by Jandy Nelson
She was no longer by my side but had stopped a few paces back.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, taking in my suddenly lobotomized sister.
“Did you see that guy, Len?”
“What guy?”
“God, what’s wrong with you, that gorgeous guy on that horse, it’s like he popped out of my novel or something. I can’t believe you didn’t see him, Lennie.” Her exasperation at my disinterest in boys was as perpetual as my exasperation at her preoccupation with them. “He turned around when he passed us and smiled right at me – he was so good-looking … just like the Revolutionary in this book.” She reached down to pick it up, brushing the dirt off the cover. “You know, the one who whisks Gertrudis onto his horse and steals her away in a fit of passion—”
“Whatever, Bailey.” I turned back around, resumed reading, and made my way to the front porch, where I sank into a chair and promptly got lost in the stampeding passion of the two on the English moors. I liked love safe between the covers of my novel, not in my sister’s heart, where it made her ignore me for months on end. Every so often though, I’d look up at her, posing on a rock by the trailhead across the road, so obviously feigning reading her book that I couldn’t believe she was an actress. She stayed out there for hours waiting for her Revolutionary to come back, which he finally did, but from the other direction, having traded in his horse somewhere for a skateboard. Turns out he didn’t pop out of her novel after all, but out of Clover High like the rest of us, only he hung out with the ranch kids and skaters, and because she was exclusively a drama diva, their paths never crossed until that day. But by that point it didn’t matter where he came from or what he rode in on because that image of him galloping by had burned into Bailey’s psyche and stolen from her the capacity for rational thought.
I’ve never really been a member of the Toby Shaw fan club. Neither his cowboy bit nor the fact that he could do a 180 Ollie into a Fakie Feeble Grind on his skateboard made up for the fact that he had turned Bailey into a permanent love zombie.
That, and he’s always seemed to find me as noteworthy as a baked potato.
“You okay, Len?” he asks from his prone position, bringing me back to the moment.
For some reason, I tell the truth. I shake my head, back and forth, back and forth, from disbelief to despair, and back again.
He sits up. “I know,” he says, and I see in his marooned expression that it’s true. I want to thank him for not making me say a word, and getting it all the same, but I just remain silent as the sun pours heat and light, as if from a pitcher, all over our bewildered heads.
He pats the grass with his hand for me to join him. I sort of want to but feel hesitant. We’ve never really hung out before without Bailey.
I motion toward the house. “I need to go upstairs.”
This is true. I want to be back in The Sanctum, full name: The Inner Pumpkin Sanctum, newly christened by me, when Bailey, a few months ago, persuaded me the walls of our bedroom just had to be orange, a blaringly unapologetic orange that had since made our room sunglasses optional. Before I’d left for school this morning, I’d shut the door, purposefully, wishing I could barricade it from Gram and her cardboard boxes. I want The Sanctum the way it is, which means exactly the way it was. Gram seems to think this means: I’m out of my tree and running loose through the park, Gramese for mental.
“Sweet pea.” She’s come out onto the porch in a bright purple frock covered in daisies. In her hand is a paintbrush, the first time I’ve seen her with one since Bailey died. “How was your first day back?”
I walk over to her, breathe in her familiar scent: patchouli, paint, garden dirt.
“It was fine,” I say.
She examines my face closely like she does when she’s preparing to sketch it. Silence tick-tocks between us, as it does lately. I can feel her frustration, how she wishes she could shake me like she might a book, hoping all the words will just fall out.
“There’s a new boy in honor band,” I offer.
“Oh yeah? What’s he play?”
“Everything, it seems.” Before I escaped into the woods at lunch, I saw him walking across the quad with Rachel, a guitar swinging from his hand.
“Lennie, I’ve been thinking … it might be good for you now, a real comfort…” Uh-oh. I know where this is going. “I mean, when you were studying with Marguerite, I couldn’t rip that instrument out of your hands—”
“Things change,” I say, interrupting her. I can’t have this conversation. Not again. I try to step around her to go inside. I just want to be in Bailey’s closet, pressed into her dresses, into the lingering scents of riverside bonfires, coconut suntan lotion, rose perfume – her.
“Listen,” she says quietly, reaching her free hand out to straighten my collar. “I invited Toby for dinner. He’s quite out of his tree. Go keep him company, help him weed or something.”
It occurs to me she probably said something similar to him about me to get him to finally come over. Ugh.
And then without further ado, she dabs my nose with her paintbrush.
“Gram!” I cry out, but to her back as she heads into the house. I try to wipe off the green with my hand. Bails and I spent much of our lives like this, ambushed by Gram’s swashbuckling green-tipped paintbrush. Only green, mind you. Gram’s paintings line the walls of the house, floor to ceiling, stack behind couches, chairs, under tables, in closets, and each and every one of them is a testament to her undying devotion to the color green. She has every hue from lime to forest and uses them to paint primarily one thing: willowy women who look half mermaid, half Martian. “They’re my ladies,” she’d tell Bails and me. “Halfway between here and there.”
Per her orders, I drop my clarinet case and bag, then plant myself in the warm grass beside a supine Toby and the sleeping dogs to help him “weed”.
“Tribal marking,” I say pointing to my nose.
He nods disinterestedly in his flower coma. I’m a green-nosed baked potato. Great.
I turtle up, tucking my knees to my chest and resting my head in the crevice between them. My eyes move from the wisteria cascading down the trellis to the several parties of daffodils gossiping in the breeze to the indisputable fact that springtime has shoved off its raincoat today and is just prancing around – it makes me queasy, like the world has already forgotten what’s happened to us.
“I’m not going to pack up her things in cardboard boxes,” I say without thinking. “Ever.”
Toby rolls on his side, shields his face with his hand trying to block the sun so he can see me, and to my surprise says, “Of course not.”
I nod and he nods back, then I flop down on the grass, cross my arms over my head so he can’t see that I’m secretly smiling a little into them.
The next thing I know the sun has moved behind a mountain and that mountain is Uncle Big towering over us. Toby and I must have both crashed out.
“I feel like Glinda the Good Witch,” Big says, “looking down on Dorothy, Scarecrow and two Totos in the poppy field outside of Oz.” A few narcotic springtime blooms are no match for Big’s bugle of a voice. “I guess if you don’t wake up, I’m going to have to make it snow on you.” I grin groggily up at him with his enormous handlebar mustache poised over his lip like a grand Declaration of Weird. He’s carrying a red cool box as if it were a briefcase.
“How’s the distribution effort going?” I ask, tapping the cool box with my foot. We are in a ham predicament. After the funeral, there seemed to be a prime directive in Clover that everyone had to stop by our house with a ham. Hams were everywhere; they filled the fridge, the freezer, lined the counters, the stove, sat in the sink, the cold oven. Uncle Big attended to the door as people stopped by to pay their respects. Gram and I could hear his booming voice again and again, “Oh a ham, how thoughtful, thank you, come in.” As the days went on Big’s reaction to the hams got more dramatic for our benefit. Each time he exclaimed “A ham!” Gram and I found each other�
�s eyes and had to suppress a rush of inappropriate giggles. Now Big is on a mission to make sure everyone in a twenty-mile radius has a ham sandwich a day.
He rests the cool box on the ground and reaches his hand down to help me up. “It’s possible we’ll be a hamless house in just a few days.”
Once I’m standing, Big kisses my head, then reaches down for Toby. When he’s on his feet, Big pulls him into his arms, and I watch Toby, who is a big guy himself, disappear in the mountainous embrace. “How you holding up, cowboy?”
“Not too good,” he admits.
Big releases him, keeping one hand on his shoulder, and puts the other one on mine. He looks from Toby to me. “No way out of this but through … for any of us.” He says it like Moses, so we both nod as if we’ve been bestowed with a great wisdom. “And let’s get you some turpentine.” He winks at me. Big’s an ace winker – five marriages to his name to prove it. After his beloved fifth wife left him, Gram insisted he move in with us, saying, “Your poor uncle will starve himself if he stays in this lovelorn condition much longer. A sorrowing heart poisons recipes.”
This has proven to be true, but for Gram. Everything she cooks now tastes like ashes.
Toby and I follow Big into the house, where he stops before the painting of his sister, my missing mother: Paige Walker. Before she left sixteen years ago, Gram had been painting a portrait of her, which she never got to finish but put up anyway. It hovers over the mantel in the living room, half a mother, with long green hair pooling like water around an incomplete face.
Gram had always told us that our mother would return. “She’ll be back,” she’d say like Mom had gone to the store for some eggs, or a swim at the river. Gram said it so often and with such certainty that for a long while, before we learned more, we didn’t question it, just spent a whole lot of time waiting for the phone to ring, the doorbell to sound, the mail to arrive.
I tap my hand softly against Big, who’s staring up at The Half Mom like he’s lost in a silent mournful conversation. He sighs, puts an arm around me and one around Toby, and we all plod into the kitchen like a three-headed, six-legged, ten-ton sack of sad.
Dinner, unsurprisingly, is a ham and ash casserole that we hardly touch.
After, Toby and I camp out on the living room floor, listening to Bailey’s music, poring over countless photo albums, basically blowing our hearts to smithereens.
I keep sneaking looks at him from across the room. I can almost see Bails flouncing around him, coming up from behind and dropping her arms around his neck the way she always did. She’d say sickeningly embarrassing things in his ear, and he’d tease her back, both of them acting like I wasn’t there.
“I feel Bailey,” I say finally, the sense of her overwhelming me. “In this room, with us.”
He looks up from the album on his lap, surprised. “Me too. I’ve been thinking it this whole time.”
“It’s so nice,” I say, relief spilling out of me with the words.
He smiles and it makes his eyes squint like the sun is in his face. “It is, Len.” I remember Bailey telling me once that Toby doesn’t talk all that much to humans but is able to gentle startled horses at the ranch with just a few words. Like St Francis, I’d said to her, and I believe it – the low slow lull of his voice is soothing, like waves lapping the shore at night.
I return to the photos of Bailey as Wendy in the Clover Elementary production of Peter Pan. Neither of us mentions it again, but the comfort of feeling Bailey so close stays with me for the rest of the evening.
Later, Toby and I stand by the garden, saying goodbye. The dizzy, drunk fragrance of the roses engulfs us.
“It was great hanging out with you, Lennie, made me feel better.”
“Me too,” I say, plucking a lavender petal. “Much better, really.” I say this quietly and to the rosebush, not sure I even want him to hear, but when I peek back up at his face, it’s kind, his leonine features less lion, more cub.
“Yeah,” he says, looking at me, his dark eyes both shiny and sad. He lifts his arm, and for a second I think he’s going to touch my face with his hand, but he just runs his fingers through the tumble of sunshine that is his hair.
We walk the few remaining steps to the road in slow motion. Once there, Lucy and Ethel emerge out of nowhere and start climbing all over Toby, who has dropped to his knees to say goodbye to them. He holds his skateboard in one hand, ruffling and petting the dogs with the other as he whispers unintelligible words into their fur.
“You really are St Francis, huh?” I have a thing for the saints – the miracles, not the mortifications.
“It’s been said.” A soft smile meanders across the broad planes of his face, landing in his eyes. “Mostly by your sister.” For a split second, I want to tell him it was me who thought that, not Bailey.
He finishes his farewell, stands back up, then drops his skateboard to the ground, steadying it with his foot. He doesn’t get on. A few years pass.
“I should go,” he says, not going.
“Yeah,” I say. A few more.
Before he finally hops on his board, he hugs me goodbye and we hold on to each other so tightly under the sad, starless sky that for a moment I feel as if our heartbreak were one instead of two.
But then all of a sudden, I feel a hardness against my hip, him, that. Holy freaking shit! I pull back quickly, say goodbye, and run back into the house.
I don’t know if he knows that I felt him.
I don’t know anything.
Someone from Bailey's drama class
yelled BRAVO at the end of the service
and everyone jumped to their feet
and started clapping
I remember thinking the roof would blow
from the thunder in our hands
that grief was a room filled
with hungry desperate light
we clapped for nineteen years
of a world with Bailey in it
did not stop clapping
when the sun set, moon rose
when all the people streamed into our house
with food and frantic sorrow
did not stop clapping
until dawn
when we closed the door
on Toby
who had to make his sad way home
I knew we must have moved from that spot
must have washed and slept and ate
but in my mind, Gram, Uncle Big and I
stayed like that for weeks
just staring at the closed door
with nothing between our hands
but air
(Found on a piece of notebook paper blowing down Main Street)
This is what happens when Joe Fontaine has his debut trumpet solo in band practice: I’m the first to go, swooning into Rachel, who topples into Cassidy Rosenthal, who tumbles onto Zachary Quittner, who collapses onto Sarah, who reels into Luke Jacobus – until every kid in band is on the floor in a bedazzled heap. Then the roof flies off, the walls collapse, and when I look outside I see that the nearby stand of redwood trees has uprooted and is making its way up the quad to our classroom, a gang of giant wooden men clapping their branches together. Lastly, the Rain River overflows its banks and detours left and right until it finds its way to the Clover High music room, where it sweeps us all away – he is that good.
When the rest of us lesser musical mortals have recovered enough to finish the piece, we do, but as we put our instruments away at the end of practice, the room is as quiet and still as an empty church.
Finally, Mr James, who’s been staring at Joe like he’s an ostrich, regains the power of speech and says, “Well, well. As you all say, that sure sucked.” Everyone laughs. I turn around to see what Sarah thought. I can just about make out an eye under a giant Rasta hat. She mouths unfreakingbelievable. I look over at Joe. He’s wiping his trumpet, blushing from the response or flushed from playing, I’m not sure which. He looks up, catches my eye, then raises his eyebrows expectan
tly at me almost like the storm that has just come out of his horn has been for me. But why would that be? And why is it I keep catching him watching me play? It’s not interest, I mean, that kind of interest, I can tell. He watches me clinically, intently, the way Marguerite used to during a lesson when she was trying to figure out what in the world I was doing wrong.
“Don’t even think about it,” Rachel says as I turn back around. “That trumpet player’s accounted for. Anyway, he’s like so out of your league, Lennie. I mean, when’s the last time you had a boyfriend? Oh yeah, never.”
I think about lighting her hair on fire.
I think about medieval torture devices: The Rack, in particular.
I think about telling her what really happened at chair auditions last fall.
Instead I ignore her like I have all year, swab my clarinet, and wish I were indeed preoccupied by Joe Fontaine rather than by what happened with Toby – each time I recall the sensation of him pressing into me, shivers race all through my body – definitely not the appropriate reaction to your sister’s boyfriend’s hard-on! And what’s worse is that in the privacy of my mind, I don’t pull away like I actually did but stay wrapped in his arms under the still sky, and that makes me flush with shame.
I shut my clarinet case wishing I could do the same on these thoughts of Toby. I scan the room – the other horn players have gathered around Joe, as if the magic were contagious. Not a word between him and me since my first day back. Hardly a word between me and anyone at school really. Even Sarah.