Very in Pieces

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “Right. The core is still there, what the poet wrote, but no matter how careful and precise the poet is, all these layers get put on top of it.”

  “It’s kind of brilliant, Very,” Dominic tells me.

  “Thanks,” I say. “The idea is that the trees are the poem, and the poet. The colors are the interpretation.”

  “Wow,” Britta says. “Awesome job. Not that I ever doubted you.” She grins at me, and I find myself grinning back. Neither one of us had thought I’d be able to pull off the artistic part of the assignment. Only Dominic had thought so.

  We’re all sitting there smiling at one another, and I guess I should have known that things were only going so well because something terrible was about to happen.

  Ms. Blythe walks over, her kitten heels click-clicking on the linoleum. She stops beside us, takes a deep breath, and says, “The office just called down. Your grandmother, she—” Ms. Blythe shakes her head. “Your parents want you to go to the hospital right away.”

  I don’t move. Don’t shake. Don’t stand. Britta and Dominic both put their hands on me.

  “I can take you,” Dominic says.

  I shake my head. “I need to find Ramona,” I say.

  Ms. Blythe looks surprised. “She’s not here today, Very. She’s on the absent list again.”

  Again.

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

  I look at Britta and Dominic, who have the exact same expression on their faces. “I’m sorry; I can see if I can get back in time, or maybe Ms. Staples will let us—”

  Britta squeezes both of my shoulders. “Just go, Very. Dominic and I will be fine.”

  So I go.

  ii.

  Nonnie is there but not there. Her body is still. Every once in a while her finger twitches. A machine fills her lungs with air.

  In out. In out.

  Mom’s face is long, haggard, dark circles under her eyes. Dad is unshaven. That he is here at all is a surprise. I do not look at his eyes. I try not to look at his hand on Mom’s, the plagiarist sign of love.

  Ramona is not here.

  There’s a vase of day lilies next to Nonnie’s bed, the scent sickeningly sweet, overpowering the smell of cleaner, of medicine. I want to take those lilies and rip off the petals, the dusty yellow stamen. I want to throw the vase out the window and wait, wait for the crash of glass as it smashes on the pavement below.

  We sit and watch. Watch nothing happening. Watch life slipping out of her.

  iii.

  When visiting hours are over, Mom sends me home. I say I will stay, but she is already curled up in the extra bed next to Nonnie’s.

  Dad left an hour before to check on Ramona. His belated concern will likely prove useless.

  So I go outside and get in the Rapier, which is smelling less like Nonnie and more like me.

  As I drive home, a group of college students saunters out into the road. I rub at some crust in the corner of my eye, waiting for the seemingly endless crowd of pedestrians to pass.

  In the pack of people there is someone who, for just an instant, looks like Ramona. The girl is shorter, and has darker hair, but she has on a pair of hot-pink tights with saddle shoes—an outfit that I thought only Ramona could put together.

  For her eighth-grade graduation, Ramona wore a white dress with black polka dots. It was too short. It only went to her midthigh, so she had put on turquoise leggings that were woven through with silver. She had twisted her hair into what looked like dozens of tiny knots on the top of her head. And then she’d put on lipstick in a deep red-brown that she’d bought in the section of makeup meant for African American women, not pale white schoolgirls.

  When she received her certificate, she did a curtsy and a pirouette. No one clapped or laughed. It was like they were collectively rolling their eyes at her.

  And me. What did I do? I texted Britta and Grace: Sister R continues to prove she is an alien changeling.

  But maybe I should have been paying more attention. Maybe that was the first sign that things were not right, that she was alone and lonely. That she was wrapping herself in a web so no one would want to get close.

  I pull the car up into the driveway.

  She is slipping away. I can feel it. These memories are hooks in me and as she falls away, they tug themselves free.

  Inside, the house is near silent. I want to apologize to Ramona. I want to tell her that I should have played her games.

  I jog up our stairs, and, without even knocking, push open the door to her room. “Ramona, I—”

  She is crouched on the floor working on a drawing of a huge oak tree, like the one at the top of our driveway in which she spends so much time. Its branches reach out across the span of one whole wall, and she’s pasted torn pieces of paper as the leaves. Apples—no, plums—are falling from the limbs. She is working on the trunk, sketching its texture. But as I step forward, I realize she isn’t drawing, she is writing.

  All the lines that made up the bark of the tree are words, tiny written words.

  “What are you doing here? I didn’t say you could come in.”

  “Ramona, what is this?”

  “It’s a tree.”

  “Well, yeah.” I step closer still. “How long did this take you to do?”

  “That’s what you want to know?” Her body is tense, like the models of animals in the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Frozen, yet still, somehow, ready to move. As if she might jump up and run past me and out of the house—or attack me.

  “I doubt you’d tell me anything else.”

  Her body relaxes just a bit. “I don’t know. A few weeks.”

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you really?”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  Yes, she had. And she can say it over and over and over again, but I don’t believe her. I watch her for a moment longer. She doesn’t move at all. I can tell she wants to keep working but won’t do it with me in the room.

  I examine the tree again. The leaves. They aren’t paper. They are pages. Pages torn from books—the library encyclopedias she’d been shredding. My friends told me she was fine, and I believed them, not because she was okay, but because I didn’t want to deal with her.

  I could have said something then, or tried to force her to talk to me. And if I had tried, then what? Then she would have pushed back harder. She was even less interested in receiving my help than I was in giving it. Still, I can’t deny the pit of guilt that rests in my stomach. I could have done something. I could’ve taken Ramona to Ruby’s when she asked, or to the library when she wanted to look up fairy tales. I could’ve done a stupid cooking class with her. All those times she asked, and I said no.

  Some of the torn pages aren’t from a printed book. They have handwriting across them. Nonnie’s handwriting.

  “Ramona, are those from Nonnie’s notebooks?”

  “Uh-huh.” She smiles, pleased with herself.

  “You had no right to destroy her notebooks!”

  “I didn’t destroy them.”

  “I came up here to try to talk to you like we used to and—”

  “When?”

  “When what?”

  “When did we used to talk?”

  I turn away, sharply. “That’s not the point. The point is, you shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I think she might like it.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  She begins writing again. I move in so I can see what she is writing. It is the words to one of Nonnie’s poems, which she wrote soon after Ramona was born:

  2 little girls in pigtails and jumpers,

  fat thighs, round tummies.

  2 little girls with teeth not yet arrived,

  lips round and red as cherries.

  Someday hands will rake through that hair,

  press over the thighs.

  Hands not their own will travel

  over the bodies,


  a foreign land.

  A land to conquer.

  Plums to pluck

  and devour

  till the juices drip down

  his chin.

  Seeing the poem scrawled up on the wall makes me uncomfortable; I’d read it before, but back when I was far too young to understand the imagery.

  “She used to come in and watch me sleep—she thought I was sleeping anyway—and just write and write and write. I can still hear the sound of her pen scratching the paper.”

  Nonnie never did that with me. Maybe I was just a deeper sleeper than Ramona. My thought is hopeful, but I don’t believe it.

  “She told me that I had the real talent. That I was finally going to make something of the Woodruff name.”

  “She told me that I was her practical girl.” I reach out and touch the wall at the place where a page is pasted.

  “It’s like the godmothers in Sleeping Beauty, how they bless the baby with graces. It’s like a twisted version of that. Like she thought she could tell us who we were. Like we didn’t have a choice.”

  “Maybe we don’t have a choice. Maybe it’s just who we are.”

  “I don’t accept that. I don’t accept that this”—she waves her arm around—“is the only way I will ever be.”

  “What are you saying?” I step toward her, my hand extended.

  “It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. Can you leave me alone now?”

  “Okay,” I say, but don’t move. “If you want to talk, I—”

  “Maybe later,” she says, and picks up her pen.

  I can tell her about Nonnie, how she’s doing worse, but it won’t stop Ramona from scrawling on the wall. It won’t even sink in.

  I go down into the kitchen but don’t get anything to eat. I just stand there, staring out across the silvery-green lawn. It’s the in-between time, when day is finally about to give way to night, and all I can do is sit and wait for the change. All I can do is react.

  fourteen

  i.

  SHE SLIPS AWAY IN the night. The breath goes out and does not come back in.

  ii.

  I’d like to say I woke up in the middle of the night, shocked awake by the sudden loss, a ripple across the cosmos. I do not. I sleep a dreamless sleep and wake with sandy eyes.

  When I come downstairs, Mom is on the couch. Dad is next to her, still pretending. They are both wilted flowers with red-rimmed eyes. Mom’s hair is tousled; Dad sports the shadow of a beard. And it is in that moment, when I see their eyes, that I know.

  I shake my head to keep them from saying it aloud, but they do anyway. “Very,” Dad says, his voice even. “Last night Nonnie—it happened last night.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I say. I do not want to hear the words from him.

  “She’s gone,” Mom says, her voice hoarse. “She’s gone away.”

  There’s all this language we use to avoid saying the truth, to avoid calling it what it is: passed, passed on, passed away, gone away, gone to a better place, left us. It’s as if death is one big road trip and the rest of us are left behind.

  My mind should not be spiraling out like this. It should be focused. I should be focused.

  “Okay,” I say. Then again: “Okay. I understand. I’m going back to bed.”

  iii.

  I sleep. Deep beneath blankets, pillow over my head, I sleep. I do not dream. And when I wake it’s like learning the truth all over again.

  Nonnie is gone.

  iv.

  Outside the sculpture glints like broken bottles on a summer sidewalk. The pipes that made the flower stems are now entwined, snaking around the bottle caps like the ivy that grows on the buildings of the college. The bird’s nest is empty, one lone feather fluttering in the breeze.

  It will have to be removed. Now that Mom will want to put the house on the market, the sculpture will have to be removed. Maybe there’s a way to take it all off in one piece, to preserve it.

  You always were my practical girl.

  The words come unbidden. This is not how I want to remember Nonnie thinking of me. I want to think of our conversations in her room, painting her nails, driving around town. I want to think of her teasing me, not cursing me.

  But maybe there is no escaping her words, because my next thought is: I will have to plan the funeral. Mom isn’t able to. Dad will find a way to abdicate responsibility. So it will fall to me. I will have to find a funeral home. Unless they have already sent her body to one. Is it in the hospital morgue? Do hospitals even have morgues or is that just the thing of movies?

  I don’t know where Nonnie is.

  I don’t know where her body is resting, and I don’t know where she wants it to be.

  I hope she has a will with all the details laid out. She always was so particular. Yes, a will. Leave the decisions to someone else.

  A breeze blows across the front of the house and the sculpture sighs.

  fifteen

  i.

  MOM HAS THE RED afghan over her feet and calves. She’s wearing a sleeveless silk blouse that has faded from black to gray, and I can see small pinpricks of goose bumps on her arms. It’s like she has taken up residency on that couch. I wonder if she even sleeps in the bedroom anymore.

  I sit down next to her and pull the blanket over both of us.

  “Going to school?”

  “I don’t think so.” I had thought about it, but when I texted Britta and Grace to let them know about Nonnie, Britta said I should take as much time as I needed, and it made me feel like going was the wrong choice.

  Mom laces her fingers through the holes of the afghan. “It could be something to keep your mind off of things.”

  Things. Nonnie would hate that we’re using such an imprecise word to describe her passing away. Her death.

  “You know what the last thing she said to me was?” she asks.

  I shake my head, the semipermanent lump in my throat re-forming.

  “She said she hoped I didn’t dissolve. She said, ‘Don’t dissolve, Annaliese. Those girls need you.’” She untangles her fingers from the afghan and wipes at her eyes. “‘Those girls need you,’ she said. Not even a moment to let me grieve. Did she think I wouldn’t grieve?”

  “It’s not like that. She said the same thing to me about Ramona, about how I would be okay, but Ramona would struggle. I think she wanted me to watch out for her.”

  “You are not your sister’s keeper. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  I glance toward the bookshelves. The books are more tumbled and out of order than usual, as if Mom or someone has been looking for something. And perhaps she has. Just the right book, just the right words to erase the ones that Nonnie left for her. “Those were her last words?”

  “To me. Her actual last words were ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ She must have planned that, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Definitely. The question is, how long did she know? When did she choose it?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. One of the ice cubes in her glass cracks.

  “You need me?” she asks. She looks at me. Her bangs are swooping down toward her bloodshot eyes.

  “We do.”

  “It’s all just so jumbled up. Life is just a big jumble and we can write and paint and never make any sense of it.”

  “I have something to show you,” I tell her.

  “Can you bring it here?” she asks.

  “It’s up in Ramona’s room.”

  Maybe learning the truth about Ramona is too much to throw at her right after Nonnie’s death, but it’s too much for me, too—too much for Ramona. I can’t carry it myself anymore, and Mom is all I have.

  She unfolds herself from the sofa and follows me up the stairs. When we get into the room, she stops and stares, her eyes shifting left, right, up, and down as she takes it all in. She puts her fingers up to her lips, and relief swells over me like the tide in the bay. I’m not going to ha
ve to take care of this on my own.

  We are still. In front of us is the tree. Behind us is the chaos of Ramona’s room.

  “I tried to talk to her about it, but, well, you know,” I say.

  Mom sits down roughly on Ramona’s unmade bed.

  “She ripped all those pages out of Nonnie’s notebooks and encyclopedias at school. I caught her doing it one day. I should’ve said something.” I nestle close to her on the bed, like I did when I was little. “She’s going to be okay, right?” I’ve been silly to keep it from her for so long. Parents make things better. Even sad, damaged parents. They put the Band-Aids on and kiss your head, and sure, Ramona is probably going to need more than that, but at least Mom is involved now.

  “She’s brilliant,” Mom replies, shaking her head. “I thought I . . .” Her voice trails off.

  “This isn’t brilliance, Mom. She’s writing on the walls like someone in an insane asylum.”

  “You don’t understand, Very. It’s not your fault. Your mind isn’t wired like ours.”

  Focus on Ramona. Just focus on Ramona. “I think that she’s depressed or something. Like she’s, I don’t know—she’s there but not there.”

  Mom shakes her head. “That’s her creative space, the place she goes. There’s this line between madness and creativity. If you can walk it, that’s genius.” She points at the wall. “She’s walking it. Her message, her impact—so precise.” She stands up, forgetting me, and walks around the room, letting her fingers linger on the wall. “I have to go,” she says.

  She flees from the room, and I follow her downstairs. She crosses the first floor and flies up the second set of stairs to her studio, where I know I’m not supposed to follow. So I just stand at the bottom of the steps, looking up, waiting to be invited when I know I won’t be. After a few moments, the crashes start.

  ii.

  Years ago I put glow-in-the-dark star stickers on my ceiling. I tried to peel them off, but they just left marks, so I let them stay. Now I stare at their uneven pattern, listening to the sounds from my mom’s studio. They are muffled, but I can still hear them: two crashes, then a pause, then three loud bumps, one after another.