by Carrie Arcos
I could relate to Hanna’s drama of screwed-up families. Most of the time our piecemeal family was cool. We did get Jenny out of the deal. When she first met us, Jenny brought me a CD of my favorite bass music and Grace some fancy colored pens. We liked her right away. At least I did. She knew about Edgar Meyer, an amazing bassist, and that gave her instant points. Later I found out that Dad had given Jenny the tip. Grace took a little longer to win over because I think she was still holding out for Mom to come home.
Sometimes it sucked. Mom and I still weren’t on the best of terms. But I always had Grace. I never had to go through it alone, not like Hanna. She was the only kid. She had all the pressure of dealing with the hurt and her parents on her own.
Hanna had a huge tear running down her face. I wanted to tell her that everything was going to be okay. No, I wanted to make everything okay for her. I reached out and wiped her cheek. I had never touched her that way.
“You’ll be okay,” I said, looking into her eyes, which were swollen around the lids, but still glossy and beautiful. She looked into mine and I wanted to kiss her. She wanted me to, because she moved a little closer and her eyes started to close. I knew what I was supposed to do. But this was different from playing truth or dare with Jessica. I’d only wanted one thing from Jessica last year. This was Hanna. The same Hanna I had been friends with since the fifth grade. The Hanna whom I knew as well as I did my sister. Hanna, who made me feel nervous and safe at the same time.
I panicked. I hesitated too long and broke the mood, so I pretended like I was just going to give her a hug.
We sat there all night, not talking, me with my arm around her, even after it started cramping. That’s when I got confused. I started to think I loved, or at least really liked, Hanna, because there was no one else I would sit up with all night long, not even Grace.
• • • •
“I hope it’s a good year,” Hanna says. “I really need a good year.”
“You’ll have a great year,” I say.
“Of course.” She pauses and adds, “There’s nothing to fear.”
I rest the back of my head on the bench. “Depends on what’s near.”
“Or if it’s all clear.”
Hanna and I play the game that she, Grace, and I started years ago. Grace was usually the best. She had an ear for rhyme. She’d write these amazing poems, so it really wasn’t fair to play with her. It was never stacked in our favor.
Tonight I win because it’s only Hanna and me now, and I’m the last one awake. I don’t mind that her head has fallen on my shoulder. She smells like Hanna, a little bit of sweat and ivory soap. I put my arm around her and rock us slowly back and forth on the swing. It’s almost morning, but I don’t want to wake her. I want to stay here as long as possible. I listen to her steady breathing and watch the orange glow of dawn creep over us and cover the sky like a blanket.
Four
The resonance of the electric bass hums against my body. It’s taken an hour to get here, but now that I’ve worked out the notes on the page, I’m inside the music. This is where I feel the most clarity. I don’t know many holy things, but I know this: Music is holy.
I’ve always had a thing for music. Dad calls it a gift. He started me on lessons when I was six and let me choose the instrument. I picked the bass because of its low and powerful sound. The bass sets the tempo and the feel. If a jazz band is a person, the bassist is the muscle. The drums are the skeleton. Guitars or keys are the limbs. Vocals add the facial gestures. At school, I alternate between upright and electric depending on the group I’m in.
I can’t sing, though. Well, I can sing in a crowd, like “Happy Birthday” or to add a little backup, but I’m more comfortable behind an instrument. I have to take music theory at school, which does require some singing. Thankfully I’m not graded on the actual vocal quality, just that I know how to read the music.
I think I’m one of the few in class who actually enjoys the theory. It’s like studying another language. Maybe I’m good at it because I know English and Tagalog. I’m not super-fluent in Tagalog, but I know more than just how to ask where the bathroom is. Any time I’m around the aunties, Dad’s sisters, they make me practice with them. Tagalog is technically my first language, though I stopped speaking it outside the house in the first grade. It was hard enough when the other kids, mainly white because of the practically all-white suburb we used to live in, would see what Mom had packed Grace and me for lunch.
“Longanisa,” I would say, as if they’d never seen sausage before. It’s awesome, even though it makes your breath stink. And you burp it up all day. So I started asking Mom for peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with the crust cut off, grapes, and a pack of chips.
After Dad married Jenny and we moved to Eagle Rock, which has a pretty good-size Filipino population, I still didn’t speak Tagalog much. The aunties said I’d regret it when I got older, but I figured I’d regret lots of things by then, so add it to the list.
But music is the perfect language because everyone can speak it. It’s not hindered by words. There’s no room for misinterpretation. There’s only the essence, the emotion of what we communicate to each other. Take sadness or anger or even joy. We try to explain how we feel, but there aren’t always the right words, or the words we have fail. But with music, you can hear a piece and say, Yeah, that’s it. That’s exactly how I feel. Especially jazz. I love how it can make you feel really laid-back or even sad, but not feel despair.
Today the music I’m playing is all minor chords.
I sense someone in front of me and open my eyes. Jenny smiles at me.
“What?” I say loudly before remembering to take off my headphones. “Sorry, Jenny.” I put the bass down next to its amp beside my bed.
“No problem. You hungry?”
“Yeah.”
She hands me a fork and a plate of scrambled eggs, toast, and bacon.
“It’s cold,” I say, but eat it anyway.
“It’s almost noon.” Translation: Get your butt downstairs earlier for breakfast. “You up late?” she asks, watching me eat, leaning against my desk with her arms crossed in front of her. She’s still got on her workout clothes—black leggings and a gray T-shirt—so it’s probably been a slow morning. Jenny’s in great shape, and works hard for it five mornings a week at the gym.
“Yeah,” I say with my mouth full of bread.
“Mmm-hmm.” She reaches out and touches my shirt. “Sleep in your clothes again? Didn’t I buy you new pj’s a week ago?”
She waits for me to answer, but I put some more food in my mouth. Jenny’s not stupid. She cuts through the bull, but she’s got a gentle touch. There’s not much you can pull over her. I like that about her. You know exactly where you stand. This morning she’s hovering between I’m going to speak to your father and You can talk to me. I’m here for you.
“Your dad left early. Someone called from the store.”
Dad works as a district manager for a chain of department stores. He’s always being called into work. It’s cool because I get free clothes all the time. But it keeps him pretty busy, especially the past few months.
“He’d like us to have dinner together. You have plans?”
“I was going to hang with Sebastian later. Maybe get some practice in.”
“I’m making chicken piccata.”
“Okay, yeah, that sounds good.” Jenny’s best dishes are always Italian, probably because that’s her background. She’s got tons of secret family recipes that she and her sisters fight over.
The first year Jenny lived with us, she tried to cook Filipino food, which Dad thought was cute. Grace reminded her each time that we didn’t just eat Filipino food, which was true, but it was our comfort food.
Jenny started with adobo. Now, everyone knows that each family makes adobo differently, some with chicken, some with pork, some more dry. Jenny found a recipe that called for coconut milk. Mom never used coconut milk. I know she was trying to please
us, but yeah, it didn’t come out right.
I will say, Mom makes a perfect adobo, better than the aunties’, though I’d never tell them that. Sometimes I’ll order it at a restaurant. It’s never the same. I explained it once to Jenny: adobo’s like Italians and their pasta sauce. She stopped trying after that. The aunties taught her how to make awesome lumpia, though, and she’ll make that every now and then.
“Good. Dinner’s at six p.m.,” Jenny says.
We’re discussing food, but we’re not talking food. Jenny’s subtext is, We’re worried about you. We want to spend time together, to act like we’re a normal family. I’m making your favorite dish. Please try. For us.
When Grace died, I thought I was going insane. I bailed on everything: school, friends, music. I started “acting out.” After I screamed at Dad and Jenny to “Leave me the fuck alone” and slammed my fist into a wall, they set up appointments with Chris. Chris said I might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, which I didn’t believe. I know guys come back from war with that. I hadn’t been in any war. Chris said PTSD could happen after any kind of trauma, and explained that it could make you emotionally detached, prone to bouts of anger and replaying the incident of trauma over and over.
I told Chris, “I lost my twin. She died. People die every day. It’s called grief. People handle it.”
“How do you think you’re handling it?”
The way he said handling it, as if the words had quotations around them, set my mouth, and I didn’t say anything for the rest of our time.
“Mom, zip me up!” Fern yells as she runs into my room. Fern is named after the girl in Charlotte’s Web, one of Jenny’s favorite books. She looks nothing like a little white farm girl, but the name somehow fits her. She takes after Jenny with her lighter olive skin tone, but she looks like Grace and me in the eyes and the dark hair. Jenny’s more of a dark blond. When Fern smiles, the small space between her two front teeth is just like Dad’s. She’s the perfect Filipino-Italian-American girl.
“Is that how we ask?” Jenny says.
“Please?”
Jenny helps Fern with her blue princess dress.
Fern twirls in front of me. Today she’s Cinderella.
Jenny fixes the bun in Fern’s hair so that a couple of black strands are loose and frame her face. “Beautiful girl.”
“You want to play princess with me, Mark?” she asks.
“Tempting,” I say, “but I need to practice.”
“You always say that.”
“It’s true.”
She pouts. “Grace would play with me.”
It takes everything inside of me to not throw my bass across the room.
“Fern,” Jenny says, “why don’t you go to your room? I’ll come play with you in a minute.” Fern’s pink slippers scamper across the wood floor like little bunnies.
Jenny looks around as if she’s working up the courage to say something. I speak up instead.
“She’s just a kid.” Kids talk and don’t always know what they’re saying. I remember this one time we were standing at a stop sign next to a very large man and Fern told me, “He’s fat.” I had been so embarrassed. The man could obviously hear her, but he didn’t even look in our direction.
Of the two of us, Grace spent more time with Fern. I kind of treat her like she’s an experiment, pushing buttons and pulling levers to see how she’ll react. Fern is my sister, but our age gap is so huge, I feel more like an uncle than a brother. There is no way we could be as close as Grace and me.
Since Grace and I were twins, we shared more than blood and a last name. Most twins, I think, have this uncanny closeness. I’ve heard stories about the ones who can actually feel pain when the other is hurt. We didn’t have any superpowers like that. We couldn’t read each other’s minds, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. When we were kids, we’d sometimes practice for hours, staring at each other, flinging our thoughts across the room, but it never worked. But I did know how Grace thought. I knew how she felt. I knew how she’d answer questions, how she only liked nuts in ice cream and not in cookies.
And when Grace died, I knew rationally she wasn’t here anymore. I knew she was gone. She is gone.
But I can still feel her. Sometimes she speaks to me. I’m not talking voices in my head, more like whispers of past conversations. It’s like being an amputee with a missing arm, reaching out to scratch an itch or still feeling pain. Grace is my phantom limb. I told this to my friend Sebastian once and he understood it right away. It was the one true thing I offered to Chris in our sessions. He said to give it time, that eventually the feeling would go away. That pissed me off because what made him think I wanted it to go away?
Maybe it’s because I’ve shared my life with Grace from the very beginning, since we were pressed back to back in our mom’s womb. The story is that when the doctor delivered us by C-section, we were holding hands. The doctor had to literally unclasp our fingers because I wouldn’t or she wouldn’t let go. I came out first, so Grace jokingly called me her big brother.
“School’s almost here,” Jenny says. “Looking forward to it or hating the idea?” I’m surprised to see tears in the corners of her eyes. Fern’s comment about Grace must be the cause. I try not to show it, but the tears make me angry. I don’t even know why, but I feel like breaking something again.
“More like neutral about it.”
She holds out her hand for my empty plate. “Well, I loved senior year. Let me know if you need anything.” I imagine dropping it and watching it shatter on the floor, but I give it to Jenny because I am handling it just fine.
• • • •
After showering, I tell Jenny I’m going out and make my way over to Sebastian’s family’s Korean BBQ food truck. It’s parked at one of their usual Sunday spots in Los Feliz.
Since it’s lunchtime, there’s a substantial line at the food truck. I go to the front, probably pissing off some people, but I don’t care. I met Sebastian freshman year in jazz band. He’s the drummer and I’m the bass player, so it’s not really a surprise that we became friends. Now I’m practically family. Sebastian’s dad sees me through the window and waves me away with a quick flip of his wrist, but Sebastian gives me a nod, the acknowledgment I was looking for.
I sit on a brick wall and wait for things to calm down. Their truck is very popular, and people follow it from place to place. Sebastian’s family actually owns a couple in the area. They started with one in LA when the food truck craze hit years back and then expanded.
Sebastian eventually brings me a plate of beef ribs, rice, and kimchee and joins me on the wall. Sebastian’s short, about 5'5". He’s half-Korean and half-white, but all skinny.
“How’s work?” I take a bite. Damn, it’s good food.
“Crazy.” He removes the black fishnet hat he has to wear. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“What does your dad put in this stuff?”
“Old family recipe,” Sebastian says with a mock Korean accent, and smiles.
After Grace died, Sebastian came over with his drum kit and we played for hours until we were both sweating and exhausted. He didn’t ask me any questions or tell me stupid stuff, like She’s in a better place or God needed another angel in Heaven.
I hated that last one, because it didn’t make any sense. Angels aren’t former people, for one thing. Angels are their own separate beings. So there’s no way that Grace is now an angel in Heaven. Maybe she is in a better place, but we don’t really know that. We can’t really say with certainty what happens after we die, where we go, if our souls live on or if they just evaporate.
Some people say that God has a plan for everything, and when life is going well that sounds good. But to think God’s plan was to let a seventeen-year-old girl die in a car accident before she’s really lived her life, before she was able to figure out why she’s here in the first place, and leave me behind like a cruel joke—well, that would be one screwed-up plan b
y one screwed-up God. I believe in God—so did Grace—but not that kind of God. God isn’t a sadist. God is supposed to be all loving and shit.
Grace’s death was tragedy. Pure tragedy. No amount of explaining could erase the meaninglessness of her death. If I thought about it too much, I started acting like a person Grace would be disappointed in.
“I’ve been thinking,” Sebastian says.
He’s got that faraway look of his. The one that comes when he’s going to get all profound about the universe. I prepare myself. “What?” I wipe my mouth with a small rough white napkin.
“With all this space and stars and galaxies, the probability of extraterrestrial life is a given. It’s only a matter of time before there’s contact. I hope I’m here to see it.” He looks up as if he’s expecting something to fall from the clear blue sky.
Sebastian’s obsession with the stars and the idea of alien life apparently started in the sixth grade when an uncle bought him a telescope. He is a member of some club at the observatory. I tend to overlook his major geekiness because Sebastian is a kick-ass drummer and beat maker and my friend. I also indulge him in these conversations, because what else were we going to talk about?
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” I say with a bit of humor that isn’t lost on Sebastian.
“I’m serious.”
“No, really. I bet they’re out there—aliens, I mean. They’re, like, millions of miles away—”
“Light-years,” Sebastian says. “Maybe even trillions.”
“Lots of light-years away. And they’re wondering if they are the only life-forms in the universe, except they only have to think it because they speak telepathically.”
“It’s plausible.” Sebastian seems pleased with my response.
“You think they eat kimchee?” I ask.
“Maybe. You ready for school Monday?”
“Sure. You?”
“Yeah. Senior year. Should be cool, right?”