Gods of Anthem (44 page)
“I’m sorry, Liza. Here I am writing instead of spending time with you. Our time could be short.”
“I get like that with my music, where I lose myself. Plus this … it isn’t about us. I’ve seen what you’ve put together so far, and it’s brilliant. No more purging. No more islands. What if they say yes? I mean, with Kiniva’s help … The fight’s still going. I just wish I could help you more, is all.”
Something distracts Jeremy, and I nudge him with my shoulder. “What is it?”
He blinks wide purple eyes slowly before grinning.
Even here, even on the brink of it all, he steals my breath away.
All this talk of borrowed time makes me drink him in: his hands are large, but with long, graceful fingers; his lean frame still borders on teenaged, yet hovers closer to a man, with promise of stature.
Something blossoms in my chest but I’m quick to stuff it down.
My father always said love is a reaction. My mother disagreed. Behind his back, she told me she’d chosen quite willfully to love my father, and it had grown from there. She said it was in rebellion against her English-born family to be with my father, an American of Russian descent—he was just the kind of man to set her own very uptight British father on his head. In one rare moment of mother-daughter giggling at the vanity, she said her father was so uptight, it was a wonder he’d loosened up enough to have children. My mother had told her own mother that she’d counted at least two times her father had “loosened up,” since she and her sister were around. My grandmother had quipped back over a glass of sherry, “One and half, Minuette. And not a moment longer.” My mother further proclaimed, in her fading accent, that she’d only had a kernel of love for my father to begin with. After he wrote his first song and offered it to her so sweetly, so demurely, and without boast, her heart had been moved; what had once been a mere seedling sprouted into a great oak that withstood even the worst of her sickness. She said from then on she’d lived as a shield for my father.
Yet she’d not been so fully enthralled with me, her own daughter. I hadn’t seen it as clearly back then, but in hindsight, with my own emerging affections for Jeremy, my mother’s dedication to my father echoes hauntingly.
My father, on the other hand, had been no one’s shield, but he’d been my very heart.
Either version of falling in love—immediate, or willful rebellion; at “first sight,” or the kernel that springs eternal—it all ends the same way.
Falling is hard. Scary.
Here with Jeremy Writer in the moonlight—I’m not calling him by any other name—I realize I’m going to be that shield for him. No good reason to feel this way other than what it is.
He’d been so fearful of his parents finding me. It makes sense now, all of it. His reluctance to be with me.
Our only distance before was misunderstanding, and with that vanished …
He laughs. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“You, either.”
Jeremy’s eyebrows rise in admission. “Touché.”
With this boy, it’s a reaction-type love. Like a knee jerked; something that happens in a snap when he watches me.
We could be the strong roots for one another forever if only fate would allow.
But here in our new world of Ash, oaks burn like tinder.
“Are
you an Aries?” Jeremy asks some time later.
“Huh?” I look up. My eyes are sore and tired from reading in the dark.
“Your sign, Liza. What is it?”
“Not sure. My birthday’s in October. The fifteenth.”
He nods and, with a mischievous smile, leans back against the grass at the edge of the pond. “Ah, that makes sense. A Libra, then. You seem to weigh things.”
“What does it mean?”
Jeremy shrugs. “You’re the judges. Might be why we first met.”
“Oh. Hm. And you?”
“Gemini.”
He laughs at my blank stare. “You’ve not been warned, then. The twins; two people. We change moods.”
I nod, wizened, though I bite back a comment that he’s more than just two. “That makes a lot of sense.”
Then, we laugh until Jeremy’s more serious expression brings us back.
“What’re you thinking?” he asks, now on his elbows, plucking grass. Mystery plays with his lips.
“Did you have someone,” I blurt out, “a girl before this? … I mean, before the flood, I should say.”
He chuckles. “I’m not
that
old. There have been a couple after. But I wouldn’t say they were anything, really; mostly missed connections. I’ve always been a busy person, I guess. A lot of faces have caught my eye, I won’t lie about that. But I’ve always had the Authority to fight, and even before Mimi, I knew something had to change. As soon as I understood what they were to us, I focused on that: what freedoms we were losing, what my parents have created …”
It nicely sums up our lives. “So many ‘might have beens,’” I mutter bitterly.
Jeremy closes his eyes. “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”
“Is that yours?”
He chokes back a laugh. “God, no. John Greenleaf Whittier, circa 1856.”
My mouth forms an “O” at the thought of so much time having passed.
“Tell me more,” I say, folding my arms around my knees.
A blush starts from my stomach and travels up my chest, working its way to my face, and I’m feeling the glow as Jeremy tries to recall poetry for me. He, the boy who speaks for an entire rebellion, sits by the pond and recites for me alone.
He starts quietly, as if embarrassed:
“Maud Muller, on a summer’s day,
Raked the meadow sweet with hay.
Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
Of simple beauty and rustic health.
Singing, she wrought, and her merry glee
The mock-bird echoed from his tree.
But when she glanced to the far-off town,
White from its hill-slope looking down,
The sweet song died, and a vague unrest
And a nameless longing filled her breast—
A wish that she hardly dared to own,
For something better than she had known.
The Judge rode slowly down the lane,
Smoothing his horse’s chestnut mane.
He drew his bridle in the shade
Of the apple-trees to greet the maid,
And ask a draught from the spring that flowed,
Through the meadow across the road.
She stopped where the cool spring bubbled up,
And filled for him her small tin cup,
And blushed as she gave it, looking down,
On her feet so bare, and her tattered gown.
“Thanks!” said the Judge; “a sweeter draught
From a fairer hand was never quaffed.”
He spoke of the grass and flowers and trees,
Of the singing birds and the humming bees;
Then talked of the haying, and wondered whether
The cloud in the west would bring foul weather.
And Maud forgot her brier-torn gown
And her graceful ankles bare and brown;
And listened, while a pleased surprise
Looked from her long-lashed hazel eyes.
At last, like one who for delay
Seeks a vain excuse, he rode away.
Maud Muller looked and sighed: “Ah me!
That I the Judge’s bride might be!
“He would dress me up in silks so fine,
And praise and toast me at his wine.
“My father should wear a broadcloth coat;
My brother should sail a painted boat.
“I’d dress my mother so grand and gay,
And the baby should have a new toy each day.”
The Judge looked back as he climbed the hill,
And saw Maud Muller standing still.
“A form more fair, a face more sweet,
Ne’er hath it been my lot to meet.
“And her modest answer and graceful air
Show her wise and good as she is fair.”
But he thought of his sisters proud and cold,
And his mother vain of her rank and gold.
So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,
And Maud was left in the field alone.
But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,
When he hummed in court an old love-tune;
And the young girl mused beside the well,
Till the rain on the unraked clover fell.
He wedded a wife of richest dower,
Who lived for fashion, as he for power.
She wedded a man unlearned and poor,
And many children played round her door.
God Pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.
For all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”
Sixty-seven
At first I
think it’s Cory that’s come back, but then I realize a more wily zombie has climbed through the window to get at me where I sit.
He’s realized his luck and speeds up, mouth bloody. My hand won’t work long enough to do more than grip my gun. Too bad it’s at my side and useless. If I fire now, it will go through my leg.
