The Sky is Everywhere(46)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Remember that pesto you made with walnuts instead of pine nuts? Well, I tried pecans, and you know what? Even better. The recipe:
2 cups packed fresh basil leaves
2/3 cup olive oil
1/2 cup pecans, toasted
1/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan
2 large garlic cloves, mashed
1/2 teaspoon salt
My mother makes pesto with walnuts! This is even better than sleeping with lilacs. So normal. So I think I’ll whip up some pasta with pesto for dinner. My mother bangs around a kitchen. She puts walnuts and basil and olive oil in a food processor, and presses blend. She boils water for pasta! I have to tell Bails. I want to scream out the window at her: Our mother boils water for pasta! I’m going to. I’m going to tell Bailey. I make my way over to the window, climb back up on the desk, put my head out, holler up at the sky, and tell my sister everything I’ve just learned. I feel dizzy, and yes, a bit out of my tree, when I climb back into the attic, now hoping no one heard this girl screaming about pasta and lilacs at the top of her lungs. I take a deep breath. Open another one.

Paige,
I’ve been wearing the fragrance you wore for years. The one you thought smelled like sunshine. I’ve just found out they’ve discontinued it. I feel as though I’ve lost you now completely. I can’t bear it.
Mom
Oh.

But why didn’t Gram tell us our mother wore a perfume that smelled like sunshine? That she slept in the garden in the springtime? That she made pesto with walnuts? Why did she keep this real-life mother from us? But as soon as I ask the question, I know the answer, because suddenly there is not blood pumping in my veins, coursing all throughout my body, but longing for a mother who loves lilacs. Longing like I’ve never had for the Paige Walker who wanders the world. That Paige Walker never made me feel like a daughter, but a mother who boils water for pasta does. Except don’t you need to be claimed to be a daughter? Don’t you need to be loved?

And now there’s something worse than longing flooding me, because how could a mother who boils water for pasta leave two little girls behind?

How could she?

I close the lid, slide the box back on a shelf, quickly stack Bailey’s boxes by the window, and go down the stairs into the empty house.

The architecture
of my sister’s thinking,
now phantom.
I fall
down stairs
that are nothing
but air.

(Found on a takeaway cup by a grove of old growth redwoods)

The next few days inch by miserably. I skip band practice and confine myself to The Sanctum. Joe Fontaine does not stop by, or call, or text, or e-mail, or skywrite, or send Morse code, or telepathically communicate with me. Nothing. I’m quite certain he and Hey Rachel have moved to Paris, where they live on chocolate, music and red wine, while I sit at this window, peering down the road where no one comes bouncing along, guitar in hand, like they used to.

As the days pass, Paige Walker’s love of lilacs and ability to boil water have the singular effect of washing sixteen years of myth right off of her. And without it, all that’s left is this: our mother abandoned us. There’s no way around it. And what kind of person does that? Rip Van Lennie is right. I’ve been living in a dream world, totally brainwashed by Gram. My mother’s freaking nuts, and I am too, because what kind of ignoramus swallows such a cockamamie story? Those hypothetical families that Big spoke of the other night would’ve been right not to be kind. My mother is neglectful and irresponsible and probably mentally deficient too. She’s not a heroine at all. She’s just a selfish woman who couldn’t hack it and left two toddlers on her mother’s porch and never came back. That’s who she is. And that’s who we are too, two kids, discarded, just left there. I’m glad Bailey never had to see it this way.

I don’t go back up to the attic.

It’s all right. I’m used to a mother who rides around on a magic carpet. I can get used to this mother too, can’t I? But what I can’t get used to is that I no longer think Joe, despite my compounding love for him, is ever going to forgive me. How to get used to no one calling you John Lennon? Or making you believe the sky begins at your feet? Or acting like a dork so you’ll say quel dork? How to get used to being without a boy who turns you into brightness?

I can’t.

And what’s worse is that with each day that passes, The Sanctum gets quieter, even when I’m blasting the stereo, even when I’m talking to Sarah, who’s still apologizing for the seduction fiasco, even when I’m practicing Stravinsky, it just gets quieter and quieter, until it is so quiet that what I hear, again and again, is the cranking sound of the casket lowering into the ground.

With each day that passes, there are longer stretches when I don’t think I hear Bailey’s heels clunking down the hallway, or glimpse her lying on her bed reading, or catch her in my periphery reciting lines into the mirror. I’m becoming accustomed to The Sanctum without her, and I hate it. Hate that when I stand in her closet fumbling from piece to piece, my face pressed into the fabrics, that I can’t find one shirt or dress that still has her scent, and it’s my fault. They all smell like me now.

Hate that her cell phone finally has been shut down.

With each day that passes, more traces of my sister vanish, not only from the world, but from my very own mind, and there’s nothing I can do about it, but sit in the soundless, scentless sanctum and cry.

On the sixth day of this, Sarah declares me a state of emergency and makes me promise to go to the movies with her that night.

She picks me up in Ennui, wearing a black miniskirt, black minier tank top that shows off a lot of tanned midriff, three-foot black heels, all topped off with a black ski hat, which I’m supposing is her attempt at practicality, because a chill blew in and it’s arctic cold. I’m wearing a brown suede coat, turtleneck, and jeans. We look like we are spliced together from different weather systems.

“Hi!” she says, taking the cigarette out of her mouth to kiss me as I get in. “This movie really is supposed to be good. Not like that last one I made you go to where the woman sat in a chair with her cat for the first half. I admit that one was problematico.” Sarah and I have opposite movie-going philosophies. All I want out of celluloid is to sit in the dark with a huge bucket of popcorn. Give me car chases, girl gets boy, underdogs triumphing; let me swoon and scream and weep. Sarah on the other hand can’t tolerate such pedestrian fare and complains the whole time about how we’re rotting our minds and soon won’t be able to think our own thoughts because our brains will be lost to the dominant paradigm. Sarah’s preference is The Guild, where they show bleak foreign films where nothing happens, no one talks, everyone loves the one who will never love them back, and then the movie ends. On the program tonight is some stultifyingly boring black-and-white film from Norway.