The Sky Is Everywhere (19 page)

One explorer is enough for any family.

But I can make up for that now by finding Mom. I put combination after combination into a mix of search engines. After an hour, however, I’m ready to toss the computer out the window. It’s futile. I’ve gotten all the way to the end of Bailey’s notebook and have started one of my own using words and symbols from Blake poems. I can see in the notebook that Bailey was working her way through Mom’s box for clues to the pseudonym. She’d used references from
Oliver Twist, Siddhartha, On the Road,
but hadn’t gotten to William Blake yet. I have his book of poems open and I’m combining words like
Tiger
or
Poison Tree
or
Devil
with
Paige
or
Walker
and the words
chef, cook, restaurant,
thinking as Gram did that that’s how she might make money while traveling, but it’s useless. After yet another hour of no possible matches, I tell the mountaintop Bailey in the explorer picture, I’m not giving up, I just need a break, and head downstairs to see if anyone is still awake.

Big’s on the porch, sitting in the middle of the love seat like it’s a throne. I squeeze in beside him.

“Unbelievable,” he murmurs, goosing my knee. “Can’t remember the last time you joined me for a nighttime chat. I was just thinking that I might play hooky tomorrow, see if a new lady-friend of mine wants to have lunch with me in a restaurant. I’m sick of dining in trees.” He twirls his mustache a little too dreamily.

Uh-oh.

“Remember,” I warn. “You’re not allowed to ask anyone to marry you until you’ve been with her a whole year. Those were your rules after your last divorce.” I reach over and tug on his mustache, add for effect, “Your fifth divorce.”

“I know, I know,” he says. “But boy do I miss proposing, nothing so romantic. Make sure you try it, at least once, Len—it’s skydiving with your feet on the ground.” He laughs in a tinkley way that might be called a giggle if he weren’t thirty feet tall. He’s told Bailey and me this our whole lives. In fact, until Sarah went into a diatribe about the inequities of marriage in sixth grade, I had no idea proposing wasn’t always considered an equal-opportunity endeavor.

I look out over the small yard where hours before Joe left me, probably forever. I think for a minute about telling Big that Joe probably won’t be around anymore, but I can’t face breaking it to him. He’s almost as attached to him as I am. And anyway, I want to talk to him about something else.

“Big?”

“Hmmm?”

“Do you really believe in this restless gene stuff?”

He looks at me, surprised, then says, “Sounds like a fine load of crap, doesn’t it?”

I think about Joe’s incredulous response today in the woods, about my own doubts, about everybody’s, always. Even in this town where free-spiritedness is a fundamental family value, the few times I’ve ever told anyone my mother took off when I was one year old to live a life of freedom and itinerancy, they looked like they wanted to commit me to a nice rubber room somewhere. Even so, to me, this Walker family gospel never seemed all that unlikely. Anyone who’s read a novel or walked down the street or stepped through the front door of my house knows that people are all kinds of weird, especially my people, I think, glancing at Big, who does God knows what in trees, marries perennially, tries to resurrect dead bugs, smokes more pot than the whole eleventh grade, and looks like he should reign over some fairy tale kingdom. So why wouldn’t his sister be an adventurer, a blithe spirit? Why shouldn’t my mother be like the hero in so many stories, the brave one who left? Like Luke Skywalker, Gulliver, Captain Kirk, Don Quixote, Odysseus. Not quite real to me, okay, but mythical and magical, not unlike my favorite saints or the characters in novels I hang on to perhaps a little too tightly.

“I don’t know,” I answer honestly “Is it all crap?”

Big doesn’t say anything for a long time, just twirls away at his mustache, thinking. “Nah, it’s all about classification, know what I mean?” I don’t, but won’t interrupt. “Lots of things run through families, right? And this tendency, whatever it is, for whatever reason, runs through ours. Could be worse, we could have depression or alcoholism or bitterness. Our afflicted kin just hit the road—”

“I think Bailey had it, Big,” I say, the words tumbling out of me before I can catch them, revealing just how much I might actually believe in it after all. “I’ve always thought so.”

“Bailey?” His brow creases. “Nah, don’t see it. In fact, I’ve never seen a girl so relieved as when she got rejected from that school in New York City.”

“Relieved?” Now
this
is a fine load of crap! “Are you kidding? She
always
wanted to go to Juilliard. She worked sooooooooo hard. It was her dream!”

Big studies my burning face, then says gently, “Whose dream, Len?” He positions his hands like he’s playing an invisible clarinet. “Because the only one I used to see working sooooooooo hard around here was you.”

God.

Marguerite’s trilling voice fills my head:
Your playing is ravishing. You work on the nerves, Lennie, you go to Juilliard
.

Instead, I quit.

Instead, I shoved and crammed myself into a jack-in-the-box of my own making.

“C’mere.” Big opens his arm like a giant wing and closes it over me as I snuggle in beside him and try not to think about how terrified I’d felt each time Marguerite mentioned Juilliard, each time I’d imagine myself—

“Dreams change,” Big says. “I think hers did.”

Dreams change, yes, that makes sense, but I didn’t know dreams could hide inside a person.

He wraps his other arm around me too and I sink into the bear of him, breathing in the thick scent of pot that infuses his clothes. He squeezes me tight, strokes my hair with his enormous hand. I’d forgotten how comforting Big is, a human furnace. I peek up at his face. A tear runs down his cheek.

After a few minutes, he says, “Bails might have had some ants in the pants, like most people do, but I think she was more like me, and you lately, for that matter—a
slave to love.”
He smiles at me like he’s inducting me into a secret society. “Maybe it’s those damn roses, and for the record, those I believe in: hook, line, and sinker. They’re deadly on the heart—I swear, we’re like lab rats breathing in that aroma all season long ...” He twirls his mustache, seems to have forgotten what he was saying. I wait, remembering that he’s stoned. The rose scent ribbons through the air between us. I breathe it in, thinking of Joe, knowing full well that it’s not the roses that have spurred this love in my heart, but the boy, such an amazing boy.
How could I?

Far away, an owl calls—a hollow, lonesome sound that makes me feel the same.

Big continues talking as if no time has passed. “Nah, it wasn’t Bails who had it—”

“What do you mean?” I ask, straightening up.

He stops twirling. His face has grown serious. “Gram was different when we were growing up,” he says. “If anyone else had it, she did.”

“Gram hardly leaves the neighborhood,” I say, not following.

He chuckles. “I know. Guess that’s how much I don’t believe in the gene though. I always thought my mother had it. I thought she just bottled it up somehow, trapped herself in that art room for weeks on end, and threw it onto those canvases.”

“Well, if that’s the case, why didn’t
my mother
just bottle it up, then?” I try to keep my voice down but I feel suddenly infuriated. “Why’d she have to leave if Gram just had to make some paintings?”

“I don’t know, honey, maybe Paige had it worse.”

“Had
what
worse?”

“I don’t know!” And I can tell he doesn’t know, that he’s as frustrated and bewildered as I am. “Whatever makes a woman leave two little kids, her brother, and her mother, and not come back for sixteen years. That’s what! I mean, we call it wanderlust, other families might not be so kind.”

“What would other families call it?” I ask. He’s never intimated anything like this before about Mom. Is it all a cover story for crazy? Was she really and truly out of her tree?

“Doesn’t matter what anyone else would call it, Len,” he says. “This is
our
story to tell.”

This is our story to tell.
He says it in his Ten Commandments way and it hits me that way: profoundly. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the storytelling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever.

You can tell your story any way you damn well please.

It’s your solo.

JOELESSNESS SETTLES OVER the morning like a pall. Gram and I are slumped spineless over the kitchen table, staring off in opposite directions.

When I got back to The Sanctum last night, I put Bailey’s notebook into the carton with the others and closed up the box. Then I returned St. Anthony to the mantel in front of The Half Mom. I’m not sure how I’m going to find our mother, but I know it isn’t going to be on the Internet. All night, I thought about what Big said. It’s possible no one in this family is quite who I believed, especially me. I’m pretty sure he hit the jackpot with me.

And maybe with Bailey too. Maybe he’s right and she didn’t have it—whatever
it
is. Maybe what my sister wanted was to stay here and get married and have a family.

Maybe that was her color of extraordinary.

“Bailey had all these secrets,” I say to Gram.

“Seems to run in the family,” she replies with a tired sigh.

I want to ask her what she means, remembering what Big said about her too last night, but can’t because he’s just stomped in, dressed for work after all, a dead ringer for Paul Bunyan. He takes one look at us and says, “Who died?” Then stops mid-step, shakes his head. “I
cannot
believe I just said that.” He knocks on his head nobody-home-style. Then he looks around. “Hey, where’s Joe this morning?”

Gram and I both look down.

“What?” he asks.

“I don’t think he’ll be around anymore,” I say.

“Really?” Big shrinks from Gulliver to Lilliputian before my eyes. “Why, honey?”

I feel tears brimming. “I don’t know.”

Thankfully, he lets it drop and leaves the kitchen to check on the bugs.

The whole way to the deli I think of the crazy French violinist Genevieve with whom Joe was in love and how he never spoke to her again. I think of his assessment of horn players as all-or-nothing types. I think how I had all of him and now I’m going to have none of him unless I can somehow make him understand what happened last night and all the other nights with Toby. But how? I already left two messages on his cell this morning and even called the Fontaine house once. It went like this:

Lennie (shaking in her flip-flops): Is Joe home?

Marcus: Wow, Lennie, shocker . . . brave girl.

Lennie (looks down to see scarlet letter emblazoned on her T-shirt): Is he around?

Marcus: Nope, left early.

Marcus and Lennie: Awkward Silence

Marcus: He’s taking it pretty hard. I’ve never seen him so upset about a girl before, about anything, actually ...

Lennie (close to tears): Will you tell him I called?

Marcus: Will do.

Marcus and Lennie: Awkward Silence

Marcus (tentative): Lennie, if you like him, well, don’t give up.

Dial tone.

And that’s the problem, I madly like him. I make an SOS call to Sarah to come down to the deli during my shift.

NORMALLY, I AM The Zen Lasagna Maker. After three and a half summers, four shifts a week, eight lasagnas a shift: 896 lasagnas to date—done the math—I have it down. It’s my meditation. I separate noodle after noodle from the glutinous lump that comes out of the refrigerator with the patience and precision of a surgeon. I plunge my hands into the ricotta and spices and fold the mixture until fluffy as a cloud. I slice the cheese into cuts as thin as paper. I spice the sauce until it sings. And then I layer it all together into a mountain of perfection. My lasagnas are sublime. Today, however, my lasagnas are not singing. After nearly chopping off a finger on the slicer, dropping the glutinous lump of noodles onto the floor, overcooking the new batch of pasta, dumping a truck-load of salt into the tomato sauce, Maria has me on moron-detail stuffing cannolis with a blunt object while she makes the lasagnas by my side. I’m cornered. It’s too early for customers, so it’s just us trapped inside the
National Enquirer
—Maria’s the town crier, chatters nonstop about the lewd and lascivious goings-on in Clover, including, of course, the arboreal escapades of the town Romeo: my uncle Big.