I'll Give You the Sun (6 page)

I stand there for a long time letting the fog erase me piece by piece.

Then, I knock again. Hard. I'm not going away. I can't. I need to make this sculpture.

“That's right.” It's Grandma in my head. “That's my girl.”

But it isn't Igor who opens the door this time, it's the English guy from the church.

Holy effing hell.

Surprise sparks in his mismatched eyes as he recognizes me. I hear banging and clattering and breaking from within the studio, like some super-humans are having a furniture-throwing contest. “Not a good time,” he says. Then I hear Igor's voice erupt in Spanish as he throws a car across the room, from the way it sounds. The English guy looks over his shoulder, then back to me, his wild face wild with worry now. All his cocky confidence, his cheerfulness, his flirtatiousness have vanished. “I'm very sorry,” he says politely, like an English butler in a movie, then closes the door in my face without another word.

• • •

A
half hour later, Grandma and I are hidden in the brush above the beach waiting, if necessary, to save Noah's life. On the way home from Drunken Igor's, while already plotting my return visit, I received an emergency text from Heather, my informant:
Noah at Devil's Drop in 15.

I don't take chances when it comes to Noah and the ocean.

The last time I stepped foot in the water was to drag him out of it. Two years ago, a couple weeks after Mom died, he jumped off this same Devil's Drop, got caught in a rip, and almost drowned. When I finally got his body—twice my size, chest still as stone, eyes slung back—to shore, and to revive, I was so furious at him I almost rolled him back into the surf.

When twins are separated, their spirits steal away
to find the other

The fog's mostly burned off down here. Surrounded by water on three sides and forest everywhere else, Lost Cove is the end, the farthest point west you can go before falling off the world. I scan the bluff for our red house, one of many ramshackles up there, clinging to the edge of the continent. I used to love living on the cliffs—surfed and swam so much that even when I was out of the water, I could feel the ground rocking under my feet like a moored boat.

I check the ledge again. Still no Noah.

Grandma's peering at me over her sunglasses. “Quite the pair, those two foreign fellas. The older one doesn't have a button left on him.”

“You're telling me,” I say, digging my fingers into the cold sand. How am I ever going to convince that hairy, drunken, furniture-throwing, scary-ass Igor to mentor me? And if I do, how will I steer clear of that unremarkable, plain-faced, dull-witted English guy who turned boycotting-me into a molten mess in a matter of minutes—and in a church!

A flock of gulls swoops down to the breakers, wings outspread, crying.

And for some reason, I keep wishing I'd told Drunken Igor that I wasn't okay either.

Grandma releases her parasol into the air. I look up, see the pink disc whirling off into the steely sky. Beautiful. Like something Noah would've drawn when he used to draw. “You have to do something about him,” she says. “You know you do. He was supposed to be the next Chagall, not the next doorstop. You are your brother's keeper, dear.”

This is one of her refrains. She's like my conscience or something. That's what the counselor at school said anyway about Grandma's and Mom's ghosts, which was pretty astute considering I hardly told her anything.

One time, she made me do this guided meditation where I had to imagine myself walking in the woods and tell her what I saw. I saw woods. But then, a house appeared, only there was no way to get in it. No doors or windows. Major heebie-jeebies. She told me the house was me. Guilt is a prison, she said. I stopped going to see her.

I don't realize I'm checking my palms for creeping lesions, eruptions called cutaneous larva migrans, until Grandma gives me The Eye-Roll. It's dizzying. I'm pretty sure I acquired this skill from her.

“Hookworm,” I say sheepishly.

“Do us all a favor, morbid one,” she chides. “Stay out of your father's medical journals.”

Though she's been dead for over three years, Grandma didn't start visiting me like this until two years ago. Just days after Mom died, I hauled the old Singer out of the closet and the moment I flipped the switch and the familiar hummingbird heartbeat of her sewing machine filled my bedroom, there she was in the chair beside me, pins in her mouth like always, saying, “The zigzag stitch is all the rage. Makes such a glamorous hem. Wait until you see.”

We were partners in sewing. And partners in luck-hunting: four-leaf clovers, sand-dollar birds, red sea glass, clouds shaped like hearts, the first daffodils of spring, ladybugs, ladies in oversized hats.
Best to bet on all the horses, dear,
she'd say.
Quick, make a wish,
she'd say. I bet. I wished. I was her disciple. I still am.

“They're here,” I tell her, and my heart begins pacing around inside my chest in anticipation for the jump.

Noah and Heather are standing on the ledge gazing out over the whitecaps. He's in swimming trunks, she in a long blue coat. Heather's a great informant because she's never more than a shout away from my brother. She's like his spirit animal, a gentle, odd, spritely being who I'm pretty sure has a storage space somewhere full of fairy dust. We've had this secret Keep Noah from Drowning Treaty for a while now. The only problem is she's not lifeguard material herself. She never goes in the water.

A moment later, Noah's flying through the air, arms outstretched like he's on the cross. I feel a surge of adrenaline.

And then what always happens:
He slows down
. I can't explain it, but it takes my brother forever to hit the surface of the water. I blink a few times at him suspended there midair as if on a tight rope. I've come to think either he has a way with gravity or I'm seriously missing more than a few buttons. I did read once that anxiety can significantly alter space-time perception.

Usually Noah faces the horizon not the shore when he jumps, so I've never before had a full frontal, tip-to-toe view of my brother dropping through space. His neck's arched, his chest's thrust forward, and I can tell, even from this distance, that his face is blown open, like it used to be, and now his arms are reaching upward like he's trying to hold up the whole sorry sky with his fingertips.

“Look at that,” Grandma says, her voice tinged with wonder. “There he is. Our boy has returned. He's in the sky.”

“He's like one of his drawings,” I whisper.

Is this why he keeps jumping, then? To become for the briefest moment who he used to be? Because the worst thing that could ever happen to Noah has happened. He's become normal. He has the proper amount of buttons.

Except for this. This fixation with jumping Devil's Drop.

At last, Noah hits the water without a splash as if he's gathered no momentum on his way down, as if he's been placed gently on the surface by a kindly giant. And then he's under. I tell him:
Come in,
but our twin-telepathy is long gone. When Mom died, he hung up on me. And now, because of all that's happened, we avoid each other—worse, repel each other.

I see his arms flail once. Is he struggling? The water must be freezing. He's not wearing the trunks I sewed protective herbs into either. Okay, he's swimming hard now, through the chaos of currents that surround the cliffs . . . and then, he's out of danger. I exhale loudly, not realizing until I do that I'd been holding my breath.

I watch him scramble up the beach, then the bluff, with his head down, shoulders hunched, thinking about Clark Gable knows what. No traces of what I just saw in his face, in his very being, remain. His soul has crawled back into its trench.

This is what I want: I want to grab my brother's hand and run back through time, losing years like coats falling from our shoulders.

Things don't really turn out like you think.

To reverse destiny, stand in a field with a knife
pointed in the direction of the wind

THE INVISIBLE MUSEUM

Noah

13
¹
/
₂
years old

The Neighborhood Terror Threat
Level drops as I pan with Dad's binoculars from the forest and street on the front side of our house to the bluff and ocean in the back. I'm on the roof, the best surveillance spot, and Fry and Zephyr are paddling through the break on their surfboards. I can tell it's them because of the sign flashing over their heads that reads:
Itchy Blistering Brain-Boiled Sociopathic Onion-Eyed Asshats
. Good. I have to be down the hill at CSA in an hour and now I can take the streets, for once, instead of tearing through the woods, trying to give Fry the slip. Zephyr, for some reason (Into Jude? The concrete dork?), leaves me alone now, but everywhere I go, there's Fry, like some mad dog on meat. Throwing me over Devil's Drop is his obsession this summer.

I mentally send a school of famished great white sharks their way, then find Jude on the beach and zoom in. She's surrounded by the same bunch of girls she's been hanging around with all spring and so far this summer instead of me. Pretty hornet-girls in bright bikinis with suntans that glimmer for miles. I know all about hornets: If one sends out a distress signal, it can trigger a whole nest attack. This can be deadly to people like me.

Mom says Jude acts the way she does now on account of hormones, but I know it's on account of her hating me. She stopped going to museums with us ages ago, which is probably a good thing, because when she did, her shadow kept trying to strangle mine. I'd see it happening on the walls or on the floor. Sometimes lately, I catch her shadow creeping around my bed at night trying to pull the dreams out of my head. I have a good idea what she does instead of coming to the museum, though. Three times now, I've seen hickeys on her neck. Bug bites, she said. Sure. I heard while spying that she and Courtney Barrett have been riding bikes down to the boardwalk on weekends, where they see who can kiss more boys.

(P
ORTRAIT
:
Jude Braiding Boy After Boy into Her Hair
)

Truth is: Jude doesn't have to send her shadow after me. It's not like she can't take Mom down to the beach and show her one of her flying sand women before the tide wipes it out. It would change everything. Not that I want that.

Not one bit.

The other day, I was watching her make one from the bluff. She was at her place, three coves away. This time it was a big round woman, done bas relief, like always, except she was halfway turned into a bird—so incredible it made my head vibrate. I snapped a picture with Dad's camera, but then something really horrible and maggoty came over me and as soon as Jude had walked off and was out of sight and earshot, I slid down the whole cliff, raced through the sand, and, roaring like a howler monkey—its roar is epic—knocked into the awesome bird-woman with my whole body, toppling and kicking it to nothing. I couldn't even wait for the tide to take it out this time. I got sand everywhere, in my eyes and ears and down my throat. I kept finding it on me days after, in my bed, in my clothes, under my nails. But I had to do it. It was too good.

What if Mom had gone for a walk and seen it?

Because what if it's Jude who has it? Why wouldn't that be the case? She surfs waves as big as houses and jumps off anything. She has skin that fits and friends and Dad and The Sweetwine Gift and gills and fins in addition to lungs and feet.

She gives off light. I give off dark.

(P
ORTRAI
T,
S
ELF-PORTRAIT
:
Twins: The Flashlight and the Flashdark
)

Oh, my body's tightening into a wrung towel from thinking like this.

And all the color's spiraling off everything.

(S
E
LF-PORTRAIT
:
Gray Noah Eating Gray Apples on Gray Grass
)

I pan back up the now colorless hill to the now colorless moving van parked in front of the now colorless house two doors down—

“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?” Prophet the parrot next door cries.

“Don't know, buddy. Nobody seems to know,” I say under my breath, while I focus on the movers, the same two guys as yesterday—
not
colorless, oh man, so not colorless—horses, both of them, I already decided, one chestnut, one palomino. They're hulking a black piano into the house. I zoom in until I can see the sweat on their flushed foreheads, dripping down their necks, leaving wet transparent patches on their white shirts, which stick to them like skin . . . These binoculars are so awesome. A tan swath of the chestnut guy's smooth stomach slides out each time he raises his arms. He's more ripped than
David
even. I sit down, rest my elbows on my bent knees, and watch and watch, the swimming, thirsty feeling taking me over. Now they're lifting a couch up the front stairs—

But then I drop the binoculars because on the roof of the house I'm casing, there's a boy pointing a telescope right
at me
. How long has he been there? I peek up at him through my hair. He's wearing a weird hat, one of those old gangster movie ones, and there's white surfer hair sticking out every which way under it. Great, another surftard. Even without the binoculars, I can see he's grinning. Is he laughing at me? Already? Does he know I was watching the movers? Does he think . . . ? He must, he must. I clench up, dread rising in my throat. But maybe not. Maybe he's just grinning in a hello-I'm-new kind of way? Maybe he thinks I was checking out the piano? And asshats usually don't have telescopes, do they? And that hat?

I stand, watching as he takes something out of his pocket, winds his arm back, and then lobs whatever it is into the air over the house between us. Whoa. I stick out my palm and as I do, something slaps hard in the center of it. I think it's burned a hole in my hand and broken my wrist, but I don't flinch.

“Nice catch,” he yells.

Ha! It's the first time anyone has said those words to me in my life. I wish Dad heard. I wish a reporter for the
Lost Cove Gazette
heard. I have an allergy to catching and throwing and kicking and dribbling of any kind.
Noah is not a team player.
Well, duh. Revolutionaries aren't team players.

I examine the flat black rock in my hand. It's about the size of a quarter and has cracks all over it. What am I supposed to do with it? I look back at him. He's redirecting the telescope upward. I can't tell what animal he is. Maybe a white Bengal tiger with that hair? And what's he looking at? It's never occurred to me that the stars are still up there shining even in the daytime when we can't see them. He doesn't turn my way again. I slip the rock into my pocket.

“Where the hell is Ralph?” I hear as I quickly climb down the ladder at the side of the house. Maybe
he's
Ralph, I think. Finally. That would be
it
.

I whip across the street to take the woods down the hill to CSA after all, because I'm too embarrassed to pass the new kid. Plus, now that color has refastened itself to everything, it's supernaturally amazing to be in the trees.

People think people are in charge, but they're wrong; it's the trees.

I start to run, start to turn into air, the blue careening off the sky, careening after me, as I sink into green, shades and shades of it, blending and spinning into yellow, freaking yellow, then head-on colliding into the punk-hair purple of lupine: everywhere. I vacuum it in, all of it, in, in—(S
ELF-PORTRAIT:
Boy Detonates Grenade of Awesome
)—getting happy now, the gulpy, out-of-breath kind that makes you feel you have a thousand lives crammed inside your measly one, and then before I know it, I'm at CSA.

When school got out two weeks ago, I started doing recon down here, peering in the studio windows when no one was around. I had to see the student artwork, had to find out if it was better than mine, had to know if I really had a shot. For the last six months, I've stayed after school almost every day oil painting with Mr. Grady. I think he wants me to get into CSA as much as Mom and I do.

The artwork must be stowed away, though, because in all my spying I didn't see one painting. I did, however, stumble onto a life drawing class being taught in one of the studio buildings off the main campus—a building with one whole side of it tucked into thick old-growth trees. A freaking miracle. Because what could stop me from taking this class? Covertly, you know, from outside the open window?

So here I am. Both classes so far, there's been a real live naked girl with missile boobs sitting on a platform. We do speed drawings of her every three minutes. Totally cool, even if I have to stand on tiptoe to see in and then bend down to draw, but so what. The most important part is that I can hear the teacher and I already learned this totally new way to hold the charcoal so it's like drawing with a motor.

Today I'm the first to arrive, so I wait for class to start, my back against the warm building, the sun smothering me through a hole in the trees. I take the black stone out of my pocket. Why did the kid on the roof give me this? Why was he smiling at me like that? It didn't seem mean, it really didn't, it seemed—a sound breaks into my thoughts, a very human sound, branches cracking: footsteps.

I'm about to bolt back into the woods, when, in my periphery, I catch some kind of movement on the other side of the building, then hear the same crunching noises as the footsteps retreat. Where there was nothing, a brown bag's lying on the ground. Weird. I wait a bit, then sneak to the other side of the building and peek around the corner: no one. I go back to the bag wishing I had X-ray eyes, then crouch down and with one hand, shake it open. There's a bottle inside. I take it out: Sapphire gin, half full. Someone's stash. I quickly stuff it back in the bag, place it on the ground, and return to my side of the building. Hello? I'm not getting busted with it and blacklisted from going to CSA.

Peering through the window, I see that everyone's there now. The teacher, who has a white beard and holds his balloon belly when he talks, is by the door with a student. The rest of the class is setting up their pads on their stands. I was right too. They don't even need to turn on the overhead lights at the school. All the students have glowing blood. All revolutionaries. A room of Bubbles. There's not an asshat or surftard or hornet among them.

The curtain around the model's dressing area opens and a tall guy in a blue robe walks out.
A guy.
He undoes the robe, hangs it on a hook, walks naked to the platform, jumps the step, almost falls, then makes some joke that causes everyone to laugh. I don't hear it because of the heat storm roaring through my body. He's
so
naked, way more naked than the girl model was. And unlike the girl, who sat and covered parts of herself with her bony arms, this guy's standing on the platform, in a hand-on-hip pose, like a dare. God. I can't breathe. Then someone says something I don't catch, but it makes the model smile and when he does, it's like all his features shift and scramble into the most disordered face I've ever seen. A face in a broken mirror. Whoa.

I wedge my pad against the wall, holding it in place with my right hand and knee. When my left hand finally stops shaking, I start to draw. I keep my eyes clamped on him, not looking at what I'm doing. I work on his body, feeling the lines and curves, muscle and bone, feeling every last bit of him travel through my eyes to my fingers. The teacher's voice sounds like waves on the shore. I hear nothing . . . until the model speaks. I don't know if it's ten minutes or an hour later. “How about a break, then?” he says. I catch an English accent. He shakes his arm out, then his legs. I do the same, realizing how cramped I've been, how my right arm has gone dead, how I've been balancing on one leg, how my knee is aching and numb from being jammed into the wall. I watch him cross to the dressing room, wobbling a little, and that's when it occurs to me the brown bag is his.

A minute later, he lazes across the classroom in his robe toward the door—he moves like glue. I wonder if he's in college around here like the teacher said the girl model was. He looks younger than she did. I'm certain he's coming for the bag even before I smell the cigarette smoke and hear the footsteps. I think about hightailing it into the woods, but I'm frozen.

He rounds the corner and immediately lowers to the ground, his back sliding down the building, not noticing me standing just yards away. His blue robe glitters in the sun like a king's. He stubs the cigarette out in the dirt, then drops his head into his hands—wait, what? And then I see it. This is the real pose, head in hands with sadness leaping off of him all the way to me.

(P
ORTRAIT:
Boy Blows into Dust
)

He reaches for the bag, takes the bottle out and uncaps it, then starts chugging with his eyes closed. There's no way you're supposed to drink alcohol like this, like it's orange juice. I know I shouldn't be watching, know this is a no-trespassing zone. I don't move a muscle, afraid he'll sense me and realize he has a witness. Several seconds pass with him holding the bottle to his face like a compress, his eyes still closed, the sun streaming down on him like he's being chosen. He takes another sip, then opens his eyes and turns his head my way.

My arms fly up to block his gaze as he scoots back, startled. “Jesus!” he says. “Where the hell did you come from?”

I can't find any words anywhere.

He composes himself quickly. “You scared the life out of me, mate,” he says. Then he laughs and hiccups at the same time. He looks from me to my pad resting against the wall, the sketch of him facing out. He recaps the bottle.

“Cat got your tongue? Or wait—do you Americans even say that?”

I nod.

“Right, then. Good to know. Only been here a few months.” He gets up, using the wall as support. “So let's have a look,” he says, walking unsteadily over to me. He fumbles a cigarette out of a pack that was in his robe pocket. The sadness seems to have evaporated right off him. I notice something remarkable.