Very in Pieces

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “Never mind.”

  I pick up the packet again and turn back to the hope poem.

  “Hope” is the thing with feathers—

  That perches in the soul—

  And sings the tune without the words—

  And never stops—at all—

  God, that stupid bird. Would it just shut up already? (But in my mind I’m picturing a tiny boat, rocking itself loose at sea.)

  “You’re not easy to get to know,” he tells me. It feels like an insult. Or a promise. Both, really.

  “You’re not giving me much choice,” I reply.

  “I can go,” he says. He stands up and I’m eye level with the hips of his worn-in jeans.

  “I’ll see you around, then,” I say. I’m just as bad as that bird.

  “Sure you will.” He grins again and strides off into the parking lot, where he gets into a beat-up black sedan and drives away.

  I’m trying to figure out why he needed me to drive him to campus if he has his own car when Ramona appears. “You’re late.”

  “So shoot me.”

  “I could just leave you here, you know. Teach you a lesson.”

  That makes her grin. “Do what you have to do.” Then she just stands there looking at me like she thinks I might actually leave her behind.

  ii.

  I ease the car into my parking spot in the driveway. As the engine noise dies down, Ramona coughs.

  “Yes?” I ask.

  “What?” she demands.

  “Did you want to say something?”

  “It was just a cough. God.” She coughs again as if I’m unclear on the concept.

  “Sorry, Your Phlegminess. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  Her hair is in a bun, and she lets it down as she gets out of the car, like Rapunzel unraveling her tresses. I wonder if Dominic was telling the truth with that whole lettuce thing. It seems so absurd, but I guess most fairy tales are. I mean, a glass slipper that fits only one woman in the whole town—not to mention the impracticality of dancing in a shoe made of glass. I’m glad Dominic didn’t bring that one up. I know the original story there, with the stepsisters cutting off their toes and all that gruesome stuff. Or the Little Mermaid walking on shards of glass. Then again, Rapunzel is just about the only fairy tale I can think of where the prince gets punished.

  I shove my door open and I’m striding toward the house when I see something glinting on the garage, just around the corner from the doors. I walk around to the side of the garage, and about five feet up is a bottle cap jammed into the stucco. It’s silver and bright like a beacon. My mind is cycling through possibilities. It fell out of the recycle bin and somehow bounced up there? The wind? Then I see that there’s not just one, but many, spotting the outside wall of the house. They fan out from that first silver one I saw, just a few close to it, but more and more as they move along the wall, maybe fifty in all. It looks like a spray pattern, but not so even. Like someone had a jar full of them and threw them at the wall and they just stuck. The twist-off tops are flat and perfectly round, but the ones you need an opener for are bent and scratched. Some are faceup, showing their brands to the world, but others are bottom up, their sharp teeth like mouths ready to bite. By far the most prevalent are the orange caps of Moxie soda, Nonnie’s favorite.

  “What the hell,” I mutter. I pick at the shiny one, but it holds fast. It’s not just shoved in, it’s glued.

  I look over my shoulder at Ramona, who is watching me. “There are bottle caps. On the house.”

  “Yes,” she replies, matter-of-factly. And I’m not sure if she’s so blasé because she’s so far divorced from reality that she thinks bottle caps attached to the house are perfectly normal. I mean, she is wearing that same Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt, right side out, with a cardigan that covers the offending cigarette, and a pair of jeans, even though it’s in the seventies. And she’s standing on one foot. So maybe in whatever new reality Ramona has constructed for herself, bottle caps on buildings are just the way things are done.

  “Go get Mom,” I tell her.

  I use my fingernail to pick at a cap from a bottle of Moxie just to test again that they are really, truly stuck, and it holds.

  Ramona steps forward. “I don’t think they’re going to come off.”

  “It looks like they used hot glue,” I agree.

  She peers closely. “Maybe. Or some sort of caulking.”

  “Why would someone glue bottle caps to our house?” I ask.

  “Why do people do any number of things?”

  If you were going to go through life with the attitude that people’s actions couldn’t be explained—well, it’s exasperating to think about. I just accept that she’s not going to go in and get Mom, so I do it myself. Inside, I find my mother sitting at the kitchen table, working on the New York Times crossword puzzle. She looks up and says, “Good day?”

  “Sure. Listen, have you—”

  “I need your help with this one: mathematics branch that deals with limits.” She taps her pencil on the paper. “Eight letters.”

  “Calculus.”

  “That works! This is why we have children, to complete the Times puzzle.”

  “Have you seen the bottle caps?” I ask.

  “Bottle caps?” she echoes.

  “On the garage? Glued there?”

  Mom throws down her newspaper. Once outside, she bends over and tries to pry off a cap, just as I had. “Those little shits,” she mutters. She says it like she knows specifically which shits are responsible.

  “You know who did this?”

  “It has to be one of Imogene’s fans. There’s that poem”—she waves her hand in the air—“about the bottles never being with their caps?”

  “‘Detritus’?” I suggest.

  “Nonnie has a poem about bottle caps?” Ramona asks.

  “About all sorts of garbage—the things we throw away,” Mom says with another wave of her hand. “‘Piling up, spilling toward entropy, where only dirt can grow.’ And there’s that section about how nothing ever matches up, and how the bottles can never find their caps.” She steps forward and rubs her hand over the bottle caps. “This is vandalism. This is trash on our house. How do they even know she’s sick?”

  Nonnie hasn’t wanted us to tell anyone. She just wants to disappear one day.

  “I’m sure it can be fixed,” I say, stepping toward my mother.

  She rakes her hand through her hair. “That’s not the point.”

  “It could be a coincidence,” Ramona says. “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with her. Or maybe Nonnie would like it,” she offers, wiping her hands on her jeans.

  “All our life people have—” Mom shakes her head. “This isn’t the tribute Nonnie wants.”

  “It’s just a little thing,” Ramona says. “Don’t be upset.”

  “How the hell did they get them to stick to stone?” Mom mutters.

  “It looks like hot glue to me, but Ramona thinks it’s caulking,” I say. “Either way, we’ll have to take them off carefully, or we could ruin the stucco.”

  “This is going to make the resale value plummet.” Mom looks heavenward, as if an answer might come from above. “You think we can get it off? We’ll hire someone. I’m not messing up the house for a bunch of crazy wannabes. What are they even thinking? Imogene would never vandalize someone else’s property. Not someone’s private property, anyway, not unless she had some political motivation for it, and what motivation would there be for putting bottle caps on our house? You know I believe in free expression, but this isn’t art or politics or creativity.”

  “Maybe—” Ramona begins, but Mom pivots on her heel and goes back inside the house. “I’m going up to my studio,” she calls over her shoulder, as if the destruction has inspired her to be creative.

  “Wait,” I call after her. She hesitates before turning back to me. “What do you mean about the resale value?” I ask.

  “Once Nonnie’s gone, what is there to
tie us to this place?” She’s looking at the ground at my feet, not at me.

  “Well,” I begin, but she doesn’t let me say anything.

  “We’ll sell this place, get something more reasonable. Maybe a condo in Portsmouth, that’s almost like a city.”

  “But that’s a different school,” I say, then bite my lip. Nonnie will survive through this school year. She has to.

  “I’m sure we can work something out if you really want to stay at Essex High School. You know I moved my senior year and I survived.”

  “But you hated it.”

  “Yes. I hated it here.”

  I can tell the conversation is over. Ramona has been watching us like a Ping-Pong match, and now she starts slowly retreating. Mom spins and heads again toward the house. Her mind is not on the bottle caps, but on oils and brushes in her locked studio.

  I stay outside in the warm afternoon air. The sky is dotted with big, white puffy clouds—like something out of a child’s drawing. As one of them moves across the sun, the light hits the bottle caps just so and makes them look like they are moving. Like the wall is alive.

  I turn to say something to Ramona, to point it out to her, but she is gone.

  iii.

  I had to explain it three times to Britta on the phone, and then she finally said, “I’m coming over. Call Grace and tell her I’ll pick her up.”

  Now we all stand and stare at the side wall of the garage. The big oak tree casts a shadow on the house, and the bottle caps have lost their shine.

  “So someone snuck up to your house and glued them on?” Britta asks. “You realize that’s creepy, don’t you?”

  “You have no sense of adventure.” Grace squats down and looks at the ground as if there might be more bottle caps there.

  Britta inspects the wall more closely. “I wonder who would do something like this. I mean, to sneak up here and put bottle caps on your house, either the person is crazy, or it’s personal.”

  “My mom thinks it’s a message to Nonnie. Because of her ‘Detritus’ poem.”

  “Right, of course,” Britta says. “It’s like all the lost caps are showing up here.”

  “She’s not too happy about it. My mom, I mean.”

  “What does Nonnie think?” Britta asks.

  “I haven’t told her yet.”

  “We should tell her now,” Britta says.

  “I think she’s sleeping.”

  Britta has always been nervous around Nonnie, even when we were younger. It’s like just hearing that Nonnie was a poet—a writer of books—made Britta’s mind reel, and she always mumbles and bumbles around Nonnie, which Nonnie both loves and hates.

  Grace hops up. “What we need to do is have a stakeout. I mean, clearly that’s the proper course of action here.”

  “Where are we going to stake out?” Britta asks.

  “Very’s house, of course. We can hide out back behind the garage there. We’ll take turns sleeping. We’ll need binoculars. I’ve already started looking for clues, and I can say with some assurance that the perpetrator left no footprints.”

  “On the paved driveway?” Britta asks.

  “Correct. You know, I’m realizing that on cop shows, there’s an awful lot of soft dirt ground for the criminals to leave their rare and unusual footprints in.” She regards her own shoes, sparkling Converse that she purchased in the children’s department of Target. “You know, maybe Nonnie did it herself.”

  “That is a ridiculous idea,” Britta says. “Imogene Woodruff would not have stuck bottle caps onto her own house.”

  It would not have been such a ridiculous idea if it weren’t for the fact that Nonnie couldn’t get up and down the stairs to her room by herself. We tried to move her into the main house, but she refused.

  Grace is undeterred. “Maybe she’s trying to tell you something, or leave a message for when she’s gone. It could be hints that will lead you to some big discovery. Like maybe it will reveal who your mother’s father was. Oh! Or maybe your grandmother, like, arranged for all of this, like, what’s that book? The Westing Game? And she’s left you your inheritance to find.”

  “Stop,” Britta says. “Slow down. Okay, now let’s step back onto the conveyor belt of reality.”

  “I don’t like conveyor belts. Like those moving walkways—I’m always afraid I’m going to get sucked down into them somehow. Escalators, too.”

  “I don’t think a stakeout is the best idea,” I tell them. “We don’t know if whoever did this is going to come back, and anyway in the dark we might not see them.”

  “Fine,” Grace sighs.

  “Very’s right. We need a more organized approach. If we could figure out what they are trying to say, then we could maybe figure out who would want to say it,” Britta suggests.

  “Dude, we are totally like Nancy Drew,” Grace says.

  “You are not Nancy,” Britta tells her.

  “Why not? Because I’m Chinese?”

  Britta sighs. “No. Because this is Very’s house. And Very’s grandmother.”

  “Nancy Drew solved crimes at other people’s houses.”

  “Nancy had Ned Nickerson, who’s an awful lot like Christian.”

  “Fine,” Grace says. “But then I’m being George. I’m not going to be wimpy-ass Bess.”

  “All right,” Britta says. “When you’re done being twelve, we need to help Very figure this out.”

  “You know,” Grace says, tucking her arm through Britta’s, “some people thought that George and Bess were a lesbian couple.”

  “You wish,” Britta replies, and laughs. “Focus on the details. We’ll figure this out. We’re smart girls.”

  Smart girls, all right, but those bottle caps glinting in the sun were not about to give up any secrets.

  iv.

  “Bottle caps?” Nonnie asks. “On the house?”

  “Glued there, I think.” I’m holding a bottle of pink nail polish, my toes spread out, and I’m trying not to slip and paint my skin.

  “Just right on the stucco?”

  “Yep. Scattered around. I don’t see any pattern. All different kinds, too, but mostly Moxie.”

  “How strange,” she says. I can tell she is pleased. The Moxie is the clue: this is in her honor.

  “Mom’s pissed.”

  “Livid,” Nonnie corrects. “Or irritated. Affronted, perhaps. But surely she is neither drunk nor urinating on the house.” She pauses. “Well, certainly not urinating.”

  “Livid,” I choose. I’ve done the right side, and now it’s time to put the second coat on the left.

  “Do mine,” she says.

  “Your what?”

  “My toes,” she says. “Though pink is not my first choice. Have you got any other colors?”

  I shake my head.

  “Pink, then.” She sits up and throws the covers off her legs. She’s still wearing her trademark black narrow pants. She folds her body in half to peel her socks off her feet and when she moves like this—graceful as a bird—it’s hard to believe she’s so ill.

  Her skin is white with lines of sharp blue like rivers through ice. Her toenails have a yellow hue. “Ghastly,” she says, shaking her head.

  “They’re the most beautiful feet I’ve ever seen,” I tell her.

  She carefully repositions her body so her feet are at the edge of the bed. I begin with her right foot. I cup the heel in one hand as I paint the toes. The pink looks like cotton candy next to her pale, pale skin.

  “Did I ever tell you about the young film director?” she asks. “The one who wanted to cast me in his movie.”

  Her foot twitches and I paint a bit on her toe, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Such a bad boy he thought he was. I told him Rebel without a Cause had already been made so he might as well just go curl up and die.” She laughs. I think of Dominic in his jeans and black Doc Martens. I can’t imagine telling him to just go curl up and die. He would probably laugh and tell me I was funny again. “Are you
sure you don’t have any other colors? Red, perhaps? Or orange? My skin did always look nice with a touch of orange nearby.”

  “I’ve got six different shades of pink, Nonnie. What can I say?”

  “The first thing I’ll do when I can get out of this bed is go get you some red nail polish. Red nail polish and red lipstick. Every girl should know the precise shade of red lipstick that’s right for her face. If you have red lips, you don’t need any other makeup. Especially with eyes like yours.”

  “Red lipstick is garish.” I want to tell her that she can get out of this bed, can go downstairs. I’ll even drive her into town. We still need to make that appointment for a haircut. But I know that she means something more than just getting out of bed, something bigger, something that just isn’t going to happen.

  “Don’t try to distract me with perfect words. This pink makes me feel like a little girl. And not in a good way.”

  “Next time I’ll bring fuchsia. Other foot.”

  She lifts her other foot and I hold it in my hand. She has a small bruise under the nail of her big toe. It’s black and more solid-looking than the mottled green-and-blue one on my face. She gets bruises so easily now because of one of her medications.

  “As I was saying, the film director. He used to paint my toenails for me. I think he had a bit of a foot fetish, though of course I never said anything about that to him.”

  This was unlike her, not to name a thing. “Why not?”

  “Why, he might have stopped painting my nails. He was quite good at it. In fact, I’d wager he enjoyed it more than the other thing we did together.”

  Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

  “Nonnie.”

  “You are seventeen; your prudishness alarms me. At any rate, all I’m saying is that I wouldn’t be surprised if his interests lay elsewhere, as it were. His rebelliousness could have been a front he put up to hide his homosexuality.”

  “Nonnie, just because a man likes nail polish doesn’t make him gay.”

  “No. But not enjoying sex with a woman is quite the clue.”

  I drop the brush back into the bottle. “Done.”

  Nonnie tilts her head back and looks at the job I’ve done. “Thank you. Of course it’s not as good a job as the James Dean impostor did, but I’ll forgive you.”