The Sky is Everywhere(37)
Author: Jandy Nelson

I lower to him, kneel in front of him, put my hands on his arms. “Toby,” I say gently. “It’s okay.” I’m stroking his hair with my hand. Fear prickles my neck and arms.

He shakes his head. “It’s not okay.” He can barely get the words out. “I wasn’t ever going to tell you.”

“What? What weren’t you going to tell me?” My voice comes out shrill, crazy.

“It makes it worse, Len, and I didn’t want it to be any harder for you.”

“What?” Every hair on my body is on end. I’m really frightened now. What could possibly make Bailey’s death any worse?

He reaches for my hand, holds it tight in his. “We were going to have a baby.” I hear myself gasp. “She was pregnant when she died.” No, I think, this can’t be. “Maybe she was looking for your mom because of that. The end of February would have been around the time when we found out.”

The idea begins to avalanche inside me, gaining speed and mass. My other hand has landed on his shoulder and although I’m looking at his face, I’m watching my sister hold their baby up in the air, making ferret faces at it, watching as she and Toby each take a hand of their child and walk him to the river. Or her. God. I can see in Toby’s eyes all that he has been carrying alone, and for the first time since Bailey’s death I feel more sorry for someone else than I do for myself. I close my arms around him and rock him. And then, when our eyes meet and we are again there in that helpless house of grief, a place where Bailey can never be and Joe Fontaine does not exist, a place where it’s only Toby and me left behind, I kiss him. I kiss him to comfort him, to tell him how sorry I am, to show him I’m here and that I’m alive and so is he. I kiss him because I’m in way over my head and have been for months. I kiss him and keep kissing and holding and caressing him, because for whatever screwed-up reason, that is what I do.

The moment Toby’s body stiffens in my arms, I know.

I know, but I don’t know who it is.

At first, I think it’s Gram, it must be. But it’s not.

It’s not Big either.

I turn around and there he is, a few yards away, motionless, a statue.

Our eyes hold, and then, he stumbles backward. I jump out of Toby’s grasp, find my legs, and rush toward Joe, but he turns away, starts to run.

“Wait, please,” I yell out. “Please.”

He freezes, his back to me – a silhouette against a sky now burning up, a wildfire racing out of control toward the horizon. I feel like I’m falling down stairs, hurtling and tumbling with no ability to stop. Still, I force myself forward and go to him. I take his hand to try to turn him around, but he rips it away as if my touch disgusts him. Then he’s turning, slowly, like he’s moving underwater. I wait, scared out of my mind to look at him, to see what I’ve done. When he finally faces me, his eyes are lifeless, his face like stone. It’s as if his marvelous spirit has evacuated his flesh.

Words fly out of my mouth. “It’s not like us, I don’t feel – it’s something else, my sister…” My sister was pregnant, I’m about to say in explanation, but how would that explain anything? I’m desperate for him to get it, but I don’t get it.

“It’s not what you think,” I say predictably, pathetically. I watch the rage and hurt erupt simultaneously in his face.

“Yes, it is. It’s exactly what I think, it’s exactly what I thought.” He spits his words at me. “How could you… I thought you—”

“I do, I do.” I’m crying hard now, tears streaming down my face. “You don’t understand.”

His face is a riot of disappointment. “You’re right, I don’t. Here.”

He pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket. “This is what I came to give you.” He crumples it up and throws it at me, then turns around and runs as fast as he can away into the falling night.

I bend over and grab the crumpled piece of paper, smooth it out. At the top it says Part 2: Duet for aforementioned clarinettist and guitarist. I fold it carefully, put it in my pocket, then sit down on the grass, a heap of bones. I realize I’m in the same exact spot Joe and I kissed last night in the rain. The sky’s lost its fury, just some straggling gold wisps steadily being consumed by darkness. I try to hear the melody he wrote for me in my head, but can’t. All I hear is him saying: How could you?

How could I?

Someone might as well roll up the whole sky, pack it away for good.

Soon, there’s a hand on my shoulder. Toby. I reach up and rest my hand on his. He squats down on one knee next to me. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly, and a moment later, “I’m going to go, Len.” Then just the coldness on my shoulder where his hand had been. I hear his truck start and listen to the engine hum as it follows Joe down the road.

Just me. Or so I think until I look up at the house to see Gram silhouetted in the doorway like Toby was last night. I don’t know how long she’s been there, don’t know what she’s seen and what she hasn’t. She swings open the door, walks to the end of the porch, leans on the railing with both hands.

“Come in, sweet pea.”

I don’t tell her what happened with Joe, just as I never told her what has been going on with Toby. Yet I can see in her mournful eyes as she looks into mine that she most likely already knows it all.

“One day, you’ll talk to me again.” She takes my hands. “I miss you, you know. So does Big.”

“She was pregnant,” I whisper.

Gram nods.

“She told you?”

“The autopsy.”

“They were engaged,” I say. This, I can tell from her face, she didn’t know.

She encloses me in her arms and I stay in her safe and sound embrace and let the tears rise and rise and fall and fall until her dress is soaked with them and night has filled the house.

I do not go to the altar of the desk to talk to Bailey on the mountaintop. I do not even turn on the light. I go straight into bed with all my clothes on and pray for sleep. It doesn’t come.

What comes is shame, weeks of it, waves of it, rushing through me in quick hot flashes like nausea, making me groan into my pillow. The lies and half-truths and abbreviations I told and didn’t tell Joe tackle and hold me down until I can hardly breathe. How could I have hurt him like this, done to him just what Genevieve did? All the love I have for him clobbers around in my body. My chest aches. All of me aches. He looked like a completely different person. He is a different person. Not the one who loved me.