I’ll Give You the Sun(50)
Author: Jandy Nelson

I don’t clear up any of it.

Sophia reaches out a hand to me. “I’ve come to suck your blood,” she says in her Transylvanian accent, but perhaps I misheard, perhaps she said, “You must be a very good sculptor.”

I mumble some gibberish in reply, feeling like a sixteen-year-old darkness-eating troll with leprosy.

And she, with her flaming hair and bright pink dress, is an exotic orchid. Of course he loves her. They’re two exotic orchids together. It’s perfect. They’re perfect. Her sweater’s fallen off her shoulder and a magnificent tattoo is twisting out of her dress and around her entire arm, a red-and-orange fire-breathing dragon. Oscar notices the sweater and adjusts it like he’s done it a hundred times. A dark surge of jealousy rises in my chest.

What about the prophecy, whatever it is?

“We should go,” she says, taking his hand, and a moment later, they’re gone.

When I’m certain they’ve left the building, I run at a full sprint—thankfully Guillermo’s still not back—down the hallway to the front window.

They’re already on the motorcycle. I watch her wrap her arms around his waist and I know just how it feels, how he feels, from sketching him today. I imagine it: gliding my hands up his long oblique muscles, lingering over the grooves of his abdomen, feeling the heat of his skin in my hands.

I press my hand against the cold glass. I actually do this.

He kick-starts the bike, revs the throttle, and then they’re ripping down the street, her red hair crackling like a wildfire behind them. When he kamikazis the corner at 500 mph, at an absolutely fatal angle, she raises both hands in the air and whoops in delight.

Because she’s fearless. She lives dangerously. Which is the worst part of all.

• • •

Walking back through the mailroom feeling dismal, I notice that a door I could’ve sworn was closed when I ran past a moment ago is now ajar. Did the wind open it? A ghost? Peering in, I find it hard to imagine one of mine would want to lure me in here, but who knows? Opening doors is not Grandma’s thing.

“Mom?” I whisper. I say a few lines of the poem, hoping she might recite them back to me again. Not this time.

I open the door wider, then step into a room that was once an office. Before a cyclone hit it. I quickly close the door behind me. There are overturned bookcases and books toppled everywhere. There are drifts of paper and sketchbooks and notepads that have been swept off the desk and other surfaces. There are ashtrays full of cigarette butts, an empty bottle of tequila on its side, another one smashed in a corner. There are punch marks in the walls, a shattered window. And in the center of the floor, there’s a large stone angel facedown on the ground, her back broken.

The room has been taken apart in a rage. I’m thinking maybe the one that was going on the first time I came here, the one that sounded like a furniture-throwing contest. I look around at the physical manifestation of Guillermo’s trouble, whatever it is, and a mixture of excitement and fear weaves through me. I know I shouldn’t snoop, but curiosity quickly overrides my conscience as it often does—snoop-control issues—and I’m bending down and randomly perusing some of the papers on the floor: mostly old letters. There’s one from an art student in Detroit wanting to work with him. Another handwritten from a woman in New York promising him anything (underlined three times) if only he’d mentor her—jeez. There are consignment forms from galleries, a proposal from a museum about a commission. Press releases from past shows. I pick up a notepad like the one he keeps in his pocket and leaf through it, wondering if there might be some clue in it, in this room, as to what happened to him. The small pad is full of sketches, some lists and notes too, all in Spanish. Maybe material lists? Notes on sculptures? Ideas? Feeling guilty, I toss it back onto the heap, but then I can’t help myself and pick up another one, flip through it, find more of the same, until I come to a page where there are some words in English:

Dearest,

I have gone mad. I do not want to eat or drink, or I will lose the taste of you in my mouth, do not want to open my eyes if not to see you, do not want to breathe any air that you have not breathe, that has not been inside your body, deep inside your beautiful body. I must

I turn to the next page, but it doesn’t continue. I must—what? I whip through the rest of the pad, but the remaining pages are blank. I search through a few more notepads scattered around, but find no more words in English, no more words for Dearest. The skin on my arms is prickling. Dearest is her. It has to be. The woman in the painting. The clay woman climbing out of the clay man’s chest. The female giant. All the female giants.

I read the note again. It’s so steamy, so desperate, so romantic.

If a man doesn’t give his beloved the letter he writes, his love is true

That’s what happened to him then: love. Tragic, impossible love. And Guillermo’s so perfectly cast. No woman can resist a man who has tidal waves and earthquakes beneath the skin.

Oscar seems like he has natural disasters under the skin too. But give me a break. Male leads in love stories need to be devoted, need to chase trains, cross continents, give up fortunes and thrones, defy convention, face persecution, take apart rooms and break the backs of angels, sketch the beloved all over the cement walls of their studios, build sculptures of giants as homages.

They don’t flirt shamelessly with the likes of me when they have Transylvanian girlfriends. What an effing jerk.

I separate the page with the love note from the rest of the notepad, and as I’m pressing it into the safety of my jeans pocket, I hear the front door to the studio do its horror-creak. Oh no. My pulse speeds as I tiptoe over to the door and tuck behind it so I’ll be hidden should Guillermo decide to come in. I’m definitely not supposed to be in here. This is a most private kind of chaos, like the contents of his mind all spilled out. I hear a chair scrape across the floor, then smell smoke. Great. He’s having a cigarette right outside the door.

I wait. And stare down at all the art books piled everywhere, recognizing a lot of them from school, recognizing my mother. Half of her face is staring back at me from one of the stacks. It’s the author photo on the back of her Michelangelo biography, Angel in the Marble. It gives me a start. But of course it’s here. He has every art book in here. I squat down and reach for it, careful not to make a sound as I pull it out of the stack. I open to the title page, wondering if she signed it when they met. She did.