I’ll Give You the Sun(10)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Before leaving school I consorted with The Oracle: Google. Internet searches are better than tea leaves or a tarot deck. You put in your question: Am I a bad person? Is this headache a symptom of an inoperable brain tumor? Why won’t my mother’s ghost speak to me? What should I do about Noah? Then you sort through the results and determine the divination.

When I put in the question: Should I ask Guillermo Garcia to be my mentor? up popped a link for the cover of Interview Magazine. I clicked on it. The photograph was of a dark, imposing man with radioactive green eyes wielding a baseball bat at Rodin’s lovely romantic sculpture The Kiss. The caption read: Guillermo Garcia: The Rock Star of the Sculpture World. On the cover of Interview! I stopped there because of the cardiac symptoms.

“You look like a hoodlum in that getup,” Grandma Sweetwine says, sweeping along beside me a good foot above the ground, twirling a magenta sun parasol, without a care for the dismal weather. She’s dressed to the nines like always, in a color-splashed Floating Dress that makes her look like a billowy sunset, and enormous tortoiseshell movie-star sunglasses. She’s barefoot. Not much need for shoes if you hover. She got lucky on the foot-front.

Some visitors from the beyond return with their feet on backward

(Beyond disturbing. Thankfully, hers are on right.)

She continues. “You look like that fella, you know, whosamacallit, Reese’s Pieces.”

“Eminem?” I ask, with a smile. The fog’s so thick, I have to walk with my arms out straight so I don’t collide into any mailboxes or telephone poles or trees.

“Yes!” She taps the sidewalk with the parasol. “I knew it was some kind of candy. Him.” The parasol’s pointing at me now. “All those dresses you make locked away in your bedroom. It’s a travesty.” She sighs one of her record-length sighs. “What about the suitors, Jude?”

“I don’t have any suitors, Grandma.”

“My point exactly, dear,” she says, then cackles with delight at her own wit.

A woman passes us with two kids in fog harnesses, also known as leashes, not unusual in Lost Cove during a white-out.

I look down at my invisibility uniform. Grandma still doesn’t get it. I tell her, “Being with boys is more dangerous for me than killing a cricket or having a bird fly into the house.” Other serious portents of death. “You know this.”

“Nonsense. What I know is you have an enviable love-line on your palm, just like your brother, but even fate needs a goose in the rear sometimes. Best stop dressing like a life-size rutabaga. And grow the hair back already, for Pete’s sake.”

“You’re very superficial, Grandma.”

She harrumphs at me.

I harrumph back, then turn the tables. “I don’t want to alarm you, but I think your feet are starting to point the wrong way. You know what they say. Nothing ruins an ensemble like ass-backward feet.”

She gasps, looking down. “How to give an old, dead woman a heart attack!”

By the time we get to Day Street, I’m damp through and shivering. I notice a small church at the end of the block, a perfect place to dry off, warm up, and strategize about how I’m going to convince this Guillermo Garcia to mentor me.

“I’ll wait outside,” Grandma tells me. “But please, take your time. Don’t worry about me, all alone out here in the cold, wet fog.” She wiggles her bare toes on both feet. “Shoeless, penniless, dead.”

“Subtle,” I say, heading down the path to the church.

“Regards to Clark Gable,” she calls after me as I pull the ring to open the door. Clark Gable is her pet name for God. A blast of warmth and light embraces me the moment I step in. Mom was a church-hopper, always dragging Noah and me with her, except never when a service was going on. She said she just liked to sit in holy spaces. Me too now.

If you’re in need of divine help, open a jar in a place of worship and close it upon leaving

(Mom told us she sometimes used to hide out from her foster “situations” in nearby churches. I suspect she needed more than
a jar of help, though it was impossible to get her to talk
much about that time in her life.)

This one is a beautiful boat-like room of dark wood and bright stained-glass panels of, it looks like, yup, Noah building the ark, Noah greeting the animals as they board, Noah, Noah, Noah. I sigh.

In every set of twins, there is one angel, one devil

I take a seat in the second row. While rubbing my arms furiously to warm up, I think about what I’m going to say to Guillermo Garcia. What does a Broken Me-Blob say to The Rock Star of the Sculpture World? A man who walks into a room and all the walls fall down? How am I going to convey to him that it’s absolutely dire that he mentor me? That making this sculpture will—

A loud clatter blasts me out of my thoughts, my seat, and skin all at once.

“Oh bloody hell, you scared me!” The deep, whispery English-accented voice is coming out of a bent-over guy on the altar picking up the candlestick he just knocked off. “Oh Christ! I can’t believe I just said bloody hell in church. And Christ, I just said Christ! Jesus!” He stands up, rests the candlestick on the table, then smiles the most crooked smile I’ve ever seen, like Picasso made it. “Guess I’m damned.” There’s a scar zigzagging across his left cheek and one running from the base of his nose into his lip. “Well, doesn’t matter,” he continues in a stage whisper. “Always thought heaven would be crap anyway. All those preposterous puffy clouds. All that mind-numbing white. All those self-righteous, morally unambiguous goody two-shoes.” The smile and accompanying crookedness hijack his whole face. It’s an impatient, devil-may-care, chip-toothed smile on an off-kilter, asymmetrical face. He’s totally wild-looking, hot, in a let’s-break-the-law kind of way, not that I notice.

Any marked peculiarity in the face indicates a similar peculiarity of disposition

(Hmm.)

And where did he come from? England, it seems, but did he just teleport here mid-monologue?

“Sorry,” he whispers, taking me in. I realize I’m still frozen with my hand plastered to my chest and my mouth open in surprise. I quickly rearrange myself. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he says. “Didn’t think anyone else was here. No one’s ever here.” He comes to this church often? To repent probably. He looks like he has sins, big juicy ones. He gestures at a door behind the altar. “I was just skulking about, taking photos.” He pauses, tilts his head, studies me with curiosity. I notice a blue tattoo poking out of his collar. “You know, you really ought to put a lid on it. Such a chatterbox, a guy can’t get a word in.”