The Sky Is Everywhere (27 page)

As soon as there’s enough light, I throw a sweatshirt over my pajamas, put on some sneakers, and run through the dawn to the forest bedroom to retrieve the note, but when I get there, it’s gone. I tell myself that the wind blew it away like all the other poems. I mean, how likely is it that Joe showed up yesterday afternoon after I left? Not likely at all.

 

SARAH IS KEEPING me company, providing humiliation support while I make lasagnas.

She can’t stop squealing. “You’re going to be first clarinet, Lennie. For sure.”

“We’ll see.”

“It’ll really help you get into a conservatory. Juilliard even.”

I take a deep breath. How like an imposter I’d felt every time Marguerite mentioned it, how like a traitor, conspiring to steal my sister’s dream, just as it got swiped from her. Why didn’t it occur to me then I could dream alongside her? Why wasn’t I brave enough to have a dream at all?

“I’d love to go to Juilliard,” I tell Sarah. There. Finally. “But any good conservatory would be okay.” I just want to study music: what life, what living itself sounds like.

“We could go together,” Sarah’s saying, while shoveling into her mouth each slice of mozzarella as I cut it. I slap her hand. She continues, “Get an apartment together in New York City.” I think Sarah might rocket into outer space at the idea—me too, though, I, pathetically, keep thinking: What about Joe?

“Or Berklee in Boston,” she says, her big blue eyes boinging out of her head. “Don’t forget Berklee. Either way, we could drive there in Ennui, zigzag our way across. Hang out at the Grand Canyon, go to New Orleans, maybe—”

“Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I groan.

“Not the poem again. What could be a better distraction than the divine goddesses Juilliard and Berklee. Sheesh. Unfreakingbelievable ...”

“You have no idea how dildonic it was.”

“Nice
word, Len.” She’s flipping through a magazine someone left on the counter.

“
Lame
isn’t lame enough of a word for this poem,” I mutter. “Sarah, I told a guy that
I belong to him.”

“That’s what happens when you read
Wuthering Heights
eighteen times.”

“Twenty-three.”

I’m layering away: sauce, noodles,
I
belong to
you,
cheese, sauce,
my heart is yours,
noodles, cheese,
I hear your soul in your music,
cheese, cheese, CHEESE . . .

She’s smiling at me. “You know, it might be okay, he seems kind of the same way.”

“What way?”

“You know, like you.”

I TELL MYSELF it’s ridiculous to go all the way back to the forest bedroom, that there’s no way in the world he’s going to be there, that no New Age meets Victorian Age poem is going to make him trust me, that I’m sure he still hates me, and now thinks I’m dildonic on top of it.

But here I am, and of course, here he’s not. I flop onto my back on the bed. I look up at the patches of blue sky through the trees, and adhering to the regularly scheduled programming, I think some more about Joe. There’s so much I don’t know about him. I don’t know if he believes in God, or likes macaroni and cheese, or what sign he is, or if he dreams in English or French, or what it would feel like—uh-oh. I’m headed from G to XXX because, oh God, I really wish Joe didn’t hate me so much, because I want to do
everything
with him. I’m so fed up with my virginity. It’s like the whole world is in on this ecstatic secret but me—

I hear something then: a strange, mournful, decidedly unforest-like sound. I pick my head up and rest on my elbows so I can listen harder and try to isolate the sound from the rustling leaves and the distant river roar and the birds chattering all around me. The sound trickles through the trees, getting louder by the minute, closer. I keep listening, and then I recognize what it is, the notes, clear and perfect now, winding and wending their way to me—the melody from Joe’s duet. I close my eyes and hope I’m really hearing a clarinet and it’s not just some auditory hallucination inside my lovesick head. It’s not, because now I hear steps shuffling through the brush and within a couple minutes the music stops and then the steps.

I’m afraid to open my eyes, but I do, and he’s standing at the edge of the bed looking down at me—an army of ninja-cupids who must have all been hiding out in the canopy draw their bows and release—arrows fly at me from every which way.

“I thought you might be here.” I can’t read his expression. Nervous? Angry? His face seems restless like it doesn’t know what to emote. “I got your poem . . .”

I can hear the blood rumbling through my body, drumming in my ears. What’s he going to say? I got your poem and I’m sorry, I just can’t ever forgive you. I got your poem and I feel the same way—
my heart is yours, John Lennon.
I got your poem and I’ve already called the psych ward—I have a straitjacket in this backpack. Strange. I’ve never seen Joe wear a backpack.

He’s biting his lip, tapping his clarinet on his leg. Definitely nervous. This can’t be good.

“Lennie, I got
all
your poems.” What’s he talking about? What does he mean
all
my poems? He slides the clarinet between his thighs to hold it and takes off his backpack, unzips it. Then he takes a deep breath, pulls out a box, hands it to me. “Well, probably not all of them, but these.”

I open the lid. Inside are scraps of paper, napkins, to-go cups, all with my words on them. The bits and pieces of Bailey and me that I scattered and buried and hid. This is not possible.

“How?” I ask, bewildered, and starting to get uneasy thinking about Joe reading everything in this box. All these private desperate moments. This is worse than having someone read your journal. This is like having someone read the journal that you thought you’d burned. And how did he get them all? Has he been following me around? That would be perfect. I finally fall in love with someone and he’s a total freaking maniac.

I look at him. He’s smirking a little and I see the faintest: bat. bat. bat. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “That I’m the creepy stalker dude.”

Bingo.

He’s amused. “I’m not, Len. It just kept happening. At first I kept finding them, and then, well, I started looking. I just couldn’t help it. It became like this weird-ass treasure hunt. Remember that first day in the tree?”

I nod. But something even more amazing than Joe being a crazy stalker and finding my poems has just occurred to me—he’s not angry anymore. Was it the dildonic poem? Whatever it was I’m caught in such a ferocious uprising of joy I’m not even listening to him as he tries to explain how in the world these poems ended up in this shoebox and not in some trash heap or blowing through Death Valley on a gust of wind.

I try to tune in to what he’s saying. “Remember in the tree I told you that I’d seen you up at The Great Meadow? I told you that I’d watched you writing a note, watched you drop it as you walked away. But I didn’t tell you that after you left, I went over and found the piece of paper caught in the fence. It was a poem about Bailey. I guess I shouldn’t have kept it. I was going to give it back to you that day in the tree, I had it in my pocket, but then I thought you’d think it was strange that I took it in the first place, so I just kept it.” He’s biting his lip. I remember him telling me that day he saw me drop something I’d written, but it never occurred to me he would go
find
it and
read
it. He continues, “And then, while we were in the tree, I saw words scrawled on the branches, thought maybe you’d written something else, but I felt weird asking, so I went back another time and wrote it down in a notebook.”

I can’t believe this. I sit up, fish through the box, looking more closely this time. There are some scraps in his weirdo Unabomber handwriting—probably transcribed from walls or sides of barns or some of the other practical writing surfaces that I found. I’m not sure how to feel. He knows everything—I’m inside out.

His face is caught between worry and excitement, but excitement seems to be winning out. He’s pretty much bursting to go on. “That first time I was at your house, I saw one sticking out from under a stone in Gram’s garden, and then another one on the sole of your shoe, and then that day when we moved all the stuff, man ... it’s like your words were everywhere I looked. I went a little crazy, found myself looking for them all the time ...” He shakes his head. “Even kept it up when I was so pissed at you. But the strangest part is that I’d found a couple before I’d even met you, the first was just a few words on the back of a candy wrapper, found it on the trail to the river, had no idea who wrote it, well, until later ...”

He’s staring at me, tapping the clarinet on his leg. He looks nervous again. “Okay, say something. Don’t feel weird. They just made me fall more in love with you.” And then he smiles, and in all the places around the globe where it’s night, day breaks. “Aren’t you at least going to say
quel dork?”

I would say a lot of things right now if I could get any words past the smile that has taken over my face. There it is again, his
I’m in love with you
obliterating all else that comes out of his mouth with it.

He points to the box. “They helped me. I’m kind of an unforgiving doltwad, if you haven’t noticed. I’d read them—read them over and over after you came that day with the roses—trying to understand what happened, why you were with him, and I think maybe I do now. I don’t know, reading all the poems together, I started to
really
imagine what you’ve been going through, how horrible it must be . . .” He swallows, looks down, shuffles his foot in the pine needles. “For him too. I guess I can see how it happened.”

How can it be I was writing to Joe all these months without knowing it? When he looks up, he’s smiling. “And then yesterday . . .” He tosses the clarinet onto the bed. “Found out you belong to me.” He points at me. “I own your ass.”

I smile. “Making fun of me?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t matter because you own my ass too.” He shakes his head and his hair flops into his eyes so that I might die. “Totally”

A flock of hysterically happy birds busts out of my chest and into the world. I’m glad he read the poems. I want him to know all the inside things about me. I want him to know my sister, and now, in some way, he does. Now he knows before as well as after.

He sits down on the edge of the bed, picks up a stick and draws on the ground with it, then tosses it, looks off into the trees. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Don’t be. I’m glad—”

He turns around to face me. “No, not about the poems. I’m sorry, what I said that day, about Bailey. From reading all these, I knew how much it would hurt you—”

I put my finger over his lips. “It’s okay”

He takes my hand, holds it to his mouth, kisses it. I close my eyes, feel shivers run through me—it’s been so long since we’ve touched. He rests my hand back down. I open my eyes. His are on me, questioning. He smiles, but the vulnerability and hurt still in his face tears into me. “You’re not going to do it to me again, are you?” he asks.

“Never,” I blurt out. “I want to be with you forever!” Okay, lesson learned twice in as many days: You can chop the Victorian novel to shreds with garden shears but you can’t take it out of the girl.

He beams at me. “You’re crazier than me.”

We stare at each other for a long moment and inside that moment I feel like we are kissing more passionately than we ever have even though we aren’t touching.

I reach out and brush my fingers across his arm. “Can’t help it. I’m in love.”

“First time,” he says. “For me.”

“I thought in France—”

He shakes his head. “No way, nothing like this.” He touches my cheek in that tender way that he does that makes me believe in God and Buddha and Mohammed and Ganesh and Mary, et al. “No one’s like you, for me,” he whispers.

“Same,” I say, right as our lips meet. He lowers me back onto the bed, aligns himself on top of me so we are legs to legs, hips to hips, stomach to stomach. I can feel the weight of him pressing into every inch of me. I rake my fingers through his dark silky curls.

“I missed you,” he murmurs into my ears, my neck and hair, and each time he does I say, “Me too,” and then we are kissing again and I can’t believe there is anything in this uncertain world that can feel this right and real and true.

Later, after we’ve come up for oxygen, I reach for the box, and start flipping through the scraps. There are a lot of them, but not near as many as I wrote. I’m glad there are some still out there, tucked away between rocks, in trash bins, on walls, in the margins of books, some washed away by rain, erased by the sun, transported by the wind, some never to be found, some to be found in years to come.

“Hey, where’s the one from yesterday?” I ask, letting my residual embarrassment get the better of me, thinking I might still be able to accidentally rip it up, now that it’s done its job.