Becoming Calder(36)

I waited a minute until my body had settled down, and then waded toward her and pulled myself up on the rock, too. I lay back and turned my head to look over at her. Her head was already turned, looking at me as well. "Thank you for teaching me things, Calder," she said.

"You teach me things, too, Eden," I said back.

She regarded me silently for a minute and then simply smiled in answer.

Then we both tilted our heads toward the sun.





CHAPTER NINE




Eden



Over the next few months, I met Calder mostly everyday for my lessons. Some days we missed seeing each other when his chores got in the way, or when there were too many council members at the main lodge. Those days were the hardest. But the days we did meet, Calder would recline lazily against a rock and draw something or another while he taught me math, science, and the rules I didn't know about the English language. Often, he'd have to stop and go over something in the notebook I filled with everything he talked about. But mostly I just took notes, and then the next day, he'd quiz me a little. I was an excellent student. Of course, I knew the value of knowledge, having been deprived of it for so long.

I didn't just learn the academics Calder taught me, I learned them from his specific point of view. Not just the information he remembered, but the way he saw the world. When we lay on the grass and looked up at the sky and talked about the color spectrum, he told me about a rainbow he'd seen once as he watered the tomato crops in the fields, after too short of a rainfall to do any good. It was as if each time a rainbow appeared, that rich smell of soil came back to him, and Elysium and earth were joined for just that moment, even if only in his own mind. We'd both gotten slightly sleepy, lying there together, and he'd been musing when he said it and he almost looked embarrassed when he realized he'd been speaking aloud. But I loved those moments—when just for a second, I was a part of Calder's innermost mind. It humbled me and warmed me, as if for just a moment, I'd stepped into a ray of sunlight.

He was goodness—raw, unguarded goodness. It glowed in him. It was impossible not to want to drown in that type of beauty . . . to feel like I could happily wrap around his bones and suffocate in his skin.

It alarmed me, and comforted me.

As we lay by our spring day after day, Calder not only told me the things he remembered from each year of his schooling, but he told me the things he'd learned from the others living in our community who had previously lived in the big society. He had learned about gambling from a man who had come to be a part of our family five years previous. He'd told Calder, as he worked alongside him, that he'd had a real problem with going to big casinos, places where adult games were played for money. If you won, you went home with more money, and if you lost, you went home with nothing. He'd lost far more than he'd won and in the end, he lost everything: his wife, his children, his job, and his friends. No one wanted him. That's when Hector had come along. And Hector had wanted him.

There were many of those stories, and I listened intently to them all.

Physically, Calder kept his distance from me, flinching when I got too near, watching me like a hawk. I wasn't so naïve I didn't understand he was having a difficult time with our closeness, and I had been telling the truth when I'd said I was going to pour all my focus into learning, but it still stung. And the unfairness of it made me angry.

Yes, my childish crush had disappeared, but I knew him now. I knew his kindness, and his protective nature. I knew his patient spirit and his sharp wit. Simply put, I was in love with him. As if my love for Calder could ever be simple.

Meeting him at our spring for an hour and a half every afternoon, as my friend and my tutor, wasn't everything. But it would have to be enough.

We didn't meet again in the evening. Clive Richter was home at night and he always seemed to be watching for me. It was safer to keep our lessons to the daytime hours. I wouldn't jeopardize those.

We talked about the names for groups of animals one day. "Gorillas come in a band, grasshoppers come in a cloud, pigs come in a team," he said as I wrote down the list. He named a few more and then couldn't remember any more. I sighed.

"Sorry," he said, laughing slightly. "I told you, I could only give you what I remember."

"The problem is," I said, tapping my pencil on my chin, "if you were prompted, or given a choice of a few, you could probably remember a lot more than you think. It's somewhere in there." I tapped my pencil on his head.

"Ouch."

I rolled my eyes. "But me, all I have is what you give me. There's literally no more."

"Well then, good thing I'm smarter than the everyday person." He winked. "I figure, even having a quarter of what I ever learned, you're better off than the average numbskull."