The Sky Above Us

by Natalie Lund

  Through my dad, she invited me to visit her at her new apartment back in Maryland, but I refused that, too. My dad only half-heartedly tried to convince me. I think it gave him some satisfaction that I’d cut my mother out so completely after she’d walked away.

  I didn’t speak to my mom for an entire year after that. It was a year of punching walls in my new school. Of glaring from lonely corners of the cafeteria. Of sleepless nights that left me delirious, unsure what was a dream and what was real. Of ignoring a counselor who advised me to hit pillows and silent scream, as though that could somehow stitch me closed.

  I think that first year on the island is part of the reason I have so few friends now.

  Nate was my only companion that year. Being with him felt like a vacation from the real world. After school we’d collect sea glass, eat taffy until our teeth were gummed up, poke dead man-o’-wars with sticks, and watch for dolphins. He never asked about my mother, or my outbursts at school. He pretended, simply, that we didn’t attend the same school, that he never saw me in the hallways. The aching hole inside me was happy to be filled—if only a little—by this conditional friendship.

  And I destroyed even that.

  Somehow I make it to the hospital nearly a mile away, but my dad’s Camry isn’t there. Maybe his surgery is finished, and he’s parked at one of the ice houses. I try Seashells first, and then Landry’s. Each stop brings me a nearly empty parking lot and a Sorry, kid.

  I sit on a curb next to Landry’s dumpster, sipping from the handle. My stomach bucks and reels, but I swallow more, force it down. And when it comes up, I let it burn all the way up my nose.

  The handle is light enough now that I can lift it over my head and chuck it across the parking lot. It shatters and I want it to relieve some of the pain, but it doesn’t feel any better than punching pillows. All it does is earn me the attention of a security guard in a small golf cart, and I’m forced to leave, to wander our island utterly alone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CASS

  The afternoon of

  I DON’T REMEMBER much about the trip home from the beach. I know my mom forced me into the shower because I wake in bed with my hair braided, my eyes burning as though I cried myself to sleep. I pull off the hair ties to loosen the pressure behind my ears. She always makes the braids too tight.

  My laptop faces me from my desk. It’s open, the screen dark. Before the party, I’d been making a spreadsheet, listing the application requirements for each school. They were ranked, my dream schools in green, my next preferred in yellow, and least preferred in orange. Today I’d planned to start my personal statement. I was going to write about chemistry—the field I’ve always wanted to study and the kind between people: me and Izzy; my mom and dad; me and Shane. How bonds form and split. I won’t be writing that essay anymore. Right now I can’t imagine writing anything again.

  I check my phone and have over one hundred notifications—texts, messages, posts, and tags.

  Thinking of you, Cass. <3 <3 <3

  We miss you, Shane, Nate, and Israel. #flying @casswithsass_49 @Izyoureal_02 @dancer_in_a_box @mels_meows

  How could you?

  The last was from Shane’s older sister, Meg, and I have no response. She’s right, of course. How could I break his heart? How could I show up at the party last night when I knew he’d be there? How could I sleep half the day after I saw them pull him from the ocean?

  A cry erupts from my mouth. I press and hold on each social media app to delete them and then chuck my phone across the room.

  My bedroom door swings open and my mom is there. She wraps her hands around my head and holds me to her belly, like she wants me to go back inside.

  “Oh, Cassie,” my mom says. “Sweetie, I’m so sorry.”

  “Can I see him?” The words don’t sound like they’re supposed to, but she understands.

  “I don’t know, honey,” she says, grasping me again. “Sometimes, the family doesn’t want to have an open casket. It depends on how—” She stops herself.

  The memory of the plane plummeting into the ocean shudders through me. That crash of water. Izzy’s scream. I sob a wobbling, anguished “Mom.”

  She rocks me and makes a shushing noise. I can tell she’s crying now too, by the way her stomach heaves against my ears. My mom has so much empathy that she’ll cry simply because you are crying. When I finally told her about why we broke up, she kept saying, “Poor Shane. Poor you.” She’s the only one who thought “Poor me,” I’m sure.

  I’ve known Shane since we were in diapers. In seventh grade, he started walking me home every day, ignoring Izzy, who’d lean out the bus windows, screeching: How’s your pet Shane? Does he realize his knuckles are dragging? But Shane didn’t ever seem to hear. He’d turn down this street and that, unconcerned about which direction we were headed. While the rest of us had our hackles up like street dogs, Shane could laugh off a teacher accusing him of cheating, his sister letting him take the fall for her weed, a goal scored on him during an important game, my protective best friend’s jabs. And he could make me laugh too.

  It was his idea to sneak into the beach houses they were building on the southern end of the island and play house—even if we were too old for it. Each of them could fit two or three of my mom’s condos inside, and it was fun to imagine they were all mine. Shane pretended to be my chef, making dishes he’d seen on TV cooking shows: scallops with pea puree, red snapper with lemon pepper and salt, brisket with coffee BBQ sauce. Back then he had the confidence to be anything, anyone. And I broke that.

  I groveled across the cafeteria. I groveled up his driveway. I sorried up and down the whole seventeen miles of our island. But I would have said sorry again. And another time after that. And again and again if that’s what Shane needed to fly further, climb higher.

  My fingernails are digging into my palm. I’m my fists. Balled and tight.

  My phone vibrates on the carpet near my closet. Mom retrieves it and looks at the screen. “It’s Izzy,” she says softly.

  I grab it from her and answer. “Iz?”

  “Cass, meet me at the Kroger.” She hangs up without another word.

  “I have to go. I need to borrow the car.” I’m already out of bed, scrambling to put on clothes. I pull my jeans over my pajama shorts and zip up a hoodie even though it’s hot out. I want to be covered, to have bulk and substance.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Cassandra.” My mom has always been wary of Izzy because of her sharp edges, but she doesn’t get to see how fiercely loyal the girl is.

  “She needs me.” I meet her eyes when I say this, try to appeal to her endless well of empathy. “Izzy has got to be feeling ten times worse than me.”

  “This is not a grief competition. She feels heartbroken. You feel heartbroken. There’s no need to measure your grief against hers.”

  She’s right, of course. Measuring grief is impossible, but what you can measure, what I’ve already started to measure, is guilt. It had to be me, the reason Shane was so determined in the firelight? The reason he fell from the sky?

  REMEMBERED SOULS FORUM

  GULF COAST

  ElGranZambini: In my last life, I was a blue heron. I didn’t know I was a blue heron at the time, but I’ve looked at plenty of bird books, and I know that’s what I must’ve been.

  I remember having this feeling that I was at home in the swamp, and that this particular tree was mine.

  One day I dropped from my tree to snap up water bugs when I saw the two humps of a gator’s eyes breaking the surface of the swamp. It set my wings to beating, but I was too late. Those things can jump, let me tell you. The jaws closed on my leg, like when you slam the car door on your finger. That’s the last thing I remember: the sharp clamp of teeth and fighting for the sky.

  Anyone else remember being an animal?

&
nbsp; LittleLambo: I think I may have been a plant or a tree. I don’t remember sights or sounds like you, but I do remember warmth and vibrations that felt like they were inside me, like I was buzzing from the inside out. There was a ticklish feeling too, like the kind that sends goose bumps all up and down your body. At the end, though, there was a sharp, screaming feeling, like being torn in two.

  AlphaHOU: I was a whale. The day I died, I was following the coast north to the bays where I was born. I knew I’d been on that route before, that the path was carved in my brain.

  I couldn’t keep up with the pod, though they were mine—children and children’s children and even further down the tree. I called out in our language, long and mournful followed by a fast chitter. My first daughter answered. She floated in the distance, waiting for me. The sun cut through the water, illuminating the black slick of her head, the white streaks above her eyes, the gray saddle patch we all share.

  I knew that it was my time—knew it as well as I knew the water around me, the path before me. I called to her again, and while I can’t put human words to what was communicated between us, I like to think that I told her I was going to be okay. That she should go on without me and lead our pod, as I probably did when my own mother finally allowed herself to sink, to settle onto the ocean floor, to become food for all the tiny creatures that surrounded us.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ISRAEL

  Thirty-one days before

  ISRAEL’S ALARM BUZZED at six a.m. He rubbed his burning eyes. His dream had first woken him up an hour before, bathed in sweat and croaking, like he’d been trying to shout. It had taken a while for his heart rate to slow and the adrenaline to drain enough for him to doze off again. Just in time to wake up for his early-bird class.

  Sometimes he didn’t remember a single thing from the dream. He only knew he’d had it from the way he’d been dragged into the waking world gasping like a fish out of water. Sometimes he remembered all of it: the pavement, shimmering where slick. The slip of the tires. A woman, whose mouth made an O, in the oncoming car. The agonizing pain in his right leg, the nothing feeling of his left. The black smoke billowing from what used to be the hood of his car. Sirens. The shouts from outside the car. Someone calling for jaws of life. The heat from flames. Frantically tugging at a seat belt that wouldn’t let go. Someone saying hold on. Trying to hold on by thinking of his wife, Lara, and son, Peter, who was in need of medicine. And when he, Israel, finally woke up, he had the haunting feeling that the person he’d been in the dream hadn’t.

  His pit bull, Luna, thumped the bed with her tail. Her wet nose burrowed under the covers and found his hand. He scratched her ear and threw his legs over the side of the bed. His whole body ached like he’d been to the gym.

  He had to be at school by 7:05 a.m. for early-bird AP Econ. He needed those weighted GPAs if he was going to make it to the top 10 percent of his class like his parents wanted, so he’d signed up for every AP class he could fit into his schedule. Freshman Israel had really screwed over now-junior Israel with all those Cs. Hell, two years ago, Israel hadn’t even thought about college. He was just a nervous, quiet kid who’d started hanging around Shane—the sun of the school—because if you were in Shane’s glow, you were seen and golden.

  Back in freshman year, it was Shane who’d said so casually, You should try out for soccer. Israel had played in a few recreational leagues as a kid, but he’d never played traveling like Shane and Nate. Still, Israel made junior varsity, along with Shane. Nate, who had talent and a soccer player’s compact yet muscular frame, made varsity. Their school was small, so JV and varsity practiced at the same time and played games back-to-back. Each evening, Israel sat across from Nate and Shane on the team bus, talking instead of doing the next day’s homework, which was why he’d had all those Cs.

  Israel opened his door, bracing himself to find Izzy there, which she often was unless she’d already put herself back to bed. Sure enough, his sister was curled into a ball, her bony knees drawn to her chest. At the sound of the door, her face scrunched and one brown eye popped open to peer up at him. She uncurled, stretching out like a starfish before pushing herself into a sitting position against the doorframe. Her hair, which she usually straightened, was limp.

  “You’re in the way.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” she said, yawning as though she wasn’t actually sorry.

  He stepped over her knees and slammed the bathroom door behind him. It irritated him that, on top of everything else, his distress and pain called her to him—even when they were both asleep. The whole twinsense thing made him feel like she was draped on him like a scarf. A wet, woolen scarf knitted by your abuela who doesn’t remember you live in Texas, where you can drink the air it’s so humid.

  He wet a comb and tried to work it through his hair, which was the sort of texture that humidity made look both greasy and frizzy. He plucked a few hairs from between his brows and rubbed shaving cream onto his cheeks. He wasn’t nearly as vain as Izzy, but he had to spend almost as much time in front of the mirror just to battle back the hair that sprang from his ears, his nostrils, and practically every part of his face.

  As he was rinsing off, he caught a whiff of coffee and heard the scrape of a kitchen chair downstairs. His father would be sitting, crossing one ankle onto the opposite knee to lace up his work boots. Usually their dad was gone by sunup, and Israel only saw him in the short sliver of time between dinner and his father’s early bedtime—even less now that Israel often ate dinner with his friends. Israel missed his dad, but lately every conversation with him had turned to his plan for Israel’s future: he’d go to college, intern in New York, and then start a job in the financial industry. His dad imagined him in slim-cut suits and mirror-glass high-rises.

  “It’s a different kind of money,” he always said when Israel pointed out that their family had plenty of money now. Israel understood what his father meant, that this other kind of money came with security and respect—the kind of respect a small island contractor would never earn, no matter how many houses he built for rich people. The kind of money that didn’t take your body to make it.

  But Israel wasn’t sure what he wanted for himself.

  “Buenos días,” he said as he descended the stairs, Luna on his heels. No response. “Buenos días,” he repeated, louder; his dad’s hearing was starting to go.

  “Buenos días, mijo.” He smiled at Israel, a chipped-tooth grin crowned by a mustache. Israel had chased that smile as a boy, trying every antic from marching in his mother’s heels to singing songs he’d heard on the playground.

  Jingle bells

  Batman smells

  Robin laid an egg

  It was hard to get noticed when your dad worked at all hours and your twin plowed through life like a hurricane.

  Israel let Luna out as his dad brushed his thinning salt-and-pepper hair forward with his palm and settled a baseball cap on his head. He was aging poorly, and noticing it made Israel’s chest ache as though he were short of breath. His dad’s shoulders—always so square and lifted—were starting to cave inward. His skin was that of a much older man: thick and dimpled like an orange rind. There was a slight tremor to his hands as he fixed his hat. Only his thick brush of a mustache remained the same.

  “Need help after practice?” Israel asked, though he knew the answer.

  His dad shook his head. “My father didn’t move us here so his grandson could one day work construction.”

  “He didn’t move here so you could work construction either,” Israel said.

  “That’s why I’m the jefe now.” His dad stood and poured coffee into a thermos. He took a mug down from a cabinet and poured Israel only half a cup. “Porque todavía estás creciendo.” Because you’re still growing. It was sweet to be cared for like he was that little boy who thought smiles were the gold at the end of a rainbow.

  “I don
’t want you to get stuck, Israel, just because business is good now. It won’t always be,” his dad said. “And there are bigger things to think of.”

  Here it was. The conversation about his future. Again.

  “How are your grades? Only a couple weeks left.”

  “They’re good. I think I’ll get straight As if I nail finals.”

  His father beamed, and Israel couldn’t help smiling back. He wanted to go to college and achieve this dream for his dad—for both of his parents. But lately, between the exhaustion from his dreams and the pressure of trying to improve his GPA, he’d been feeling as thin as tissue paper. He carefully patched and pasted together the self that he brought to school, that played soccer, that he allowed his parents to see, but one breath of wind or drop of rain, and he was sure he would tear apart.

  “How about you take a Saturday off? Make mandocas like old times. You look like you could use a rest,” Israel said. When they were little and it was too rainy for their dad to work, they’d wake to him mixing the dough, rolling and shaping it into individual teardrops, dropping them into hot oil, and serving them with a freshly squeezed lime drink called papelón con limón.

  “Your sister doesn’t eat those anymore. Tiene miedo de engordar.” He patted the slight paunch of his own stomach and laughed. “Plus, I’ll rest when I’m dead.” It was his favorite Americanism.