Wild Blue Wonder

by Carlie Sorosiak

  “You noticed that, huh?”

  Hana shushes us both before he can reply.

  After the movie, the temperature starts to drop and so does the sky. Leaving the theater requires bundling: scarves and hats and mittens. On the sidewalk, Fern and Harper blow past us—heading toward Waffle Mart, I bet. The only other restaurant that’s open is Manny’s Grill, so I suggest that. We grab chili burgers and—since there’s nowhere to eat inside—sit on the benches by the beach, just in front of the boarded-up bathhouses, all of us shivering in the coolness. And, okay, Hana and Elliot are cute; he keeps kissing her nose, asking if she wants his jacket in addition to her own. I get why they like each other: they’re both good and kind. Selfless.

  Pitching my chili burger wrapper in the trash by the playground, I make my way down the cement steps toward the beach, careful not to slip on the ice. Alexander’s by my side a few moments later; we start drawing designs in the snowy sand.

  “Have you ever gotten along?” he asks suddenly.

  “Who?”

  “You and your sister.”

  “I mean, yeah.”

  “Sorry . . . you . . . you probably don’t want to talk about this.”

  I swallow, nudge a piece of frozen seaweed with my boot, and resume drawing. “You have any siblings?”

  “Only child.”

  “Do you like that?”

  He shrugs, tracing a cloud next to a chunk of ice. “I suppose it’s lonely sometimes.”

  I’ve noticed that, when I mention his family, he always speaks about them like this. I suppose or I guess. Never definitive. Always shrouded in this vague sort of mystery.

  He gestures at my drawing. “What is that?”

  “It’s a dolphin.”

  “I am unfamiliar with that particular species, the kind of dolphin that is a perfect rectangle.”

  “It has a tail! That is a clearly distinct dolphin tail.”

  We argue about the anatomical shape of dolphins, and before I know it, I’m telling him the coolest facts: how dolphins have a well-developed theory of mind; how they can recognize that some women are pregnant before the women know; how they basically have names—unique whistles to identify themselves to others.

  Alexander’s either fascinated or doing really well at pretending to be. “So . . . if they have a language,” he asks, “then why can’t we communicate with them?”

  “See, that’s the really interesting part.” I brush the cold sand off my palms. “Some bottlenose dolphins have learned, like, sixty signals for human words, which means dolphins are really, really smart. But humans—who are supposed to be the most intelligent beings on Earth—haven’t learned a single word of dolphinese.”

  “How’d you learn all this stuff?”

  “My dad. Books. Podcasts.”

  Nearby, Hana’s teeth start to chatter. “Can we,” she says, interrupting us, “maybe g-g-go inside somewhere? My fingers are turning blue.”

  We make our way past the skate park, which hasn’t been renovated for about a decade, and enter Fun-O-Mania. It’s touristy, yes, but also great in an it’s-so-bad-it’s-good sort of way, like Hostess fruit pies. In the winter, the owner opens it two Sundays a month—and that’s it.

  “Consider this part of your Winship education,” I tell Alexander.

  “Right. Should I be taking notes?”

  “I would.”

  The smell always hits me first: cotton candy, bleach, and plastic—basically, the scent of my childhood Augusts. In the back of my closet, you can probably scrounge up several hundred Fun-O-Mania tickets stuffed in shoeboxes after seven summers of kicking ass at Skee-Ball.

  Ginormous fluorescent lights are blinking overhead. I forgot how cavernous this place is, with its big barn ceiling and rows upon rows of games. Cheap stuffed animals and made-in-China toys hang limply from the rafters. The main sound is the roll of duckpin bowling and that stupid plastic strongman chuckling as it arm-wrestles kids for cash.

  As Elliot and Hana head for the motorcycle games, I beat Alexander three times at the basketball toss—until he suggests that we try “that rolling thingy over there.”

  “Skee-Ball?” I say.

  “Uh . . . if that’s what it’s called.” Tentatively, he examines the left-most Skee-Ball machine and feeds a quarter into the slot, while I position myself in front of the lane next to him.

  I win. Twelve times. By an embarrassing number of points. Near the end, I’m wearing my tickets like a scarf.

  “Bugger,” Alexander keeps saying, and I don’t know why it’s making me crack up.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve laughed so hard.

  The next Saturday, Nana announces bright and early that—instead of putting a final coat of varnish on the boat today, as planned, as she promised—we’re going on a family trip.

  “Chop, chop. Let’s get a move on,” she says. “We’ve got Christmas tree hunting to do!”

  “Hunting?” I say, gloomily. “Should we dress in camouflage, or would the tree find that confusing?”

  “That’s the spirit!” says Nana, thwacking the table.

  Dad’s finishing up his bowl of organic cornflakes, and Mom’s doing Reiki on Galileo in the kitchen; they exchange words about this. Him: Why are you practicing energy healing on the cat? Her: Why can’t you recognize that it’ll rebalance the cat’s emotional and physical health? Nana ushers them along, herding all of us into the Time Machine. I sit in the way, way back, while Mom squishes herself between Fern and Reed.

  Nana’s driving. As we head down the driveway, she beeps at a few indecisive chipmunks (“Get off the darn road, little critters!”), and then we’re officially off.

  “One stop before we go!” she says.

  Oh, guess not.

  Before I know it, we’re pulling up to Alexander’s house.

  “What’s happening?” I ask.

  Nana says, “Did you know that Alexander’s grandmother joined my fiber guild? Theia is wonderful. We got to talking last night about this trip, and it turns out Alexander’s never chopped down his own Christmas tree, so . . .”

  He emerges from his house in typically symphonic style as Dad wanders around to the back of the car, popping the trunk. “Hello, yes, thank you, good morning,” Alexander says, sliding into the backward seat next to mine. When the car engine’s sputtering again, he leans in to whisper, “Just so you know, this was a surprise to me, too.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m happy I’m here.” From his coat pocket, he pulls out a small Ziploc bag of what appear to be cookies. “Want one? They’re paxemáthia—spiced biscuits. You’ll like them.”

  I pop one in my mouth; it’s almondy and buttery and yum. I do feel bad—dragging Alexander into yet another Sad Sawyer Family outing. But . . . I like the snacks. And Alexander, I admit to myself. Although he’s always kind of jittery, he makes me calm.

  The roads are nearly empty, the sunlight blindingly brilliant against the snow. It’s freezing—the kind of arctic weather that makes your eyes tear.

  “So, Alexander!” Nana shouts from the driver’s seat. “You still liking America?”

  “Yes,” he says back. “But . . . uh . . . I do seem to get asked a lot if I know the queen.”

  I say, “You do, right?”

  “Oh yes, Liz and I are like this.” He crosses his fingers to demonstrate the closeness. “It’s been a little rough since the move, but we Snapchat. Lots of corgi pictures.”

  Maybe it’s because I’m smiling. Maybe it’s because I’m not allowed to smile, after everything I did. But I can sense Fern’s anger shooting off her like radiation.

  Reed’s resting his head against the window. His baseball cap’s on backward. When I recognize that it’s a Portland Pirates hat—that it’s Dylan’s hat—I turn fully back around.

  And keep my mouth shut for the rest of the journey.

  The Mousam River Christmas Tree Farm is right off Route 1, sandwiched between summer commun
ities with empty houses boarded up for the winter. There’s—you guessed it—a river flowing around the property, lapping ice chunks at the shore. We haven’t come here for years; when I was really little, Mom, Dad, and Nana loved the romance of it: stalking around the snowy landscape for hours on end, searching for the absolutely perfect tree—the greenest and most symmetrical, the one that looked like it belonged on a movie set. Nana would announce, ax in hand, “This is it! This is it!” and we’d gather around as she thwacked the blade over and over again into its base, until it toppled in a great emerald whoosh. But eventually I think we all got kind of tired: Wasn’t it easier just to select a tree from the stand at the gas station and then go for donuts? And should seventy-three-year-old Nana really be wielding an ax? Sure, she’s strong enough to chop down a tree . . . but still.

  It’s only a thirty-minute drive, yet my legs are cramped as I stumble from the car. Alexander does a little jig, shaking out his limbs. The wind’s bitter.

  Nana immediately flags down the farm’s owner, Mr. Edmonton, who’s perched on a stool in a small, open shack, blowing hot breath on his hands. I remember him from years ago; it’s really, really hard to forget a mustache like a squirrel’s tail.

  “You folks want a chain saw?”

  Nana says we have an ax, because she’s old-school like that, and then the seven of us are wrapping our scarves tighter, trudging into a Christmas tree forest. The sun is egg-yolk yellow and splashing over our heads, but I still feel like we’re a rain cloud.

  “How about this one?” Mom says, stopping a minute or two in, brushing a dusting of snow off a Norwegian fir with her mitten.

  Reed shrugs. “It’s okay.”

  Nana says, “That one’s puny. We can do better.”

  But after an hour with no luck (the perfect tree has yet to make itself known), Mom suggests that we split up. “I’m sure the kids’ feet are starting to freeze. We’d have better luck if we each took a quarter of the land.”

  Nana’s firm. “Jade, we’re going to do this together.”

  Fern whines, “Can we just go home? This is stupid.”

  Reed adds, “I saw some good ones at Texaco.”

  The trees are thick around us—a weave of needles and branches—so the seven of us are clustered together, our breaths smoking in a circle.

  “No,” Nana says. “Absolutely not.”

  Mom says, “Mother . . .”

  And that’s when Nana snaps. I’ve never seen her snap—never even bend. Whenever there’s conflict, her usual coping mechanism is unearthing Tibetan singing bowls from the cupboard, letting their soothing frequency ring out over the house. I’m not entirely sure what’s happening.

  “Fine,” she says. “That’s fine, Jade. If you don’t want to help fix this family, then that’s up to you. Let’s just choose any old tree, then. How about this one?” Her left hand—the one not holding the ax—practically smacks into the nearest tree. It has approximately twelve branches on it, arranged in a haphazard fashion, mostly near the bottom. Compared to this one, the Charlie Brown Christmas tree belongs at Rockefeller Center.

  Dad attempts some reason. “We can keep looking for a minute. I’m sure there are . . .” But Nana’s determined to make a point: that if we don’t band together, this is what our future looks like—as desolate and lonely as that crap tree. When she hoists the ax, Dad says, “Whoa, whoa, hold on, Eden.” We all jump back a mile, branches poking into our spines; we all watch, hearts in our throats, as Dad gently takes the ax from Nana.

  “Let me do it,” he says calmly. “I’d like to do it.”

  And then there is nothing but the swift swish of ax against air, of wooden chinks into the helpless tree, as it stands and keeps standing and refuses to go down. It’s lasting forever. As time extends like an elastic band, Fern starts crossing her arms and Reed begins staring down at the snow and—

  This is not us.

  This is not us.

  We should be singing carols. We should be joking about this stupid fucking tree and how can something so flimsy be so strong?

  I don’t know the exact moment that I start crying, but suddenly: a hot rush down my cheeks. I swipe it away quickly with my mitten, but Fern sees . . . and doesn’t react. Doesn’t even flinch.

  When I cried, she used to cry, too.

  Maybe I mumble, “I’ll see you at the car,” but I’m not sure it comes out. The only thing I’m sure about is: I can’t be here, I can’t deal with this, and I’m swishing through the trees as quickly as that ax through air. I want to put hundreds of thousands of miles between us, because I am the cause of this. Me. And if I go away . . .

  “Quinn?” Alexander’s voice is at my back. “Slow down.”

  I don’t slow down. I run.

  But the strangest thing is . . . he runs, too.

  By the parking lot, he’s caught up to me.

  “Are you . . . ?” he says. “Perhaps this is an inane question, but are you okay?”

  I cover my face with my gloves, pushing the woolen fingertips into the corners of my eyes. Stop crying. Stop crying.

  Alexander stutters. “Because it’s, you know it’s . . . okay if you’re not. It’s understandable if you’re not.”

  And that’s when I know that he knows about last summer. Of course he knows. How can he live in this town and not know?

  My stomach is a squid.

  “This is so bad” is all I can say, and I’m not even sure what I’m referring to exactly. Just . . . everything.

  A few seconds later, more footsteps. “Sweetheart?” Mom says, gently gripping my shoulders. I lower my hands from my eyes, and all I see is worry. Every inch of her is worry: every breath, every cell. And I feel even guiltier—because I have done this, too.

  Monster, a whisper says. Monster.

  “It’s . . . I’m fine,” I say. “Are we going home now?”

  “Yes, we’re going home.”

  The three of us wait by the Time Machine as Dad hauls the Christmas tree from the woods, branches swiping against the ground; it’s gathering snow and muck as it goes, like a prisoner being dragged through a public square. I can’t even look at Alexander. Not in the parking lot, not on the way home. Along Route 1, I stare out the window, at the snow fluttering between spruce trees; it reminds me of ghosts.

  July

  Octopuses Blush in a Dozen Hues

  You and I didn’t talk about it, Dylan. Maybe that was the worst part, how we went for almost a week without mentioning the tree house at all.

  But you’d held my hand, and that meant something.

  Didn’t it?

  I’d been waiting for the opportunity to get you one-on-one, away from swim lessons and charades and talking ketchup bottles in the mess hall. The opportunity came with a skunk.

  On the first of July, during the fourth weekly session of camp, there were screams in the woods.

  You and I were by the arts-and-crafts cabin, campers hanging off your arms like those plastic monkeys in a barrel. Our heads snapped toward the sound—and we ran. But you ran slightly faster.

  In a circle of spruce trees, there were three nine-year-old boys, scared stiff.

  And a skunk, with its tail up.

  “No,” I said, coming to a halt ten feet behind you. “No, no, Dylan, don’t move.”

  “It’s okay, Sawyer,” you said, inching closer to the skunk. “I’ve got it all under control.”

  But, well, you didn’t.

  Feeling threatened, the critter darted left, spun its hindquarters, and released a yellow spray that coated you from sneaker to torso.

  You said, “Holy mother of—”

  I’d only smelled skunks from the car window, as we passed them dead on the highway. This close, it was overwhelming. I started to retch. The boys continued screaming. The skunk laughed (or so I imagined) before retreating victoriously into the bayberry bushes.

  Nana and Mom raided the mess hall for extra cans of tomato soup and drew you a bath in the large soaking tub up
stairs.

  Half an hour later, I rapped on the door. “Are you . . . you know . . . ?”

  “Am I naked?” came from the bathroom.

  My heart did jumping jacks in its cage. “Um, yeah.”

  “Swim trunks,” was your response, and I creaked open the door, to where you were lounging up to your neck in soup. Obviously I pulled out my phone and snapped a photo.

  “Instagram,” I said.

  “Mean,” you said, a smile on your lips.

  Setting my phone on the vanity, I perched myself on the edge of the tub, careful to avoid any drips of tomato soup. “What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking that I could beat a skunk in a battle of wits. But it turns out, in the battle of man versus skunk, skunk won.”

  You paused, and here was my opportunity. Just ask, I thought. About holding my hand in the tree house. About Fern. I didn’t consider myself a coward, but what came out was: “I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned this, but you smell really bad.”

  The smile grew larger on your face. “Huh.”

  “It’s almost like you’ve been sprayed by the anal glands of a woodland animal.”

  “You know, if you get a little closer, it doesn’t really smell that—” As soon as I leaned in a millimeter, your arms emerged from the bath in a flash, quickly pulling me into the tub. Tomato soup soaked into the right half of my clothes, into my ponytail. Everything was slippery.

  I let out a shocked laugh. “You did not just do that.”

  When I tried to scramble up, you wrapped your arms around me until I was practically nestling against your bare chest.

  You said, “Drink in the scent, Sawyer. Drink. It. In.”

  “This is the worst moment of my life,” I replied, although it wasn’t even close.

  I prayed you didn’t feel my pulse fluttering like a sparrow trapped in the rafters of our barn.

  For three days afterward, I couldn’t stop smelling tomatoes. Tomatoes in my hair. Tomatoes under my fingernails. Even in the water—tomatoes. When I tried to scrub it off, it was just there, as ever-present as my feelings for you.

  No matter what, I had to ask why you held my hand.