This Is the Story of You (4 page)

I would wish not.
That's what my little brother always said, his Wednesday mantra. “I would wish not. Please.”

He would say it lying there on his bed, in the crack of light. He'd say it as I pulled his curtains wide, those fabric cars running a wavy north and south. I'd open his window, let in the breeze. I'd get his clothes out of the dresser drawer, toss them his way. I'd sit on the corner of his mattress, low to the floor, especially arranged, and nudge him on the arm.

“Hey.”

“I would wish not,” he'd say.

“Please?”

I'd sit on the edge of his bed as he squeezed his gray eyes shut, so many versions of wishing. I'd watch him and see everything he struggled with—walking a straight line, pedaling a bike, digging a sand castle, balancing a spoon, keeping his tongue inside his mouth, staying unangry even if his hands were a little bit like claws and his face kept flattening.
Mickey, someone ironed my face.
I'd sit there and try to see an ounce of Mickey in him, and then I'd try to imagine his dad, which was not the same as trying to imagine my own—different people and no photograph that I'd ever found of either. I'd never asked Mickey which one of her children's fathers she'd loved the best, or
if
she'd loved them, even, because what kind of question is that, and how would it not make her sad, and did I even want the answer?

My dad had been a deserter; that's all Mickey had said. Jasper Lee's dad had been one of those, too, gone after the pregnancy news and too lily-livered to ever show up here and say,
Hello and how are you, and how is our son, you
need something, Mickey?
I never met any man I could call Dad. But in the morning, when my brother wished not, I tried to see a father in my brother's bones, in the genes he'd left, in the enzyme he'd been robbed of. I tried to see a dad, but all I could see was a kid who wished not for a machine and a hospital bed, a kid who would give anything at all to be medium smart, medium blond, medium fine, school pic after ordinary school pic.

Medical history of my brother in a nutshell: Adenoids removed to help him sleep. Bilevel positive airway pressure machine—BiPAP—to help him breathe. Spine permanently curved because his fragile bones prevented a fix. Hernias removed, and then more hernias.

If you need a reason not to complain about your so-called problems—the B on your Algebra 2, the tear in the seam of your jeans, the bruise above your heart, the overkill worry of your one best friend and the incredible naïveté of the other, the fact that Mario never notices you, that he sings baritone past you, that he's short and he never looks up—then I invite you to imagine my brother. On Wednesdays he wished not, and would you not, too? Wished not to rise, not to be driven, not to be hooked up, not to be cocktailed, not to be Elaprased. In our house by the beach on the island of Haven, Wednesdays were Wish Not. We practiced the religion of persuasion.

“Come on, little brother.”

Groan.

“Open your eyes.”

He opened his eyes.

“I'm skipping today for tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow will be here in no time.”

“Maybe for you.”

“Maybe for you, too. Someday.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Yeah.”

The breeze through the window took his planes for a spin—the barnstormer, the Fokker, the Sopwith Camel. They went one way and then snapped back, and I thought of the day that Deni and Eva and I had hung them there, Jasper Lee lying on the bed beneath us while we cut the nylon string with our teeth. “Works of art,” Eva had said.

She had twisted her hair into a dozen braids. She had stood there, on my brother's bed, craning her neck, looking up. Then she'd stepped off the bed and lay flat on the wide-planked floor. “Your planes,” she'd said. “They fly eternal. No storm will ever reach them, no quake will ever fold them, no continental shelf will ever take them down, they will live on and on. Eternal,” she'd said again. She said it in that small but lovely voice she had. She said it with emotion. She said it as if suddenly she could see the future, too, and not just stratospheres of once. Deni and I stood on the trembling mattress. Jasper Lee lay there flat. We heard her voice. It echoed like prayer. I looked down and my little brother was crying.

Eternal. What a word it was, to a boy who might not live to be adult.

“Come on,” I said again that Wednesday. Nudging him, picking his clothes up from one side of the bed and placing them closer to where he could reach them.

He lay there. I sat there. We felt the breeze, both of us; heard the sound of someone talking on Old Carmen's radio.

“She wearing her boots?” Jasper Lee finally asked, closing his eyes again.

“Guess so.”

“She fishing?”

I turned, strained, looked out the window.

“She's getting started. You hear that?” I said.

“What?”

“Mickey's making your scrapple.”

“Scrapple is gross.”

“I know.”

“You've got to tell her.”

“Tell her what?”

“That I'm not a fan of scrapple.”

Every Wednesday I made the promise. Every Wednesday I broke it. I knew what Jasper Lee knew—that Mickey needed the scrapple more than Jasper Lee wanted scrapple. I knew what I couldn't fix—that she needed to believe she could do something more for her second child than what the doctors and the Elaprase offered.

Jasper Lee would always be crooked. He would always be fragile. He would never be graceful. His tongue would always be too big for his mouth. Jasper Lee would always be the person people could not see first, because people see what they want to see, at least in a quick and judging first glance. Mickey hated this about people. Mickey hated it for her son. She made him scrapple because making scrapple was active, it was one of the ways that Mickey loved him out loud.

“Just go with it, all right? Get up?”

“I'm getting up. Can't you see me getting up?”

He pulled the sheet away with the best of his two hands.

Then he turned in his bed.

There's no traffic to speak of off-season at Haven.
There's hardly any traffic on the bridge. But there's mainland traffic on the way to Memorial, and Mickey did her best to beat it. That day Mickey had taken her apron off and combed her hair. Jasper Lee had caned his way down the hall, out the door, over the pebbles, to the car. I'd waved goodbye and gone inside, up the steps, into my room, when my cell phone rang, and it was Deni.

“She's at it again,” she said, no hello, no stop. “I was walking Cinnamon Nose, right? By the beach, right? And there were Eva and Shift out on the rocks.” I thought of Deni and her Bernese mountain dog, prettiest dog I'd ever seen. Dog had a good leash yank in him. Cinnamon Nose made spying tough on Deni, but she was keen on practicing the art.

“Which rocks?”

“South end.”

“What time?”

“Early.”

I was putting my bracelets on, my eleven earrings. I was slipping the key around my neck, touching the bruise it left. I was pulling the ponytail higher on my head and checking the mirror and feeling the breeze through the window. I was listening but I was distracted, too—remembering the look on Jasper Lee's face when Mickey had backed her Mini Cooper down the pebble drive. His eyes were everlasting gray. The cherry-red Cooper with the dragging back fender was headed off toward the bridge—Mickey's hand held high and Jasper Lee's hand held low, waving their opposite goodbyes.

“Mira?” I heard Deni now. “You listening?”

“I'm listening.”

“You sound like you're miles and miles away.”

“How could I be miles and miles away?” I asked. “In Haven?”

“Don't you care what happens to Eva?”

“Of course I care what happens to Eva. But she hasn't been kidnapped, Deni. She's met someone new. This is what Eva
does
.”

“I don't have a good feeling.”

“Do you ever?”

“He came out of nowhere. He only has one name. Who shows up in Haven to go to Alabaster, middle of September?”

“A transfer,” I said. “I guess.”

“Eva's already in, whole hog.”

“Don't go crazy on her, Deni.”

“I'm not crazy. I'm just careful.”

Of course, Deni wasn't completely wrong. Eva was an overtruster. She'd bring every ball of furry-stray home. She'd set up lemonade stands for the feeble. She'd think that she could cure the brokenhearted with her triple-flavored taffy. Eva was a bleeding heart and her heart was bigger than two Grand Canyons. Loving Eva was keeping an eye on her. It came with the package.

Deni needed needing most of all. We loved her in spite of herself.

That morning, Deni kept talking until she stopped. I mean: She kept talking and I went down into the kitchen to start cleaning up, water running, pan scrubbing while Deni talked and I uh-huh'd in the pauses, and then we said goodbye. I'd left my backpack upstairs and so I hurried up to get it—past the paintings on the striped stair wall and past the clay pots that sat one pot per step, each with a face that Mickey had carved at Sandy Sacks, the community art center where she worked. She'd made the pieces in the off hours when the bisque was cooling in the kiln. She'd brought each home, and she'd laughed at them, and we'd tried to guess who she'd been thinking of when she carved the nose, the brow, the grin.
Not telling,
she'd say.
Secrets are secrets.
She used oxides instead of glazes to give the creatures color. Their teeth were gray. Their eyes were hollow. We called them gargoyles behind her back and then in front of her, but she wouldn't give in, wouldn't tell her secrets.

Just people I knew,
she'd say.
Acquaintances.

In my room, the breeze was moving the curtains around, the paisley bedspread, the skirts in the closet. I rolled the sliding door open, brought my cactus inside, placed it on the bureau beside the photo of my aunt. Then I went back out onto the deck and took one last look around for dolphins, noticed the waves coming in at an angle, no Old Carmen. I'd have been late for school if I stood up there any longer. I'd be getting a call from Deni first, and then a reminder from Mr. Friedley. So I stepped back inside. I bolted the door. I grabbed the backpack and my skates and headed down the stairs.

At the landing I heard a sound in my brother's room. There was something stirring the model planes—the breeze through the shingles and plaster. I stood for a moment and watched the planes fly. I thought of Jasper Lee, wishing not. I thought of Mickey behind the wheel of the car, the hair she combed getting tangled at once because she liked her window down.

I didn't see the forgotten Bag of Tricks until I was halfway gone. It'd be a long day at Memorial, I thought.

And felt a sudden wash of sorry.

Too late for homeroom.
Too late, even with my skates keyed to my Skechers and my backpack aerodynamically strapped and no sandwich in the Ziploc; the morning had run out of time. I was Bonnie Blair, crunched at the waist. I rollered north toward the sanctuary, took some air over the curb, pumped until I was up to steady speed, and the breeze was strong, it was working with me. At the broken shells of the parking lot, I stopped, unkeyed my skates, then ran, quiet as I could over the wide white crunch.

I heard the birds before I heard the O'Sixteens, some of their songs close and some of them falling in from the faraway coves. I followed the clattering bridge, passed the pond and the sleeping swans, and now the breeze was in the tops of the trees, and I was still on the path, edging the empty culs-de-sac of trees and nests, until there they were, in the shade, campfire style.

Ms. Isabel's lavender coat was dragging behind her. Mario was up on his backpack for the purpose of height. Chang held her azalea-pink blade like a dish, and Tiny Tina and Taneisha were holding hands, no secrets to those two, not since a year before, when Tiny Tina had stood up on the lunch-table bench and announced that she was in love and Taneisha was hers: “Taneisha Green, you are off the market. O-fish-o-lee.”

I didn't see Deni at first, then there she was, sitting against a cypress whose lower branches were long gone, the stubs of them like the start of deer horns. She had her arms crossed over the tied sleeves of her brother's jacket. She had her tic-tac-toe T-shirt on and her khaki shorts and a pair of hiking boots, scuffed at the reinforced toes. Her eyes were disappointed, cautious. They looked from me and then to them and then back again.

Where the hell have you been?
her eyes said.

I need some help here.

Look.

I looked to where she was looking. I saw: Eva and Shift sharing the stump of a tree. They were sitting back to back, propped against each other, sideways to the rest of us, like they had known each other all their lives, like they were O-fish-o-lee. There was moss hanging like Mardi Gras beads above their heads. There was a blackbird in their tree. Shift's hood was up. The binoculars were back around Eva's neck, but on Shift's denim lap was a perfect conch shell, still sweating with the salts of the sea. Shells were an Eva specialty. She found them, whole and unbroken. She gave the best as gifts, her name written inside with a gold glitter pen, as if she were the shell's creator.

What do you want me to do about it?
my eyes said back.

Something?

What
something?

She gave him a shell, Mira. A
shell.

“Mira Banul,” Ms. Isabel said. “Please take a seat.”

There was a pine-needle clearing between Marco and Dascher, and I chose that. Slipped the backpack off. Set down the skates. I took out my notebook and I glanced back at Deni and she was staring into the middle distance, only half listening to Ms. Isabel telling the story Ms. Isabel wished she didn't have to tell. About the rising sea levels and the habitat loss, about invasive species, vegetation shifts, birds getting all messed up in the head—confused on the subjects of migration and breeding, nesting and care. Birds showing up at the wrong time in the wrong places, Ms. Isabel was saying, her roller cart at her feet, her coat full of fluff, her buttons wound loose on their threads.

“Look up,” Ms. Isabel said. “Listen. Love.”

Eva lifted her eyes toward the tops of the trees.

Deni took a long, painful look at me.

We sat quiet.

There was the
whooo
of an owl.

“I don't know how I could love much more,” Eva said, the kind of thing she was unafraid to say to an entire audience of O'Sixteens. The kind of thing they let her say, without bothering to tease.

“That's the tragedy of it, isn't it,” Ms. Isabel said. And then she looked at Shift and dialed the dahlia in her dreads.

I waited, I kept waiting, for Shift to look up, to look back.

Tell me who you are, Shift.