I’ll Give You the Sun(84)
Author: Jandy Nelson

There’s one thought in my head, the thought that’s been there for days: If it weren’t for him, she’d be alive.

I stand but have been sitting so long lumped up there, my legs give. “Hey,” he says, catching me and settling me back onto the sidewalk, right next to him. Heat’s rising off his skin and an overpowering man smell too. I hear a wail, the kind that comes out of jackals, and realize it’s coming out of me. The next thing I know, his arms are around me and I can feel him shaking, both of us are, like we’re in sub-arctic conditions. He pulls me closer, then he pulls me onto his lap, cradling me so that his sobs land on my neck and mine on his arms. I want to crawl down his throat. I want to live in the pocket of his smock. I want him to rock me like this forever, like I’m a small boy, the smallest boy who ever was. He knows just how to do it too. Like Mom’s inside of him telling him how to comfort me. How come he’s the only one who knows how? How come he’s the only one she’s inside of?

No.

Birds screech in the trees above us.

This is not right.

I didn’t come here for this. I came for the opposite of this. He can’t hold me like we’re in this together, like he understands. He’s not my father. He’s not my friend.

If it weren’t for him, she’d be alive.

And then I’m twisting and wriggling out of his embrace, returning to my full-grown size and person, my full-grown knowledge and revulsion and hatred. I stand over him and say what I came to. “It’s your fault she’s dead.” His face wrecks. I go on. “I blame you.” I’m the wrecking ball now. “She didn’t love you. She told me she didn’t.” Wrecking and wrecking him and I don’t care. “She wasn’t going to marry you.” I slow down so every word sinks in. “She wasn’t going to ask my father for a divorce. She was on her way to ask him to come home.”

Then I enter the crawlspace deep inside me and shut the hatch. Because I’m not coming back out. Ever.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Untitled)

THE HISTORY OF LUCK

Jude

Age 16

When I wake up, Noah’s already gone, like usual these days, so I can’t tell him what I need to or ask him all that I want to. The irony of this is not lost on me. Now that I want more than anything to confess about CSA, I can’t. I check LostConnections.com, where there’s still no response from Brian, then grab Oscar’s leather jacket, my sketchpad, and head down the hill.

Soon after I arrive, I’m tapping my foot nervously on the floor as Guillermo opens my sketchpad on the large white drafting table in the center of the studio. I want him to like the studies of Mom’s sculpture and I want him to agree to the piece being done in stone, preferably marble or granite. He flips through the first studies quickly, back views. I’m watching him and can’t tell what he’s thinking, but then he stops at the frontal view and inhales sharply as he raises a hand to his mouth. That bad? Now he’s trailing a finger over my mother’s face. Oh yes, of course. I’d forgotten that they met. I guess I nailed the likeness. He turns to me and his expression causes me to jerk backward.

“Dianna is your mother.” He doesn’t so much speak the words as becomes them.

“Yes,” I say.

His breathing has gone volcanic. No idea what’s happening here. He returns his gaze to the sketches, touching them now like he wants to peel them off the page.

“Well,” he says. The skin under his left eye won’t stop twitching.

“Well?” I ask, confused and getting frightened.

He closes the pad. “I don’t think I can help you after all. I will call Sandy back, recommend someone else.”

“What?”

In a cold, closed voice I’ve never heard before, he says, “I am sorry. I am too busy. I was wrong. It is too distracting to have someone here so much.” He won’t look at me.

“Guillermo?” My heart’s shaking inside my chest.

“No, please go. Now. You must. I have things to do.” I’m too stunned to argue. I take my pad and start for the door, hear, “Do not come back to my studio.”

I turn around but he’s facing the opposite direction. I don’t know why I glance up at the window to the fire escape, maybe the same sense that someone’s watching me that I had while working outside yesterday. And I’m right, someone is watching.

Looking down on us with one hand pressed to the glass is Noah.

Guillermo turns to see what I’m looking at and by the time we both look back at each other, Oscar has walked through the studio door, his face shining with fear.

A moment later, Noah blasts into the studio like a lit stick of dynamite, then freezes as he scans the room. Guillermo’s face is unrecognizable—he’s scared, I think. Guillermo is scared. Everyone’s scared, I realize. We are four points in a rectangle and three of those points have these wild panicked eyes on me. No one’s saying a word. It’s clear everyone knows something I don’t and if their expressions are any indication, I’m not sure I want to know what it is. My eyes dart from one of them to the next and back again, not understanding, because, what—or more accurately, whom—it seems, each one of them is afraid of is: me.

“What?” I ask finally. “What’s going on? Someone tell me, please. Noah? Is it about Mom?”

It’s mayhem.

• • •

“He killed her.” Noah’s finger is pointed at Guillermo, his voice trembling with anger. “If it wasn’t for him, we’d still have her.” The studio begins to pulse, to rock beneath my feet, to tip over.

Oscar turns to Noah. “Killed her? Are you crazy? Look around you. No man has ever loved a woman more than he loved her.”

Guillermo says softly, “Oscore, be quiet.”

The room’s really swaying now, swinging, so I find the only thing near me and lean against it, the leg of a giant, but immediately lurch back because I swear it shuddered—it moved—and then I’m seeing it. The giants are stomping and roaring to life, hurling their colossal bodies into each other’s arms, fed up with spending eternity frozen, always a breath away from their heart’s desire. Split-aparts, all of them, now throwing themselves together. Each couple spinning across the floor, arm in arm, turning and turning, causing tremor after tremor inside me, as things start adding up. It wasn’t my age that freaked Oscar out last night. It surely wasn’t. It was the family photograph. And what turned Guillermo into Drunken Igor was nothing but the anniversary of my mother’s death.