The Sky is Everywhere(36)
Author: Jandy Nelson

THE.
WORLD.
IS.
NOT.
A.
SAFE.
PLACE.

(Found on a candy wrapper half-buried by the roses, Gram’s Garden)

I see Toby’s truck out front and a bolt of anger shoots through me. Why can’t he just stay away from me for one freaking day even? I just want to hang on to this happiness. Please.

I find Gram in the art room, cleaning her brushes. Toby is nowhere in sight.

“Why is he always here?” I hiss at Gram.

She looks at me, surprised. “What’s wrong with you, Lennie? I called him to help me fix the trellising around my garden and he said he would stop by after he was done at the ranch.”

“Can’t you call someone else?” My voice is seething with anger and exasperation, and I’m sure I sound completely bonkers to Gram. I am bonkers – I just want to be in love. I want to feel this joy. I don’t want to deal with Toby, with sorrow and grief and guilt and DEATH. I’m so sick of DEATH.

Gram does not look pleased. “God, Len, have a heart, the guy’s destroyed. It makes him feel better to be around us. We’re the only ones who understand. He said as much last night.” She is drying her brushes over the sink, snapping her wrist dramatically with each shake. “I asked you once if everything was all right between you two and you said yes. I believed you.”

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to coerce Mr Hyde back into my body. “It’s okay, it’s fine, I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Then I pull a Gram and walk right out of the room.

I go up to The Sanctum and put on the most obnoxious head-banging punk music I have, a San Francisco band called Filth. I know Toby hates any kind of punk because it was always a point of contention with Bailey, who loved it. He finally won her over to the alt-country he likes, and to Willie Nelson, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, his holy trinity, but he never came around to punk.

The music is not helping. I’m jumping up and down on the blue dance rug, banging around to the incessant beat, but I’m too angry to even bang around BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO DANCE IN THE INNER PUMPKIN SANCTUM ALONE. In one instant, all the rage that I felt moments before for Toby has transferred to Bailey. I don’t understand how she could have done this to me, left me here all alone. Especially because she promised me her whole life that she would never EVER disappear like Mom did, that we would always have each other, always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS. “It’s the only pact that mattered, Bailey!” I cry out, taking the pillow and pounding it again and again into the bed, until finally, many songs later, I feel a little bit calmer.

I drop on my back on the bed, panting and sweating. How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don’t believe time heals. I don’t want it to. If I heal, doesn’t that mean I’ve accepted the world without her?

I remember the notebook then. I get up, turn off Filth, put on a Chopin Nocturne to see if that’ll settle me down, and go over to the desk. I take out the notebook, turn to the last page, where there are a few combinations that haven’t yet been crossed out. The whole page is combinations of Mom’s name with Dickens characters. Paige/Twist, Paige/Fagan, Walker/ Havisham, Walker/Oliver/Paige, Pip/Paige.

I turn on the computer, plug in Paige Twist and then search through pages of docs, finding nothing that could relate to our mom, then I put in Paige Dickens and find some possibilities, but the documents are mostly from high school athletic teams and college alumni magazines, none that could have anything to do with her. I go through more Dickens combinations but don’t find even the remotest possibility.

An hour’s passed and I’ve just done a handful of searches. I look back over the pages and pages that Bailey did, and wonder again when she did it all and where she did it, maybe at the computer lab at the State, because how could I not have noticed her bleary-eyed at this computer for hours on end? It strikes me again how badly she wanted to find Mom, because why else would she have devoted all this time to it? What could have happened in February to take her down this road? I wonder if that was when Toby asked her to marry him. Maybe she wanted Mom to come to the wedding. But Toby said he had asked her right before she died. I need to talk to him.

I go downstairs, apologize to Gram, tell her I’ve been emotional all day, which is true every freaking day lately. She looks at me, strokes my hair, says, “It’s okay, sweet pea, maybe we could go on a walk together tomorrow, talk some—” When will she get it? I don’t want to talk to her about Bailey, about anything.

When I come out of the house, Toby’s standing on a ladder, working on the trellis in the front of the garden. Streamers of gold and pink peel across the sky. The whole yard is glowing with the setting sun, the roses look lit from within, like lanterns. He looks over at me, exhales dramatically, then climbs slowly down the ladder, leaning against it with arms crossed in front of his chest. “Wanted to say sorry … again.” He sighs.

“I’m half out of my mind lately.” His eyes search mine. “You okay?”

“Yeah, except for the half out of my mind part,” I say.

He smiles at that, his whole face alighting with kindness and understanding. I relax a little, feel bad for wanting to behead him an hour before.

“I found this notebook in Bailey’s desk,” I tell him, eager to find out if he knows anything and very eager not to talk or think about yesterday. “It’s like she was looking for Mom, but feverishly, Toby, page after page of possible pseudonyms that she must have been putting in search engines. She’d tried everything, must have done it around the clock. I don’t know where she did it, don’t know why she did it…”

“Don’t know either,” he says, his voice trembling slightly. He looks down. Is he hiding something from me?

“The notebook is dated. She started doing this at the end of February – did anything happen then that you know of?”

Toby’s bones unhinge and he slides down the trellis, and drops his head into his hands and starts to cry.

What’s going on?