The Sky is Everywhere(5)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Big releases him, keeping one hand on his shoulder, and puts the other one on mine. He looks from Toby to me. “No way out of this but through … for any of us.” He says it like Moses, so we both nod as if we’ve been bestowed with a great wisdom. “And let’s get you some turpentine.” He winks at me. Big’s an ace winker – five marriages to his name to prove it. After his beloved fifth wife left him, Gram insisted he move in with us, saying, “Your poor uncle will starve himself if he stays in this lovelorn condition much longer. A sorrowing heart poisons recipes.”

This has proven to be true, but for Gram. Everything she cooks now tastes like ashes.

Toby and I follow Big into the house, where he stops before the painting of his sister, my missing mother: Paige Walker. Before she left sixteen years ago, Gram had been painting a portrait of her, which she never got to finish but put up anyway. It hovers over the mantel in the living room, half a mother, with long green hair pooling like water around an incomplete face.

Gram had always told us that our mother would return. “She’ll be back,” she’d say like Mom had gone to the store for some eggs, or a swim at the river. Gram said it so often and with such certainty that for a long while, before we learned more, we didn’t question it, just spent a whole lot of time waiting for the phone to ring, the doorbell to sound, the mail to arrive.

I tap my hand softly against Big, who’s staring up at The Half Mom like he’s lost in a silent mournful conversation. He sighs, puts an arm around me and one around Toby, and we all plod into the kitchen like a three-headed, six-legged, ten-ton sack of sad.

Dinner, unsurprisingly, is a ham and ash casserole that we hardly touch.

After, Toby and I camp out on the living room floor, listening to Bailey’s music, poring over countless photo albums, basically blowing our hearts to smithereens.

I keep sneaking looks at him from across the room. I can almost see Bails flouncing around him, coming up from behind and dropping her arms around his neck the way she always did. She’d say sickeningly embarrassing things in his ear, and he’d tease her back, both of them acting like I wasn’t there.

“I feel Bailey,” I say finally, the sense of her overwhelming me. “In this room, with us.”

He looks up from the album on his lap, surprised. “Me too. I’ve been thinking it this whole time.”

“It’s so nice,” I say, relief spilling out of me with the words.

He smiles and it makes his eyes squint like the sun is in his face. “It is, Len.” I remember Bailey telling me once that Toby doesn’t talk all that much to humans but is able to gentle startled horses at the ranch with just a few words. Like St Francis, I’d said to her, and I believe it – the low slow lull of his voice is soothing, like waves lapping the shore at night.

I return to the photos of Bailey as Wendy in the Clover Elementary production of Peter Pan. Neither of us mentions it again, but the comfort of feeling Bailey so close stays with me for the rest of the evening.

Later, Toby and I stand by the garden, saying goodbye. The dizzy, drunk fragrance of the roses engulfs us.

“It was great hanging out with you, Lennie, made me feel better.”

“Me too,” I say, plucking a lavender petal. “Much better, really.” I say this quietly and to the rosebush, not sure I even want him to hear, but when I peek back up at his face, it’s kind, his leonine features less lion, more cub.

“Yeah,” he says, looking at me, his dark eyes both shiny and sad. He lifts his arm, and for a second I think he’s going to touch my face with his hand, but he just runs his fingers through the tumble of sunshine that is his hair.

We walk the few remaining steps to the road in slow motion. Once there, Lucy and Ethel emerge out of nowhere and start climbing all over Toby, who has dropped to his knees to say goodbye to them. He holds his skateboard in one hand, ruffling and petting the dogs with the other as he whispers unintelligible words into their fur.

“You really are St Francis, huh?” I have a thing for the saints – the miracles, not the mortifications.

“It’s been said.” A soft smile meanders across the broad planes of his face, landing in his eyes. “Mostly by your sister.” For a split second, I want to tell him it was me who thought that, not Bailey.

He finishes his farewell, stands back up, then drops his skateboard to the ground, steadying it with his foot. He doesn’t get on. A few years pass.

“I should go,” he says, not going.

“Yeah,” I say. A few more.

Before he finally hops on his board, he hugs me goodbye and we hold on to each other so tightly under the sad, starless sky that for a moment I feel as if our heartbreak were one instead of two.

But then all of a sudden, I feel a hardness against my hip, him, that. Holy freaking shit! I pull back quickly, say goodbye, and run back into the house.

I don’t know if he knows that I felt him.

I don’t know anything.

Someone from Bailey’s drama class
yelled BRAVO at the end of the service
and everyone jumped to their feet
and started clapping
I remember thinking the roof would blow
from the thunder in our hands
that grief was a room filled
with hungry desperate light
we clapped for nineteen years
of a world with Bailey in it
did not stop clapping
when the sun set, moon rose
when all the people streamed into our house
with food and frantic sorrow
did not stop clapping
until dawn
when we closed the door
on Toby
who had to make his sad way home
I knew we must have moved from that spot
must have washed and slept and ate
but in my mind, Gram, Uncle Big and I
stayed like that for weeks
just staring at the closed door
with nothing between our hands
but air

(Found on a piece of notebook paper blowing down Main Street)

This is what happens when Joe Fontaine has his debut trumpet solo in band practice: I’m the first to go, swooning into Rachel, who topples into Cassidy Rosenthal, who tumbles onto Zachary Quittner, who collapses onto Sarah, who reels into Luke Jacobus – until every kid in band is on the floor in a bedazzled heap. Then the roof flies off, the walls collapse, and when I look outside I see that the nearby stand of redwood trees has uprooted and is making its way up the quad to our classroom, a gang of giant wooden men clapping their branches together. Lastly, the Rain River overflows its banks and detours left and right until it finds its way to the Clover High music room, where it sweeps us all away – he is that good.