The Sky Is Everywhere (7 page)

SCHOOL’S BEEN OUT for two weeks. Gram, Big, and I are certifiably out of our trees and running loose through the park—all in opposite directions.

Exhibit A: Gram’s following me around the house with a teapot. The pot is full. I can see the steam coming out the spout. She has two mugs in her other hand. Tea is what Gram and I used to do together, before. We’d sit around the kitchen table in the late afternoons and drink tea and talk before the others came home. But I don’t want to have tea with Gram anymore because I don’t feel like talking, which she knows but still hasn’t accepted. So she’s followed me up the stairs and is now standing in the doorway of The Sanctum, pot in hand.

I flop onto the bed, pick up my book, pretend to read.

“I don’t want any tea, Gram,” I say, looking up from
Wuthering Heights,
which I note is upside down and hope she doesn’t.

Her face falls. Epically.

“Fine.” She puts a mug on the ground, fills the other one in her hand for herself, takes a sip. I can tell it’s burned her tongue, but she pretends it hasn’t. “Fine, fine, fine,” she chants, taking another sip.

She’s been following me around like this since school got out. Normally, summer is her busiest time as Garden Guru, but she’s told all her clients she is on hiatus until the fall. So instead of guruing, she happens into Maria’s while I’m at the deli, or into the library when I’m on my break, or she tails me to Flying Man’s and paces on the path while I float on my back and let my tears spill into the water.

But teatime is the worst.

“Sweet pea, it’s not healthy . . .” Her voice has melted into a familiar river of worry. I think she’s talking about my remoteness, but when I glance over at her I realize it’s the other thing. She’s staring at Bailey’s dresser, the gum wrappers strewn about, the hairbrush with a web of her black hair woven through the teeth. I watch her gaze drifting around the room to Bailey’s dresses thrown over the back of her desk chair, the towel flung over her bedpost, Bailey’s laundry basket still piled over with her dirty clothes . . . “Let’s just pack up a few things.”

“I told you, I’ll do it,” I whisper so I don’t scream at the top of my lungs. “I’ll do it, Gram, if you stop stalking me and leave me alone.”

“Okay, Lennie,” she says. I don’t have to look up to know I’ve hurt her.

When I do look up, she’s gone. Instantly, I want to run after her, take the teapot from her, pour myself a mug and join her, just spill every thought and feeling I’m having.

But I don’t.

I hear the shower turn on. Gram spends an inordinate amount of time in the shower now and I know this is because she thinks she can cry under the spray without Big and me hearing. We hear.

Exhibit B: I roll onto my back and before long I’m holding my pillow in my arms and kissing the air with an embarrassing amount of passion. Not again, I think. What’s wrong with me? What kind of girl wants to kiss every boy at a funeral, wants to maul a guy in a tree after making out with her sister’s boyfriend the previous night?
Speaking of which, what kind of girl makes out with her sister’s boyfriend, period?

Let me just unsubscribe to my own mind already, because I don’t get any of it. I hardly ever thought about sex before, much less did anything about it. Three boys at three parties in four years: Casey Miller, who tasted like hot dogs; Dance Rosencrantz, who dug around in my shirt like he was reaching into a box of popcorn at the movies. And Jasper Stolz in eighth grade because Sarah dragged me into a game of spin the bottle. Total blobfish feeling inside each time. Nothing like Heathcliff and Cathy, like Lady Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, like Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet! Sure, I’ve always been into the Big Bang theory of passion, but as something theoretical, something that happens in books that you can close and put back on a shelf, something that I might secretly want bad but can’t imagine ever happening to me. Something that happens to the heroines like Bailey, to the commotion girls in the leading roles. But now I’ve gone mental, kissing everything I can get my lips on: my pillow, arm chairs, door-frames, mirrors, always imagining the one person I should not be imagining, the person I promised my sister I will never ever kiss again. The one person who makes me feel just a little less afraid.

The front door slams shut, jarring me out of Toby’s forbidden arms.

It’s Big. Exhibit C: I hear him stomp straight into the dining room, where only two days ago, he unveiled his pyramids. This is always a bad sign. He built them years ago, based on some hidden mathematics in the geometry of the Egyptian pyramids. (Who knows? The guy also talks to trees.) According to Big, his pyramids, like the ones in the Middle East, have extraordinary properties. He’s always believed his replicas would be able to prolong the life of cut flowers and fruit, even revive bugs, all of which he would place under them for ongoing study. During his pyramid spells, Big, Bails, and I would spend hours searching the house for dead spiders or flies, and then each morning we’d run to the pyramids hoping to witness a resurrection. We never did. But whenever Big’s really upset, the necromancer in him comes out, and with it, the pyramids. This time, he’s at it with a fervor, sure it will work, certain that he only failed before because he forgot a key element: an electrically charged coil, which he’s now placed under each pyramid.

A little while later, a stoned Big drifts past my open door. He’s been smoking so much weed that when he’s home he seems to hover above Gram and me like an enormous balloon-every time I come upon him, I want to tie him to a chair.

He backtracks, lingers in my doorway for a moment.

“I’m going to add a few dead moths tomorrow,” he says, as if picking up on a conversation we’d been having.

I nod. “Good idea.”

He nods back, then floats off to his room, and most likely, right out the window.

This is us. Two months and counting. Booby Hatch Central.

 

THE NEXT MORNING, a showered and betoweled Gram is fixing breakfast ashes, Big is sweeping the rafters for dead moths to put under the pyramids, and I am trying not to make out with my spoon, when there’s a knock at the door. We freeze, all of us suddenly panicked that someone might witness the silent sideshow of our grief. I walk to the front door on tiptoe, so as not to let on that we are indeed home, and peek through the peep-hole. It’s Joe Fontaine, looking as animated as ever, like the front door is telling him jokes. He has a guitar in his hand.

“Everybody hide,” I whisper. I prefer all boys safe in the recesses of my sex-crazed mind, not standing outside the front door of our capsizing house. Especially this minstrel. I haven’t even taken my clarinet out of its case since school ended. I have no intention of going to summer band practice.

“Nonsense,” Gram says, making her way to the front of the house in her bright purple towel muumuu and pink towel turban ensemble. “Who is it?” she asks me in a whisper hundreds of decibels louder than her normal speaking voice.

“It’s that new kid from band, Gram, I can’t deal.” I swing my arms back and forth trying to shoo her into the kitchen.

I’ve forgotten how to do anything with my lips but kiss furniture. I have no conversation in me. I haven’t seen anyone from school, don’t want to, haven’t called back Sarah, who’s taken to writing me long e-mails (essays) about how she’s not judging me at all about what happened with Toby, which just lets me know how much she’s judging me about what happened with Toby. I duck into the kitchen, back into a corner, pray for invisibility.

“Well, well, a troubadour,” Gram says, opening the door. She has obviously noticed the mesmery that is Joe’s face and has already begun flirting. “Here I thought we were in the twenty-first century . . .” She is starting to purr. I have to save him.

I reluctantly come out of hiding and join swami seductress Gram. I get a good look at him. I’ve forgotten quite how luminous he is, like another species of human that doesn’t have blood but light running through their veins. He’s spinning his guitar case like a top while he talks to Gram. He doesn’t look like he needs saving, he looks amused.

“Hi, John Lennon.” He’s beaming at me like our tree-spat never happened.

What are you doing here?
I think so loudly my head might explode.

“Haven’t seen you around,” he says. Shyness overtakes his face for a quick moment—it makes my stomach flutter. Uh, I think I need to get a restraining order for all boys until I can get a handle on this newfound body buzz.

“Do come in,” Gram says, as if talking to a knight. “I was just preparing breakfast.” He looks at me, asking if it’s okay with his eyes. Gram’s still talking as she walks back into the kitchen. “You can play us a song, cheer us up a bit.” I smile at him, it’s impossible not to, and motion a welcome with my arm. As we enter the kitchen, I hear Gram whisper to Big, still in knight parlance, “I daresay, the young gentleman batted his extraordinarily long eyelashes at me.”

We haven’t had a real visitor since the weeks following the funeral and so don’t know how to behave. Uncle Big has seemingly floated to the floor and is leaning on the broom he had been using to sweep up the dead. Gram stands, spatula in hand, in the middle of the kitchen with an enormous smile on her face. I’m certain she’s forgotten what she’s wearing. And I sit upright in my chair at the table. No one says anything and all of us stare at Joe like he’s a television we’re hoping will just turn itself on.

It does.

“That garden is wild, never seen flowers like that, thought some of those roses might chop off
my
head and put me in a vase.” He shakes his head in amazement and his hair falls too adorably into his eyes. “It’s like Eden or something.”

“Better be careful in Eden, all that temptation.” The thunder of Big’s God voice surprises me—he’s been my partner in muteness lately, much to Gram’s displeasure. “Smelling Gram’s flowers has been known to cause all sorts of maladies of the heart.”

“Really?” Joe says. “Like what?”

“Many things. For instance, the scent of her roses causes a mad love to flourish.” At that, Joe’s gaze ever so subtlety shifts to me—whoa, or did I imagine it? Because now his eyes are back on Big, who’s still talking. “I believe this to be the case from personal experience and five marriages.” He grins at Joe. “Name’s Big, by the way, I’m Lennie’s uncle. Guess you’re new around here or you’d already know all this.”

What he would know is that Big is the town lothario. Rumors have it that at lunchtime women from all over pack a picnic and set out to find which tree that arborist is in, hoping for an invitation to lunch with him in his barrel high in the canopy. The stories go that shortly after they dine, their clothes flutter down like leaves.

I watch Joe taking in my uncle’s gigantism, his wacked-out mustache. He must like what he sees, because his smile immediately brightens the room a few shades.

“Yup, we moved here just a couple months ago from the city, before that we were in Paris—” Hmm. He must not have read the warning on the door about saying the word
Paris
within a mile radius of Gram. It’s too late. She’s already off on a Francophiliac rhapsody, but Joe seems to share her fanaticism.

He laments, “Man,
if only
we still lived—”

“Now, now,” she interrupts, wagging her finger like she’s scolding him. Oh no. Her hands have found her hips. Here it comes: She singsongs,
“If only
I had wheels on my ass, I’d be a trolley cart.” A Gram standard to forestall wallowing. I’m appalled, but Joe cracks up.

Gram’s in love. I don’t blame her. She’s taken him by the hand and is now escorting him on a docent walk through the house, showing off her willowy women, with whom he seems duly and truly impressed, from the exclamations he’s making, in French, I might add. This leaves Big to resume his scavenging for bugs and me to replace fantasies of my spoon with Joe Fontaine’s mouth. I can hear them in the living room, know they are standing in front of The Half Mom because everyone who comes in the house has the same reaction to it.

“It’s so haunting,” Joe says.

“Hmm, yes . . . that’s my daughter, Paige. Lennie and Bailey’s mom, she’s been away for a long, long time . . .” I’m shocked. Gram hardly ever talks about Mom voluntarily. “One day I’ll finish this painting, it’s not done . . .” Gram has always said she’ll finish it when Mom comes back and can pose for her.

“Come now, let’s eat.” I can hear the heartache in Gram’s voice through three walls. Mom’s absence has grown way more pronounced for her since Bailey’s death. I keep catching her and Big staring at The Half Mom with a fresh, almost desperate kind of longing. It’s become more pronounced for me too. Mom was what Bails and I did together before bed when we’d imagine where she was and what she was doing. I don’t know how to think about Mom without her.

I’m jotting down a poem on the sole of my shoe when they come back in.

“Run out of paper?” Joe asks.

I put my foot down. Ugh. What’s your major, Lennie? Oh yeah: Dorkology.

Joe sits down at the table, all limbs and graceful motion, an octopus.

We are staring at him again, still not certain what to make of the stranger in our midst. The stranger, however, appears quite comfortable with us.

“What’s up with the plant?” He points to the despairing Lennie houseplant in the middle of the table. It looks like it has leprosy. We all go silent, because what do we say about my doppelganger houseplant?