by Jandy Nelson
In photographs of us together,
she is always looking at the camera
and I am always looking at her.
(Found on a folded up piece of paper half buried in pine needles on the trail to the Rain River)
I am sitting at Bailey’s desk with St Anthony: Patron of Lost Things.
He doesn’t belong here. He belongs on the mantel in front of The Half Mom where I’ve always kept him, but Bailey must’ve moved him, and I don’t know why. I found him tucked behind the computer in front of an old drawing of hers that’s tacked to the wall – the one she made the day Gram told us our mother was an explorer (of the Christopher Columbus variety).
I’ve drawn the curtains, and though I want to, I won’t let myself peek out the window to see if Toby is under the plum tree. I won’t let myself imagine his lips lost and half wild on mine either. No. I let myself imagine igloos, nice, frigid, arctic igloos. I’ve promised Bailey nothing like what happened that night will ever happen again.
It’s the first day of summer vacation and everyone from school is at the river. I just got a drunken call from Sarah informing me that not one, not two, but three unfreaking-believable Fontaines are supposed to be arriving momentarily at Flying Man’s, that they are going to play outside, that she just found out the two older Fontaines are in a seriously awesome band in LA, where they go to college, and I better get my butt down there to witness the glory. I told her I was staying in and to revel in their Fontainely glory for me, which resurrected the bristle from yesterday: “You’re not with Toby, are you, Lennie?”
Ugh.
I look over at my clarinet abandoned in its case on my playing chair. It’s in a coffin, I think, then immediately try to unthink it. I walk over to it, unlatch the lid. There never was a question what instrument I’d play. When all the other girls ran to the flutes in fifth grade music class, I beelined for a clarinet. It reminded me of me.
I reach in the pocket where I keep my cloth and reeds and feel around for the folded piece of paper. I don’t know why I’ve kept it (for over a year!), why I fished it out of the garbage later that afternoon, after Bailey had tossed it with a cavalier “Oh well, guess you guys are stuck with me,” before throwing herself into Toby’s arms like it meant nothing to her. But I knew it did. How could it not? It was Juilliard.
Without reading it a final time, I crumple Bailey’s rejection letter into a ball, toss it into the garbage can, and sit back down at her desk.
I’m in the exact spot where I was that night when the phone blasted through the house, through the whole unsuspecting world. I’d been doing chemistry, hating every minute of it like I always do. The thick oregano scent of Gram’s chicken fricassee was wafting into our room and all I wanted was Bailey to hurry home already so we could eat because I was starving and hated isotopes. How can that be? How could I have been thinking about fricassee and carbon molecules when across town my sister had just taken her very last breath? What kind of world is this? And what do you do about it? What do you do when the worst thing that can happen actually happens? When you get that phone call? When you miss your sister’s rollercoaster of a voice so much that you want to take apart the whole house with your fingernails?
This is what I do: I take out my phone and punch in her number. In a blind fog of a moment the other day I called to see when she’d be home and discovered her account hadn’t yet been canceled.
Hey, this is Bailey, Juliet for the month, so dudes, what say’st thou? Hast thou not a word of joy? Some comfort…
I hang up at the tone, then call back, again and again, and again, and again, wanting to just pull her out of the phone. Then one time I don’t hang up.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were getting married?” I whisper, before snapping the phone shut and laying it on her desk. Because I don’t understand. Didn’t we tell each other everything? If this doesn’t change our lives, Len, I don’t know what will, she’d said when we painted the walls. Is that the change she’d wanted then? I pick up the cheesy plastic St Anthony. And what about him? Why bring him up here? I look more closely at the drawing he was leaning against. It’s been up so long that the paper has yellowed and the edges have curled, so long that I haven’t taken notice of it for years. Bailey drew it when she was around eleven, the time she started questioning Gram about Mom with an unrelenting ferocity.
She’d been at it for weeks.
“How do you know she’ll be back?” Bailey asked for the millionth time. We were in Gram’s art room, Bailey and I lay sprawled out on the floor drawing with pastels while Gram painted one of her ladies at a canvas in the corner, her back to us. She’d been skirting Bailey’s questions all day, artfully changing the subject, but it wasn’t working this time. I watched Gram’s arm drop to her side, the brush sending droplets of a hopeful green onto the bespattered floor. She sighed, a big lonely sigh, then turned around to face us.
“I guess you’re old enough, girls,” she said. We perked up, immediately put down our pastels, and gave her our undivided attention. “Your mother is … well … I guess the best way to describe it … hmmm … let me think…” Bailey looked at me in shock – we’d never known Gram to be at a loss for words.
“What, Gram?” Bailey asked. “What is she?”
“Hmmm…” Gram bit her lip, then finally, hesitantly, she said, “I guess the best way to say it is … you know how some people have natural tendencies, how I paint and garden, how Big’s an arborist, how you, Bailey, want to grow up and be an actress—”
“I’m going to go to Juilliard,” she told us.
Gram smiled. “Yes, we know, Miss Hollywood. Or Miss Broadway, I should say.”
“Our mom?” I reminded them before we ended up talking some more about that dumb school. All I’d hoped was that it was in walking distance if Bailey was going there. Or at least close enough so I could ride my bike to see her every day. I’d been too scared to ask.
Gram pursed her lips for a moment. “Okay, well, your mother, she’s a little different, she’s more like a … well, like an explorer.”
“Like Columbus, you mean?” Bailey asked.
“Yes, like that, except without the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria. Just a woman, a map, and the world. A solo artist.” Then she left the room, her favorite and most effective way of ending a conversation.
Bailey and I stared at each other. In all our persistent musings on where Mom was and why she left, we never ever imagined anything remotely this good. I followed after Gram to try and find out more, but Bailey stayed on the floor and drew this picture.
In it, there’s a woman at the top of a mountain looking off into the distance, her back to us. Gram, Big, and I – with our names beneath our feet – are waving up at the lone figure from the base of the mountain. Under the whole drawing, it says in green Explorer. For some reason, Bailey did not put herself in the picture.
I bring St Anthony to my chest, hold him tight. I need him now, but why did Bailey? What had she lost?
What was it she needed to find?
I put on her clothes
I button one of her frilly shirts
over my own t-shirt.
Or I wrap one, sometimes two,
sometimes all of her diva scarves around my neck.
Or I strip and slip one of her slinkier dresses over my head,
letting the fabric
fall over my skin like water.
I always feel better then,
like she's holding me.
Then I touch all the things
that haven't moved since she died:
crumpled up dollars
dredged from a sweaty pocket,
the three bottles of perfume
always with the same amount of liquid in them now,
the Sam Shepherd play
Fool for Love
where her bookmark will never move forward.
I've read it for her twice now,
always putting the bookmark back
where
it was when I finish—
it kills me
she will never find out
what happens
in the end.
(Found on the inside cover of Wuthering Heights, Clover High library)
Gram spends the night
in front of The Half Mom.
I hear her weeping—
sad
endless
rain.
I sit at the top of the stairs,
know she's touching
Mom's cold flat cheek
as she says: I'm sorry
I'm so sorry.
I think a terrible thing.
I think: You should be.
I think: How could you have let this happen?
How could you have let both of
them leave me?
(Found written on the wall of the bathroom at Cecilia’s Bakery)
School’s been out for two weeks. Gram, Big and I are certifiably out of our trees and running loose through the park – all in opposite directions.
Exhibit A: Gram’s following me around the house with a teapot. The pot is full. I can see the steam coming out the spout. She has two mugs in her other hand. Tea is what Gram and I used to do together, before. We’d sit around the kitchen table in the late afternoons and drink tea and talk before the others came home. But I don’t want to have tea with Gram anymore because I don’t feel like talking, which she knows but still hasn’t accepted. So she’s followed me up the stairs and is now standing in the doorway of The Sanctum, pot in hand.
I flop onto the bed, pick up my book, pretend to read.
“I don’t want any tea, Gram,” I say, looking up from Wuthering Heights, which I note is upside down and hope she doesn’t.
Her face falls. Epically.
“Fine.” She puts a mug on the ground, fills the other one in her hand for herself, takes a sip. I can tell it’s burned her tongue, but she pretends it hasn’t. “Fine, fine, fine,” she chants, taking another sip.
She’s been following me around like this since school got out. Normally, summer is her busiest time as Garden Guru, but she’s told all her clients she is on hiatus until the fall. So instead of guruing, she happens into Maria’s while I’m at the deli, or into the library when I’m on my break, or she tails me to Flying Man’s and paces on the path while I float on my back and let my tears spill into the water.
But teatime is the worst.
“Sweet pea, it’s not healthy…” Her voice has melted into a familiar river of worry. I think she’s talking about my remoteness, but when I glance over at her I realize it’s the other thing. She’s staring at Bailey’s dresser, the gum wrappers strewn about, the hairbrush with a web of her black hair woven through the teeth. I watch her gaze drifting around the room to Bailey’s dresses thrown over the back of her desk chair, the towel flung over her bedpost, Bailey’s laundry basket still piled over with her dirty clothes…“Let’s just pack up a few things.”
“I told you, I’ll do it,” I whisper so I don’t scream at the top of my lungs. “I’ll do it, Gram, if you stop stalking me and leave me alone.”
“Okay, Lennie,” she says. I don’t have to look up to know I’ve hurt her.
When I do look up, she’s gone. Instantly, I want to run after her, take the teapot from her, pour myself a mug and join her, just spill every thought and feeling I’m having.
But I don’t.
I hear the shower turn on. Gram spends an inordinate amount of time in the shower now and I know this is because she thinks she can cry under the spray without Big and me hearing. We hear.
Exhibit B: I roll onto my back and before long I’m holding my pillow in my arms and kissing the air with an embarrassing amount of passion. Not again, I think. What’s wrong with me? What kind of girl wants to kiss every boy at a funeral, wants to maul a guy in a tree after making out with her sister’s boyfriend the previous night? Speaking of which, what kind of girl makes out with her sister’s boyfriend, at all?
Let me just unsubscribe to my own mind already, because I don’t get any of it. I hardly ever thought about sex before, much less did anything about it. Three boys at three parties in four years: Casey Miller, who tasted like hot dogs; Dance Rosencrantz, who dug around in my shirt like he was reaching into a box of popcorn at the movies. And Jasper Stolz in eighth grade because Sarah dragged me into a game of spin the bottle. Total blobfish feeling inside each time. Nothing like Heathcliff and Cathy, like Lady Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, like Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet! Sure, I’ve always been into the Big Bang theory of passion, but as something theoretical, something that happens in books that you can close and put back on a shelf, something that I might secretly want bad but can’t imagine ever happening to me. Something that happens to the heroines like Bailey, to the commotion girls in the leading roles. But now I’ve gone mental, kissing everything I can get my lips on: my pillow, armchairs, doorframes, mirrors, always imagining the one person I should not be imagining, the person I promised my sister I will never ever kiss again. The one person who makes me feel just a little less afraid.
The front door slams shut, jarring me out of Toby’s forbidden arms.
It’s Big. Exhibit C: I hear him stomp straight into the dining room, where only two days ago, he unveiled his pyramids. This is always a bad sign. He built them years ago, based on some hidden mathematics in the geometry of the Egyptian pyramids. (Who knows? The guy also talks to trees.) According to Big, his pyramids, like the ones in the Middle East, have extraordinary properties. He’s always believed his replicas would be able to prolong the life of cut flowers and fruit, even revive bugs, all of which he would place under them for ongoing study. During his pyramid spells, Big, Bails and I would spend hours searching the house for dead spiders or flies, and then each morning we’d run to the pyramids hoping to witness a resurrection. We never did. But whenever Big’s really upset, the necromancer in him comes out, and with it, the pyramids. This time, he’s at it with a fervor, sure it will work, certain that he only failed before because he forgot a key element: an electrically charged coil, which he’s now placed under each pyramid.
A little while later, a stoned Big drifts past my open door. He’s been smoking so much weed that when he’s home he seems to hover above Gram and me like an enormous balloon – every time I come upon him, I want to tie him to a chair.
He backtracks, lingers in my doorway for a moment.
“I’m going to add a few dead moths tomorrow,” he says, as if picking up on a conversation we’d been having.
I nod. “Good idea.”
He nods back, then floats off to his room, and most likely, right out the window.
This is us. Two months and counting. Booby Hatch Central.
The next morning, a showered and betoweled Gram is fixing breakfast ashes, Big is sweeping the rafters for dead moths to put under the pyramids, and I am trying not to make out with my spoon, when there’s a knock at the door. We freeze, all of us suddenly panicked that someone might witness the silent sideshow of our grief. I walk to the front door on tiptoe, so as not to let on that we are indeed home, and peek through the peephole. It’s Joe Fontaine, looking as animated as ever, like the front door is telling him jokes. He has a guitar in his hand.
“Everybody hide,” I whisper. I prefer all boys safe in the recesses of my sex-crazed mind, not standing outside the front door of our capsizing house. Especially this minstrel. I haven’t even taken my clarinet out of its case since school ended. I have no intention of going to summer band practice.
“Nonsense,” Gram says, making her way to the front of the house in her bright purple towel muumuu and pink towel turban ensemble. “Who is it?” she asks me in a whisper hundreds of decibels louder than her normal speaking voice.
“It’s that new kid from band, Gram, I can’t deal.” I swing my arms back and forth trying to shoo her into the kitchen.
I’ve forgotten how to do anything with my lips but kiss furniture. I have no conversation i
n me. I haven’t seen anyone from school, don’t want to, haven’t called back Sarah, who’s taken to writing me long e-mails (essays) about how she’s not judging me at all about what happened with Toby, which just lets me know how much she’s judging me about what happened with Toby. I duck into the kitchen, back into a corner, pray for invisibility.
“Well, well, a troubadour,” Gram says, opening the door. She has obviously noticed the mesmery that is Joe’s face and has already begun flirting. “Here I thought we were in the twenty-first century…” She is starting to purr. I have to save him.
I reluctantly come out of hiding and join swami seductress Gram. I get a good look at him. I’ve forgotten quite how luminous he is, like another species of human that doesn’t have blood but light running through their veins. He’s spinning his guitar case like a top while he talks to Gram. He doesn’t look like he needs saving, he looks amused.
“Hi, John Lennon.” He’s beaming at me like our tree-spat never happened.
What are you doing here? I think so loudly my head might explode.
“Haven’t seen you around,” he says. Shyness overtakes his face for a quick moment – it makes my stomach flutter. Uh, I think I need to get a restraining order for all boys until I can get a handle on this newfound body buzz.
“Do come in,” Gram says, as if talking to a knight. “I was just preparing breakfast.” He looks at me, asking if it’s okay with his eyes. Gram’s still talking as she walks back into the kitchen. “You can play us a song, cheer us up a bit.” I smile at him, it’s impossible not to, and motion a welcome with my arm. As we enter the kitchen, I hear Gram whisper to Big, still in knight parlance, “I daresay, the young gentleman batted his extraordinarily long eyelashes at me.”
We haven’t had a real visitor since the weeks following the funeral and so don’t know how to behave. Uncle Big has seemingly floated to the floor and is leaning on the broom he had been using to sweep up the dead. Gram stands, spatula in hand, in the middle of the kitchen with an enormous smile on her face. I’m certain she’s forgotten what she’s wearing. And I sit upright in my chair at the table. No one says anything and all of us stare at Joe like he’s a television we’re hoping will just turn itself on.
