I'll Give You the Sun

by Jandy Nelson

you will be in his heart

  (Thanks, but no thanks. I did this with Zephyr.)

  I pretend she’s a normal dead person: silent.

  There’s a tap-tapping of heels on the cement floor. Oscar glances out the door. “Sophia! In here.” Definitely not the plumber, unless the plumber wears stilettos. He turns to me. I can tell he wants to say something before we’re interrupted. “Look, bad news I may be, but I’m not a stranger. You said so yourself. ‘I’m so familiar to you,’” he mimics me with perfect beach girl inflection, then snaps the cover on his lens. “I’m certain I’ve never met you until that day in the church, but I’m also certain I was meant to meet you. Don’t think me a nutter, but it’s been prophesized.”

  “Prophesized?” I say. Is this the Information? It must be. “By whom?”

  “My mum. On her deathbed. Her very last words were about you.”

  What someone says to you right before they die will come true?

  • • •

  Sophia—definitely not his little sister nor his great-aunt—and her comet of red hair streaks into the room. She has on a fuchsia fifties swing dress with a neckline that plunges to the equator. Green-and-gold sparkling sweeps wing her pale blue eyes.

  She glitters like she walked out of a Klimt painting.

  “Hello my darling,” she says to Oscar in a thick accent, I swear, identical to Count Dracula’s.

  She kisses his left cheek, right cheek, then presses her lips to his in a long, lingering finale. Very long and lingering. My chest caves in.

  Still lingering . . .

  Friends do not greet each other like this. Under any circumstances.

  “Hello there,” Oscar says warmly. Her magenta lipstick is smudged all over his lips. I have to put my hand in my sweatshirt pocket so I don’t reach over and wipe it off.

  I take back all that Goldilocks garbage.

  “Sophia, this is CJ, Garcia’s new disciple from The Institute.” So he does think I go there. He thinks I’m their age. And a good enough artist to get into The Institute.

  I don’t clear up any of it.

  Sophia reaches out a hand to me. “I’ve come to suck your blood,” she says in her Transylvanian accent, but perhaps I misheard, perhaps she said, “You must be a very good sculptor.”

  I mumble some gibberish in reply, feeling like a sixteen-year-old darkness-eating troll with leprosy.

  And she, with her flaming hair and bright pink dress, is an exotic orchid. Of course he loves her. They’re two exotic orchids together. It’s perfect. They’re perfect. Her sweater’s fallen off her shoulder and a magnificent tattoo is twisting out of her dress and around her entire arm, a red-and-orange fire-breathing dragon. Oscar notices the sweater and adjusts it like he’s done it a hundred times. A dark surge of jealousy rises in my chest.

  What about the prophecy, whatever it is?

  “We should go,” she says, taking his hand, and a moment later, they’re gone.

  When I’m certain they’ve left the building, I run at a full sprint—thankfully Guillermo’s still not back—down the hallway to the front window.

  They’re already on the motorcycle. I watch her wrap her arms around his waist and I know just how it feels, how he feels, from sketching him today. I imagine it: gliding my hands up his long oblique muscles, lingering over the grooves of his abdomen, feeling the heat of his skin in my hands.

  I press my hand against the cold glass. I actually do this.

  He kick-starts the bike, revs the throttle, and then they’re ripping down the street, her red hair crackling like a wildfire behind them. When he kamikazis the corner at 500 mph, at an absolutely fatal angle, she raises both hands in the air and whoops in delight.

  Because she’s fearless. She lives dangerously. Which is the worst part of all.

  • • •

  Walking back through the mailroom feeling dismal, I notice that a door I could’ve sworn was closed when I ran past a moment ago is now ajar. Did the wind open it? A ghost? Peering in, I find it hard to imagine one of mine would want to lure me in here, but who knows? Opening doors is not Grandma’s thing.

  “Mom?” I whisper. I say a few lines of the poem, hoping she might recite them back to me again. Not this time.

  I open the door wider, then step into a room that was once an office. Before a cyclone hit it. I quickly close the door behind me. There are overturned bookcases and books toppled everywhere. There are drifts of paper and sketchbooks and notepads that have been swept off the desk and other surfaces. There are ashtrays full of cigarette butts, an empty bottle of tequila on its side, another one smashed in a corner. There are punch marks in the walls, a shattered window. And in the center of the floor, there’s a large stone angel facedown on the ground, her back broken.

  The room has been taken apart in a rage. I’m thinking maybe the one that was going on the first time I came here, the one that sounded like a furniture-throwing contest. I look around at the physical manifestation of Guillermo’s trouble, whatever it is, and a mixture of excitement and fear weaves through me. I know I shouldn’t snoop, but curiosity quickly overrides my conscience as it often does—snoop-control issues—and I’m bending down and randomly perusing some of the papers on the floor: mostly old letters. There’s one from an art student in Detroit wanting to work with him. Another handwritten from a woman in New York promising him anything (underlined three times) if only he’d mentor her—jeez. There are consignment forms from galleries, a proposal from a museum about a commission. Press releases from past shows. I pick up a notepad like the one he keeps in his pocket and leaf through it, wondering if there might be some clue in it, in this room, as to what happened to him. The small pad is full of sketches, some lists and notes too, all in Spanish. Maybe material lists? Notes on sculptures? Ideas? Feeling guilty, I toss it back onto the heap, but then I can’t help myself and pick up another one, flip through it, find more of the same, until I come to a page where there are some words in English:

  Dearest,

  I have gone mad. I do not want to eat or drink, or I will lose the taste of you in my mouth, do not want to open my eyes if not to see you, do not want to breathe any air that you have not breathe, that has not been inside your body, deep inside your beautiful body. I must

  I turn to the next page, but it doesn’t continue. I must—what? I whip through the rest of the pad, but the remaining pages are blank. I search through a few more notepads scattered around, but find no more words in English, no more words for Dearest. The skin on my arms is prickling. Dearest is her. It has to be. The woman in the painting. The clay woman climbing out of the clay man’s chest. The female giant. All the female giants.

  I read the note again. It’s so steamy, so desperate, so romantic.

  If a man doesn’t give his beloved the letter he writes, his love is true

  That’s what happened to him then: love. Tragic, impossible love. And Guillermo’s so perfectly cast. No woman can resist a man who has tidal waves and earthquakes beneath the skin.

  Oscar seems like he has natural disasters under the skin too. But give me a break. Male leads in love stories need to be devoted, need to chase trains, cross continents, give up fortunes and thrones, defy convention, face persecution, take apart rooms and break the backs of angels, sketch the beloved all over the cement walls of their studios, build sculptures of giants as homages.

  They don’t flirt shamelessly with the likes of me when they have Transylvanian girlfriends. What an effing jerk.

  I separate the page with the love note from the rest of the notepad, and as I’m pressing it into the safety of my jeans pocket, I hear the front door to the studio do its horror-creak. Oh no. My pulse speeds as I tiptoe over to the door and tuck behind it so I’ll be hidden should Guillermo decide to come in. I’m definitely not supposed to be in here. This is a most private kind of chaos, like the contents of his mind all s
pilled out. I hear a chair scrape across the floor, then smell smoke. Great. He’s having a cigarette right outside the door.

  I wait. And stare down at all the art books piled everywhere, recognizing a lot of them from school, recognizing my mother. Half of her face is staring back at me from one of the stacks. It’s the author photo on the back of her Michelangelo biography, Angel in the Marble. It gives me a start. But of course it’s here. He has every art book in here. I squat down and reach for it, careful not to make a sound as I pull it out of the stack. I open to the title page, wondering if she signed it when they met. She did.

  To Guillermo Garcia,

  “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

  Thank you for the interview—a tremendous honor.

  Yours with admiration,

  Dianna Sweetwine

  Mom. I close the book quickly, quickly, keeping it shut with my hands so it doesn’t fly open, so I don’t. My knuckles are white with the effort. She always signed with that Michelangelo quote. It was her favorite. I hug the book to my chest tight, so tight, wanting to jump inside it.

  Then I secure it inside the waistband of my jeans and cover it with my sweatshirt.

  “CJ,” Guillermo calls. I hear his retreating footsteps. When I’m certain he’s gone, I slip soundlessly out of the room, shutting the door behind me. I cross the mailroom swiftly, quietly, and enter the jail cell room, where I hide Mom’s book in my portfolio case, aware, oh, yes, I am, that I’m acting like a super-kook, buttons flying everywhere today. Though it’s not my first bout of larceny. I’ve stolen quite a few copies of Mom’s books from the school library too—every time they replace them, in fact. And the town library. And several bookstores. I do not know why I do it. I do not know why I stole the love note. I do not know why I do much of anything.

  I find Guillermo in the studio, squatting, petting a blissed-out Frida Kahlo’s belly. His note to Dearest is burning up my pocket. I want to know more. What happened to them?

  He nods at me. “Are you ready?” He rises. “Are you ready for your life to change?”

  “And how,” I say.

  The rest of the afternoon consists of my choosing a practice rock—I fall in love with an amber-colored alabaster one that looks like a fire’s burning inside it—and listening to Guillermo, who has become Moses, recite commandments about carving:

  Thou shalt be bold and courageous.

  Thou shalt take chances.

  Thou shalt wear protective gear.

  (BECAUSE THERE’S ASBESTOS IN THE DUST!)

  Thou shalt have no preconceptions about what is inside the practice rock but shall wait for the rock to tell thee directly.

  After this one, he touches my solar plexus with his outspread hand, adding, “What slumbers in the heart is what slumbers in the stone, understand?”

  Then he bestows the final commandment onto me:

  Thou shalt remake the world.

  This is something I would very much like to do, though no clue how carving a rock will achieve it.

  When I get home after hours and hours of practice carving—I’m spectacularly horrible at it—with my wrist muscles aching, thumbs bruised from hundreds of hammer mishaps, asbestosis disease already spreading through my lung tissue despite the face mask, I open my bag and find three big round oranges looking up at me. I’m stupid-struck with love for Oscar for a moment, then remember Sophia.

  What duplicity! Seriously, what a major asshat, as Noah used to say when he was Noah.

  I bet he told Sophia his mother prophesized about her too.

  I bet his mother’s not even dead.

  I take the oranges to the kitchen and make juice.

  • • •

  On returning to my bedroom after The Great Orange Massacre hoping to sew for a bit, I find Noah squatting over the bag I left on the floor, flipping through a sketchpad that had been tucked safely inside the bag only moments before. Instant payback from the universe for going through Guillermo’s papers?

  “Noah? What’re you doing?”

  He jumps up, exclaims, “Oh! Hey! Nothing!” Then proceeds to put his hands on his waist only to move them to his pockets, then back to his waist. “I was just . . . nothing. Sorry.” He laughs too loud, then claps his hands together.

  “Why are you going through my stuff?”

  “Wasn’t . . .” He laughs again, well, more like whinnies. “I mean, I guess I was.” He looks at the window like he wants to jump out of it.

  “But why?” I ask, giggling a little myself—he hasn’t acted like such a certifiable weirdo in forever.

  He smiles at me as if he heard me thinking. It does something wonderful inside my chest. “Guess I just wanted to see what you were working on.”

  “Really?” I ask, surprised.

  “Yup,” he says, shifting back and forth on his feet. “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” I hear the eagerness in my voice.

  He gestures toward the pad. “I saw the sketches of Mom. Are you doing some kind of sculpture of her?”

  “Yes,” I say, excited by his curiosity, not caring at all about the sketchpad spying—how often did I used to do the same to him? “But those studies in there aren’t even close to being finished. I just started them last night.”

  “Clay?” he asks.

  A sudden powerful how-dare-I-talk-to-him-about-my-artwork feeling is overtaking me, but it’s been so long since we’ve connected about anything, so I go on. “Not clay, stone,” I tell him. “Marble, granite, don’t know yet. I’m working with this totally cool sculptor now. He’s amazing, Noah.” I walk over and pick the pad up off the floor. Holding it in front of both of us, I point to the most completed sketch, a frontal view. “I was thinking of doing it realistic. Not at all bulbous-y like usual. I want it to be elegant, a little willowy, but wild somehow too, you know, like her. I want people to see the wind in her hair, in her clothes—oh, it’ll be a Floating Dress for sure, but only we’ll get that. I hope, well, you know how she used to stand on the deck every—” I stop because he’s taken a phone out of his pocket. It must’ve vibrated. “Hey dude,” he says, and then starts talking about some trail-run and mileage and other cross-country mumbo jumbo. He makes an apologetic face at me like it’s going to be a while and leaves the room.

  I tiptoe to the door, wanting to hear him talk to his friend. Sometimes I stand outside his room when he and Heather are hanging out and listen to them gossip, laugh, be goofy. A few times on weekends, I’ve sat reading by the front door, thinking they might ask me to go with them on one of their zoo trips or after-running pancake extravaganzas, but they never do.

  Halfway down the hallway, Noah abruptly stops talking mid-sentence and puts the phone back into his pocket. Wait. So he faked the call and was pretend-talking to no one just to get away from me? Just to stop me blathering on like that? My throat constricts.

  We’re never going to be okay. We’re never going to be us again.

  I walk over to the window, flip the shade so I can see the ocean.

  I stare it down.

  There are times when surfing where you’ll take on a wave only to realize the bottom’s dropped out of it and so suddenly without warning you’re free-falling down the entire face.

  It feels like this.

  • • •

  When I arrive at Guillermo’s studio the next afternoon at the scheduled time—he doesn’t seem to care it’s winter break and there’s nowhere I’d rather be, so—I find a piece of paper thumbtacked to the door that says: Be back soon—GG.

  All morning, while sucking on anti-Oscar lemons, I listened from across town, hoping my practice rock would tell me what was inside it. So far, not a peep. Not a peep between Noah and me since yesterday either, and this morning he was gone before I woke up. As was all of the cash Dad left us for emergencies. Effing whatever.

>   Back to the clear and present danger: Oscar. I’m ready. In addition to the lemons, in preparation for a possible encounter, I did some catch-up reading on a myriad of particularly raunchy venereal diseases. Followed by some bible study:

  People with two different-colored eyes are duplicitous cads

  (Yes, I wrote this passage.)

  The Oscar case is closed.

  I slip quickly down the hallway, thrilled to find Grandma and no one else in the mailroom. She’s in a splendid outfit. A striped straight skirt. Vintage floral sweater. Red leather belt. Paisley scarf championed with attitude around her neck. All topped off with black felt beret and John Lennon sunglasses. Exactly what I’d wear to the studio if I weren’t bound to the root vegetable look.

  “Perfect,” I tell her. “Very shabby chic.”

  “Chic would suffice. Shabby as a label offends my sensibilities. I was going for Summer of Love with more than a smidgeon of Beatnik. All this art, the mess and disorder, these mysterious foreign men are making me feel very free-spirited, very throw caution to the wind, very daring, very—”

  I laugh. “I get it.”

  “No, I don’t think you do. I was going to say very Jude Sweetwine. Remember that intrepid girl?” She points to my pocket. I pull out the extinguished candle. She tsk tsks at me. “Don’t use my bible to forward your dreary agenda.”

  “He has a girlfriend.”

  “You don’t know that for sure. He’s European. They have different mores.”

  “Haven’t you read Jane Austen? English people are more uptight than us, not less.”

  “One thing that boy doesn’t seem is uptight.” Her whole face contorts with the effort of a wink. She’s not a subtle winker, not a subtle anything.

  “He has trichomoniasis,” I grumble at her.

  “Nobody has that. Nobody but you even knows what it is.”

  “He’s too old.”

  “Only I’m too old.”

  “Well, he’s too hot. Way too hot. And he knows it. Did you see the way he leans?”

  “The way he what?”

  “Leans against a wall like James Dean, leans.” I do a quick demonstration against a pillar. “And he drives that motorcycle. And has that accent and those different-color eyes—”