Chapter Twenty Seven

Turtle Hill

Veda

I woke up. At first, I thought I was back with my cousins in the real world, but it was too quiet. Nothing moved or spoke. Was I dead? I could hear the wind rustling leaves and the clock ticking on the wall. I couldn’t be dead. The smooth hardwood floor under my head convinced me.

I opened my eyes and saw where I was. I was in my house on Turtle Hill. It wasn’t a real place, but inside a book I wrote.

Someone was reading another one of my books. That was the only explanation for why Antony jabbing me with that needle hadn’t killed me. I was safe because this book had caught me. Except, it was confusing. This was not one of the books Antony had pinched out of the trash. The last I knew, I had hidden it in Hattie’s room.

Was Hattie reading my book?

I stood up and saw Salinger coming up across the yard through the window. He was the one reading it! At that moment, something happened that had never happened to me before. My heart skipped a beat because the man I loved was on his way to visit me.

I opened the door for him. Shyly, I hid most of my body behind the door and peered around it at him.

His gaze on the other side was troubled. “Veda? Is that really you or is it a version of you made only for this story?”

I let go of the door because I wanted to hold something sturdier than the wood. I reached for him and he caught me.

At that moment, all my manners… fell off me.

I clutched him with one hand and covered my mouth to hold back the sobs with the other. “Antony… killed me…”

Salinger pushed my hair out of my face and held it in a knot behind my back to keep it separate from my tears that gushed forth. I was the type that didn’t cry. Now I cried because I couldn’t hold it back anymore. He pushed my face into his shirt, so I could wipe my wet cheeks on the fabric. I couldn’t stand for my face to be wet, and I hated the feeling of my sinuses being full of all the fluid I was suddenly losing.

When I didn’t stop crying and I couldn’t speak because every time I tried, I sounded like a new kind of whale, he lifted me over his shoulder and carried me into the house.

There was a sofa there, soft and inviting, unlike the way my real living room was furnished. He lowered us down on the cushions and settled me onto his chest. He patted me and made soothing sounds that may have been words in English, or words I didn’t know, like Inuit spells made to calm a person.

I tried to cool down, but my cheeks were flushed and my heart was hammering.

Finally, I was able to say something intelligible and it was only because they were the words I would have said if the book progressed the way it was supposed to. “Welcome to Turtle Hill cottage. Come to relax, stay to be healed.”

He laughed and said, “Let’s hope so.”

“He killed me,” I managed to say without hyperventilating.

Salinger nodded thoughtfully.

“I thought that he cast that spell to replace my voice because he didn’t want me to go away. I thought that if I convinced him that I wouldn’t kill myself then everything would work out.”

“He entered the hospital book, huh? He must have known you would be there, and with the real you there, the book was a death trap. Did he know that when he went in?” Salinger wondered.

It was hard to listen to him through the steaming fog that filled my brain. “He asked me to leave the hospital with him. He said, and proved, that he had added more to the book, but he changed his mind about whatever story he had planned. After he killed me, he told me he wanted me with him always even though he hates me.”

“How else could he have left the story? Either you were going to die or he was.”

I gasped in fear. “Are you dead? Is that why Antony got my book? Because you died?”

“My Ata saved me, but if he hadn’t come in when he did, I would have died. My guess about the rest of the book is that that was where Antony was going to take you if he decided he wanted to try one last time to romance you. If he was successful, maybe he would have kept you alive.”

“He changed his mind after I took him into the bathroom to show him how we look the same, like family. My back was turned for a second and he jabbed me with the needle. What did you do when you woke up and found you weren’t dead?” I asked.

He looked at me like he did not like to admit what he had done, but he had no intention of hiding it from me. “I unraveled the scarf you and your mother made.”

I breathed and bit my lips together. “She gave it to you?”

“Yes.”

I waited quietly for my world to explode. Everything should have been turned upside down. It wasn’t. It was exactly the same, except for one thing. Salinger was holding me on his lap with that look on his face. He was analyzing me. He was wondering what he could do to make me feel better. He was wondering if he ought to make me feel better. Maybe what I was feeling was what I had to feel whether it was pleasant or not.

How did I feel?

I was rattled. There were so many emotions coming from so many directions. I started crying again, sobbing into his shirt.

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“Veda,” he said, lifting my head off his chest. Looking around, he yanked a doily out from under a nearby lamp and wiped my face with it.

I took it and blew my nose.

He angled in like he was planning to kiss me.

My eyes went wide. I had never seen a person that close before. I almost shoved him off, but then I remembered that I had had people that close to me… and often. I taught dancing and I was sometimes one millimeter off of being that close to my partner.

“Salinger, what are you doing?”

“I was going to comfort you. You’ve just been through a lot and you could use some… comfort.” He said the last word with a playful grin.

I put a contemplative finger to my temple. “That sounds like a lame excuse.”

“It’s true that I’d kiss you because the moon is up and then kiss you because it’s down. You are right that I’d say anything, but making out honestly feels the best when someone is a little distressed.”

“Is that so?”

“That’s been my experience,” he said, still cheeky like there was a personal joke hidden in his words.

“Salinger,” I said, my voice trembling. “Would you be surprised to learn that I have never been kissed before?”

He put a finger to his temple. “My divination has shown that. It’s shown a great many other things too. Can you see what I’ve seen?”

I started thinking of my spell book like a stack of cards, or tea leaves, or a crystal ball. If I was reading what was around me, I saw the lines of Salinger’s arms and one of his legs. In them, I could see all the readings I had ever taken and now they all made sense. “I was never going to be able to stay in Edmonton. We will never be able to prove to the police that Antony tried to kill me, and he’ll always be here, with the rest of my family. That’s why my readings always showed a future where I was gone!”

Salinger nodded. “When you do your readings, where’s Clementine?”

“She’s gone too,” I suddenly realized.

His Adam’s apple bobbed uncomfortably as he admitted the next part. “That’s because she’s coming with you, with us, up north.”

“I can’t go with you to Whitehorse! I’m a child! I can’t be your wife or anyone else’s,” I protested.

He shook his head soothingly. “I’m not asking for that. Just come up there with me and take a look around. See if you like it there, see if you like me when I’m there and if you can imagine a life for yourself there.”

I relaxed into his arms, but swamped with uncertainty, I turned to him. “And you love me?”

“I love you.”

“If I say I love you back, will you try to push me into accepting--”

He cut me off. “Calm down. I love you enough to take things at your pace. All I want today is for you to kiss me… once.”

“Only once?”

He smiled. “One real kiss from you would mean everything.”

Slowly, I said, “I’ll go to Whitehorse with you.” It was easier to agree to that.

He nodded heartily.

“And I’ll kiss you once today,” I whispered.

“What was that?” he said, bending his ear and tilting his head closer to me.

I said it even quieter, “I’ll kiss you.”

“Come again?” He came even closer.

I kissed him on the cheek.

He smiled, but said, “That was very sweet, but that isn’t going to cut it. I want a real kiss and it sounded like you said you’d give me one.”

I recoiled slightly. “I’m a bit nervous.”

He glanced at my body from my knees to the top of my head. “No, you’re not. You’re excited. Veda, it’s been very clear to me from the moment I first saw you that you want to be appreciated as a real woman. That doesn’t mean little pecks on the cheek. That means that you want me to put my hands on your waist, feel the curves I’m allowed to touch, fantasize about the ones I’m not allowed to touch yet, and get excited. You must love teasing the guys you teach to dance. They touch you, get all keyed up, and you like it. You’re not as inexperienced at this as you have convinced yourself you are.”

An uncomfortable heat colored my cheeks. “You think about the curves you’re not allowed to touch yet?”

“I’m a man, not a rock.”

“And do you think that those boys I danced with…”

“Also thought about the curves they’re not allowed to touch?” Salinger finished for me. “If I were to make a guess, they probably don’t care about dancing and only took your tutoring so they could dance with you. You take care to make sure a man notices you’re a woman and then you get that confused lost look on your face when they do? I don’t believe it. You know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

“Of course,” I admitted, allowing my face to be red without trying to cool it. “I just don’t want to blame myself for what Antony tried to do, and I don’t want...” I trailed off hesitantly.

“What?” he asked, concentrating on my face.

“I don’t want to be so charming and beautiful that you don’t have a choice about whether or not you love me. Or inadvertently turn you into what Antony has become. How much of a part did I play in that?”

A half-smile played on his lips before he said, “I don’t see why you have to take responsibility for anything Antony or I do, or make excuses for what you want. We all get the same chances and you don’t control anyone’s destiny other than your own. You’re going to have to let your feelings of responsibility toward your cousins end here.”

“But I’ve always felt responsible for them!”

He smiled. “You’re stalling.”

Even with his prompting, I still couldn’t move to place my lips on his.

He took his hands off me and scooched out from under me. “I get it. I asked for too much. Even in a place like this, I asked for too much.”

As he took his body heat from me, I suddenly felt frozen, and I clearly realized that I had been cold all my life and that when he took me in his arms, that was the first time I’d been warm. I was too slow to grab him. He was already standing next to the couch. He was walking the length of the house and taking it all in.

He shook his head faintly. “We’re in a house, on a hill, on the back of a turtle, swimming through the ocean. Is there anywhere for it to land?”

“Not really. This place is supposed to be a contained space. I made this book as a gift for my cousins so that after I died, they would be able to come here and talk to me in the same way you would go to a therapist.”

Putting his hands on the support beams of the ceiling, they were close enough for him to reach, he smiled and said, “This is a really intricate room. You are a much better writer than I am.”

My ears tingled and bells rang in my brain. Like the secretly clumsy girl I was, I got my feet out from under me, and on uncertain legs, I crossed the space on the floor between us. I had to kiss him. I leaned forward and…

The sensory experience was almost too much for a girl like me.

He had stubble on his chin. His lips were dry. He had saliva in his mouth and it tasted like something I’d never tasted before. It was unfamiliar… and too intimate. I couldn’t breathe. Was I allowed to breathe? I would never get used to what two mouths pushing against each other felt like.

It was exactly what I had always suspected about myself. I was not made for love.

At least, that was what I thought until I felt everything else. His hands were on my back, touching me, rubbing parts of my back that felt tense, then parts of my shoulders that felt tense. That felt right. That felt normal.

Without warning, the kiss on our lips felt normal. Like kissing was normal, good, and even desirable. I was desirable.

I could breathe.

He could kiss me.

And I could love him.