A Mango-Shaped Space

by Wendy Mass

  The hammering begins and the familiar mottled gray bursts of color appear about a foot away from my face. The color and shape of a hammer hitting a nail has become such a part of my existence that I barely notice it. I can see right through the color-bursts, but they still distract me from whatever I’m doing. If it was a nicer color, I might not mind as much.

  I slip into my sneakers as I approach the back kitchen door, stepping cautiously around wooden planks, hammers, nails, and one very scary-looking chain saw. As always, the smell of sawdust is in the air and on my clothes and in my throat. It is inescapable around here, and it has long since mingled with the taste of multicolored chalk dust that still haunts me from third grade.

  I go up to my room and look for Mango, whose official name is Mango the Magnificat. He usually sleeps at the foot of my bed on my old Winnie-the-Pooh baby blanket, completely covering the faded Pooh and Piglet walking into the sunset. He’s not there now, but he left behind his favorite toy — a stuffed Tweety Bird that he likes to carry around in his mouth. I call out his name and hear a faraway, orange-soda-colored meow in response. I trace the sound to Beth’s room and find the little gray-and-white traitor curled up on Beth’s pillow. I swoop him up in my arms and glance at Beth’s night table. By some huge oversight on her part, Beth left her diary right out in plain sight when she went to California. When I first noticed it, I thought maybe she wanted me to read it. Then I decided that she had probably booby-trapped it somehow and she’d know if I peeked.

  I deposit Mango on my blanket, where he belongs. I start to shut the door behind me, when Zack sticks his foot in the way.

  “Just a sec, Mia,” Zack says, pushing the door back open. “I need to do something.”

  “You need to do something in my room?” I ask, instantly suspicious. Zack has only recently gotten over his destructive phase. For years, nothing in the house was safe. He was very good at taking things apart but much less skilled at the art of putting them back together.

  “Don’t worry,” he insists. “It will only take a second.”

  “On one condition,” I say, trapping him in the doorway. “You have to tell me why it’s bad luck to walk under a ladder.”

  He rolls his eyes. “That’s easy. It’s because you’re disrupting the sacred triangle of life formed by the ladder, the ground, and the wall.”

  “Huh?” I let my guard down, and he takes this opportunity to brush past me into my room. He heads directly over to my clock collection on the far wall. I follow him and notice he’s clutching several watches in his small hands. Two belong to my father, one is my mother’s, and one is Beth’s.

  “What are you doing with all those wa —”

  “Shh,” he says, cutting me off. “I have to get this exactly right.” He stares at the faces of my clocks as if they have a message for him.

  “Get what exactly ri —”

  “Shh!” His eyes dart from the wooden cuckoo clock to the fluorescent star-shaped one, over to the big digital one, down to the clock in the shape of a train, and across to the electronic one that speaks the time out loud. I’ve collected clocks since first grade. Every Christmas, I get to pick out another one.

  “I have to set these watches exactly right,” Zack explains, busily twisting the watch dials to match the time on my synchronized clocks. “Otherwise, some of us will be living in the past and some in the future. In the very same house! Can’t have that. Very bad.”

  “What difference could a minute or two make?”

  “It has to do with folds in the space-time continuum, obviously,” he replies, as though I should clearly have known that.

  “Where did you get that from? It sounds like something from Star Trek.”

  He shakes his head adamantly. “I read it on the NASA Web site.”

  I should have known. Zack is addicted to the Internet. “You can’t believe everything you read on the comput —”

  I don’t get to finish my sentence because at that moment all the clocks strike five. The cuckoo pops out and cuckoos. Loudly. The train blows its whistle. Really loudly. All the alarms go off at the same time — buzzing and chiming and ringing and shrieking — all much louder than I’ve ever heard them. My father is still hammering. My mother honks in the driveway to let us know she is back from the airport with Beth. Beth slams the front door open and drops her suitcase on the floor. Mango runs under the bed. I put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes to stop all the colors that are bombarding me.

  It doesn’t work. My sight is filled with blurry purple triangles and waves of green and floating black dots and balls of all sizes and shades of colors, spinning, swooping, swirling in front of me and across the room and in my mind’s eye. If I had been prepared, I would have been able to anticipate the onslaught, but now it is overwhelming and I feel like I’m suffocating.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Zack shouts. I’m crouching on the floor now.

  “Why is everything so loud?” I cry above the noise.

  A second later the chimes stop. No more honking, no more doors slamming, just the usual hammering. The colors and shapes quickly fade away, and I feel like I can breathe again. I open my eyes to find Zack staring at me with a combination of concern and surprise. I stand up and quickly turn one of the clocks around. The volume was turned all the way up. The same with the others. My hand shakes slightly as I pull them all off the wall and rest them on the bed.

  “I don’t get it. I always keep the alarms turned off.”

  Zack tries to slink out of the room, but I grab his sleeve. I hold him there until he confesses.

  “Okay, I switched on the alarms and turned the volume up a little before you came home. I did it so I’d be able to hear them from my room.”

  “You could have heard them from your room if your room was in Alaska!” I push him into the hall and lock my door.

  “Hey,” he says, knocking hard. “I only did it so I wouldn’t be in your room without permission.”

  “You were in here without permission to turn the alarms on, weren’t you?”

  Silence. Then, “What’s your problem anyway?”

  Ignoring him, I switch off the alarms and hang the clocks in their rightful spots. I watch them silently ticking and blink back the stinging tears. How could Zack be so unaffected by the noise? What if I’d been out in public when something like that happened? I’d look pretty ridiculous crouching in the hallway at school.

  As I stand there feeling sorry for myself, Mango peeks out from his hiding place, looks around, then tentatively crawls out and winds himself around my legs. I pick him up and head over to the closet, where I store my art supplies. I have a painting to finish and a grandfather to visit. I always put music on when I paint, but for the first time I can remember, I’m afraid that the colors will overwhelm me. I never want to feel so out of control again.

  I try to finish the painting, but I can’t concentrate. It’s too quiet. Even the hammering has stopped. I choose a Mozart piece that Grandpa used to like, turn the volume way down, and press the Play button before I can chicken out. The colors immediately and gently flow over me, energizing me, reminding me that I can still enjoy them. The glossy red-barnlike color of the violin, the silvery-bluish white of the flute, the school-bus yellow of the French horn. All of them layering on top of one another, changing, shifting, belonging, at that minute, only to me.

  Chapter Two

  I stand back to admire my work. Against a background of blue-gray sky, my grandfather seems to gaze right at me. His round face has the look of someone waiting for something that has been a long time coming.

  But something is still missing. Staring at the painting, I finally realize what it is. I wash off my brush and prepare the gray and white paints. Brush stroke by brush stroke, Mango appears, perched on Grandpa’s right shoulder. I can only fit a kitten-size Mango in the small space. I stand back and study it, pleased with the result. After a whole year, the painting is now finished. Mango fits on Grandpa’s shoulder like the las
t piece of a puzzle. It makes perfect sense, considering where I first found Mango.

  I can hear Mango wheeze from across the room as I pack up my watercolors. He was wheezing that first day too, the little yellow-orange puffs of air wafting around him. It was the day of Grandpa’s funeral. The whole family was standing around the grave, crying and holding hands, offering Grandpa up to heaven. Living in the country, we’re used to offering small animals up to heaven, but then it’s usually only Zack who’s crying over the skunk or possum. This was totally different. The local minister — who I’d only met once before — was in the middle of his closing prayer when I glanced over and saw a tiny kitten. He was sitting about three feet away from the grave, and he had Grandpa’s eyes — round and kind and all-knowing. I loved him immediately.

  It took two weeks of relentless begging before my parents agreed to lift their “no animals in the house” rule. Everyone thinks I named him Mango because of his orange eyes, but that’s not the case. I named him Mango because the sounds of his purrs and his wheezes and his meows are all various shades of yellow-orange, like a mango in different seasons.

  We had to bring him to the vet right away because of the wheeze. Mango threw up twice during the twenty-minute ride, and my mother was not happy. The vet told us that Mango was born with a deep rip in the lining of one lung and that it couldn’t be fixed. She said that if he lived another month, his body would probably compensate for it and he’d be okay.

  That was a year ago. Mango still has the wheeze, but I still have Mango.

  I should probably go downstairs and say hello to Beth. But I really want to go up to the cemetery to give Grandpa his present before dinner. I gently lift the painting off the easel and almost drop it when my father knocks on my door. I steady the painting and unlock the door.

  “We’re going to take Beth to the drugstore,” he says, wiping his dirt-covered hands on his faded jeans. “Do you want to come?”

  “I have to clean all this up,” I tell him, gesturing over my shoulder toward the easel and paints. For some reason I don’t want to tell him that the picture is a gift for Grandpa. He hasn’t mentioned what today is, and I don’t want to remind him.

  “Can I see it?” He walks in and studies the painting intently.

  “This is really something.” He sounds genuine, but it’s hard to tell with parents. “You have a great sense of color.”

  If only he knew the half of it! “Thanks,” I reply.

  “They say the eyes are the windows to the soul, you know. I can see Grandpa in those eyes.” My father knows important things, even if he isn’t “book smart” like my mother, who was a high school science teacher until Zack was born.

  “It’s interesting how you did this,” he says, peering more closely at the painting. “You made Mango’s and Grandpa’s eyes the same shape.”

  I smile to myself, pleased that he noticed. Just then, Beth yells up from downstairs, and my father pats me on the head as if I’m a child and turns to go.

  “It’s gonna rain,” I warn him as he heads down the long hall, Mango at his heels.

  He laughs and says there isn’t a cloud in the sky. But I hear him tell Beth to take an umbrella.

  As soon as the front door slams shut, I grab the canvas, pull on my sneakers, and run out the back. Grandpa is buried in the small cemetery on the hill about a half-mile past our house, snuggled right up next to Grams, who died when I was three. They are my dad’s parents, but my mother was very close to them. Her own parents are still alive in Florida, but we don’t see them because they won’t fly. I think there’s more to the story, something to do with “marrying beneath one’s station” and the “dearth of culture in farm country,” whatever that means. Mom never talks about it.

  Jenna’s mother is buried in the same cemetery, and I intend to stop by and pay my respects. I’m halfway to the cemetery with the still partially wet portrait held carefully away from my body when I notice Mango is following me. I wait for him to catch up, but he keeps getting distracted. There are a lot of things out here to catch a cat’s attention. The fields back up to acres of overgrown land, complete with a thriving ecosystem of creepy crawling things, various small animals, and, according to tales Grandpa used to tell, the souls of the dead who once farmed this land.

  Once, Grandpa led Zack and me through the woods until we came across a huge piece of green foam that was half buried in the thick brush. Zack, who was only six at the time, announced that it was a piece of the moon that had fallen to Earth. Grandpa said surely that’s what it was, and he ripped off a chunk of it. I knew the foam was the inside of some rotting old couch cushion, but I played along. Grandpa made a little speech over that piece of cushion, holding it in front of him as if it were some priceless jewel. “As your guide on this trail,” he said, his voice deep and reverent, “it is my honor to hereby bestow upon you both a little piece of the moon.” He tore the chunk in half and handed each of us a piece about the size of an egg. It was squishy and moist, and the green color rubbed off on my fingers. I put it in a little box and hid it safely in the back of my desk drawer. I have no idea what Zack did with his.

  I know Grandpa’s soul isn’t wandering the woods like the ghosts I sometimes think I glimpse between the trees. Part of his soul is right next to me, stored safe and sound inside Mango. I knew this as soon as I saw the little kitten sitting by Grandpa’s grave that day, looking up at me with Grandpa’s eyes. I firmly believe that people’s souls can splinter off when they die. Part of Grandpa is inside of Mango, part is in heaven dancing with Grams (who was a really good dancer), and only Grandpa himself knows where the rest of him is. This is just my own personal theory.

  As we rise over the last ridge, I can see Grandpa’s grave clearly because the grass covering it is shorter than the rest. The headstones are glowing with the last of the sun, and I see a glint of something shiny resting on Grandpa’s. When I reach it, I discover it’s a bottle of my grandfather’s favorite brand of beer. Dad must have left it there along with the flowers on Grams’s headstone. I know he misses them a lot, even though he always says, “When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.” God’s will and all that. We’re not a very religious family, but where death is concerned, it pays to be open-minded. I try not to think about death too much. I’m not good with endings. They make me too sad.

  “Hi, Grandpa,” I whisper, laying the painting down on the grave. “I brought you a present.” Mango immediately walks over and sniffs the edge of the painting. Then he saunters right across it before I can grab him. Now I have to clean the paint off his paws, not to mention paint over the paw prints.

  The air is heavy around us and blackish-purple clouds roll in faster than I had expected. When I was little, I used to run out into the rain and let the water run all over me. Then one day I saw lightning split a tree nearly in half. That pretty much took the joy out of prancing around in thunderstorms. Mango’s tail is sinking low, a sure sign that the storm is almost upon us.

  I quickly fan out the flowers on Grams’s grave and tell Grandpa I miss him and that I hope he likes the painting. I’m about to kneel down to pick it up when the first drops of rain come out of nowhere and splatter right on it. Mango takes off for shelter in the trees, and I freeze while the wind whips up around me. The thunder fills the air with streaks of charcoal-black spirals, and for a split second I think they’re trying to pound me into the ground. I turn on my heel and run, leaving the painting with Grandpa.

  Wild Child is on the move.

  At the edge of the woods I call out for Mango. The woods are awfully dark now, and the rain is really coming down and it’s still thundering. What if lightning strikes a tree and it falls on him in the woods? Can he hear me calling him? I don’t know what to do. One more clap of thunder makes my mind up for me, and I start running toward home.

  When I get back to the house, three things hit me at once. I realize I’m soaked clear through to the bone and am now without both my cat and my painting. Why d
idn’t I take my own advice and bring an umbrella? I try to make it upstairs before anyone sees me, but luck is not on my side tonight.

  “What happened to you?” Beth asks as she follows Dad through the front door and folds up her umbrella. “You look terrible.”

  “Good to see you too,” I say, shivering.

  She leans in and gives me a hug. A real one, with affection and everything. She’s not wearing any makeup, and her hair is tied back in a ponytail instead of being hair-sprayed out to there. I don’t think I’ve seen her without lipstick on since she was twelve. No makeup, no hair spray, no new piercings, and on top of it a hug? It is all very mysterious and too un-Bethlike. Something’s up.

  “Want to see what I brought back from California?” she asks, heading upstairs.

  She is actually inviting me up to her room. I look at my father for some sign that he recognizes this odd behavior. He’s beaming, and I think those might be tears in his eyes. Dad has always been our more sensitive parent. He cries his way through the Olympics and Hallmark commercials. Zack takes after him. He’s the only one of us who will offer a dead beetle up to heaven. The rest of us figure bugs have got their own deal worked out.

  I follow Beth upstairs and step tentatively into her room, afraid the real Beth will show up any minute and yell at me for trespassing. She rummages through one of her suitcases, pulls out a big plastic bag, and dumps the contents on the bed.

  I move closer and my eyes widen. Multicolored candles of all sizes surround bags of tiny flowers and ground herbs, a ceramic goblet, and a tin bowl.

  “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” I ask, fingering the smooth goblet.

  “Very funny,” she says, snatching the goblet from my hand. “I simply learned to get in touch with the power of nature this summer. Zack’s going to help me move my bed around later.”

  “Move your bed? Why?”