Breathless

by Jennifer Niven

  The last thing I remember as I drift off to sleep, underneath daisy sheets, in navy blue pajamas, is Wyatt saying, See you around, then, which could mean anything because as of today the entire world is still possible.

  7 DAYS TILL GRADUATION

  It is almost eleven a.m. and I am in my room, talking to Saz on the phone. We are talking specifically about our summer plans. First and foremost, our road trip, which will be the two of us exploring the entire state of Ohio before we bid it goodbye forever, or at least for the next four years. We’ve bought matching bikinis (black for me, red for her) and Kånken backpacks (sky blue for me, yellow for her), and Saz is getting permission to borrow the car for a week or two. She wants to start north and I want to start south, and we’re both talking and laughing at once, which is why I don’t hear the knock on the door.

  Suddenly it opens and my dad is standing there, and there is this look on his face as he takes in the posters on the walls and the T-shirts and jeans and dresses all over my floor and the books everywhere and me standing on a mountain of clothes like I’m on the peak of Kilimanjaro, and I’m still laughing but also trying to remember when in the hell he was last in my room, if ever.

  I should suspect something then, but I don’t. Instead I say, “I’m on the phone.”

  He says, “I need to talk to you.”

  And now I’m not laughing and neither is Saz, who goes, “Is that your dad?”

  She sounds every bit as surprised as I am.

  * * *

  —

  He perches on the corner of the bed, feet on the floor, looking like he might spring up and away at any moment. At first I think something horrible has happened to my mom. Or that he’s going to tell me the dog is dead or the cat is dead or my grandparents are dead. I rummage through my memories, trying to unearth the last time he sat down like this to talk to me, and I can’t remember anything prior to age thirteen, when he looked at my mom and said, “I didn’t speak teenager even when I was one. She’s in your hands now.”

  I sit down next to him, several inches between us. I am wondering where my mom is and if she knows he’s here, and then he says, “Your mom asked me to talk to you….”

  For some reason my mind goes immediately to Shane and the hayloft. Please don’t let them know. It is the worst thing I can imagine, because my life so far has been reasonably quiet and reasonably uneventful, which is apparently why I can’t write with any sort of feeling. I’ve never even had a cavity.

  And then my dad clears his throat and begins talking in this low, serious voice, which is not at all like his usual voice. And as he talks, he starts to cry, something I’ve never seen him do before.

  I’m thinking, Stop this. Don’t cry. Not you. Dads don’t cry. Which is stupid, really, but there you go.

  I think I say, “Don’t cry.”

  Or maybe I say nothing.

  Because he is telling me that he doesn’t love us anymore, my mom and me.

  That the past eighteen years of my life—

  the eighteen years that make up my entire life—

  have been a really horrible joke and that he never actually loved us at all, not once,

  or that maybe he did for a tiny while but love dies when the objects of that love are as unlovable as my mom and I are,

  and unfortunately, it’s our fault that we can’t be his family anymore.

  That he needs us to go far away so he never has to look at us again because our mere presence makes him ill. He’s still talking, but I’m not listening. I’m too focused on the way the tears are rolling into the stubbly beard on his chin and disappearing. Where are they going?

  “Clew,” he says. My nickname. The one that only he calls me. Our special name, the one just for us and secret bakery runs before school and secret ice creams before dinner and driving too fast and watching scary movies. All the things my mom is too momish to allow. Even though all my life it’s always been Claudine and Lauren, Lauren and Claudine, the Llewelyn women, because Mom never actually took Dad’s name, and we’ve always been more Llewelyn than Henry. Which basically means we believe in possibility and magic instead of always looking at the practical (i.e., darkly realistic) side of things.

  Meanwhile, my dad has stood on the perimeter, not as much like us, watching and applauding and joining in as much as he can. All my life, everyone loves us, the two Llewelyns. Everyone, apparently, but him.

  “Clew,” he says again. “It’s not because I don’t care about you.” Even now, at this moment, as the floor of my room is disappearing, as I’m staring down, past my feet, wondering how I’ll ever stand again, he can’t bring himself to say love. As in It’s not because I don’t love you.

  And then he says, “I just can’t have a family right now.”

  And maybe he says none of this, really, but it’s what I hear. And at that moment I stop looking at his tears and his beard and I am staring at the place where the floor used to be. All I can think is how one minute the floor was there and now it’s not. How you could go through an entire day, every day, not thinking about the floor or the ground because you just assume it will always be there. Until it isn’t.

  * * *

  —

  The real conversation goes more like this:

  Dad: “I need to talk to you.”

  Me: “Okay.”

  “I don’t want you to think there’s anyone else. It’s important that you know that. But your mom and I are separating, and she asked me to tell you because it’s not her idea; it’s my idea.” He looks away when he says this. And then: “I just can’t do this right now. I can’t do it.” Followed by: “It isn’t you and it isn’t your mom. It’s me. We wanted to stay together for your senior year. We didn’t want to uproot you. For the next two weeks, we’ll stay here together in this house, and then we’ll separate.”

  When he says separate, I think of a heart being cut open, of limbs being sawn off.

  “But yesterday you drove me to school.” What I mean to say is, Yesterday we were normal. We ate thumbprint cookies and rode in companionable silence and drove faster than anyone on the road.

  “It’s something that’s been building for a while,” he says. “We’ve just been trying to figure out what’s best for you and your mom and me.”

  So he knew about this as we drove across Main Street Bridge. As we drove downtown. As we ate cookies outside Joy Ann.

  I suddenly feel left out. Like all these years, even when it was Claudine and Lauren, Lauren and Claudine, I believed it was the three of us married to each other, and I’m only just realizing it was the two of them all along.

  “I don’t want you to talk to anyone about this, Clew, not even Saz. Not until we get everything sorted out. I know you love Saz and her parents, but they’re our good friends and we’re not ready for them to know. We’re not ready for anyone to know. Not yet.”

  This is how numb I am: I don’t get angry; I don’t even ask why. I don’t say, You can’t tell me who I can or can’t talk to about this. You don’t get to tell me the world is ending and then ask me not to share it. Instead I just sit there, hollowing out, hands withering in my lap, heart withering in my chest, feet dangling over the bed into space because the floor is nowhere to be found.

  He says from very far away, “This town’s so goddamn small—the last thing we need is people discussing your mom and me because they have nothing better to do. And I don’t want them making this harder on you than it has to be.”

  I don’t hear anything else after that.

  * * *

  —

  After he leaves, my mom comes in and puts her arms around me. She tells me we can talk if I want to, that it’s important to talk and get things out. “You have to let the tears come,” she always says. “Because if you don’t, they’ll come out eventually—maybe not as tears, but as anger or something worse.”
/>   “So this is real,” I say.

  “This is real.”

  And, all at once, there is this rush of feeling in my hands, in my heart, in every part of my body that just went hollow and dead, and I nearly double over from the pain of it. I feel as if a bomb has dropped from the sky directly into my room, directly onto my head.

  “I know it’s sudden. And it’s a lot. And I’m sorry. So sorry.” She pulls me in tighter.

  “Dad says I’m not allowed to talk about it.” For a minute I wonder if she can hear me, because my voice is so far away, as if it’s locked in a dark, empty room with no windows or doors.

  “Not outside the house, just while we try to figure this out.” I attempt to strangle the hope that bubbles up over while we try to figure this out, as if this whole thing is something fixable and undecided.

  “How are Saz and I supposed to go on a road trip without me saying anything?”

  “I’m not sure the road trip is going to happen, Claude. At least not right away.”

  “But we’ve been planning it.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry.” And I can see that she’s as lost as I am. “Honestly, I’m trying to understand all of this myself.” She goes quiet, and I can almost hear her choosing her words so, so carefully. “But what you need to remember is that it has nothing to do with you. Your dad and I love you more than anything.”

  * * *

  —

  After she leaves, I lie in bed. No pile of books. No dreams of Wyatt or plans for a road trip. Just me, wondering where the floor disappeared to.

  I lie there for a very long time.

  The house is so still, except for when I hear the whirring of the garage door and the roar of my dad’s car driving away. And then, a little later, when there is a banging at my door, which is my cat, Dandelion, wanting to get in. But I can’t move. So I lie there.

  And lie there.

  When Vesuvius erupted, the citizens of Pompeii were caught completely unprepared, but we know from the letters of a survivor that there were warnings. Plumes of smoke. Earth tremors. How could I not have seen the signs? How could I not have known?

  I think of all the people in the history of the world whose lives have changed in an instant, like the woman I was named for. Claudine Blackwood, my mom’s great-aunt, was only five years old when her mother shot herself in the bedroom of their Georgia island home. It was after breakfast on a Thursday, and Claudine’s father had left the house moments earlier. Claudine was the one who heard the gunshot, who found her mom lying in a pool of her own blood. It was one of those tragedies that my mom the writer refers to as a defining moment: that moment when life suddenly changes and you’re left picking up the pieces. She says it’s actually how you pick up the pieces that defines you.

  Aunt Claudine and her father remained in the house, even after that. She spent a few years in Connecticut at Miss Porter’s School for Girls, but returned to the island for good when she was nineteen. When her father died, she inherited the house. I often wondered what that must have been like, to grow up in the same space where your mother killed herself, to walk by that bedroom thousands of times over the years.

  Aunt Claudine was my mother’s favorite relative. When Mom was ten, she went to visit her and found the bullet hole in the closet door. She said she could fit her finger inside it. From the pictures I’ve seen of Claudine, she looked like a neat and tidy woman with a short blond bob and three fat dachshunds that supposedly followed her everywhere. She dressed in button-down shirts and khakis, but according to my mom, she carried herself like royalty.

  I wish I could ask Aunt Claudine if, looking back, there were signs leading up to what her mother did, but Claudine died before I was born. And maybe she noticed signs, maybe she didn’t. After all, Aunt Claudine was only five when it happened. Whatever memories of her mom, and the girl Claudine might have been if that gun had never gone off, went with her. She didn’t leave a husband or children behind, or anyone who could tell us why she stayed her whole life in that house on some island off the coast of Georgia.

  It makes me wonder, Is this a defining moment for me? And if so, what will I do with all these pieces?

  At some point I realize that I should keep moving. That lying here is only making it worse. So I pick up my phone. Saz has sent fifteen texts and left three messages. Instead of going downstairs to eat what my dad calls “breakfast for lunch,” like I have every Saturday morning for the past eighteen years, I turn the phone off and reach for the notebook and pen I keep on my bedside table. All my life, I’ve given stories to everything because I’ve felt that everything deserved to have a history. Even if it was just an old marble lodged into the basement wall. Where did it come from? Who put it there? And why?

  The thing no one knows—I am writing a novel. A bad, overly long novel that I am in love with even though it has no plot and about seven hundred characters and I’ll probably never finish it. So far it fills three notebooks, and I am still going. One day I will either throw the notebooks away or type all these words into my laptop.

  I open the notebook. Uncap the pen.

  I stare at the page.

  It stares back.

  “Stop staring at me,” I tell it.

  I write my name on it, just to show it who’s in charge here. Claude.

  I circle it. Circle it again and again until my name looks like it’s trapped inside an angry cloud.

  I write my full name. Claudine Llewelyn Henry. Llewelyn, as in my mom’s maiden name. I cross out the Henry and write: Claudine Llewelyn. Maybe this is who I’ll be from now on.

  I reach for my phone, turn it back on, and call Saz.

  “What did your dad want?”

  “What?”

  “Your dad,” she says. “What did he want?”

  “Nothing. Just to talk to me about graduation. My grandparents are coming to visit us so they can hear my speech.” And I think, Oh, I’m really doing this. I am really not telling her. I look down at the inside of my arm, where I am pinching the skin so hard it’s turning blue.

  “You sound weird. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m good. Just tired. I didn’t sleep much.” I think about telling her then, even though my dad said not to, even though my mom agreed I shouldn’t, about the bomb he just dropped onto my head and onto my heart. But that would make it real, and right now it doesn’t feel real. Instead I say, “What are you doing later?” Just to see what happens, I poke my skin with the tip of my pen, again and again, until the skin is blue all over from the ink, or maybe from bruises.

  “Nothing. Right now I’m kind of half watching a movie and making a Leah Basco voodoo doll.”

  “Can you get the car?”

  “Probably. You can always come over here.” Saz lives three blocks away.

  “Okay.”

  “Or we can go to Dayton instead.”

  I think of driving fast and turning the music up loud, loud, loud. “That sounds better.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I look down at the notebook, where I’ve filled the page with my name. Claude three hundred times. At the little spots of blue on my arm.

  “I’m sure.”

  We hang up, and I prepare to wait in my room for the next five or six hours so I don’t have to sit downstairs and talk to my mom.

  * * *

  —

  Saz drives. Her car is a five-year-old Honda that she shares with her brother Byron. We drive fast with the music up and the windows down, and we don’t talk about Yvonne or Wyatt or Shane. We let ourselves become part of the air and the night and the song, and we sing until we’re hoarse.

  This is part of Saz and Claude, of two best friends growing up in a town that is too small. She was the first person who made me feel at home in Mary Grove. We bonded over the fact that neither of us was born
here, and we became outsiders together. At ten, as soon as we discovered that we were both planning to be writers, we decided we were going to leave Mary Grove and be Big Deals out in the world someday. Leaving this town and Ohio behind was something we agreed was necessary to our survival. That’s when the list started—a list of everything we would do and accomplish once we were free. In fifth grade we formed an all-girl band so that we could leave sooner. We weren’t very good at playing music, but we were great at listening to it, and our love for all decades and genres brought us to Françoise Hardy and the yé-yé girls of the 1960s. These were women we learned about in seventh-grade French class who—in all their amazing, exotic Frenchness—transported us out of ourselves and away from our small Midwestern town and inspired an obsession with all things old and French.

  In Dayton, we climb the steps of the Art Institute, which is closed tight but lit up on the outside. We sit huddled against the wind and the cold, even though it’s nearly summer. We watch the sky change from gray to gold to pink to navy. The moon appears, followed by the stars, which are too bright. There is something unfair about them.

  At age eleven, when Saz concluded she was adopted because her small, quiet brothers and small, quiet parents didn’t begin to understand her, we decided she was a foundling instead. And even though I love my parents and I am exactly like them, split down the middle, I decided I might be a foundling too. In spite of Saz’s Lilliputian size and my too-long limbs, her brown skin and my freckles, her dark, straight hair and my electric orange mop, we told ourselves we were separated at birth, and the only explanation had to be that we were stolen from our real family. We created an entire written history for ourselves of our original parents, our original siblings, and the people who had stolen us. At thirteen, we made a plan—when high school was over, we would go to California and share an apartment and earn our living as writers. Over the years, as we became better and better friends, it was hard to tell where Saz began and I ended.