Torn Away

by Jennifer Brown

  She sniffled some more, blinking and calming down as she tried to understand what I was giving her.

  “What’s this?” she said, pulling a crumpled tissue out of her pants pocket and wiping her cheeks with it.

  I licked my lips. “This is Marin,” I said.

  Slowly, with shaky hands, she reached out and plucked a foil out of my palm. She unfolded it, looking uncertain.

  “ ‘Marin loves scorpions,’ ” she read. She flicked a curious glance at me, then reached out and took another. “ ‘Marin is a monkey.’ ”

  And even though my drawings couldn’t possibly have made sense to her, she took another and then another, reading each one aloud, sometimes laughing a wet laugh and sometimes unable to finish the sentence for the tears in her voice. She met her other granddaughter that way, one chewed-up memory at a time.

  We sat down on the ground together at my mom’s feet, the purse open between us so my grandmother could put the foils down without their blowing away. I explained some of them. The same way she told me about my mom’s cut bangs and swimming prowess, I told her about Marin’s peach-colored leotard and about the East Coast Swing. I picked at the petals of one of Mom’s roses as I talked, and my grandmother cried and asked questions and laughed and interjected and cried some more.

  Finally, when we were both talked and cried out, I turned onto my knees and placed the bouquets of flowers on each grave, wiping dirt that had gotten stuck on my palms onto the sides of my shirt. I assessed how the flowers looked, and then, struck by a moment of bravery, I decided that if I was on my knees anyway, I might as well give talking to my mom a try.

  At last.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY

  My grandfather had said that to pray was to speak from my heart. So that’s exactly what I did. I pressed my palms together and closed my eyes, feeling shaky and nervous and self-conscious. I talked silently, in my head, so my grandmother couldn’t hear what I had to say. We had started to get to know each other, but that didn’t mean I wanted her to know everything. I still wanted to keep some things to myself.

  Hey, God, I said. I know you’re keeping Mom and Marin safe up there and everything, and I’m really glad about that. I’m sure they were scared when they got to you. So thanks for taking care of them. I took a breath and squeezed my palms together tighter. I’m, um… not sure how to do this, but I’d really kind of like to talk to my mom, if that’s okay. I haven’t gotten to say anything to her since she died.

  My knees pressed into the soft ground, and I let my butt sink slowly to rest on the backs of my legs. I squeezed my eyes tight, like I’d done before, and tried to picture Mom’s face in my mind.

  And just when I thought the image would never come, it did.

  She was smiling at me. Laughing, maybe. There was sunlight highlighting the top of her head and she was wearing that ridiculous pair of sunglasses that I’d always made fun of because they were so huge.

  I felt such love radiating off her, the words poured out of my heart.

  Hi, Mom, I said in my head. I’m sorry you haven’t heard from me until now. I didn’t know how to talk to you at first and I was afraid that if I started talking to you it would mean you were really dead. Which is stupid, of course, because you’ve been really dead all along. I’ve just had a hard time believing it.

  So I guess you’ve seen everything that’s happened since you died. All the stuff with Ronnie and Clay and Lexi and Meg. I’m not gonna lie, Mom, it’s been hard. And scary. And every day I wish I had died with you. Not that I’m suicidal or anything, so you don’t need to worry about that. Just that I wish I hadn’t been left behind, all alone. That part really sucks.

  But I’ve learned a few things. Like that Ronnie loved you so much he can’t live without you. Which, even though it hurt me, is kind of cool in a way.

  And that Clay is maybe the worst man on earth and I will never, ever be stuck in the same room with him again. At first I didn’t understand why you lied to me about him leaving us, and I felt really betrayed. I thought everything I knew about you might have been a lie, but since meeting him and your parents, I’ve realized that the parts of you I knew weren’t untrue; they were only part-truths. There were lots of things about you that I didn’t know, and learning those things has actually been comforting in a way. They make me feel closer to you. And I can see that actually there’s one real truth, and that is you loved me enough to do anything it took to protect me. I think that’s something I’ve known my whole life. I’m thankful for it.

  Grandma Patty and Grandpa Barry. Well, they’re not so bad, Mom. Maybe I just haven’t seen the bad side of them yet, and maybe someday I will and I’ll totally understand all the things you said about them. But right now I don’t feel like I have to hold my breath when I’m around them as much, which is good, because they’re my only choice.

  I think about you all the time. You and Marin both, but mainly you. I remember all the stuff we did together, and the little moments when you did awesome things like get us out of bed to go get ice cream or buy us snowboards or that time you read the entire Harry Potter series out loud to us. It took you like six months, but you never complained.

  Do you remember that time you took me to the water park? Just me, because Marin wasn’t born yet and you hadn’t even met Ronnie. I think I was in third grade, maybe? You wore your red polka-dotted swimsuit and I had that bikini with the stripes that I hated because it made me feel fat.

  Anyway, we went to the water park and we rode that huge slide. I think it was called the Slippery Cyclone. Remember how you had to talk and talk to get me on it? I was so scared. That slide was so tall and the pool at the end looked so deep and I wasn’t sure if I could touch the bottom.

  I was afraid something would happen to me if I sat down and let myself go. But, worse than that, I was afraid something would happen to you. That you’d fly off into the woods and smash onto the rocks below or that the slide would cave in and crush you or that you’d just never come down and I’d be treading water at the bottom of that slide forever and ever waiting for you. Waiting for those red-and-white polka dots to swoosh around that last corner.

  That’s how I feel now, Mom. Like I’m treading water and you’re not coming down the slide. I can’t touch the bottom here, and I’m scared. I want you back.

  There are some things I never got to say. I’m sorry, Mom, for all the times I got mad and was mean to you. I’m sorry about the time I told you I hated you because you wouldn’t let me go to Jane’s house on Ronnie’s birthday. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I loved you when you took Marin to dance the night of the tornado. If I had to do it all over again, I would like to say I’d take all those things back, but I don’t know if I would. We were close, so close sometimes we screamed at each other, and I’ve been thinking that maybe those things were just different sides of the same coin. When we were screaming hateful things, it was only because we were feeling loving things. I don’t know, maybe that sounds stupid. But I like to think that way, because it makes me feel as if even though I didn’t show it sometimes, you still knew how much I loved you.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “everything.” Whenever something horrible happens, you hear people say they “lost everything.” They lost their house, or their car or their stuff or whatever, and to them it feels like “everything.” But they have no idea what it’s really like to lose everything. I thought I knew, but now I realize even I haven’t lost everything, because I still have that polka-dot swimsuit in my memory. I still have those ice cream nights and the snowboards and the scorpion that scared Marin and the Barking Bulldogs sweatshirt and the robin’s-egg-blue nail polish. Somehow having those things makes the other stuff matter less.

  I’m wondering if it’s even possible to lose “everything,” or if you just have to keep redefining what “everything” is. Because I didn’t know it before, but somehow Grandpa Barry and Grandma Patty fit into my “everything” now, and even if I’m not sure yet
how they fit, they’re there.

  I guess that’s just my way of saying you don’t need to worry about me giving up. I’m just going to keep redefining “everything” for as long as I need to, because I’m pretty sure that’s the best way to keep on going when you feel like you’ve lost it all.

  I’ve learned a lot of new things about you from a lot of different people, but one thing everyone agrees on is that you were headstrong. You were tough. You taught me how to be tough, too. You taught me how to tread water and how to swim out of the deep end. But I’ll probably be looking for that red swimsuit for a while yet.

  I love you, Mom, and I miss you so much. Tell Marin I said I love her, too. And I miss the way she hums.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  The first thing I carried into our Elizabeth duplex was a litter box. I’d set it in the laundry room closet and poured litter into it, hoping Swing would get the hang of it in our new place.

  She was a gray-and-white ball of trouble, or at least that’s what my grandfather called her after the fourth or fifth time he had to pluck her from the top of the drapes, which she was forever climbing, and she still had blue eyes. My grandmother said eventually her eyes would turn gold, like other cats’ eyes, but for now the fuzz and the wide blue eyes made her so heartbreakingly cute I could barely stand it.

  Marin would have been over the moon with her.

  We had gone out and adopted the cat the day my grandparents found the duplex we’d be living in from August to May. She was our celebration.

  “What are you going to name her?” my grandmother had asked in the car on the way home, the little kitten mewing loudly in my lap. I stroked her head to calm her.

  I’d thought about how much Marin had wanted a cat, how she’d never even gotten one of the porcelain birthday kittens that I had gotten every year. I wanted to name this cat something important to Marin.

  “Swing,” I said. “E. C. Swing.”

  “Sounds fancy,” my grandfather had said, and I’d grinned. Marin would have loved a fancy name for a fancy cat.

  We officially moved in the week before school was supposed to start. Most of Elizabeth was still barely out of cleanup mode, just beginning to rebuild, and we were uncertain who all would be making it back for senior year. The library remained the place where everyone caught up, and as the first day grew nearer, more and more of us showed up there, taking over the parking lot. The librarians didn’t appear to mind. They seemed to like being the place where the crippled community felt comfortable gathering again.

  I went with Dani a few times, while my grandparents stayed at the duplex and got us settled. Jane was still in Kansas City, and it didn’t look like her house would be rebuilt before school started. Which meant she wouldn’t be back for senior year. Dani and I would be a duo, and I wasn’t sure how we would do without Jane. We made her promise to visit a lot.

  Three days before school started, Kolby showed up in the library parking lot, his arm still wrapped in a weeping bandage. His sister, Tracy, who seemed to have grown up so fast, hovered near him every step he took. At first people stared and whispered, but then someone asked him about it, and when he told the story, girls cried and people called him a badass and he smiled, relaxed.

  I sidled up to him. “I’m really sorry,” I said.

  “About what?”

  I pointed at his arm. “I didn’t clean it good enough.”

  He held it up and shrugged. “It’s not your fault, Jersey,” he said. “It’s nobody’s fault. It is what it is. The whole thing is what it is.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  He shrugged again, shook his head, then grinned and nodded. “Like ten thousand mothers,” he said. “Not as bad anymore, though. But at first it was wicked. And I was pissed off.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know the feeling.” In some ways it was like Kolby and I were both nursing the same infection, only mine was on the inside. We were both healing, but not without the scars to remind us that the cut, deep and painful, had been there.

  Some girls came by and told him they were inspired by his story, and Kolby kind of ate it up a little bit, the good old Kolby I’d always known. After they left, his mom pulled up to the curb and honked, ducking and bobbing her head to find him in the crowd. He bumped my shoulder with his. “So admit it. I have a pretty nice ass, don’t I?” he joked, holding his arm up and waving it in front of me. I couldn’t help laughing.

  “You’re disgusting,” I said, but I was happy to see that what had happened to him hadn’t broken his stride any, and hadn’t changed things between us.

  “Come on, Kolby, we gotta go,” Tracy said, heading toward the car. He started after her, then turned back.

  “I’m glad you came back to Elizabeth,” he said. “ ’Cause there’s something I want to ask you.”

  “What?”

  He held out his arm and pointed to the bandage. “How do you feel about guys with scars? Pretty hot, right?”

  I laughed, a little tingling sensation in my chest, and nodded. “Definitely hot.” I tugged at my hair. “That is, if you care what purple-haired chicks think.”

  “I was hoping you’d feel that way.” He smirked. “And I like the purple. Makes your eyes stand out.” Quickly, he bent and kissed me on the cheek, then strode to his mom’s car without missing a beat. “I’ll call you,” he said as he ducked inside.

  Later that night, when Dani’s mom dropped me off at the duplex, I found my grandmother pushing the couch out of the way, against the wall in the living room.

  “Oh, good, I’m glad you’re home,” she said when she saw me. She bent and fiddled with the little CD player that had been in their garage back in Waverly.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Music started to pour out of the speakers, and my grandmother twisted the volume knob to make it louder. Swing swatted at the power cord, which hung down the back of a little table. My grandmother turned and held her arms out as horns started playing in the background.

  “What’s…?” I asked again, but then it dawned on me what she was doing. She began to bob, bending her knees up and down to the time of the music.

  “May I have this dance?” she asked, and I laughed out loud.

  “Sure, why not?” I said. I kicked off my shoes and dropped Marin’s purse next to the front door and went to her.

  When Marin was born, my mom told me that family had nothing to do with blood, but only had to do with what was in your heart. I felt sad for her, that she’d cut her family, my grandparents, out of her heart.

  And I felt sad that she’d left me with a heart so empty of family. Without her, I had been confused and lonely, unsure who I belonged to.

  Clay was right. He wasn’t my family, because I wasn’t in his heart.

  But my grandparents’ hearts were open. I still didn’t know when or how far I could open my own heart, but I knew that if I wanted the family I’d never had, all I needed to do was open up and let them in.

  My grandmother enveloped me in her arms, perfecting our form, and then slowly moved her feet for me to follow. “Betcha didn’t know your sister’s dance genes were inherited,” she said.

  I stumbled, frowned. “I think I missed that gene.”

  Suddenly, she whisked me into a twirl and I giggled. When we were face-to-face again, she raised her eyebrows. “That’s why you have me,” she said.

  And she taught me the East Coast Swing, both of us humming along happily.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, as always, I want to thank my agent, Cori Deyoe at 3 Seas Literary Agency, for the many hours spent pushing me forward, holding me up, and making me smile.

  Thank you to my editors, Pam Garfinkel and Julie Scheina, for discussi
ng and suggesting and making sure what’s inside my head matches what’s on the paper. Thank you to everyone at Little, Brown, including Barbara Bakowski, Erin McMahon, Victoria Stapleton, and the many others who work tirelessly on my behalf.

  Thank you to Daffny Atwell for the name suggestion, and to her sister, Jersey, for letting me borrow. Thank you to Susan Vollenweider for the constant support.

  Thank you to Paige, Weston, and Rand for letting summer break be all about the revisions, and thank you, Scott, for… just everything.

  A special thank-you to Joplin Public Library, which refused to cancel my appearance scheduled for just weeks after tornado devastation destroyed much of the city. Thank you to the many community members who came to hear me speak, and especially to librarian Cari Boatright Rerat, who took me on a driving tour of the devastated area after my presentation. The spirit of Joplin inspired me.

  AUTHOR’S

  NOTE

  On a late Sunday afternoon in May 2011, the city of Joplin, Missouri, was hit by a deadly EF-5 tornado. The twister was nearly a mile wide and carved a six-mile gash through the city, the 200-mile-per-hour winds destroying everything in their path. Homes were leveled and businesses devastated, causing billions of dollars in damage. More than 150 people died. Many others lost everything.

  For months, I had been scheduled to speak at the Joplin Public Library. My appearance was supposed to happen just weeks after the tornado, in late July. Of course, upon seeing the news coverage of the tornado, I was sure my program would be canceled. Who could expect the people of a ravaged town to have time for an author event? I e-mailed the librarian, telling her that my thoughts and prayers were with them and I’d be happy to reschedule whenever they were ready.