I'll Give You the Sun (26 page)

I ram the chisel with the hammer, watch a corner of the stone break off, watching myself rush into the surf that winter day. I swam fast as a shark despite my clothes, then started diving down where he sank, gripping armful after armful of water, trying to think about currents and riptides and maelstroms and everything Dad had ever taught me. I let the rip take me, dove down again, up and down, until there was Noah floating faceup, alive, but not conscious. I dragged him to shore, swimming one-armed, sinking more every stroke with the weight of him, both our lives pounding inside me, and then on the beach, I beat his sternum with shaking hands, blew breath after terrified breath into his cold clammy mouth, and when he revived, the second I knew he was okay, I slapped him as hard as I could across the face.

Because how could he have done this?

How could he have chosen to leave me here all alone?

He told me he hadn't been trying to kill himself, but I didn't believe him. That first jump was different than all the others that followed. That time he was trying to fling himself off the earth for good. I know he was. He wanted out. He'd chosen to leave. To leave me. And he would have had I not dragged him back.

I think the valve inside me that loosened during the conversation with Oscar has popped its gasket. I'm whacking the chisel with such force now my whole body's vibrating, the whole world is.

Noah had stopped breathing. So there were these moments when I was in life without him.

For the first time. Not even in the womb were we apart. Terror doesn't come close to describing it. Fury doesn't come close. Heartbreak, no. There is no way to describe it.

He wasn't there. He wasn't with me anymore.

I'm starting to sweat in the plastic jumpsuit as I slam the hammer into the chisel with all the power in me, forgetting proper angles now, not caring about anything Guillermo just taught me, remembering only how my anger toward Noah wouldn't go away after that. I couldn't get rid of it and everything he did seemed to compound it. I went to Grandma's bible, desperate, but it didn't matter how many rosehips I put in my tea, how much lapis lazuli I hid under my pillow, I couldn't get rid of the rage.

And I'm feeling it again, as I cut into the rock, as I drag Noah out of the ocean, as I rip into the stone, wanting us out, out of the treacherous water, out of this suffocating rock, wanting us free, when I hear, “So that's why you did it?” It's Mom and Grandma in unison. When did they become a team? A chorus? They say it again, their voices a duet of accusation in my head. “So is that why? Because it was right after that. We watched you do it. You didn't think anyone saw. But we did.” I position the chisel on the other side of the stone and try to hammer away their voices but I can't. “Leave me alone,” I hiss under my breath, peeling off the plastic suit, ripping off the face mask and goggles. “You're not real,” I tell them.

I stumble into the studio, feeling rudderless, hoping their voices won't follow me, not sure if I make them up or not, not sure of anything.

Inside, Guillermo is absorbed in another clay piece—so far, a man, all huddled up.

But something's wrong in here too.

Guillermo's bent over the bent-over clay man. His hands are working the face from behind and he's talking in Spanish, his words growing more and more hostile. I watch in disbelief as he raises a fist and heaves it into the back of the clay man, leaving a hollow that I feel on my own spine. The blows come fast after that.
The guy's bloody ferocious,
Oscar had said. I think of the punched-in walls of the cyclone room, the smashed window, the broken angel. He steps aside to inspect the damage he just inflicted, and as he does, he catches a glimpse of me and the violence in his fists is now in his eyes and directed at me. He puts his hand up and motions me out.

I back into the mailroom, my heart slamming inside my chest.

No, it's not like this at CSA.

If this is what he meant about putting yourself into your art, if this is what it takes, I don't know, I really don't know if I'm up to it.

• • •

T
here's no way I'm going back into the studio where bloody ferocious Guillermo is beating up on an innocent clay man or out on the patio where bloody ferocious Grandma and Mom are wanting to beat up on me, so I head upstairs. I know Oscar's gone because I heard his motorcycle peel away over an hour ago.

The loft's smaller than I'd imagined. Just a guy's bedroom really. There are nails and thumbtack holes all over the walls where pictures and posters have been removed. The bookshelves have been ransacked. Only a few shirts hang in the closet. There's a table with a computer and some kind of printer, maybe for photos. A desk. I walk over to the unmade bed, where he was hoping to dream about his mother earlier today.

It's a tangle of brown sheets, one lone swirl of a Mexican blanket, a sad flat pillow in a faded pillowcase. A lonely-looking boy bed. I can't help it; despite warnings and ghosts and shaky boycotts and cataclysmic girl-destroying exhalations, I lie down, rest my head on Oscar's pillow, and breathe in the faint scent of him: peppery, sunny, wonderful.

Oscar does not smell like death.

I cover myself to the shoulders with his blanket and close my eyes, seeing his face, the desperate way it looked today when he told me what happened with his mother. He was so alone in that story. I breathe him in, all cocooned up in the place he dreams, tenderness crushing into me. And I understand why he shut down like that. Of course I do.

Opening my eyes, I see that on the bedside table, there's a framed picture of a woman with long gray hair in a floppy white hat. She's seated in a chair in a garden, a drink in her hand. There's sweat on the glass. Her face is leathery from the sun and jam-packed with Oscar. She's laughing and I somehow know she had the same breezy laugh he does.

“Forgive him,” I say to his mother, sitting up. I touch her face with my finger. “He needs you to forgive him already.”

She doesn't answer. Unlike my dead relatives. Speaking of which, what happened to me outside? Like taking a chisel to my own psyche. That counselor said ghosts—she used finger quotes around the word—are often manifestations of a guilty conscience. Check. Or sometimes of a deep inner longing. Check. She said the heart overcomes the mind. Hope or fear overcomes reason.

After a loved one dies, you must cover every mirror in the house
so the spirit of the departed can rise—otherwise they will be stuck
forever among the living

(I've never told anyone this, but when Mom died, not only didn't
I cover the mirrors, I went to the drugstore and bought dozens
of pocket ones. I left them all over the house, wanting her spirit
to get stuck with us, wanting it so bad.)

I don't know if I make up the ghosts or not, I only know I don't want to think about what they just said to me, so I start perusing the titles of books stacked by Oscar's bed. Mostly art history, some religion, novels. There's an essay sticking out of one of the books. I remove it. It's titled “The Ecstatic Impulse of the Artist,” and in the corner of the page it says:

Oscar Ralph

Professor Hendricks

AH 105

Lost Cove University

I hug the paper to my chest. My mother used to teach AH 105. It's the introductory art history course for freshmen. Had she not died, she would've met Oscar, read this paper, graded it, talked to him during her office hours. She would've loved his topic: “The Ecstatic Impulse of the Artist
.
” It makes me think of Noah. He sure had an ecstatic impulse. It didn't used to feel safe how much he could love a color or a squirrel or brushing his teeth even. I turn to the last page of the paper, where a big fat A is circled in red with the line:
Entirely compelling argument, Mr. Ralph!
It's then that Oscar's last name crashes into my consciousness. Oscar
Ralph
. Last name, first name, who cares? Oscar is Ralph!
I found Ralph.
I start to laugh. This is a sign. This is destiny. This is a miracle, Grandma! This is Clark Gable being very funny.

I get up, feeling worlds better—I found Ralph!—and peek over the railing of the loft to make sure Guillermo isn't in the mailroom listening to me giggling up here all alone. Then I walk over to the desk because hanging on the chair is Oscar's leather jacket. I reach in the pocket and . . . no note. Which means he got it. Which makes my stomach whirl.

I put on the jacket; it's like climbing right into his arms and I'm luxuriating in its heavy embrace, its scent, when I glance down at the desk and see
me
. All over it. Photograph after photograph arranged in a row, some with yellow sticky notes on them, some not. The air starts to vibrate.

Above the whole thing on a yellow sticky note, it says:
The Prophecy.

The first photo is of an empty pew in the church where we met. A sticky note on it says:
She said I'd meet you in church. Granted, she probably said this so I'd go to church. I kept coming back to this one to photograph the empty pews.

The second photo is of me sitting in the same pew as the previous shot. The note says:
Then one day they weren't empty.
Except
I hardly recognize myself. I look, I don't know, hopeful. And I don't remember smiling at him like that at all. I don't remember smiling at anyone like that in my whole life.

The next photo is also from that day
.
The sticky says:
She said I'd know you right away because you'd glow like an angel. Yes, she was high as hell on pain meds, as was I—like I told you—but you glow. Look at you.
I look at the me he saw through his camera and again I hardly recognize her. I see a girl looking very swoony. I don't understand. I'd only met him moments before.

The third photo is of me, taken the same day but before I said he could take photos of me. He must've been stealth shooting. It's the moment when I put my finger to my lips to shush him and my grin's as law-breaking as his. The sticky says:
She said you'd be a bit odd.
He made a smiley face.
Forgive me, don't mean to offend, but you are bizarre.

Ha! He
no offense, but
–ed me, English-style.

It's like his camera has found this other girl, one I wish I could be.

The next photo is of me taken today in the mailroom talking to Grandma Sweetwine, talking to no one. There's no denying how completely empty the room is, how alone I am, how marooned. I swallow.

But the sticky note says:
She said you would feel like family.

So he came up here to print photos and write these messages after he left me downstairs? He must've wanted to tell me these things even as he fled like his feet were on fire.

If you dream you're taking a bath, you will fall in love

If you stumble going upstairs, you will fall in love

If you walk into someone's room and find countless pictures of yourself with lovely notes attached to them, you will fall in love

I sit down, not quite believing any of this, that he might really like me too.

I pick up the last photo in the series. It's of us kissing. Yes, kissing. He blurred out the background and added wild swirling color to everything around us so that we're . . . exactly like the couple in the painting! How'd he do it? He must've used a photo he took of me kissing my hand and then manipulated one of himself into the image.

The sticky on this one reads:
You asked what it would be like.
This is what it
would
will be like. I don't want to be just friends.

I don't either.

Meeting your soul mate
is
like walking into a familiar house. I
do
recognize everything. I
could
find my way around in the dark. The bible rules.

I pick up the photograph of the kiss. I'm going to take it to La Lune and tell him I don't want to be just friends either—

Then footsteps clomping up the steps, loud and hurried, mixed with laughter. I hear Oscar say, “Love when they overstaff. The extra helmet is right up here. And you can wear my jacket. It's going to be cold on the bike.”

“So glad we finally get to hang out.” It's a girl's voice. Not Sophia's from Transylvania either. Oh no, please. Something in my chest is collapsing. And I have about one second to make a decision. I choose the bad movie option, diving for the closet and shutting myself in before Oscar's boots are stomping across the room. I do not like the way this girl said
hang out
. Not one bit. It was definitely code for
hook up
. Definitely code for kissing his lips, his closed eyelids, his scars, the tattoo of the beautiful blue horse.

Oscar: I could've sworn I left my jacket here.

Girl: Who's she? She's pretty.

Shuffling, shuffling. Is he sweeping the photos of me from sight?

Girl (voice tight): Is she your girlfriend?

Oscar: No, no. She's nobody. It's just a project for school.

Knife stab, center chest.

Girl: You sure? That's a lot of pictures of one girl.

Oscar: Really, she's nobody at all. Hey, come here. Sit on my lap.

Come here, sit on my lap?

Did I say knife? It's an ice pick.

This time I'm certain no donuts are involved in the intimate sounds I'm hearing. This time I'm also certain I'm not misconstruing friendship for romance like I did with Sophia. I don't understand. I don't. How can the same guy who took those photos of me and wrote those notes to me be making out with another girl on the other side of this door? I hear him say the name Brooke in between heavy breaths. This is hell. This has to be karmic retribution for the last time I was in a closet I shouldn't have been in.

I can't stay in here.

Nobody-at-all pushes open the closet door. The girl springs out of Oscar's lap like a crazed cat. She has long tumbling brown hair and almond-shaped eyes that are popping out of her head at the sight of me. She's buttoning her shirt with frenzied fingers.