“Not true.”
“Is true.”
“Nah-uh, nah-uh, nah-uh.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.”
Etc.
Her previous display of enthusiasm was nothing compared to the one that is going on now. She’s doing circles around me, saying, “Oh my God. I am soooooooooooooo jealous. Every girl in Clover is after one Fontaine or another. No wonder you’ve been a shut-in. I would be too, if I could shut in with one of them. God, let me live vicariously through you. Tell me every freaking detail. That beautiful, beautiful boy, those eyes, those
eyelashes,
that unfreakingbelievable smile, that trumpet playing, wow, Lennnnnnnnnie.” She’s pacing now, has lit another cigarette, is chain smoking in glee—a naked smokestack maniac. I’m so happy to be hanging out with the marvel that is my best friend Sarah. And I’m so happy to be happy about it.
I tell her every detail. How he came over every morning with croissants, how we played music together, how he made Gram and Big so happy just by being in the house, how we drank wine last night and kissed until I was sure I had walked right into the sky. I told her how I think I can hear his heart beating even when he’s not there, how I feel like flowers—Gramgantuan ones—are blooming in my chest, how I’m sure I feel just the way Heathcliff did for Cathy before—
“Okay, stop for a second.” She’s still smiling but she looks a bit worried and surprised too. “Lennie, you’re not in love, you’re demented. I’ve never heard anyone talk about a guy like this.”
I shrug. “Then I’m demented.”
“Wow, I want to be demented too.” She sits down next to me on the rock. “It’s like you’ve hardly kissed three guys in your whole life and now this. Guess you were saving it up or something...”
I tell her my Rip Van Lennie theory of having slept my whole life until recently.
“I don’t know, Len. You always seemed awake to me.”
“Yeah, I don’t know either. It was a wine-induced theory.”
Sarah picks up a stone, tosses it into the water with a little too much force. “What?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer right away, picks up another stone and hurls it too. “I am mad at you, but I’m not allowed to be, you know?”
It’s exactly how I feel toward Bailey sometimes lately.
“You’ve just been keeping so much from me, Lennie. I thought ... I don’t know.”
It’s as if she were speaking my lines in a play.
“I’m sorry,” I say again feebly. I want to say more, give her an explanation, but the truth is I don’t know why I’ve felt so closed off to her since Bailey died.
“It’s okay,” she says again quietly.
“It’ll be different now,” I say, hoping it’s true. “Promise.”
I look out at the sun courting the river’s surface, the green leaves, the wet rocks behind the falls. “Want to go swimming?”
“Not yet,” she says. “I have news too. Not breaking news, but still.” It’s a clear dig and I deserve it. I didn’t even ask how she was.
She’s smirking at me, quite dementedly, actually. “I hooked up with Luke Jacobus last night.”
“Luke?” I’m surprised. Besides for his recent lapse in judgment, which resulted in his band-kill status, he’s been devotedly, unrequitedly in love with Sarah since second grade. King of the Nerdiverse, she used to call him. “Didn’t you make out with him in seventh grade and then drop him when that idiot surfer glistened at you?”
“Yeah, it’s probably dumb,” she says. “I agreed to do lyrics for this incredible music he wrote, and we were hanging out, and it just happened.”
“What about the Jean-Paul Sartre rule?”
“Sense of humor trumps literacy, I’ve decided—and jumping giraffes, Len, growth geyser, the guy’s like the Hulk these days.”
“He is funny,” I agree. “And green.”
She laughs, just as my phone signals a text. I rifle through my bag and take it out hoping for a message from Joe.
Sarah’s singing, “Lennie got a love note from a Fontaine,” as she tries to read over my shoulder. “C’mon let me see it.” She grabs the phone from me. I pull it out of her hands, but it’s too late. It says:
I need to talk to you. T
.
“As in Toby?” she asks. “But I thought ... I mean, you just said ... Lennie, what’re you doing?”
“Nothing,” I tell her, shoving the phone back in my bag, already breaking my promise. “Really. Nothing.”
“Why don’t I believe you?” she says, shaking her head. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Don’t,” I say, swallowing my own atrocious feeling. “Really. I’m demented, remember?” I touch her arm. “Let’s go swimming.”
We float on our backs in the pool for over an hour. I make her tell me everything about her night with Luke so I don’t have to think about Toby’s text, what might be so urgent. Then we climb up to the falls and get under them, screaming FUCK over and over into the roar like we’ve done since we were little.
I scream bloody murder.
chapter 21
There were once two sisters
who were not afraid of the dark
because the dark was full of the other’s voice
across the room,
because even when the night was thick
and starless
they walked home together from the river
seeing who could last the longest
without turning on her flashlight,
not afraid
because sometimes in the pitch of night
they’d lie on their backs
in the middle of the path
and look up until the stars came back
and when they did,
they’d reach their arms up to touch them
and did.
(Found on an envelope stuck under the tire of a car on Main Street)
BY THE TIME I walk home from the river through the woods, I’ve decided Toby, like me, feels terrible about what happened, hence the urgency of the text. He probably just wants to make sure it will never happen again. Well, agreed. No argument from demented ol’ moi.
Clouds have gathered and the air feels thick with the possibility of a rare summer rain. I see a to-go cup on the ground, so I sit down, write a few lines on it, and then bury it under a mound of pine needles. Then I lie down on my back on the spongy forest floor. I love doing this—giving it all up to the enormity of the sky, or to the ceiling if the need arises while I’m indoors. As I reach my hands out and press my fingers into the loamy soil, I start wondering what I’d be doing right now, what I’d be feeling right this minute if Bailey were still alive. I realize something that scares me: I’d be happy, but in a mild kind of way, nothing demented about it. I’d be turtling along, like I always turtled, huddled in my shell, safe and sound.
But what if I’m a shell-less turtle now, demented and devastated in equal measure, an unfreakingbelievable mess of a girl, who wants to turn the air into colors with her clarinet, and what if somewhere inside I prefer this? What if as much as I fear having death as a shadow, I’m beginning to like how it quickens the pulse, not only mine, but the pulse of the whole world. I doubt Joe would even have noticed me if I’d still been in that hard shell of mild happiness. He wrote in his journal that he thinks I’m on full blast,
me,
and maybe I am now, but I never was before. How can the cost of this change in me be so great? It doesn’t seem right that anything good should come out of Bailey’s death. It doesn’t seem right to even have these thoughts.
But then I think about my sister and what a shell-less turtle she was and how she wanted me to be one too.
C’mon, Lennie,
she used to say to me at least ten times a day.
C’mon, Len.
And that makes me feel better, like it’s her life rather than her death that is now teaching me how to be, who to be.
I KNOW TOBY’S there even before I go inside, because Lucy and Ethel are camped out on the porch. When I walk into the kitchen, I see him and Gram sitting at the table talking in hushed voices.
“Hi,” I say, dumbfounded. Doesn’t he realize he can’t be here?
“Lucky me,” Gram says. “I was walking home with armfuls of groceries and Toby came whizzing by on his skateboard.” Gram hasn’t driven since the 1900s. She walks everywhere in Clover, which is how she became Garden Guru. She couldn’t help herself, started carrying her shears on her trips to town and people would come home and find her pruning their bushes to perfection: ironic yes, because of her hands-off policy with her own garden.
“Lucky,” I say to Gram as I take in Toby Fresh scrapes cover his arms, probably from wiping out on his board. He looks wild-eyed and disheveled, totally unmoored. I know two things in this moment: I was wrong about the text and I don’t want to be unmoored with him anymore.
What I really want is to go up to The Sanctum and play my clarinet.
Gram looks at me, smiles. “You swam. Your hair looks like a cyclone. I’d like to paint it.” She reaches her hand up and touches my cyclone. “Toby’s going to have dinner with us.”
I can’t believe this. “I’m not hungry,” I say. “I’m going upstairs.”
Gram gasps at my rudeness, but I don’t care. Under no circumstances am I sitting through dinner with Toby,
who touched my breasts,
and Gram and Big. What is he thinking?
I go up to The Sanctum, unpack and assemble my clarinet, then take out the Edith Piaf sheet music that I borrowed from a certain garcon, turn to “La Vie en Rose,” and start playing. It’s the song we listened to last night while the world exploded. I’m hoping I can just stay lost in a state of Joeliriousness, and I won’t hear a knock at my door after they eat, but of course, I do.
Toby,
who touched
my
breasts and let’s not forget put his
hand
down my pants
too, opens the door, walks tentatively across the room, and sits on Bailey’s bed. I stop playing, rest my clarinet on my stand. Go away, I think heartlessly, just go away. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen, none of it.
Neither of us says a word. He’s rubbing his thighs so intently, I bet the friction is generating heat. His gaze is drifting all around the room. It finally locks on a photograph of Bailey and him on her dresser. He takes a breath, looks over at me. His gaze lingers.
“Her shirt...”
I look down. I forgot I had it on. “Yeah.” I’ve been wearing Bailey’s clothes more and more outside The Sanctum as well as in it. I find myself going through my own drawers and thinking, Who was the girl who wore these things? I’m sure a shrink would love this, all of it, I think, looking over at Toby. She’d probably tell me I was trying to take Bailey’s place. Or worse, competing with her in a way I never could when she was alive. But is that it? It doesn’t feel like it. When I wear her clothes, I just feel safer, like she’s whispering in my ear.
I’m lost in thought, so it startles me when Toby says in an uncharacteristic shaky voice, “Len, I’m sorry. About everything.” I glance at him. He looks so vulnerable, frightened. “I got way out of control, feel so bad.” Is this what he needed to tell me? Relief tumbles out of my chest.
“Me too,” I say, thawing immediately. We’re in this together.
“Me more, trust me,” he says, rubbing his thighs again. He’s so distraught. Does he think it’s all his fault or something?
“We both did it, Toby,” I say. “Each time. We’re both horrible.”
He looks at me, his dark eyes warm. “You’re not horrible, Lennie.” His voice is gentle, intimate. I can tell he wants to reach out to me. I’m glad he’s across the room. I wish he were across the equator. Do our bodies now think whenever they’re together they get to touch? I tell mine that is most definitely not the case, no matter that I feel it again. No matter.
And then a renegade asteroid breaks through the earth’s atmosphere and hurtles into The Sanctum: “It’s just that I can’t stop thinking about you,” he says. “I can’t. I just...” He’s balling up Bailey’s bedspread in his fists. “I want—”
“Please don’t say more.” I cross the room to my dresser, open the middle drawer, reach in and pull out a shirt, my shirt. I have to take Bailey’s off. Because I’m suddenly thinking that imaginary shrink is spot on.
“It’s not me,” I say quietly as I open the closet door and slip inside. “I’m not her.”
I stay in the dark quiet getting my breathing under control, my life under control, getting my own shirt on my own body. It’s like there’s a river under my feet tumbling me toward him, still, even with everything that’s happened with Joe, a roaring, passionate, despairing river, but I don’t want to go this time. I want to stay on the shore. We can’t keep wrapping our arms around a ghost.
When I come out of the closet, he’s gone.
“I’m so sorry,” I say aloud to the empty orange room.
As if in response, thousands of hands begin tapping on the roof. I walk over to my bed, climb up to the window ledge and stick my hands out. Because we only get one or two storms a summer, rain is an event. I lean far over the ledge, palms to the sky, letting it all slip through my fingers, remembering what Big told Toby and me that afternoon. No
way out of this but through.
Who knew what through would be?
I see someone rushing down the road in the downpour. When the figure gets near the lit-up garden I realize it’s Joe and am instantly uplifted. My life raft.
“Hey,” I yell out and wave like a maniac.
He looks up at the window, smiles, and I can’t get down the stairs, out the front door, into the rain and by his side fast enough.
“I missed you,” I say, reaching up and touching his cheek with my fingers. Raindrops drip from his eyelashes, stream in rivulets all down his face.
“God, me too.” Then his hands are on my cheeks and we are kissing and the rain is pouring all over our crazy heads and once again my whole being is aflame with joy.
I didn’t know love felt like this, like turning into brightness.
“What are you doing?” I say, when I can finally bring myself to pull away for a moment.
“I saw it was raining—I snuck out, wanted to see you, just like this.”