The Sky is Everywhere(52)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Gram turns toward me as if finally remembering I’m in the room. “Your mother was at the end of her rope and she never was someone with a lot of rope on hand. She’d come for the weekend so I could see you girls. At least that’s why I’d thought she’d come, until she began asking me what I’d do if she left. ‘Left?’ I said to her, ‘Where? For how long?’ which is when I found out she had a plane ticket to God knows where, she wouldn’t say, and planned on using it – a one-way ticket. She told me she couldn’t do it, that she didn’t have it right inside to be a mother. I told her that her insides were right enough, that she couldn’t leave, that you girls were her responsibility. I told her that she had to buck up like every other mother on this earth. I told her that you could all live here, that’d I’d help her, but she couldn’t just up and go like those others in this crazy family, I wouldn’t have it. ‘But if I did leave,’ she kept insisting, ‘what would you do?’ Over and over she asked it. I remember I kept trying to hold her by her arms, to get her to snap out of it, like I’d do when she was young and would get wound up, but she kept slipping out of my grasp like she was made of air.” Gram takes a deep breath. “At this point, I was very upset myself, and you know how I get when I blow. I started shouting. I do have my share of the tornado inside, that’s for sure, especially when I was younger, Big’s right.” She sighs. “I lost it, really lost it. ‘What do you think I’d do if you left?’ I hollered. ‘They’re my granddaughters, but Paige, if you leave you can never come back. Never. You’ll be dead to them, dead in their hearts, and dead to me. Dead. To all of us.’ My exact despicable words. Then I locked myself in my art room for the rest of the night. The next morning – she was gone.”

I’ve fallen back into my chair, boneless. Gram stands across the room in a prison of shadows. “I told your mother to never come back.”

She’ll be back, girls.

A prayer, never a promise.

Her voice is barely above a whisper. “I’m sorry.”

Her words have moved through me like fast-moving storm clouds, transforming the landscape. I look around at her framed green ladies, three of them in the kitchen alone, women caught somewhere between here and there – each one Paige, all of them Paige in a billowy green dress, I’m sure of it now. I think about the ways Gram made sure our mother never died in our hearts, made sure Paige Walker never bore any blame for leaving her children. I think about how, unbeknownst to us, Gram culled that blame for herself.

I remember the ugly thing I’d thought that night at the top of the stairs when I overheard her apologizing to The Half Mom. I’d blamed her too. For things even the almighty Gram can’t control.

“It’s not your fault,” I say, with a certainty in my voice I’ve never heard before. “It never was, Gram. She left. She didn’t come back – her choice, not yours, no matter what you said to her.”

Gram exhales like she’s been holding her breath for sixteen years.

“Oh Lennie,” she cries. “I think you just opened the window” – she touches her chest – “and let her out.”

I rise from my chair and walk over to her, realizing for the first time that she’s lost two daughters – I don’t know how she bears it. I realize something else too. I don’t share this double grief. I have a mother and I’m standing so close to her, I can see the years weighing down her skin, can smell her tea-scented breath. I wonder if Bailey’s search for Mom would have led her here too, right back to Gram. I hope so. I gently put my hand on her arm wondering how such a huge love for someone can fit in my tiny body. “Bailey and I are so lucky we got you,” I say. “We scored.”

She closes her eyes for a moment, and then the next thing I know I’m in her arms and she’s squeezing me so as to crush every bone. “I’m the one who lucked out,” she says into my hair. “And now I think we need to drink our tea. Enough of this.”

As I make my way back to the table, something becomes clear: life’s a freaking mess. In fact, I’m going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: for those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because Gram’s right, there’s not one truth ever, just a whole bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It’s all a beautiful calamitous mess. It’s like the day Mr James took us into the woods and cried triumphantly, “That’s it! That’s it!” to the dizzying cacophony of soloing instruments trying to make music together. That is it.

I look down at the piles of words that used to be my favorite book. I want to put the story back together again so Cathy and Heathcliff can make different choices, can stop getting in the way of themselves at every turn, can follow their raging, volcanic hearts right into each other’s arms. But I can’t. I go to the sink, pull out the trash can, and sweep Cathy and Heathcliff and the rest of their unhappy lot into it.

Later that evening, I’m playing Joe’s melody over and over on the porch, trying to think of books where love actually triumphs in the end. There’s Lizzie Bennet and Darcy, and Jane Eyre ends up with Mr Rochester, that’s good, but he had that wife locked up for a while, which freaks me out. There’s Florentino Aziza in Love in the Time of Cholera, but he had to wait over fifty years for Fermina, only for them to end up on a ship going nowhere. Ugh. I’d say there’s slim literary pickings on this front, which depresses me; how could true love so infrequently prevail in the classics? And more importantly, how can I make it prevail for Joe and me? If only I could convert him to messessentialism … If only I had wheels on my ass, I’d be a trolley cart. After all that he said today, I think that about covers my chances.

I’m playing his song for probably the fiftieth time when I realize Gram’s in the doorway listening to me. I thought she was locked away in the art room recovering from the emotional tumult of our afternoon. I stop mid-note, suddenly self-conscious. She opens the door, strides out with the mahogany box from the attic in her hands. “What a lovely melody. Bet I could play it myself at this point,” she says, rolling her eyes as she puts the box on the table and drops into the love seat. “Though it’s very nice to hear you playing again.”