“Never mind,” I say and get back on my bike.
I’m about to ride away when he says, “I run cross-country.”
I stop, hesitantly glancing at him.
“I’ve seen you sleeping here before. Why do you sleep?”
He asks the question honestly, so I answer the same way.
“To escape,” I say.
His eyes travel down to his shoes. “It’s the same with running.”
He starts down the trail again, running even faster than before, almost rejuvenated. That or he really doesn’t want to talk to me. I don’t follow him, because it’s hard to escape when someone’s riding your tail and you have to look back constantly when you should keep your eyes forward.
But the boy with the buzzed hair asks really good questions. I may have met my match.
I ask Mom if I can go out tonight. It’s Friday. We’re standing in the kitchen making dinner. Tom is still at the bank. Mom fills up my “Esther” water bottle and sets it down next to me.
“With who?”
I keep my head down as I chop onions for the spaghetti sauce. They sting my eyes.
“Color. The girl who cleans our house,” I say. “You said we need to make friends.”
“Color,” Mom says. “Interesting name.” She doesn’t answer my question right away, but takes some of the chopped onions and adds them to the cooking meat. I keep dicing as tears begin to form in my eyes and fall down my cheeks.
“You know, I wanted to name you Violet, but your dad didn’t like names that were colors, like Ruby and Hazel.” Mom tucks loose auburn hair behind her ear. Hannah does the same motion with her hair, too.
“Amber . . . Jade . . . Goldie?” I say.
“How about Olive?”
“Raven?”
“Scarlet.”
I gag.
“I still love the name Violet, though,” Mom says. “It’s nice for a girl.”
“I like it, too.” I keep chopping. Mom keeps cooking. I add more onions to the pot. She turns to me then, with tears running down her face, just like mine. We stare at each other. It’s the wettest thing to happen in the desert since we arrived.
I ask Mom in my head, Why did you let this happen? It’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever asked because I made this happen. I wrote the equation and asked Mom and Tom to answer it. And they did.
“From the onions,” Mom says, with a sniffle that knows it’s a lie. I hand her a napkin. She points at the “Esther” water bottle as she pats her face dry. “Drink that.” I follow her orders. Mom says, “Color. I like that name.” Then she adds, “Just let me deal with Tom.”
Mom is a liar, which I knew, but somehow managed to forget in the move. She tells Tom that I’m going out with Beth from church. She says it so smoothly, I almost believe her.
Hannah sits in her seat, frowning.
I ignore her. It’s what she wants anyway. Tom says that as long as I’m home by ten, he doesn’t see a problem with it. A napkin is tucked into the collar of his long-sleeved button-down shirt, so he doesn’t slurp spaghetti sauce on it, but he doesn’t roll up his sleeves. I see the tail of his snake tattoo. I swear it rattles at me.
When Mom drives me to the Blockbuster in her old, run-down van, I ask her why she lied.
“Esther, why do you think I drive this piece of shit?” The question throws me, not only because it’s not an answer, but also because when Mom swears, it’s like she becomes herself again. Right there in the front seat—she’s transformed into the woman who worked as a grocery store manager for eight years. Who brought home life-sized cardboard cutouts of famous people from displays at the store, just so we could have Brad Pitt at our dinner table. The woman who likes multicolored Christmas lights instead of the white ones Tom makes us put up.
“Why?” I ask.
Mom pulls into the strip mall’s lot and parks. “Because every woman should have something of her own. Her very own.” Mom gestures to the Blockbuster. “I’m letting you have this, Esther. No funny business this time. Don’t let my lie go to waste.”
I swallow the sudden lump in my throat.
“I’ll pick you up at ten,” she says. Then she pulls her ponytail free, letting long auburn hair cascade down her back, and turns up the radio. I hear her sing at the top of her lungs as she pulls out of the parking lot.
At the door of the Blockbuster, I pause, the reason for meeting here unknown. But I invited her to lie in an empty pool. Who am I to judge? Paper covers the windows, so I can’t see inside. The place feels totally abandoned.
The doors open within a few seconds, and Color pops her head out.
“You’re here!” she shouts, and grabs my arm to yank me inside. And as the doors close, Color says, “Esther, welcome to Heaven.”
8
Heaven is an old, boarded-up Blockbuster. It’s filled with all sorts of items—a tricycle, a pogo stick, a few rocking chairs, rugs, an old TV and VCR, books, paintings. There’s even an entire wall of random family photos. The space is large and echoes, and yet it doesn’t feel cavernous. The lights are dim, casting a soft glow on everything. The luminescence fills the room and practically radiates warmth.
I notice two accessories I really wasn’t expecting to find.
“Iced soy mocha frap?” Jesús says. “Is that you?”
“What is she doing here?” the boy with the buzzed hair says at the same time.
Color says, “You guys know each other?”
Jesús answers by running up and grabbing me in a hug. “Mon chéri, this is unexpected. I love when things like this happen. It’s kismet.”
“Oh my God, this is so meant to be! I didn’t know you knew each other!” Color gestures animatedly. “Isn’t this amazing? You just went from being in the universe to being in our universe. It’s like BAM! Life-changing moment right now. The universe totally wanted all of us to be friends!”
“Stop speaking for the universe,” the boy with the buzzed hair says.
I’m speechless. How are they all here? How did this happen? And is this really Heaven? It feels that way. I feel euphoric.
“I can’t believe this is the girl you were talking about,” the boy with the buzzed hair says to Color, and I finally know where I’ve seen him before. I’ve seen her in him. He looks exactly like Color.
“Fungus,” I say as it all clicks in my head.
Jesús puts his arm around me. “You’re already fitting in.”
“It’s Moss,” he says harshly. “Moss. And how do we know if we can trust you?”
“Fungus, you need to get laid,” Jesús says. “Then maybe you wouldn’t be so grouchy. I bet a good old-fashioned hand job would even do the trick. You don’t need a girlfriend for one of those.” Jesús winks at me.
“You would know,” Moss snaps.
“You can trust Esther,” Color says. “She saved my ass. And a fish.”
I walk around the room, still in shock, checking out all of the accessories. Color follows me, riding on the tricycle, her knees up in her chest. I find the pair of roller skates I gave her.
“Is all of this the stuff you’ve taken?” I ask. “But how—”
“Our mom owns the space,” Color answers before I can finish the question. It’s like she’s in my brain, like the universe wants us together. “She had a Blockbuster franchise until she realized that movie rentals were contributing to childhood obesity, and the universe didn’t like that, so she gave up on the business.”
“Also, Netflix was invented,” Moss adds from across the room.
“That, too.” Color shrugs. “She gave us the space as a gift. To do whatever we want with it. So we created Heaven. It’s better than the landfill.”
“And it was a secret until now,” Moss says.
“Secrets, secrets are no fun. Secrets, secrets hurt someone,” Jesús chides.
“Not in my book,” Moss scoffs.
“Why do you call it ‘Heaven’?” I ask.
“Well, it’s kind of like all of t
hese things died. I saved them and brought them here—to the afterlife. Plus, what’s the safest place in the universe? Heaven.” Color literally sounds like heaven when she says that.
I stand in front of the wall with the framed family pictures.
“People throw these out?” I ask.
Jesús comes up next to me on the pogo stick. “I wish I could throw my family out.” He bounces up and down, eyes on the pictures. Then a wide grin grows on his face. “You haven’t even seen the best part.”
“Don’t,” Moss says firmly.
“Stop being a fungus, Fungus.”
Moss groans from across the room like Jesús is an asshole. He’s sitting in an old oversized armchair, eating from a bag of potato chips.
“We should show her,” Color says to Jesús. His eyes sparkle with excitement, and he bounces enthusiastically across the room, like a gigantic bunny.
“I warned you!” Moss calls after us.
Color leads me to the back of the store and stops in front of an archway that has no door, just a red velvet curtain hanging over the entrance. Above the curtain are the words “Adults Only.”
“This is the old porn section,” she says. “Many a lonely soul wandered behind this curtain, looking for comfort.”
“Comfort? Is that what we’re calling it now?” Jesús smiles. “God, I love to comfort myself.”
“Multiple times a day,” Moss says, walking up behind us. I peek over my shoulder at him, startled. Our eyes connect. He has the same gray eyes as Color. Moss bites down on a chip and says with his mouth full, “In your case, that is, Jesús.”
“It’s important for the soul.” Jesús pats his heart, and then his hand moves down to his pants. “And my frothing wand.”
“The symbolism is kind of perfect,” Color says. “The world is filled with desperate people seeking solace and acceptance, but it isn’t until they pass behind a protective curtain that they can finally admit who they are. And they can be free.”
“Amen,” Jesús says. “I speak for every gay kid hiding behind the world’s heaviest closet door. Or curtain in this instance.”
With a momentary glance at Jesús, I ask in my head, Are you gay?
Jesús winks at me then.
“Color, only you would be able to make a bunch of lonely men with boners sound eloquent.” Moss shakes his head.
Color dusts her shoulder off and then wraps her arm around me. She covers me in this open space where things thought dead come back alive. I know how these items feel. This might really be heaven.
“Are you ready, Esther?” she asks.
Are you ready, Esther?
A memory pulls. The question echoes in my mind. It’s attached to a string that threatens to pull me back to the past.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Moss says.
Color yanks back the curtain.
What I see . . . is absolutely beautiful.
9
Every color of the rainbow fills my eyes. I ask the universe Color believes in, Is this real? I run my hand over the walls. It has to be real. Life is on the walls in front of me, splattered in words and pictures.
“Do you like it?” Color asks.
I nod slowly and Jesús squeals.
“How did . . . what . . .” I can’t find my words.
“It was Color’s brilliant idea,” Jesús says. “She wanted a place for . . . everything.”
“Not everything is an object you can steal,” Color says. “But even our thoughts deserve a home. A place to . . . belong.”
Moss sits on the ground with his knees pulled up to his chest. He looks like a little boy. The light illuminates his face, making his eyes sparkle and enveloping him in a radiant halo. Color carries the same glow. And so does Jesús. I wonder if here, right now in the porn section of Blockbuster, I have a halo, too.
I trace the words written on the walls. “Lust” is written in red marker. Next to the word is a list of names: Sam, Louis, Pedro, Joel, Brett.
I look at Jesús. He says, “If I can’t have them, I had to hold them somewhere.”
There are maps of Scotland, India, and the United States tacked to the wall. Without thinking, dazed by all that’s around me, my hand reaches out to touch California, knowing this moment is the closest I’ve come to actually being there. My fingers trace a disjointed, illogical route all the way back to Ohio.
“It’s just a place for us to put all the things that we feel don’t have a place,” Color says, breaking my trance. “Like all those lost, random thoughts that swirl around in your head. They go here.” She touches the wall.
Words are everywhere. All connecting. It’s everything that exists in the universe in one room captured on three walls and closed off by a curtain. I feel the words, each letter wrapped around me, encasing me, telling me I belong, too.
“This place really is heaven,” I say.
With a bucket of markers in her hands, Color dances toward me, like she’s tempting me with a tango.
“Now it’s your turn, Esther,” she says, twirling me in a circle. “Add something lost to the walls, so it can be found.”
“But I don’t know what to write.” I take a step back, my head swirling slightly from Color’s spin. I’m kind of lying, because I don’t know if there was a single part of me that wasn’t lost along the way to New Mexico, until I met Color.
“You can write anything. We won’t judge you,” Jesús says. “There’s no judging in Heaven.”
“That wouldn’t be very heavenly of us,” Color says.
But there are shadows. I can see mine, hanging over me and around me, cast not just on the walls, but everywhere. I can’t seem to get away from them.
Color rattles the bucket of markers and holds it out. “Go for it.”
I steal a glance at Moss. I don’t know why, but I do. I want him to trust me. I remember what he said at the river. He runs because he’s escaping something, too. Maybe we all are. But here in this place, maybe I can stop running. Maybe I can just . . . be.
If I want them to trust me, I have to trust them. And trust is handing over a piece of your heart to someone and believing they’ll hold it as delicately as you do.
I take the bucket from Color and find a magenta marker. My head starts to swim as the blood goes to my toes again. I walk up to a blank space on the wall, and I take a breath so I don’t fall over. I close my eyes and ask myself if this is OK. But it feels OK. It feels better than that. It feels like there’s life in the desert after all.
And life begets life begets life begets life.
I write on the wall, adding my lost piece to Heaven, and in that moment, I actually pray it will be found. I ask the God that Tom believes in for the impossible. That’s what he’s supposed to do after all.
I ask that she will be found. If only for a moment. Just to see her eyes.
When I’m done, Jesús says, “What does she mean?” The boy who brought me back to life stands behind me, his arm touching mine.
What doesn’t she mean?
I step back, wobbling on my feet because my blood isn’t pumping right, and I haven’t breathed in a while. It’s happening again—I’m being chased by memories, and yet I’m paralyzed. My only choice is to let it wash over me.
“It’s what the nurse called her,” I say.
“Called who?” Moss says from across the room. I can’t read his tone. He’s a complex math problem, and I don’t have time to solve it right now.
It really does feel like I’m in heaven here. Like I could be free. Like maybe I don’t need to run.
“The baby,” I say.
The bucket of markers falls from my hand with a heavy thud. Every color of the rainbow cascades onto Heaven’s floor. This time, I don’t have an empty pool to drown in or a pillow to cover me. The memory hits me like a wave, the feeling of being knocked over rocking me backward as I stand. I have to catch myself on the wall.
“It’s a girl,” the nurse said, protectively cradling a blanket. Somewhe
re inside it was a tiny baby, exposed just enough to haunt me forever.
“You promised I’d never know,” I said to Mom.
“It was a mistake,” Mom said. “The nurse made a mistake. It happens.”
“She gets to keep her mistake. Why can’t I keep mine?”
“You know why,” Mom said. “This is the solution we came to.”
“The solution,” I said.
“To the problem, Esther.”
But the baby didn’t feel like a problem then. She felt like the answer.
10
Tom said I needed to ask for forgiveness, and God would give it to me. It was that easy. But God really wasn’t in the forefront of my mind when it came to forgiveness. What about Mom and Hannah? Amit? And what about the baby? What about her? I gave her away. For the rest of her life, she’ll know I did that. She’ll paint a picture of me however she wants, just like I do with my scumbag dad. He gave Hannah and me away, and now, I’ve done the same. As if I didn’t already have abandonment issues.
I don’t need forgiveness from God. I need forgiveness from myself.
“Esther.”
I blink with lazy eyes. My head swims through thick air.
“Esther. Are you OK?”
“Lay her down and put her feet up the wall,” Jesús says.
“That’s a terrible idea,” Moss says.
“You have a better idea, Fungus?”
“Don’t call me Fungus.”
“Then don’t act like one.”
I can see and hear them talking, but I can’t seem to respond. It’s like my body has given out. I’ve carried this secret with me all the way from Ohio to New Mexico. Tom said I was leaving it behind, but that’s not how secrets work. They follow you. Haunt you. Steal your breath when you’re not looking.
“Google what to do when someone faints,” Moss says. “Does she need mouth to mouth or something?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jesús says.
“What’s so ridiculous about that?”
“She’s clearly breathing,” Jesús says. “You just want to put your mouth on hers.”
“Shut up, asshole.”
“Whatever. I’m rubber. You’re glue.”
The Infinite Pieces of Us Page 5
