The Sky is Everywhere(16)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Whoa – I wasn’t expecting that, but I like it. “A la St Joseph?”

He nods. “Got into the idea.”

“What kind of launch?” I ask. “Like rockets?”

“No way, an effortless take-off, Superman-style.” He raises one arm up and crosses his guitar with the other to demonstrate. “You know.”

I do know. I know I’m smiling just to look at him. I know that what he just said is making something unfurl inside. I know that all around the porch, a thick curtain of fog hides us from the world.

I want to tell him.

“It’s not that I don’t want to play with you,” I say quickly so I don’t lose my nerve. “It’s that, I don’t know, it’s different, playing is.” I force out the rest. “I didn’t want to play first chair, didn’t want to do the solos, didn’t want to do any of it. I blew it, the chair audition … on purpose.” It’s the first time I’ve said it aloud, to anyone, and the relief is the size of a planet. I go on. “I hate soloing, not that you’d understand that. It’s just so…” I’m waving my arm around, unable to find the words. But then I point my hand in the direction of Flying Man’s. “So like jumping from rock to rock in the river, but in this kind of thick fog, and you’re all alone, and every single step is…”

“Is what?”

I suddenly realize how ridiculous I must sound. I have no clue what I’m talking about, no clue. “It doesn’t matter,” I say.

He shrugs. “Tons of musicians are afraid to fall on their faces.”

I can hear the steady whoosh of the river as if the fog’s parted to let the sound through.

It’s not just performance anxiety though. That’s what Marguerite thought too. It’s why she thought I quit – You must work on the nerves, Lennie, the nerves – but it’s more than that, way more. When I play, it’s like I’m all shoved and crammed and scared inside myself, like a jack-in-the-box, except one without a spring. And it’s been like that for over a year now.

Joe bends down and starts flipping through the sheet music in his case; lots of it is handwritten. He says, “Let’s just try. Guitar and clarinet’s a cool duet, untapped.”

He’s certainly not taking my big admission too seriously. It’s like finally going to confession only to find out the priest has earplugs in.

I tell him, “Maybe sometime,” so he’ll drop it.

“Wow.” He grins. “Encouraging.”

And then it’s as if I’ve vanished. He’s bent over the strings, tuning his guitar with such passionate attention I almost feel like I should look away, but I can’t. In fact, I’m full on gawking, wondering what it would be like to be cool and casual and fearless and passionate and so freaking alive, just like he is – and for a split second, I want to play with him. I want to disturb the birds.

Later, as he plays and plays, as all the fog burns away, I think, he’s right. That’s exactly it – I am crazy sad and, somewhere deep inside, all I want is to fly.

Grief is a house
where the chairs
have forgotten how to hold us
the mirrors how to reflect us
the walls how to contain us
Grief is a house that disappears
each time someone knocks at the door
or rings the bell
a house that blows into the air
at the slightest gust
that buries itself deep in the ground
while everyone is sleeping
Grief is a house where no on can protect you
where the younger sister
will grow older than the older one
where the doors
no longer let you in
or out

(Found under a stone in Gram’s garden)

As usual I can’t sleep and am sitting at Bailey’s desk, holding St Anthony, in a state of dread about packing up her things. Today, when I got home from lasagna duty at the deli, there were cardboard boxes opened by her desk. I’ve yet to crack a drawer. I can’t. Each time I touch the wooden knobs, I think about her never thumbing through her desk for a notebook, an address, a pen, and all the breath races out of my body with one thought: Bailey’s in that airless box—

No. I shove the image into a closet in my mind, kick the door shut. I close my eyes, take one, two, three breaths, and when I open them, I find myself staring again at the picture of Explorer Mom. I touch the brittle paper, feel the wax of the crayon as I glide my finger across the fading figure. Does her human counterpart have any idea one of her daughters has died at nineteen years old? Did she feel a cold wind or a hot flash or was she just eating breakfast or tying her shoe like it was any other ordinary moment in her extraordinary itinerant life?

Gram told us our mom was an explorer because she didn’t know how else to explain to us that Mom had what generations of Walkers call the “restless gene.” According to Gram, this restlessness has always plagued our family, mostly the women. Those afflicted keep moving, they go from town to town, continent to continent, love to love – this is why, Gram explained, Mom had no idea who either of our fathers were, and so neither did we – until they wear themselves out and return home. Gram told us her Aunt Sylvie and a distant cousin, Virginia, also had the affliction, and after many years adventuring across the globe, they, like all the others before them, found their way back. It’s their destiny to leave, she told us, and their destiny to return, as well.

“Don’t boys get it?” I asked Gram when I was ten years old and “the condition” was becoming more understandable to me. We were walking to the river for a swim.

“Of course they do, sweet pea.” But then, she stopped in her tracks, took my hands in hers, and spoke in a rare solemn tone. “I don’t know if at your mature age you can understand this, Len, but this is the way it is: when men have it, no one seems to notice, they become astronauts or pilots or cartographers or criminals or poets. They don’t stay around long enough to know if they’ve fathered children or not. When women get it, well, it’s complicated, it’s just different.”

“How?” I asked. “How is it different?”

“Well, for instance, it’s not customary for a mother to not see her own girls for this many years, is it?”

She had a point there.

“Your mom was born like this, practically flew out of my womb and into the world. From day one, she was running, running, running.”

“Running away?”