Instead, I go to church. And when I return to the studio an hour or so later, all’s quiet. I spent my time with Mr. Gable trying not to be a compassionate person. Trying not to think about a scared grieving boy in a tough leather jacket. Wasn’t too hard. I sat in the pew, the same one I was in when Oscar and I met, and repeated the mantra: Come here, sit on my lap, ad infinitum.
Guillermo greets me in the mailroom with safety goggles on his head. There’s nothing in his expression to indicate he’s recently taken a circular saw to Oscar. He does look different, though. His black hair’s powdered with dust like Ben Franklin. And a large paisley scarf, also dusted with white powder, is wrapped a few times around his neck. Has he been carving? I glance up at the loft—no sign of Oscar. He must’ve left. Not surprising. Guillermo sure wasn’t holding back on the tough love. I can’t even remember the last time Dad went at Noah or me like that. I can’t remember the last time Dad was really a dad.
“I was afraid we scare you away,” Guillermo says, examining me a little too closely. The examining and the “we” make me wonder what Oscar might’ve told him. And that makes me wonder if what I overheard before might’ve had something to do with me. “Oscore say you leave very upset yesterday.”
I shrug, feeling heat in my face. “It’s not like I wasn’t warned.”
He nods. “If only the heart listen to reason, right?” He puts an arm around me. “C’mon, what is bad for the heart is good for art. The terrible irony of our lives as artists.” Our lives as artists. I smile at him and he squeezes my shoulder the way I’ve seen him squeeze Oscar’s, and instantly, my mood brightens. How did I ever find this guy? How did I get so lucky?
When I pass the stone angel, I reach out my hand and touch hers.
“The rocks call me back,” he says, brushing dust off his smock. “I am outside with you today.” I notice how dingy and graying his smock is, like all the others that hang on hooks around the studio. I should make him a better one, a colorful one that suits him. A Floating Smock.
When we pass by, I see that the clay man survived yesterday’s battery, more than survived. He’s no longer huddled and defeated but unfurling like a frond. He’s finished, drying, and beautiful.
“So I look at your practice rock and model last night,” Guillermo says. “I think you are ready for some electricity. You have a lot of stone to remove before you can even begin to find the brother and sister, understand? This afternoon I teach you to use the power tools. With these you must be so, so careful. The chisel, like life, allows for second chances. With the saws and drills, often there is no second chance.”
I stop walking. “You believe that? About second chances? In life, I mean.” I know I sound like an Oprah episode, but I want to know. Because to me, life feels more like realizing you’re on the wrong train barreling off in the wrong direction and there’s nothing you can do about it.
“Of course, why not? Even God, he have to make the world twice.” His hands take to the air. “He make the first world, decide it is a very terrible world he made, so he destroy with the flood. Then he try again, start it all over with—”
“With Noah,” I say, finishing his sentence.
“Yes, so if God can have two tries, why not us? Or three or three hundred tries.” He laughs under his breath. “You will see, only with the diamond blade circular saw do you have one chance.” He strokes his chin. “But even then sometimes you make a catastrophic mistake, you think I am going to kill myself because the sculpture is ruined, but in the end it come out more incredible than had you not made the mistake. This is why I love the rocks. When I sculpt with clay, it feel like cheating. It is too easy. It has no will of its own. The rocks are formidable. They stand up to you. It is a fair fight. Sometimes you win. Sometimes they win. Sometimes when they win, you win.”
Outside, sunlight has gathered from all corners of the earth. It’s a gorgeous day.
I watch Guillermo climb the ladder up to the female giant’s head. He pauses for a moment, pressing his forehead to her massive stone one, before rising above her. Then he lowers the safety goggles, lifts his scarf to cover his mouth—oh, I see, he’s too cool for a face mask—picks up the diamond blade circular saw that’s resting on top of the ladder, and wraps the cord around his shoulder. A loud jack-hammer-like noise fills the air, quickly followed by the shriek of granite, as Guillermo, without any hesitation, takes his one chance and slices into Dearest’s head, and then is lost in a cloud of dust.
It’s crowded in the yard today. In addition to Guillermo and the unfinished couple, The Three (extremely frightening) Brothers, and me, there’s Oscar’s motorcycle, for some reason. Also, Grandma and Mom are at the ready, I sense it. And I keep thinking someone’s watching me from the fire escape, but each time I look up, there’s only Frida Kahlo basking in the sun.
I forget everything else and work on freeing NoahandJude.
Slowly I chip, chip, chip away at the stone, and as I do, like yesterday, time begins to rewind, and I start to think and can’t stop thinking about things I don’t normally let myself think about, like how I wasn’t home when Mom left that afternoon to reconcile with Dad. I wasn’t there to hear her say that we were going to be a family again.
I wasn’t there because I’d run off with Zephyr.
I think about how she died believing I hated her because that’s all I’d been telling her since she kicked Dad out. Since before that.
I drive the chisel into a groove and hit it hard with the hammer, taking off a big chunk of rock, then another. Had I been at home that afternoon and not with Zephyr raining down bad luck, I know everything would’ve been different.
I take off another hunk, a whole corner, and the force of the hit sprays granules onto my goggles, into my exposed cheeks. I do it again on the other side, hit after hit, the misses bloodying my fingers, hitting and missing, hacking away at the stone, at my fingers, and then I’m remembering the moment Dad told me about the accident and how I threw my hands over Noah’s ears to protect him from what I was hearing. My first reaction. Not over my own ears but over Noah’s. I’d forgotten I’d done that. How could I have forgotten that?
What happened to that instinct to protect him? Where’d it go?
I take the hammer and crush it into the chisel.
I have to get him out of here.
I have to get both of us out of this fucking rock.
I slam into the stone again and again, remembering how Noah’s grief filled the whole house, every corner, every crevice. How there was no room left for mine or Dad’s. Maybe that’s why Dad started walking, to find some place where Noah’s heartbreak didn’t reach. I’d see Noah all curled up in his room and when I’d try to comfort him, he’d tell me how I didn’t understand. How I didn’t know Mom like he did. How I couldn’t possibly comprehend what he was feeling. Like I hadn’t just lost my mother too! How could he have said those things to me? I’m beating on the stone now, taking off more and more rock. Because I couldn’t believe he was hogging her in death, just like he had in life. Making me believe I had no right to grieve, to miss her, to love her, like he did. And the thing is I believed him. Maybe that’s why I never cried. I didn’t feel entitled to.
Then he threw himself off Devil’s Drop and almost drowned that day, almost died, and my anger toward him got wild and thrashing, monstrous and dangerous.
So maybe you’re right, I yell at Mom and Grandma in my mind. Maybe that’s why I did it.
I’m pounding on the stone now, cracking into it, opening it all up.
Opening it all up.
Noah’s application to CSA had been sitting on the kitchen counter radiating genius since the week before Mom died. He and Mom had sealed the envelope together for luck. They didn’t know I was watching from the door.
Three weeks after Mom’s accident, a week after Noah jumped off the cliff, the night before the CSA application was due, I wrote the application essays, stapled them to a couple dress patterns, added two sample dresses. What else did I have to submit? My sand women had all washed away.
Dad drove us to the post office to mail off the applications. We couldn’t find a parking spot so Dad and Noah waited in the car while I went in. That’s when I did it. I just did it.
I only mailed mine.
I took from my brother the thing he wanted most in the world. What kind of person does that?
Not that it matters, but I went back to the post office the next day, ran all the way there, but the garbage had been emptied. All his dreams got taken out with the trash. Mine went straight to CSA.
I kept telling myself I would tell Noah and Dad. I would tell them at breakfast, after school, at dinner, tomorrow, on Wednesday. I would tell Noah in time so he could reapply, but I didn’t. I was so ashamed—the kind that feels like suffocating—and the longer I waited, the more the shame grew and the more impossible it got to admit what I’d done. Guilt grew too, like a disease, like every disease. There weren’t enough diseases in Dad’s library. Days kept passing, then weeks, and then, it was too late. I was too scared if I confessed, I’d lose Dad and Noah forever, too cowardly to face it, to fix it, to make it right.
This is why my mother destroys everything I make. This is why she can’t forgive me.
When CSA announced the freshmen class on their website, his name wasn’t on the list. Mine was. When my acceptance letter came, I waited for him to ask about his rejection letter, but he didn’t. He’d already destroyed all his artwork by then. And sometime before this, he must’ve sent in pictures of my sand sculptures and gotten me in.
The world has gone dark. Guillermo’s standing in front of me blocking the sun. He takes the hammer and chisel out of my hands, which have long ago stopped carving. He takes off his scarf, shakes it out, and wipes the stripe of brow between my hat and goggles. “I don’t think you are okay,” he says. “Sometimes you work the stone, sometimes the stone works you. I think today the rock win.”
I slip down my face mask, and say, “So this is what you meant when you said what slumbers in here”—I touch my chest—“slumbers in here.” I touch the rock.
“This is what I meant,” he says. “I think we have a coffee?”
“No,” I say quickly. “I mean, thank you, but I need to keep working.”
And that’s what I do. I work for hours, obsessively, frenetically, unable to stop cutting into the stone, Grandma and Mom chanting at me with every hit: You crushed his dreams. You crushed his dreams. You crushed his dreams. Until for the first time since she died, Mom materializes and is standing before me, her hair a blaze of black fire, her eyes damning me.
“And you crushed mine!” I yell at her in my head before she vanishes again into thin air.
Because isn’t that also true. Isn’t it? Over and over again, day after day, all I wanted was for her to see me, to really see me. Not to forget me at the museum, like I didn’t exist, and go home without me. Not to call off a contest, certain of my failure, before she even looked at my drawings. Not to keep reaching inside me to turn down the light while at the same time reaching into Noah to turn his to full brightness. Always as if I were nothing but some stupid slutty girl named that girl. Invisible to her in every other way!
But what if I don’t need her permission, her approval, her praise to be who I want to be and do what I love? What if I’m in charge of my own damn light switch?
I put down the tools, take off the goggles, the mask, the plastic suit. I peel off my hat and toss it on the table. I’m so sick of being invisible. Sunshine tosses its giddy greedy fingers through my hair. Off comes my sweatshirt and I have arms again. The breeze welcomes them, skidding over the surface of my skin, raising hair after hair, tingling, awakening every exposed inch of me. What if my reasons for not sending Noah’s application had more to do with Mom and me than it did him and me?
To awaken your spirit, throw a stone into your
reflection in still water
(I never believed Noah and I shared a soul, that mine was half a tree with its leaves on fire, like he said. I never felt like my soul was something that could be seen. It felt like motion, like taking off, like swimming toward the horizon or diving off a cliff or making flying women out of sand, out of anything.)
I close my eyes for a moment and then it’s as if I’ve woken from the deepest slumber, as if someone has extricated me from granite. Because I realize: It doesn’t matter if Noah hates me, if he never forgives me. It doesn’t matter if I lose him and Dad forever. It just doesn’t. I have to uncrush his dream. That’s all that matters.
I go into the studio and climb the stairs to Oscar’s room, where there’s a computer. I turn it on, log onto my account, and write an email to Sandy at CSA asking if we can meet before school on Wednesday, the first day back after break. I tell him it’s urgent and that my brother will be coming to the meeting too with a painting portfolio that will blow his mind.
I’m going to give up my spot. It’s what I should’ve done every single day for the last two years.
I press SEND and the feeling is unmistakable: I’m free.
I’m me.
I text Noah: We need to talk. It’s important! Because he better get painting. He has four days to put a portfolio together. I lean back in the chair, feeling like I’ve emerged from the darkest cave into bountiful blinding sunlight. Only then do I look around the loft. At Oscar’s bed, his books, his shirts. Disappointment takes hold of me—but there’s nothing to do about it. The coward in the tough leather jacket has made it very clear how he feels about the coward in the invisibility uniform.
As I get up to leave, I spot Guillermo’s note that I gave Oscar on the bedside table by the photograph of his mother. I take it with me downstairs, and once I put it back in the notepad in Guillermo’s cyclone room where it belongs, I go outside and ask him to teach me how to use the diamond blade circular saw. He does.
It’s time for second chances. It’s time to remake the world.
Knowing I only have one shot to get it right with this tool, I wrap the cord around my shoulder, position the circular saw between Noah’s shoulder and my own, and turn on the power. The tool roars to life. My whole body vibrates with electricity as I split the rock in two.
So that NoahandJude becomes Noah and Jude.
“You kill them?” Guillermo says in disbelief.
“No, I saved them.”
Finally.