The Sky Is Everywhere

by Jandy Nelson

  “What way?”

  “You know, like you.”

  Bails?

  Yeah.

  Can you believe Cathy married Edgar Linton?

  No.

  I mean what she had with Heathcliff,

  how could she have just thrown it away?

  I don't know. What is it, Len?

  What's what?

  What's with you and that book already?

  I don't know.

  Yes you do. Tell me.

  It's cornball.

  C'mon, Len.

  I guess I want it.

  What?

  To feel that kind of love.

  You will.

  How do you know?

  Just do.

  The toes knows?

  The toes knows.

  But if I find it, I don't want to screw it all up like they did.

  You won't. The toes knows that, too.

  Night, Bails.

  Len, I was just thinking something...

  What?

  In the end, Cathy and Heathcliff are together,

  love is stronger than anything, even death.

  Hmm...

  Night, Len.

  (Found on a folded up piece of music paper, in the parking lot, Clover High)

  I tell myself it’s ridiculous to go all the way back to the forest bedroom, that there’s no way in the world he’s going to be there, that no New Age meets Victorian Age poem is going to make him trust me, that I’m sure he still hates me, and now thinks I’m dildonic on top of it.

  But here I am, and of course, here he’s not. I flop onto my back on the bed. I look up at the patches of blue sky through the trees, and adhering to the regularly scheduled programming, I think some more about Joe. There’s so much I don’t know about him. I don’t know if he believes in God, or likes macaroni and cheese, or what sign he is, or if he dreams in English or French, or what it would feel like – uh-oh. I’m headed from PG to XXX because, oh God, I really wish Joe didn’t hate me so much, because I want to do everything with him. I’m so fed up with my virginity. It’s like the whole world is in on this ecstatic secret but me—

  I hear something then: a strange, mournful, decidedly unforest-like sound. I pick my head up and rest on my elbows so I can listen harder and try to isolate the sound from the rustling leaves and the distant river roar and the birds chattering all around me. The sound trickles through the trees, getting louder by the minute, closer. I keep listening, and then I recognize what it is, the notes, clear and perfect now, winding and wending their way to me – the melody from Joe’s duet. I close my eyes and hope I’m really hearing a clarinet and it’s not just some auditory hallucination inside my lovesick head. It’s not, because now I hear steps shuffling through the brush and within a couple minutes the music stops and then the steps.

  I’m afraid to open my eyes, but I do, and he’s standing at the edge of the bed looking down at me – an army of ninja-cupids who must have all been hiding out in the canopy draw their bows and release – arrows fly at me from every which way.

  “I thought you might be here.” I can’t read his expression. Nervous? Angry? His face seems restless like it doesn’t know what to emote. “I got your poem…”

  I can hear the blood rumbling through my body, drumming in my ears. What’s he going to say? I got your poem and I’m sorry, I just can’t ever forgive you. I got your poem and I feel the same way – my heart is yours, John Lennon. I got your poem and I’ve already called the psych ward – I have a straitjacket in this backpack. Strange. I’ve never seen Joe wear a backpack.

  He’s biting his lip, tapping his clarinet on his leg. Definitely nervous. This can’t be good.

  “Lennie, I got all your poems.” What’s he talking about? What does he mean all my poems? He slides the clarinet between his thighs to hold it and takes off his backpack, unzips it. Then he takes a deep breath, pulls out a box, hands it to me. “Well, probably not all of them, but these.”

  I open the lid. Inside are scraps of paper, napkins, take-away cups, all with my words on them. The bits and pieces of Bailey and me that I scattered and buried and hid. This is not possible.

  “How?” I ask, bewildered, and starting to get uneasy thinking about Joe reading everything in this box. All these private desperate moments. This is worse than having someone read your journal. This is like having someone read the journal that you thought you’d burned. And how did he get them all? Has he been following me around? That would be perfect. I finally fall in love with someone and he’s a total freaking maniac.

  I look at him. He’s smirking a little and I see the faintest: bat. bat. bat. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “That I’m the creepy stalker dude.”

  Bingo.

  He’s amused. “I’m not, Len. It just kept happening. At first I kept finding them, and then, well, I started looking. I just couldn’t help it. It became like this weird-ass treasure hunt. Remember that first day in the tree?”

  I nod. But something even more amazing than Joe being a crazy stalker and finding my poems has just occurred to me – he’s not angry anymore. Was it the dildonic poem? Whatever it was I’m caught in such a ferocious uprising of joy I’m not even listening to him as he tries to explain how in the world these poems ended up in this shoebox and not in some trash heap or blowing through Death Valley on a gust of wind.

  I try to tune in to what he’s saying. “Remember in the tree I told you that I’d seen you up at The Great Meadow? I told you that I’d watched you writing a note, watched you drop it as you walked away. But I didn’t tell you that after you left, I went over and found the piece of paper caught in the fence. It was a poem about Bailey. I guess I shouldn’t have kept it. I was going to give it back to you that day in the tree, I had it in my pocket, but then I thought you’d think it was strange that I took it in the first place, so I just kept it.” He’s biting his lip. I remember him telling me that day he saw me drop something I’d written, but it never occurred to me he would go find it and read it. He continues, “And then, while we were in the tree, I saw words scrawled on the branches, thought maybe you’d written something else, but I felt weird asking, so I went back another time and wrote it down in a notebook.”

  I can’t believe this. I sit up, fish through the box, looking more closely this time. There are some scraps in his weirdo Unabomber handwriting – probably transcribed from walls or sides of barns or some of the other practical writing surfaces that I found. I’m not sure how to feel. He knows everything – I’m inside out.

  His face is caught between worry and excitement, but excitement seems to be winning out. He’s pretty much bursting to go on. “That first time I was at your house, I saw one sticking out from under a stone in Gram’s garden, and then another one on the sole of your shoe, and then that day when we moved all the stuff, man … it’s like your words were everywhere I looked. I went a little crazy, found myself looking for them all the time…” He shakes his head. “Even kept it up when I was so pissed at you. But the strangest part is that I’d found a couple before I’d even met you, the first was just a few words on the back of a candy wrapper, found it on the trail to the river, had no idea who wrote it, well, until later…”

  He’s staring at me, tapping the clarinet on his leg. He looks nervous again. “Okay, say something. Don’t feel weird. They just made me fall more in love with you.” And then he smiles, and in all the places around the globe where it’s night, day breaks. “Aren’t you at least going to say quel dork?”

  I would say a lot of things right now if I could get any words past the smile that has taken over my face. There it is again his I’m in love with you obliterating all else that comes out of his mouth with it.

  He points to the box. “They helped me. I’m kind of an unforgiving doltwad, if you haven’t noticed. I’d read them – read them over and over after you came that day with the roses – trying to understand what happened, why you were with him, and I think maybe I do now. I don’t
know, reading all the poems together, I started to really imagine what you’ve been going through, how horrible it must be…” He swallows, looks down, shuffles his foot in the pine needles. “For him too. I guess I can see how it happened.”

  How can it be I was writing to Joe all these months without knowing it? When he looks up, he’s smiling. “And then yesterday…” He tosses the clarinet onto the bed. “Found out you belong to me.” He points at me. “I own your ass.”

  I smile. “Making fun of me?”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t matter because you own my ass too.” He shakes his head and his hair flops into his eyes so that I might die. “Totally.”

  A flock of hysterically happy birds busts out of my chest and into the world. I’m glad he read the poems. I want him to know all the inside things about me. I want him to know my sister, and now, in some way, he does. Now he knows before as well as after.

  He sits down on the edge of the bed, picks up a stick and draws on the ground with it, then tosses it, looks off into the trees. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Don’t be. I’m glad—”

  He turns around to face me. “No, not about the poems. I’m sorry, what I said that day, about Bailey. From reading all these, I knew how much it would hurt you—”

  I put my finger over his lips. “It’s okay.”

  He takes my hand, holds it to his mouth, kisses it. I close my eyes, feel shivers run through me – it’s been so long since we’ve touched. He rests my hand back down. I open my eyes. His are on me, questioning. He smiles, but the vulnerability and hurt still in his face tears into me. “You’re not going to do it to me again, are you?” he asks.

  “Never,” I blurt out. “I want to be with you forever!” Okay, lesson learned twice in as many days: you can chop the Victorian novel to shreds with garden shears but you can’t take it out of the girl.

  He beams at me. “You’re crazier than me.”

  We stare at each other for a long moment and inside that moment I feel like we are kissing more passionately than we ever have even though we aren’t touching.

  I reach out and brush my fingers across his arm. “Can’t help it. I’m in love.”

  “First time,” he says. “For me.”

  “I thought in France—”

  He shakes his head. “No way, nothing like this.” He touches my cheek in that tender way that he does that makes me believe in God and Buddha and Mohammed and Ganesh and Mary et al. “No one’s like you, for me,” he whispers.

  “Same,” I say, right as our lips meet. He lowers me back onto the bed, aligns himself on top of me so we are legs to legs, hips to hips, stomach to stomach. I can feel the weight of him pressing into every inch of me. I rake my fingers through his dark silky curls.

  “I missed you,” he murmurs into my ears, my neck and hair, and each time he does I say, “Me too,” and then we are kissing again and I can’t believe there is anything in this uncertain world that can feel this right and real and true.

  Later, after we’ve come up for oxygen, I reach for the box, and start flipping through the scraps. There are a lot of them, but not near as many as I wrote. I’m glad there are some still out there, tucked away between rocks, in trash bins, on walls, in the margins of books, some washed away by rain, erased by the sun, transported by the wind, some never to be found, some to be found in years to come.

  “Hey, where’s the one from yesterday?” I ask, letting my residual embarrassment get the better of me, thinking I might still be able to accidentally rip it up, now that it’s done its job.

  “Not in there. That one’s mine.” Oh well. He’s lazily brushing his hand across my neck and down my back. I feel like a tuning fork, my whole body humming.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he says. “But I think the roses worked. On my parents – I swear, they can’t keep their hands off each other. It’s disgusting. Marcus and Fred have been going down to your place at night and stealing roses to give to girls so they’ll sleep with them.” Gram is going to love this. It’s a good thing she’s so smitten with the Fontaine boys.

  I put down the box, scoot around so I’m facing him. “I don’t think any of you guys need Gram’s roses for that.”

  “John Lennon?”

  Bat. Bat. Bat.

  I run my finger over his lips, say, “I want to do everything with you too.”

  “Oh man,” he says, pulling me down to him, and then we are kissing so far into the sky I don’t think we’re ever coming back.

  If anyone asks where we are, just tell them to look up.

  Bails?

  Yeah?

  Is it so dull being dead?

  It was, not anymore.

  What changed?

  I stopped peering over the ledge...

  What do you do now?

  It's hard to explain — it's like swimming,

  but not in water, in light.

  Who do you swim with?

  Mostly you and Toby, Gram, Big,

  with Mom, too, sometimes.

  How come I don't know it?

  But you do, don't you?

  I guess, like all those days we spent

  at Flying Man's?

  Exactly, only brighter.

  (Written in Lennie’s journal)

  Gram and I are baking the day away in preparation for Big’s wedding. All the windows and doors are open and we can hear the river and smell the roses and feel the heat of the sun streaming in. We’re chirping about the kitchen like sparrows.

  We do this every wedding, only this is the first time we’re doing it without Bailey. Yet, oddly, I feel her presence more today in the kitchen with Gram than I have since she died. When I roll the dough out, she comes up to me and sticks her hand in the flour and flicks it into my face. When Gram and I lean against the counter and sip our tea, she storms into the kitchen and pours herself a cup. She sits in every chair, blows in and out the doors, whisks in between Gram and me humming under her breath and dipping her finger into our batters. She’s in every thought I think, every word I say, and I let her be. I let her enchant me as I roll the dough and think my thoughts and say my words, as we bake and bake – both of us having finally dissuaded Joe of the necessity of an exploding wedding cake – and talk about inanities like what Gram is going to wear for the big party. She is quite concerned with her outfit.

  “Maybe I’ll wear pants for a change.” The earth has just slid off its axis. Gram has a floral frock for every occasion – I’ve never seen her out of one. “And I might straighten my hair.” Okay, the earth has slid off its axis and is now hurtling toward a different galaxy. Imagine snake-haired Medusa with a blow-dryer. Straight hair is an impossibility for Gram or any Walker, even with thirty hours to go until party time.

  “What gives?” I ask.

  “I just want to look nice, no crime in that, is there? You know, sweet pea, it’s not like I’ve lost my sex appeal.” I can’t believe Gram just said sex appeal. “Just a bit of a dry spell is all,” she mutters under her breath. I turn to look at her. She’s sugaring the raspberries and strawberries and flushing as crimson as they are.

  “Oh my God, Gram! You have a crush.”

  “God no!”

  “You’re lying. I can see it.”

  Then she giggles in a wild cackley way. “I am lying! Well, what do you expect? With you so loopy all the time about Joe, and now Big and Dorothy … maybe I caught a little of it. Love is contagious, everyone knows that, Lennie.”

  She grins.

  “So, who is it? Did you meet him at The Saloon that night?” That’s the only time she’s been out socializing in months. Gram is not the Internet dating type. At least I don’t think she is.

  I put my hands on my hips. “If you don’t tell me, I’m just going to ask Maria tomorrow. There’s nothing in Clover she doesn’t know.”

  Gram squeals, “Mum’s me, sweet pea.”

  No matter how I prod through hours more of pies, cakes and even a few batches of berry pudding, h
er smiling lips remain sealed.

  After we’re done, I get my backpack, which I loaded up earlier, and take off for the cemetery. When I hit the trailhead, I start running. The sun is breaking through the canopy in isolated blocks, so I fly through light and dark and dark and light, through the blazing unapologetic sunlight, into the ghostliest loneliest shade, and back again, back and forth, from one to the next, and through the places where it all blends together into a leafy-lit emerald dream. I run and run and as I do the fabric of death that has clung to me for months begins to loosen and slip away. I run fast and free, suspended in a moment of private raucous happiness, my feet barely touching the ground as I fly forward to the next second, minute, hour, day, week, year of my life.

  I break out of the woods on the road to the cemetery. The hot afternoon sunlight is lazing over everything, meandering through the trees, casting long shadows. It’s warm and the scent of eucalyptus and pine is thick, overpowering. I walk the footpath that winds through the graves listening to the rush of the falls, remembering how important it was for me, despite all reason, that Bailey’s grave be where she could see and hear and even smell the river.

  I’m the only person in the small hilltop cemetery and I’m glad. I drop my backpack and sit down beside the gravestone, rest my head against it, wrap my hands and arms around it like I’m playing a cello. The stone is so warm against my body. We chose this one because it had a little cabinet in it, a kind of reliquary, with a metal door that has an engraving of a bird on it. It sits under the chiseled words. I run my fingers across my sister’s name, her nineteen years, then across the words I wrote on a piece of paper months ago and handed to Gram in the funeral parlor: The Color of Extraordinary.

  I reach for my pack, pull a small notebook out of it. I transcribed all the letters Gram wrote to our mom over the last sixteen years. I want Bailey to have those words. I want her to know that there will never be a story that she won’t be a part of, that she’s everywhere like sky. I open the door and slide the book in the little cabinet, and as I do, I hear something scrape. I reach in and pull out a ring. My stomach drops. It’s gorgeous, an orange topaz, big as an acorn. Perfect for Bailey. Toby must have had it made especially for her. I hold it in my palm and the certainty that she never got to see it pierces me. I bet the ring is what they were waiting for to finally tell us about their marriage, the baby. How Bails would’ve showed it off when they made the grand announcements. I rest it on the edge of the stone where it catches a glint of sun and throws amber prismatic light over all the engraved words.