This Is the Story of You (13 page)

The nicking of the sand blowing in.

The cat on my lap.

The cries of gulls in the empty space beneath me.

I closed my eyes.

The sand sifted, stayed.

I remembered.

Something.

An adventure we'd had.
It was a December Sunday, Mickey sleeping in. It was the voice on Old Carmen's radio reporting snow coming in from the north. Old Carmen out on the rocks, wrapped in her blankets, her radio blaring, her flag at her back.

“I would prefer,” Jasper Lee had said.

“Prefer what?” I'd asked.

We'd been lying feet to feet on his double bed, watching the planes fly nowhere above our heads. I had my hands beneath my head. He was propped up on three pillows. Around his mouth were the triangle lines from the BiPAP machine he had slept with—the face mask leading to the tubes leading to the machine on wheels, the machine's green face glowing. He'd needed the BiPAP air the night before—more oxygen into his stunted lungs, into his blood—but now he was breathing on his own. He had his glasses on, the ones with the lavender frames. His eyes were open. And then they closed.

“I would prefer to be the first Year-Rounder to see the year's first snow.” He said it all at once, with a single breath, then took a noisy swallow of air.

“That's what you want?” I said.

“That's what I want,” he said.

It was quiet in the house, with Mickey still sleeping.

He cranked his one foot around its anklebone. I heard the bones in his body pop. He sighed and his lungs gurgled and I pretended I didn't hear—studied the ceiling, thought about the things my brother preferred. To find the stars on a clean-sky night. To have a second scoop of ice cream, just before bed, teeth already brushed. To have somebody read him his favorite books, over and again. To be photographed sitting so no one could see the curve of him standing, or not to be photographed at all.

I was lying there imagining that I could see us both from up above, that I was flying one of his planes, looking down. My head at his footboard, my knees like a tent, the shine on my painted toenails, the flop of Jasper Lee's tube socks, the crank of his foot, his flannel pajama bottoms with their rolled-up hems, the Yankees sweatshirt that Mickey had hemmed quick with a pair of scissors and some yellow thread. I imagined Jasper Lee's hands, like animal hands, he used to say, like claws. I imagined his head propped high on three foam pillows. I imagined his nose, his lips, his tongue as what they were, and after that, his ears, which were perfect pale, exotic shells.

The enzymes had not touched them.

Through the windows behind him, I could see the nighttime dialing its darkness back. To the one side was the BiPAP. To the other his nightstand with the home-schooling pile—the workbooks and secondhand Scholastic readers and science that Ms. Isabel sent home once each week in a green-folder pack, Ms. Isabel staying sometimes, sitting on the edge of Jasper Lee's bed explaining, or asking Mickey for baking soda and setting off a volcano, or listening to Jasper Lee talk about his sand, because already he had questions about its infinitesimalness, about how there was so vastly much, how the world never ran out of sand. Ms. Isabel listened. She helped him look things up. She brought him books, she brought him vials, she drew out worksheets just for him.

Everything was frozen beside Jasper Lee's bed.

Everything was still.

Jasper Lee wanted to see the snow.

It was like a dream he'd had.

“All right,” I said, after a long time. “All right. Get up.”

He struggled up onto his elbows, didn't understand.

“Be ready,” I said, “for when I come back.” I rolled off the bed and left him where he was. I ran the stairs to my room, but very quiet. I turned on no lights. I hurried into my jeans. I pulled one of my aunt's old hats and scarves from the closet we shared and pulled my skates from beneath the skirt of the bed.

He was ready by the time I got back downstairs. He was standing by the door with his four-pocket khaki pants on, the hems cuffed high. He had his navy parka on and Mom's tulip-patterned scarf around his neck and his straw hat pressed to his head, his lavender glasses on the bridge of his stunted nose.

“Game on,” I said, opening the door, letting it close soft behind us.

He waited. I got ready. Fit the skates onto my Skechers. Took the key from around my neck. “Wheels up,” I said at last, crouching so that he could climb onto my back—tie his arms around my neck, knot his legs around my waist. Our house was four miles from Haven's northern tip. Jasper Lee was seven years old and small and weighed what I could carry. I was his sister, and together we were strong. I felt his heart beating into my left shoulder blade.

I walked over the pebbles.

I stepped onto the walk.

I climbed over the curve.

We were off.

All the pebbled lawns of Haven were sleeping, and Mickey, too, was sleeping, and the darkness was giving way to gray, and we disturbed no one. We reached the north end of the island just as the snow began to fall.

“What you prefer,” I said, catching my breath. “At your service.”

He hugged me hard from behind, and then he climbed down. I skated, he slowly walked to a weathered bench where the fishermen sat on summer days, throwing their lines into the sea. But that day it was just Jasper Lee and me keeping company with the striped lighthouse and the lapping edge of the water and the soft snow that fell. We let it fall on us, gently blanket us, color of perfectly white and simply perfect.

“You're the luck part of my life,” he said. “You and Mickey and Haven.”

The luck part of his life, I thought.
The luck part of something.
I'd been sitting on the bed where the stranger had been. The sand had been breezing against me, a stiff crust. Sterling had settled in for a nap and so had the crisp, white birds of Jasper Lee's stories. I didn't know the time, but the sun had risen. Deni would be coming for me soon, standing by Old Carmen's rock, anxious with news—her news to tell and to take.

I used the toilet down the hall that didn't flush. I dug out my map of Haven as it once had been, before all its parts had perished, the thermos that had rolled beneath my bed the night of the storm, still some water in it, and these I tucked into my trench coat pockets, alongside Jasper Lee's stories. I did all this, but first I found the pen and journal I'd salvaged the day after the storm, still right there in my trench coat pocket. I wrote:

Tell me who you are, and what you're taking.

“Game on,” I told Sterling, nudging her out of her sleep and tucking her down into the pocket. I found a snow globe in the curio cabinet. I left the note on the bed. I anchored it down with the snow globe.

That was it. All my preparations.

“Let's blow this popsicle joint,” I told that cat, and we staggered out, across the tilted deck. We gave our lives over to Rapunzel.

The tide was drawing back.
The sand was wet cement oozed over gutters, swished across ironing boards, flat on the flat-screen TVs, swirled in the swirls of chandeliers and candlesticks. The beachcombers were scavenger birds, their heads bent, their hands hooked over cranky parts and pieces. Nothing had changed except the smell was worse and the beach seemed more crowded and there were bootprints, somewhere, left behind by the stranger who'd come, kicked up into the chaos.

The sun was noon-high in the sky. I picked my way toward Old Carmen's rock—the red flag flapping and the fire sending up a thin SOS. The hem of my trench coat skittered over the dry upper sand. It dragged where the sand was damp and my waders sank. Sterling had two paws on my shoulder and her tail in a pocket. She had assigned herself a detail that I called the reverse lookout.

“You are,” I told her twice, “an excellently fine cat.” She was especially talented in reverse.

Now, lifting one hand to block the sun, I searched for Deni. I saw everything but her and nothing but ruin. I kept walking, watching where my waders went, cutting the distance between me and the rock, until finally I saw Deni still way out there, hugging the shoreline in her brother's army boots. Her hair had spiked back up to antennae heights. Her aviators were pooling the sun. She'd changed into her brother's
army
sweatshirt, its round neck cut in a fraying V—I would have known that anywhere, picked it out from any mile—and she was traveling Gem-free. Her hurt arm high in its sling, she was half-walking, half-running; she hadn't seen me.

“Hey!” I waved.

Too much between us.

Matching Deni's pace now, ignoring the throb in my knee, threading as quickly as I could across the stalagmite landscape. I was doing a dangerous weave between sofas and butcher blocks, pillows and lampshades, the people I knew, the split side of a deck, the triple shelves of a library shelf, Elly P. in loafers and an anchor miniskirt, Rahna D. with a bandanna holding back the lovely masses of her hair, Dr. Hagy, who had never gone far without her tennis racquet and who was carrying it now, like a miniature webbed table, its strings holding the silverware she had dug out from the sand. We all were going in between and out. We were stopping to hug each other, to console each other, to say what we'd heard, what we knew, what we suspected, but not for long. We had to carry on. We were scratched, dirty, standing, sorry, and there was nothing we could do, and Deni was coming, she was so much closer, and when people wanted to talk I did, and when people couldn't look up I understood.

Tragedy is a public thing.

It is also a private condition.

“Hey, Deni!” I called, and she heard me this time. Stopped to make sure. Started cutting faster in my direction. She was past Old Carmen's rock, her boots splashing the edge of the sea. She was past where the deer had been and where Chang and Mario had disappeared into the mirage or into the weird place of my imagination. Weather vanes and a parking meter and a Christmas wreath lay tossed between us. A chili bowl, a clothesline pole, a telephone, a mattress. The mattress had its quilt intact and a wet dog curled at its end and I thought it was dead except for how it barked when we passed, and now Sterling was making a show of discontent—little desertion moves, all four of her feet crouched on my shoulder.

“Don't you dare leave your post,” I said. “We're almost there.” Lifting her from my shoulder to give her a good, stern glare and still walking forward because Deni had news, I could tell she did, and I had news for her.

That's when the thud of my boot struck the bell of some metal.

That's when I tripped and shivered forward, then fell flat.

I remember Sterling flying, better than some circus act.