Wider than the Sky

by Katherine Rothschild

  Copyright © 2021 by Katherine Rothschild

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of f iction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used f ictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States by Soho Teen

  an imprint of Soho Press, Inc.

  227 W 17th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mason, Lizzy, author.

  Title: Between the bliss and me / Lizzy Mason.

  Description: New York, NY : Soho Teen, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020012353

  ISBN 978-1-64129-113-2

  eISBN 978-1-64129-114-9

  Subjects: CYAC: Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. | Musicians—Fiction. | Schizophrenia—Fiction. | College choice—Fiction.

  Mothers and daughters—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M37614 Bet 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  to my dad

  when I said

  I’ll study law

  you said

  what about writing?

  1

  HOPE AND OTHER FEATHERED THINGS

  You know how you can read a poem, like, ten times and still not get it?

  Teachers say: just read it again because something magic happens and suddenly you’ll get it. Well, the day my dad died I totally understood this Emily Dickinson poem called “‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers.” Not like the understanding helped. Poems can’t bring people back to life. But suddenly getting poetry was a weird little gift that got me through what happened next.

  On that day, my sister, Blythe, and I stumbled into a windowless, overly air-conditioned room in Huntington Hospital. Inside we found a doctor, my cashmere-sweatered mom, and a cluster of silent machines. And my dad’s dead body. No one said he was dead—no one had to. The space his soul had taken up in the room had vanished.

  The doctor unhooked one more monitor and put her hand way too casually on my dad’s dead leg. “Take as much time as you need.”

  Like time was what we needed.

  When the doctor was gone, my mom reached for us and we ran to her like we’d survived a plane crash or something. Which I guess we kind of had. We were surviving this empty room, weathering it the way our bikes did the ocean air, oxidizing and cracking—and crying. There were tears, teary questions, and more tears. When we finally stepped back to wipe our noses, the air filled with the silence only hospitals can achieve: a bustle and racket in the outside, but in here? No more beeping. I felt a stone in my heart, round and cold, sharp against my sternum.

  Then someone cleared his throat. A man stood in the doorway. For a blink of mind-time I was sure it was my dad. He couldn’t be dead. He had barely even been sick. He was fine. He was right there.

  “May I . . . ?” He let the question hang in the air, like Southerners do. Like my dad did. Had.

  Maybe we were all thinking the same thing, because no one said a word. Then he stepped into the room, beneath the glaring fluorescent lights. He was not my dad. Of course he wasn’t my dad. My dad wasn’t anywhere. When we walked through the jerking automatic hospital doors, the stone in my heart knew. My dad was gone. And this man? He was just some random middle-aged guy with sandy hair. Standing beside us. Staring at a dead body. Like a total creeper.

  Blythe and I turned to our mom. She was looking from my dad to this guy and back to my dad. When she spoke, her voice cracked. “Charlie?”

  He nodded. She swept the salty mascara from her cheeks and pushed her short curls behind her ears. She cleared her throat. “Girls, I have to take a moment—I’ll be back. Stay with your father.” As if he needed supervising. Then my mom walked into the hallway with a stranger.

  I took my sister’s hand and squeezed.

  My mom’s voice rose above the din. “No. Not for at least a month.”

  “We don’t have a month,” the man said.

  Silence. I held my breath, listening.

  “I thought we agreed to see this through.” His voice was almost too soft to hear. “Allies.”

  “We are.” My mom’s voice hitched. “We are.”

  “I won’t stay even though . . .” He coughed, and I lost the words. “I won’t attend the memorial. But you must come up by next week.” There was a long silence when I wondered if she would ask, Come up where? But she didn’t. Footsteps fell behind us, and I finally looked away from my dad long enough to see that she’d come back alone.

  “Who was that guy?” Blythe asked. She squeezed my hand so hard I felt her bones.

  My mom didn’t say anything, and Blythe didn’t ask again. And I didn’t want to know. Because we were all staring at this dad who wasn’t breathing, who wasn’t alive. This dad who would only be there until the orderlies had their turn. I should have been falling apart, with tiny pieces of myself flicking into the curtain and rolling under the metal bed. But instead, that stone in my heart stirred. It softened. It shuddered and shaped itself around my heart, not hard like a stone anymore, but soft, like feathers. Then I felt a flap, like wings. Like a second heartbeat.

  I rubbed my thumbnail over my lower lip. Back and forth. Back and forth. Blythe saw and shook her head. She knew what I was about to do. But it was too late.

  “Hope. Hope. Hope. Hope is the thing. Hope is the thing. Hope is the thing with feathers. Hope is the thing that perches in the soul. Soul. Soul. Winged soul.” I heard the words before I knew that I was whispering them. Chanting them. I swallowed the words down, and they dove inside me. All the way to my toes.

  And right then, I got it.

  Hope is what’s left when nothing else is.

  “Hope” is the thing with feathers -

  That perches in the soul -

  And sings the tune without the words -

  And never stops—neverstopsneverstopsneverstops—at all.

  The next time we saw Charlie, we were moving in with him.

  2

  A DEATH BLOW IS A LIFE BLOWN UP

  It only took a week. Seven days to find a resting place for my dad, to fill our house with friends and casseroles, and then to empty it of everything. Even us. And then it was over. Even our bikes were sold to the kids down the street. A six-hour drive later, we pulled into a completely new life.

  A moving truck blocked the driveway, so we parked on the street. I stepped out of the car beneath a street sign. It read: welcome to thornewood: where everyone knows everyone. Right. Everyone except us. It felt personal.

  I turned and got my first look at our new home and stared for a long time at number six Magnolia. I’d expected none of the strange and terrible things that had happened to us this past week. Not a single day felt less than surreal. But this? This was a new level.

  “Dad died and left us Hill House,” I said. Blythe squinted up at the ramshackle mansion, maybe trying to make out if that was a raven on the roof, or just a splatter of jagged shingles. We blinked at the monstrosity.

  “It’s closer to Amityville Horror. Or the house in The Shining.”

  “The Shining was in a hotel,” I said.

  “Semantics.”

  “Realities.” I turned to my mom, who was in the back of the minivan, half swallowed by bags and boxes. “Are we seriously living in
a house possessed by evil?”

  She pulled herself out of our life shrapnel and handed me a house key. It was plain silver, shining, and newly cut. It looked like our old house key. I’d half expected it to be made of human bone.

  “You love old stuff,” Mom said absently. “Just watch out for floorboard holes.” Holes? In the floor? She gave me a pat on the back and marched toward the offending moving truck.

  When Mom was out of earshot, Blythe turned to me, mimicking Mom’s tinny voice. “You love old stuff, don’t you, Bean?”

  “Good old Maryann Interiors.” It was something Dad had called her. It was the name of her company, but it was also her when she was being . . . like this.

  Blythe waved a hand to the house. “Just throw some fabric over it.” Mom’s catchphrase. Stained duvet? Throw fabric! Cracked window? Fabric drape. Boxes for bedside tables? Guess what will fix that!

  “Too bad fabric can’t cover holes in the floor,” I said.

  “And she’s going to have to be Maryann Interiors and Exteriors if she wants to make something of this place.” Blythe tapped the crumbling brick walkway with one foot. I gave her a rueful smile.

  We hauled our bags and ourselves to the wrought iron gate. It fought opening, but we yanked, flecks of rust coming off on our palms. It gave. Balancing our bags, we gingerly made our way across a dead, gopher-holed lawn.

  Blythe stumbled, and I caught her arm, then kept her upright until we were back on brick. She shot the crispy yellow grass a dirty look from the walkway. “She didn’t warn us about the holes in the lawn.”

  I managed a laugh. “When you’re going through hell . . .”

  “Keep going,” she finished.

  It was a Winston Churchill quote. But really, it was a Dad quote. He’d had a lot of them, but I was afraid this one would stick with me. We’d been standing in his hospital room, my mom pacing after the doctors had told us that Dad’s infection wasn’t responding to antibiotics. As always, he’d tried to lighten the mood. His eyes had been closed as he’d spoken, his voice low and hoarse. “But Churchill was a notorious drunk,” he’d added. “So who knows if he even said it. History is a game of telephone.” I tried to think of something that would lighten the mood in this moment, like my dad had in that moment. But I had nothing.

  I let go of Blythe and made my way up the warped steps to the buckling porch. I pulled out the completely normal key and unlocked the door. As I pushed it open, a long-drawn-out creak emanated from the house. It was like a horror film parody. I lifted a brow to Blythe and in a whispery voice said: “After you.”

  Blythe shoved her way in, batting dust motes away. “How is this an ‘unbelievable decorating opportunity’?”

  “The key word is unbelievable.” But I couldn’t fault my mom for trying to look on the bright side. Our lives were pretty dim at the moment.

  “How many people do you think died here?” Blythe whispered, mimicking my horror film voice. “Don’t go low. One of the ghosts will know for sure.”

  “Stop it,” I said, and stepped inside behind her. The foyer paint was peeling in long strips, as if the walls were shedding skin. A chandelier tilted precariously over an antique entry table, the mahogany coated with a thick layer of dust. Everything was covered with dust. If there was ever a house in need of Maryann Interiors, this was it. As I squinted into the gloom, a corner of gold fleur-de-lis wallpaper caught the sun and glinted. Gold wallpaper. Classy. This place might have been beautiful. Once.

  Blythe scanned the high ceilings and smirked at the admittedly suspicious-looking water stains, edged in a coppery red, like dried blood. “My money’s on ten. With at least one window-sash beheading.”

  “Just don’t tell me there’s a poltergeist,” I said.

  My sister held her hands up to test the air, as if taking a psychic reading. She nodded. “Two, actually.” She left me standing beneath the skull-crushing chandelier.

  I followed her into what could only be called a parlor lined with thick moth-bitten velvet drapes. In the hall I passed, I spied a built-in wooden telephone booth, a tiny private room with a glass door and its own light. An old-fashioned rotary telephone hung on the wall. I tried to pull the door open, but it was stuck. Blythe was ahead of me, so I left it and followed her to the dining room. A door to the side said butler’s pantry, but the handle was locked or stuck, too. Beyond was a barren conservatory, the decorative tile gray and yellow in the afternoon light.

  I blinked, thinking of my dad’s office, with its Lucite desk and Eames chairs. “This doesn’t seem like Dad at all. He loved modern. Modern everything.”

  Blythe popped back around the corner. “I doubt he was planning to keep it this way.”

  My mood lifted when we found a completely renovated kitchen. A new kitchen island looked recently cleaned, as if . . . well, as if someone lived here. I guess they did. We did, kind of. Still. I couldn’t imagine my dad’s coffee cup on this new kitchen island. Or his gardening gloves on that antique entry table. My dad smelled like Old Spice and manila folders. This place smelled like mold.

  Outside, the moving truck blared, backing up toward the house to make way for the Momobile.

  “Do we dare go upstairs?” Blythe asked me.

  “It’s that or sleep in the car.”

  Mom had told us what to expect: it would be livable. Now, as we walked through the second floor, I saw what she meant. We walked past four musty bedrooms full of broken furniture before we got to the end of the hall, and our room. I felt queasy as I pushed the door open, but it was the only room that didn’t look like it needed to be ripped to the studs and renovated. The windows were thrown open; clean air wafted in. Our Jenny Lind beds were already set up, and a new chaise in pink velvet was waiting beneath the bank of back windows. There was a view of a dry terraced backyard leading up to the only living thing I’d seen so far. A willow tree.

  “How did someone manage to put a regular room into the middle of a decaying mansion?” I leaned out the open window. The air smelled like rose water with an undertone of low-VOC paint.

  “Mom must have redecorated. It is her job.” Blythe removed her laptop before she dropped her bag to the ground.

  “In a week? From home?”

  Blythe looked at me. “Maybe it was . . . that guy. From the hospital.”

  I was about to speak his name when my mom walked in, leading with jazz hands.

  “You love the chaise, don’t you? It’s custom. You have no idea what it cost to have it done so fast.” I raised an eyebrow. She raised hers back, ruffled the velvet, and smoothed it down.

  “We had to move because of money,” I said, “but you got a custom chaise?”

  “I wanted something special for you.” She smiled.

  I petted it, too. I couldn’t help myself. So far, ruffled-velvet feel was the best part of my day.

  “Besides,” Mom said, “we moved because of taxes. That’s different from money.”

  Blythe snorted from the corner, where her desk was almost set up, her screens already glowing. “Wi-Fi code?” Blythe asked, pulling out her phone.

  “Oh. I don’t know. For particulars you’ll have to check with . . .” My mom flipped a hand. As if he’d been waiting for us all along, Charlie walked in. I looked between them. His smile was a sliver of ice down my back.

  I’d never lost a parent to unspecified reasons before, but I was pretty sure most moms didn’t decide to share their lives with a new guy soon after their husband’s funeral.

  I rubbed my thumbnail over my lower lip. “A death blow is a life blow, for some. For some. For you, maybe . . .” I pushed my hand down and pressed my lips together.

  Too late. The weird had gotten out.

  Blythe pretended not to notice. Or maybe she was oblivious by now. Since my dad had died, I’d been poeting more than usual.

  I’d always had a little habit
of reciting poetry. Poeting. Not on purpose. I wasn’t winning poetry slams or anything. This was more inadvertent. It happened before I knew it, and it seemed to strike at random. Like the time I was supposed to be giving an oral report on the great state of Delaware (home of the Punkin Chunkin pumpkin-throwing contest), and ended up reciting half of e. e. cummings’s “in Just-.” Or the time Blythe and I saw our first horror film in the theater (The Babadook), and she said I ruined its scare-ability by whispering, “I took the road not taken, taken, taken.” Or when we were saying goodbye to our dad in the hospital, and I couldn’t stop saying “neverstops.”

  But now it was becoming a thing. A noticeable thing.

  Charlie cleared his throat and looked at my mom. She smiled as if I were a prodigy rather than a teen suffering from a potentially undiagnosed literary medical condition, which would make her a for-real negligent parent, and not just inattentive.

  “I don’t think we were properly introduced,” he said. Blythe looked up from her phone. Our eyes met across the room. That drawl and those Southern manners. So much like Dad’s. It was disconcerting.

  “I’m Charlie Parker.”

  My mom gathered my hair behind my shoulders, about to go into the ritual of who was born first, but Charlie held up a hand and pointed to me. “You’re Sabine.”

  I stepped back. No one tried to tell us apart right away. Seriously. NO one.

  He gestured to today’s tan boots. I’d chosen them because Vivienne Westwood calls them Pirate Boots, and I needed pirate-level courage today. And I’d chosen them because tan was noncommittal, which was exactly how I was feeling about my life. “I knew your father for many years. You’ve had a boot fetish since you were knee-high to a grasshopper. Your first pair was white with rainbow unicorns. Am I right?”

  I blinked. I loved those boots. The rainbow part was iridescent. How did he know about that? I glanced at my mom, but she looked confused. Only Blythe’s mouth twitched with a knowing smile. “Remember when you wouldn’t take them off for circle time?” she said. “And you screamed so loud Dad had to pick us up from school?”