I’ll Give You the Sun(85)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Because she is Dearest.

I turn to Noah, try to speak. “But you said . . .” is all I can get out before my voice gets sucked back in. I try again. “You told us . . .” I still can’t finish and then all I can say is, “Noah?”

This is what he’s been keeping from me.

“I’m sorry, Jude,” he cries. And then it’s as if Noah really and truly is busting through stone, as if his spirit’s rising up as his back arches, his arms suspend behind him and he says, “She was on her way to ask Dad for a divorce so she could marry . . .” He turns to Guillermo, meets his eyes. “. . . you.”

Guillermo’s mouth has fallen open. And now my words are coming out of it. “But Noah, you said . . .” His stare could burn a hole in granite. “You told me . . .” Oh, Noah—what did you do? I can tell Guillermo’s trying to tamp down the emotion in his face, hide from us what is swelling from the very core of him, but it’s starting to seep out of him anyway: joy, no matter how belated.

Her answer was yes.

I need to get out of here, away from all of them. It’s too much. Too, too much. Mom is Dearest. She’s the clay woman climbing out of the clay man’s chest. She’s the stone woman he makes again and again and again. She’s the color-drenched faceless woman in the painting of the kiss. Her body turns and twists and bends and arches facelessly over every inch of the walls in the studio. They were in love. They were split-aparts! She was never going to ask Dad to come home. We were never going to be a family again. And Noah’s known this. And Dad doesn’t! Finally my father’s perpetually perplexed preoccupied expression makes sense. Of course he doesn’t understand. For years, he’s been trying to compute a mathematical problem in his head that does not compute. No wonder he walks the soles off all his shoes!

I’m staggering down the sidewalk, sun blinding my eyes, careening from car to telephone pole, trying to get away from the truth, from the frenzy of emotions chasing me down. How could she have done this to Dad? To us? She’s an adulterer. She’s that girl! And not in the good way, not in the badass way! And then, something occurs to me. This is why, after she died, Noah kept telling me I didn’t understand how he was feeling, that I didn’t know Mom like he did. Now I get it. He was right. I had no idea who Mom was. He wasn’t being cruel. He wasn’t hogging her. He was protecting her. And Dad and me. He was protecting our family.

I hear quick frantic footsteps gaining on me. I pivot around, knowing they’re his. “You were protecting us? That’s why you lied?”

He reaches for me but doesn’t touch me. His hands are manic birds. “I don’t know why I did it, maybe I wanted to protect you and Dad or maybe I just didn’t want it to be this way. I didn’t want her to be this way.” His face is flushed, his dark eyes storming. “I knew she didn’t want me to lie about her life. She wanted me to tell the truth, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell the truth about anything.” He looks at me so apologetically. “That’s why I couldn’t be around you, Jude.” How did Noah and I ever get so locked up in secrets and lies? “It was so much easier just to blend in than to be me, to face . . .” He’s stopped talking, but there’s definitely more and I can tell he’s gearing up to say it. I’m seeing him again like I did in the studio, like a figure busting out of rock. It’s a jailbreak. “I think I lied because I didn’t want it to be my fault,” he says. “I saw them together that day. I followed her and I saw them. And that’s why she got in the car. That’s why.” He’s starting to cry. “It’s not Garcia’s fault. I want it to be his so it doesn’t have to be mine, but I know it’s mine.” He’s holding his head like he’s trying to keep it from exploding. “I told her I hated her before she left, Jude, right before she drove away. She was crying. She shouldn’t have been driving. I was so angry at her—”

I take him by the shoulders. “Noah.” My voice has returned. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t.” I repeat the words until I’m sure he’s heard them, believes them. “It wasn’t anyone’s. It just happened. This terrible thing happened to her. This terrible thing happened to us.”

And then it’s my turn. I’m being shoved forward, shoved right out of my skin with just how terrible—Mom ripped out of my life the very moment I needed her the most, the bottomless unconditional shielding sheltering love she had for me taken forever. I let myself feel the terrible, surrender to it finally instead of running from it, instead of telling myself it all belongs to Noah and not to me, instead of putting an index of fears and superstitions between me and it, instead of mummifying myself in layers of clothing to protect myself from it, and I’m falling forward with the force of two years of buried grief, the sorrow of ten thousand oceans finally breaking inside me—

I let it. I let my heart break.

And Noah is there, strong and sturdy, to catch me, to hold me through it, to make sure I’m safe.

• • •

We take a long winding way home through the woods, tears streaming down my face, words out of his mouth. Grandma was right: A broken heart is an open heart.

“So much was going on then,” Noah’s saying. “More even than—” He flicks his wrist in the direction of Guillermo’s studio. “Stuff with me.”

“And Brian?” I ask.

He looks at me. “Yeah.” This is the first time he’s admitted it. “Mom caught us . . .” How could so much have happened to both of us in one week, on one day?

“But Mom was okay with it, wasn’t she?” I ask.

“That’s just it. She was totally okay with it. One of the last things she said to me was how wrong it is to live a lie. How it’s my responsibility to be true to my heart. And then I go and turn her life into a lie.” He pauses. “And my own too.” He grabs a stick off the ground and breaks it in half. “And I totally ruined Brian’s life.” He breaks the stick into smaller and smaller pieces. There’s torment in his face, shame.

“No you didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ever heard of Google?”

“I did that once, twice actually.”

“When?” Twice. OMCG, only Noah. He’s probably never been on a social network in his life.