by M. Anjelais
I went back into the house, carrying the trowel limply in one hand, and found my mother and Leigh sitting on the floor of the kitchen, with Leigh’s laptop lying on its side on the floor next to them. Leigh was crying loudly into my mother’s shoulder, like a little, angry toddler; looking at her made me feel as though I was watching something I shouldn’t, something not appropriate. Vivienne was standing awkwardly next to them. After a few moments, she leaned down and picked up the laptop, putting it right side up on the kitchen counter. I looked at the screen and saw the clip of Cadence playing the piano paused, frozen in its little gray window. And behind it, an Internet window. Vivienne clicked on the Internet window to bring it to the front, so that she could exit it, and in the brief second that it was up and readable, I saw that it was an email: the art gallery director’s reply.
My mother and Leigh separated; Leigh remained hunched on the floor as my mother pulled me into a tight hug.
“Dad’s coming,” she said. “He couldn’t leave with me because of work. He’ll be here tomorrow.”
“Great,” I said, feeling so, so strange. My mother was talking to me so casually. In her mind, she was greeting me at the end of a short time apart. She didn’t know what she’d almost lost. I buried my face in her neck.
“I’ve really been missing you,” she said into the top of my head.
“Yeah, I’ve missed you too,” I whispered. My mother’s clothes smelled like my bedroom at home, like her lavender bodywash. Someday, I would tell her everything. I would tell her what had almost happened. Someday, I would explain to her exactly why I had held her so hard, exactly why I would live from this point onward with my head held higher and my voice louder. I dug my fingernails into the back of her shirt and clung to her.
Then I looked up over her shoulder and saw Leigh, still down on the floor, with Vivienne kneeling in front of her, saying something I couldn’t hear, her lips moving slowly. Reluctantly, I let go of my mother and left her to help Leigh, to talk about adult things and try not to cry, and I went upstairs to clean up the bedroom I had been staying in. The stairs felt hollow under my feet as I climbed them, like a ghost of something solid. The fact that Cadence was gone, the fact that I was not — none of it had quite sunk in yet.
In a fog, I cleaned all my makeup out of the guest bathroom, scrubbed the sink, shook out the towels and hung them up, wiped out the shower. When I left the bathroom with all my stuff bundled in my arms, there was no trace of my having been there. I had erased my presence, like a good houseguest. I dumped all my makeup on the bed and dragged my suitcase out from the closet, laid it out open next to the makeup, and went to work. Folding my shirts, my pants, deciding which shoes to wear and which to pack in the bottom of the suitcase. I filled and zipped up all the little compartments, and then went into the closet and made sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I hadn’t, I was packed. I put the full suitcase back down on the floor, leaning against the wall, and made up the bed. I didn’t have anything to wear to a funeral, I realized.
The digital camera was the only thing in the room that hadn’t been there before I came, and that wasn’t mine. I picked it up and sat gingerly on the edge of the newly made bed, turning it over and over in my hands. Slowly, I opened the case and took out the camera, my fingers hovering over the button to turn it on. Did I want to watch the clips, or was it too soon? Yes, I did, I did want to see them. I pressed the button and the little screen lit up.
When I went into the camera’s memory, I expected the first clip to be the most recent: the last film of Cadence, completing the blue canvas. Instead, it was a shot of Cadence, sitting in the chair in front of the desk in his bedroom. It was framed harshly around his face, and I assumed the camera had been propped up on a stack of books. When I pressed down on the button to start playing, the first movement was his hand moving away from the camera, having just started filming.
“Sphinxie,” he said, and the urge to reply, to acknowledge him somehow, was on the tip of my tongue. “I always know.” I shivered, feeling as though he were right there, not really gone yet. “This was my old camera. You’ve done exactly what I wanted you to do.” And I could see him in my head: getting his old camera out, inserting a new memory card, placing it on the table in the piano room, somehow knowing what I would do when I saw it there. He wanted me to film him. And, like a twisted prophet, he knew I would do it.
He laughed, and the camera screen blurred for me, somehow softened.
“You’re a good girl, Sphinx,” he said, in that cheerfully mocking way, and leaned back in the chair, looking satisfied, his eyes glowing. He shook his head, looking at the camera screen for a moment, a vague hint of a smile playing around his mouth. “And you’re different now.” His hand reached out to press the button on the camera, to end the movie, but stopped.
“Cremate me,” he said decidedly, and his hand came forward. The clip ended.
Only five people were present at the service. Near to the end, Cadence’s father arrived and joined Leigh, my mother and father, Vivienne, and me. Leigh didn’t look at him, and he didn’t look at her. Instead, they looked out at the ocean, where the ashes were, where the human being was whom they had once created together. I stood back from the group, wearing a dress my mother had brought along in her suitcase. It was simple, black, conventional. Once again, I was the ordinary one.
In front of me, the ocean reached out in every direction, rolling and changing, like the blue canvas.
We drove back to the house in a rental; there wasn’t enough space for my family plus Vivienne in Leigh’s little car. We were only going to stay a night or two, depending on what Leigh wanted us to do, and then we would be gone, sitting on a plane, flying over that expanse of blue. In the backseat of the car, I let my head rest against the window, and it was cold against my skin. It was so strange that everything was over, that Cadence was gone, that soon I would really go back home, and I had no reason to try and lengthen the visit anymore.
There was no one in the house who rose at the crack of dawn, who read books that made my head spin, who played the piano when the sun came in the window, who held his head high, whose eyes burned like flames behind ice, who was such a genius when he painted.
I licked my finger and rubbed the concealer off my cheek, exposing the scar. I straightened up and looked at my reflection in the car’s rearview mirror, at the thin white line on my upper cheek. Perhaps I hadn’t been touched by an angel, but I had been touched by something. Once, I had been marked by someone who shone so brightly, and who lived in the dark. Once, there had been a plan for our lives.
Outside the car window, a woman was coming out of her house, a handbag slung over her arm, holding hands with a little girl. I watched them walk down the front steps from their house, toward the car in their driveway. And I remembered: all the eggs, all the children a woman will ever have, are with her, inside her, from the moment of her birth.
A child I was supposed to have, my own end of the plan, the future of the world. A little girl or boy of my own, who would someday look up at me and ask me why there was a mark on my cheek, why I had a scar. I would tell a child the reason, someday, and that child was with me now, had been with me when I received the mark, when I made my decisions, when I was out on the swings, when Cadence had touched me, when I watched him paint his life away on the canvas of blue, up there in the empty attic. At the end, when his eyes were so bright, when he looked at me like I was the only one in the room, when I lived. My child was there with me, dormant, sleeping, one egg out of millions.
My child was there.
My utmost thanks go out to the following beings:
• To my God, Who first showed me the future and told me to write when I was very young.
• To Barry Cunningham and Imogen Cooper, without whom this book would not be here today.
• To my mother, who has answered the question “What did I do good today?” a thousand times over.
• To my father, who took me walking on th
e bridge when I asked him to.
• To my sisters, both blood and adopted, who strengthen me, inspire me, and stand by me as the very best of friends.
• To my soul twin who sat on her porch at night with me, and to our old black sheep man in another universe.
• To all of the dear friends who have been readers, listeners, laughers, and sparklers.
• To the lost little girl from my childhood, who knows not what she did for me.
• And to my shining girl, in the light — endlessly.
M. Anjelais was just eighteen years old when her debut novel, Breaking Butterflies, was shortlisted for the Times (London) Children’s Fiction Competition. Now in her twenties, she has postponed college to pursue her career as a writer. She lives in Nesco, New Jersey. Follow her on Twitter @Anjelais.
Text copyright © 2014 by M. Anjelais
All rights reserved. Published by Chicken House, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. CHICKEN HOUSE, SCHOLASTIC, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by Chicken House, 2 Palmer Street, Frome, Somerset BA11 1DS.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
First American edition, September 2014
Cover art by Helen Crawford-White
Cover design by Helen Crawford-White and Sharismar Rodriguez
e-ISBN 978-0-545-66767-8
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