The Moment Before

by Suzy Vitello

  “Cavorting. Listen to you,” Connor says, then gestures at my stairway to nowhere. “Seriously, Brady, you should go back. You’re wicked smart, talented.”

  “And I just made headlines, pointing my finger of blame at the school, at Nick—who, by the way, could run for President and win. I go back, I’ll be tarred and feathered.”

  Connor peels a couple blossoms off of me. “Tarred and flowered, you mean.”

  The sun is out to stay this afternoon, and in its warm glow I move in close to this boy that everyone thinks killed my sister. Some of my hail-blasted petals migrate to Connor as we hug. He feels solid and perfect against me, and I wonder why Sabine resisted him—this boy who held her in place while she cheered. Why would she instead choose the lanky body of Nick, all angles and bones?

  Our lips connect again, the fullness of them together. Like a spring worm, too big for a robin’s beak. And then, we pull apart. He and I, facing each other and just standing still. I see us on canvas, surrounded by a frame. It’s the only way I know to make time stop. Make art out of it. Forever and ever, Amen.

  And then, it’s done. Just as quick as he arrived, Connor heads down the trail with his doughnut box, leaving me to contemplate the form of a stairway that stops before it reaches its right place.

  eighteen

  There is a car I don’t recognize in Nona’s driveway when I get back to North Portland. A bronze Toyota with a “Keep Portland Weird” bumpersticker. My grandparents are unaccustomed to visitors, and I get the feeling that that car has something to do with moi.

  “Brady, your teacher is here. Mrs. McCornell, from your English class.”

  “Please, call me Beverly,” says Mrs. McConnell, standing up and giving me the onceover as I walk into the living room. The smell of Italian cooking is thick. Sabine’s prayer candle is plugged into the wall, her hair glows white from the little table behind the assembled Inquistion.

  “Hi?” I say, biting my tongue so I won’t ask why the hell she’s here.

  “I tracked you down, Brady,” says my Classics teacher, proud of herself and obviously relieved I’m not dead or dismembered.

  “Your teacher was surprised you’re not in school today, Nipote. I’m surprised, too.”

  Nona has that I’m-going-to-take-a-wooden-spoon-to-your-behind look in her eye.

  “It’s the article,” Mrs. McConnell says to Nona, whose eyebrows are all wrinkled together in confusion.

  “Papi, come out, we have company,” Nona hollers behind her at the hallway.

  There’s a noise from the bedroom. Some shuffling, and Nona excuses herself to go back to help my grandfather amble out. I talk fast. “They don’t know anything about it, Mrs. McConnell, and I think we should keep it that way. They’re old, you know? It’ll upset them.”

  Mrs. McConnell sighs. “I hate to think that you’re eliminating your support system, Brady. You took a risk, and I know that you’ll have consequences. From your peers, at any rate. I just worry that you’re cutting yourself off from those who care about you.”

  It makes sense, but I’m still not sure what’s going on. “Is that why you’re here?”

  “I know it seems odd, that a teacher would follow up like this, instead of a counselor, but, you know, everyone has their hands full. It’s a crazy time of year, and with the budget vote next week, so much is in the air.”

  I touch the lightened bruise under my eye; it’s still a bit tender. “It is a crazy time. That’s true.”

  “Brady,” she says in a half-whisper, nervously tucking her gray bob behind her ears, “You’re a bright girl. Your family has just had a devastating tragedy. One, I can relate to. I lost my brother when I was your age, and I made lots and lots of mistakes in the wake of that.”

  She looks fragile, my teacher, like, if given the choice, she would disappear into her sweater. This is not the Fucknarian scholar with the booming voice I know from class. I feel like hugging her, or at least patting her hand, but that would be insane.

  “I was in the park,” I say happily, hoping that I can somehow translate the positive aspect of that. “With a sketch pad and pencils. I knew Greenmeadow would be awful today, so I went and did the thing that brings me, you know, peace and joy and whatnot.”

  Mrs. McConnell nods, but in a sort of robot-like way, the way adults do when they’re about to tell you you’re an idiot. “Peace and joy and whatnot? I have nothing against that. But, Brady, you’re about to flunk the semester. Don’t. It’ll just make things harder for you. Come back to school, and I’ll get the paperwork together—an IEP or something—so you can get back on track.”

  An IEP. That’s like being a SPED kid. Great. I get all the special ed attention, it’ll be the fire instead of the frying pan. I figure as long as she’s here, I might as well go ahead and ask the question I’m not sure I want to know the answer to. “Did you happen to see Martha Hornbuckle and Nick Avery today?”

  Mrs. McConnell does more bob-tucking, and then my grandparents come shuffling back into the room. “Yes,” is all she manages to say before Nono, both hands secured to his walker, greets my teacher in his charming, “Buona sera.”

  The table is set for four, I notice, after we bid Mrs. McConnell goodbye. And I know without asking that Mom will be joining us. To her credit, my English teacher kept mum about the article, but suggested that I discuss the current school environment with my grandparents. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, as a parting shot, her laser eyes into mine.

  Nono answered for me. “Oh, she’ll be there alright. Her grandma and me, we’ll drag her in by her ear.”

  Nice.

  Nona has been simmering a sauce all day, and the basil, oregano, pork and garlic aroma is something that Jesus would die for. Really. And maybe that’s why Nona’s so proud of her sauce. And why Mom never refuses it. The macaroni is draining, and Mom comes bursting in, a bottle of red wine in one hand, flowers in the other, like a date.

  “Sonia?” Nona says in a surprised voice. It’s for show, that voice. A little game the Panapentos play. It’s followed by my mother kissing the air and curtseying.

  “Hi,” I offer in a lukewarm voice. “You bring my charger?”

  “We’ll talk later,” she says.

  I shake a no into my head as Nona takes the flowers and jams them into a cut crystal vase. My grandfather returns from yet another bathroom break, the grin on his face huge when he sees Mom.

  For a few years, when Sabine and I were little, we spent most of every Sunday with them while Mom held open houses or took clients around and Dad played golf. After church, Sabine and Nono would go to the market to buy vegetables and meat after dropping Nona and me here. It was Nona who first put a brush in my hand, taught me the exotic names of oil paints like cinnabar and sanguine. Vermillion and cerulean. We’d set up little canvases, side-by-side on the back porch, and if it was cold, Nona plugged in a little space heater and we’d paint in our winter coats, the old dusters she kept for paint smocks bundled around the bulk of our outer clothes. Time would melt away while we painted bowls of pears and vases of flowers. And all too soon my grandfather and sister would return and Sabine would come galloping in, asking for hot chocolate or vanilla Coke.

  Something in the way Nono looks at Mom reminds me of those Sundays, and how we were all so familiar with one another. We had a system and roles and when we argued we all knew how far to take it. With Sabine gone, and Dad on the edge, and Mom all mysterious and weird, it’s like someone replaced the Monthly Missalettes at Holy Redeemer with the Latin version. I don’t know our new language.

  The four of us sit for supper around the kitchen table, hold hands, bow heads. Nono says, “We thank God for these gifts and for our family, Amen,” and then Nona passes the salad bowl. Always iceberg lettuce, radishes, cherry tomatoes, mixed with salt, pepper, oil, vinegar. Never has there been a bottle of dressing in this house. Or a jar of Ragu.

  The smell of Nona’s sauce mixes with th
e trace of sugar that’s still on my lips. The faint taste of Connor. Steam from the bowl of meat adds to the heat in my cheeks. I realize I’m giddy. This is what giddy feels like.

  It’s not until the meatballs and chunks of pork are nestled in the spaghetti that she brings it up, my mom. But, of course, she does bring it up. “Sounds like Mrs. Cupworth thinks quite highly of your talent, Brady.”

  “She liked that drawing of the homeless guy,” I say, hoping, against the odds, that we’ll close the subject.

  But, no, she launches right to the heart of it. “Has there been a lot of fallout for you because of what you said about Nick?”

  “Fallout?”

  “C’mon daughter. Don’t play coy here.”

  Nona says, “Sonia, what are you talking about?”

  “The piece in the paper, Ma. Didn’t you see it?”

  Nono, through sauce-covered lips, says, “Brady, what’s she talking about?”

  My grandfather is the type of guy you don’t bullshit. When he narrows his eyes, looks through you, all his I-came-to-this-country-with-nothing power behind it, you must speak the truth. No matter how hard. So I do. I fill in the blanks about the Cupworth Prize, that night at the Art Show, why Martha and not me—both versions, and then Cupworth summoning me to her mansion. Bowerman and her zeal to right the wrongs. That VP twerp, and then, I get to the Martha and Nick storyline. Which is the ultimate breach of loyalty as far as first-gen Sicilian immigrants are concerned. Even with Mom, sipping her wine and clucking her tongue—because, truly, she wants to believe her dead daughter’s boyfriend was a saint—I don’t stop until it’s all out. Well, mostly out. I leave off the Connor stuff. I leave off what I know about Sabine, and the abuse, the pregnancy. But Mom, she won’t let it go. She brings up the boyfriend trouble quote. “Why, Brady? Why would you say that?”

  And this is when I make shit up.

  “Sabine told me,” I say. “Before she died. She said that she wanted to break up with Nick. He was jealous, and insecure, and she wanted to end it.”

  Liar, says Sabine.

  “That makes no sense at all,” Mom says. “She would have said something to me.”

  Nona chimes in, “Like you always shared your secrets with me, Sonia? Ha. No, a daughter at this age, she not tell the Mama nothing.”

  I have to agree. But I keep quiet. Drink my water and bite into a meatball. And then Mom says, “Brady, a realtor from my office said she saw you today. She was meeting a client over on Pettygrove, by the grade school? She said she was pretty sure it was you, out in a hail storm getting soaked.”

  Sabine’s electric candle glows. Saint Agatha and the Virgin statues and that candle and Mom’s realtor colleague, and even the faded oil painting of JFK, they all point their accusatory fingers at me. I’m trying to gather my words. Why don’t I have words? Sabine? Help? All the way home from the park today I rehearsed a speech about school and art and why I should simply bail and get my GED and none of it makes sense, suddenly. I shift my gaze from Mom to Nona and Nono, hoping that inspiration will come, and Nono says, in a calm, scary voice, “She skipped school today. And I don’t blame her. Look at her face. Look what your husband did.”

  “It true Sonia. Papi and I are very concerned,” Nona says, crossing herself.

  “Dad, you should talk. You and your belt, eh? How many times did you whip me for this and that growing up?” Mom stands up and machine guns her hand around the room, pointing to relics and photographs and various religious icons. “You hide behind all of this pious crap. So righteous. So holy. Not that it’s any of your business, but John and I are working things out with a mental health specialist. John is mortified that he struck his daughter. Mortified. He’s staying with a friend for now, but it’s just temporary.”

  My heart is beating a mile a minute. A drum and bugle corps in my chest. We are having a full-fledged Panapento scene, the likes of which I haven’t witnessed since the summer of Johnsaffair. Mom turns to me. “Brady, you’re coming home tonight. You’re going back to school tomorrow, and then we’re going to counseling. Your dad has some very important things he needs to say to you.”

  I close my eyes and nod my head, and all I can do to quiet the craziness around me is sink into the memory of the afternoon. Connor and his lips. The way his arms felt around me. His dimple, his eyes, and my sketch of the stairway, and the sugary doughnut taste. The happiest I’ve been in months. Maybe this is how Saint Agatha got through her ordeal of getting beaten, having her breasts chopped off. Maybe Jesus was her Connor—her art. Some place she could go inside her head and heart that would deliver her from the present very shitty moment. Shackle me, drag me away, but you can’t have my spirit, I think. For this horrible reality is only temporary.

  And then, in the clock-ticking silence that follows, it’s Sabine, finally.

  That’s exactly how I felt up there, cheering. Just before I misjudged my landing.

  The next morning, Mom drives me to school. First stop at Greenmeadow is Call-me-Leonard’s office, where his pretty young wife and his little boys in their holiday sweaters smile at us from his desk. Mom, as usual, looks fiery and gorgeous in her CAbi separates. Her eyebrows tweezed just so. And “Leonard” is openly flirting with her, his grin extra broad, and his occasional chuckle just this side of inappropriate. But Mom is most definitely not flirting back. “I want some assurances, Leonard,” she says. “I will not drop my daughter into a snake pit.”

  “Oh, you know how teenagers are,” he says, waving his hand dismissively. “This’ll blow over in no time. Prom’s this weekend. The kids have bigger things on their minds than the little piece in the paper.”

  Prom. I’d forgotten all about it. Not that anyone would have asked me. Typically, Bowerman’s art class paints a mural for Prom, and this year’s theme—Greenmeadow is 50—was no exception. It was supposed to be this retro Mad Men sort of mural. 60s prom gowns, The Beatles, maybe, playing in the background. But in light of the arts funding issues, Ms. Bowerman put her Birkenstock down. This is one of the many things you can’t have without an art program at the school. We were boycotting Prom this year, she let it be known. And secretly, I was disappointed. I’d looked forward to sketching girls in chiffon and satin gowns. I wanted at those strands of pearls and elaborate hairdos.

  “Never-the-less,” says Mom. “Beverly McConnell and I have discussed an IEP. We think that, under the circumstances, allowances for Brady’s recent slew of absences need to be made.”

  Beverly McConnell?

  Mr. Field shuffles some papers. On his desk there is a bulging file with the word Wilson block-lettered on the tab. The flirting tone in Leonard’s voice is magically gone. “Looks like your daughter has missed several exams. Assignments. The district has a policy on that.”

  “What was the name of that reporter, Brady?” Mom coyly asks.

  Leonard’s wife looks dreamily outward, and now her tanned photo-shopped face contrasts that of her husband in real life in his leather office chair. He’s whiter than the papers in my file.

  In the end, we get our IEP. I will be graded on stuff I turned in. The four weeks of missed this’s and that’s will be erased. It’s like confession. The way Nona explains it, you go into the booth with your soul all full of black spots, spill your sins, then the priest absolves you and gives you an assignment. A bunch of prayers you have to say before you leave church. My penance is that I have to agree not to miss any more days. “From this point forward, understand?”

  We are dismissed and the booth clicks shut, leaving Leonard Field to pop a couple of Excedrins.

  We’re in the main spine of the “E” and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what just happened, this negotiation and all of this information, and what’s next. As if in answer to that, Mom offers, “I will see you at 3:30 sharp. Dr. Stern’s office.”

  I nod. Promise to show up, and watch my mother stride for the door, her stylish Coach handbag looped on her shoulder. And t
hen, I promptly head off to girl’s bathroom, where I’ll stay until lunch.

  nineteen

  Somehow I make it through the school day without running into Martha. A small miracle. Mrs. McConnell is particularly animated in Classics. We’re done with As I Lay Dying, and this month, we’re delving into Flannery O’Connor. Cathi Serge’s hand gets a terrific workout. She doesn’t get the symbolism in Revelation. She wonders why there’s so much violence in A Good Man is Hard to Find. But Beverly, Mom’s apparent BFF, is undaunted. She offers quick answers to Cathi’s questions, the type of answers that invite a student to read other great works for a deeper understanding. Plus, I am not kept after class; in fact Mrs. McConnell does not acknowledge me in any way.

  Then, as soon as the dismissal bell rings and I head out the main door for my after-school therapy session, out of nowhere, there’s Nick in my face. “We need to have a chat,” he says, gesturing to my sister’s car, which sparkles in the afternoon sunlight in its space in the student lot.

  “I have somewhere I need to be,” I tell him.

  “Won’t take long, Brady.”

  With a weird flip-flop in my belly, I follow Nick down the short, grassy slope to the car. He’s got his lacrosse uniform on, so I know he has somewhere else to be, too. I cringe as I squeak open the heavy Volvo passenger door. This car, as far as I’m concerned, will always be Sabine’s.

  “Just what’s your fucking beef with me?” Nick says the second we’re both inside.

  He’s tall, but skinny. So skinny. Ichabod Crane skinny. I see his Adam’s apple going up and down like a tumor in his throat. His ever-present sunglasses are plastered over his eyes, but I can still make out a twitch.

  I say, “I know more than you think I do.”