]tiS!
a Few Plctces I've Been
and that was all, the only spot in town where it dipped down and then swooped back up again and headed for the coast. By afternoon, they'd tell us that it had fizzled out at sea, harming no one. Before I could answer Dill, Lewis walked in behind me. I heard the bell ring and then his voice saying, "Susie, I've been looking for you all night." I turned to see his wicked face, ready to tell him everything he deserved. He walked right up to me, looked into my red eyes, ugly by then from all that crying, and he touched my chest with his abbreviated alligator finger, saying first, "I'm so sorry. You know that wasn't true," and then, only: "Home," in a cracking E.T. voice that made me laugh and also love him again. I let him back into our room on Rhubarb Lane, where we stayed until November. Almost all the leaves had fallen. We wanted to get back before Thanksgiving. The night before we'd leave, Lewis sank into the rose-sheeted bed and curled up against my back, staying just that way all night. The air outside chilled into the year's first frost, all the flowers curled and wilted by morning, and each blade of grass coated in white. And we thought that night, and for the whole year that followed, that we would be together forever, the two of us in love, the first ones to feel it like this. We didn't last much more than the year before we slipped away from each other, me asking too many questions (reassure, reassure), and Lewis wanting something big and wild from the world that-he thought- ! didn't have. Maybe, right then, I didn't. But I would one day. One day, he'd come looking for me again. THAT TORNADO MORNING AT THE CuSHION CAFE when Lewis and I found each other again, Dill took one look at our faces and got this slow sweet grin, and his eyes lost their hound dog look for a minute while he saw himself in his own good past, his whole other life that he never told to us. Living for a moment in sweet private secrets. Rooms with doors that close on shadows, rooted that way forever in our minds. J!'
Summer- Fa\12006
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