The next morning, I do not go up on the roof at dawn because I’m not leaving my bedroom until Brian’s back at boarding school three thousand miles from here. It’s only seven weeks away. I’ll drink the plant water if I get thirsty. I’m lying on the bed staring at a print on the ceiling of Munch’s The Scream, an off-the-hook painting I wish I made of a guy blowing a gasket.
Like I am.
Jude and Mom are bickering on the other side of the wall. It’s getting loud. I think she hates Mom even more than she hates me now.
Mom: You’ll have plenty of time to be twenty-five when you’re twenty-five, Jude.
Jude: It’s just lipstick.
Mom: Lipstick you’re not wearing, and while I’m on your bad side, that skirt is way too short.
Jude: Do you like it? I made it.
Mom: Well, you should’ve made more of it. Look in the mirror. Do you really want to be that girl?
Jude: Who else am I going to be? For the record, that girl in the mirror is me!
Mom: It’s really scaring me how wild you’re getting. I don’t recognize you.
Jude: Well, I don’t recognize you either, Mother.
Mom has been acting a little strange. I’ve noticed things too. Like how she sits lobotomized at red lights long after they turn green and doesn’t hit the gas until everyone starts honking at her. Or how she says she’s working in her office, but spying reveals that she’s really going through boxes of old photographs she got down from the attic.
And there are horses galloping inside her now. I can hear them.
Today, she and Jude are going to the city together for a mother-daughter day to see if it can make them get along. Not a good start. Dad used to try to get me to go to ball games when they did this, but he doesn’t bother anymore, not since I spent a whole football game facing the crowd instead of the field, sketching faces on napkins. Or maybe it was a baseball game?
Baseball. The Ax. The Axhat.
Jude rapid-fire knocks, doesn’t wait for me to say come in, just swings open the door. I guess Mom won, because she’s lipstick-free and wearing a colorful sundress that goes to her knees, one of Grandma’s designs. She looks like a peacock tail. Her hair is calm, a placid yellow lake around her.
“You’re home for once.” She seems genuinely happy to see me. She leans against the doorframe. “If Brian and I were drowning, who’d you save first?”
“You,” I tell her, glad she didn’t ask me this yesterday.
“Dad and me?”
“Please. You.”
“Mom and me?”
I pause, then say, “You.”
“You paused.”
“I didn’t pause.”
“You so did, but it’s okay. I deserve it. Ask me.”
“Mom or me?”
“You, Noah. I’d always save you first.” Her eyes are clear blue skies. “Even though you almost beheaded me the other night.” She grins. “It’s okay. I admit it. I’ve been awful, huh?”
“Totally rabid.”
She makes an eye-bulging crazy face that cracks me up even in my mood. “You know,” she says, “those girls are okay but they’re so normal. It’s boring.” She does a goofy, fake ballerina leap across the room, lands on the bed, and shoulders up to me. I close my eyes. “Been a while,” she whispers.
“So long.”
We breathe and breathe and breathe together. She takes my hand and I think how otters sleep floating on their backs in water, holding hands exactly like this, so they don’t drift apart in the night.
After a while, she picks up her fist. I do the same.
“One two three,” we say at the same time.
Rock/Rock
Scissors/Scissors
Rock/Rock
Paper/Paper
Scissors/Scissors
“Yes!” she cries. “We still got it, yes we do!” She jumps to her feet. “We can watch the Animal Channel tonight. Or a movie? You can pick.”
“Okay.”
“I want to—”
“Me too,” I reply, knowing what she was going to say. I want to be us again too.
(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Brother and Sister on a Seesaw, Blindfolded)
She smiles, touches my arm. “Don’t be sad.” She says it so warmly, it makes the air change color. “It came right through the wall last night.” This was worse when we were younger. If one cried, the other cried even if we were on different sides of Lost Cove. I didn’t think it happened anymore.
“I’m fine,” I say.
She nods. “See you tonight then if Mom and I don’t kill each other.” She gives a salute and is off.
I don’t know how this can be but it can: A painting is both exactly the same and entirely different every single time you look at it. That’s the way it is between Jude and me now.