On returning to my bedroom after The Great Orange Massacre hoping to sew for a bit, I find Noah squatting over the bag I left on the floor, flipping through a sketchpad that had been tucked safely inside the bag only moments before. Instant payback from the universe for going through Guillermo’s papers?
“Noah? What’re you doing?”
He jumps up, exclaims, “Oh! Hey! Nothing!” Then proceeds to put his hands on his waist only to move them to his pockets, then back to his waist. “I was just . . . nothing. Sorry.” He laughs too loud, then claps his hands together.
“Why are you going through my stuff?”
“Wasn’t . . .” He laughs again, well, more like whinnies. “I mean, I guess I was.” He looks at the window like he wants to jump out of it.
“But why?” I ask, giggling a little myself—he hasn’t acted like such a certifiable weirdo in forever.
He smiles at me as if he heard me thinking. It does something wonderful inside my chest. “Guess I just wanted to see what you were working on.”
“Really?” I ask, surprised.
“Yup,” he says, shifting back and forth on his feet. “Yeah.”
“Okay.” I hear the eagerness in my voice.
He gestures toward the pad. “I saw the sketches of Mom. Are you doing some kind of sculpture of her?”
“Yes,” I say, excited by his curiosity, not caring at all about the sketchpad spying—how often did I used to do the same to him? “But those studies in there aren’t even close to being finished. I just started them last night.”
“Clay?” he asks.
A sudden powerful how-dare-I-talk-to-him-about-my-artwork feeling is overtaking me, but it’s been so long since we’ve connected about anything, so I go on. “Not clay, stone,” I tell him. “Marble, granite, don’t know yet. I’m working with this totally cool sculptor now. He’s amazing, Noah.” I walk over and pick the pad up off the floor. Holding it in front of both of us, I point to the most completed sketch, a frontal view. “I was thinking of doing it realistic. Not at all bulbous-y like usual. I want it to be elegant, a little willowy, but wild somehow too, you know, like her. I want people to see the wind in her hair, in her clothes—oh, it’ll be a Floating Dress for sure, but only we’ll get that. I hope, well, you know how she used to stand on the deck every—” I stop because he’s taken a phone out of his pocket. It must’ve vibrated. “Hey dude,” he says, and then starts talking about some trail-run and mileage and other cross-country mumbo jumbo. He makes an apologetic face at me like it’s going to be a while and leaves the room.
I tiptoe to the door, wanting to hear him talk to his friend. Sometimes I stand outside his room when he and Heather are hanging out and listen to them gossip, laugh, be goofy. A few times on weekends, I’ve sat reading by the front door, thinking they might ask me to go with them on one of their zoo trips or after-running pancake extravaganzas, but they never do.
Halfway down the hallway, Noah abruptly stops talking mid-sentence and puts the phone back into his pocket. Wait. So he faked the call and was pretend-talking to no one just to get away from me? Just to stop me blathering on like that? My throat constricts.
We’re never going to be okay. We’re never going to be us again.
I walk over to the window, flip the shade so I can see the ocean.
I stare it down.
There are times when surfing where you’ll take on a wave only to realize the bottom’s dropped out of it and so suddenly without warning you’re free-falling down the entire face.
It feels like this.