Eventown

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “The cake was disgusting. It was wet in the middle and the orange and peanut butter tasted all wrong together. On the top he wrote the twins’ names, but it was hard to fit all the letters, so they trailed off to the sides, making the top look like it said omi and Elo.

  “‘I guess that’s what I’ll call you from now on,’ Lawrence said. ‘My little sisters, Omi and Elo.’”

  The recording keeps going, and Veena is listening, but I don’t have to. The spark of story has opened up the rest of the memory for me. The names fit. Naomi thought the names fit even better than our real names, plus they were better because Lawrence had come up with them. I can hear him calling me Elo right now.

  It makes my heart flip. Then ache.

  I know that Lawrence and I were super close, and sometimes Naomi felt left out. She wasn’t as loud and brave and silly as Lawrence and I were. But on our eighth birthday, Lawrence pulled Naomi—Omi—aside. He told me to stay put. That he needed a little special time with Omi.

  They went out to the backyard, and I watched them from the kitchen window, just like I watch the rosebush from the kitchen window now. I watched Naomi teach Lawrence how to do cartwheels. He was awful at them. His legs were too long, and he always started laughing halfway through.

  I remember it began to rain while they were out there. I remember I walked away from the window. I never liked the rain very much. For me that’s the end of the memory, but Naomi’s voice is still talking, so I turn the recording up to hear what I missed after I left.

  “Omi walked to the door when the rain started. But Lawrence stopped her. He told her they could try cartwheels in the rain. He joked that he’d probably be better at them that way.

  “Omi wasn’t so sure. It was muddy and messy and even sort of dangerous. But Lawrence did one first, and he fell down, mud splattering everywhere. Something about the way he laughed made Omi feel like it would be okay. So she stayed out there too. Doing cartwheels. Making a mess. Slipping and falling. It was weird, but she liked it. She liked it way more than she ever thought she would.

  “‘You’re wonderful all the time,’ Lawrence told Omi. Told me,” Naomi on the recording corrects herself, the story hers for only one minute longer. It tugs at my heart even more. “He told me I was best of all in the rain. We stayed out there all afternoon. Just the two of us. No Elo. No Mom and Dad. Just me and Lawrence. Both of us loving the rain together.

  “And it was just ours.”

  There’s a pause on the recording. A big sigh. The unmistakable noise of Naomi fidgeting. Then her voice, small and sad. “That’s the most joyful story I know.”

  37

  Sometimes a Spark Is Enough

  I’m crying.

  And Veena is crying too. I don’t think she’s ever cried before. She wipes the tears from her face and looks at her fingertips in shock. “Oh,” she says, over and over. “Oh.”

  They scare her. “Make it stop!” she says, but I can’t.

  “You’re crying,” I say. I huddle next to her. I let her cry on my shoulder, the tears coming so fast she can’t wipe them away anymore.

  “It’s so wet,” she says. She hiccups. She tries to breathe normally but can’t. “It’s hard to talk! Why is it so hard to talk? And breathe? And stop?”

  “You’re sad,” I say, rubbing her back the way Mom used to rub mine, I think, back when I was in Juniper. Back when I used to cry too. “You’re sad for all of us.”

  “It feels bigger than sad,” Veena says.

  “Yeah,” I say, remembering something but not everything. Remembering only the edges of the way sad felt, because sad is locked away in my box. “It’s like that sometimes.”

  For a moment, it’s easy to ignore the voices getting closer, the never-ending bells, the footsteps as they parade through the Hallway of Past Heartaches.

  “A boy named Lawrence,” I say.

  “You had a brother,” Veena says.

  “I had a brother.” It breaks my heart, to have to use the past tense. I hold my breath, wishing I could make it present. Wishing I could make him present. I don’t know what happened to him, I don’t know where he is, but I hate that I forgot him, even for a moment. I hate that we all forgot him.

  “They made you forget,” Veena says. She’s still sad, but it’s a different sad now. A sad with some anger mixed in. Some bravery. Some certainty.

  I nod.

  The door to the tiny room we are in swings open.

  Dozens of townspeople are there, on the other side. The rest, I’m sure, are upstairs still, waiting for normalcy to be restored.

  I don’t think it will be.

  I hope it won’t.

  “Elodee!” I hear my mother cry out.

  “Veena!” Ms. Butra says.

  “What are you doing?” Naomi says. She is huddled next to Mom, so tight nothing could possibly fit between them. “Elodee. What have you done?”

  “These are ours,” I say, gesturing to the shelves of boxes holding years and years of stories. “It’s time we took them back.”

  Veena is nervous next to me. The tears have thrown her. The dozens of people at the doorway have thrown her, and I think learning about Lawrence has thrown her too.

  Josiah and Christine are shaking their heads near the back of the group, whispering urgently. Probably discussing what they’re going to do with us.

  But the story of Lawrence, Naomi’s story of Lawrence, has made me braver, so I go on.

  “I want to remember everything,” I say. “Even though it will hurt. I want to know all of it. The good parts and the bad parts and everything else. I want to know all the parts because they’re all—they’re all mine. And Naomi’s. And Lawrence’s. They’re our stories.”

  Veena nods. She clears her throat like she wants to make sure her voice comes out as true as possible. “No one should ever have to forget a story like that,” she says.

  “Does anyone else want to listen to their stories?” I ask. I pretend this is normal, because so far no one is rushing at me and prying Naomi’s box from my hands. No one is yelling at me. No one is telling us to stop.

  They are all in a stunned silence. They look at the ceilings, at all the objects that might even mean something to some of them. They look at the rows of stories. But mostly they look at me and Veena and our tears. I go on. “I loved your story, Naomi. About Lawrence and the rain.” I watch her face for a sign of remembering. “Will you listen to mine?” I want to sit side by side with my sister and listen to all of our stories and tell any others we can think of. I want Mom and Dad there too. And anyone else who wants to listen. But mostly I want to know what else Naomi loves and aches for and wonders about. The things she misses about Lawrence aren’t the things I miss about him. We don’t miss him in the same way. And missing might even mean something different to both of us.

  Christine finally emerges from the crowd of quiet, confused spectators.

  “Okay,” Christine says. “All right. Now. This can all be put back together. It can. You listened to how many stories? One? Two? And did you listen to your own or someone else’s? Did Veena here listen to her parents’? If we know exactly the damage that’s been done I think we can put things back together the way they’re supposed to be.”

  “We listened to one,” I say. “But we want to listen to more.”

  There’s a grumble, at last, among everyone watching.

  “We want to listen too!” Ms. Butra says. She makes her way into the room with us. She puts a hand on my shoulder, and one on Naomi’s. More women and men, the ones who stopped my Welcoming, join us too.

  “I want to listen,” says a woman in a beautiful silvery hijab.

  “I want to listen,” says a man with a thick mustache but a bald head.

  “I want to listen,” says a woman with long braids.

  “I want to listen too.”

  The last voice is one I know.

  My father.

  He joins us in the room, too, his shoulders back, his face a li
ttle flushed, his eyes only on me.

  “I told you,” he whispers in my ear, “that day when you brought me pancakes, that if you ever wanted to remember, it was okay. I told you it would still be there, if you needed it.”

  That day wasn’t very long ago, but it could have been another lifetime. When he said those words, I didn’t know what they meant. Now I know.

  “I never totally forgot,” I say. “Not everything.”

  “If you remember one little thing,” Ms. Butra says, “it can be enough to open the door to the rest. And Elodee held on to three stories. Sometimes a spark is enough. And sometimes a whole story can change everything.”

  “Everyone calm down,” Christine says. Josiah hasn’t come forward yet. He is wringing his hands in the back. “Let’s all take a deep breath. Ms. Butra, with all due respect, what you did in the middle of Elodee’s Welcoming was completely inappropriate. And our lack of following up was also unacceptable. I’m not sure how we missed that. Josiah is usually very good at keeping our records in order. We’ve all made some mistakes here. But it’s okay. We know what Eventown is for, don’t we?”

  I look back at Josiah again. He has a funny look on his face. A little like a smile. Ms. Butra is looking at him too. I’d thought he was worried, but he’s not. He’s excited. He’s excited that something is happening.

  I see Ms. Butra mouth something to him.

  Thank you.

  He catches my eye. And he blinks. It’s a long blink that goes along with a long nod.

  His own box of stories, I see at last, is in his hands. He holds it close to his heart.

  I mouth thank you to him too.

  “Why are we here in Eventown?” Christine calls out again, more desperately. “Aren’t we here to have the best, happiest lives we can?”

  I look to the crowd, waiting for their nodding heads. But their heads don’t nod. They are confused and bewildered and surprised. They are wandering in the hallway and into other rooms. Some of them, maybe, I hope, are looking for their own stories already.

  “What’s the true purpose of our beautiful town?” Christine tries again. She wants them to call back something about a fresh start.

  They don’t.

  We don’t.

  There is another ruckus, more people climbing down the vine ladder, a few families arguing about what to do about their stories, and people asking me what I remember. In the middle of all of it, Naomi and Mom hold hands and crinkle their foreheads and seem to be stuck in a moment of not-remembering and not being sure if they want to remember.

  But I need them to. I need them to remember Lawrence.

  My brother.

  “We want to listen,” Veena says, her voice so clear the whole world quiets to hear it. “We hope you do too.”

  Veena pulls my box of stories from the shelf.

  She hands it to me. Gives a nod of her head, telling me it will be okay. So I hit the gold button marked Heartbreak.

  “Once upon a time,” I hear my own voice say. And I sit down on the ground. Because I can tell from the way my voice shakes that it is going to hurt.

  38

  What Lawrence Forgot

  Once upon a time, there was a boy named Lawrence.

  Most little kids asked for toys for Christmas. Lawrence’s friend Alex got a train set. His friend Bryan got a science kit. His friend Sandra got a basketball hoop.

  Lawrence asked for only one thing—a rosebush.

  His little sisters would be arriving soon, according to his parents. And Lawrence had fallen in love with flowers. He liked ones that other people called weeds, but still seemed beautiful to him. He loved flowers in vases and in fancy gardens and in people’s hair and coming from trees. He begged his parents for a rosebush. He promised them he’d tend to it himself.

  Lawrence’s mom and dad got him that rosebush. It couldn’t fit under the tree, of course, so they tied a ribbon around a single rose, and when Lawrence saw it he looked at them with wide eyes and wonder.

  “Look outside,” his dad said, almost as excited as Lawrence himself. Lawrence jumped up and ran outside and there it was—the rosebush. He yipped. He cheered. Then he made a big mistake—he ran up to the rosebush and hugged it. Mom and Dad shouted when they realized what he was doing, but it was too late. Lawrence had been poked with the roses’ thorns. Luckily, only a few had dug all the way into his skin, but it was the first time Lawrence had to go to the emergency room nonetheless.

  Other kids might have been scared of the rosebush after that, but not Lawrence. Lawrence loved it and tended to it and spent hours sitting and waiting, hoping to watch the moment the blooms opened into grown-up roses.

  When he got older, Lawrence kept at his gardening. He planted vegetables and herbs and all kinds of flowers. But his favorite thing in his garden was still the rosebush. He wasn’t afraid of getting a little bit hurt by something he loved so much.

  Sometimes Elodee and Naomi helped Lawrence with his garden, but neither of them took to it.

  Eventually Lawrence started up cooking, too, and the two interests worked well together. He grew herbs that he could cook with. Every day after school, he’d work in his garden, and in the evening he’d make delicious things in the kitchen, and he seemed happy most of the time.

  Except sometimes Lawrence wanted to stay in the garden instead of going to school. Or anywhere else.

  Sometimes he left a recipe halfway through.

  Sometimes Lawrence decorated the whole neighborhood with flower wreaths cut from his garden. Sometimes he’d wear a rose or a daffodil pinned to his shirt.

  But sometimes he didn’t do any of his wacky and wonderful things. Sometimes he hid in his room and said he was tired, and his roses would start to look tired too.

  When Lawrence was sixteen and Elodee and Naomi were ten, Lawrence looked tired almost every day.

  Elodee tried to be wacky and wonderful enough for the both of them when Lawrence hid away. She wore silly outfits and sang on the bus and even baked the things Lawrence loved to bake. She’d bake peanut butter–banana cookies and apple-cinnamon-blueberry bread. But the one thing she couldn’t bake without Lawrence was his specialty cake. Lawrence’s specialty cake was one he’d made up himself when he was having one of his hard weeks. It was a jasmine–olive oil cake with white chocolate–pear frosting. And it was delicious.

  Whenever Lawrence made the cake, he’d start to feel better. The cake, he said, was like magic.

  Elodee wished she could make that magical cake herself.

  Maybe when she was a teenager herself in a few years, Lawrence would teach her how. But Lawrence stopped baking altogether over the holidays, and he didn’t start back up again in the new year.

  Naomi and Elodee asked him to. They begged him to make angel food cake or pick some flowers and arrange them in a vase. They asked him to play Monopoly or watch a movie or go on a bike ride. They asked him to just sit at dinner with the family, to be there.

  He said no.

  He said no to school and to his friends wanting to go on a ski trip and to Mom and Dad insisting he go to the doctor. He said no to getting out of bed and eating food and talking.

  “It’s called depression,” Mom and Dad said, when Lawrence said no to Naomi and Elodee’s birthday in April.

  “But Lawrence always bakes us a cake for our birthday,” Naomi said.

  “He can’t this year,” Mom said.

  “But Lawrence loves our birthday,” Elodee said.

  “Sometimes he forgets how much he loves things,” Dad said. He stared at the rosebush. It was starting to droop.

  “Has he been forgetting for a long time?” Elodee asked. She was thinking of the day Lawrence didn’t join them at the beach and the day that Lawrence gave up on his specialty cake baking halfway through and Elodee had to finish it without him.

  She still couldn’t get the special cake right without him, even though she was sure the magical cake would cheer Lawrence right up.

  Mom and Dad looked a
t each other. They didn’t like Elodee’s question. It made them sad. Dad shuffled his feet on the floor. Mom kept her mouth shut very tight. Her fists too.

  They didn’t answer, but Elodee was pretty sure not answering meant that Lawrence had been forgetting for a long time and that maybe Mom and Dad didn’t know how to make him remember.

  Elodee and Naomi tried to make him remember. They knocked on his door to bring him a rose plucked from the bush and a batch of sugar cookies that Elodee had experimented with, adding lavender and basil and a scoop of raspberry jam.

  “What do you want?” Lawrence called. He sounded tired. Maybe he just needed someone to help him wake up. Cookies were good for that. So were twin newly eleven-year-old sisters.

  “We brought you flowers and cookies!” Naomi said.

  “We thought we could play cards. Or go for a walk. Or just eat cookies in your bed. Can we eat cookies in your bed? We won’t be messy! We brought napkins,” Elodee said. She was getting excited. This would work. Lawrence would remember he loved cookies and flowers and his family.

  “Not right now,” Lawrence said. He sounded even more tired.

  “But I made the cookies especially for you,” Elodee said. She wanted to fling the door open and tell him everything he’d forgotten—that his new patch of tomatoes was coming in and that Naomi had perfected her back flip and it was the best thing ever to watch her nail it over and over, and that Mom had bought Elodee and Lawrence a special torch to make crème brûlée and Elodee wasn’t allowed to try it out without her big brother’s help.

  “Your rosebush is getting sick. It needs help. And Dad’s really bad at helping it,” Naomi said.

  “He’ll figure it out,” Lawrence said.

  “I don’t think he will,” Elodee said. “When do you think you’ll come out of your room?”

  “Tonight?” Naomi said. “Mom said we could have burgers and eat them outside tonight. She said maybe you’d take us out for ice cream after.”