by Carrie Arcos
I look down at her hand, the one with the elephant ring on it. I take a risk and reach for it, squeeze it, and then let go. I don’t need to hold on to it to love her. And just because she didn’t kiss me back doesn’t mean I can’t keep loving her either.
Maybe Ezra is right. Maybe love is knowing when to hold on and when to let go.
Sometimes love is just showing up.
Sometimes love looks like sitting quietly, watching a pond.
And I can do that.
I DO NOT LOVE YOU EXCEPT BECAUSE I LOVE YOU
I pull at the knot of the tie Mom made me add to my ensemble, one of Dad’s skinny black ones. I thought I was fine in a button-down light-blue shirt and jeans, but Mom said this is a big night and I needed to be more formal. If I knew formal would feel like I was being choked every time I turned my head, I would have ditched the tie in the car.
Mr. Fisher works the small foyer. I’m actually surprised at how many people showed up. Most are adults I don’t recognize. But Greyson is here too with other guys from our art class. He gives me the thumbs-up sign. Everyone’s buzzing about the LOVE IS wall.
I stand next to the covered mural and politely shake the hands of people Mr. Fisher introduces me to. They’re from the school board, the community, and a few artist friends of his. I try to smile and focus on their faces, but I keep looking over shoulders, around talking heads, scanning the crowd for another face.
She isn’t here.
Mom and Dad stand next to each other and appear to be talking. To any outside observer, it would seem that they are a typical married couple, but their body language speaks of the unresolve between them. Dad hasn’t touched her once. He has his hands in his pockets, and Mom’s arms are crossed in front of her.
Mr. Fisher calls for everyone’s attention and the crowd quiets down. The first person to speak is Mr. Jones, our principal. He gives a general welcome and then says how proud he is of Mr. Fisher and his contribution to our school. He keeps talking, but I don’t have a clue what he’s saying because I glance toward the back and see Callie standing there. Her hair is up in two little buns on the side, and she’s wearing a black dress and a purple cardigan. She gives me a head nod when she sees me. I barely nod back. I can’t look too eager. Besides, now I’m nervous.
I hear my name and suddenly Mr. Fisher is talking about the mural and about me, and then it’s my turn to speak.
“Thank you, Mr. Fisher, and everyone who has come out tonight.” I pause, trying to remember what else I’m supposed to say. “Uh, so the mural was designed to be a reflection of our student body. How different and similar we all are. How we’re all a part of this collective experience of school, and it’s a part of us too. I hope you like it.”
Mr. Fisher moves to stand at the opposite end of the sheet curtain as me. This is it. The biggest, most important art piece I’ve ever done. Years from now, I hope I’ll be able to look back on this as the beginning of my professional art career. People will say this is where the artist Neruda Diaz got his start.
Mr. Fisher encourages the crowd to count.
“One! Two! Three!”
Together we pull the sheet off the wall.
I back away from it and examine my work.
It’s as if all the air has been sucked out of the room. Then I hear low rumblings that become small tremors. Someone giggles. The rumbling becomes louder. Mr. Fisher puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes it hard.
“What? Did you . . . ?” He looks into my surprised eyes and he knows that I most certainly did not have anything to do with what we’re looking at. Well, I did, but not the parts that everyone is freaking out about.
The mural has eight different students on it. A boy and a girl embracing underneath a tree. Two guys playing with a soccer ball. A girl sitting and reading a book on some steps. The prominent girl in the front, who looks a lot like Callie, stares off in the distance. A boy skates with his backpack slung over his shoulder. A girl walks and strums a guitar. I created all of them.
What I didn’t create is the genitalia that has been drawn over each of them in thick black marker. The girls have huge melon boobs. The boys all have drooping penises and extra-large balls.
I find Callie’s eyes in the crowd and they’re wide in shock, like everyone else’s.
This was supposed to be my moment.
“Excuse me, everyone,” Mr. Fisher says. “I am very sorry, but as you can see, this beautiful mural has been vandalized and defaced. I apologize for the graphic images. We will get to the bottom of this and the responsible party will be held accountable.”
I know who did it. I would recognize his artistry anywhere. No wonder he was cool with me earlier. I should have known.
From now on, everyone will associate my name with this stupid mural. Instead of “Neruda, like the poet?” they’ll say, “Oh yeah, that artist, the one who did the mural with the boobs and floating penises?”
I back away from the wall and the library and all of the people looking at me with concern. Callie and I lock eyes, but I can’t look at her for more than a second. Even she cannot console me.
I walk outside and keep going until my mom pulls up alongside me and gives me a ride home.
POESIA
The following day, I find out Luis has been suspended. Even if it doesn’t change what happened, it does make me feel a bit better.
But English class quickly destroys whatever sense of peace I’ve found, because Mr. Nelson begins by telling us to take out our papers.
“I thought it would be fun to hear from you guys today. See what you wrote about your partners. That way, we can all learn a little something more about each other.”
He calls on Josh and Shannon to go first. I don’t hear what they’re saying because my heart is pounding in my head. I didn’t know he was going to make us read them out loud. I read and reread what I wrote over the weekend, which was barely anything. After the disaster with the mural, I couldn’t really concentrate on writing.
Callie is silent next to me, with only the occasional clanging of her bracelets like a quiet ripple across a pond. I try to steal a glance at her paper, but she has it covered. I can only make out the title: The Enigma of Neruda Diaz. She kept it the same.
After a few pairs read their essays, Mr. Nelson calls on me and Callie. She looks at me to go first.
“Callie Leibowitz sat next to me for thirty-nine days, took approximately 897,001 breaths, before I noticed she had eyes like the ocean. I don’t mean the color. Anyone can look and see that her eyes are light brown. I mean if you look too long, you’ll start to drift off on one of the currents, and you’ll see how she’s much more than who she appears to be, sitting here in class in those beat-up black boots of hers.
“Here’s what I’ve learned about Callie.
“She was born in Huntington Hospital seventeen years ago. She’s always lived in the same house. It’s about a mile and a half from here. Her parents are still together, which doesn’t seem like a big thing, but it is. They’re nice. Her dad is very tall. She looks like a younger version of her mom. She has a yellow dog named Lucy. Lucy smells like old, worn socks because she’s probably not bathed enough, but I haven’t said anything to Callie about this. It’s just something I’ve observed.”
I stop reading because this is where I stopped writing.
How do I talk about Callie’s essence? How do I capture on the page what is essentially untranslatable? It would be just as hard as explaining how the stars hang in the sky or how a cheetah blurs across an African desert or how a blade of grass grows from the ground. All of these things are beautiful and unique and totally unto themselves and speak of something deep and unknowable, as if to even attempt to explain them would reduce them, make them less somehow.
“Mr. Nelson, I’m not very good with words, as you know. If I can, I’d like to show you.”
“Wh
at do you mean?” Mr. Nelson asks.
“The rest of my essay.” I stand up. “I’d like to show it to you. Can the class please follow me?”
He raises his eyebrows at me, probably deciding if he’s going to let me do this or not. “All right. Everyone up. Quiet in the halls. Neruda, this was not the assignment. It better be good.”
I walk out of the classroom, leading the class into the quad and over to the library. The graffiti has already been cleaned off for the most part. There are still some faint lines left, and you can make out the images that had been there. I can repaint the spots that were damaged. I can also redo some sections that I wasn’t super pleased with.
But it doesn’t matter.
Now the mural is totally my own.
After everyone enters, I say, “Someone tried to destroy my mural. So I have to fix it in places, but hopefully you can look past that.”
I point to the portrait of the prominent girl in the front who is staring off in the distance. The girl who looks like Callie because she is Callie.
“This is the rest of my essay. I tried to capture the core of who Callie is.” And what she means to me, I want to say, but I don’t say the last part aloud. I stand back and invite them to look at it.
Everyone is quiet. It’s like we’re in some sacred space. They take turns standing in front of the portrait of Callie before moving aside and waiting by the front door.
I watch Callie, but her expression is unreadable.
Mr. Nelson is the last to face the wall. He stands there awhile before he turns to me. Finally he smiles, and I swear there are tears in his eyes.
As we’re walking back to class, I get a lot of positive comments about the mural. I also get sympathy regarding the damage done. It’s surprising how decent people can be sometimes.
But the one person I want to hear from most doesn’t say a word. She hurries out of class without a word or a glance in my direction.
• • •
At home after school, I’m surprised to find Dad there. He’s on a stepladder on the porch, unscrewing the burnt-out bulb.
“Hey, Neruda,” he says when I approach.
“Hey.”
“Finally changing the bulb here.” He gives it one more twist and removes the bulb. “Help me out?” He hands it to me.
I take the old bulb. He points to the new one in the package on the ground. I grab it and give it to him. He twists it in, gets off the ladder, and turns on the switch. The bulb shines brightly above us.
“Good as new.”
He folds up the ladder and walks it back to the garage. He comes out rolling his bike.
“I forgot this the other day.” He brings it to his car and leans it against the side. “So, how was the fallout today?”
I shrug. “They’ve already cleaned most of it off the wall.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you, son.” He moves his hand toward me like he’s going to touch my arm, but he drops it instead. “And I’m sorry this has been such a hard time. It’s not what I would have wished on anyone.” Tears well up in his eyes, and I turn away, embarrassed by them.
“How’s your mom doing?” he asks.
“Good.” I’m not sure what their arrangement is, but I don’t want to be the middleman. If he wants to know what’s going on with her, he needs to ask her.
“How’s Tía Lilia?” I ask.
“Busy. I’ve hardly seen her. But her place is nice. You’ll have to come over soon. We can do dinner.”
“Yeah, sure,” I say. And I guess this is how it’s going to be for a while. I’ll see my dad randomly and on weekends. It sucks.
I’m about to head inside when my dad says, “Want to play?”
“What?”
He points to the hoop in our driveway. I can’t remember the last time Dad and I played hoops together. We used to play all the time when I was younger.
“Just a game or two. I mean, if you have time.”
I want to tell him I don’t. But there’s also a part of me that wants things to be okay between us, to know that we can get back some of what we’ve lost and get to a place where we can move forward. So I say yes.
I get the ball from the garage and toss it to Dad.
As he’s dribbling, I steal the ball from him and quickly do a layup. It goes in.
“That’s one.”
“Okay, okay,” he says. “Don’t get cocky. We play to twenty-one.”
We don’t talk much for the rest of the game. Or during the second one, except to call out fouls. I play hard, and so does Dad. In the end, each of us is both a winner and a loser, and that’s okay by me.
THE WIDE OCEAN
“Neruda!” Mom yells. “Can you get the door?”
When I open it, Callie is standing there.
“Oh, hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
She looks so pretty with her pink top and jeans rolled halfway up her ankles.
I look around and see her bike parked in our driveway.
“You biked here?” I ask, though I shouldn’t be surprised.
“Yeah. Can you take a walk?” she asks.
I follow her out to the street, where we turn right and walk around the block. It’s cooler now that it’s early evening, but I start to sweat. I take her through the neighborhood, wondering how long we are going to walk like this. Maybe I should just start talking about something, but the words we don’t say pile up between us.
“I thought you said you were going to give me a copy of the drawing you made at LACMA,” she says. “I didn’t expect to see it on the library wall.”
“I didn’t know how to talk to you after, you know . . .”
“I know,” she says. “Me neither. It’s just that I’ve been really burned in the past by guys—well, one guy really—and I just feel like I need to focus on me. Figure out my own stuff, you know?”
And there it is. The truth.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t handle things well,” she continues.
“Maybe we both didn’t,” I say softly. “I didn’t mean to make you feel weird. With the mural. I just wanted you to see how I see you. But you know, Luis added his artistic embellishments.”
“Yeah, about that. The proportions were all off, don’t you think?”
“What?”
“My boobs are not that big.”
I stare at her, careful to keep my eyes on her face.
“Too soon?” she asks.
“Probably.”
“Luis is a jerk. And it sucks what he did. I’m sorry.”
I nod. “I can paint it over,” I say. “But thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
She smiles and I feel the air lighten.
“So, do you think we can do this?” she asks. “Be friends again?”
She’s asking me to get past the kiss, to change my expectations, to be her friend.
It’s not what I would choose first, but I’m happy I get a choice.
“It depends,” I say.
“On what?”
“As long as I get to pick the movies sometimes.”
We turn down another street and keep walking. We’re traveling farther and farther from my house now. The sun is shifting in the sky, casting long shadows behind us.
“But you don’t know anything about movies,” she says. Callie goes off on how she’s much more of a movie expert than I am, how that gives her a credibility that I don’t have. How it’s in both our best interests if she picks the movies, most of the time.
I fall in step to the rhythm of her voice. The more she talks, the more my faith in love begins to grow again. For a moment I close my eyes and picture hers and I’m drawn back into the deep, but her voice is there as well, steady, and it keeps me above the current. It guides me like a lighthouse back to the shore and sp
eaks to my deepest parts and whispers, “You are not alone.”
You are not alone moves in and out, in and out with the tide of her voice.
Callie’s eyes turn toward me all lit up because she’s telling me about the latest movie that she’s going to show me.
I gaze into her horizon and I know that this is enough.
For now.
This is enough.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, Esteban Payan, who first introduced me to Pablo Neruda when you were my student way back when. Who knew it would be the catalyst for a life of reading his work and a future book?
Thank you to the following people who helped me with some details along the way: Franco Gonzalez, August Many, Jakob Williams, Jason Takarabe, and Jordan Dokolas.
Thank you, Liza Kaplan, for championing Neruda from the beginning and for helping me get his story where it needed to be. Thanks to Talia Benamy and the rest of the crew at Philomel. I am so happy to be part of team Philomel.
Thank you, Kerry Sparks. Your praises are many and easy to sing.
Thank you to my family. David, I love you. Aiden, Matisse, and Judah, you are my joy. Now, go read some books!
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