The Sky is Everywhere(4)
Author: Jandy Nelson

For some reason, I tell the truth. I shake my head, back and forth, back and forth, from disbelief to despair, and back again.

He sits up. “I know,” he says, and I see in his marooned expression that it’s true. I want to thank him for not making me say a word, and getting it all the same, but I just remain silent as the sun pours heat and light, as if from a pitcher, all over our bewildered heads.

He pats the grass with his hand for me to join him. I sort of want to but feel hesitant. We’ve never really hung out before without Bailey.

I motion toward the house. “I need to go upstairs.”

This is true. I want to be back in The Sanctum, full name: The Inner Pumpkin Sanctum, newly christened by me, when Bailey, a few months ago, persuaded me the walls of our bedroom just had to be orange, a blaringly unapologetic orange that had since made our room sunglasses optional. Before I’d left for school this morning, I’d shut the door, purposefully, wishing I could barricade it from Gram and her cardboard boxes. I want The Sanctum the way it is, which means exactly the way it was. Gram seems to think this means: I’m out of my tree and running loose through the park, Gramese for mental.

“Sweet pea.” She’s come out onto the porch in a bright purple frock covered in daisies. In her hand is a paintbrush, the first time I’ve seen her with one since Bailey died. “How was your first day back?”

I walk over to her, breathe in her familiar scent: patchouli, paint, garden dirt.

“It was fine,” I say.

She examines my face closely like she does when she’s preparing to sketch it. Silence tick-tocks between us, as it does lately. I can feel her frustration, how she wishes she could shake me like she might a book, hoping all the words will just fall out.

“There’s a new boy in honor band,” I offer.

“Oh yeah? What’s he play?”

“Everything, it seems.” Before I escaped into the woods at lunch, I saw him walking across the quad with Rachel, a guitar swinging from his hand.

“Lennie, I’ve been thinking … it might be good for you now, a real comfort…” Uh-oh. I know where this is going. “I mean, when you were studying with Marguerite, I couldn’t rip that instrument out of your hands—”

“Things change,” I say, interrupting her. I can’t have this conversation. Not again. I try to step around her to go inside. I just want to be in Bailey’s closet, pressed into her dresses, into the lingering scents of riverside bonfires, coconut suntan lotion, rose perfume – her.

“Listen,” she says quietly, reaching her free hand out to straighten my collar. “I invited Toby for dinner. He’s quite out of his tree. Go keep him company, help him weed or something.”

It occurs to me she probably said something similar to him about me to get him to finally come over. Ugh.

And then without further ado, she dabs my nose with her paintbrush.

“Gram!” I cry out, but to her back as she heads into the house. I try to wipe off the green with my hand. Bails and I spent much of our lives like this, ambushed by Gram’s swashbuckling green-tipped paintbrush. Only green, mind you. Gram’s paintings line the walls of the house, floor to ceiling, stack behind couches, chairs, under tables, in closets, and each and every one of them is a testament to her undying devotion to the color green. She has every hue from lime to forest and uses them to paint primarily one thing: willowy women who look half mermaid, half Martian. “They’re my ladies,” she’d tell Bails and me. “Halfway between here and there.”

Per her orders, I drop my clarinet case and bag, then plant myself in the warm grass beside a supine Toby and the sleeping dogs to help him “weed”.

“Tribal marking,” I say pointing to my nose.

He nods disinterestedly in his flower coma. I’m a green-nosed baked potato. Great.

I turtle up, tucking my knees to my chest and resting my head in the crevice between them. My eyes move from the wisteria cascading down the trellis to the several parties of daffodils gossiping in the breeze to the indisputable fact that springtime has shoved off its raincoat today and is just prancing around – it makes me queasy, like the world has already forgotten what’s happened to us.

“I’m not going to pack up her things in cardboard boxes,” I say without thinking. “Ever.”

Toby rolls on his side, shields his face with his hand trying to block the sun so he can see me, and to my surprise says, “Of course not.”

I nod and he nods back, then I flop down on the grass, cross my arms over my head so he can’t see that I’m secretly smiling a little into them.

The next thing I know the sun has moved behind a mountain and that mountain is Uncle Big towering over us. Toby and I must have both crashed out.

“I feel like Glinda the Good Witch,” Big says, “looking down on Dorothy, Scarecrow and two Totos in the poppy field outside of Oz.” A few narcotic springtime blooms are no match for Big’s bugle of a voice. “I guess if you don’t wake up, I’m going to have to make it snow on you.” I grin groggily up at him with his enormous handlebar mustache poised over his lip like a grand Declaration of Weird. He’s carrying a red cool box as if it were a briefcase.

“How’s the distribution effort going?” I ask, tapping the cool box with my foot. We are in a ham predicament. After the funeral, there seemed to be a prime directive in Clover that everyone had to stop by our house with a ham. Hams were everywhere; they filled the fridge, the freezer, lined the counters, the stove, sat in the sink, the cold oven. Uncle Big attended to the door as people stopped by to pay their respects. Gram and I could hear his booming voice again and again, “Oh a ham, how thoughtful, thank you, come in.” As the days went on Big’s reaction to the hams got more dramatic for our benefit. Each time he exclaimed “A ham!” Gram and I found each other’s eyes and had to suppress a rush of inappropriate giggles. Now Big is on a mission to make sure everyone in a twenty-mile radius has a ham sandwich a day.

He rests the cool box on the ground and reaches his hand down to help me up. “It’s possible we’ll be a hamless house in just a few days.”

Once I’m standing, Big kisses my head, then reaches down for Toby. When he’s on his feet, Big pulls him into his arms, and I watch Toby, who is a big guy himself, disappear in the mountainous embrace. “How you holding up, cowboy?”

“Not too good,” he admits.