Notes from Ghost Town (15 page)

“So, you’re saying, for example, Matthew Pauls would be a lot more fun to paint than me because he weighs like three-hundo?”

I laugh, feeling the ice in my chest break apart just a little more. “Exactly.”

“If you had the choice, you’d be on a boat with him tonight instead of me, wouldn’t you?”

“You got it.” I grin.

Austin laughs, flicks me playfully below the knee. “So why did you stop painting if you loved it so much?” He turns the boat to the left, wind catching in the sails that sends us rocking slightly backward. The stripes of the mainsail dance some more, rippling in and out of focus.

I pause for a moment, preparing my answer. “I wasn’t very good at it,” I finally say. I can’t tell him that for me the world has dissolved into gray; then he’d think I was nuts. And I want him to like me, weirdly enough. I think I need him to like me.

“Really?” He’s so close, still emitting that strong, strange, boy scent. “That surprises me. You see things in such a unique way.”
He has no idea
. “Did your mom paint, too? Or just play piano?”

My face stars to burn. “Just played,” I reply, feeling my fingers begin to tingle—they do this sometimes when I start to feel sick, or nervous, or anxious. I run them through my hair, try to focus on the perfectly cut angles of his face, the constellation of freckles across his nose.

He inches the fingers of his free hand closer to me, to the between-space of my knees. I can feel the heat and tension of them, pulsing toward me.
Oh my god
. “Where’d they send her again?”

My whole body’s so hot at this point I’m just waiting to spontaneously combust. I mumble: “Broadwaithe. For now.”

“Man … that’s got to be tough.” He looks at me, his fingers still lingering between my knees. “Aren’t certain kinds of insanity genetic?”

I stare at him, hot-faced, hot-mouthed. “I don’t … why would you say that?” I hug my knees together and pull them into my chest. “You—you think I’m crazy?”
Can he see it? Can everyone see it?

“No, no. Of course not. Sorry—bad joke.” He puts a hand over my sandaled foot. I move my foot away, burning up to hell inside.

“Because I’m
not
crazy. Jesus, Austin. Why would you even say that?”

He reasserts his warm palm on top of my foot. “That
was a really stupid joke to make and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. The truth is, I think … you’re just crazy hot. And really fun. And probably the sanest person I know. And the smartest.” The sea slaps the sides of the boat. He tugs the mainsail taut again, stares at me with those big, moonglow eyes. “I like you, Olivia.”

My stomach surges, a hot pulse of saliva filling my mouth like it does just before you puke. I swallow it down, steady my hands beside me on the boat bench. The waves keep slapping the sides and I feel like they’re somehow
inside
me, sloshing around, trying to rush out my mouth in a thick, briny fist.

“I need to go back to shore,” I say, scooting closer to the smooth painted edge of the boat; the tips of waves peak like foamy fingers, try to pull me down into the deep dark. I lean back, stare up into the star-freckled sky. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

And then I am: on the floor of Austin’s dead dad’s boat, and into the deep dark sea, with its fine, finger-spray of foam.

A
lamp is still burning in the living room, casting a glow on the driveway. It’s almost twelve. Heather and Dad must still be up. They might even be waiting for me, sitting jittery on the sofa, sipping coffee and praying I’m not bleeding in a ditch somewhere.

I twist my key carefully in the front door lock, still queasy from the boat ride, from wondering the whole way home if, despite his claims otherwise, Austin saw something
—sees
something—a hint or glint, twitch or tick, that indicates to the world in no uncertain terms how quickly I’m unraveling.

When I step inside, there’s no rush of worried greeting: Dad and Heather are passed out on the couch in the living room, surrounded by messy stacks of RSVP cards. He’s got one arm around her. Her thin face is mostly obscured in the nook of his shoulder, her pin-straight blonde hair messy for once, a halo of untended frizz, one arm slung around his waist. Johnny Cash is skipping in the old CD system Dad brought with him from Oh Susannah and I
creep quietly to the console beside the spanking new big screen TV to turn it off, the sounds of their sleeping breath audible now, even sweet.

She snores a little in her sleep—a ragged puttering sound from her perfect little doll nose. Dad’s breath moves like a little steamroller through his tall, thin body and out his lips in a little
puh
. I leave the lamp on so they don’t wake up in the dark and tiptoe back over the soft carpeting, before padding upstairs to my room. My cell phone buzzes from my purse. Probably Raina. I ignore it; don’t feel much like talking.

I switch on the cracked old clown lamp that takes up most of my nightstand and start to undress, my whole body heavy with exhaustion. I stare at the gray curves and dark-shadow dips of my body in the mirror, remembering the two months in seventh grade I did this for hours on end, at night, before bed. I’d tried to starve myself: allowed myself one slice of salted bread with lettuce and an apple per day. I was so self-conscious, so unsure. But I had everything then. Everything. And I didn’t even realize it.

I turn away from the mirror, and tug on my big, old nightshirt, a shirt Dad used to wear in college. I start to climb into my unmade bed but stop when I notice something crumpled up in the comforter and sheets—a body—something warm. Breathing slowly, carefully, I tug them back.

“Wynn!” I sigh. “Jesus …” She blinks sleepily at the sound of my voice, rubbing her eyes with one hand.

“Livieeeee!” Wynn squeals, leaping up in bed to clutch me around the neck. “You’re home!” She’s dressed in her Little Mermaid pajamas. I notice several sheets of paper scattered in bed beside her—old drawings, I’m guessing, by the shadow of lines peaking through their undersides.

I exhale loudly. “Wynn,” I say in my best Serious Adult tone, lifting her arms from around my neck, moving to crouch beside the bed. She looks at me with puppy-dog eyes, blonde curls haloed around her face. “Why aren’t you sleeping in your own bed, and”—I motion my head toward the drawings—“where did you find those?”

Her eyes go even wider, pleading with mine. “I woke up and I wasn’t sleepy anymore, Livie,” she starts, dancing her fingers over the comforter toward mine. “And I came in here to find you and I found your drawings first and I really really liked them and”—she pauses, tactically, dancing her fingers over my hand, biting her teeth over her bottom lip—“will you draw me? Because you’re a good drawer and I wanna show Kimmy and Lisa. Livie. Please? Pleeease?”

I lift the drawings from the bed and quickly shuffle through them—old sketches from middle school and the beginning of high school: our old house; a sketch of our sweet, old mutt, Cody, I’d made as practice for a painting I made Mom for Mother’s Day one year; a picture of Raina on the beach, with seaweed for hair. “It’s not nice to go through someone’s things, Wynn. That’s my private stuff. And you don’t go through someone’s private stuff.”

“But,” she starts to whine, “I wasn’t tired and-and-and I found them by accident.” She looks up at me, eyes still thoroughly puppy-dogged, hugging my comforter into her chest. “I said I’m sorry so will you draw me now? I’ll never do it again, cross my heart hope to die stick a needle in my eye. Kimmy taught me that yesterday even though Mommy thinks it’s not nice,” she says, proudly, twisting one of her curls around her pointer finger.

“I—I’m really tired, Wynny,” I say, rolling the pieces of paper together and shoving them, this time, into the way-back of my closet.

“Please?” Her voice crests into a desperate whine. Dr. Levine’s request, so strangely urgent, returns to me:
keep sketching, just stick to black and white for now
.

I turn back to Wynn.

“All right, Panda.” I scoop her up, giggling, and fling her over my shoulder. “I’ll draw you, but you have to get in
your
bed first.”

I stoop to lift the sketchpad and a charcoal pencil from my book bag, carry her to her pink-carpeted, ballet-slippered room, click the ladybug nightlight on. When it’s dark, everything looks to me like it’s covered in fog—the outlines and edges and architecture of a room the only things I can truly decipher without having, first, to be shuffled through a whole mess of memory and logic. She leaps into bed, snuggling beneath her covers, burrowing beneath her piles of stuffed animals. I flip my sketchbook open to the next blank page.
“Are you ready, Wynn? Because you can’t move once I start.”

She hugs the stuffed panda I gave her to her chest, gives it a little kiss on the beak. “You’re gonna be okay, Panda,” she tells it, very seriously. “You’re gonna have real sweet dreams and I’ll be right here the whole time.” It’s what Heather says to her before bed sometimes, too, when Wynn’s too scared to sleep. I wonder if she learned that in the support group where she met Dad. I wonder if they say it to each other before sleep. Maybe there’s a whole group of people out there who’ve lived with “emotionally unstable” people and need someone to reassure them that they’ll
be here the whole time
every night before sleep. Wynn looks up at me, then, radiant, smiling so the gaps of her three missing baby teeth show. “Ready.”

I start moving charcoal across page, struggling at first, not trusting my hand, my eye, second-guessing the sweep of my lines across a page. But then, when I draw in the strawberry-roundness of her face, start to fill in her wide, light-lashed eyes, button nose, kewpie mouth—that
thing
begins to happen. That time-lapse thing when past and present and future just melt into one long, patient, quiet moment where nothing matters but this.

I stop noticing the almost apple-juice scent that Wynn’s room carries, the photographs of Wynn and Heather holding mittened hands in front of a giant pyramid of pumpkins somewhere up North, the lone photograph of Wynn’s father’s smiling gray face stuffed behind a sheet
of glass and held tight in a smooth wood frame, small balloons painted in two of the four corners.

I stop noticing anything at all but the mass of line and shadow that bring Wynn—finally asleep, snoring softly—alive on the page before me. I finish the drawing, plant a very soft kiss at the top of her forehead.

Back in my room, I lean against the wood frame of my bed and let my hand hover over a new blank page in my sketchbook. I’m trying to remember the details of Mom’s face—every inch of her skin, the shadow of her cheekbones, exact curve of her jaw, the little c-curve of her earlobes, the tip of her nose she always thought was too bulbous, the sea-surge of hair down her back. But it’s hard. The images keep getting spliced with Broadwaithe Mom—
Gray Space
Mom—choppy slats of hair poking out at odd angles behind her ears, down her neck. I make several drawings, shade bags under her eyes huge and scary and wrong. Try again. And again. But they all come out wrong. Her face isn’t solid to me anymore. It’s lost to that other realm. Silent. A place where art cannot exist.

Except
, I remind myself,
The Gray Space doesn’t exist. It can’t be real
.

I look down, disgusted at my attempts: they’re awful. Total shit. I tear them from the book, crumple them into hard little balls in my fist, and hurl them into the waste-basket beside my desk. In a surge of frustration, I rip the comforter off my bed, biting hard into it to stop from screaming. I can’t stop; I rip the silk sheets off my bed, too.
Mom always thought silk sheets were a silly, unnecessary luxury and now she’s sleeping on steel wool with a toilet five inches from her head and I’ve got
silk
and big billowing window treatments, all bought with money from Ghost Town. So that we can look like everyone else, so that Dad can prove that he’s above it all. That what happened can’t hold him back. That she can’t hold him back. He’s got bigger, better, more expensive things now.

My cell phone buzzes on my nightstand.
1 new text message
. From Raina.
Why are you ignoring me? Meet me and Tif at Beast Beach!! Champagne of beers. Bonfire. Maybe some fly honeys. Come onnnn, yo …

I ignore it.

The sheets lie in a pile next to the trash can and I toss the sketchbook on top, away from me. How stupid I am to have thought there was salvation in this—in making time slow down with a pencil in my hands, in creating, in thinking I could escape myself.

You can never escape.

I click off my lamp, climb on top my bare mattress. Cold and uncomfortable, I press my knees against my chest beneath my sleep shirt and wriggle around awhile until I’m too tired to wriggle anymore and everything goes full black.

My dream feels more real to me than reality has felt lately. I’m in my bed, and Stern’s beside me, and he’s warm. We’re both pretending to be asleep, but I can’t sleep because his
hands are on my body. Every one of my cells seems drawn, magnetized, straight into the spot where his hands meet my skin. So warm. He’s so warm, and he smells like he’s always smelled—like the detergent his mom uses to wash his clothes with a little sweet-bitter tug of the Marlboro cigarettes his dad smokes and then the just-him smell. And his face is too beautiful to look away from. Just too freaking beautiful. His lips—parted just slightly. And his body is too close to allow for sleep. And every single part of me is buzzing.

I can hear him breathe. I can feel his heartbeat in the inches of sheet and bedcover between us. There’s a little bit of light peaking out through the semitranslucence of my window shades. Our knees are touching. I could scream with happiness.

Don’t close your eyes
, I keep telling myself.
Stay here forever. If you stay awake, you can stay here forever
. There’s a little smile on his face, like he’s dreaming of something very, very nice. He starts humming the tune to “Oh! Susannah” under his breath, like he’s trying to lullaby me further into sleep though I don’t want it. But, at the soothing sound of his hum, I’m suddenly too tired to keep my lids up.
Don’t you cry for me, I come from Alabama with a
—too tired. So tired.
Hold on—