The Sky Is Everywhere (24 page)

I stand there dumbstruck—sure, there were some discouraging things just said, but all of them seem to have fallen away. I’m left with six wonderful words:
I’m already in love with you.
Present tense, not past. Rachel Brazile be damned. A skyful of hope knocks into me.

“Let me explain,” I say, intent on remembering my lines this time, intent on getting him to understand.

He makes a noise that’s part groan, part roar, like
ahhharrrrgh,
then says, “Nothing to explain. I
saw
you two. You lied to me over and over again.”

“Toby and I were—”

He interrupts. “No way, I don’t want to hear it. I told you what happened to me in France and you did this anyway. I can’t forgive you. It’s just the way I am. You have to leave me alone. I’m sorry.”

My legs go weak as it sinks in that his hurt and anger, the sickness of having been deceived and betrayed, has already trumped his love.

He motions down the hill to where Toby and I were that night, and says, “What. Did. You. Expect?” What
did
I expect? One minute he’s trying to tell me he loves me and the next he’s watching me kiss another guy. Of course he feels this way.

I have to say something, so I say the only thing that makes sense in my mixed-up heart. “I’m so in love with you.”

My words knock the wind out of him.

It’s as if everything around us stops to see what’s going to happen next—the trees lean in, birds hover, flowers hold their petals still. How could he not surrender to this crazy big love we both feel? He couldn’t not, right?

I reach my hand out to touch him, but he moves his arm out of my reach.

He shakes his head, looks at the ground. “I can’t be with someone who could do that to me.” Then he looks right in my eyes, and says, “I can’t be with someone who could do that to her
sister.”

The words have guillotine force. I stagger backward, splintering into pieces. His hand flies to his mouth. Maybe he’s wishing his words back inside. Maybe he even thinks he went too far, but it doesn’t matter. He wanted me to get it and I do.

I do the only thing I can. I turn around and run from him, hoping my trembling legs will keep me up until I can get away. Like Heathcliff and Cathy, I had the Big Bang, once-in-a-lifetime kind of love, and I destroyed it all.

 

ALL I WANT is to get up to The Sanctum so I can throw the covers over my head and disappear for several hundred years. Out of breath from racing down the hill, I push through the front door of the house. I blow past the kitchen, but backtrack when I glimpse Gram. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, her arms folded in front of her chest, her face hard and stern. In front of her on the table are her garden shears and my copy of
Wuthering Heights.

Uh-oh.

She jumps right in. “You have no idea how close I came to chopping your precious book to bits, but I have some self-control and respect for other people’s things.” She stands up. When Gram’s mad, she practically doubles in size and all twelve feet of her is bulldozing across the kitchen right at me.

“What were you thinking, Lennie? You come like the Grim Reaper and decimate my garden, my
roses.
How could you? You know how I feel about anyone but me touching my flowers. It’s the one and only thing I ask. The one and only thing.”

She’s looming over me. “Well?”

“They’ll grow back.” I know this is the wrong thing to say, but holler-at-Lennie-day is taking its toll.

She throws her arms up, completely exasperated with me, and it strikes me how closely her expression and arm flailing resemble Joe’s. “That is not the point and you know it.” She points at me. “You’ve become very selfish, Lennie Walker.”

This I was not expecting. No one’s ever called me selfish in my life, least of all Gram—the never-ending fountain of praise and coddling. Are she and Joe testifying at the same trial?

Could this day get any worse?

Isn’t the answer to that question always yes?

Gram’s hands are on her hips now, face flushed, eyes blazing, double uh-oh—I lean back against the wall, brace myself for the impending assault. She leans in. “Yes, Lennie. You act like you’re the only one in this house who has lost somebody. She was like my daughter, do you know what that’s like? Do you? My
daughter.
No, you don’t because you haven’t once asked. Not once have you asked how I’m doing. Did it ever occur to you that
I
might need to talk?” She is yelling now. “I know you’re devastated, but Lennie, you’re not the only one.”

All the air races out of the room, and I race out with it.

I BOLT DOWN the hallway and out the door and jump all four porch steps. I want to run into the woods, veer off the path, find a spot where no one can find me, sit down under an old craggy oak and cry. I want to cry and cry and cry and cry until all the dirt in the whole forest floor has turned to mud. And this is exactly what I’m about to do except that when I hit the path, I realize I can’t. I can’t run away from Gram, especially not after everything she just said. Because I know she’s right. She and Big have been like background noise to me since Bailey died. I’ve hardly given any thought to what they’re going through. I made Toby my ally in grief, like he and I had an exclusionary right to it, an exclusionary right to Bailey herself. I think of all the times Gram hovered at the door to The Sanctum trying to get me to talk about Bailey, asking me to come down and have a cup of tea, and how I just assumed she wanted to comfort me. It never once occurred to me that she needed to talk herself, that she needed
me.

How could I have been so careless with her feelings? With Joe’s? With everyone’s?

I take a deep breath, turn around, and make my way back to the kitchen. I can’t make things right with Joe, but at least I can try to make them right with Gram. She’s in the same chair at the table. I stand across from her, rest my fingers on the table, wait for her to look up at me. Not one window is open, and the hot stuffy kitchen smells almost rotten.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Really.” She nods, looks down at her hands. It occurs to me that I’ve disappointed or hurt or betrayed everyone I love in the last couple months: Gram, Bailey, Joe, Toby, Sarah, even Big. How did I manage that? Before Bailey died, I don’t think I ever really disappointed anyone. Did Bailey just take care of everyone and everything for me? Or did no one expect anything of me before? Or did I just not do anything or want anything before, so I never had to deal with the consequences of my messed-up actions? Or have I become really selfish and self-absorbed? Or all of the above?

I look at the sickly Lennie houseplant on the counter and know that it’s not me anymore. It’s who I used to be, before, and that’s why it’s dying. That me is gone.

“I don’t know who I am,” I say, sitting down. “I can’t be who I was, not without her, and who I’m becoming is a total screw-up.

Gram doesn’t deny it. She’s still mad, not twelve feet of mad, but plenty mad.

“We could go out to lunch in the city next week, spend the whole day together,” I add, feeling puny, trying to make up for months of ignoring her with a lunch.

She nods, but that is not what’s on her mind. “Just so you know, I don’t know who I am without her either.”

“Really?”

She shakes her head. “Nope. Every day, after you and Big leave, all I do is stand in front of a blank canvas thinking how much I despise the color green, how every single shade of it disgusts me or disappoints me or breaks my heart.” Sadness fills me. I imagine all the green willowy women sliding out of their canvases and slinking their way out the front door.

“I get it,” I say quietly

Gram closes her eyes. Her hands are folded one on top of the other on the table. I reach out and put my hand over hers and she quickly sandwiches it.

“It’s horrible,” she whispers.

“It is,” I say

The early-afternoon light drains out the windows, zebra-ing the room with long dark shadows. Gram looks old and tired and it makes me feel desolate. Bailey, Uncle Big, and I have been her whole life, except for a few generations of flowers and a lot of green paintings.

“You know what else I hate?” she says. “I hate that everyone keeps telling me that I carry Bailey in my heart. I want to holler at them:
I don’t want her there.
I want her in the kitchen with Lennie and me. I want her at the river with Toby and their baby. I want her to be Juliet and Lady Macbeth, you stupid, stupid people. Bailey doesn’t want to be trapped in my heart or anyone else’s.” Gram pounds her fist on the table. I squeeze it with my hands and nod
yes,
and feel
yes,
a giant, pulsing, angry yes that passes from her to me. I look down at our hands and catch sight of
Wuthering Heights
lying there silent and helpless and ornery as ever. I think about all the wasted lives, all the wasted love crammed inside it.

“Gram, do it.”

“What? Do what?” she asks.

I pick up the book and the shears, hold them out to her. “Just do it, chop it to bits. Here.” I slip my fingers and thumb into the handle of the garden shears just like I did this morning, but this time I feel no fear, just that wild, pulsing, pissed-off yes coursing through me as I take a cut of a book that I’ve underlined and annotated, a book that is creased and soiled with years of me, years of river water, and summer sun, and sand from the beach, and sweat from my palms, a book bent to the curves of my waking and sleeping body. I take another cut, slicing through chunks of paper at a time, through all the tiny words, cutting the passionate, hopeless story to pieces, slashing their lives, their impossible love, the whole mess and tragedy of it. I’m attacking it now, enjoying the swish of the blades, the metal scrape after each delicious cut. I cut into Heathcliff, poor, heartsick, embittered Heathcliff and stupid Cathy for her bad choices and unforgivable compromises. And while I’m at it, I take a swipe at Joe’s jealousy and anger and judgment, at his
dickhead-him
inability to forgive. I hack away at his ridiculous all-or-nothing-horn-player bullshit, and then I lay into my own duplicity and deceptiveness and confusion and hurt and bad judgment and overwhelming, never-ending grief. I cut and cut and cut at everything I can think of that is keeping Joe and me from having this great big beautiful love while we can.

Gram is wide-eyed, mouth agape. But then I see a faint smile find her lips. She says, “Here, let me have a go.” She takes the shears and starts cutting, tentatively at first, but then she gets carried away just as I had, and starts hacking at handfuls and handfuls of pages until words fly all around us like confetti.

Gram’s laughing. “Well, that was unexpected.” We are both out of breath, spent, and smiling giddily

“I am related to you, aren’t I?” I say

“Oh, Lennie, I have missed you.” She pulls me into her lap like I’m five years old. I think I’m forgiven.

“Sorry I hollered, sweet pea,” she says, hugging me into her warmth.

I squeeze her back. “Should I make us some tea?” I ask.

“You better, we have lots of catching up to do. But first things first, you destroyed my whole garden, I have to know if it worked.”

I hear again:
I can’t be with someone who could do that to her sister,
and my heart squeezes so tight in my chest, I can barely breathe. “Not a chance. It’s over.”

Gram says quietly, “I saw what happened that night.” I tense up even more, slide out of her lap and go over to fill the tea kettle. I suspected Gram saw Toby and me kiss, but the reality of her witnessing it sends shame shifting around within me. I can’t look at her. “Lennie?” Her voice isn’t incriminating. I relax a little. “Listen to me.”

I turn around slowly and face her.

She waves her hand around her head like she’s shooing a fly. “I won’t say it didn’t render me speechless for a minute or two.” She smiles. “But crazy things like that happen when people are this shocked and grief-stricken. I’m surprised we’re all still standing.”

I can’t believe how readily Gram is pushing this aside, absolving me. I want to fall to her feet in gratitude. She definitely did not confer with Joe on the matter, but it makes his words sting less, and it gives me the courage to ask, “Do you think she’d ever forgive me?”

“Oh, sweet pea, trust me on this one, she already has.”

Gram wags her finger at me. “Now, Joe is another story. He’ll need some time . . .”

“Like thirty years,” I say.

“Woohoo—poor boy, that was an eyeful, Lennie Walker.” Gram looks at me mischievously. She has snapped back into her sassy self. “Yes, Len, when you and Joe Fontaine are forty-seven—” She laughs. “We’ll plan a beautiful, beautiful wedding—”

She stops mid-sentence because she must notice my face. I don’t want to kill her cheer, so I’m using every muscle in it to hide my heartbreak, but I’ve lost the battle.

“Lennie.” She comes over to me.

“He hates me,” I tell her.

“No,” she says warmly. “If ever there was a boy in love, sweet pea, it’s Joe Fontaine.”