The Sky Is Everywhere (2 page)

“Lennie, welcome back, dear,” another voice says. Mr. James—also known in my mind as Yoda for both outward appearance and inward musical mojo—has stood up at the piano and is looking over at me with the same expression of bottomless sadness I’ve gotten so used to seeing from adults. “We’re all so very sorry.”

“Thank you,” I say, for the hundredth time that day. Sarah and Joe are both looking at me too, Sarah with concern and Joe with a grin the size of the continental United States. Does he look at everyone like this, I wonder. Is he a wingnut? Well, whatever he is, or has, it’s catching. Before I know it, I’ve matched his continental U.S. and raised him Puerto Rico and Hawaii. I must look like The Merry Mourner. Sheesh. And that’s not all, because now I’m thinking what it might be like to kiss him, to really kiss him—uh-oh. This is a problem, an entirely new un-Lennie-like problem that began (
WTF-edly?!
) at the funeral: I was drowning in darkness and suddenly all these boys in the room were glowing. Guy friends of Bailey’s from work or college, most of whom I didn’t know, kept coming up to me saying how sorry they were, and I don’t know if it’s because they thought I looked like Bailey, or because they felt bad for me, but later on, I’d catch some of them staring at me in this charged, urgent way, and I’d find myself staring back at them, like I was someone else, thinking things I hardly ever had before, things I’m mortified to have been thinking in a church, let alone at my sister’s funeral.

This boy beaming before me, however, seems to glow in a class all his own. He must be from a very friendly part of the Milky Way, I’m thinking as I try to tone down this nutso smile on my face, but instead almost blurt out to Sarah, “He looks like Heathcliff,” because I just realized he does, well, except for the happy smiling part—but then all of a sudden the breath is kicked out of me and I’m shoved onto the cold hard concrete floor of my life now, because I remember I can’t run home after school and tell Bails about a new boy in band.

My sister dies over and over again, all day long.

“Len?” Sarah touches my shoulder. “You okay?”

I nod, willing away the runaway train of grief barreling straight for me.

Someone behind us starts playing “Approaching Shark,” aka the
Jaws
theme song. I turn to see Rachel Brazile gliding toward us, hear her mutter, “Very funny,” to Luke Jacobus, the saxophonist responsible for the accompaniment. He’s just one of many band-kill Rachel’s left in her wake, guys duped by the fact that all that haughty horror is stuffed into a spectacular body, and then further deceived by big brown fawn eyes and Rapunzel hair. Sarah and I are convinced God was in an ironic mood when he made her.

“See you’ve met The Maestro,” she says to me, casually touching Joe’s back as she slips into her chair—first chair clarinet—where I should be sitting.

She opens her case, starts putting together her instrument. “Joe studied at a conservatory in
Fronce.
Did he tell you?” Of course she doesn’t say
France
so it rhymes with
dance
like a normal English-speaking human being. I can feel Sarah bristling beside me. She has zero tolerance for Rachel ever since she got first chair over me, but Sarah doesn’t know what really happened—no one does.

Rachel’s tightening the ligature on her mouthpiece like she’s trying to asphyxiate her clarinet. “Joe was
a fabulous
second in your absence,” she says, drawing out the word
fabulous
from here to the Eiffel Tower.

I don’t fire-breathe at her: “Glad everything worked out for you, Rachel.” I don’t say a word, just wish I could curl into a ball and roll away. Sarah, on the other hand, looks like she wishes there were a battle-ax handy.

The room has become a clamor of random notes and scales. “Finish up tuning, I want to start at the bell today,” Mr. James calls from the piano. “And take out your pencils, I’ve made some changes to the arrangement.”

“I better go beat on something,” Sarah says, throwing Rachel a disgusted look, then huffs off to beat on her timpani.

Rachel shrugs, smiles at Joe—no not smiles: twinkles—oh brother. “Well, it’s true,” she says to him. “You were—I mean, are—
fabulous
.”

“Not so.” He bends down to pack up his clarinet. “I’m a hack, was just keeping the seat warm. Now I can go back to where I belong.” He points his clarinet at the horn section.

“You’re just being modest,” Rachel says, tossing fairy-tale locks over the back of her chair. “You have
so
many colors on your tonal palette.”

I look at Joe expecting to see some evidence of an inward groan at these imbecilic words, but see evidence of something else instead. He smiles at Rachel on a geographical scale too. I feel my neck go hot.

“You know I’ll miss you,” she says, pouting.

“We’ll meet again,” Joe replies, adding an eye-bat to his repertoire. “Like next period, in history.”

I’ve disappeared, which is good really, because suddenly I don’t have a clue what to do with my face or body or smashed-up heart. I take my seat, noting that this grinning, eye-batting fool from Fronce looks nothing like Heathcliff. I was mistaken.

I open my clarinet case, put my reed in my mouth to moisten it and instead bite it in two.

THE REST OF the day blurs by and before the final bell, I sneak out and duck into the woods. I don’t want to take the roads home, don’t want to risk seeing anyone from school, especially Sarah, who informed me that while I’ve been in hiding, she’s been reading up on loss and according to all the experts, it’s time for me to talk about what I’m going through—but she, and the experts, and Gram, for that matter, don’t get it. I can’t. I’d need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark.

As I walk through the redwood trees, my sneakers sopping up days of rain, I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes when grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe. The only one who didn’t seem to spot it on me today—besides Rachel, who doesn’t count—was the new boy. He will only ever know this new sisterless me.

I see a scrap of paper on the ground dry enough to write on, so I sit on a rock, take out the pen that I always keep in my back pocket now, and scribble a conversation I remember having with Bailey on it, then fold it up and bury it in the moist earth.

When I break out of the forest onto the road to our house, I’m flooded with relief. I want to be at home, where Bailey is most alive, where I can still see her leaning out the window, her wild black hair blowing around her face as she says, “C’mon, Len, let’s get to the river pronto.”

“Hey you.” Toby’s voice startles me. Bailey’s boyfriend of two years, he’s part cowboy, part skate rat, all love slave to my sister, and totally MIA lately despite Gram’s many invitations. “We really need to reach out to him now,” she keeps saying.

He’s lying on his back in her garden with the neighbor’s two red dogs, Lucy and Ethel, sprawled out asleep beside him. This is a common sight in the springtime. When the angel’s trumpets and lilacs bloom, her garden is positively soporific. A few moments among the blossoms and even the most energetic find themselves on their backs counting clouds.

“I was, uh, doing some weeding for Gram,” he says, obviously embarrassed about his kick-back position.

“Yeah, it happens to the best of us.” With his surfer flop of hair and wide face sun-spattered in freckles, Toby is the closest a human can come to lion without jumping species. When Bailey first saw him, she and I were out road-reading (we all road-read; the few people who live on our street know this about our family and inch their way home in their cars just in case one of us is out strolling and particularly rapt). I was reading
Wuthering Heights,
as usual, and she was reading
Like Water for Chocolate,
her favorite, when a magnificent chestnut brown horse trotted past us on the way to the trailhead.
Nice horse,
I thought, and went back to Cathy and Heathcliff, only looking up a few seconds later when I heard the thump of Bailey’s book as it hit the ground.

She was no longer by my side but had stopped a few paces back.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, taking in my suddenly lobotomized sister.

“Did you see that guy, Len?”

“What guy?”

“God, what’s wrong with
you,
that gorgeous guy on that horse, it’s like he popped out of my novel or something. I can’t believe you didn’t see him, Lennie.” Her exasperation at my disinterest in boys was as perpetual as my exasperation at her preoccupation with them. “He turned around when he passed us and smiled right at me—he was so good-looking ... just like the Revolutionary in this book.” She reached down to pick it up, brushing the dirt off the cover. “You know, the one who whisks Gertrudis onto his horse and steals her away in a fit of passion—”

“Whatever, Bailey.” I turned back around, resumed reading, and made my way to the front porch, where I sunk into a chair and promptly got lost in the stampeding passion of the two on the English moors. I liked love safe between the covers of my novel, not in my sister’s heart, where it made her ignore me for months on end. Every so often though, I’d look up at her, posing on a rock by the trailhead across the road, so obviously feigning reading her book that I couldn’t believe she was an actress. She stayed out there for hours waiting for her Revolutionary to come back, which he finally did, but from the other direction, having traded in his horse somewhere for a skateboard. Turns out he didn’t pop out of her novel after all, but out of Clover High like the rest of us, only he hung out with the ranch kids and skaters, and because she was exclusively a drama diva, their paths never crossed until that day. But by that point it didn’t matter where he came from or what he rode in on because that image of him galloping by had burned into Bailey’s psyche and stolen from her the capacity for rational thought.

I’ve never really been a member of the Toby Shaw fan club. Neither his cowboy bit nor the fact that he could do a 180 Ollie into a Fakie Feeble Grind on his skateboard made up for the fact that he had turned Bailey into a permanent love zombie.

That, and he’s always seemed to find me as noteworthy as a baked potato.

“You okay, Len?” he asks from his prone position, bringing me back to the moment.

For some reason, I tell the truth. I shake my head, back and forth, back and forth, from disbelief to despair, and back again.

He sits up. “I know,” he says, and I see in his marooned expression that it’s true. I want to thank him for not making me say a word, and getting it all the same, but I just remain silent as the sun pours heat and light, as if from a pitcher, all over our bewildered heads.

He pats the grass with his hand for me to join him. I sort of want to but feel hesitant. We’ve never really hung out before without Bailey.

I motion toward the house. “I need to go upstairs.”

This is true. I want to be back in The Sanctum, full name: The Inner Pumpkin Sanctum, newly christened by me, when Bailey, a few months ago, persuaded me the walls of our bedroom just had to be orange, a blaringly unapologetic orange that had since made our room sunglasses optional. Before I’d left for school this morning, I’d shut the door, purposefully, wishing I could barricade it from Gram and her cardboard boxes. I want The Sanctum the way it is, which means exactly the way it was. Gram seems to think this means:
I’m out of my tree and running loose through the park,
Gramese for
mental.

“Sweet pea.” She’s come out onto the porch in a bright purple frock covered in daisies. In her hand is a paintbrush, the first time I’ve seen her with one since Bailey died. “How was your first day back?”

I walk over to her, breathe in her familiar scent: patchouli, paint, garden dirt.

“It was fine,” I say.

She examines my face closely like she does when she’s preparing to sketch it. Silence tick-tocks between us, as it does lately. I can feel her frustration, how she wishes she could shake me like she might a book, hoping all the words will just fall out.

“There’s a new boy in honor band,” I offer.

“Oh yeah? What’s he play?”

“Everything, it seems.” Before I escaped into the woods at lunch, I saw him walking across the quad with Rachel, a guitar swinging from his hand.

“Lennie, I’ve been thinking ... it might be good for you now, a real comfort ...” Uh-oh. I know where this is going. “I mean, when you were studying with Marguerite, I couldn’t rip that instrument out of your hands—”

“Things change,” I say, interrupting her. I can’t have this conversation. Not again. I try to step around her to go inside. I just want to be in Bailey’s closet, pressed into her dresses, into the lingering scents of riverside bonfires, coconut suntan lotion, rose perfume—her.

“Listen,” she says quietly, reaching her free hand out to straighten my collar. “I invited Toby for dinner. He’s quite out of his tree. Go keep him company, help him weed or something.”