The Sky Above Us

by Natalie Lund

  “Catholics don’t believe in reincarnation,” she says.

  “Well, we’re barely Catholic,” I say. “I’d call us Catholic-lite.” What I don’t say: Israel was definitely an atheist.

  “Dile a tu abuelo.” Tell that to your grandfather. Her father is one of our few relatives who still lives in Venezuela. He comes to stay with us for a month every few years, and, when he does, it’s Mass at the Cathedral Basilica twice a week.

  There are creases beneath my mother’s eyes that I’ve never seen before. They make her skin look brittle, like it might snap to pieces if she smiled. Not that she would.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I was thinking about how Israel would have that dream,” I say.

  She covers her face with her arm.

  “¿Recuerdas?” I prod.

  “I remember,” she answers, her voice muffled.

  Israel and I couldn’t have been more than four or five, belted in the back seat of my dad’s pickup truck. He was tracing the path of a rain droplet down the car window. I’m not sure why I remember that detail.

  “It was raining like this when I crashed,” he said casually—almost dreamily.

  “You crashed, Israel?” our mom responded from the front seat. She was applying makeup using the mirror on the back of the sun visor while we drove to some event. A birthday party? A baptism?

  “A long time ago,” he said. “I was getting medicine for my son, Peter.”

  My parents glanced at each other, and our mom turned around in her seat to face us; one eyelid was plain and the other had been shaded in blue. “What an imagination you have,” she said. My dad’s eyes kept flicking to the rearview mirror so he could see us. He has dark, expressive eyes like Israel’s, but in those short flashes, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  “We’ll be careful driving,” our mom said.

  “That’s what I told Lara,” Israel said. “My wife.”

  I don’t remember if the conversation continued, but I do remember his nightmares did. Back then we shared a walk-in closet my father had converted into a bedroom. In his dreams, Israel rolled back and forth like he was on fire, and mumbled nonsensically. Was it this Lara person he was talking to? Or his son, Peter?

  I’m guessing we didn’t have money or insurance for a shrink at the time, so my parents took him to see a friend who was a doctor on the mainland. They moved him onto the pull-out couch in the living room so he wouldn’t wake me anymore. But I could still feel his terror—sharp along my right side—as we were getting ready to go to bed. After the move, I’d wake spooning him on the couch with no memory of having gone to comfort him. Once we had our own rooms, he’d lock the door to keep me out, and I started waking up right outside—sleepwalking to be near him.

  It’s why Janie’s script got my attention last fall in film class. I’d picked her for our group because she’d told the class she wanted to be a screenwriter, and I thought she’d do most of the heavy lifting, leaving Cass and me to act. She surprised me by turning in a script about an old man who takes his granddaughter to the aquarium after his wife dies. The man sees an orca and believes the whale has been inhabited by his wife’s soul. He thinks he can tell her everything he always meant to say. In the final scene, the viewing room is black, the man a silhouette against the glass, the water on the other side a deep blue. The man splays his fingers against the glass. At first the orca is a distant dark shape in the tank, and then it swims toward the man, looming large, until the whale’s shadow swallows that of the man. And Fin.

  “How on earth are we supposed to film that?” Cass said, probably pissed because her grade was on the line. “Do you have a trained orca we can borrow?”

  Janie looked stunned, like the thought hadn’t even occurred to her.

  We ended up doing a basic drunk-driver-on-prom-night story, but Janie had hooked me. The script was far weirder and more interesting than anything else in the class—the kind of movie I loved. Plus it made me wonder if Janie knew something about whether this thing Israel experienced in his dreams was real. It was enough to motivate me to hang out with her here and there.

  “It gave me the chills,” my mom says, interrupting my thoughts. “How sure he was.”

  “But you didn’t believe him?”

  “The doctor said it was nightmares.”

  I’m not surprised my parents believed that their treasured son was simply afflicted by bad dreams. They also don’t believe in my twinsense, even though it’s gotten me into trouble for years.

  “Is your dad home?” she asks.

  I shrug.

  He made all the funeral arrangements and spent last night loudly directing the kitchen renovation of a beach house on the north side from the hallway outside our bedrooms. He’s one of the few contractors who anticipated the upswing in tourism, the shifting of our island from seventeen miles of cheap hotels to a rich Texan playground with shiny condos and beach mansions.

  “Why don’t you just stop?” my mom had called from the bedroom.

  “Mis clientes no viven aquí, Victoria,” he’d said. “They don’t know what happened.”

  “I envy them,” she’d said.

  And I do too. Since I was young, I tried to channel the way the tourists barreled into a place as though they owned it, and gave so little of themselves in return. Israel complained about the tourists like everyone else on our island. Of course, he seemed perfectly happy to live in our new house, drive around in his car, and play soccer—all paid for with money our father earned from tourists.

  Mom’s phone buzzes on the nightstand and she reaches over me to grab it. I can tell by the way she pinches the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger that it’s the police.

  “I see,” she says. “Have you learned anything from the instructor . . . ? Wait. What?”

  What do they want? I mouth.

  She shakes her head, but her jaw drops open and her eyes fill with tears.

  “I understand. . . . Okay. . . . I’ll be there in an hour.”

  She hangs up and clutches the phone to her chest, letting out a sound that is as much a birdcall as it is a sob.

  “What happened? What did they say?”

  “They—want—to—interview—me—again,” she says, each word punctuated by a wet heave.

  “That’s probably normal, right?” Honestly, I don’t know what’s normal but it’s not this. She answers with another shrieking sound. I feel like I should duck in case the room fills with feathers and beaks and wings.

  “Tell me what’s wrong, mami.”

  “They said—they are still trying to determine if it was an accident or—”

  Or if they were trying to become animals? I don’t say that aloud.

  “Suicidio.” She whispers the word.

  The crawling sensation intensifies, like my skin is shivering from the inside out. I bolt out of bed, wanting nothing more than to pull the blankets off her, to pry the pictures from the wall and shatter them on the floor, to roar like a lion over her bird noises. I don’t know if I’m mad at the police for suggesting it or at my mother for falling apart over it or at myself for not considering the possibility or at Israel for putting us all through this.

  Luna leans against my thigh. The weight—her solid bulk—helps. “It wasn’t,” I say. “It couldn’t be.” If he was dead, for real, I’d know. And if it wasn’t a death, then it wasn’t a suicide. Simple.

  “Do you know that?” my mom wails. “Because I don’t.”

  “I know him.” It’s a lie, but I stalk out, Luna eager at my side, and slam the door on my mom’s hothouse of grief. In the hallway, I can’t stop it: the crawling in my throat, under my eyelids, down my forearms. I scratch furiously at my skin, leaving pink tracks from my nails.

  Luna heads for the stairs, back to her hunt. She’s right not to stop.

&nbs
p; I won’t either.

  I pull my phone out of my pocket and text Janie. She has given me plenty of car rides since the project, so maybe she won’t think it’s too weird if I ask her to take me out in her dad’s boat.

  I will find the dolphins again, up close. I will confirm that Israel is out there. That there’s some logical explanation for all of this. There has to be.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CASS

  Two days after

  EACH TIME I start to fall asleep, I feel his arms around me, and it’s so familiar—the tightness, the pressure, the way he folds me into him—that I sit up, certain he’s in the room. Then I have to confront the truth—again and again—that he isn’t. That my brain is missing someone into existence.

  I pick up my phone to distract myself but immediately remember why I deleted all those apps. I turned off the notifications for my text threads, too, but I still check for messages from Izzy. We haven’t talked since we stood together on the seawall and sobbed.

  You awake? I text.

  She doesn’t answer, though I doubt she’s asleep. Her energy can be manic—especially when she’s upset. I’d be surprised if she wasn’t stalking up and down the island, power walking like the middle-aged women at dawn.

  When gray light eventually peeks through my curtains, I climb out of bed to start some coffee. I turn on the kitchen TV and keep the volume low. The local news is about to start. There’s a teaser about the crash with video of the plane being drawn out of the water. Then a clip of a man in a cheap suit at a podium responding to reporter questions.

  “At this stage we cannot determine if they died by suicide,” the man says.

  My heart thuds in my ears, and I realize I’m holding the screen, gripping the hard plastic edges and tilting it toward me, like you’d hold someone’s face. It’s a commercial now. A chipper voice lists all the cars in stock while a red-and-white banner screaming SALE flashes across the screen. It’s replaced by an insurance commercial with a calm, fatherly man telling you to protect your loved ones. When the news returns, the anchors smile warmly, but their smiles drop almost immediately. The plane is up first.

  The screen goes black.

  “You should stay away from the news right now, love.” My mom puts down the remote. “You have to protect your heart above all else.” It’s something she says often: how the heart is a precious resource to be guarded.

  She’s wrapped in her robe, and she pulls me into a fuzzy hug. I’m much taller than her now, and there’s something about the height difference that makes me feel like I should be more mature than I am, that I should need her less. My chin is on top of her head like I’m the one comforting her.

  “Do you think they—” I can’t get the words died by suicide out, but she hugs me tighter, like she understands.

  “I don’t know,” she says softly. She pushes me away from her so she can look up at my face. “I know it’s hard, Cassie, but you should go express your condolences to his parents in person. I can go with you if you want.”

  Tammy and Travis opened their home to me on countless occasions. I spent summers swimming in their pool, dinners at their table, and movie nights on their couch. I have no idea what Shane or his sister, Meg, told them about our breakup, but Mom is right. At the very least, I owe them a visit.

  Mom pulls a box of brownie mix from the cabinet. It was Shane’s favorite and the only kind we keep around—dark chocolate with chocolate chips.

  “It might help,” she says, but it doesn’t. The smell of chocolate feels like his arms around me all over again.

  * * *

  • • •

  As the brownies cool, I hear the familiar ring of Skype on my laptop down the hall. It can only be my dad, who is stationed in Hawaii now. He was raised in Louisiana and enlisted in the navy right out of high school. When my parents met, my dad was at a base in Texas and my mom was living nearby with her parents. He got deployed abroad not long after I was born. Since then, he’s been stationed several other places—Florida, Bahrain, California, Virginia, El Salvador—and we’ve never followed him. My mom said she kept us on the island because she’d grown up a navy brat herself and knew how moving every few years could feel for a kid.

  Izzy, though, thinks there’s another reason. Who doesn’t put family first? People who aren’t a family anymore, that’s who. It’s brutal, but that’s Izzy, and I’m not saying she’s wrong. When my dad visits us or we visit him, my parents are affectionate and lovey for the first few days. By the end they’re squabbling like roommates. Mom seems relieved when the visit ends. If I ask her about it, she swears up and down that they’re fine, that the fighting is part of getting used to each other again. She is honest with me to a fault, but I’m not convinced she’s very honest with herself.

  “Mom!” I yell. “Did you tell him to call?” She’s always trying to force us to talk more. She feels guilty he’s not in my life enough—not that he couldn’t make more of an effort too.

  “Of course!” she calls back.

  I groan but jog to my room to answer the laptop. “Hi, Papa.” He is hunched over his own computer, too tall and broad for the frame. The walls behind him are blank, sterile like a hospital’s.

  “Hi, Cassie, cher.” Even after years away, his New Orleans accent is thick. “Your mama told me what happened.”

  “Yeah.” I stare at myself in the tiny corner video. I look washed-out, like crying has drained me of blood and sleeplessness has bruised me.

  The image of him turns pixelated and his voice stutters. “Shane was a goo-goo-good boy,” he says. “Real good.” My dad always emphasized how boyish Shane was. On the phone call after our breakup, he said I’d be able to find a real man when I was ready to find a real man. My mom and I left out the part about me cheating on Shane. He would think it wasn’t behavior befitting nice girls. And you’re a nice girl, ain’tcha, Cassie?

  “Yeah, he was good,” I say, trying not to burst into tears at the past tense: was. I’m not sure why I feel the need to be stoic for my dad. Because we don’t show strangers our grief?

  “Pass along my condolences to his folks, won’tcha?”

  “I will.”

  My mom steps into the frame behind me. “Bernard, maybe it’s time for a trip home.” I have a feeling they’ve talked about this recently—argued, probably—and my mom thinks he won’t be able to say no if I’m on camera looking like I’ve been drained of all life.

  “Kitty—”

  “Your daughter needs you.”

  It’s like I’m not there, seated right between her and the screen. “Mom, I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine, Cass,” she says, her hand on my back.

  “Don’t speak for me,” I say sharply, though of course she’s right. I’m not fine. I don’t think fine will be a word I use to describe myself ever again.

  I slip out of the chair. “I’m gonna go see his parents now.”

  “I’ll come with,” my mom says.

  “No, I need to do this alone. You two finish”—I wave at the computer—“whatever this is.”

  It’s the first time I’ve been to Shane’s house in weeks, and it feels as automatic as ever, as though I’ll climb the stairs to their wraparound deck, open the always unlocked front door, shout a hello to his parents, and then head up to his bedroom and find him on the bed, listening to music.

  But there are cars I don’t recognize in the driveway—one that has dash lights and looks like an unmarked police vehicle. The house blinds are down. The door, I’m sure, is locked.

  When I muster enough bravery to ring the doorbell, I hear voices and the soft tread of bare feet. There’s a pause; someone has seen me and is deciding whether or not to open the door.

  It’s Meg who finally swings it open. We were on the volleyball team together before she graduated. She’s athletic and tall like Shane—onl
y an inch shorter than me—with Shane’s same thin, straight hair. Without makeup and with her hair back, her face looks like his too: a high, flat forehead and broad cheekbones. His ears protruded like he was a character in a child’s drawings, but hers are as delicate as seashells.

  Behind her, there’s a voice I don’t recognize and can’t make out. Her dad’s voice booms back.

  “It has to at least be negligence,” he’s saying. “Teenagers shouldn’t be able to just take a plane.”

  Meg glances back before stepping onto the deck and allowing the screen door to shut behind her.

  “What do you want?”

  “Oh, I, um, I just wanted to offer my condolences to your parents.” I hold out the brownies.

  “They’re busy, and I doubt they want to see you.”

  It feels like a playground pinch—something small enough to swat away but big enough to bruise. “Can you just please tell them I’m here?”

  “No, I know what they’ll say, and I’d prefer to protect them from any further pain.”

  This feels like a blow to my temple, but I get it. “Okay. Listen, Meg, I’m so, so sorry for your loss. Shane was—”

  “I don’t need you to tell me anything about Shane. I’ve known him his whole life.”

  “Okay.” I push the brownies toward her hands. For a moment I think that she won’t take them, that I’ll either have to return home with the brownies or allow the plate to shatter on the deck. Who, I wonder, would pick up the shards?

  But she reaches for them. Mom says people can feel intent, that sometimes you need to exude all the positive energy you can and will it into the space around you. In the few seconds both of our hands are on the plate, I hope Meg feels how much I love him, how we are united by the fact that we’ll both remember him for as long as we can.