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Authors: Jandy Nelson

Tags: #Performing Arts, #Love & Romance, #Family, #Juvenile Fiction, #General, #Music

The Sky Is Everywhere (9 page)

BOOK: The Sky Is Everywhere
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He sighs, frustrated. “I know that, I know.” He picks up his pace as if to leave behind what he just told me.
“She’d kill me.” He says it so definitively and passionately that I wonder if he’s really talking about skating or what happened between us.
“I won’t do it anymore,” he insists.
“Good,” I say, still not totally sure what he’s referring to, but if it’s us, he doesn’t have to worry, right? I’ve kept the curtains drawn. I’ve promised Bailey nothing will ever happen again.
Though even as I think this, I find my eyes drinking him in, his broad chest and strong arms, his freckles. I remember his mouth hungrily on mine, his big hands in my hair, the heat coursing through me, how it made me feel—
“It’s just so reckless . . .” he says.
“Yeah.” It comes out a little too breathy
“Len?”
I need smelling salts.
He looks at me funny, but then I think he reads in my eyes what has been going on in my head, because his eyes kind of widen and spark, before he quickly looks away.
GET A GRIP, LENNIE.
We walk in silence then through the woods and it snaps me back into my senses. The stars and moon are mostly hidden over the thick tree cover, and I feel like I’m swimming through darkness, my body breaking the air as if it were water. I can hear the rush of the river getting louder with every step I take, and it reminds me of Bailey, day after day, year after year, the two of us on this path, lost in talk, the plunge into the pool, and then the endless splaying on the rocks in the sun—
I whisper, “I’m left behind.”
“Me too ...” His voice catches. He doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t look at me; he just takes my hand and holds it and doesn’t let it go as the cover above us gets thicker and we push together farther into the deepening dark.
I say softly, “I feel so guilty,” almost hoping the night will suck my words away before Toby hears.
“I do too,” he whispers back.
“But about something else too, Toby . . .”
“What?”
With all the darkness around me, with my hand in Toby’s, I feel like I can say it. “I feel guilty that I’m still here . . .”
“Don’t. Please, Len.”
“But she was always so much ... more—”
“No.” He doesn’t let me finish. “She’d hate for you to feel that way.”
“I know.”
And then I blurt out what I’ve forbidden myself to think, let alone say: “She’s in a coffin, Toby.” I say it so loud, practically shriek it—the words make me dizzy, claustrophobic, like I need to leap out of my body.
I hear him suck in air. When he speaks, his voice is so weak I barely hear it over our footsteps. “No, she isn’t.”
I know this too. I know both things at once.
Toby tightens his grip around my hand.
Once at Flying Man’s, the sky floods through the opening in the canopy. We sit on a flat rock and the full moon shines so brightly on the river, the water looks like pure rushing light.
“How can the world continue to shimmer like this?” I say as I lie down under a sky drunk with stars.
Toby doesn’t answer, just shakes his head and lies down next to me, close enough for him to put his arm around me, close enough for me to put my head on his chest if he did so. But he doesn’t, and I don’t.
He starts talking then, his soft words dissipating into the night like smoke. He talks about how Bailey wanted to have the wedding ceremony here at Flying Man’s so they could jump into the pool after saying their vows. I lean up on my elbows and can see it as clearly in the moonlight as if I were watching a movie, can see Bailey in a drenched bright orange wedding dress laughing and leading the party down the path back to the house, her careless beauty so huge it had to walk a few paces ahead of her, announcing itself. I see in the movie of Toby’s words how happy she would have been, and suddenly, I just don’t know where all that happiness, her happiness, and ours, will go now, and I start to cry, and then Toby’s face is above mine and his tears are falling onto my cheeks until I don’t know whose are whose, just know that all that happiness is gone, and that we are kissing again.

When I’m with him,

there is someone with me

in my house of grief,

someone who knows

its architecture as I do,

who can walk with me,

from room to sorrowful room,

making the whole rambling structure

of wind and emptiness

not quite as scary, as lonely

as it was before.

(Found on a branch of a tree outside Clover High)

chapter 11
JOE FONTAINE’S KNOCKING. I’m lying awake in bed, thinking about moving to Antarctica to get away from this mess with Toby. I prop myself up on an elbow to look out the window at the early, bony light.
Joe’s our rooster. Each morning since his first visit, a week and a half ago, he arrives at dawn with his guitar, a bag of chocolate croissants from the bakery, and a few dead bugs for Big. If we aren’t up, he lets himself in, makes a pot of coffee thick as tar, and sits at the kitchen table strumming melancholy chords on his guitar. Every so often he asks me if I feel like playing, to which I reply
no,
to which he replies
fine.
A polite standoff. He hasn’t mentioned Rachel again, which is okay by me.
The strangest part about all this is that it’s not strange at all, for any of us. Even Big, who is not a morning person, pads down the stairs in his slippers, greets Joe with a boisterous back slap, and after checking the pyramids (which Joe has already checked), he jumps right back into their conversation from the previous morning about his obsession du jour: exploding cakes.
Big heard that a woman in Idaho was making a birthday cake for her husband when the flour ignited. They were having a dry spell, so there was lots of static electricity in the air. A cloud of flour dust surrounded her and due to a spark from a static charge in her hand, it exploded: an inadvertent flour bomb. Now Big is trying to enlist Joe to reenact the event with him for the sake of science. Gram and I have been adamantly opposed to this for obvious reasons. “We’ve had enough catastrophe, Big,” Gram said yesterday, putting her foot down. I think the amount of pot Big’s been smoking has made the idea of the exploding cake much funnier and more fascinating than it really is, but somehow Joe is equally enthralled with the concept.
It’s Sunday and I have to be at the deli in a few hours. The kitchen’s bustling when I stumble in.
“Morning, John Lennon,” Joe says, looking up from his guitar strings and throwing me a jaw-dropping grin—what am I doing making out with Toby,
Bailey’s
Toby, I think as I smile back at the holy horses unfreakingbelievable Joe Fontaine, who has seemingly moved into our kitchen. Things are so mixed up—the boy who should kiss me acts like a brother and the boy who should act like a brother keeps kissing me. Sheesh.
“Hey, John Lennon,” Gram echoes.
Unbelievable. This can’t be catching on. “Only Joe’s allowed to call me that,” I grumble at her.
“John Lennon!” Big whisks into the kitchen and me into his arms, dancing me around the room. “How’s my girl today?”
“Why’s everyone in such a good mood?” I feel like Scrooge.
“I’m not in a good mood,” Gram says, beaming ear to ear, looking akin to Joe. I notice her hair is dry too. No grief-shower this morning. A first. “I just got an idea last night. It’s a surprise.” Joe and Big glance at me and shrug. Gram’s ideas often rival Big’s on the bizarre scale, but I doubt this one involves explosions or necromancy.
“We don’t know what it is either, honey,” Big bellows in a baritone unfit for eight a.m. “In other breaking news, Joe had an epiphany this morning: He put the Lennie houseplant under one of the pyramids—I can’t believe I never thought of that.” Big can’t contain his excitement, he’s smiling down on Joe like a proud father. I wonder how Joe slipped in like this, wonder if it’s somehow because he never knew her, doesn’t have one single memory of her, he’s like the world without our heartbreak—
My cell phone goes off. I glance at the screen. It’s Toby. I let it go to voicemail, feeling like the worst person in the world because just seeing his name recalls last night, and my stomach flies into a sequence of contortions. How could I have let this happen?
I look up, all eyes are on me, wondering why I didn’t pick up the phone. I have to get out of the kitchen.
“Want to play, Joe?” I say, heading upstairs for my clarinet.
“Holy shit,” I hear, then apologies to Gram and Big.
Back on the porch, I say, “You start, I’ll follow.”
He nods and starts playing some sweet soft chords in G minor. But I feel too unnerved for sweet, too unnerved for soft. I can’t shake off Toby’s call, his kisses. I can’t shake off cardboard boxes, perfume that never gets used, bookmarks that don’t move, St. Anthony statues that do. I can’t shake off the fact that Bailey at eleven years old did not put herself in the drawing of our family, and suddenly, I am so upset I forget I’m playing music, forget Joe’s even there beside me.
I start to think about all the things I haven’t said since Bailey died, all the words stowed deep in my heart, in our orange bedroom, all the words in the whole world that aren’t said after someone dies because they are too sad, too enraged, too devastated, too guilty, to come out—all of them begin to course inside me like a lunatic river. I suck in all the air I can, until there’s probably no air left in Clover for anyone else, and then I blast it all out my clarinet in one mad bleating typhoon of a note. I don’t know if a clarinet has ever made such a terrible sound, but I can’t stop, all the years come tumbling out now—Bailey and me in the river, the ocean, tucked so snug into our room, the backseat of cars, bathtubs, running through the trees, through days and nights and months and years without Mom—I am breaking windows, busting through walls, burning up the past, pushing Toby off me, taking the dumb-ass Lennie houseplant and hurling it into the sea—
I open my eyes. Joe’s staring at me, astonished. The dogs next door are barking.
“Wow, I think I’ll follow next time,” he says.

I’d been making decisions for days.

I picked out the dress Bailey would wear forever—

a black slinky one—inappropriate—that she loved.

I chose a sweater to go over it, earrings, bracelet, necklace,

her most beloved strappy sandals.

I collected her makeup to give to the funeral director with a recent photo—

I thought it would be me that would dress her;

I didn’t think a strange man should see her naked

touch her body

shave her legs

apply her lipstick

but that’s what happened all the same.

I helped Gram pick out the casket, the plot at the cemetery.

I changed a few lines in the obituary that Big composed.

I wrote on a piece of paper what I thought

should go on the headstone.

I did all this without uttering a word.

Not one word, for days,

until I saw Bailey before the funeral

and lost my mind.

I hadn’t realized that when people say so-and-so

snapped

that’s what actually happens—

I started shaking her—

I thought I could wake her up

and get her the hell out of that box.

When she didn’t wake,

I screamed: Talk to me.

Big swooped me up into his arms,

carried me out of the room, the church,

into the slamming rain,

and down to the creek

where we sobbed together

under the black coat he held over our heads

to protect us from the weather.

(Found on a piece of staff paper crumpled up by the trailhead)

chapter 12
I WISH I had my clarinet, I think as I walk home from the deli. If I did, I’d head straight into the woods where no one could hear me and face-plant like I did on the porch this morning.
Play the music, not the instrument,
Marguerite always said. And Mr. James:
Let the instrument play you.
I never got either instruction until today. I always imagined music trapped inside my clarinet, not trapped inside of me. But what if music is what escapes when a heart breaks?
I turn onto our street and see Uncle Big road-reading, tripping over his massive feet, greeting his favorite trees as he passes them. Nothing too unusual, but for the flying fruit. There are a few weeks every year when if circumstances permit, like the winds are just so and the plums particularly heavy, the plum trees around our house become hostile to humans and begin using us for target practice.
Big waves his arm east to west in enthusiastic greeting, narrowly escaping a plum to the head.
I salute him, then when he’s close enough, I give a hello twirl to his mustache, which is waxed and styled to the hilt, the fanciest (i.e., freakiest) I’ve seen it in some time.
“Your friend is over,” he says, winking at me. Then he puts his nose back into his book and resumes his promenade. I know he means Joe, but I think of Sarah and my stomach twists a little. She sent me a text today:
Sending out a search party for our friendship.
I haven’t responded. I don’t know where it is either.
A moment later, I hear Big say, “Oh, Len, Toby called for you, wants you to ring him right away.”
He called me on my cell again too while I was at work. I didn’t listen to the voicemail. I reiterate the oath I’ve been swearing all day that I will never see Toby Shaw again, then I beg my sister for a sign of forgiveness—
no need for subtlety either, Bails, an earthquake will do.
As I get closer, I see that the house is inside out—in the front yard are stacks of books, furniture, masks, pots and pans, boxes, antiques, paintings, dishes, knickknacks—then I see Joe and someone who looks just like him but broader and even taller coming out of the house with our sofa.
BOOK: The Sky Is Everywhere
11.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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