The Sky Is Everywhere (23 page)

Hate that her cell phone finally has been shut down.

With each day that passes, more traces of my sister vanish, not only from the world, but from my very own mind, and there’s nothing I can do about it, but sit in the soundless, scentless sanctum and cry.

On the sixth day of this, Sarah declares me a state of emergency and makes me promise to go to the movies with her that night.

She picks me up in Ennui, wearing a black miniskirt, black minier tank top that shows off a lot of tan midriff, three-foot black heels, all topped off with a black ski hat, which I’m supposing is her attempt at practicality, because a chill blew in and it’s arctic cold. I’m wearing a brown suede coat, turtleneck, and jeans. We look like we are spliced together from different weather systems.

“Hi!” she says, taking the cigarette out of her mouth to kiss me as I get in. “This movie really is supposed to be good. Not like that last one I made you go to where the woman sat in a chair with her cat for the first half. I admit that one was problematico.” Sarah and I have opposite movie-going philosophies. All I want out of celluloid is to sit in the dark with a huge bucket of popcorn. Give me car chases, girl gets boy, underdogs triumphing, let me swoon and scream and weep. Sarah on the other hand can’t tolerate such pedestrian fare and complains the whole time about how we’re rotting our minds and soon won’t be able to think our own thoughts because our brains will be lost to the dominant paradigm. Sarah’s preference is The Guild, where they show bleak foreign films where nothing happens, no one talks, everyone loves the one who will never love them back, and then the movie ends. On the program tonight is some stultifyingly boring black-and-white film from Norway.

Her face drops as she studies mine. “You look miserable.”

“Sucky week all around.”

“It’ll be fun tonight, promise.” She takes one hand off the wheel and pulls a brown sack out of a backpack. “For the movie.” She hands it to me. “Vodka.”

“Hmm, then I’ll for sure fall asleep in this action-packed, thrill-a-minute, black-and-white, silent movie from Norway.”

She rolls her eyes. “It’s not silent, Lennie.”

While waiting in line, Sarah jumps around trying to keep warm. She’s telling me how Luke held up remarkably well at the symposium despite being the only guy there, even made her ask a question about music, but then mid-sentence and mid-jump, her eyes bulge a little. I catch it, even though she’s already resumed talking as if nothing has happened. I turn around and there’s Joe across the street with Rachel.

They’re so lost in conversation they don’t even realize the light has changed.

Cross the street,
I want to scream.
Cross the street before you fall in love.
Because that’s what appears to be happening. I watch Joe lightly tug at her arm while he tells her something or other I’m sure about Paris. I can see the smile, all that radiance pouring over Rachel and I think I might fall like a tree.

“Let’s go.”

“Yup.” Sarah’s already walking toward the Jeep, fumbling in her bag for the keys. I follow her, but take one look back and meet Joe’s eyes head on. Sarah disappears. Then Rachel. Then all the people waiting in line. Then the cars, the trees, the buildings, the ground, the sky until it is only Joe and me staring across empty space at each other. He does not smile. He anti-smiles. But I can’t look away and he can’t seem to either. Time has slowed so much that I wonder if when we stop staring at each other we will be old and our whole lives will be over with just a few measly kisses between us. I’m dizzy with missing him, dizzy with seeing him, dizzy with being just yards from him. I want to run across the street, I’m about to—I can feel my heart surge, pushing me toward him, but then he just shakes his head almost to himself and looks away from me and toward Rachel, who now comes back into focus. High-definition focus. Very deliberately, he puts his arm around her and together they cross the street and get in line for the movie. A searing pain claws through me. He doesn’t look back, but Rachel does.

She salutes me, a triumphant smile on her face, then flips an insult of blond hair at me as she swings her arm around his waist and turns away.

My heart feels like it’s been kicked into a dark corner of my body.
Okay I get it,
I want to holler at the sky.
This is how it feels.
Lesson learned. Comeuppance accepted. I watch them retreat into the theater arm in arm, wishing I had an eraser so I could wipe her out of this picture. Or a vacuum. A vacuum would be better, just suck her up, gone. Out of his arms. Out of my chair. For good.

“C’mon Len, let’s get out of here,” a familiar voice says. I guess Sarah still exists and she’s talking to me, so I must still exist too. I look down, see my legs, realize I’m still standing. I put one foot in front of the other and make my way to Ennui.

There is no moon, no stars, just a brightless, lightless gray bowl over our heads as we drive home.

“I’m going to challenge her for first chair,” I say.

“Finally.”

“Not because of this—”

“I know. Because you’re a racehorse, not some podunk pony.” There’s no irony in her voice.

I roll down the window and let the cold air slap me silly.

SARAH AND I are hanging half in, half out my bedroom window, passing the bottle of vodka back and forth.

“We could offher?” Sarah suggests, all her words slurring into one.

“How would we do it?” I ask, swigging a huge gulp of vodka.

“Poison. It’s always the best choice, hard to trace.”

“Let’s poison him too, and all his stupid gorgeous brothers.” I can feel the words sticking to the insides of my mouth. “He didn’t even wait a week, Sarah.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. He’s hurt.”

“God, how can he like her?”

Sarah shakes her head. “I saw the way he looked at you in the street, like a crazy person, really out there, more demented than demented, holy Toledo tigers bonkers. You know what I think? I think he put his arm around her for your benefit.”

“What if he has sex with her for my benefit?” Jealousy mad-dogs through me. Yet, that’s not the worst part, neither is the remorse; the worst part is I keep thinking of the afternoon on the forest bed, how vulnerable I’d felt, how much I’d liked it, being that open, that
me,
with him. Had I ever felt so close to anyone?

“Can I have a cigarette?” I ask, taking one before she answers.

She cups a hand around the end of her smoke, lights it with the other, then hands it to me, takes mine, then lights it for herself. I drag on it, cough, don’t care, take another and manage not to choke, blowing a gray trail of smoke into the night air.

“Bails would know what to do,” I say.

“She would,” Sarah agrees.

We smoke together quietly in the moonlight and I realize something I can never say to Sarah. There might’ve been another reason, a deeper one, why I didn’t want to be around her. It’s that she’s not Bailey, and that’s a bit unbearable for me—but I need to bear it. I concentrate on the music of the river, let myself drift along with it as it rushes steadily away.

After a few moments, I say, “You can revoke my free pass.” She tilts her head, smiles at me in a way that floods me with warmth. “Done deal.”

She puts out her cigarette on the windowsill and slips back onto the bed. I put mine out too, but stay outside looking over Gram’s lustrous garden, breathing it in and practically swooning from the bouquet that wafts up to me on the cool breeze.

And that’s when I get the idea. The
brilliant
idea. I have to talk to Joe. I have to at least try to make him understand. But

I could use a little help.

“Sarah,” I say when I flop back onto the bed. “The roses, they’re aphrodisiacal, remember?”

She gets it immediately. “Yes, Lennie! It’s the last-resort miracle! Flying figs, yes!”

“Figs?”

“I couldn’t think of an animal, I’m too wasted.”

I’M ON A mission. I’ve left Sarah sound asleep in Bailey’s bed and I’m tiptoeing my thumping vodka head down the steps and out into the creeping morning light. The fog is thick and sad, the whole world an X-ray of itself. I have my weapon in hand and am about to begin my task. Gram is going to kill me, but this is the price I must pay.

I start at my favorite bush of all, the Magic Lanterns, roses with a symphony of color jammed into each petal. I snip the heads off the most extraordinary ones I can find. Then go to the Opening Nights and snip, snip, snip, merrily along to the Perfect Moments, the Sweet Surrenders, the Black Magics. My heart kicks around in my chest from both fear and excitement. I go from prize bush to bush, from the red velvet Lasting Loves to the pink Fragrant Clouds to the apricot Marilyn Monroes and end at the most beautiful orange-red rose on the planet, appropriately named: the Trumpeter. There I go for broke until I have at my feet a bundle of roses so ravishing that if God got married, there would be no other possible choice for the bouquet. I’ve cut so many I can’t even fit the stems in one hand but have to carry them in both as I head down the road to find a place to stash them until later. I put them beside one of my favorite oaks, totally hidden from the house. Then I worry they’ll wilt, so I run back to the house and prepare a basket with wet towels at the bottom and go back to the side of the road and wrap all the stems.

Later that morning, after Sarah leaves, Big goes off to the trees, and Gram retreats into the art room with her green women, I tiptoe out the door. I’ve convinced myself, despite all reason perhaps, that this is going to work. I keep thinking that Bails would be proud of this harebrained plan.
Extraordinary,
she’d say. In fact, maybe Bails would like that I fell in love with Joe so soon after she died. Maybe it’s just the exact inappropriate way my sister would want to be mourned by me.

The flowers are still behind the oak where I left them. When I see them I am struck again by their extraordinary beauty. I’ve never seen a bouquet of them like this, never seen the explosive color of one bloom right beside another.

I walk up the hill to the Fontaines’ in a cloud of exquisite fragrance. Who knows if it’s the power of suggestion, or if the roses are truly charmed, but by the time I get to the house, I’m so in love with Joe, I can barely ring the bell. I have serious doubts if I’ll be able to form a coherent sentence. If he answers I might just tackle him to the ground till he gives and be done with it.

But no such luck.

The same stylish woman who was in the yard squabbling the other day opens the door. “Don’t tell me, you must be Lennie.” It’s immediately apparent that Fontaine spawn can’t come close in the smile department to Mother Fontaine. I should tell Big—her smile has a better shot at reviving bugs than his pyramids.

“I am,” I say. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Fontaine.” She’s being so friendly that I can’t imagine she knows what’s happened between her son and me. He probably talks to her about as much as I talk to Gram.

“And will you just look at those roses! I’ve never seen anything like them in my life. Where’d you pick them? The Garden of Eden?” Like mother, like son. I remember Joe said the same that first day.

“Something like that,” I say. “My grandmother has a way with flowers. They’re for Joe. Is he home?” All of a sudden, I’m nervous. Really nervous. My stomach seems to be hosting a symposium of bees.

“And the aroma! My God, what an aroma!” she cries. I think the flowers have hypnotized her. Wow. Maybe they do work. “Lucky Joe, what a gift, but I’m sorry dear, he’s not home. He said he’d be back soon though. I can put them in water and leave them for him in his room if you like.”

I’m too disappointed to answer. I just nod and hand them over to her. I bet he’s at Rachel’s feeding her family chocolate croissants. I have a dreadful thought—what if the roses actually are love-inducing and Joe comes back here with Rachel and both of them fall under their spell? This was another disastrous idea, but I can’t take the roses back now. Actually, I think it would take an automatic weapon to get them back from Mrs. Fontaine, who is leaning farther into the bouquet with each passing second.

“Thank you,” I say. “For giving them to him.” Will she be able to separate herself from these flowers?

“It was very nice to meet you, Lennie. I’d been looking forward to it. I’m sure Joe will
really
appreciate these.”

“Lennie,” an exasperated voice says from behind me. That symposium in my belly just opened its doors to wasps and hornets too. This is it. I turn around and see Joe making his way up the path. There is no bounce in his walk. It’s as if gravity has a hand on his shoulder that it never did before.

“Oh, honey!” Mrs. Fontaine exclaims. “Look what Lennie brought you. Have you ever seen such roses. I sure haven’t. My word.” Mrs. Fontaine is speaking directly to the roses now, taking in deep aromatic breaths. “Well, I’ll just bring these in, find a nice place for them. You kids have fun . . .”

I watch her head disappear completely in the bouquet as the door closes behind her. I want to lunge at her, grab the flowers, shriek,
I need those roses more than you do, lady,
but I have a more pressing concern: Joe’s silent fuming beside me.

As soon as the door clicks closed, he says, “You still don’t get it, do you?” His voice is full of menace, not quite if a shark could talk, but close. He points at the door behind which dozens of aphrodisiacal roses are filling the air with promise. “You’ve got to be kidding. You think it’s that easy?” His face is getting flushed, his eyes bulgy and wild. “I don’t want tiny dresses or stupid fucking magic flowers!” He flails in place like a marionette. “I’m
already
in love with you, Lennie, don’t you get it? But I can’t be with you. Every time I close my eyes I see you with
him.
”