“Why’d you have to sneak out?” The rain’s drenching us, my shirt clings to me, and Joe’s hands to it, rubbing up and down my sides.
“I’m in prison,” he says. “Got busted big-time, that wine we drank was like a four-hundred-dollar bottle. I had no idea. I wanted to impress you so took it from downstairs. My dad went ape-shit when he saw the empty bottle—he’s making me sort wood all day and night in the workshop while he talks to his girlfriend on the phone the whole time. I think he forgets I speak French.”
I’m not sure whether to address the four-hundred-dollar bottle of wine we drank or the girlfriend, decide on the latter. “His girlfriend?”
“Never mind. I had to see you, but now I have to go back, and I wanted to give you this.” He pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket, stuffs it quickly into mine before it can get soaked.
He kisses me again. “Okay, I’m leaving.” He doesn’t move. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I don’t want you to,” I say. His hair’s black and snaky all around his glistening face. It’s like being in the shower with him. Wow—to be in the shower with him.
He turns to go for real then and I notice his eyes narrow as he peers over my shoulder. “Why’s he always here?”
I turn around. Toby’s in the doorframe,
watching us
—he looks like he’s been hit by a wrecking ball. God. He must not have left, must have been in the art room with Gram or something. He pushes open the door, grabs his skateboard, and rushes past without a word, huddled against the downpour.
“What’s going on?” Joe asks, X-raying me with his stare. His whole body has stiffened.
“Nothing. Really,” I answer, just as I did with Sarah. “He’s upset about Bailey.” What else can I tell him? If I tell him what’s going on, what went on even after he kissed me, I’ll lose him.
So when he says, “I’m being stupid and paranoid?” I just say, “Yeah.” And hear in my head:
Never cross a horn player.
He smiles wide and open as a meadow. “Okay” Then he kisses me hard one last time and we are again drinking the rain off each other’s lips. “Bye, John Lennon.”
And he’s off.
I hurry inside, worrying about what Toby said to me and what I didn’t say to Joe, as the rain washes all those beautiful kisses off of me.
chapter 22
I’M LYING DOWN on my bed, holding in my hands the antidote to worrying about anything. It’s a sheet of music, still damp from the rain. At the top, it says in Joe’s boxlike weirdo boy handwriting :
For a soulful, beautiful clarinetist, from a homely, boring, talentless though passionate guitarist. Part 1, Part 2 to come.
I try to hear it in my head, but my facility to hear without playing is terrible. I get up, find my clarinet, and moments later the melody spills into the room. I remember as I play what he said about my tone being so lonely, like a day without birds, but it’s as if the melody he wrote is nothing but birds and they are flying out of the end of my clarinet and filling the air of a still summer day, filling the trees and sky—it’s exquisite. I play it over and over again, until I know it by heart.
It’s two a.m. and if I play the song one more time, my fingers will fall off, but I’m too Joelirious to sleep. I go downstairs to get something to eat, and when I come back into The Sanctum, I’m blindsided by a want so urgent I have to cover my mouth to stifle a shriek. I want Bails to be sprawled out on her bed reading. I want to talk to her about Joe, want to play her this song.
I want my sister.
I want to hurl a building at God.
I take a breath and exhale with enough force to blow the orange paint right off the walls.
It’s no longer raining—the scrubbed newness of the night rolls in through the open window. I don’t know what to do, so I walk over to Bailey’s desk and sit down like usual. I look at the detective’s business card again. I thought about calling him but haven’t yet, haven’t packed up a thing either. I pull over a carton, decide to do one or two drawers. I hate looking at the empty boxes almost more than I hate the idea of packing up her things.
The bottom drawer’s full of school notebooks, years of work, now useless. I take one out, glide my fingers over the cover, hold it to my chest, and then put it in the carton. All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings—they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.
I stack the rest of the notebooks on top of the first, close the drawer, and do the same with the one above it. I close the carton and start a new one. There are more school notebooks in this drawer, some journals, which I will not read. I flip through the stack, putting them, one by one, into the box. At the very bottom of the drawer, there is an open one. It has Bailey’s chicken scrawl handwriting all over it; columns of words cover the whole page, with lines crossing out most of them. I take it out, feel a pang of guilt, but then my guilt turns to surprise, then fear, when I see what the words are.
They’re all combinations of our mother’s name combined with other names and things. There is a whole section of the name Paige combined with people and things related to John Lennon, my namesake, and we assume her favorite musician because of it. We know practically nothing about Mom. It’s like when she left, she took all traces of her life with her, leaving only a story behind. Gram rarely talks about anything but her amazing wanderlust, and Big isn’t much better.
“At five years old,” Gram would tell us over and over again, holding up her fingers for emphasis, “your mother snuck out of her bed one night and I found her halfway to town, with her little blue backpack and a walking stick. She said she was on an adventure—at five years old, girls!”
So that was all we had, except for a box of belongings we kept in The Sanctum. It’s full of books we foraged over the years from the shelves downstairs, ones that had her name in them:
Oliver Twist, On the Road, Siddhartha, The Collected Poems of William Blake,
and some Harlequins, which threw us for a loop, book snobs that we are. None of them are dogeared or annotated. We have some yearbooks, but there are no scribbles from friends in them. There’s a copy of
The Joy of Cooking
with food spattered all over it. (Gram did once tell us that Mom was magical in the kitchen and that she suspects she makes her living on the road by cooking.)
But mostly, what we have are maps, lots and lots of them: road maps, topographic maps, maps of Clover, of California, of the forty-nine other states, of country after country, continent after continent. There are also several atlases, each of which looks as read and reread as my copy of
Wuthering Heights.
The maps and atlases reveal the most about her: a girl for whom the world beckoned. When we were younger, Bailey and I would spend countless hours poring over the atlases imagining routes and adventures for her.
I start leafing through the notebook. There are pages and pages of these combinations: Paige/Lennon/Walker, Paige/ Lennon/Yoko, Paige/Lennon/Imagine, Paige/Dakota/Ono, and on and on. Sometimes there are notes under a name combination. For instance, scribbled under the words
Paige/Dakota
is an address in North Hampton, MA. But then that’s crossed out and the words
too young
are scrawled in.
I’m shocked. We’d both put our mother’s name into search engines many times to no avail, and we would sometimes try to think of pseudonyms she might have chosen and search them to no avail as well, but never like this, never methodically, never with this kind of thoroughness and persistence. The notebook is practically full. Bailey must have been doing this in every free moment, every moment I wasn’t around, because I so rarely saw her at the computer. But now that I’m thinking about it, I did see her in front of The Half Mom an awful lot before she died, studying it intently, almost like she was waiting for it to speak to her.
I turn to the first page of the notebook. It’s dated February 27, less than two months before she died. How could she have done all this in that amount of time? No wonder she needed St. Anthony’s help. I wish she’d asked for mine.
I put the notebook back in the drawer, walk back over to my bed, take my clarinet out of the case again, and play Joe’s song. I want to be in that summer day again, I want to be there with my sister.
At night,
when we were little,
we tented Bailey’s covers,
crawled underneath with our flashlights
and played cards: Hearts,
Whist, Crazy Eights,
and our favorite: Bloody Knuckles.
The competition was vicious.
All day, every day,
we were the Walker Girls—
two peas in a pod
thick as thieves—
but when Gram closed the door
for the night,
we bared our teeth.
We played for chores,
for slave duty,
for truths and dares and money.
We played to be better, brighter,
to be more beautiful,
more,
just more.
But it was all a ruse—
we played
so we could fall asleep
in the same bed
without having to ask,
so we could wrap together
like a braid,
so while we slept
our dreams could switch bodies.
(Found written on the inside cover of
Wuthering Heights,
Lennie’s room)
chapter 23
I used to talk to The Half Mom a lot,
but I’d wait until no one else was home
and then I’d say:
I imagine you
up there
not like a cloud or a bird or a star
but like a mother,
except one who lives in the sky
who doesn’t make a fuss
about gravity
who just goes about her business
drifting around with the wind.
(Found on a piece of newspaper under the Walkers’ porch)
WHEN I COME down to the kitchen the next morning, Gram is at the stove cooking sausages, her shoulders hunched into a broad frown. Big slouches over his coffee at the table. Behind them the morning fog shrouds the window, like the house is hovering inside a cloud. Standing in the doorway I’m filled with the same scared, hollow feeling I get when I see abandoned houses, ones with weeds growing through the front steps, paint cracked and dirty, windows broken and boarded up.
“Where’s Joe?” Big asks. I realize then why the despair is so naked this morning: Joe’s not here.
“In prison,” I say.
Big looks up, smirks. “What’d he do?” Instantly, the mood is lifted. Wow. I guess he’s not only my life raft.
“Took a four-hundred-dollar bottle of wine from his father and drank it one night with a girl named John Lennon.”
At the same time, Gram and Big gasp, then exclaim, “Four hundred dollars?!”
“He had no idea.”
“Lennie, I don’t like you drinking.” Gram waves her spatula at me. The sausages sizzle and sputter in the pan behind her.
“I don’t drink, well hardly Don’t worry.”
“Damn, Len. Was it good?” Big’s face is a study of wonder.
“I don’t know. I’ve never had red wine before, guess so.” I’m pouring a cup of coffee that is thin as tea. I’ve gotten used to the mud Joe makes.
“Damn,” Big repeats, taking a sip of his coffee and making a disgusted face. I guess he now prefers Joe’s sludge too. “Don’t suppose you will drink it again either, with the bar set that high.”
I’m wondering if Joe will be at the first band practice today—I’ve decided to go—when suddenly he walks through the door with croissants, dead bugs for Big, and a smile as big as God for me.
“Hey!” I say.
“They let you out,” says Big. “That’s terrific. Is it a conjugal visit or is your sentence over?”
“Big!” Gram chastises. “Please.”
Joe laughs. “It’s over. My father is a very romantic man, it’s his best and worst trait, when I explained to him how I was feeling—” Joe looks at me, proceeds to turn red, which of course makes me go full-on tomato. It surely must be against the rules to feel like this when your sister is dead!
Gram shakes her head. “Who would have thought Lennie such a romantic?”
“Are you kidding?” Joe exclaims. “Her reading
Wuthering Heights
twenty-three times didn’t give it away?” I look down. I’m embarrassed at how moved I am by this.
He knows me.
Somehow better than they do.
“Touché, Mr. Fontaine,” Gram says, hiding her grin as she goes back to the stove.
Joe comes up behind me, wraps his arms around my waist. I close my eyes, think about his body, naked under his clothes, pressing into me, naked under mine. I turn my head to look up at him. “The melody you wrote is so beautiful. I want to play it for you.” Before the last word is out of my mouth, he kisses me. I twist around in his arms so that we are facing each other, then throw my arms around his neck while his find the small of my back, and sweep me into him. Oh God, I don’t care if this is wrong of me, if I’m breaking every rule in the Western World, I don’t care about freaking anything, because our mouths, which momentarily separated, have met again and anything but that ecstatic fact ceases to matter.
How do people function when they’re feeling like this?
How do they tie their shoes?
Or drive cars?
Or operate heavy machinery?
How does civilization continue when this is going on?
A voice, ten decibels quieter than its normal register, stutters out of Uncle Big. “Uh, kids. Might want to, I don’t know, mmmm ...” Everything screeches to a halt in my mind. Is
Big
stammering? Uh, Lennie? Probably not cool to make out like this in the middle of the kitchen in front of your grandmother and uncle. I pull away from Joe; it’s like breaking suction. I look at Gram and Big, who are standing there fiddly and sheepish while the sausages burn. Is it possible that we’ve succeeded in embarrassing the Emperor and Empress of Weird?