Life at the Speed of Us

by Heather Sappenfield

  The doorbell woke me with Mom and Dad’s wedding photo a rectangle weight on my chest. I rubbed my face. The clock read 3:02 p.m. I knuckled my eyes as I descended the stairs. Big John filled the skinny window beside the front door. I blew out my breath and opened it.

  “Hey, Sov.”

  Silence.

  “Your dad sent me to check on you.”

  Handler must have texted Dad that I’d ditched. Again. I swallowed against what Dad must have thought. If I hadn’t seen Gage, I’d have gone back to school after lunch. This wasn’t his fault. But then I considered the vision—seeing Mom—and I couldn’t regret ditching.

  Big John watched my face with interest. I spun on my heel and walked down the hall. He closed the door and eased off his boots and jacket. I drew a glass of water in the kitchen. He entered the room and stood across from me, the breakfast bar a thick line between us. I avoided looking at his good-natured face. We listened to liquid rush down my throat.

  “Your cheek looks good.”

  I shrugged.

  “I wonder how many folks in the world have had a jowl full of quills. Dogs, sure. But humans?” He grinned. “How the hell’d that happen, anyway?”

  Nobody had asked me that. It seemed like the sort of thing a person would want to know.

  I shrugged.

  “Still not talking? Word is, you’re saying a little.” Big John sounded hurt. He was like that, always wearing his heart on his sleeve.

  “An impasse.” I shrugged.

  He chuckled. “With a porcupine?” He scanned the room. “Haven’t been here much lately.” He focused on the yellow tulips in the table’s center, and he smiled sadly. I thought how he had twin sons in kindergarten. Big, grinning, tow-headed boys I hadn’t seen in a while. I pictured them towering over the other kids.

  “Time was,” Big John said, “I’d come over here and you’d be at that table with headphones on. Or the couch. Those things were pretty near part of your head. Remember?”

  I nodded. Before Big John had fallen in love and married—all in about a month—he’d been here almost as much as Wash. Those big headphones had etched the patterns and vocabularies of stories in me, and that made people believe I was smart. Till they saw me write or heard me read, that is. I hadn’t worn those headphones in years—earbuds had replaced them—so I knew he was remembering me little, like his boys. Placing himself in Dad’s position.

  “Thanks.” I said it like Please go, and then wished I could rewind the word.

  “Talking, indeed.” He looked at his hands, turned, and lumbered back down the hall. The set of his shoulders was like a mirror of all my faults. He scuffed on his boots and shrugged on his jacket. “How ’bout you call your dad?”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe next time, tell him before you leave school. He’s not your mom, but he loves you just the same.” Big John stepped onto the narrow porch. “We all love you, Sov.”

  Shame pressed my chin to my chest as I shut the door. I slumped on the stairs. If this was a movie, the audience would itch to slap me. I pictured myself in those headphones like Big John had. Where had they gone?

  I trudged upstairs and searched through my desk, under my bed, on my closet’s top shelf. No headphones.

  Inspiration hit, and I walked to Mom and Dad’s room. My body’s indent on Mom’s side of the bed stopped me cold. It looked like she’d just taken a nap. That Mom/me vision came right back, but I shook my head. I opened Mom’s top dresser drawer, leaning back a little like something might jump out. There, right at the front, lay those headphones.

  I slid them on, saw my kindergarten self in the mirror over the dresser, and bit back a laugh. I reached out to that young reflection, but when my fingers touched the cool glass, it was me. I ground the freckle that rode my upper lip. The only one on my face, and I hated it. I drew the cord from the drawer, coiling it around my hand, and there was that business card from the New York guy who’d said I could model. I shut the drawer.

  Still wearing the headphones, I smoothed the covers on Mom’s side of the bed, fluffed my head’s dent from the pillow, and put back the wedding photo. In my bedroom, I smashed my cheek against the wall to see along my dresser’s back. I got a broom from the kitchen pantry and retrieved my voice recorder. Coated with dust, its corner had a blue scrape that matched my bedroom wall, but I put in new batteries, pressed the play button, and it worked.

  Like Mom had shown me a thousand times, I turned on my laptop and opened the library’s website. I meticulously typed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings into the catalog’s search engine. It didn’t work. I looked closer, dove my fingers into my hair, and tried to fix the spellings.

  I was in luck: the library owned an audio version, read by Angelou herself. I downloaded it onto my phone, and downloaded the visual book onto my Kindle so I could read it with bigger font. Then I headed for the kitchen table, to sit where Big John had seen the kindergarten me, and realized I still hadn’t called Dad. Gage wanting to get back together + me ditching school = Dad hurt. I paused on the stairs, held my phone awkwardly in my sling-hand, and texted I’M HOME AND FINE, TIRED, autocorrect fixing my spelling.

  My homework was to read the memoir’s first two chapters. I sat at the table and started the book. Angelou spoke deep-voiced and slow, enunciating each syllable like the voice of destiny.

  8

  When Dad got home, I still wore those headphones but had red sauce and water for pasta bubbling on the stove. I turned off the book, longing to shout I saw Mom today! Through the steam, sadness hung on his face. My pulse turned loud. I knew that guilty sensation for living on without her. He forced a smile.

  “This is a nice surprise.”

  “Sorry,” I managed. “About school.”

  “Please tell me before you leave, Sov.”

  I started to shrug, but made myself nod. We were slogging through new ground. Solving for y.

  Dad studied me. I pushed my lies way back in my eyes. This I was practiced at.

  “You haven’t worn those in years.” He chin-pointed at my headphones as he drew his wallet and keys from his pockets and set them in their usual spot, where the breakfast bar met the wall.

  “Big John reminded me.”

  Dad laughed lightly. “Nostalgic bugger. Either they’ve gotten smaller or you’ve gotten bigger.”

  I pulled the silent headphones to rest around my neck. Their gentle pressure had brought back the everything-is-okay sense that had surrounded my life back then. A detail from the vision today came to me: that Sovern had been slightly taller than Mom. When she’d died, Mom and I had been the same height. I leaned into the counter, my whole body weak, because me being taller than her = no way it was memory. I looked at Dad. Should I tell him?

  “Sov?”

  I straightened and stirred the pasta.

  “Something’s bothering you.”

  I shrugged.

  Dad set the table. I ladled the pasta and sauce into bowls, pulled the salad I’d made from the fridge, and set it all on the table.

  Dad sat down. He said, “Drinks,” and started to rise, but I lunged up and into the kitchen. My phone in my jeans pocket buzzed with a text. Gage: MISSED YOU IN CALI. I read it again: MISSED YOU IN CALC. I set my phone on the counter and took a long sip of air to divert my nicotine craving.

  “Water’s fine,” Dad said.

  I filled a new glass, topped off the one I’d been using, and set the two glasses at our places. Dad started eating. I started eating. Salad crunched in Dad’s teeth. My fork scraped against the bowl’s bottom as I twirled pasta onto it. The fridge squeaked, marking every cruel second. Eons seemed to stretch between us.

  “What have you been listening to?” he finally said.

  “English.”

  “A novel?”

  “Memoir.”

  “About what?”
<
br />   I could do this: speak. “An African-American girl. Her parents divorce. She’s sent to Arkansas. Raised by her grandma.” So many words.

  “What’s it called?”

  “I Know Why”—I had to pause—“the Caged Bird Sings.”

  “I read that in school. Pretty brutal. At the end … ” He looked at me sharply, and then away.

  “What?” I said.

  “Caged bird. You’ve always called this place a prison.” Dad shoved a forkful of pasta into his mouth and looked around the room. “They’re looking for someone to live in the cabin again.”

  “What?”

  “They want a presence up there. Full-time. They’re preparing to do some construction over the summer, already starting to bring up gear, so they want someone there as soon as possible.”

  I surged forward in my chair, nodding.

  “I thought you’d say that. Sov, it won’t be like it was before.”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s not just your mom. You’re older now. You won’t be able to escape home from school if you’re tired. You’ll have to learn to drive a snowmobile—”

  “Bonus.”

  “And a truck in summer.”

  I turned hot. I’d avoided driving since Mom died. “Bike.”

  Mom’s bronze medal from Mountain Bike Nationals still hung on the garage wall. She’d raced in the first Mountain Bike World Championships. Time was, she had me on a bike constantly.

  Dad smiled a little. “You’ll have to get up a half-hour earlier for the commute. Going out with friends won’t be—”

  “What friends?”

  Dad shrugged. “Gage?”

  My gaze dropped in shame. I pictured nights loitering with Gage in the shadowy arch supports below the Gem Bridge, Crystal Creek flowing below, cheery tourists flowing above. Our legs had dangled over the edge of the concrete pillars as our hands gripped liquor—stolen from the cabinet at Gage’s—and our mouths exhaled white smoke against the dark. The line where our arms met was a fever, the adrenaline of maybe getting caught a drug.

  I stared down, blinking with realization: All that time, I’d been trying to hurt Dad, sure, but what I’d really been after was his attention. Now, I had it, and I couldn’t even meet his eye.

  I tasted today’s kiss. “Gage and I are done,” I said to the table.

  I felt more than saw Dad’s smile and his nod. “That’s a relief.”

  I forced my gaze to meet his, grimacing, not sure how to react to having done something right.

  9

  On Friday, Gage watched me slide into my desk. I’d purposely arrived in Calc just before the tardy bell.

  “Hey, sexy,” he said. “Playing hard to get?”

  Rolling eyes = my emotions’ inverse.

  “Open your books to page 530,” Kenowitz said.

  I faced front. On my back, Gage drew a heart with his finger. He’d done the same thing the day before, making my skin tingle both times.

  “Aren’t we skipping a chapter?” said Shelley Millhouse, future valedictorian. Home-schooled till middle school, Shelley used to play with me at the cabin while her mom skied, then later at the Condo. Her house was this cool ski chalet turned bed-and-breakfast, right on Crystal Creek. How strange her life must have been, with strangers sleeping down the hall and eating breakfast in her dining room, but the Millhouses welcomed everyone. Till sixth grade, when Shelley and I ended up in class together, and she witnessed how reading labeled me officially dumb.

  “I find it works better,” Kenowitz said, “if we learn parametric, vector, and polar functions before infinite series. Infinite series can get confusing.”

  “Great,” George Polinsky said. George had been confused by life in general since kindergarten. It used to bug me, but over the last year, I could relate.

  “I’m always available after school. You know that, people. Okay. What’s a parametric curve? Imagine the motion of a projectile.” Kenowitz penned a curve on the SMART Board’s graph screen. I’d looked at the chapter last fall, wondering at the equation for my own life’s descent. When I collided with that Shangri-La tree, my descent had paused. That vision of Mom and me two days ago had seemed like the descent starting again, yet tonight Dad and I would move our stuff up to the cabin, and that was definitely ascending.

  Gage traced another heart on my back. Two crescents meeting top and bottom. I considered its parametric equation.

  “So what we end up with are some interesting and cool-looking graphs,” Kenowitz concluded. “Look at Section 10.1 on page 531.”

  I glanced at page 531 and then doodled a line for my future. A wobbly, Mom-less one that made me swallow guilt as I forced it to curve slightly up. I considered its equation, but my mind drifted to imagining Dad, me, and our ski-patrol family at the cabin eating dinner, coyote howls for music. I imagined standing on its deck in my pajamas, gazing at night’s infinity, the invisible sea of peaks rolling below.

  I pictured the recreation-path vision. This time, I focused on myself as I’d stood, hand pressed to that tree, summer all around. My body remembered that cello-string vibration, and I realized it was the same resonance as when I’d collided with that Shangri-La tree. I straightened in my desk, remembering the porcupines in both trees. Both trees had been spruce.

  I gaped at my palm. If I tilted my hand horizontal, the line along the meat of my thumb matched the one I’d just doodled. I suddenly needed to press that palm’s line against yesterday’s spruce.

  Kenowitz’s demonstration of parametric equations and how to graph them was drawing to a close. The bell rang.

  I shot from my desk, gathered my pencil and graphing calculator, and bolted. At my locker, I shoved my homework into my backpack, knowing it was wrong to ditch again, but no way could I concentrate, let alone sit in a desk. I texted Dad: TIRED. HEADING HOME.

  I slung my backpack over my shoulder and made for the door next to the cafeteria, where it was easiest to slip away without being seen. Just before I reached those doors, Gage called, “Sovern?”

  I turned.

  “Need some company?”

  The unsure set of his shoulders stopped me. I gripped my backpack’s one strap over my shoulder with both hands.

  He shrugged. “I miss you. I miss you bad.”

  I wanted to rush to him. Instead, I forced out, “That girl you knew—she wasn’t really me.”

  The Sovern from the vision rose in my memory, and I blinked her back.

  “Maybe that wasn’t me, either,” Gage said.

  My mouth sagged open.

  “Maybe we were both just pissed at the world. Maybe we were the best thing that could have happened to each other,” he said.

  “Best thing? You broke up with me on the anniversary of my mom’s death!”

  “I know. I was desperate, see? You were destroying yourself, and I couldn’t handle it.” He rubbed the back of his head the way he did when I knew he was thinking for real. “I’m sorry.”

  I’d never heard Gage talk this way. Never heard him apologize. To anyone.

  He shoved his hands in his front pockets. “Later.”

  I watched him round the hall’s corner and felt like he’d stuffed my heart in one of those pockets. I bolted out the door.

  I tugged up my hood. They’d plowed the path, so walking was easy, and the storm had vacated, leaving crystalline sky. On a deep inhalation, my nostrils stuck together. The spruce came into view, and I stopped, shielded my eyes from the afternoon sun, and searched for a brown-gray lump but found none.

  The storm had erased my tracks. I stepped to the spruce and studied its bark. I reached out, pulse in my fingertips. Good, I thought. Gage hadn’t taken my heart after all. I laid my palm against the trunk.

  Nothing.

  From up the path, two jogging women approached, so I stepped aside.
Their voices hung in the frigid air. They smiled at me, but I was a delinquent to them, no doubt. One cocked her head and looked up. The other woman looked up too, saying, “Oh!” She pointed at a different spruce than the one I’d just touched as they drifted to the path’s far side.

  From where I stood, I couldn’t see anything, so I walked to where the woman had pointed from, shielded my eyes against the sun, and peered up. A porcupine huddled in that spruce’s branches. I considered its base, rooted on Crystal Creek’s frozen bank. I’d been at the wrong tree.

  The women disappeared around the path’s bend as I strode to the correct tree and, innards fluttering, pressed my palm against it. That cello sound shimmered through me and out of each quill hole in my cheek.

  Sun shafts. Green’s scent.

  A rushing river’s shout.

  Mom and I strolled along the path, farther down now, their backs to me. I circled around the trunk, right to the river’s edge, so I could see them. Their heads were tilted close. That warm breeze flowed from vision-me to Mom’s dress and set the late spring wildflowers swaying. Vision-me wore a dress too. A dress?

  “MIT ! See what believing ‘I can’ will do? Don’t ever let anyone tell you something’s impossible,” Mom said, and her arm wrapping my shoulder squeezed me closer. She kissed vision-me’s forehead. My hand almost came to my own forehead, but I forced it still against that trunk.

  Dad appeared around the path’s corner on my other side, catching up to them. He was smiling, proud, content. His gait was swift but relaxed. The breeze ruffled his hair. “Hey, you two!”

  Mom and vision-me turned. Mom held out her hand to him, and he took it. They kissed.

  “Mom?” I called.

  She saw me then and studied me, head to toe. She paled and shivered.

  “Tay?” Dad said.

  Her brow furrowed, and her free hand came to it. “Do you—?”

  “Mom?” vision-me said.