Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

something like this when I never, ever suspected that I could, there might be other things waiting ahead. It’s incredible.” He ran his hands down a dead maple. “What if I had never come to Belle Haven? What if Rusty had never given me that knife? What if I had never found these trees? What if I’d lived and died without ever knowing how unbelievably satisfying it is to make something like this?”

He sat down and stretched his long legs out in front of him, tipped his head back so that the sun struck his face. “There have been lots of times in my life when I’ve done something beautiful in my head, but I’ve never come close to achieving the same perfection outside of my skull. When I was a kid, I thought up the most wonderful birdhouse, but when I tried to build the thing, I simply made a mess. French. That was another thing. After four years of classes, I could speak it so well in my head, but when I opened my mouth, it came out lousy. Although I suppose those things had more to do with inexperience than anything. But there’s more to most things than experience. If there weren’t, there would be thousands of Mozarts.”

He looked at Rachel to see if she understood what he was saying, but she was still gazing silently at Holly’s face. He trailed his fingers absently through the grass. “I’ve painted paintings in my head,” he said, “composed music, designed machines. All things that should not be so difficult to lift from my mind and make. That’s the only part I couldn’t do: make the thing, whatever it was.

“But there’s a synapse. I don’t know what to call it. A hiatus. Even in the making of a birdhouse, even if you know how to use a hammer and where to place a nail, there’s something else you have to have in order to do it right. With a birdhouse, maybe it’s nothing more than a knack. In the case of a symphony, a really good symphony, you have to have knowledge, and experience, and whatever bridges the hiatus. I don’t know what to call it.” He shook his head. “It sounds too pretentious to call it a gift. But I think that I may have been given a little piece of it. Just enough. And there’s only one thing that ruins it.”

Rachel turned away from the carving.

Joe pulled his knees up to his chest. He shook his head. He looked everywhere but at Rachel—the sky, the trees—and finally closed his eyes. His hands lay still in the ferns. Rachel could see his throat working.

“What ruins it?” she said, moving next to him, kneeling by his side. When he made a small sound in his throat and dropped his head into his hands, Rachel put her arms around him. He tucked his head into her neck, and Rachel was reminded of the night a year earlier when he had called his father.

He had never told anyone, not even Rachel, what he’d learned that night. But now he did.

“When I called my father last May,” he said, his voice terrible, “he told me that Holly had died.”

At which Rachel pulled back sharply to look into his face and then took him again into her arms, shutting her eyes. “Oh, my Joe,” she said. But he did not seem to hear her.

“He told me that she had been in a terrible car accident in San Francisco. Right after she arrived there. Right after she left home. She wasn’t driving. She didn’t have a car and I’m not even sure she knew how to drive. But there was a lot of fog. It was late at night.” He took a long breath. “No one was sure what happened. And I don’t really remember what else my father said about it. He told me a lot of things that night. He told me that she had already been cremated. Everything over and done with.” (And here again Rachel felt as if she had slipped backward through the months to arrive at the feel of cold water around her bare ankles and the sight of ashes moving like a bird’s shadow downstream.) “He told me that if anyone was to blame for my not knowing, it was me. I was the one who had left without a word. I was the one to blame for a lot of things.” Joe lifted his head. “And that’s what ruins this.” He looked into the gallery of trees.

“But I still don’t understand why.”

Joe gestured impatiently toward the dead branches. “Everything I’ve done here is tied to what I did back there.” He scoured his face with his hands. “If I hadn’t given Holly the money, she wouldn’t have left, she wouldn’t have gone to San Francisco, she wouldn’t have died. And if she hadn’t died, I might … I’m sure I would have left Belle Haven a year ago, or at least never stayed anywhere near this long. If she hadn’t died, I might never have discovered that I could do something like this.” He nodded toward the carving among the trees. “If she hadn’t died, if I hadn’t stayed in Belle Haven, maybe there wouldn’t have been anything to discover.”

“Is that what your father told you that night?” she asked, looking again into his face. “That it was your fault Holly died?”

“I don’t want to talk about him anymore,” Joe said.

“What a bastard,” she muttered, shaking her head. “You can’t avoid being involved in other peoples’ lives. Especially when they’re your family. But that doesn’t mean you’re to blame for Holly’s death, or that your”—she swept a hand toward the tree—“your ability is tainted by it.”

“It feels that way. Holly simply wouldn’t have died when and how she did if I hadn’t meddled with her life.”

“No,” Rachel admitted. “She wouldn’t have died then and there. But that doesn’t mean you killed her. It just means that you were involved