Jonah
I don’t like running, but I do it any time Silas can be home in the morning. My feet plod along the sand. Really, it’s a fast-paced slog. I have an old iPod with shitty battery life, but it works. When running along the beach, I listen to metal. I used to hate the sound of all that screaming, but now it helps. It usually drowns out my thoughts, but not today.
Vivi has been by my side for almost two weeks now, but I needed to angst alone this morning. My worries woke me up early, pestering me like Leah on Christmas morning. I crept through rare silence in our dark house, left a note, then drove the car a few miles down the coast. I didn’t want to run in Verona Cove, down Main Street or along the beach path like I normally do. I needed to run in a place where memories don’t fill my peripheral vision, the ghosts of who we used to be watching me like marathon spectators.
I’m following a trail of questions down this long stretch of sand: What the hell are we going to do? Will Silas really defer college? Do I finally tell Felix that I think my mom needs real help? And my dad’s heart problem—I know it was genetic. Can I even get checked for that?
After my dad died, I looked up the most heart-healthy foods. Now I make oatmeal almost every morning for my brothers and sisters. They seem to understand that I have to do something. So I invent flavors to keep it interesting—peanut butter–banana oatmeal, maple syrup–walnut oatmeal, strawberry–powdered sugar oatmeal. When they demand pancakes as a change of pace, I use a recipe that includes oatmeal and chocolate chips. I’m not sure if shoving the maximum amount of oats down all my siblings’ throats is the best heart-health plan, but it’s better than nothing.
My dad was naturally big. Not round, but tall and wide. Vivi would say he was descended from redwoods. All of us kids have my mom’s build—medium height and lean. Naomi and I have my dad’s Sicilian dark hair and eyes. The rest of my siblings have the lighter coloring from my mom’s side. Ever since he died, I’ve been looking for my dad in Silas and Isaac, watching their faces for his nose, his expressions, his eye crinkles. Felix says I’m more like my dad every day, but I don’t see it.
Vivi relieves me of these thoughts. She lives in overdrive, and I have to work to keep up. It takes so much energy that I can’t concentrate on my own crappy life. She fills everything with new memories so that my life feels like more than “exactly like it was only minus my dad.” She makes me drive an hour to the nearest Target so we can ride the bikes up the aisles, and Leah can play with the bouncy balls until the manager asks us to leave. She writes a play with Isaac about an old-timey baker named Paunchy Paul and the many critters that sneak into his bakery late at night to eat his bread. In the one-night-only performance, Isaac played Paul, complete with our dad’s chef hat, a pillow stuffed down his shirt as a fat belly, and a mustache drawn with Vivi’s eye makeup. Vivi was costume director, lighting director, and Head Mouse. Bekah played a mouse in one scene and a raccoon in another; Leah played the squirrel that persuades Paul to bake them miniature breads stuffed with acorns. I baked bread to use as a prop, and Silas and Naomi whistled as they bowed. My mom didn’t come down. But the next morning, the littles reenacted their parts in her room. She laughed at their silly happiness until she cried. I hustled them out the door and left her in peace.
The memory makes my legs push harder against the sand until they burn. Vivi never gets weird when I’m sad or frustrated or pissed about the state of my family right now. I don’t know much about dating, but I know enough to be grateful that Vivi doesn’t push.
I dated a girl named Sarah last year, my longest relationship ever, and she pushed like a wrecking ball. I still like her as a person, but not as a girlfriend. She’s tiny and feisty, like a little Yorkie dog. I liked that she was in charge of about half the clubs at school. When we were little, she was the girl who got every colorful Girl Scout badge and outsold everyone in the tristate area during cookie season. She thinks success is a quick one-two punch of deciding what to do and doing it.
In the first days after my dad died, Sarah was nice to have around. She’s prepared. Just, as a lifestyle choice: prepared. For any situation. She does things like pack a whole purse full of tissues when she attends your dad’s funeral. She even had a bottle of baby aspirin, like she knew my sister would cry until her head throbbed.
But then I became her project. She was extra peppy—all positive thinking and up-and-at-’ems. When I couldn’t decide to be happy and then do it, when my grief wasn’t an easily conquerable goal . . . well, the yipping grated against my eardrums.