Yellow

The reservoir had a flat rock on the eastern bank, barely above the waterline when the summer was wet and jutting a good foot out when it was dry, and they had been going there since they were fifteen and calling it theirs without ever saying so out loud, the way best friends claim places by returning to them until returning becomes the point.

Eli kept a yellow stone in his pocket. He'd found it in their third summer — quartz, he thought, shot through with something metallic that caught the afternoon light and held it — and he'd kept it because Marcus had picked it up first, turned it over once in his hands and said, without looking up, it's the same colour as your shirt. That was all. He'd handed it back and waded into the water, and Eli had closed his fist around the stone and understood, for the first time, what it felt like to want something so much that keeping a rock could feel like enough.

He was nineteen. He had known he was in love with his best friend for four years, with the slow certain weight of something growing in a dark room, pressing toward a light it could not name. He had been very good at not saying anything about it. He had, in fact, been excellent.

Then the summer of their nineteenth year, two weeks after Marcus's birthday, on the flat rock with their feet trailing in the water and the sky going spectacular in the west —

He said it.

I think I'm in love with you. Six words. He'd been holding them for four years like a stone in a closed fist.

Marcus went very still. The kind of still that is not peace but the moment before a verdict. Eli watched his face instead of the sky and what he saw there was not what he had hoped for — not a matching thing, not the quiet exhale of someone who had been waiting too — but something more complicated. A careful closing. A door not slamming but being very deliberately and gently shut.

Eli. Just his name. Said in a way that was kind and final at the same time, which Eli would later understand to be the most particular kind of cruelty — the cruelty that does not know it is cruel.

Forget I said it, Eli said quickly. I mean it. Just — forget it.

Marcus did not forget it. He could see that clearly in the way Marcus looked at him in the moment after — the way you look at something that has just become a problem you don't know how to solve, and are hoping will solve itself if left alone. Eli pocketed the stone. They sat for another twenty minutes without talking and then they went home separately and Eli lay in his bedroom staring at the ceiling with his hand pressed flat against his own sternum, as if he could push the feeling back down into wherever it had come from.

I should not have said it. I knew as the words were leaving my mouth that I should not have said it and I said it anyway because four years is a long time and the sky was doing something extraordinary and he was sitting right there and I am, it turns out, not as good at keeping things inside me as I believed.

· · ·

It was Marcus's younger brother who told people. He'd been somewhere nearby at the reservoir — they had not noticed, they never noticed Danny, Danny was sixteen and invisible in the way of younger brothers — and Danny told someone at school, and that someone told someone else, and the town was small and the summer was long and there was nothing else particularly interesting happening.

By August everyone knew.

By August Eli's father had heard.

· · ·

His father's name was Robert Marsh and he was not, by most measures, a cruel man. He paid his bills and remembered birthdays and coached Little League for seven years. He was a product of a small town and a particular generation and a particular church on Garfield Street, and none of these things are excuses — Eli understood this and had always understood it — but they are what made him the kind of man who could do what he did next and believe, with his whole heart, that he was doing right by his son.

He came into Eli's room on a Thursday evening and he shut the door behind him and he stood at the foot of the bed with his arms hanging at his sides and he said: is it true.

Eli was sitting cross-legged on his bed with a book he had not been reading. He looked at his father's face — the face he had been looking at his entire life, the face he had looked at first when he was small and afraid and needed something solid — and he thought: he already knows. This is already done.

yes, he said.

The word that came from his father's mouth then was faggot — said not loudly, not with theatrics, but with a flatness and a weight that was somehow worse than shouting would have been. The word deployed like a verdict. Like a classification. Like the door being locked rather than just shut. Then: You are not my son. Not like this. Not in my house.

He left. He came back ten minutes later with a bag. He set it on the bed. He said: You have until morning.

Eli packed yellow things. He didn't plan to — his hands just found them in the dark of the wardrobe, the yellow shirts, the yellow hoodie, the yellow flannel he'd had since he was seventeen. He filled the bag with the colour Marcus had once said suited him and he walked out of his childhood home at eleven at night with his father standing in the hallway watching and he did not look back. He understood that if he looked back he would not survive it.

The porch light was on. It was on when I left. I kept waiting to hear him call me back. The light stayed on for a long time — I could see it getting smaller as I walked. It stayed on. He didn't call me back. I don't know why the light being on made it worse. I think it was because it looked like someone had left it on for someone they expected to return.

· · ·

The town had a particular quality in the weeks that followed — the way small places do when a secret has become public knowledge, a slight over-brightness in the eyes of people who see you, a fractional pause before the hello, the careful looking-away of people who used to look at you directly. The ones who were not careful: the boys from school. He heard faggot from a car window three times in two weeks. Heard queer from someone who had sat next to him in English for three years. Once someone threw something from a moving vehicle — not accurately, just in his direction, a this is what we think of you gesture — and he did not run. He kept walking. He kept his face very still.

He stayed at his cousin Regan's for two weeks until Regan's husband started making his discomfort known in the way small discomforts are made known in households — through silences, through comments, through the quality of the air at dinner. He found a room above Teller's Laundromat on Marsh Street and paid for it with money from a job at the BP on the edge of town where the night manager asked no questions and the overnight shift was quiet enough that he could be entirely alone with himself for eight hours running.

He waited for Marcus to call.

Marcus did not call.

I understood why. I did — I genuinely did. His family went to the same church as my father. His brother was the one who'd told. If he stood beside me he would have been standing beside the thing they were already calling him by association. The town was the only life he had, the only future he could see from where he was standing. I understood every morning in the room above the laundromat when the machines came on at six and the first thought I had was his name and the second thought was the understanding, patient and complete. The understanding was very little company at six in the morning. But I understood. He did not call. He did not call. He did not call.

· · ·

In September — a Friday, the weather turning — he went back to the reservoir one last time.

The flat rock was the same. Of course it was. The water was lower with the dry end of summer, the rock out its full height, the same pale lichens on the north face he had been looking at since he was fifteen. He sat and put his feet in and the water was cold and he took the yellow stone from his pocket and held it in both hands.

He wrote the letter there, on the rock, with a pen that kept catching on the paper where the damp had got into it. He wrote carefully and slowly, stopping several times. He wrote for a long time.

When he was done he folded the letter around the stone and put both inside the small waterproof bag he'd brought for the purpose, sealed it, and found the crack in the rock's eastern face — the crack below the waterline that widened into a shelf when you reached your hand in — and he wedged the bag inside it, deep enough that it wouldn't wash loose, and he smoothed the rock face over it with his hand.

He stood. He looked at the water for a while.

He walked home through the birches and the birches were turning and the light through them was the particular gold of the last days of summer going, and he kept walking, and the reservoir went quiet behind him, and the yellow stone was in the rock in the water, and he was done.

A year. That is how long it took him to go back.

He had driven past the reservoir forty-something times in twelve months and turned the wheel the other way each time — not a conscious choice, just the wheel going the direction the rest of him was already going — and then one afternoon in the late autumn of the following year he found himself on the path through the birches without having decided to be there. The leaves were down. The path was soft. He kept walking.

Eli had died in October of the previous year. The official account was accident — the BP station, the late shift, a road that was dark and wet and unforgiving. Marcus had accepted the official account because the alternative required knowing something he could not put down, and he was already carrying enough. He had been carrying it for a year. He would, he understood, be carrying it for considerably longer than that.

I did not go to the funeral. I told myself it was because his father had been clear that certain people were not welcome and I was probably one of those people. That was true. But it was not the reason. The reason was that if I walked into that room I would have had to look at what I had done, and I was not ready for that, and I am still not ready for that, and I am not sure there is a version of ready I will ever reach.

He sat on the flat rock and looked at the water. The surface of it had that gunmetal quality the reservoir got in November — not black, not grey, something between the two, a colour with no good name. He sat with his feet pulled up because the water was cold now, nothing like the June water they used to wade into, and he did not do anything in particular. He had been doing that a lot in the past year: sitting in places without doing anything, as if the doing had gone out of him.

His mother had told him to talk to someone. He had said he was fine, which was not true, but he did not know how to explain what the truth was — which was that the thing he needed to talk about was the thing he could not say, and the person he most needed to say it to was not available, and would not be available, and he had made certain of that by keeping his mouth shut for an entire summer while the town turned on a person he loved.

loved. past tense. loved. I loved him. That is the sentence I have not said aloud to anyone and have been saying inside my own head every day for a year. I loved him and I was twenty years old and afraid and the town was the only thing I could see, and I chose the town, and now I am sitting on a rock in November with no one and the town has not noticed and has not cared and has not given me anything back in exchange for what I gave it, and I chose the town, and I chose the town, and I chose the town.

The light was going — that flat November light that gives up early without ceremony — when he noticed something in the crack along the eastern face of the rock. He had been sitting on this rock for five years. He knew the shape of it the way he knew the shape of his own hands. There was something in the crack below the waterline that had not been there before, or that he had not seen before, or that he had not been ready to see before.

He reached in.

A waterproof bag. He held it and his brain caught up slowly to what his hands were already doing. Inside the bag: a folded square of paper, damp at the edges but intact, the way things that have been carefully placed are intact, and wrapped in the paper —

The yellow stone.

He recognised it before he could stop himself from recognising it. He had held it himself once, a long time ago, on a summer afternoon when they were fifteen and the world was not yet what it would become. It's the same colour as your shirt. He had handed it back without understanding what he was handing back. He was twenty years old before he understood what he had handed back.

His hands were shaking. He did not realise this until he tried to unfold the paper and could not.

He took a breath. He unfolded it.

He read it.

Marcus — I'm not writing this so you'll feel bad. Please know that first. I have thought about this letter for a long time and I need you to know that feeling bad is not the point and is not what I want for you. If you're reading this you found it, which means you came back to the rock, which means I was right about you. You always did come back to things. · · · I loved you. I have loved you since we were fifteen and you said my yellow shirt suited me, and I don't think you even remember saying it — it was nothing to you, just a thing you said while looking at the water — but I kept it. I kept all of it. Every small thing. I built something out of every small careless kind thing you ever said to me without knowing you were saying it, and I built it for four years, and it was very large by the time I told you, and I am sorry I said it like that, at the reservoir, without warning. That was not fair to you. · · · I am not angry about the summer. I want you to know that. You were scared and the town was small and Danny had a big mouth and your family was watching, and I understood every day. You did not have to explain it to me. I understood it the way you understand something you wish you didn't — completely, without comfort. I just needed you to know that you were the best thing in my life. The summers. The rock. The way you'd hand me the last of whatever you were drinking without being asked. The way you'd come find me in the morning when I hadn't answered my phone. All of it. All the small ordinary accumulated weight of you — that was the best thing. · · · Be happy. I mean that sincerely. Fall in love with someone who gets to keep you, and don't be afraid of it, because you were always braver than you let yourself know. The stone was always yours. I'm just returning it. — Eli

Marcus sat on the rock with the letter in both hands and the stone pressed into his palm and the sky went the rest of the way dark and the water went black around the rock and he sat there. He did not cry at first. There was something past crying — a place where the chest seizes and the throat locks and the eyes simply will not produce what the body is supposedly designed to produce in these moments — and he sat in that place instead, in the locked cold of it.

Eli had forgiven him. Eli had sat on this rock and written him a letter that forgave him. Eli had known, apparently, that Marcus would eventually come back, would eventually reach his hand into the crack in the rock, would eventually be ready to read what was in there — and had prepared for it, had left something for that version of Marcus to find, had thought about what that person would need to hear.

That was the thing that broke him open. Not the absence. The forgiveness. The care that had been taken with the forgiveness, the deliberateness of it, the fact that Eli had used his last summer to write a letter that would make Marcus feel less alone after he was gone. The generosity of that. The unbearable, annihilating generosity of that.

He knew I would come back. He knew and he prepared for it and he left me something warm to find in the cold and I don't know what to do with that. I don't know what you do with being known that well by someone you let down that completely. I don't know what you do with any of this. I don't know. I don't know. I should have called. I should have called on the first day and every day after and I should have stood in the street outside his father's house and said his name as many times as it took and I was twenty years old and afraid and I have to live the rest of my life knowing that I was twenty years old and afraid and that it mattered. I should have called. I should have called. I should have called.

He sat there until the stars were out, and the water was black, and the stone in his fist was warm from his hand. He sat there until he stopped being locked and started shaking, and then until he stopped shaking and started weeping, and then until that stopped too and there was only the dark and the cold and the ordinary quiet sounds of the water and the trees.

He put the letter inside his jacket, against his chest.

He kept the stone.

He stood on the flat rock above the dark reservoir and he looked at the place where both their feet had been for five summers running — at the particular dip in the rock's surface where the water collected and caught the sky — and he said Eli's name out loud. Just his name. Once. Into the dark, into the cold, into the completely indifferent November air.

There was no answer.

There would not be an answer.

He walked home through the birches with the letter over his heart and the stone in his closed fist and behind him the reservoir went on being still and cold and exactly itself — full of dark water and last light and the absolute silence of a place where nothing important is still happening, where everything important already happened and is over, and was over, and would always now be over — and the birches stood the way birches stand, pale and patient and entirely without mercy, and he walked between them, and did not look back, and the dark took the path behind him as he went.