I’ll Give You the Sun(40)
Author: Jandy Nelson

It’s more than I’ve talked in the last two years combined.

He brings his hand to his mouth and begins examining me less like I’m a space alien and more like he did that sculpture last night. When he finally speaks, to my great surprise and relief, he doesn’t say, “I’m calling the authorities,” but, “We will have a cup of coffee. Yes? I could use a break.”

• • •

I follow Guillermo Garcia down a dark dusty hallway with many closed doors leading to rooms where all the other sixteen-year-old art students are kept chained up. It occurs to me that no one knows I’m here. Suddenly the whole gravestone-cutter thing doesn’t seem like such a plus.

For courage, say your name three times into your closed hand

(How about a can of pepper spray instead, Grandma?)

I say my name three times into my closed hand. Six times. Nine times and counting . . .

He turns around, smiles, points with his finger into the air. “No one makes coffee as good as Guillermo Garcia.”

I smile back. So that didn’t seem particularly homicidal, but maybe he’s trying to relax me, ease me into his lair, like the witch in Hansel and Gretel.

Health Alert: A respirator is in order. Whole civilizations of motes are caught in the thick stripes of light beaming down from two high windows. I look at the floor, jeez, it’s so dusty I’m making footprints. I wish I could hover like Grandma S. so as not to stir it all up. And this dankness—there’s got to be toxic black mold spores creeping all over these cement walls.

We enter a bigger area.

“The mailroom,” Guillermo says.

He’s not kidding. There are tables, chairs, couches, land-sliding with months, maybe years of mail, all unopened, falling to the floor in piles. There’s a kitchen area to my right teeming with botulism, another closed door, surely where some bound and gagged hostages are, a staircase leading to a loft area—I can see an unmade bed—and on my left, oh Clark Gable yes, to my great happiness, there is: a life-size stone angel that looks like it lived outside long before it moved in here.

It’s one of them. It has to be. Jackpot! In his biography, it said that to this day, in Colombia, people come from far and wide to whisper their wishes into the cold stone ears of a Guillermo Garcia angel. This one is spectacular, as tall as me, with hair that falls down her back in long loose locks that appear to be made of silk, not stone. Her wide oval face is cast downward like she’s gazing lovingly over a child, and her wings rise from her back like freedom. She looks like David did in Sandy’s office, one breath away from life. I want to hug her or start squealing but instead ask calmly, “Does she sing to you at night?”

“I am afraid, the angels, they do not sing to me,” he says.

“Yeah, me neither,” I say, which for some reason makes him turn around and smile at me.

When his back is to me again, I make a hard left and tiptoe across the room. I can’t help it. I have to get my wish in that angel’s ear immediately.

He waves an arm in the air. “Yes, yes, everyone does that. If only it work.”

I ignore his skepticism and wish my heart out into the perfect shell-like ear of the angel—Best to bet on all the horses, dear—noticing, when I’ve finished, that the wall behind the angel is covered in sketches, mostly of bodies, lovers, blank-faced men and women embracing or rather exploding in each other’s arms. Studies, I suppose, for the giants in the other room? I survey the mailroom again, see that most of the walls are similarly covered. The only break in the cave art is where a large painting hangs without a frame. It’s of a woman and a man kissing on a cliff by the sea while the whole world around them spins into a tornado of color—the palette is bold and bright like Kandinsky’s or my Mom’s favorite Franz Marc’s.

I didn’t know he painted too.

I walk over to the canvas, or maybe it’s the other way around. Some paintings stay on a wall; not this one. It’s color-flooding out of two dimensions, so I’m smack in the middle of it, smack in the middle of a kiss that could make a girl, one not on a boycott, wonder where a certain English guy might be . . .

“It saves paper,” Guillermo Garcia says. I didn’t realize I’d started tracing my hand over one of the wall-sketches by the painting. He’s leaning against a large industrial sink watching me. “I like the trees very much.”

“Trees are cool,” I say absently, a bit overwhelmed by all the naked bodies, all the love, the lust everywhere around me. “But they’re my brother’s, not mine,” I add without thinking. I glance at his hand for a wedding ring. None. And no feeling that a woman’s been here for ages. But what about the giant couples? And the woman wrenching out of the male form in the sculpture he made last night? And this painting of a kiss? And all these lusty cave drawings? And Drunken Igor? And the sobbing I witnessed? Sandy said something happened to him—what was it? What is it? There’s definitely the feeling here that something’s gone terribly wrong.

The clay on Guillermo’s forehead has crinkled up with his confusion. I realize what I just said about the trees. “Oh, my brother and I divvied up the world when we were younger,” I tell him. “I had to give him the trees and the sun and some other stuff for an incredible cubist portrait he made that I wanted.”

The remains of the portrait are still in a plastic bag under my bed. When I got home from Brian’s going away party that night, I saw that Noah had ripped it up and scattered it all over my bedroom. I thought: That’s right, I don’t deserve a love story. Not anymore. Love stories aren’t written for girls who could do what I just did to my brother, for girls with black hearts.

Still, I gathered up every last piece of the guy. I’ve tried to put him back together so many times, but it’s impossible. I can’t even remember what he looked like now, but I’ll never forget the reaction I had when I first saw him in Noah’s drawing pad. I had to have him. I would’ve given up the real sun, so giving him an imaginary one was nothing.

“I see,” Guillermo Garcia says. “So how long did these negotiations last? To divide the world?”

“They were ongoing.”

He crosses his arms, again in that battle stance. It seems to be his preferred pose. “You are very powerful, you and your brother. Like gods,” he says. “But honestly, I do not think you make a good trade.” He shakes his head. “You say you are so sad, maybe this is why. No sun. No trees.”