Last Summer at Mars Hill Read Free Page A

been that long since she’d hugged her mother?
    She started crying, and Jason drew closer to her.
    “Hey,” he whispered, his thin arm edging around her shoulders. “It’s okay, Moony, don’t cry, it’s all right—”
    How can you say that? she felt like screaming, sobs constricting her throat so she couldn’t speak. When she did talk the words came out in anguished grunts.
    “They’re dying—how can they— Jason —”
    “Shh—” he murmured. “Don’t cry, Moony, don’t cry…”
    Beside her, Jason sighed and fought the urge for another cigarette. He wished he’d thought about this earlier, come up with something to say that would make Moony feel better. Something like, Hey! Get used to it! Everybody dies! He tried to smile, but he felt only sorrow and a headache prodding at the corners of his eyes. Moony’s head felt heavy on his shoulder. He shifted on the bench, stroking her hair and whispering until she grew quiet. Then they sat in silence.
    He stared across the room, to the altar and the wall beyond, where a stained glass window would have been in another kind of chapel. Here, a single great picture window looked out onto the bay. In the distance he could see the Starry Islands glittering in the sunlight, and beyond them the emerald bulk of Blue Hill and Cadillac Mountain rising above the indigo water.
    And, if he squinted, he could see Them. The Others, like tears or blots of light floating across his retina. The Golden Ones. The Greeters.
    The Light Children.
    “Hey!” he whispered. Moony sniffed and burrowed closer into his shoulder, but he wasn’t talking to her. He was welcoming Them.
    They were the real reason people had settled here, over a century ago. They were the reason Jason and Moony and their parents and all the others came here now; although not everyone could see Them. Moony never had, nor Ariel’s friend Diana; although Diana believed in Them, and Moony did not. You never spoke of Them, and if you did, it was always parenthetically and with a capital T—“Rvis and I were looking at the moon last night (They were there) and we thought we saw a whale.” Or, “Martin came over at midnight (he saw Them on the way) and we played Scrabble…”
    A few years earlier a movement was afoot, to change the way of referring to Them. In a single slender volume that was a history of the Mars Hill spiritualist community, They were referred to as the Light Children, but no one ever really called Them that. Everyone just called them Them. It seemed the most polite thing to do, really, since no one knew what They called Themselves.
    “And we’d hate to offend Them,” as Ariel said.
    That was always a fear at Mars Hill. That, despite the gentle nature of the community’s adherents, They inadvertently would be offended one day (a too-noisy volleyball game on the rocky beach; a beer-fueled Solstice celebration irrupting into the dawn), and leave.
    But They never did. Year after year the Light Children remained. They were a magical commonplace, like the loons that nested on a nearby pond and made the night an offertory with their cries, or the rainbows that inexplicably appeared over the Bay almost daily, even when there was no rain in sight. It was the same with Them. Jason would be walking down to call his father in from sailing, or knocking at Moony’s window to awaken her for a three A.M. stroll, and suddenly there They’d be. A trick of the light, like a sundog or the aurora borealis: golden patches swimming through the cool air. They appeared as suddenly as a cormorant’s head slicing up through the water, lingering sometimes for ten minutes or so. Then They would be gone.
    Jason saw Them a lot. The chapel was one of the places They seemed to like, and so he hung out there whenever he could. Sometimes he could sense Them moments before They appeared. A shivering in the air would make the tips of his fingers go numb, and once there had been a wonderful smell, like warm buttered bread.