by Jandy Nelson
But what if I’m a shell-less turtle now, demented and devastated in equal measure, an unfreakingbelievable mess of a girl, who wants to turn the air into colors with her clarinet, and what if somewhere inside I prefer this? What if as much as I fear having death as a shadow, I’m beginning to like how it quickens the pulse, not only mine, but the pulse of the whole world. I doubt Joe would even have noticed me if I’d still been in that hard shell of mild happiness. He wrote in his journal that he thinks I’m on full blast, me, and maybe I am now, but I never was before. How can the cost of this change in me be so great? It doesn’t seem right that anything good should come out of Bailey’s death. It doesn’t seem right to even have these thoughts.
But then I think about my sister and what a shell-less turtle she was and how she wanted me to be one too. C’mon, Lennie, she used to say to me at least ten times a day. C’mon, Len. And that makes me feel better, like it’s her life rather than her death that is now teaching me how to be, who to be.
I know Toby’s there even before I go inside, because Lucy and Ethel are camped out on the porch. When I walk into the kitchen, I see him and Gram sitting at the table talking in hushed voices.
“Hi,” I say, dumbfounded. Doesn’t he realize he can’t be here?
“Lucky me,” Gram says. “I was walking home with armfuls of groceries and Toby came whizzing by on his skateboard.” Gram hasn’t driven since the 1900s. She walks everywhere in Clover, which is how she became Garden Guru. She couldn’t help herself, started carrying her shears on her trips to town and people would come home and find her pruning their bushes to perfection: ironic yes, because of her hands-off policy with her own garden.
“Lucky,” I say to Gram as I take in Toby. Fresh scrapes cover his arms, probably from wiping out on his board. He looks wild-eyed and disheveled, totally unmoored. I know two things in this moment: I was wrong about the text and I don’t want to be unmoored with him anymore.
What I really want is to go up to The Sanctum and play my clarinet.
Gram looks at me, smiles. “You swam. Your hair looks like a cyclone. I’d like to paint it.” She reaches her hand up and touches my cyclone. “Toby’s going to have dinner with us.”
I can’t believe this. “I’m not hungry,” I say. “I’m going upstairs.”
Gram gasps at my rudeness, but I don’t care. Under no circumstances am I sitting through dinner with Toby, who touched my breasts, and Gram and Big. What is he thinking?
I go up to The Sanctum, unpack and assemble my clarinet, then take out the Edith Piaf sheet music that I borrowed from a certain garçon, turn to “La Vie en Rose,” and start playing. It’s the song we listened to last night while the world exploded. I’m hoping I can just stay lost in a state of Joeliriousness, and I won’t hear a knock at my door after they eat, but of course, I do.
Toby, who touched my breasts and, let’s not forget, put his hand down my jeans too, opens the door, walks tentatively across the room, and sits on Bailey’s bed. I stop playing, rest my clarinet on my stand. Go away, I think heartlessly, just go away. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen, none of it.
Neither of us says a word. He’s rubbing his thighs so intently, I bet the friction is generating heat. His gaze is drifting all around the room. It finally locks on a photograph of Bailey and him on her dresser. He takes a breath, looks over at me. His gaze lingers.
“Her shirt…”
I look down. I forgot I had it on. “Yeah.” I’ve been wearing Bailey’s clothes more and more outside The Sanctum as well as in it. I find myself going through my own drawers and thinking, Who was the girl who wore these things? I’m sure a shrink would love this, all of it, I think, looking over at Toby. She’d probably tell me I was trying to take Bailey’s place. Or worse, competing with her in a way I never could when she was alive.
But is that it? It doesn’t feel like it. When I wear her clothes, I just feel safer, like she’s whispering in my ear.
I’m lost in thought, so it startles me when Toby says in an uncharacteristic shaky voice, “Len, I’m sorry. About everything.” I glance at him. He looks so vulnerable, frightened. “I got way out of control, feel so bad.” Is this what he needed to tell me? Relief tumbles out of my chest.
“Me too,” I say, thawing immediately. We’re in this together.
“Me more, trust me,” he says, rubbing his thighs again. He’s so distraught. Does he think it’s all his fault or something?
“We both did it, Toby,” I say. “Each time. We’re both horrible.”
He looks at me, his dark eyes warm. “You’re not horrible, Lennie.” His voice is gentle, intimate. I can tell he wants to reach out to me. I’m glad he’s across the room. I wish he were across the equator. Do our bodies now think whenever they’re together they get to touch? I tell mine that is most definitely not the case, no matter that I feel it again. No matter.
And then a renegade asteroid breaks through the earth’s atmosphere and hurtles into The Sanctum: “It’s just that I can’t stop thinking about you,” he says. “I can’t. I just…” He’s balling up Bailey’s bedspread in his fists. “I want—”
“Please don’t say more.” I cross the room to my dresser, open the middle drawer, reach in and pull out a shirt, my shirt. I have to take Bailey’s off. Because I’m suddenly thinking that imaginary shrink is spot on.
“It’s not me,” I say quietly as I open the closet door and slip inside. “I’m not her.”
I stay in the dark quiet getting my breathing under control, my life under control, getting my own shirt on my own body. It’s like there’s a river under my feet tumbling me toward him, still, even with everything that’s happened with Joe, a roaring, passionate, despairing river, but I don’t want to go this time. I want to stay on the shore. We can’t keep wrapping our arms around a ghost.
When I come out of the closet, he’s gone.
“I’m so sorry,” I say aloud to the empty orange room.
As if in response, thousands of hands begin tapping on the roof. I walk over to my bed, climb up to the window ledge and stick my hands out. Because we only get one or two storms a summer, rain is an event. I lean far over the ledge, palms to the sky, letting it all slip through my fingers, remembering what Big told Toby and me that afternoon. No way out of this but through. Who knew what through would be?
I see someone rushing down the road in the downpour. When the figure gets near the lit-up garden I realize it’s Joe and am instantly uplifted. My life raft.
“Hey,” I yell out and wave like a maniac.
He looks up at the window, smiles, and I can’t get down the stairs, out the front door, into the rain and by his side fast enough.
“I missed you,” I say, reaching up and touching his cheek with my fingers. Raindrops drip from his eyelashes, stream in rivulets all down his face.
“God, me too.” Then his hands are on my cheeks and we are kissing and the rain is pouring all over our crazy heads and once again my whole being is aflame with joy.
I didn’t know love felt like this, like turning into brightness.
“What are you doing?” I say, when I can finally bring myself to pull away for a moment.
“I saw it was raining – I snuck out, wanted to see you, just like this.”
“Why’d you have to sneak out?” The rain’s drenching us, my shirt clings to me, and Joe’s hands to it, rubbing up and down my sides.
“I’m in prison,” he says. “Got busted big-time, that wine we drank was like a four-hundred-dollar bottle. I had no idea. I wanted to impress you so took it from downstairs. My dad went ape-shit when he saw the empty bottle – he’s making me sort wood all day and night in the workshop while he talks to his girlfriend on the phone the whole time. I think he forgets I speak French.”
I’m not sure whether to address the four-hundred-dollar bottle of wine we drank or the girlfriend, decide on the latter. “His girlfriend?”
“Never mind. I had to see you, but now I have to go back, and I w
anted to give you this.” He pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket, stuffs it quickly into mine before it can get soaked.
He kisses me again. “Okay, I’m leaving.” He doesn’t move.
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“I don’t want you to,” I say. His hair’s black and snaky all around his glistening face. It’s like being in the shower with him. Wow – to be in the shower with him.
He turns to go for real then and I notice his eyes narrow as he peers over my shoulder. “Why’s he always here?”
I turn around. Toby’s in the doorframe, watching us – he looks like he’s been hit by a wrecking ball. God. He must not have left, must have been in the art room with Gram or something. He pushes open the door, grabs his skateboard, and rushes past without a word, huddled against the downpour.
“What’s going on?” Joe asks, X-raying me with his stare. His whole body has stiffened.
“Nothing. Really,” I answer, just as I did with Sarah. “He’s upset about Bailey.” What else can I tell him? If I tell him what’s going on, what went on even after he kissed me, I’ll lose him.
So when he says, “I’m being stupid and paranoid?” I just say, “Yeah.” And hear in my head: Never cross a horn player.
He smiles wide and open as a meadow. “Okay.” Then he kisses me hard one last time and we are again drinking the rain off each other’s lips. “Bye, John Lennon.”
And he’s off.
I hurry inside, worrying about what Toby said to me and what I didn’t say to Joe, as the rain washes all those beautiful kisses off of me.
I’m lying down on my bed, holding in my hands the antidote to worrying about anything. It’s a sheet of music, still damp from the rain. At the top, it says in Joe’s boxlike weirdo boy handwriting: For a soulful, beautiful clarinettist, from a homely, boring, talentless though passionate guitarist. Part 1, Part 2 to come.
I try to hear it in my head, but my facility to hear without playing is terrible. I get up, find my clarinet, and moments later the melody spills into the room. I remember as I play what he said about my tone being so lonely, like a day without birds, but it’s as if the melody he wrote is nothing but birds and they are flying out of the end of my clarinet and filling the air of a still summer day, filling the trees and sky – it’s exquisite. I play it over and over again, until I know it by heart.
It’s 2 a.m. and if I play the song one more time, my fingers will fall off, but I’m too Joelirious to sleep. I go downstairs to get something to eat, and when I come back into The Sanctum, I’m blindsided by a want so urgent I have to cover my mouth to stifle a shriek. I want Bails to be sprawled out on her bed reading. I want to talk to her about Joe, want to play her this song.
I want my sister.
I want to hurl a building at God.
I take a breath and exhale with enough force to blow the orange paint right off the walls.
It’s no longer raining – the scrubbed newness of the night rolls in through the open window. I don’t know what to do, so I walk over to Bailey’s desk and sit down like usual. I look at the detective’s business card again. I thought about calling him but haven’t yet, haven’t packed up a thing either. I pull over a carton, decide to do one or two drawers. I hate looking at the empty boxes almost more than I hate the idea of packing up her things.
The bottom drawer’s full of school notebooks, years of work, now useless. I take one out, glide my fingers over the cover, hold it to my chest, and then put it in the carton. All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.
I stack the rest of the notebooks on top of the first, close the drawer, and do the same with the one above it. I close the carton and start a new one. There are more school notebooks in this drawer, some journals, which I will not read. I flip through the stack, putting them, one by one, into the box. At the very bottom of the drawer, there is an open one. It has Bailey’s chicken scrawl handwriting all over it; columns of words cover the whole page, with lines crossing out most of them. I take it out, feel a pang of guilt, but then my guilt turns to surprise, then fear, when I see what the words are.
They’re all combinations of our mother’s name combined with other names and things. There is a whole section of the name Paige combined with people and things related to John Lennon, my namesake, and we assume her favorite musician because of it. We know practically nothing about Mom. It’s like when she left, she took all traces of her life with her, leaving only a story behind. Gram rarely talks about anything but her amazing wanderlust, and Big isn’t much better.
“At five years old,” Gram would tell us over and over again, holding up her fingers for emphasis, “your mother snuck out of her bed one night and I found her halfway to town, with her little blue backpack and a walking stick. She said she was on an adventure – at five years old, girls!”
So that was all we had, except for a box of belongings we kept in The Sanctum. It’s full of books we foraged over the years from the shelves downstairs, ones that had her name in them: Oliver Twist, On the Road, Siddhartha, The Collected Poems of William Blake, and some Harlequins, which threw us for a loop, book snobs that we are. None of them are dog-eared or annotated. We have some yearbooks, but there are no scribbles from friends in them. There’s a copy of The Joy of Cooking with food spattered all over it. (Gram did once tell us that Mom was magical in the kitchen and that she suspects she makes her living on the road by cooking.)
But mostly, what we have are maps, lots and lots of them: road maps, topographic maps, maps of Clover, of California, of the forty-nine other states, of country after country, continent after continent. There are also several atlases, each of which look as read and reread as my copy of Wuthering Heights. The maps and atlases reveal the most about her: a girl for whom the world beckoned. When we were younger, Bailey and I would spend countless hours poring over the atlases imagining routes and adventures for her.
I start leafing through the notebook. There are pages and pages of these combinations: Paige/Lennon/Walker, Paige/ Lennon/Yoko, Paige/Lennon/Imagine, Paige/Dakota/Ono, and on and on. Sometimes there are notes under a name combination. For instance, scribbled under the words Paige/Dakota is an address in North Hampton, Massachusetts. But then that’s crossed out and the words too young are scrawled in.
I’m shocked. We’d both put our mother’s name into search engines many times to no avail, and we would sometimes try to think of pseudonyms she might have chosen and search them to no avail as well, but never like this, never methodically, never with this kind of thoroughness and persistence. The notebook is practically full. Bailey must have been doing this in every free moment, every moment I wasn’t around, because I so rarely saw her at the computer. But now that I’m thinking about it, I did see her in front of The Half Mom an awful lot before she died, studying it, intently, almost like she was waiting for it to speak to her.
I turn to the first page of the notebook. It’s dated February 27, less than two months before she died. How could she have done all this in that amount of time? No wonder she needed St Anthony’s help. I wish she’d asked for mine.
I put the notebook back in the drawer, walk back over to my bed, take my clarinet out of the case again, and play Joe’s song. I want to be in that summer day again, I want to be there with my sister.
At night,
when we were little,
we tented Bailey's covers,
crawled underneath with our flashlights
and played cards: Hearts,
Whist, Crazy Eights,
and our favorite: Bloody Knuckles.
The competition was vicious.
All day, every day,
we were the Walker Girls—
two peas i
n a pod
thick as thieves—
but when Gram closed the door
for the night,
we bared our teeth
we played for chores,
for slave duty,
for truths and dares and money.
We played to be better, brighter,
to be more beautiful,
more,
just more.
But is was all a ruse—
we played
so we could fall asleep
in the same bed
without having to ask,
so we could wrap together
like a braid,
so while we slept
our dreams could switch bodies.
(Found written on the inside cover of Wuthering Heights, Lennie’s room)
I used to talk to The Half Mom a lot,
but I'd wait until no one else was home
and then I'd say:
I imagine you
up there
not like a cloud or a bird or a star
but like a mother,
except one who lives in the sky
who doesn't make a fuss
about gravity
who just goes about her business
drifting around with the wind.
(Found on a piece of newspaper under the Walkers’ porch)
When I come down to the kitchen the next morning, Gram is at the stove cooking sausages, her shoulders hunched into a broad frown. Big slouches over his coffee at the table. Behind them the morning fog shrouds the window, like the house is hovering inside a cloud. Standing in the doorway I’m filled with the same scared, hollow feeling I get when I see abandoned houses, ones with weeds growing through the front steps, paint cracked and dirty, windows broken and boarded up.
