by Karen Rivers
Kit tried to picture everything her mom was afraid of and how it would look if each fear were a star. There would be so many lines connecting this constellation that the dot-to-dot would create something enormous, like a dinosaur.
Not just a dinosaur, the biggest dinosaur. A titanosaur. An Argentinosaurus. She happened to know that Argentinosaurus was the biggest known dinosaur right now, but she also knew that was always changing as archaeologists found more and more fossils. Maybe they would find an even bigger one and her mom’s constellation would grow to form that one, too.
Kit leaned her head back and turned on the TV, clicking the remote until she found the TMTFIA recording from that terrible day.
She fast-forwarded to the family who had the dogs, the exact kind of dogs that Clem had been so crazy about. Soft and loose dogs. Kit always watched their act. They ended up winning the show.
Even though they were good, there were so many other things on TV that kit would rather watch, but wouldn’t let herself watch. Better things! Her favorite show was a documentary about Antarctica that was on Discovery Channel. She had once learned that Antarctic ice was three percent penguin pee. Three percent! She loved knowing that! There was also no light pollution in Antarctica so you could see a million kajillion stars and, by extension, a million kajillion constellations.
But lately, instead of learning new, important facts about Antarctica, every time kit turned on the TV, she watched the Garcias’ episode of TMTFIA again.
The dogs finished jumping through the hoops, and from outside, she heard a screeching of brakes. Last week, there had been a bad accident—a car hit a pedestrian who was pushing a baby in a stroller—and kit’s mom was now extra worried about cars and crosswalks. When kit had left for school that morning—it was only a three-block walk for her—her mom had hugged her too tight and whispered, “Only cross when you’re sure, promise me.”
Kit had agreed, but her mom had said it two more times, like she didn’t trust her. “Promise me, promise me.” So kit promised again and again, but the whole way to school, she had felt scared—and being scared made her sad.
She did not want to have any stars in her own constellation of fears. She didn’t want to have a constellation at all. She wanted her mom to stop spreading her anxiety, like a virus, to kit.
“Or just get over it!” she muttered. She would never be mean like that to her mom’s face, but sometimes behind her back, she couldn’t help it.
On the TV, Mr. G. was walking across the stage.
Kit suddenly felt scared to watch, which made no sense, because she’d watched it so many times.
“I am not scared,” she whispered to the picture of her mom. “I’m not you. K.i.t.!”
She was scared though. She just didn’t know why.
She made herself watch the whole thing, but this time, when it was over, she pressed delete.
“Are you sure?” asked the box that popped up on the screen.
“No,” she said out loud, but she clicked ok. Then she went out to the fire escape and sat down, dangling her legs.
“The End,” she said to the darkening blue sky. She wasn’t sure what it was the end of, exactly, but it was definitely the end of something, if only just the end of her year of obsessively watching that one episode of TMTFIA.
She felt relieved.
The thing that happened wasn’t going to happen again. It had been a year since the first and only time. She was safe from it now. The year between her and it happening made it feel safe, anyway.
Thinking that made her feel brave. Braver than she’d felt in a long time.
“You’re not my father,” she said to the sky. “Jackson told me the truth.”
She looked away. She looked down at the road, where real actual people were going about the end of their day, ducking into the bodega for milk or a sandwich, getting on the bus and going home.
Then she looked back up. The sky was dark and velvety. She knew there were places where you could see a million stars, places that weren’t wrecked by light pollution, but Kensington was not one of those places.
Her heart felt small and cold and lonely.
She wanted her dad to be the Night Sky.
Who was Jackson to take that away from her?
“Sorry, Dad,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” She lay back and focused on the sky until she saw the first star pop through the darkness. It felt like a sign that she was still okay, that her dad was still there, looking out for her, that the thing Jackson had told her was just a cruel lie after all.
Clem
“Your grandfather was in a cult, you know,” Grandma said. She was standing at the counter in her kitchen, pouring Clem and Jorge some homemade juice. She was crazy about juicing. “He died. Drank the Kool-Aid, as they say, except he did it literally. It was poisoned.” She announced it so matter-of-factly, in the same voice she would use to say, “Carrot juice is a great source of beta carotene.” She put Clem’s glass down and reached up and adjusted a picture on the wall. “That was so crooked!” She laughed, but Clem didn’t know what was funny, exactly: the juice, her dead grandfather, or the crooked picture.
Clem’s mom was like that, too, someone who punctuated sentences with laughter that didn’t always seem related to what she’d said.
“That’s not funny, Grandma,” she said. “He died in a cult? Like he was murdered?”
“Oh, I know it isn’t funny!” Grandma sighed. “Your mother is going to be mad I told you. Drink your juice, it’s best when it’s fresh.” Then she laughed again.
“GRANDMA. Seriously, stop laughing!”
“I didn’t even notice that I did!”
“Grandpa died in a cult. That’s what you said. We are going to need more information, please. Like, right now.” Clem took a sip of juice. It tasted like sweet, watery dirt. “This is good, Grandma,” she lied, trying to make eye contact with Jorge. She kicked him under the table.
“Well, not Grandpa. He didn’t die in a cult. He’s in the living room. But my first husband. Beau. He would be your grandfather, but seeing as he was only twenty when he died, it’s hard to think of him as a grandpa, isn’t it?”
“Uh, yeah.” Clem nudged Jorge, who still hadn’t said anything, not even about the juice. She wondered if he was even listening or if he was daydreaming about Marina.
“Which cult?” asked Jorge. He was idly sorting through a box of Christmas ornaments, putting the broken ones into a bag by his feet. He picked up his juice and looked at it, like he’d only just noticed it was there.
“Jonestown,” said Grandma. “It was called the People’s Temple. It was very famous.”
“I haven’t heard of it,” said Clem.
“What cults have you heard of?” asked Jorge.
“Good point,” said Clem.
“It was one of those cults that was all about making a new society where everyone was equal. On paper, I suppose it sounded like a nice idea. A utopia. Away from the craziness of modern life, the consumerism, the whole . . . ” Grandma spread her arms wide, as though she meant to include everything, practically knocking over Clem’s unfinished juice. “ . . . cycle, I suppose.”
“Consumerism is terrible,” said Clem. “Everyone buys too much junk. Mostly from the dollar store.”
“It’s good that they do,” said Jorge, giving her a funny look, so Clem kicked him again. “What?” he said. “It is! It pays the bills!” He threw another ornament into the garbage bag.
“It pays the bills? You sound like an old man,” said Clem. “Are you a hundred years old? Those ornaments are going to go into the landfill you know. They’ll take like a million years to decompose.”
“It was suicide,” said Grandma. “They all killed themselves.” She suddenly looked worried. “That’s definitely not appropriate for young people.”
“Jeez,
Grandma,” said Clem. “We’re twelve, not two. You’re okay.”
“A lot of famous people have died by suicide,” added Jorge, gulping down his juice like it was delicious lemonade. He burped. “We know it happens. Depression is a sickness.”
“Duh,” said Clem, but inside her heart clanged in her chest like a bell. She was depressed. She sort of knew that but she also knew that no one else had noticed. She was good at hiding it, she supposed.
Anyway, she definitely didn’t want to kill herself.
You could be depressed and not want to die.
Or, apparently, you could want to die and not be depressed.
“Was he depressed?” Clem asked. “Were they all depressed?”
“No! Not when I last saw him. He was . . . hopeful. He thought they were going to change the world.”
“Right,” said Clem, rolling her eyes. “Change the world.”
“Why are you rolling your eyes? People can change the world,” said Jorge. “Why are you being like that?”
“Like what?”
He shrugged. “Eye-rolly.”
Clem couldn’t explain but it had something to do with having a grandfather who would have got her. He understood that the world was dumb, but unlike her, he didn’t just walk around being mad at it, he did something. He joined a weird utopian cult! He had big dreams for the world! He got hopeful, not depressed! He probably wouldn’t have wanted to buy junk at the dollar store either. Maybe he could have helped her figure out how to be hopeful, too.
She didn’t say all that. “I’m not eye-rolly,” she said instead.
“Are you crying?” asked Jorge.
“No. Jeez.” Clem wiped her eyes.
“Oh dear,” said Grandma. “Your mother was right.”
“Grandma, it’s fine. I’m not crying or eye-rolly. I’m just listening and drinking this juice. I want to hear it. Please.” She held her breath and took a gulp of her drink.
“I shouldn’t say any more.”
“Come on, Grandma,” Jorge said. “It’s seriously worse to tell half the story. Then we have to guess the details and our imaginations are very colorful.”
So Grandma told them: It was before Mom was even born. This grandfather—Mom’s father—hadn’t even met Mom. “Well, not after she was born,” said Grandma. “Arguably he was there when she was started.”
“GRANDMA,” said Clem. “Seriously? Gross.”
“He left pretty much right after we got married. Marriage wasn’t for him. I thought he was the love of my life . . . ” Her voice trailed off and she touched her face. Clem had noticed that people touch their faces a lot when they don’t know what to say.
“Whoa,” said Jorge. “He just left you? Weren’t you heartbroken?” That was how he talked now, like an old person’s romance novel. “How did you, like, go on?”
Clem snorted.
Grandma smiled. “I was heartbroken. But we’d married pretty impulsively! To get him to Canada, you see, so he could avoid the draft. There was a war. It was partly about the war and it was partly just that he didn’t really fit in with a society that was all about making and spending money. He said everything was wrong with everything.”
“Everything is wrong with everything,” said Clem. She finished her juice and put her glass down with a flourish.
“Oh, Grandma.” Jorge looked like he was about to cry now, too.
Clem punched him in the arm. “Don’t,” she told him. “So you really only knew this guy for like a month and a half?”
“Yes,” Grandma answered. “But he wrote me letters at first from California and then he went to South America with the rest of them, and then . . . ” She clapped her hands. “Well, that was that.”
“That was that?” said Clem.
“Well, yes,” said Grandma. Her eyes looked sad, but she wasn’t crying. “That was that.”
Grandma and Grandpa—the one in the living room, snoring exuberantly, who would never in a million years have joined a cult—lived in a huge rent- controlled apartment over a Laundromat. It always smelled like fresh, clean sheets and fabric softener. The sound of the machines working downstairs filled up a bit of the silence that followed Grandma’s story, and Grandpa’s loud, pillowy snores from the other room filled up the rest. Clem got up and opened the window. She felt like she couldn’t breathe.
“So he was Mom’s dad?” Jorge asked. “What a jerk.”
“He was your mom’s father,” said Grandma. “I wouldn’t say he was a dad, would you? I mean a dad is the person who is there for you. So your mom’s dad is the one making that cacophony on the couch.” She tilted her head toward the door.
“Technicality,” muttered Clem.
“We were just kids, so he wasn’t really a jerk. He was brainwashed by that whackadoo with his whole DO YOU WANT ME TO BE YOUR GOD? I WILL BE YOUR GOD nonsense. Beau wanted to believe that someone knew the answers. He just believed in the wrong person, that’s all.”
“Kool-Aid is poisonous?” asked Jorge.
“Duh,” said Clem. “They obviously added poison.”
“Oh, that makes more sense.”
“Nothing makes sense. That’s the point.” Clem sat back down. She meant more than just drinking the Kool-Aid. She meant the whole world. She meant everything.
For some reason, Clem had thought her mom’s biological father had died in some kind of old-timey war, maybe in a plane. She was a little mad that she’d been lied to, sort of, by not being told the whole truth. It was a lie of omission.
“Beau thought you could make up a new way of living and just do it, that all of society would follow along.” Grandma made that gesture that meant crazy, swirling her finger around her temple. “He was lovely, but he wasn’t born in the right time. He was cuckoo. But very good looking!”
“Why didn’t Mom want us to know?”
“She thought it would scare you. Is it scaring you?” Grandma looked really worried.
“We aren’t scared,” Clem said, firmly. “I think everyone should be happy living in utopia. In a place where, like, it’s not all about money. It would be better than here.”
“Well,” said Grandma. “Utopias are always meant to be perfect, but it always goes wrong, because people are involved. People get full of themselves. Then the whole thing derails. Lord knows it’s happened many, many times. You give all your money and worldly goods to someone who is selling an idea and by the time you realize you’ve been swindled, it’s too late.” Her shoulders dropped, like she was suddenly tired from carrying something heavy.
“Oh,” said Clem. It was a lot to take in.
“I’m sorry, Grandma,” Jorge added.
“What for?” Grandma touched her cheek again. “It was so long ago. I really hardly knew him.”
“He could have been the love of your life,” Jorge said with such a moony look on his face that Clem reached over and punched him on the arm. “Hey! What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing. What about Grandpa? Isn’t he the great love of your life?” Clem made a kissy-face.
“Well, of course.” Grandma smiled as Grandpa let out a huge snort.
“Seriously?” said Clem.
Grandma ignored the question. She was staring out the window, like she could see something really amazing beyond the library that was across the road. “I think of Beau all the time, yet the person I’m thinking of probably never existed, just the idea of him.”
Grandma got up, her crisp, wide-legged pants swishing briskly as she walked away. She cleared their empty glasses and then left the room and came back with a big, cardboard box, which she tipped over on the table. A cascade of photos spilled out, pictures of a much younger version of herself and a man who looked pretty much exactly like Clem and Jorge.
The photos gave Clem goose bumps.
“Whoa,” said Jorge. “He
looks like me.”
“And me,” said Clem. “We look the same. He looks like us.”
“He sure does!” said Grandma. “He was a beautiful man.”
“You were beautiful, too, Grandma!” Clem said. It was hard to tell the glamorous girl in the photographs was the same person as her grandma. “You look like a movie star!”
Grandma did look beautiful in the photos, but Clem couldn’t stop staring at her grandfather, Beau.
He had the same eyebrows and longish nose that Clem and Jorge did. He had the same color hair, worn to his shoulders, just like theirs. He had a smile that looked like it went higher on one side than the other, just like theirs did.
“Every time I look at these, he looks younger.” Grandma lifted a photo out of the pile, smiled, put it back down. “So many photos for such a short moment in time . . . ” She started staring out the window again.
Jorge held up another photo. “He looks like Mom in this one,” he said. “Like a man version of mom.”
From the other room, Grandpa sneezed. Grandma jumped. Grandpa had a way of screaming when he sneezed that was as startling as an explosion. “Excuse me!” he yelled, then he started snoring again.
Jorge and Grandma laughed.
Clem didn’t. “Bless you,” she mumbled. She didn’t find sneezes funny. She couldn’t find them funny anymore, not since what happened on TMTFIA.
She squeezed her eyes shut, like that could stop her from thinking about it, which of course, it couldn’t. The memory leaked through anyway.
The thing was that Jorge didn’t let go of Clem.
He didn’t drop her.
Clem sneezed.
It was her fault that she fell, not his.
She had patted the dog backstage and she knew she was allergic.
Maybe she knew it would happen.
Maybe she wrecked everything on purpose because she didn’t want to win.
