There’s no way I’m going back into the studio where bloody ferocious Guillermo is beating up on an innocent clay man or out on the patio where bloody ferocious Grandma and Mom are wanting to beat up on me, so I head upstairs. I know Oscar’s gone because I heard his motorcycle peel away over an hour ago.
The loft’s smaller than I’d imagined. Just a guy’s bedroom really. There are nails and thumbtack holes all over the walls where pictures and posters have been removed. The bookshelves have been ransacked. Only a few shirts hang in the closet. There’s a table with a computer and some kind of printer, maybe for photos. A desk. I walk over to the unmade bed, where he was hoping to dream about his mother earlier today.
It’s a tangle of brown sheets, one lone swirl of a Mexican blanket, a sad flat pillow in a faded pillowcase. A lonely-looking boy bed. I can’t help it; despite warnings and ghosts and shaky boycotts and cataclysmic girl-destroying exhalations, I lie down, rest my head on Oscar’s pillow, and breathe in the faint scent of him: peppery, sunny, wonderful.
Oscar does not smell like death.
I cover myself to the shoulders with his blanket and close my eyes, seeing his face, the desperate way it looked today when he told me what happened with his mother. He was so alone in that story. I breathe him in, all cocooned up in the place he dreams, tenderness crushing into me. And I understand why he shut down like that. Of course I do.
Opening my eyes, I see that on the bedside table, there’s a framed picture of a woman with long gray hair in a floppy white hat. She’s seated in a chair in a garden, a drink in her hand. There’s sweat on the glass. Her face is leathery from the sun and jam-packed with Oscar. She’s laughing and I somehow know she had the same breezy laugh he does.
“Forgive him,” I say to his mother, sitting up. I touch her face with my finger. “He needs you to forgive him already.”
She doesn’t answer. Unlike my dead relatives. Speaking of which, what happened to me outside? Like taking a chisel to my own psyche. That counselor said ghosts—she used finger quotes around the word—are often manifestations of a guilty conscience. Check. Or sometimes of a deep inner longing. Check. She said the heart overcomes the mind. Hope or fear overcomes reason.
After a loved one dies, you must cover every mirror in the house
so the spirit of the departed can rise—otherwise they will be stuck
forever among the living
(I’ve never told anyone this, but when Mom died, not only didn’t
I cover the mirrors, I went to the drugstore and bought dozens
of pocket ones. I left them all over the house, wanting her spirit
to get stuck with us, wanting it so bad.)
I don’t know if I make up the ghosts or not, I only know I don’t want to think about what they just said to me, so I start perusing the titles of books stacked by Oscar’s bed. Mostly art history, some religion, novels. There’s an essay sticking out of one of the books. I remove it. It’s titled “The Ecstatic Impulse of the Artist,” and in the corner of the page it says:
Oscar Ralph
Professor Hendricks
AH 105
Lost Cove University
I hug the paper to my chest. My mother used to teach AH 105. It’s the introductory art history course for freshmen. Had she not died, she would’ve met Oscar, read this paper, graded it, talked to him during her office hours. She would’ve loved his topic: “The Ecstatic Impulse of the Artist.” It makes me think of Noah. He sure had an ecstatic impulse. It didn’t used to feel safe how much he could love a color or a squirrel or brushing his teeth even. I turn to the last page of the paper, where a big fat A is circled in red with the line: Entirely compelling argument, Mr. Ralph! It’s then that Oscar’s last name crashes into my consciousness. Oscar Ralph. Last name, first name, who cares? Oscar is Ralph! I found Ralph. I start to laugh. This is a sign. This is destiny. This is a miracle, Grandma! This is Clark Gable being very funny.
I get up, feeling worlds better—I found Ralph!—and peek over the railing of the loft to make sure Guillermo isn’t in the mailroom listening to me giggling up here all alone. Then I walk over to the desk because hanging on the chair is Oscar’s leather jacket. I reach in the pocket and . . . no note. Which means he got it. Which makes my stomach whirl.
I put on the jacket; it’s like climbing right into his arms and I’m luxuriating in its heavy embrace, its scent, when I glance down at the desk and see me. All over it. Photograph after photograph arranged in a row, some with yellow sticky notes on them, some not. The air starts to vibrate.
Above the whole thing on a yellow sticky note, it says: The Prophecy.
The first photo is of an empty pew in the church where we met. A sticky note on it says: She said I’d meet you in church. Granted, she probably said this so I’d go to church. I kept coming back to this one to photograph the empty pews.
The second photo is of me sitting in the same pew as the previous shot. The note says: Then one day they weren’t empty. Except I hardly recognize myself. I look, I don’t know, hopeful. And I don’t remember smiling at him like that at all. I don’t remember smiling at anyone like that in my whole life.
The next photo is also from that day. The sticky says: She said I’d know you right away because you’d glow like an angel. Yes, she was high as hell on pain meds, as was I—like I told you—but you glow. Look at you. I look at the me he saw through his camera and again I hardly recognize her. I see a girl looking very swoony. I don’t understand. I’d only met him moments before.
The third photo is of me, taken the same day but before I said he could take photos of me. He must’ve been stealth shooting. It’s the moment when I put my finger to my lips to shush him and my grin’s as law-breaking as his. The sticky says: She said you’d be a bit odd. He made a smiley face. Forgive me, don’t mean to offend, but you are bizarre.
Ha! He no offense, but–ed me, English-style.
It’s like his camera has found this other girl, one I wish I could be.
The next photo is of me taken today in the mailroom talking to Grandma Sweetwine, talking to no one. There’s no denying how completely empty the room is, how alone I am, how marooned. I swallow.
But the sticky note says: She said you would feel like family.
So he came up here to print photos and write these messages after he left me downstairs? He must’ve wanted to tell me these things even as he fled like his feet were on fire.
If you dream you’re taking a bath, you will fall in love
If you stumble going upstairs, you will fall in love
If you walk into someone’s room and find countless pictures of yourself with lovely notes attached to them, you will fall in love
I sit down, not quite believing any of this, that he might really like me too.
I pick up the last photo in the series. It’s of us kissing. Yes, kissing. He blurred out the background and added wild swirling color to everything around us so that we’re . . . exactly like the couple in the painting! How’d he do it? He must’ve used a photo he took of me kissing my hand and then manipulated one of himself into the image.
The sticky on this one reads: You asked what it would be like. This is what it would will be like. I don’t want to be just friends.
I don’t either.
Meeting your soul mate is like walking into a familiar house. I do recognize everything. I could find my way around in the dark. The bible rules.
I pick up the photograph of the kiss. I’m going to take it to La Lune and tell him I don’t want to be just friends either—
Then footsteps clomping up the steps, loud and hurried, mixed with laughter. I hear Oscar say, “Love when they overstaff. The extra helmet is right up here. And you can wear my jacket. It’s going to be cold on the bike.”
“So glad we finally get to hang out.” It’s a girl’s voice. Not Sophia’s from Transylvania either. Oh no, please. Something in my chest is collapsing. And I have about one second to make a decision. I choose the bad movie option, diving for the closet and shutting myself in before Oscar’s boots are stomping across the room. I do not like the way this girl said hang out. Not one bit. It was definitely code for hook up. Definitely code for kissing his lips, his closed eyelids, his scars, the tattoo of the beautiful blue horse.
Oscar: I could’ve sworn I left my jacket here.
Girl: Who’s she? She’s pretty.
Shuffling, shuffling. Is he sweeping the photos of me from sight?
Girl (voice tight): Is she your girlfriend?
Oscar: No, no. She’s nobody. It’s just a project for school.
Knife stab, center chest.
Girl: You sure? That’s a lot of pictures of one girl.
Oscar: Really, she’s nobody at all. Hey, come here. Sit on my lap.
Come here, sit on my lap?
Did I say knife? It’s an ice pick.
This time I’m certain no donuts are involved in the intimate sounds I’m hearing. This time I’m also certain I’m not misconstruing friendship for romance like I did with Sophia. I don’t understand. I don’t. How can the same guy who took those photos of me and wrote those notes to me be making out with another girl on the other side of this door? I hear him say the name Brooke in between heavy breaths. This is hell. This has to be karmic retribution for the last time I was in a closet I shouldn’t have been in.
I can’t stay in here.
Nobody-at-all pushes open the closet door. The girl springs out of Oscar’s lap like a crazed cat. She has long tumbling brown hair and almond-shaped eyes that are popping out of her head at the sight of me. She’s buttoning her shirt with frenzied fingers.
“CJ?” Oscar exclaims. There’s lipstick all over the bottom of his face. Again. “What’re you doing up here? In there?” Definitely a valid question. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the capacity for speech. And, I believe, for movement as well. I feel pinned to this awful moment like a dead insect. His eyes have landed on my chest. I realize I’m hugging the photograph of the kiss to me. “You saw,” he says.
“Nobody at all, huh?” the girl named Brooke says, picking up her bag from the floor and slinging it over her shoulder in preparation, it seems, for a quick, angry exit.
“Wait,” he says to her, but then his eyes dart back to me. “G.’s note?” he says, something dawning in his face. “You put it in my jacket?”
It hadn’t occurred to me he’d recognize Guillermo’s handwriting, but of course.
“What note?” I squeak out. Then I tell the girl, “I’m sorry. Really. I was just, oh I don’t know what I was doing in there, but there’s nothing between us. Nothing at all.” I find my legs are working enough to get me down the stairs.
I’m halfway across the mailroom when I hear Oscar from the stairs. “Check the other pockets.” I don’t turn around, just push down the hallway, through the door, then down the path, landing on the sidewalk, panting, sick to my stomach. I forge up the street on legs so weak and wobbly I can’t believe they’re carrying me. Then when I’m about a block away, throwing all dignity to the wind, I start checking the pockets of the jacket, finding nothing but a film canister, candy wrappers, a pen. Unless . . . I run my hands over the inside lining and there’s a zipper. I unzip it, reach in and pull out a piece of paper, carefully folded up. It looks like it’s been there a while. I open it. It’s a color copy of one of the photos of me in the church. The one with the law-breaking grin. He keeps me with him?
But wait. How can it matter? It can’t. It can’t matter if he chose to be with someone else anyway, to be with her right after writing those amazing notes to me, right after what happened between us on the floor of the jail cell room—not that I know what happened, but something did, something real, the laughing as well as the very intense rest of it when I had this sense there might be a key somewhere somehow that could set us both free. I really did.
And then: Nobody at all. And: Come here, sit on my lap.
I imagine him inhaling Brooke, inhaling girl after girl, like Guillermo said, like he’s done to me, so now he can exhale and blow me to smithereens.
I am so stupid.
They do make love stories for girls with black hearts after all. They go like this.
I’m not even a block away—the picture balled up in my hand—when I hear someone behind me. I turn around, certain that it’s Oscar, hating the fountaining of hope in my chest, only to find Noah: wild-eyed, unhinged, no padlocks anywhere on him, looking petrified, looking like he has something to tell me.
THE INVISIBLE MUSEUM
Noah
Ages 131/2–14
The day after Brian leaves for boarding school, I sneak into Jude’s room while she’s in the shower and see a chat on the computer.
Spaceboy: Thinking about you
Rapunzel: Me too
Spaceboy: Come here right this minute
Rapunzel: Haven’t perfected my teleporting
Spaceboy: I’ll get on it
I blow up the entire country. No one freaking notices.
They’re in love. Like black vultures. And termites. Yes, turtle doves and swans aren’t the only animals that mate for life. Ugly, toilet-licking termites and death-eating vultures do too.
How could she do this? How could he?
It’s like having explosives on board 24/7, the way I feel. I can’t believe when I touch things they don’t blow to bits. I can’t believe I was so way off.
I thought, I don’t know, I thought wrong.
So wrong.
I do what I can. I turn each of Jude’s doodles I find around the house into a murder scene. I use the most hideous deaths from her stupid How Would You Rather Die? game. A girl being shoved out a window, knifed, drowned, buried alive, strangled by her own hands. I spare no detail.
I also put slugs in her socks.
Dip her toothbrush in the toilet bowl. Every morning.
Pour white vinegar into the glass of water by her bed.
But the worst part is that for the few minutes every hour when I’m not psychopathic, I know that to be with Brian: I would give all ten fingers. I would give anything.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Rowing Madly Back Through Time)
A week passes. Two. The house gets so big it takes hours for me to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen and back, so big that even with binoculars, I can’t make out Jude across a table or room. I don’t think our paths will ever cross again. When she tries to talk to me over the miles and miles of betrayal between us, I put in ear buds like I’m listening to music, when really, the other end is attached to my hand in my pocket.
I never want to speak to her again and make this very clear. Her voice is static. She is static.
I keep thinking Mom will realize that we’re at war and act like the United Nations as she’s done in the past, but she doesn’t.
(PORTRAIT: Disappearing Mother)
Then one morning, I hear voices in the hallway: Dad talking to a girl who isn’t Jude, who I quickly realize is Heather. I’ve barely given a speck of brain space to her, even after what happened between us in the closet. That horrible lie of a kiss. I’m sorry, Heather, I say in my head as I pad silently over to the window, sorry, so sorry, as I lift it as quietly as possible. I climb out, falling to safety below the sill as I hear the knock on the door and Dad saying my name. It’s all I can think to do.
Halfway down the hill, a car peels by me and I want to stick out my thumb. Because I should hitchhike to Mexico or Rio like a real artist. Or to Connecticut. Yes. Just show up where Brian is in that dorm—in a shower full of wet naked guys. The thought comes out of nowhere and all the explosives on board detonate at once. It’s worse than thinking about him and Jude in the closet. And better. And much worse.
When I emerge out of the nuclear mushroom of this thinking, burnt to a crisp, I’m at CSA. My feet somehow got here on their own. Summer classes have been over for more than two weeks and lots of the students who board are returning. They look like highly functioning graffiti. I watch them lug suitcases and portfolios and boxes out of car trunks, hug parents who are peering at each other with eyes that say, Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I vacuum it all in. The girls with blue green red purple hair shrieking into each other’s arms. A couple of tall weedy guys leaning against a wall smoking and laughing and radiating cool. A ragtag group with dreads who look like they just tumbled out of a dryer. A guy walking past me with a mustache on one side of his face and a beard on the other. So awesome. They not only make art, they are art.
I remember then the conversation I had with the naked English guy at the party and decide to take my burnt remains on a recon mission to the inland flats of Lost Cove, where he said that barking mad sculptor had a studio.
Before too long, a few seconds later maybe—because trying not to think about Brian turns me into a superhuman speed-walker—I’m standing in front of 225 Day Street. It’s a big warehouse and the door’s half-open, but there’s no way I can walk on in, can I? No. I don’t even have my sketchpad. I want to, though, want to do something, have to do something. Like kiss Brian. The idea snags me and then I can’t get out of it. I totally should’ve tried. But what if he’d punched me? Cracked my head open with a meteorite? Oh, but what if he hadn’t? What if he’d kissed me back? Because I’d catch him staring at me sometimes when he didn’t think I was paying attention to him. I was always paying attention to him.
I blew it. I did. I should’ve kissed him. One kiss, then I could die. Well, wait, no freaking way, if I’m going to die, I want to do more than kiss. Way way more. I’m sweating. And hard. I sit on the sidewalk, try to breathe, just breathe.
I pick up a stone and toss it into the street, trying to mimic his bionic wrist movement and after three pathetic tries, my whole thinking flips over. There was an electric fence between us. He put it up. Kept it up. He wanted Courtney. And he wanted Jude from the first moment he saw her. I just didn’t want to believe it. He’s a popular douchebag jock who likes girls. He’s the red giant. I’m the yellow dwarf. The end.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Everyone Lives Happily Ever After Except for the Yellow Dwarf)
I shake it off, all of it. All that matters is the worlds I can make, not this toilet-licking one I have to live in. In the worlds I make, anything can happen. Anything. And if—when—I get into CSA I’ll learn how to make it all come out half as decent on paper as it is in my head.
I stand, suddenly realizing I could totally climb the fire escape that scales the side of the warehouse. It leads to a landing where there’s a bank of windows, which must look down on something. All I’d have to do is hop the outside fence without anyone seeing me. Well, why not? Jude and I used to sneak over tons of fences so we could visit various horses or cows or goats or a certain madrone tree we both married when we were five (Jude was also the minister).
I glance up and down the quiet street. See in the distance the back of an old-looking woman in a bright-colored dress . . . who actually may be floating. I blink—she’s still floating and it looks like she’s barefoot for some reason. She’s entering a small church. Whatever. Once she’s inside, I cross to the other side of the street, then easily and quickly monkey up and over the fence. I bolt down the alley, climb carefully up the stairs of the escape, trying not to creak the old metal, grateful there’s some kind of construction going on nearby to cover up any sound I may be making. I scoot across the landing and peer around the side of the building, realizing the ear-splitting sound I’m hearing is not coming from a construction site, but the courtyard below, where I believe the apocalypse has just occurred, because whoa: It’s the scene after the aliens have launched a chemical attack on Earth. All over the yard, there are rescue workers in hazmat suits and face masks and goggles, wielding power drills and circular saws, emerging from and disappearing into white billowing clouds as they attack hunks of rock. This is a stone studio? These are stone sculptors? What would Michelangelo think? I watch and watch and when the dust settles, I see that three massive pairs of eyes are boring into me.
My breath catches. From across the yard, three enormous stone men-monsters are staring at me.
And they’re breathing. I swear it.
My ex-sister Jude would freak. Mom too.
I need to get closer to them, I’m thinking, when a tall, dark-haired man walks out of the building through an entire wall that’s pulled halfway up like a garage door. He’s talking with some kind of accent into a phone. I watch him throw his head back in supreme happiness, like he’s hearing that he gets to choose the colors for all the sunsets from now on or that Brian’s waiting for him in his bedroom naked. He’s practically dancing around with the phone now, then he laughs a laugh so happy it blasts about a billion balloons into the air. This must be the barking mad artist and the scary-ass granite men-monsters across from me must be his barking mad art.
“Hurry,” he says, his voice as big as he is. “Hurry, my love.” Then he kisses two of his own fingers and touches the phone, before slipping it in his pocket. Total whale dork move, right? But not when he did it, trust me. Now he has his back to the courtyard and is facing a pillar, his forehead touching it. He’s smiling at the concrete like a total whack job, but I’m the only one who knows, due to my stellar vantage point. He looks like he would give all ten fingers too. After a few minutes, he pivots out of his delirium and I get the first clear shot of his face. His nose is like a capsized ship, his mouth the size of three, his jaw and cheekbones hefty as armor, and his eyes are iridescent. His face is a room overstuffed with massive furniture. I want to draw it immediately. I watch as he surveys the apocalyptic scene before him, then raises his arms like a conductor and in an instant every power tool goes silent.
As do the birds, the passing cars. In fact, I can’t hear a rustle of wind, the buzz of a fly, a word of conversation. I can’t hear anything. It’s like someone pressed mute on the whole world because this man is about to speak.
Is he God?
“I talk very much about bravery,” he says. “I say to you carving is not for cowards. Cowards stick to clay, yes?”
All the rescue workers laugh.
He pauses, swipes a matchstick on a column. It bursts into flame. “I tell you, you must take risks in my studio.” He finds a cigarette behind his ear and lights it. “I tell you not to be timid. I tell you to make the choices, make the mistakes, big, terrible, reckless mistakes, really screw it all up. I tell you it is the only way.”
An affirmative murmur.
“I say this, yes, but I still see so many of you afraid to cut in.” He begins to pace, slowly like a wolf, which is definitely his mirror animal. “I see what you are doing. When you leave yesterday, I go from work to work. You feel like Rambo maybe with the drills, the saws. You make lots of noise, lots of dust, but very few of you have found even this much”—he pinches two fingers together—“of your sculptures. Today this changes.”
He walks over to a short blond-haired girl. “May I, Melinda?”
“Please,” she says. I can see how much she’s blushing even from up here. She’s totally in love with him. I look at the faces of the others who have gathered around them and realize they all are, male and female both.
(PORTRAIT, LANDSCAPE: A Man on a Geographic Scale)
He takes a long drag on the cigarette, then tosses it barely smoked onto the ground and steps on it. He smiles at Melinda. “We find your woman, yes?”
He studies the clay model beside the large rock, then closes his eyes and combs the surface with his fingers. He does the same with the hunk of stone next to it, examining it with his hands while his eyes are closed. “Okay,” he says, taking a power drill off the table. I can feel the excitement of the students, as he, without any hesitation, plows straight into the rock. Before long, a dust cloud forms and I can’t see any more. I need to get closer. I mean really close. I think I need to live on this man’s shoulder like a parrot.
When the noise stops and the dust clears, all the students start clapping. There in the rock is the curved back of a woman identical to the one on the clay model. It’s unbelievable.
“Please,” he says. “Back to your own work.” He hands Melinda the drill. “You will find the rest of her now.”
He goes from student to student, sometimes not saying a thing, sometimes exploding into praise. “Yes!” he cries to one of them. “You did it. Look at that breast. The most beautiful breast I ever see!” The kid cracks up and the artist cuffs him on the head like a proud father might. It makes something pull in my chest.
To another student, he says, “Very good. Now it’s time to forget everything I just say. Now you go slow. So, so slow. You caress the stone. You make love to it but gently, gently, gently, understand? Use the chisels, nothing else. One wrong move and you ruin everything. No pressure.” Same head cuff for him.
When he seems to determine that no one needs him, he goes back inside. I follow him, walking to the other side of the landing where the windows are, standing to the side so I can see in without being seen. Inside, there are more rock giants. And on the far side of the studio, three naked women, with thin red scarves veiling their bodies, are modeling on a platform surrounded by a group of students sketching.
No naked English guy.
I watch the artist as he goes from student to student, standing behind each one and peering down at their work with a cold hard stare. I tense up as if he’s looking at my sketches. He’s not pleased. All at once, he claps his hands and everyone stops drawing. Through the window I hear muffled words as he becomes increasingly animated and his hands begin to glide around like Malaysian flying frogs. I want to know what he’s telling them. I need to know.
Finally, they resume drawing. He grabs a pencil and pad off a table and joins them, saying the following so loudly and with so much rocket fuel in his voice I hear it through the window, “Sketch like it matters, people. No time to waste, nothing to lose. We are remaking the world, nothing less, understand?”
Just like Mom says. And yes, I do understand. My heart is speeding. I totally understand.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Remakes World Before World Remakes Boy)
He sits down and begins sketching with the group. I’ve never seen anything like the way his hand races back and forth across the pad, the way his eyes seem to suck in every morsel of the models posing before him. My stomach’s in my throat as I try to figure out what he’s doing, as I study the way he holds the pencil, the way he is the pencil. I don’t even need to see his sketchpad to know the genius that’s on it.
Until this moment, I didn’t realize how badly I sucked. How far I have to go. I really might not get in to CSA. The Ouija Board was right.
I stumble down the fire escape, lightheaded, unsteady. In one split second I saw everything I could be, everything I want to be. And all that I’m not.
The sidewalk has risen up and I’m sliding down it. I’m not even fourteen, I tell myself. I have years and years to get good. But I bet Picasso was already hella good at my age. What have I been thinking? I totally freaking blow. I’m never going to get in to CSA. I’m so stuck in this toilet-licking conversation in my head, I almost fly past the red car parked out front that looks just like Mom’s car. But it couldn’t be. What in the world would she be doing all the way over here? I glance at the plates—it is Mom’s car. I swivel around. Not only is it Mom’s car, but Mom’s in it, bent over the passenger seat. What’s she doing?
I knock on the window.
She springs up, but doesn’t seem as surprised to see me as I am to see her. She doesn’t seem surprised at all, in fact.
She rolls down the window, says, “You scared me, honey.”
“What were you doing bent over like that?” I ask instead of the more obvious question: What are you doing here?
“I dropped something.” She looks strange. Her eyes are too bright. There’s sweat on her lip. And she’s dressed like a fortune-teller, with a glittery purple scarf around her neck and a yellow river of a dress with a red sash. On her wrists are color bangles. Except the times when she wears one of Grandma’s Floating Dresses, she usually dresses like a black-and-white movie, not a circus.
“What?” I ask.
“What what?” she asks back, confused.
“What did you drop?”
“Oh, my earring.”
Both her ears have earrings in them. She sees me see this. “Another earring, I wanted to change pairs.”
I nod, pretty sure she’s lying to me, pretty sure she saw me and was hiding from me and that’s why she didn’t seem surprised to see me. But why would she hide from me?
“Why?” I ask.
“Why what?”
“Why did you want to change pairs?”
We need a translator. I’ve never needed a translator with Mom before.
She sighs. “I don’t know, I just did. Get in, honey.” She says this like we had a plan all along for her to pick me up here. This is so weird.
On the way home, the car is a box of tension and I don’t know why. It takes me two blocks to ask her what she was doing in that part of town. She tells me there’s a very good dry cleaner on Day Street. And there are about five closer to our house, I don’t say. But she hears anyway because she explains further, “It was one of the dresses Grandma made for me. My favorite. I wanted to make sure it was in very good hands, the best hands, and this cleaner is the best.” I look for the pink receipt, which she usually clips to the dash. Not there. But maybe it’s in her purse? I guess this could be true.
It takes another two blocks for her to say what she should’ve said immediately. “You’re a long way from home.”
I tell her I went for a walk and ended up there, not wanting to tell her I hopped a fence, climbed a fire escape, and stalked some genius, who made it very clear she’s wrong about me and my talent.
She’s about to question me further, I can tell, but then her phone vibrates on her lap. She looks at the number and presses the button to ignore it. “Work,” she says, glancing my way. I’ve never known her to perspire like this. There are darkened circles in the yellow fabric under her arms like she’s a construction worker.
She squeezes my knee with her hand when we pass the CSA studio buildings, now so familiar to me. “Soon,” she says.
Then it all becomes clear. She followed me. She’s worried about me because I’ve been such a hermit crab. There’s no other explanation that makes sense. And she hid and lied to me about the dry cleaner because she didn’t want me to freak out about her spying on me and invading my privacy. I relax into this explanation.
Until she takes the second instead of the third left up the hill, and near the top, pulls into a driveway. I stare in disbelief as she gets out, saying, “Well, aren’t you coming in?” She’s almost to the door, keys in hand, when she realizes she’s on her way into some other house, where some other family lives.
(PORTRAIT: Mom Sleepwalking into Another Life)
“Where’s my head?” she says, when she gets back in the car. This could be funny, it should be, but it’s not. Something’s not right. I can feel it in every bone, but I don’t know what it is. She doesn’t start up the engine either. We stay in this other family’s driveway in silence, staring out at the ocean, where the sun has made its gleaming road to the horizon. It looks like there are stars on the water and I want to take a walk on it. It totally sucks that only Jesus gets to walk on water. I’m about to say this to Mom when I realize the car has filled up with the thickest, heaviest kind of sadness and it’s not mine. I had no idea she was so sad. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t noticed Jude and I have gotten a divorce.
“Mom?” I say, my throat suddenly so dry it comes out like a croak.
“Everything’s going to work out,” she says quickly, quietly, and starts the engine. “Don’t worry, honey.”
I think about all the horrible things that happened the last time someone told me not to worry, but nod, just the same.