Wider than the Sky

by Katherine Rothschild

  The next image was of two middle-aged men, framed where their arms wrapped around each other. They were looking at the camera, but somehow it felt like they were also looking at each other—like they were sharing their love for each other with the audience. I wondered who they were. The next image was of a young, handsome, shirtless, and very well-inked guy sitting in lotus. His eyes were closed, and in the backdrop was a gorgeous motorcycle. He wore a small smile, and at his throat glinted a necklace—a name? I squinted. It said: hope.

  Did Charlie expect me to connect to the people in the photographs? To want to share a house with them? And I wondered, were these the people who’d stay at number six if it became part of the Mission Project? Suddenly, I hated Charlie for making me come here, for making me see this. I pulled away from Kai and hurried the few steps toward the receptionist’s desk. With a thunk, I gave her the package. I was about to turn away when she looked up and said: “You have to sign.”

  I scribbled my name and handed her back the pen. She took the sheet and said: “Oh.” Her eyes traveled to the image closest to the desk, at the base of the right-hand-side stairway. My gaze followed hers.

  The photo was of a man beneath a willow tree, smiling as he looked up into its branches. I knew that tree. I knew that man. That was my dad. That was my dad. I turned and looked at all the other pictures. Were they all dead? They all had HIV/AIDS, but like Blythe said, people lived long lives, healthy lives, with HIV. I turned back to the photo of my dad. That’s when I saw a tiny plaque on the wall. artist: charles parker.

  The camera equipment in his car. The photos on the walls of his apartment. Charlie. Charlie was a photographer. And he’d wanted me to see this. Why? So that I would forgive him? So that I would care about him? Was he showing me that the people who would come through number six were like my dad? That I should care about them, even if I didn’t know them? I shook my head. This didn’t make me love these people like I’d loved my dad. It made me wonder if the love I’d felt for my dad was ever real.

  “I need to get out of here,” I said, and I rushed out to the street and turned toward where we’d come from, and I knew we’d be heading back to: the brick stairs of the Sixteenth Street Muni station. I didn’t even realize how fast I was going until I heard Kai call from behind me. “Sabine! Wait up!” But I couldn’t. My vision blurred as I clicked my card and pushed through the turnstile. I just needed a minute to get it together, to feel like I knew my life and I knew myself and I knew my dad. But maybe that would never happen.

  Since we’d moved, my memories of my dad had dimmed—as if they were dependent on our garden and his office and the bagel shop on the corner to exist. Those were the places where I could picture him. But now, thanks to Charlie, where I pictured him was in his other life. Maybe Charlie had thought it would help. But it didn’t help. It hurt.

  “I should recruit you.” Kai stood with his hands on his hips, breathing hard. “Played soccer before?” I looked up, and Kai’s bright blue eyes filled my vision. I breathed in as deeply as I could, but it was a jagged thing. I shook my head.

  It looked like Kai would say more, but I held up a hand. “Let’s go to the park, okay?”

  He nodded and took my hand, and he didn’t let go. Not as we ran up and over to another platform or as we boarded then held on through the roar of the tunnel. Not even when we rose into a colorful neighborhood of Victorian homes and the train came to a sudden halt.

  Kai slammed his boot on the release lever and we hopped off the train. We walked through a foggy, quiet neighborhood, turning onto Ninth Avenue. Mist hung in the air. In the distance, a modern cement building rose from redwoods into the sky.

  Golden Gate Park.

  We walked from city into park, and after a few blocks of trees, Kai ducked onto a dirt trail. He held aside a branch and gestured for me to follow. I followed him into a garden so civilized it could have been on an estate in England. Yellow-leafed plum trees and stone benches lined the grass and redwoods rose all around. In the middle of the garden was a tall brick wall etched with quotes, and in the center of the wall was a bust of Shakespeare. “The Shakespeare garden?” I asked. Kai threw a grin over his shoulder and nodded.

  He walked to the Romeo and Juliet plaque and read aloud: “‘My only love sprung from my only hate.’ I love all the fighting in this play, but I can’t get behind the dual-suicide thing. What were they thinking?”

  I shrugged. “The Heart is the Capital of the Mind.” I glanced over to find Kai’s eyes bright against the gray sky.

  He pressed his lips together and his hands deep in his pockets, as if looking for a Hacky that wasn’t there. “I looked that up the day we met. What’s so special about Dickinson?”

  I bit my lip. Did I even know? I was afraid if I opened my mouth I would poet, but I did it anyway. “It was what my dad read to us when we were little. Emily Dickinson. I kept the books, but I didn’t know how well I knew them until he died and I opened one. I didn’t read them. I already knew them. Opening that book was like finding words my dad hid inside my mind a long time ago. I let them out. And I can’t put them back in.”

  “You don’t need to,” he said, then squinted at me. “Stay still.” He held up his phone to take a picture, but I turned away. “Okay,” he said, laughing. “Both of us.” I handed him my phone, and we took a picture together—neither of us was really smiling, but our heads were together, and we looked . . . content. I felt content, to be with him.

  We left the Shakespeare garden and walked past tourists trailing cameras and children and locals trailing dogs. We wandered through the Music Concourse, then stopped for lunch at a hot dog cart across from the de Young Museum. After eating, we snuck past a guard to walk through the museum’s sculpture garden. Then as we headed back toward Ninth, we stepped off the sidewalk and followed a path that dropped down a set of wood-and-gravel stairs to a grassy dell. Below street level, the trees rose up, and birdsong replaced the buzz of traffic. My hope bird stretched its wings in answer.

  “I did a Boy Scout project here with my brothers a few years ago.” Kai jogged to a bench and pointed out an area of new planting. “Pretty nice, right?”

  “Goody Two-shoes,” I said, and poked his side.

  He pointed at me in mock surprise. “That’s what it said on the merit badge.” He gave me that lopsided smile as we walked over a crushed granite trail to a small copse of trees.

  It was like a tiny enchanted forest, complete with babbling brook and oversized boulders. It was man-made, but in the middle of the trees it felt like it had always been there. We sat down, and I pulled my legs beneath me, staring up at the dizzying height of the trees. I breathed in the woody air. There was something about the whole place, how you dropped down into a little valley, and this forest sprang up out of nowhere. The word reverence came to mind. We sat for a few moments, listening and looking.

  “That was your dad, wasn’t it? In the photograph with the tree? You look like him.” I shook my head, but I didn’t disagree. “You have his eyes.” He touched my cheek. “You have his same bones. All angly. And beautiful.”

  I tried to smile, but thinking of my dad was as painful as stitching my fingers with a sewing machine. “Thanks,” I got out, but didn’t trust myself to say more.

  “I want you to know I didn’t think about this before—I mean, I didn’t know. About your dad. About how he died. I mean . . .”

  I turned to Kai, facing him on the bench. “What are you talking about?”

  “This is the de Laveaga Dell. It’s the National AIDS Memorial Grove.” The trees suddenly looked too tall. Too branchy and scratchy. Too close. I took a deep breath and felt a little tugging in my heart.

  “It’s okay,” I said, because I wanted to be with him, and I wanted to be happy. I wanted not to care that everywhere we went reminded me of my dad. “Show me around.”

  He nodded but gave me a long look before
pulling me to my feet. I followed him to the main pathway, where the gravel was lined with stone benches bearing name plaques. Now I looked at them differently. Was each one a grave marker? I thought of my dad’s Little League trophy plaque and wished, for just a split second, that his name was in a garden, near a flowering plant, and not on a drawer. We kept walking, and the path opened into a circle. It was like a meditation labyrinth, but instead of the marks of a maze, there were names engraved in the stone. Hundreds of names. Kai started to walk across it, but I stopped him. “What is this?”

  “It’s the Circle of Friends.” He tugged my hand. “It’s okay to walk on it.” I looked at the ground. Kai tugged on my arm, but I kept staring. All these people. All these lives. There were so many names. I rubbed my thumbnail over my lower lip.

  “This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies. Light and love and girls and boys. ” The poem floated through my mind, and I imagined them, the people laughing and sighing. And then no more. “Light and love and life and curls.” I was made of words. Wordswordswords. I was still poeting, and I couldn’t stop. I felt Kai’s hands on my arms. When I met his eyes, the words dropped from my lips back into the stone. I said: “I can’t walk on them.”

  “No problem,” he said. We edged around the names until we were on the other side where a path led up and out of the garden. Then we walked and walked, through the Conservatory of Flowers and then the Rhododendron Dell, until the sun began to peek through the clouds. We were quiet, but it wasn’t a sad silence, or an awkward one. It was just quiet. As we were leaving, we slid down a cement slide behind a carousel that chimed a tinny version of “Bicycle Built for Two.” Even that reminded me of my dad—and his darn whistling.

  I tasted that particular tang of sadness—like the scent of thunder—and tried to swallow it away. But it was there, filling the air around us, so that it wasn’t companionable silence anymore. We boarded the train at Sixth Avenue and found a place to stand together, then watched in silence as the houses disappeared, and the train rumbled into a tunnel. We got out to change trains, and sat down on one of the round stone benches in the middle of the station, no longer distracted by scenery, or houses, or foggy parks.

  Kai pulled his legs up in crisscross applesauce so we faced each other. “Was it seeing your dad’s photo? Why you’re sad?” Kai’s eyes were drawn, and they’d gone darker, like the fog. “Did Charlie warn you?”

  I shook my head. “I think Charlie wanted me to connect to the Mission Project. He wants me to stop fighting them about number six.” Kai went to take my hands, but I buried them in my lap. This wasn’t how I wanted this date to go—and it really wasn’t how I wanted it to end. There was that far-off rumble of an approaching train, and we stood. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “It’s okay to be sad, Sabine,” Kai said, his hands in his pockets. “We get all this pressure to pretend we’re perfect and happy all the time. I’m sore all the time, but I have to pretend I’m happy to help my dad on weekends, and that I want to go to soccer practice every day. I hate it. It should be okay not to be okay.” He hesitated, then gave me a little smile. “At least, when you’re with me.”

  I pressed my lips together, thinking about how hard it had been to see that picture of my dad in a public place, where people walked by him every day. It was like he was plastered here, in a BART station, for everyone to see, and there was nothing left of him for me.

  “It’s like I didn’t even know him,” I said, swallowing hard. That intimacy I’d felt with the other photos—it was as if the photo of my dad had the opposite effect. It was confirmation that we had no intimacy. Kai reached out a hand, and I took it, stepping closer to him. When I looked up, his eyes turned down, his lashes long and spiked against his cheeks, and I realized he looked the way I felt—bereft. And then I started to cry right there in the middle of the stranger-filled BART station. I pinched my eyes shut and willed the tears away, but it was too late.

  Kai pulled me to him, and I held on tight. The rumble of the incoming train shook the floor, and a whoosh of air pushed through the station. Kai held me tighter. The tears came, and I burrowed into Kai’s fleece. I took a breath, listening to the rumble of the train. Beneath was Kai’s steady heartbeat. I pressed close and listened, letting the sound soothe me, letting it bring me back from where I’d gone. I took another breath and dried my cheeks. I lifted my face, grateful for his calm when I felt so crazy.

  “Thank you for . . .” Our eyes met, and I lost whatever words I had.

  “There’s not enough said about hugs, is there?” He held me tightly. Then he nudged my nose with his, and when I leaned into him, he kissed me.

  I was so aware of every place we touched—our hips and bellies. Our knees. Our toes. The shaking ground was joined by the careening screech of the train, and suddenly it wasn’t a sweet kiss like we’d shared before, but a deep and hungry kiss, fueled by adrenaline and tears and noise and vibration. And a touch of insanity. When we broke apart, I didn’t feel normal or whole. But I felt on solid ground. I took a deep breath, and I started toward the train, but Kai pulled me back.

  “Nope. That train’s going to the airport,” he said. I turned back to Kai and laughed, and it was loud enough to hold all my pain and all my joy together.

  We didn’t move more than a few inches apart all the way back to number six Magnolia. And when we got there as the sun began to set, I knew I didn’t want to say goodbye. Maybe ever. I put my hands on his shoulders and kissed his cheek, then the corner of his mouth.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I had a great time being not okay. With you.”

  “Me, too,” he said, and turned his head, and then we were really kissing, and I wondered why we’d been doing anything else all day.

  That’s when I heard a sound, a scratching, like branches in the wind. I looked up, but the trees were still. I pulled away and looked to the house.

  A light was visible on the second floor. And there was a silhouette in the window, watching us.

  21

  NOT WITH A CLUB, THE HEART IS SMASHED

  Inside, the house was still and quiet, as if all the breath had been sucked out of it. I listened for a few moments, shutting the door as quietly as I could, wishing Kai were still beside me. Who was at the window? It hadn’t been Blythe . . . I knew my sister.

  I started to call out, for Blythe, or Charlie, or anyone, but the silhouette in the window stopped me. Instead, I crept through the house, walking around the plastic and piled materials to the main staircase. There was a light on upstairs, and I heard a sudden noise, the clatter of a machine. Was that . . . a sewing machine?

  I held my breath as I continued up, listening as carefully as I could. I paused and the noise stopped. I kept going and hit a creak.

  “Bean?” Blythe’s voice slid through the thick air inside number six, and I let out a long breath. “We’re upstairs!”

  We? Was Charlie with her? I took the stairs two at a time, moving toward her voice. I knew Charlie was staying in the house this weekend with us, but did that mean he had to babysit her every minute? I turned the corner on the landing to find a little room at the front of the house all lit up.

  I caught myself on the door frame and peered in. The walls were a deep green, and I thought it might have once been a nursery. The white curtains were lacy and had the feel of whimsy even in their yellowed disrepair. The mess that was left had been cleared to one side, and now a big table occupied the space. The table was piled with fabric and a sewing machine, and at two chairs were Blythe and Emma.

  “What did . . . how are . . .” I looked from Blythe to Emma. Had one of them been at the window? “What’s going on?”

  “When you bailed on your sister,” Emma said, and pumped the foot of the sewing machine, sending a tinny snap-snap-snap sound through the echoing room, “she called me to help.”

  “I didn’t bail on her.” I looked at Blythe, whos
e eyes were on her phone. “I wrote your mash-up, Blythe. I just couldn’t rehearse because . . .” I tried to say something, but all the things I could say seemed like the wrong things.

  “Because?” Emma blinked at me in the hard glare of the overhead light. I swallowed, wanting to take a step back out of the doorway and run to my room and slam the door closed. When I stayed silent, Blythe put her phone down on the table and twisted her lips.

  “Who was that she was kissing outside, anyhow?” Blythe looked at me, not blinking. “Whoever it was, I guess they’re more important than I am.”

  “Blythe.” I stepped inside the room. “Come on. You know no one is more important than you are.”

  “And yet,” she said, and stood up. Blythe turned, and the light caught her eyes. They were bright green. “From what we just saw, it didn’t seem like your first kiss.” It wasn’t jealousy in her voice. It was something worse. Mistrust. I opened my mouth, searching for words, but I gulped air and humiliation and, worst of all, desire for Kai.

  She pushed past me out the door. “I was going to tell you about Kai!” I called after her down the hall.

  She shouted back: “Like you were going to help with the mash-up?” Our door slammed at the end of the hall.

  I shifted from foot to foot, watching as Emma focused on her sewing, turning the fabric this way and that before placing it back beneath the foot of the machine and tapping the pedal until it hummed again. When she paused, she met my eyes over her glasses. “You know he missed soccer to do . . . whatever you did today. I went to practice, but he wasn’t there. So if he doesn’t get a scholarship, I can blame that on you, too.”

  He hadn’t told me that. “What about an academic scholarship? He could—”

  “Be realistic.” She shook her head, gathering up her sewing. “I hope it’s okay if I leave this here. When I told Blythe my situation, she said that since I didn’t have a sewing room anymore, well . . . you understand.” I thought of her staying on Kai’s pull-out sofa and flushed with shame. Of course there wasn’t space for anything of hers there. I imagined her going to the impound lot and hauling this sewing machine and her fabric bags out of the van by herself. My cheeks flamed.