The Sky is Everywhere(38)
Author: Jandy Nelson

I see Joe’s face, then Bailey’s, the two of them looming above me with only three words on their lips: How could you?

I have no answer.

I’m sorry, I write with my finger on the sheets over and over until I can’t stand it anymore and flip on the light.

But the light brings actual nausea and with it all the moments with my sister that will now remain unlived: holding her baby in my arms. Teaching her child to play the clarinet. Just getting older together day by day. All the future we will not have rips and retches out of me into the trash bin I am crouched over until there’s nothing left inside, nothing but me in this ghastly orange room.

And that’s when it hits.

Without the harbor and mayhem of Toby’s arms, the sublime distraction of Joe’s, there’s only me.

Me, like a small seashell with the loneliness of the whole ocean roaring invisibly within.

Me.

Without.

Bailey.

Always.

I throw my head into my pillow and scream into it as if my soul itself is being ripped in half, because it is.

Bailey, do you love Gram more than me?
Nope.
Uncle Big?
Nope.
What about Toby?
I don’t love anyone more than you, Lennie, okay?
Me, too.
That’s settled then.
You’ll never disappear like Mom?
Never.
Promise?
God, how many times do I have to say it:
I will never disappear like Mom. Now, go to sleep.

(Found on a takeaway cup, Rain River)

(Found scrawled on the branch of a tree outside Clover High)

(Found written on a desk, Clover Public Library)

Part 2

Len, where is she tonight?
I was sleeping.
C’mon, Len.
Okay, India climbing in the Himalayas.
We did that one last week.
You start then.
All right. She’s in Spain. Barcelona. A scarf covering her head,
sitting by the water, drinking Sangria, with a man named Pablo.
Are they in love?
Yes.
But she will leave him come morning.
Yes.
She’ll wake up before dawn, sneak her suitcase out from under the bed, put on a red wig, a green scarf, a yellow dress, white pumps.
She’ll catch the first train out.
Will she leave a note?
No.
She never does.
No.
She’ll sit on the train and stare out the window at the sea.
A woman will sit next to her and they’ll strike up a conversation.
The woman will ask her if she has any children, and she’ll say, "No."
Wrong, Len. She’ll say, "I’m on the way to see my girls right now."

(Found on a piece of paper stuck between two rocks at Flying Man’s)

Iwake up later with my face mashed into the pillow. I lean up on my elbows and look out the window. The stars have bewitched the sky of darkness. It’s a shimmery night. I open the window, and the sound of the river rides the rose-scented breeze right into our room. I’m shocked to realize that I feel a little better, like I’ve slept my way to a place with a little more air. I push away thoughts of Joe and Toby, take one more deep breath of the flowers, the river, the world, then I get up, take the trash bin into the bathroom, clean it and myself, and when I return head straight over to Bailey’s desk.

I turn on the computer, pull out the notebook from the top desk drawer where I keep it now, and decide to continue from where I left off the other day. I need to do something for my sister and all I can think to do is to find our mother for her.

I start plugging in the remaining combinations in Bailey’s notebook. I can understand why becoming a mother herself would have compelled Bailey to search for Mom like this. It makes sense to me somehow. But there is something else I suspect. In a far cramped corner of my mind, there is a dresser, and in that dresser there is a thought crammed into the back of the bottom-most drawer. I know it’s there because I put it there where I wouldn’t have to look at it. But tonight I open that creaky drawer and face what I’ve always believed and that is this: Bailey had it too. Restlessness stampeded through my sister her whole life, informing everything she did from running cross country to changing personas on stage. I’ve always thought that was the reason behind why she wanted to find our mother. And I know it was the reason I never wanted her to. I bet this is why she didn’t tell me she was looking for Mom like this. She knew I’d try to stop her. I didn’t want our mother to reveal to Bailey a way out of our lives.

One explorer is enough for any family.

But I can make up for that now by finding Mom. I put combination after combination into a mix of search engines. After an hour, however, I’m ready to toss the computer out the window. It’s futile. I’ve gotten all the way to the end of Bailey’s notebook and have started one of my own using words and symbols from Blake poems. I can see in the notebook that Bailey was working her way through Mom’s box for clues to the pseudonym. She’d used references from Oliver Twist, Siddhartha, On the Road, but hadn’t gotten to William Blake yet. I have his book of poems open and I’m combining words like Tiger or Poison Tree or Devil with Paige or Walker and the words chef, cook, restaurant, thinking as Gram did that that’s how she might make money while traveling, but it’s useless. After yet another hour of no possible matches, I tell the mountaintop Bailey in the explorer picture, I’m not giving up, I just need a break, and head downstairs to see if anyone is still awake.

Big’s on the porch, sitting in the middle of the love seat like it’s a throne. I squeeze in beside him.

“Unbelievable,” he murmurs, goosing my knee. “Can’t remember the last time you joined me for a nighttime chat. I was just thinking that I might play hooky tomorrow, see if a new lady-friend of mine wants to have lunch with me in a restaurant. I’m sick of dining in trees.” He twirls his mustache a little too dreamily.

Uh-oh.

“Remember,” I warn. “You’re not allowed to ask anyone to marry you until you’ve been with her a whole year. Those were your rules after your last divorce.” I reach over and tug on his mustache, add for effect, “Your fifth divorce.”

“I know, I know,” he says. “But boy do I miss proposing, nothing so romantic. Make sure you try it, at least once, Len – it’s skydiving with your feet on the ground.” He laughs in a tinkly way that might be called a giggle if he weren’t thirty feet tall. He’s told Bailey and me this our whole lives. In fact, until Sarah went into a diatribe about the inequities of marriage in sixth grade, I had no idea proposing wasn’t always considered an equal-opportunity endeavor.