The Sky is Everywhere(3)
Author: Jandy Nelson

“You know I’ll miss you,” she says, pouting.

“We’ll meet again,” Joe replies, adding an eye-bat to his repertoire. “Like next period, in history.”

I’ve disappeared, which is good really, because suddenly I don’t have a clue what to do with my face or body or smashed-up heart. I take my seat, noting that this grinning, eye-batting fool from Fronce looks nothing like Heathcliff. I was mistaken.

I open my clarinet case, put my reed in my mouth to moisten it and instead bite it in two.

At 4.48PM on a Friday in April,
My sister was rehearsing the role of Juliet
and less than one minute later
she was dead.
To my astonishment, time didn’t stop
with her heart.
People went to school, to work, to restaurants;
they crushed crackers into their clam chowder,
fretted over their exams,
sang in their cars with the windows up.
For days and days, the rain beat its fists
on the roof of our house—
evidence of the terrible mistake
God had made.
Each morning, when I woke
I listened for the tireless pounding
looked at the drear through the window
and was relieved
that at least the sun had the decency
to stay the hell away from us.

(Found on a piece of music paper, spiked on a low branch, Flying Man’s Gulch)

The rest of the day blurs by and before the final bell, I sneak out and duck into the woods. I don’t want to take the roads home, don’t want to risk seeing anyone from school, especially Sarah, who informed me that, while I’ve been in hiding, she’s been reading up on loss and according to all the experts, it’s time for me to talk about what I’m going through – but she, and the experts, and Gram, for that matter, don’t get it. I can’t. I’d need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark.

As I walk through the redwood trees, my sneakers sopping up days of rain, I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes when grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe. The only one who didn’t seem to spot it on me today – besides Rachel, who doesn’t count – was the new boy. He will only ever know this new sisterless me.

I see a scrap of paper on the ground dry enough to write on, so I sit on a rock, take out the pen that I always keep in my back pocket now, and scribble a conversation I remember having with Bailey on it, then fold it up and bury it in the moist earth.

When I break out of the forest onto the road to our house, I’m flooded with relief. I want to be at home, where Bailey is most alive, where I can still see her leaning out the window, her wild black hair blowing around her face as she says, “C’mon, Len, let’s get to the river pronto.”

“Hey you.” Toby’s voice startles me. Bailey’s boyfriend of two years, he’s part cowboy, part skate rat, all love slave to my sister, and totally missing in action lately despite Gram’s many invitations. “We really need to reach out to him now,” she keeps saying.

He’s lying on his back in her garden with the neighbor’s two red dogs, Lucy and Ethel, sprawled out asleep beside him. This is a common sight in the springtime. When the angel’s trumpets and lilacs bloom, Gram’s garden is positively soporific. A few moments among the blossoms and even the most energetic find themselves on their backs counting clouds.

“I was, uh, doing some weeding for Gram,” he says, obviously embarrassed about his kick-back position.

“Yeah, it happens to the best of us.” With his surfer flop of hair and wide face sun-spattered in freckles, Toby is the closest a human can come to lion without jumping species. When Bailey first saw him, she and I were out road-reading (we all road-read; the few people who live on our street know this about our family and inch their way home in their cars just in case one of us is out strolling and particularly rapt). I was reading Wuthering Heights, as usual, and she was reading Like Water for Chocolate, her favorite, when a magnificent chestnut brown horse trotted past us on the way to the trailhead. Nice horse, I thought, and went back to Cathy and Heathcliff, only looking up a few seconds later when I heard the thump of Bailey’s book as it hit the ground.

She was no longer by my side but had stopped a few paces back.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, taking in my suddenly lobotomized sister.

“Did you see that guy, Len?”

“What guy?”

“God, what’s wrong with you, that gorgeous guy on that horse, it’s like he popped out of my novel or something. I can’t believe you didn’t see him, Lennie.” Her exasperation at my disinterest in boys was as perpetual as my exasperation at her preoccupation with them. “He turned around when he passed us and smiled right at me – he was so good-looking … just like the Revolutionary in this book.” She reached down to pick it up, brushing the dirt off the cover. “You know, the one who whisks Gertrudis onto his horse and steals her away in a fit of passion—”

“Whatever, Bailey.” I turned back around, resumed reading, and made my way to the front porch, where I sank into a chair and promptly got lost in the stampeding passion of the two on the English moors. I liked love safe between the covers of my novel, not in my sister’s heart, where it made her ignore me for months on end. Every so often though, I’d look up at her, posing on a rock by the trailhead across the road, so obviously feigning reading her book that I couldn’t believe she was an actress. She stayed out there for hours waiting for her Revolutionary to come back, which he finally did, but from the other direction, having traded in his horse somewhere for a skateboard. Turns out he didn’t pop out of her novel after all, but out of Clover High like the rest of us, only he hung out with the ranch kids and skaters, and because she was exclusively a drama diva, their paths never crossed until that day. But by that point it didn’t matter where he came from or what he rode in on because that image of him galloping by had burned into Bailey’s psyche and stolen from her the capacity for rational thought.

I’ve never really been a member of the Toby Shaw fan club. Neither his cowboy bit nor the fact that he could do a 180 Ollie into a Fakie Feeble Grind on his skateboard made up for the fact that he had turned Bailey into a permanent love zombie.

That, and he’s always seemed to find me as noteworthy as a baked potato.

“You okay, Len?” he asks from his prone position, bringing me back to the moment.