by Phoebe North
I winced. I’d made a mistake. Said too much. Hurt him again, without meaning to.
“Okay,” I said limply. “Drink a glass for me.”
“Will do,” my brother said, and he hung up the phone.
I was quiet and unsettled that afternoon, through lunch and our afternoon walk in the woods. I didn’t know how to tell Miranda what had transpired on the phone. So I figured it was easier to say nothing. That’s what I’d been doing all along.
But then, just before dinner, Miranda called me up to the room we shared. She scrambled under the bed and came up with a box, then shoved it into my hands.
It was a watercolor set, brand-new.
“Seems like you needed a pick-me-up,” she said. “So I ordered this for you. I know you’ve missed painting since we’ve been here.”
I held it between my hands, turning over the tubes, almost tasting the names of the colors on my lips. Yellow ocher. Cerulean. Titanium white.
That evening, my headache mostly a memory, I sat on the front steps painting the fields before us while Miranda sat on the porch swing, reading a dog-eared fantasy novel she’d brought from home. We should have been doing summer reading, both of us. But Miranda didn’t care for Charles Dickens, and all I wanted to do was paint. When I contemplated words, thoughts of Jamie seeped back in. He was free now, and I should have felt happy about it, but all I felt was a lump of uncertainty in my stomach for what would come next. For him. For me. So instead I painted, layering yellow on green on brown, watching the pigment leak into the water. There was a dark streak of trees in the distance, a summer storm bubbling on the horizon. I closed my eyes for a moment. I imagined. A shadow in the woods. It could have been a girl. It could have been a boy. I worked a dollop of paint into the corner.
“Ultramarine,” I said softly. Miranda looked up at me.
“What?” she asked.
I shrugged. “It’s nothing,” I told her, but it was a lie. It wasn’t nothing. It was a person, for sure.
I just wasn’t sure who.
I kissed a girl that summer. Not Miranda. Not Vidya. Someone new. Her name was Reese and we met in the food tent at the state fair in Ohio. She had a rainbow key chain on her backpack and so I struck up a conversation with her and her friends. Miranda ended up going off with one of the boys Reese was with, a gangly emo kid with long dyed hair. She and her boyfriend had broken up before the trip, and she was eager to be free. So Reese and I stayed behind while they rode the Ferris wheel. We sat on a park bench, our knees angled together. She was wearing a tank top that showed a patch of freckles that were almost in the shape of a continent. I wanted to touch them. I wanted to be touched. She told me about her parents, who she hated, and she told me about school, which she hated, too. Her voice was low and husky. I don’t think she was used to flirting with girls. As she talked, she played with the rainbow key chain.
“How about you?”
“I’m not interesting,” I told her, and even though I was lying through my teeth, it felt good to say it. “I’m normal.”
She squinted into the sunlight at me, the bridge of her nose wrinkling. I could see how the color of her eyes through her thick lashes was more complex than I initially thought—a blue-speckled hazel like a stone you crack open to reveal a geode inside. I wanted to kiss her, but it felt risky there, surrounded by strangers, felt wrong. So I grabbed her hand and dragged her off toward the Ferris wheel. Miranda and the emo boy were getting off just as we were getting on. Her expression was wild and breathless. She smiled to let me know she was okay, that it was safe. That we could be safe up there, in the sky, all by ourselves. Reese was sweet, helping me up into the basket, her touch warm and eager. We both knew what was coming. The sky overhead was endless, thick with humidity. When we started kissing at the top, it felt like my lungs and mouth and lips were full of water. She tasted good. She tasted like nothing. I held her thick, soft waist in my hands, feeling the heat of her body through that tank top, drawing her close. I would never see her again, even though she texted me late at night sometimes, all about her parents, her life, nothing of consequence.
38
I came home so sunburned that my skin peeled off in sheets. My luggage was full of paintings, wrinkly pages of watercolor paper. I gave one to Mom. It was Miranda’s uncle’s barn, a sunset lit blue-purple behind it. There was another figure in the woods. My paintings were full of people, if you knew where to look. My mother didn’t know where to look. Still, she hung it up on her office wall.
“This is good. This is really good,” she said. “The art department at SUNY is really well ranked, you know. You need to start thinking about your application.”
My mother had decided that I’d go to the college in the next town over without ever discussing it with me. I guess it seemed like the natural conclusion to all this, the whole family back together, forever. We’d never really talked about it; the truth was, I avoided even thinking about it. But when Mom brought it up that day, when my skin was still pink and crispy from the sun, when my bag wasn’t even half unpacked, I let the idea of it sink down into me.
She wouldn’t want me to live in the dorms. Our house was so close. It would be an enormous waste of money. No, no, she would expect me to commute. Gram and Poppy were talking about selling me their old car, and for a moment, in Mom’s office, I saw it in my mind’s eye. Driving back and forth down the same roads I’d always known—the same tangled woods that I’d once imagined were Gumlea looking dark and faint beyond them.
Miranda had already visited two dozen colleges by then. Her parents were helping her fill out the applications. Not a single one was local. Wherever she went, it was going to be a world away. When I imagined the future, it was a big, ugly, empty gap. Yawning and black. The kind of thing that would swallow me up.
“Sure, Mom,” I said quickly, not wanting to let her see how unmoored I felt. I turned and shuffled down the hall, feeling cold despite the way my own skin was warm now, from the inside.
I went into the living room and slumped down on the sofa. Jamie was already there, stretched out in his old familiar chair. He was watching some bad sci-fi show, and he didn’t even look up when I came in. I looked at him for a moment. He was wearing his work shirt from ShopRite, a little rumply and unwashed, the name tag hanging off-kilter from his pocket. James.
This wasn’t a future I’d ever imagined for my brother. It wasn’t a bad one, in the scheme of things—he was happy enough with his job, with smoking pot in the woods with Neal Harriman when Neal was home from his fancy school. Jamie seemed content enough most days to veg out watching TV when he wasn’t sitting silently at the dinner table with our parents. But I felt it then, a deep and echoing sense of loss.
He was supposed to go to college someday, like Mom and Dad had done. He was supposed to move away and do brilliant things—beautiful things. He was supposed to be a writer or a philosopher, something fascinating, something that our mother could brag about at parties. He was supposed to lead the way for me, so I would know how to get out, too.
But we were stuck here, both of us. Jamie wasn’t going anywhere, and so I couldn’t go anywhere, either.
“This show sucks,” he told me, and he tossed me the remote. “Here, you pick something.”
I picked up the remote and just held it for a moment. Then, sighing, I changed the channel.
You’d think that after everything that had happened, Jamie would have been a celebrity. And sure, there were a few strange internet forums where posters discussed his current and former mental state, why he’d stayed and whether it was all the result of being insufficiently loved by our mother. We knew because occasionally she would stumble across them in her insomniac web searching, and because she’d come down to breakfast, dark bags behind her eyes, slamming the coffeepot and the cereal dishes down in front of us.
“It’s none of their business! I’d like to see how their mothers treated them!”
Jamie and I would exchange looks, but neither of us
would say anything. There was no room for anyone but Mom’s anger at our dining room table.
Of course, we were meant to be left alone—Jamie had been underage during the time of his capture, so our last name was left out of newspaper articles and the TV special. The Wikipedia entry on him was deleted a dozen times, though anyone who had been following our story from the beginning could have connected the dots. At first, people did, still interested in the teenaged boy who had vanished and then reappeared again, inches taller and spotted with acne. But once the trial concluded and Kevin Rapp-Palmer was locked away for three lifetimes without parole, the media seemed to decide that Jamie was boring. Occasionally, a boy would disappear, and we’d get a phone call from a reporter asking if he would like to sit down for an interview. But Mom fielded those calls and usually ended up shouting into the receiver about our right to a private life. Jamie was just a normal teenager, she’d say to me, talking right over the television. I turned up the volume.
Never mind that Jamie’s life was smaller than it should have been. Mornings watching The Price Is Right, then off to work on a secondhand bicycle he got on Craigslist. Setting vegetables out under the misters, arranging them just so. Flirting with the slender, gap-toothed girl in the bakery, the one he eventually took out on a date. She came to the door for him that night. Blushing, speaking in low, awkward tones, he introduced her as Shelley.
“Can you believe it?” Mom asked after they left, lowering her voice even though they were already gone in Shelley’s Subaru. It was one of the nights that Dad was visiting, and he was being careful. He avoided Mom’s gaze and shrugged.
“She seems nice enough,” Dad said. “Polite.”
“Are you going to tell me she’s a nice Christian girl, Dave?” But Mom was smiling when she said it. They always smiled at one another now, all teeth and gentleness.
Dad said, “I’m glad he’s found someone.”
“Thank G-d for small miracles,” Mom agreed, driving a fork through her chicken chow mein.
That was when Elijah spoke up, his voice creaky and wry. “I think she seems like a fucking idiot.”
Dad said, “Eli!”
But me and Mom just looked at each other. Because the truth was, we agreed with him.
So life moved on, as it always did. I’d learned that a long time ago when I tried to hold on to my baby teeth and lost every single one instead. It didn’t matter how many offerings you served up to some invisible G-d or King. There was no stopping time, or Saturday dinners with Dad, or the SATs, or any of it. Mom got her master’s, and we held balloons for her as she walked across the stage. We went out to eat and Dad stayed late with a bottle of champagne and was there in the morning, too, and life was changing again, shifting, but not in the way that I wanted, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“What’ll we do if they get back together?” Elijah asked me one Saturday night as I scraped the plates and he stacked them into the dishwasher.
It was the same question Jamie had asked me a year before. And really, my perspective hadn’t changed.
“I don’t know,” I said, speaking carefully. Jamie had already gone up to his room to call Shelley, but my parents were watching TV together in the living room. Holding hands. I wasn’t sure if they could hear me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted them to hear. “Be happy for them?”
My little brother, who was taller than me now, let out a snort. He didn’t care if anyone heard or not, but then he’d always been subject to different rules than I had. “It’s a mess when they’re together. Mom won’t let me go to church—”
“You’ll have to stand up to her. Isn’t that what faith means?”
“Oh, like you kept going to shul?”
I frowned. It was complicated, Eli knew it was, but then maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I had too many excuses, maybe . . .
“He’ll move out if Dad moves in, you know,” my little brother added in a low voice. “He told me.”
At that news I almost dropped one of the dinner plates.
I told myself in the moment that I wasn’t surprised by the fact that Jamie might leave, not really. I told myself that the only shock was that they’d been talking about this—like friends. Like brothers. Like family.
But the truth was that I had never, ever expected him to leave. Not now. Not when I had already decided—or had it decided for me—that I was staying, too.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said quickly. “Where would he go?”
“I dunno,” Eli said, snatching the plate from me. “Somewhere. Anywhere. He’ll go live with his idiot girlfriend. He’s seventeen. He can do whatever he wants. I think that’s his plan, anyway. He says he doesn’t want to live with the two of them together. He says he can’t deal with it. All that fighting.”
I frowned, recalling the night Jamie and I had talked about it. I’d tried to tell myself that he was being ridiculous. Whatever had happened between Mom and Dad was between them. The rest of us just went with it. But was that true?
Because Dad had always been hard on Jamie, right from the start. Screaming at him, telling him to get his head out of the clouds. Back then, Mom had defended Jamie. They argued about religion and lawyers. But Jamie was the one thing they’d ever really, truly fought about. I thought about Jamie’s expression that night in the woods with Neal, how he cried. It wasn’t easy to be me, either.
“Yeah,” I told Elijah with a sigh. There was nothing else to say, really. Nothing else that could be done about it. Eli grabbed for the Cascade and squirted a gleaming orange pile of it into the dishwasher before slamming the door shut.
“I guess it doesn’t really matter to you either way,” he told me bitterly as I turned the dishwasher on. “I mean, you’re not actually going to SUNY like Mom wants you to, right?”
There was hurt in his voice, but an accusation, too. I stared at him. I hadn’t even let myself contemplate it. But in that moment, I realized that Elijah was right. I didn’t have to go to SUNY just because Mom had decided it. I could leave. In fact, I needed to leave. I felt it suddenly, urgently, frantically. Undeniably. Like a thousand mosquito bites on your bare legs on a summer night—the irrepressible urge to move. No matter what Mom thought about keeping our family together, frozen like a set of pinned butterflies under glass, I was about to fly away. Because time kept moving and changing, and we couldn’t stay this way forever. Especially if Jamie already had plans to move on.
“Come on,” I said softly, and something in my voice almost broke. “Let’s go watch TV.”
Eli rolled his eyes at me, and then stormed out of the kitchen.
39
There are moments in your life that are passageways, cracks in a rocky wall, a thin beam of light guiding you up and up and out. And there are other moments that are like doorways that close in your face, firmly and abruptly. As winter of my senior year began, I began, in a scramble, to at last think about college. One day at the end of art class, I finally gathered up my nerves. The art teacher, Mrs. DeGrassio, was kind enough to me—though she never seemed particularly interested in my paintings. Once she’d stood over a self-portrait I’d done and told me, frowning, that she thought I was limiting myself. I hadn’t known what to say to that. I’d been trying my hardest to create something honest, but there were so many things I never let myself feel, say, or do. I couldn’t paint dragons all the time, like the one I’d drawn for Vidya. Sure, they made me happy, but they belonged to a different Annie, one who had died a long, long time ago. If they even belonged to her at all, and not to a version of my brother who was also, equally dead.
Still, Mrs. DeGrassio knew I was talented. So I’d hoped she would help. I approached her slowly. She was busy on her potter’s wheel, her sleeves pushed up around her elbows, talking to some other student about the right way to work the clay. She was a ceramicist, primarily. She made vases, bowls. Which I thought was ironic, in a way—how was she any less limited than I was?
Maybe we didn’t like each other. Maybe that’s al
l there was to it.
“Excuse me?” I said softly. At first, she ignored me when I spoke. So I spoke louder the second time.
“Mrs. D. I really need your help with my portfolio,” I said. I hated making myself vulnerable like that, but it felt like I had no choice. “My mom wants me to go to SUNY but I want to go away. . . .”
Get away, is what I meant. Ever since Elijah had mentioned it, my brain was busy with the promise of freedom, whatever that meant. What would it feel like to be in a whole new place, to be somewhere—someone—new? It would be like Ohio but better, dorming somewhere, surrounded by other kids who also weren’t carrying the weight of their former lives.
“SUNY has a great art program,,” Mrs. DeGrassio said. She didn’t look me in the eye when she spoke, just kept her gaze on her own hands, slick with red clay.
“I know it is. But I want to go—”
“Annie,” she said, hands still on the wheel, but she finally looked up at me when she said it. “If you wanted to go to art school, then you should have been working on your portfolio for at least a year. You could have signed up for an independent study with me. Do you know how much work is involved? You’ve already missed half of the portfolio review days. I’m sorry, but no.”
As she spoke, I felt like the center of my body was slowly unraveling; my hope drifted far out to sea.
“But . . . I need help,” I said once more, hating how weak I sounded, how desperate. For so long, I’d told myself that I needed no one and nothing, that I could pull myself out of this long, deep hole myself. I tried to imagine life at SUNY. Walking around those same familiar paths, the ones where me and Jamie had ridden scooters as kids. Running into Vidya’s dad between classes. Hearing the whispers follow me, like they always had, and then returning to my old bed every night, the same old room, the same house. Even in the bright art room, the smell of crayons and wet earth all around me, I felt the walls closing in.