The Sky is Everywhere(33)
Author: Jandy Nelson

They’re all combinations of our mother’s name combined with other names and things. There is a whole section of the name Paige combined with people and things related to John Lennon, my namesake, and we assume her favorite musician because of it. We know practically nothing about Mom. It’s like when she left, she took all traces of her life with her, leaving only a story behind. Gram rarely talks about anything but her amazing wanderlust, and Big isn’t much better.

“At five years old,” Gram would tell us over and over again, holding up her fingers for emphasis, “your mother snuck out of her bed one night and I found her halfway to town, with her little blue backpack and a walking stick. She said she was on an adventure – at five years old, girls!”

So that was all we had, except for a box of belongings we kept in The Sanctum. It’s full of books we foraged over the years from the shelves downstairs, ones that had her name in them: Oliver Twist, On the Road, Siddhartha, The Collected Poems of William Blake, and some Harlequins, which threw us for a loop, book snobs that we are. None of them are dog-eared or annotated. We have some yearbooks, but there are no scribbles from friends in them. There’s a copy of The Joy of Cooking with food spattered all over it. (Gram did once tell us that Mom was magical in the kitchen and that she suspects she makes her living on the road by cooking.)

But mostly, what we have are maps, lots and lots of them: road maps, topographic maps, maps of Clover, of California, of the forty-nine other states, of country after country, continent after continent. There are also several atlases, each of which look as read and reread as my copy of Wuthering Heights. The maps and atlases reveal the most about her: a girl for whom the world beckoned. When we were younger, Bailey and I would spend countless hours poring over the atlases imagining routes and adventures for her.

I start leafing through the notebook. There are pages and pages of these combinations: Paige/Lennon/Walker, Paige/ Lennon/Yoko, Paige/Lennon/Imagine, Paige/Dakota/Ono, and on and on. Sometimes there are notes under a name combination. For instance, scribbled under the words Paige/Dakota is an address in North Hampton, Massachusetts. But then that’s crossed out and the words too young are scrawled in.

I’m shocked. We’d both put our mother’s name into search engines many times to no avail, and we would sometimes try to think of pseudonyms she might have chosen and search them to no avail as well, but never like this, never methodically, never with this kind of thoroughness and persistence. The notebook is practically full. Bailey must have been doing this in every free moment, every moment I wasn’t around, because I so rarely saw her at the computer. But now that I’m thinking about it, I did see her in front of The Half Mom an awful lot before she died, studying it, intently, almost like she was waiting for it to speak to her.

I turn to the first page of the notebook. It’s dated February 27, less than two months before she died. How could she have done all this in that amount of time? No wonder she needed St Anthony’s help. I wish she’d asked for mine.

I put the notebook back in the drawer, walk back over to my bed, take my clarinet out of the case again, and play Joe’s song. I want to be in that summer day again, I want to be there with my sister.

At night,
when we were little,
we tented Bailey’s covers,
crawled underneath with our flashlights
and played cards: Hearts,
Whist, Crazy Eights,
and our favorite: Bloody Knuckles.
The competition was vicious.
All day, every day,
we were the Walker Girls—
two peas in a pod
thick as thieves—
but when Gram closed the door
for the night,
we bared our teeth
we played for chores,
for slave duty,
for truths and dares and money.
We played to be better, brighter,
to be more beautiful,
more,
just more.
But is was all a ruse—
we played
so we could fall asleep
in the same bed
without having to ask,
so we could wrap together
like a braid,
so while we slept
our dreams could switch bodies.

(Found written on the inside cover of Wuthering Heights, Lennie’s room)

I used to talk to The Half Mom a lot,
but I’d wait until no one else was home
and then I’d say:
I imagine you
up there
not like a cloud or a bird or a star
but like a mother,
except one who lives in the sky
who doesn’t make a fuss
about gravity
who just goes about her business
drifting around with the wind.

(Found on a piece of newspaper under the Walkers’ porch)

When I come down to the kitchen the next morning, Gram is at the stove cooking sausages, her shoulders hunched into a broad frown. Big slouches over his coffee at the table. Behind them the morning fog shrouds the window, like the house is hovering inside a cloud. Standing in the doorway I’m filled with the same scared, hollow feeling I get when I see abandoned houses, ones with weeds growing through the front steps, paint cracked and dirty, windows broken and boarded up.

“Where’s Joe?” Big asks. I realize then why the despair is so naked this morning: Joe’s not here.

“In prison,” I say.

Big looks up, smirks. “What’d he do?” Instantly, the mood is lifted. Wow. I guess he’s not only my life raft.

“Took a four-hundred-dollar bottle of wine from his father and drank it one night with a girl named John Lennon.”

At the same time, Gram and Big gasp, then exclaim, “Four hundred dollars?!”

“He had no idea.”

“Lennie, I don’t like you drinking.” Gram waves her spatula at me. The sausages sizzle and sputter in the pan behind her.

“I don’t drink, well hardly. Don’t worry.”

“Damn, Len. Was it good?” Big’s face is a study of wonder.

“I don’t know. I’ve never had red wine before, guess so.” I’m pouring a cup of coffee that is thin as tea. I’ve gotten used to the mud Joe makes.

“Damn,” Big repeats, taking a sip of his coffee and making a disgusted face. I guess he now prefers Joe’s sludge too. “Don’t suppose you will drink it again either, with the bar set that high.”

I’m wondering if Joe will be at the first band practice today – I’ve decided to go – when suddenly he walks through the door with croissants, dead bugs for Big, and a smile as big as God for me…

“Hey!” I say.

“They let you out,” says Big. “That’s terrific. Is it a conjugal visit or is your sentence over?”