by Jandy Nelson
He bursts out laughing. “That’s incredible! We’re absolutely split-aparts.”
“I don’t know if I want a split-apart,” I say honestly. “I think I need my own soul.”
“That’s fair. Maybe we can be occasional split-aparts. On occasions like these, for instance.” He runs a finger slowly down the side of my neck, crossing over my collarbone, then down, down. What was I thinking with this plunging neckline? I wouldn’t say no to a fainting couch. I wouldn’t say no to anything. “But why rip me up and stuff me in a bag?” he asks.
“Oh, my brother did that. He was angry at me. I tried to put you back together many times.”
“Thank you,” he says, but then something across the room catches his attention and in a flash he’s up and walking toward my dresser. He picks up a photograph of my family and studies it. I’m watching him in the mirror. His face has turned ashen. What? He turns around and stares right through me. “You’re not his older sister,” he says more to himself than me. “You’re twins.” I can see the wheels spinning in his head. He must know how old Noah is and now he knows how old I am.
“I was going to tell you,” I say. “I guess I was afraid to. I was afraid you’d—”
“Holy hell.” He’s springing for the window. “Guillermo doesn’t know.” He’s halfway over the ledge. I don’t know what’s going on.
“Wait,” I say. “Wait. Oscar. Of course he does. Why would he care? Why is it that big of a deal?” I run to the window, yell out, “My father was eleven years older than my mother! It doesn’t matter.”
But he’s already gone.
I go to the dresser, pick up the photograph. It’s my favorite family portrait. Noah and I are about eight and dressed in matching sailor outfits looking totally daffy. But it’s because of my parents that I love it.
My mother and father are gazing at each other like they have the best secret.
THE INVISIBLE MUSEUM
Noah
Age 14
One by one, I empty each tube of paint into the laundry sink.
I need color, rich, bright, fuck-you, fuck-off, fuck-everything color, mounds and mounds of it. I need the gleam of new paint. I need to sink my fingers, my hands, into chartreuse, into magenta, into turquoise, into cadmium yellow. I wish I could eat it. I wish I could drown my whole body in it. That’s what I want, I think, mixing and swirling, making green, making purple, making brown, spiraling one into the next, sinking my hands, my arms into the cold slippery shining mush until my eyes are dancing.
About an hour ago, I watched Mom get into her car from the window.
The second she turned on the engine, I ran out after her. It had started to drizzle.
That’s when I screamed it: I hate you. I hate you so much.
She looked at me, shocked, her eyes huge, tears running down her cheeks. She mouthed: I love you, then put her hand to her heart and pointed at me like I was deaf.
A second later, she peeled out of the driveway to go tell Dad she wanted a divorce so she could marry that other man.
“I don’t care,” I say out loud to no one. I don’t care about her and Dad. About Brian and Courtney. Not even CSA. I don’t care about anything but color, color and more brightness. I add a tube of cornflower blue to the growing mountain—
That’s when the phone rings.
And rings.
And rings. She must’ve forgotten to turn on the machine. Ringing, still. I find the phone in the living room, wipe my hands on my shirt but still get paint all over the phone.
A man with a gruff voice says, “Is this the residence of Dianna Sweetwine?”
“That’s my mom.”
“Is your father home, son?”
“No, he doesn’t live here now.” A current zips through me—something’s wrong. I can hear it in his voice. “Who is this?” I ask, though I know it’s the police before he even confirms it. I don’t know how, but I know everything in that moment.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: The Boy Inside the Boy Stops Breathing)
He doesn’t tell me there’s been an accident. That a car’s spun out of control on Highway 1. He doesn’t tell me anything. But somehow I know.
“Is my mother okay?” I demand, running to the window. The police radio crackles in the background. I see several surfers paddling out, none of them Jude. Where is she? Fry said she took off with Zephyr. Where did they go? “Did something happen?” I ask the man, watching as the ocean disappears, then the horizon. “Please tell me.” Mom was so upset when she left. Because of me. Because I told her I hated her. Because I followed her to The Wooden Bird. Because I made that picture. All the endless love I have for her fountains up, up, up, up. “Is she okay?” I ask again. “Please tell me she’s okay.”
“Can I have your father’s cell phone number, son?” I want him to stop calling me son. I want him to tell me my mother’s okay. I want my sister home.
I give him Dad’s cell.
“How old are you?” he asks. “Is anyone with you?”
“It’s only me here,” I say, panic flipping me over. “I’m fourteen. Is my mom okay? You can tell me what happened.” But as soon as I say it out loud, I know I don’t want him to tell me. I don’t want to ever know. I see now paint has dripped all over the floor like multicolored blood. I’ve tracked it everywhere. There are handprints all over the window, the back of the couch, the curtains, lampshades.
“I’m going to call your dad now,” he says quietly, then hangs up.
I’m too scared to try Mom’s cell. I call Dad. It goes straight to voicemail. I’m sure he’s talking to the cop, who’s telling him everything he didn’t tell me. I get the binoculars and go to the roof. It’s still drizzling. And way too warm. Everything’s wrong. I don’t see Jude on the beach or the street or anywhere on the cliffs. Where’d she and Zephyr go? I tell her telepathically to come home.
I look over at Brian’s house, wishing he were on his roof, wishing he knew how sorry I was, wishing he’d come over and talk about planetary orbits and solar flares. I reach in my pocket for the rock and close my hand around it. Then I hear a car skid into the driveway. I run to the other side of the roof. It’s Dad, who never skids. Behind him is a police car. My skin falls off. I fall off.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Careens Off World)
I climb down the ladder at the side of the house, go through the sliding doors into the living room. I’m a statue in the hallway when Dad’s key turns in the lock.
He doesn’t have to say a word. We crash together, falling to the ground, to our knees. He holds my head to his chest with both hands. “Oh Noah. I’m so sorry. Oh God, Noah. We have to get your sister. This is not happening. This is not happening. Oh God.”
I don’t plan it. The panic’s coursing out of him and into me, out of me and into him, and the words just fly out. “She was going to ask you to come home so we could all be a family again. She was on her way to tell you that.”
He pulls away, looks into my burning face. “She was?”
I nod. “Before she left she said that you were the love of her life.”
• • •
There’s something I have to do. The house is still full of mourners and misery and food, so much food spoiling on all the counters and tables. The funeral was yesterday. I walk through the red-eyed people, past the hunching walls, the graying paint, the collapsing furniture, the darkening windows, the moth-eaten air. I see I’m crying when I pass a mirror. I don’t know how to stop. It’s become like breathing. An always thing. I tell Dad I’ll be right back. Jude—who cut off all her hair so I hardly recognize her—tries to come with me, but I say no. She won’t let me out of her sight. She thinks I’m going to die too now. Last night I found dirt-covered hogwash roots in my bed. And when I had a coughing fit in the car on the way home from the cemetery, she went ballistic, yelling at Dad to go to the emergency room because I could have
pertussis, whatever that is. Dad, being an expert on disease, talked her down.
Somehow I make it to the sculptor’s studio. Then I sit down on the sidewalk and wait, whipping pebbles at the asphalt. Eventually he’ll have to come out. At least he had the decency not to come to the funeral. I looked for him the whole time.
Brian came. He sat in the last row with his mother, Courtney, and Heather. He didn’t find me after.
What does it matter? All the color’s gone. There’s only darkness in the sky-buckets now, spilling out over everything and everybody.
Ages later, the sculptor crumbles out of the doorway and up to the mailbox. He opens the little door, pulls out a bunch of letters. I see the crying all over his face.
And he sees me.
He’s staring and I’m staring and I can tell how much he loves her in the way he’s looking at me, a tsunami of feeling rolling out of him to me. I don’t care.
“You look just like her,” he whispers. “Your hair.”
There’s one thought in my head, the thought that’s been there for days: If it weren’t for him, she’d be alive.
I stand but have been sitting so long lumped up there, my legs give. “Hey,” he says, catching me and settling me back onto the sidewalk, right next to him. Heat’s rising off his skin and an overpowering man smell too. I hear a wail, the kind that comes out of jackals, and realize it’s coming out of me. The next thing I know, his arms are around me and I can feel him shaking, both of us are, like we’re in sub-arctic conditions. He pulls me closer, then he pulls me onto his lap, cradling me so that his sobs land on my neck and mine on his arms. I want to crawl down his throat. I want to live in the pocket of his smock. I want him to rock me like this forever, like I’m a small boy, the smallest boy who ever was. He knows just how to do it too. Like Mom’s inside of him telling him how to comfort me. How come he’s the only one who knows how? How come he’s the only one she’s inside of?
No.
Birds screech in the trees above us.
This is not right.
I didn’t come here for this. I came for the opposite of this. He can’t hold me like we’re in this together, like he understands. He’s not my father. He’s not my friend.
If it weren’t for him, she’d be alive.
And then I’m twisting and wriggling out of his embrace, returning to my full-grown size and person, my full-grown knowledge and revulsion and hatred. I stand over him and say what I came to. “It’s your fault she’s dead.” His face wrecks. I go on. “I blame you.” I’m the wrecking ball now. “She didn’t love you. She told me she didn’t.” Wrecking and wrecking him and I don’t care. “She wasn’t going to marry you.” I slow down so every word sinks in. “She wasn’t going to ask my father for a divorce. She was on her way to ask him to come home.”
Then I enter the crawlspace deep inside me and shut the hatch. Because I’m not coming back out. Ever.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Untitled)
THE HISTORY OF LUCK
Jude
Age 16
When I wake up, Noah’s already gone, like usual these days, so I can’t tell him what I need to or ask him all that I want to. The irony of this is not lost on me. Now that I want more than anything to confess about CSA, I can’t. I check LostConnections.com, where there’s still no response from Brian, then grab Oscar’s leather jacket, my sketchpad, and head down the hill.
Soon after I arrive, I’m tapping my foot nervously on the floor as Guillermo opens my sketchpad on the large white drafting table in the center of the studio. I want him to like the studies of Mom’s sculpture and I want him to agree to the piece being done in stone, preferably marble or granite. He flips through the first studies quickly, back views. I’m watching him and can’t tell what he’s thinking, but then he stops at the frontal view and inhales sharply as he raises a hand to his mouth. That bad? Now he’s trailing a finger over my mother’s face. Oh yes, of course. I’d forgotten that they met. I guess I nailed the likeness. He turns to me and his expression causes me to jerk backward.
“Dianna is your mother.” He doesn’t so much speak the words as becomes them.
“Yes,” I say.
His breathing has gone volcanic. No idea what’s happening here. He returns his gaze to the sketches, touching them now like he wants to peel them off the page.
“Well,” he says. The skin under his left eye won’t stop twitching.
“Well?” I ask, confused and getting frightened.
He closes the pad. “I don’t think I can help you after all. I will call Sandy back, recommend someone else.”
“What?”
In a cold, closed voice I’ve never heard before, he says, “I am sorry. I am too busy. I was wrong. It is too distracting to have someone here so much.” He won’t look at me.
“Guillermo?” My heart’s shaking inside my chest.
“No, please go. Now. You must. I have things to do.” I’m too stunned to argue. I take my pad and start for the door, hear, “Do not come back to my studio.”
I turn around but he’s facing the opposite direction. I don’t know why I glance up at the window to the fire escape, maybe the same sense that someone’s watching me that I had while working outside yesterday. And I’m right, someone is watching.
Looking down on us with one hand pressed to the glass is Noah.
Guillermo turns to see what I’m looking at and by the time we both look back at each other, Oscar has walked through the studio door, his face shining with fear.
A moment later, Noah blasts into the studio like a lit stick of dynamite, then freezes as he scans the room. Guillermo’s face is unrecognizable—he’s scared, I think. Guillermo is scared. Everyone’s scared, I realize. We are four points in a rectangle and three of those points have these wild panicked eyes on me. No one’s saying a word. It’s clear everyone knows something I don’t and if their expressions are any indication, I’m not sure I want to know what it is. My eyes dart from one of them to the next and back again, not understanding, because, what—or more accurately, whom—it seems, each one of them is afraid of is: me.
“What?” I ask finally. “What’s going on? Someone tell me, please. Noah? Is it about Mom?”
It’s mayhem.
• • •
“He killed her.” Noah’s finger is pointed at Guillermo, his voice trembling with anger. “If it wasn’t for him, we’d still have her.” The studio begins to pulse, to rock beneath my feet, to tip over.
Oscar turns to Noah. “Killed her? Are you crazy? Look around you. No man has ever loved a woman more than he loved her.”
Guillermo says softly, “Oscore, be quiet.”
The room’s really swaying now, swinging, so I find the only thing near me and lean against it, the leg of a giant, but immediately lurch back because I swear it shuddered—it moved—and then I’m seeing it. The giants are stomping and roaring to life, hurling their colossal bodies into each other’s arms, fed up with spending eternity frozen, always a breath away from their heart’s desire. Split-aparts, all of them, now throwing themselves together. Each couple spinning across the floor, arm in arm, turning and turning, causing tremor after tremor inside me, as things start adding up. It wasn’t my age that freaked Oscar out last night. It surely wasn’t. It was the family photograph. And what turned Guillermo into Drunken Igor was nothing but the anniversary of my mother’s death.
Because she is Dearest.
I turn to Noah, try to speak. “But you said . . .” is all I can get out before my voice gets sucked back in. I try again. “You told us . . .” I still can’t finish and then all I can say is, “Noah?”
This is what he’s been keeping from me.
“I’m sorry, Jude,” he cries. And then it’s as if Noah really and truly is busting through stone, as if his spirit’s rising up as his back arches, his arms suspend behind him and he says, “S
he was on her way to ask Dad for a divorce so she could marry . . .” He turns to Guillermo, meets his eyes. “. . . you.”
Guillermo’s mouth has fallen open. And now my words are coming out of it. “But Noah, you said . . .” His stare could burn a hole in granite. “You told me . . .” Oh, Noah—what did you do? I can tell Guillermo’s trying to tamp down the emotion in his face, hide from us what is swelling from the very core of him, but it’s starting to seep out of him anyway: joy, no matter how belated.
Her answer was yes.
I need to get out of here, away from all of them. It’s too much. Too, too much. Mom is Dearest. She’s the clay woman climbing out of the clay man’s chest. She’s the stone woman he makes again and again and again. She’s the color-drenched faceless woman in the painting of the kiss. Her body turns and twists and bends and arches facelessly over every inch of the walls in the studio. They were in love. They were split-aparts! She was never going to ask Dad to come home. We were never going to be a family again. And Noah’s known this. And Dad doesn’t! Finally my father’s perpetually perplexed preoccupied expression makes sense. Of course he doesn’t understand. For years, he’s been trying to compute a mathematical problem in his head that does not compute. No wonder he walks the soles off all his shoes!
