The Sky is Everywhere(39)
Author: Jandy Nelson

I look out over the small yard where hours before Joe left me, probably forever. I think for a minute about telling Big that Joe probably won’t be around anymore, but I can’t face breaking it to him. He’s almost as attached to him as I am. And anyway, I want to talk to him about something else.

“Big?”

“Hmmm?”

“Do you really believe in this restless gene stuff?”

He looks at me, surprised, then says, “Sounds like a fine load of crap, doesn’t it?”

I think about Joe’s incredulous response today in the woods, about my own doubts, about everybody’s, always. Even in this town where free-spiritedness is a fundamental family value, the few times I’ve ever told anyone my mother took off when I was one year old to live a life of freedom and itinerancy, they looked like they wanted to commit me to a nice rubber room somewhere. Even so, to me, this Walker family gospel never seemed all that unlikely. Anyone who’s read a novel or walked down the street or stepped through the front door of my house knows that people are all kinds of weird, especially my people, I think, glancing at Big, who does God knows what in trees, marries perennially, tries to resurrect dead bugs, smokes more pot than the whole eleventh grade, and looks like he should reign over some fairy tale kingdom. So why wouldn’t his sister be an adventurer, a blithe spirit? Why shouldn’t my mother be like the hero in so many stories, the brave one who left? Like Luke Skywalker, Gulliver, Captain Kirk, Don Quixote, Odysseus. Not quite real to me, okay, but mythical and magical, not unlike my favorite saints or the characters in novels I hang on to perhaps a little too tightly.

“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “Is it all crap?”

Big doesn’t say anything for a long time, just twirls away at his mustache, thinking. “Nah, it’s all about classification, know what I mean?” I don’t, but won’t interrupt. “Lots of things run through families, right? And this tendency, whatever it is, for whatever reason, runs through ours. Could be worse, we could have depression or alcoholism or bitterness. Our afflicted kin just hit the road—”

“I think Bailey had it, Big,” I say, the words tumbling out of me before I can catch them, revealing just how much I might actually believe in it after all. “I’ve always thought so.”

“Bailey?” His brow creases. “Nah, don’t see it. In fact, I’ve never seen a girl so relieved as when she got rejected from that school in New York City.”

“Relieved?” Now this is a fine load of crap! “Are you kidding? She always wanted to go to Juilliard. She worked sooooooooo hard. It was her dream!”

Big studies my burning face, then says gently. “Whose dream, Len?” He positions his hands like he’s playing an invisible clarinet. “Because the only one I used to see working sooooooooo hard around here was you.”

God.

Marguerite’s trilling voice fills my head: Your playing is ravishing. You work on the nerves, Lennie, you go to Juilliard.

Instead, I quit.

Instead, I shoved and crammed myself into a jack-in-the box of my own making.

“C’mere.” Big opens his arm like a giant wing and – closes it over me as I snuggle in beside him and try not to think about how terrified I’d felt each time Marguerite mentioned Juilliard, each time I’d imagine myself—

“Dreams change,” Big says. “I think hers did.”

Dreams change, yes, that makes sense, but I didn’t know dreams could hide inside a person.

He wraps his other arm around me too and I sink into the bear of him, breathing in the thick scent of pot that infuses his clothes. He squeezes me tight, strokes my hair with his enormous hand. I’d forgotten how comforting Big is, a human furnace. I peek up at his face. A tear runs down his cheek.

After a few minutes, he says, “Bails might have had some ants in the pants, like most people do, but I think she was more like me, and you lately, for that matter – a slave to love.” He smiles at me like he’s inducting me into a secret society. “Maybe it’s those damn roses, and for the record, those I believe in: hook, line and sinker. They’re deadly on the heart – I swear, we’re like lab rats breathing in that aroma all season long…” He twirls his mustache, seems to have forgotten what he was saying. I wait, remembering that he’s stoned. The rose scent ribbons through the air between us. I breathe it in, thinking of Joe, knowing full well that it’s not the roses that have spurred this love in my heart, but the boy, such an amazing boy. How could I?

Far away, an owl calls – a hollow, lonesome sound that makes me feel the same.

Big continues talking as if no time has passed. “Nah, it wasn’t Bails who had it—”

“What do you mean?” I ask, straightening up.

He stops twirling. His face has grown serious. “Gram was different when we were growing up,” he says. “If anyone else had it, she did.”

“Gram hardly leaves the neighborhood,” I say, not following.

He chuckles. “I know. Guess that’s how much I don’t believe in the gene though. I always thought my mother had it. I thought she just bottled it up somehow, trapped herself in that art room for weeks on end, and threw it onto those canvases.”

“Well, if that’s the case, why didn’t my mother just bottle it up, then?” I try to keep my voice down but I feel suddenly infuriated. “Why’d she have to leave if Gram just had to make some paintings?”

“I don’t know, honey, maybe Paige had it worse.”

“Had what worse?”

“I don’t know!” And I can tell he doesn’t know, that he’s as frustrated and bewildered as I am. “Whatever makes a woman leave two little kids, her brother, and her mother, and not come back for sixteen years. That’s what! I mean, we call it wanderlust, other families might not be so kind.”

“What would other families call it?” I ask. He’s never intimated anything like this before about Mom. Is it all a cover story for crazy? Was she really and truly out of her tree?

“Doesn’t matter what anyone else would call it, Len,” he says. “This is our story to tell.”

This is our story to tell. He says it in his Ten Commandments way and it hits me that way: profoundly. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the storytelling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever.