again,Silas is sitting against a tree, twenty feet behind his cabin. Not hard to find but not easy, either: his head back, eyes closed, feet bare, legs in front of him. It’s deep into the night now, not that time has meaning here: it’s dark or it’s not, the moon is somewhere, crickets chirp.
He opens his eyes but doesn’t move when I crunch toward him in the sneakers I borrowed from June, wearing sweatpants I borrowed from Wyatt under my dress.
Silas watches me, his pupils blown in the dark. There’s a look on his face like he’s holding something back: a word, a sentence, a sob, an embrace. Like there’s a canyon between us that only he can see.
The thought of it makes me feel like I’m exploding inside, the anxiety like broken glass. I wonder if he’s about to end things. Tell me I shouldn’t have come. Tell me that I’ve got it all wrong and this was him faking it all along, could I please go home now.
I’m afraid he’ll tell me something that isn’t about me at all, and I wonder how many of his secrets I can hear. I want the answer to be all of them, but I also know I’m human. My capacity isn’t unlimited.
But right now he looks at me, brave and lovely in the dark, and I try to quell myself as I kneel next to him.
“Can I touch you?” I ask, and he nods. There’s a curl of his deep auburn hair stuck to his forehead, so I reach out and brush it off. In the pale moonlight I can see a strand of gray threaded through it, and I let it sift through my fingers, falling away from his face.
When I comb my fingers through the rest of his hair, his eyes flicker shut and his lips part, head back against the tree. He swallows convulsively, throat working in the dark.
“I used to think about doing this all the time,” he finally says.
“Sitting in the woods?” I ask, and slow my fingers, pull them out of his hair. He doesn’t open his eyes.
“Just… disappearing,” he goes on, his voice low and slow. “However Javier broke, I could break, too. Get in my car one day and just drive. End up somewhere no one knows me and no one cares.”
He breathes, and I want to tell him that there’s no place like that, but that’s not helpful and he’s not done.
“Pitch a tent in the forest,” he goes on. “Live off the land. Go to the rundown part of some city and scrape by on under-the-table jobs. Find some cave and stay there.”
Silas pushes both hands through his hair, eyes open and focused on nothing. The gray strand catches the moonlight for a moment and then disappears, and I want to kiss it as proof of how far he’s come.
“I still do, sometimes,” he says. “Not much. But I will always have killed people and hurt people and caused suffering because I was following orders. And there’s always a part of me that will want to walk into the woods. Like if I could leave everything and everyone behind, maybe I’ll finally fix myself.”
I bite my lips together, take his hand, put it on my knee. I want to disappear forever is the first step on a long path down, and I know that.
“I wanted that for such a long time,” he says. “To fix myself. But turns out there’s no fixing me. There’s only living with the damage.”
So many meaningless platitudes crowd into my brain that they start punching each other for space: from you’re not damaged to broken is beautiful to everything is fixable if you believe in yourself!
I don’t say anything, but his hair’s fallen onto his forehead again and I brush it back.
“What if it’s me, Kat?” he asks, voice quiet and rough as tree bark. His eyes open, endless as the horizon.
“If you disappeared?” I ask.
He nods, barely.
“I’d look for you.”
“What if you couldn’t find me?”
“I’d keep looking.”
“What if I told you not to look?”
His hand is covered with mine, and I’m in uncharted territory. All I can do is hope I understand what he needs.
“I’d ignore you and look anyway. Until I found you.”
Finally he looks away, his eyes tracking upward. He’s looking at the moon, I think.