Very in Pieces (22 page)

“No.” I shake my head. “You're busy.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks, Very.” He goes back to his conversation, telling this Kaitlin person that he would love if she came over later to help him organize his resources. When I reach the door, he says, “Thanks for stopping by, Very. We'll talk soon.”

“That'd be great,” I say. I can lie almost as well as him now.

The one thing I was sure of was that he loved my mother. Another certainty slips away. I charge down the hallway and
almost run right into Professor Winslow. “Veronica,” he says. “You look like a girl who could use a butterscotch candy.” He puts his hand on my back and guides me into his office, which I know well from my failed attempts at learning the piano. That same piano is still in the corner, its music stand holding one sheet of music.

Professor Winslow takes the top off of a glass canister on his desk and pretends not to notice as I wipe furiously at my eyes. He hands me two golden candies and then sits down on the piano bench. “These are hard days for you,” he says.

I sink into an armchair, the same armchair where I always ended my lessons, and Professor Winslow starts to play a piece that I don't recognize. I am pretty sure it's in the minor key and it dances from scale to scale. I close my eyes and tilt my head back, and it is almost like I am little again, listening to Professor Winslow play at the end of our lessons, still believing that maybe someday I can play like that. The sweet, buttery taste fills my mouth as the candy dissolves.

The pace of the song picks up, like someone is dancing lightly in her shoes, spinning and waltzing, the notes tumbling the way Nonnie's poetry could.

I wonder if she knows he loves her. I would like to think not, but I feel certain she does. This kind man with his tweed hats and argyle socks and the—I'm imagining here—blue veins crisscrossing his calves. Professor Winslow would have loved her sweetly, would have taken care of her, bought the groceries, taken her for Sunday drives up the Maine coast. He would
have read her poetry and filled her wineglass and told her she looked absolutely stunning and would have believed it—
meant
it—even as the cancer took spark after spark from her.

The music ends with one long note that he lets die out.

“That's beautiful,” I tell him. “Who wrote it?”

“Original composition. I wrote it for your grandmother. It's based on one of her poems. And her.”

I smile. It's the sort of thing she would love but profess to hate.

“She says I ought to play it at her funeral.”

“I guess that's as close to a compliment as you could get from her.”

He looks down at the keys of the piano. “It's hard being an old man giving advice to young people. It's always meant in earnest, but it can be so hard to believe.” He reaches up and smooths the sheet of music. “I want to tell you that it will get better. And it will. But that doesn't make it any easier in the moment, does it?”

“No.”

“Then I won't tell you that. But you see, the reason that we want to step in and give advice is that it hurts us—it hurts me to see you so in pain. I wish there were something I could do to make it lighter. And so we resort to words, which never carry all the meaning we want them to. Though perhaps Imogene would disagree.”

“Could you play it again for me?”

“Yes,” he says. He stretches out his fingers and looks at me
with soft, pale eyes. “Yes, it would be an honor.”

I tuck my legs up onto the chair with me and nestle my head on my knees so I am as small as I can be. I close my eyes again, and as I listen to the music, I feel Nonnie with me.

i.

THE GALLERY IS ALL
lit up when I walk by, glowing against the gloaming sky. Marcus Schmidt's squares are like patches in a deconstructed quilt.

The door makes a sucking sound as I pull it open, and the older couple wandering around turn their heads to look at me before turning back to the pictures with intense inspection.

Maybe I remembered the paintings wrong, or hadn't paid enough attention. Maybe there really is some variation. Bleeding edges. Uneven paint application that will give a hint of the sideways message that Marcus Schmidt has to share. But no. I look at every single one of the paintings, and the only thing that changes is size and color. It's like he took paint samples from the hardware store and blew them up to one hundred times their original size.

And, I read on the gallery wall, he doesn't even sign his name. It's a stamp, applied in the same spot every time, “eschewing the
normal constraints of fame and the artist.”

So I go back downstairs. I don't look at me. I don't look at the girls on the back wall. I look for something else.

A student from way up in the northern part of the state has a painting of a pig, its eyes bright as it turns on a spit, beer can shoved in its mouth. The hairs on the back of the pig stand up like thin wires. From this painting, I know this boy—far better than one could know me, or Serena or Callie, from looking at our portraits.

In the next cluster of art there is a sculpture of a dancer, a knockoff Degas, only the face has been replaced by a twisted clown's mask. Mom would call it shocking without a message. Nonnie would probably buy it and stick it somewhere prominent in our house. I'm imagining that alternate world—the one where Nonnie is healthy and she and Mom engage in an elaborate game of shifting the sculpture around the house—when I see an etching. The print is framed, and the metal plate used to make it is next to it.

It's the ocean. The actual ocean. Swirling and shining and
moving
. This life, that's what is missing from Marcus Schmidt's dull squares above.

I step closer and it's like being on the deck of a ship: the ocean in the print moves with me, catches me off-balance.

My eyes flick to the small white card that identifies the artist:

Our Ocean

Copper plate etching and print

Dominic Meyers

Essex High School

Proof:

There's no doubt anymore. Even Mr. Tompkins would approve of this one.

ii.

I'm certain I will find Dominic at his house, so I look up his address on my phone and just drive with the soundness of my proof carrying me. I need to tell him I know about the sculpture and to thank him for it. He'll be so pleased, I think, that I figured it all out, it won't even matter that I blew him off at school.
I'll have a chance to explain that, too.

At his door, I hesitate before pressing the bell.
Our Ocean
, he called it. Who was the “we”? Who was the other person?

Shaking off the doubt, I ring the doorbell. A woman in a pink tweed suit answers the door. She has her hair pulled back at the nape in a way that is old-fashioned yet pretty. She must be a girlfriend of Dominic's father's. But no, that isn't right. Because, the thing is, she looks exactly like Dominic: same green eyes, same pointed nose. “You're back,” I blurt out.

She blinks her eyes in confusion. “I'm sorry. Do I know you? Are you in one of my lectures?”

“Lectures?” Inside the house a grandfather clock chimes five times, as dull and final as a judge's gavel. “No, I'm a friend of Dominic's. He hasn't been at school the past few days, and I thought maybe you all had gone on vacation and now, you're back!” I speak quickly, rambling, feeling more and more like an idiot.

“He hasn't been in school?”

“Yes, well, at least, I haven't seen him. Maybe our paths just didn't cross or something.”

“What's your name?” she asks.

“Very Sayles-Woodruff.”

“Like the poet?” I nod. “Well, Very, this is the first I've heard of his not going to school.”

As she speaks, I see him padding down the stairs behind her in white crew socks. “Like I say, it's possible we just weren't running into each other. It's a small school, but you'd be surprised
how you can miss people.”

“I see,” she says, totally unconvinced.

“Hello, Very,” Dominic says, not quite at the bottom of the stairs.

“Oh, hi,” I reply, as if I've just seen him.

Mrs. Meyers looks over her shoulder. “Very just told me you haven't been in school.”

“That I haven't
seen
him in school,” I correct.

“Can we talk about this later?” Dominic asks.

“Oh, you can be sure that we will.” She turns back to me. “It's been lovely to meet you.”

We both watch as she walks away. He jams his feet into a pair of Vans. “Come on.” He takes me by the arm and leads me outside. The evening has grown chilly, as if fall is whispering a teasing hello, and I zip up my jacket. We walk to the end of his driveway, past the recycling bin full of empty bottles of wine and organic juice, tin cans for hearts of palm, and the plastic clamshells for hothouse tomatoes, then turn and start down the road. “What are you doing here? I didn't realize I had another appointment with my peer counselor.”

I kick at an acorn, my face hot. “I'm sorry. It's just that I'm having a hard time. And then I went to—”

“So what do you want me to do about it?” He stares past me.

“I'm sorry about the other day. I thought you would understand.”

“That you were embarrassed to be seen with me. Who's too cool now?”

“Dominic, it's not like that, I just need—”

“Are you hoping I can hook you up? What's your pleasure? What kind of a girl are you, Very?”

I step away from him. “God, no.”

“Of course not. Not Veronica Sayles-Woodruff.”

“Jesus, Dominic, I just came here to talk.” I am blinking so fast he seems to be moving like stop-motion animation.

“And fuck up my life.”

“I didn't tell her you were skipping school. I told her I hadn't seen you around. And anyway, I don't know why you're being so self-righteous when you're the one who lied to me about your mother. What is she, a professor?”

“Why do you care?”

“I've been defending you at school, telling people to cut you some slack because they don't know what you've been through.” I'd gotten all defensive with Ms. Pickering, but she had been right about him.

“Oh really?”

“Really.”

“Because here's what I saw. I saw you backpedal away from me so hard you should have road rash. I saw you making a calculation—you're good at those, right—and you decided that what you knew about me had less value than the rumors.”

“What I know about you? I don't know one solitary thing about you. Everything you told me was a lie.”

“I told you what you needed to hear.”

“So you could get in my pants?”

“Did I get in your pants? I don't remember that. I guess it wasn't too memorable. Of course, with all the girls I've got it's hard to keep you all straight.”

I stop where I am, tears in my eyes. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“What's wrong with you? Showing up at my house like some kind of girlfriend or something.”

“Why are you being so mean? Everything is messed up right now. Everything. And all I wanted was to come over and talk to you because I thought, that thing you made, I thought it meant something.” The tears are rolling down my face now, and I know my skin is red and blotchy, and probably the snot will start flowing soon, but I just can't seem to care.

“Poor, poor Very. Game not going the way you want it? That's what this has all been to you. I'm just one part of your reinvention. Cut your hair, check. Retro car, check. Boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks, check.”

“You're not my boyfriend, and Essex doesn't have a wrong side of the tracks.”

“That's right. I'm not your boyfriend. So, why aren't you at his house talking to him?”

I pivot and start walking back toward his house and my car.

“Fuck,” I hear him whisper. I keep walking. I will not look back. The leaves are skittering across the street in front of me like spiders. I will not look back.

“Oh come on,” he calls after me. “Come back, Very. I'm sorry.”

The recycling truck careens around the corner. A man in a
fluorescent green vest hangs off the back. He swings down like a gymnast from the uneven bars and scoops up the bin with one hand. He dumps it into the back of the truck, all of it crashing and cracking and slamming together. The man whistles as he jumps back onto the truck.

I'm nearly to my car now. The truck rumbles to the next house. Keep walking. Just a few more steps.

“Seriously, Very, we didn't even get to make out or anything!”

iii.

Dominic returns to school the next day. I know it before I even see him. Just as Ms. Staples says good morning, I glance up at him, and he mouths the words, “I'm sorry.”

I look away.

“Welcome back, Dominic,” Ms. Staples says. “We've been doing a group project getting ready to present a poet and her work. Everyone is partnered up, so you'll have to join a pair and make a group of three. How about you jump in with Britta and Very. They'll get you right up to speed.”

“No,” I say.

Ms. Staples looks at me with some surprise.

We've been working on this project for almost a week already. Admittedly, Britta has done the majority of the work. It seems unfair to tether another deadweight to her. “He doesn't even know who we've chosen. Shouldn't he be placed in a group
based on the poet? Anyway, we've already done almost all the work. It wouldn't be fair for him to just jump in.”

“I can join with someone else. No problem.”

Ms. Staples, though, shakes her head. “Let me worry about the equity of work distribution. Dominic will join your group for the presentation next week.” She shifts her focus from me to the rest of the class. “I'm going to give you some time to work on your presentation right now. So get in your groups.”

Crap, crap, crap.
Dominic walks across the room and pulls up an empty desk next to us. I stare down at my notebook. Britta takes over. Thank God for Britta. “We're doing Gwendolyn Bennett. From the Harlem renaissance.”

“I know who she is,” he says.

She flips open her notebook and shows him the outline we have so far. “So you've read her poems?”

“Yeah. I read the whole packet while I was out. I wanted to stay caught up.”

Britta looks impressed. Even she hasn't read all the poems yet.

“We've started looking at her imagery. Lots of trees, for example, so we want to talk about that.”

“Lots of body references, too,” he says. “Hands, fingers, lips.”

I flip through the packet like I'm trying to find something.

“That's not really one of our talking points, but if you want to go there, be my guest.”

He laughs like falling leaves, and I finally allow myself to look at him. His eyes squint and his lips are chapped. I shift
my glance out the window, where a bird is hopping along the windowsill, fluttering her wings without flying. I look down at my notes.

Britta says, “So we figured we're going to start by giving some background about her. Then highlight a few of the poems, talking about the imagery and the messages. You know, maybe compare the ones that are explicitly about race to the ones that are more universal. The love one.”

“And the hate one,” I say.

“And there's the ‘artistic representation' piece.” She makes air quotes as she says it. We have to do an art project that relates to the poems, which Britta thinks is not real scholarship and thus a waste of time.

“Sounds good,” Dominic says. “Listen, Very, I'm really sorry about yesterday.”

Britta snaps her head around to look at me. I glare at him. “Forget about it.”

“I can't.”

“Forget about it,” I say again. “We need to break down who's going to talk about what. I've done a little research about her life, so I can take the biography.”

Britta, recovering gamely, says, “I'll do the nature imagery.”

“I think Very should do the art piece,” Dominic says.

“What?”

“That's a horrible idea,” Britta says.

“Why?” Dominic asks.

“Because we want to pass this course. Right, Very? Tell him
it's a stupid idea.”

They're both looking at me and it's like that story with the frog where both kids want it and can't agree and it's going to be pulled in two, and I'm the frog. “I'll do it,” I say. “But then you need to do her biography.”

Dominic leans back in his chair. “Fine.”

“Can you handle it?” I ask.

“Yeah, of course.”

“Are you going to be in class?” I ask.

He looks at the window, toward the now-still bird. “Yes, I'll be here.”