Very in Pieces (24 page)

“A turret bedroom. If I come back at night, Rapunzel, will you let down your hair?”

I run my hand over my closely cropped head. “There'd be nothing to throw down to you.”

“We probably don't want to be in that kind of story anyway.”
The smile is gone, but his face is kind.

“Right. I mean, what if we get lost in the woods and I never find you to cure your blindness with my tears?”

“I think you'd find me,” he says.

“Because it's our fated destiny?” I try to press a smirk onto my lips. I don't want him to think I'm serious.

“I was thinking more that as a newly blind man I'd be flailing and stumbling around the forest wailing, ‘My eyes! My eyes! For the love of God, the witch has stolen my eyes!' There'd be no way for you to miss me.”

“And when I found you, all I would have to do is cry. I'm not much of a crier.”

“That's the thing about fairy tales, it's all metaphor.”

“I'm not so good at that, either.”

“You're probably selling yourself short, but in this case, it's how she feels about him. And there's all sorts of ways to show someone that.”

The wire between us is coiling itself tighter and tighter.

He smiles. Just an upturn of the lips. I reach out and touch them. They are softer than I remember. And warm.

“You're so very solid,” I tell him. “Not a fairy-tale prince.”

“And I'm not going anywhere. I'm anchored to you.”

“To hold me in place? Or do you mean like the poem? The Emily Dickinson poem about the ship in the storm?”

“Whatever you want me to be.”

I don't know what I want him to be, but the idea of a still, calm night, a solid place to rest, that is appealing. And he is
offering. So I fall toward him and my lips reach his, and we are kissing and lurching toward the bed. We stumble and my elbow hits his chest, but he just grips me closer. We kiss. And kiss. On the bed, and still kissing. His knee presses between my legs. His hand grazes my hip. Every place his body touches mine it's like he's flicking a light switch—
on, on, on
—until the electricity is sparking across my body. He puts his hands on my upper arms, pulls back, and looks at me. “Are you okay?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Good.” He pushes his hair out of his eyes and I want him to kiss me again. He makes no move, so I do, lifting myself up, and pressing my lips to his.

“You smell like the ocean,” he whispers.

I could say I don't know what is going to happen next. I could say it is all his idea—his plan from the beginning even—and everyone will believe me. But I know what is going to happen. I want it.

He takes his shirt off.

He runs his fingers across my cheek and down onto my neck, then he helps me to sit up so I can take off my own shirt. “Are you cold?” he asks as he pulls the covers over us. I'm not. I am warm all over.

You'd think it is my first time the way my hands fumble over his body, not sure where to land. He thinks it is. “Have you . . . ?” He leaves the question unspoken.

“Yes,” I say.

He pauses for a moment with his hands above the button of
my jeans and I nod. I watch his eyelids, as he undoes it, the way his long eyelashes flutter one two three times against his cheek. This close I can see every detail, the way his lashes cross over one another, and how the blue of his eyelids isn't consistent but mottled, light in some places, and almost purple in others, the way his lips have a tiny piece of skin peeling off.

“I have condoms. In the drawer by my bed.”

I don't tell him why I have them, and he doesn't ask about this trace of Christian left behind. He reaches across me and I can smell him, and the smell envelops me and my body arches up so my face is in his chest.

The paper on the condom wrapper tears. We separate for a moment.

“Okay?” he asks.

“Okay.”

And then his breath is in my ear, my neck, hot and sweet. There's a sharp pain, a hesitation—mine, his, ours—and then he is inside of me.

Now I know why my grandmother used such long metaphors for sex. You have to come at it sideways.

v.

After, we lie there. Still.

“You look pretty like that,” he says. I sit up and pull my legs to my chest, then rest my head on my knees.

“Now you look sad,” he says. He's lying on his side, holding his head up with his hand. With Christian, there was always a rush to clean up, to get back to our homework or a movie on TV. To act like it hadn't even happened.

“I'm not sad.”

“You sure?”

“I wouldn't lie to you.”

“Can I show you something?” he asks. “It's kind of cheesy. It might seem like a move—”

“You don't need to make a move. We already did it.”

“True. But maybe I'm laying the groundwork for the future. Anyway, it's just something I drew.”

He reaches down and grabs his messenger bag, and I pull my T-shirt on. He tugs a Moleskine sketchbook out; with it comes a small Baggie, and inside the Baggie are six neatly rolled joints.

We look at each other. “Do you . . .” I begin. “I mean, are these like, for sale?”

“You interested?”

I shake my head quickly, and he laughs. “Probably for the best. Minds like yours are few and far between and we wouldn't want to wreck it.”

I pick up the Moleskine journal. “So what's this?”

“You can look through. It's mostly sketches.”

As I flip through, I recognize people from school—Adam, Mr. Solloway, Ramona. He drew her looking off into the distance, her eyes wide and searching. Her long hair cascades down her back and almost seems to move. I notice her strong jawline
and how it's so similar to my own.

“She was in the art room one day and said it was okay if I sketched her. She said she wanted to look permanent.”

I flip the page and am surprised to see Christian. He stares out at me from the page with such open innocence, it makes me feel guilty and I turn the page. There are the lyrics to “Veronica,” written not in Dominic's usual print, but in a shaky cursive.

I hold the page up and show him.

“Turn the page,” he tells me.

I do and there I am. Beautiful. My short hair is sticking out in all directions. The bruise is a faded shadow of hash marks. With bright eyes I look up shyly. At him. Who else would I look at like that?

He sits up behind me now, his chest against my back. “That's what I wanted to show you. Do you like it?” he asks. “I want to make an etching of it. I sound like a total d-bag, don't I?”

“No.” I shake my head.

“You don't like it, do you.”

“I don't normally see myself that way. From that perspective.”

“It's always interesting to see how someone else sees you.” His hand settles on my ankle. “I haven't figured out how you see me yet, Very.”

“We just had sex, didn't we?”

“That's just a thing any two people can do. It doesn't have to mean anything.”

I turn my head away. It had been good sex, I thought, and
that seemed to be meaningful just on its own. Or maybe I was ascribing too much value to the physical. With Christian we were doing it because it was what we were supposed to do. This was different, and I liked it more. “Right—” I begin.

“No, wait. It meant something to me. What I can't figure out is what it meant to you. Why you did it.”

I think of Ramona's words when we first saw the sculpture:
Why do people do any number of things?

“Because I wanted to,” I reply.

“I wish I could figure you out.”

I look back down at the drawing. It isn't shyness, I realize, that he captured, but curiosity. I am trying to figure him out as much as he is trying to figure out me. I run my fingers along my eyes in the drawing.

“Tell me three true things,” I say. “Three true things about yourself.”

He scoots back on my bed so he's leaning against the headboard. “I have lived all of my life in Essex.”

“I already knew that. Tell me the truths of the lies you told me.”

He blinks. “Okay, well, my dad really did want to be a musician. He can play the guitar like crazy, and I think he's more than a little disappointed that I don't play. He does something really boring at a tech company. I don't even know what it is. Not cool technology, but, like paper pushing. He seems to like it. He does travel a lot. And when he travels a lot of times he goes to shows.”

“And your mother?”

“Well, she probably should have left us. She's a professor at the college. Economics. She's brilliant, actually, and could probably get a job at a better school, but my dad's work is here. And she thinks she needs to ‘be a mother' to me, quote unquote. Whatever that means.”

“So why all the lies?”

“Is that my third true thing?”

“Yes.”

“Because I was going to tell you something about you and your grandmother.”

“Now you have to tell me both.”

“Why?”

“My bed, my rules.”

“Fair enough. I lie because it's easier than telling the truth. I mean, it makes the day easier to get through if you're telling a story about it rather than the actual day. Like my dad, I find him ceaselessly depressing when he's there listening to Eric Clapton and doing air guitar while he looks over quarterly reports. So I gave him a different life.”

“A more depressing life.”

“An appropriately depressing life.”

“And me? And Nonnie?”

“I liked her first.”

“I know.”

“And that's okay?”

“Well, I liked her first, too.”

“I just don't want you to think I was going after you because of her poetry.”

“But you were.”

“Maybe at first. But it was also what I said. I read all these poems and thought I knew her, and then there you were in front of me, and nothing like her at all, and I wanted to know why.”

“I'm not like her, but she used to be like me. That's what she said.”

“Now that I know you, I think you are like her. The good parts. Smart. Witty. Biting, but also kind.”

I look down at my toenails. The polish I put on with Nonnie is chipped in places, and my nails have grown, so there are naked half circles at the base. “I have a truth for you.” He slides over beside me so our thighs are touching. “Sometimes I wish she would die.”

I wait for him to respond. To tell me I'm disgusting. That I'm some kind of a monster for wanting her gone.

“I bet she sometimes wishes that, too.”

I bend my forehead to my knees, but he can still tell that I'm crying. He wraps his arms around me. “Remember how I told you it felt like people were trying to steal my memories of her? Now it's me. I feel myself trying to cut loose from her, trying to let her go, but I can't. I can't. And so I'm just in this stasis and I can't make one single decision. I can't decide where to go to college until I know if she is going to live or die. I can't decide anything. And I feel like once she's gone this veil will be lifted,
and then the future path will be clear in front of me. I'll know where I'm headed.”

We sit curled into each other like that so long that my back begins to ache. I stretch out my legs and slide down so I'm flat on my back and he's above me. He has his eyes closed, but I don't think he's sleeping, because his fingers are interlaced through mine.

It's what Ramona's been doing, too, I realize. She can't go see Nonnie because she's already letting go—maybe she's even already let go completely.

He opens his eyes. They are not solid green, I realize, but marbled with darker and lighter shades. It would be easy to dive into those eyes and forget. It would be just the kind of forgetting that Mom and Nonnie would want me to do. So instead of letting him speak, I kiss him again.

But I can't forget, not all the way.

We kiss for a while longer, until my lips are tingling and raw. He wraps his arms around me. “I should go,” he says. “I'm grounded. I should have been home hours ago.”

This makes me smile.

“What?”

“I just didn't think that Dominic Meyers got grounded. You're way too cool for that.”

“I usually ignore it, but maybe this time I'll make an effort. I'm a changed man, Very.”

“Sure you are. Do you need a ride?”

“I can walk. It's not so far.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. You look amazing right now, and I want to walk a while with that image in my head. I'll see you in school tomorrow.”

I pause for a moment. “You promise?”

“It's the big presentation day, right? I've got my biography all written up and ready to go. Don't you worry.”

I worry.

i.

DOMINIC SITS IN ONE
of the comfy chairs in the library. There's a floor lamp next to the magazine rack, and it casts its light down on him like he's some kind of angel, and I almost laugh because it's so silly and perfect and just the sight of him makes me giggle.

Britta asked Dominic to meet us in the library before school so we can make sure we're all set for our presentation. I sit down in the chair next to him, notice the small hole in the knee of his jeans. He smiles. Britta looks from me to him and back again. I don't care if she knows what Dominic and I did, but I don't want to tell her. The secret buzzes inside my mouth. Thinking about him last night gave me sweet relief from my fears about Nonnie. Sometimes things are just that simple.

“Everyone ready?” she asks.

Dominic pulls out a bulleted list of facts about Gwendolyn
Bennett's life. “Ready,” he says.

Britta takes it and looks it over.

“I know this is last-minute, Dominic, but I was thinking maybe you could read one of the poems. You did a great job reading the one by Very's grandmother.”

It feels like gears are sliding into place. I did my artwork after Dominic left. Britta's being nice to Dominic. Maybe everything will work out.

“‘Song' is a good one,” she suggests.

Dominic nods but says, “It's fairly long, though. And I'm not sure I feel comfortable reading the part that's like a slave song. I think I'd need to practice it so it doesn't sound like a stereotype.”

“What would you prefer?” she asks.

I'm still glowing just watching them talk back and forth.

“‘Secret,' maybe. Or the second sonnet.”

“The love poems?” she asks. “That's not really what the Harlem renaissance was all about.”

“Don't you think?” Dominic asks. “Wasn't it about raising their voices no matter the topic?”

Britta considers this, and I'm worried their conversation might go off the rails—although they are talking to each other without malice—so I unroll the poster I've made. It has my painting in the center, with copies of her poems around it.

“What's that?” Britta asks.

My stomach drops. “It's the art piece.”

I'd painted trees on the paper, tall and still. They looked
more like those cell-phone towers designed to look like trees than the strong and regal ones Gwendolyn Bennett described. So I dug through the drawers of my desk to find, pressed way in the back, one of those kid sets of watercolors. Each circle a bright color: red, yellow, blue, green, brown, black, orange, purple. I always insisted on having my own set because Ramona always mixed the colors so each circle turned a dull gray-brown. Mine were still pristine. I got a paper cup of water from the bathroom, cleared a spot on my desk, and began.

I started with red and painted a square over the top of the leftmost tree. Then I moved more toward the middle to do another red square, as close to the same size as I could. I knew I needed to wait for the paint to dry before I could put another square on top or even close. I cleaned the brush, changed the water, and put a yellow square in the bottom right. Just one. Yellow might be too sunny of a color for these poems.

When I finished, my trees were covered with overlapping squares of color. The paper was curling and wrinkling a bit. It had been a long time since I'd painted with watercolors and I used too much water.

In the morning I glued it down onto the poster board before bringing it to school. I clear my throat. “I was just thinking about interpretation, how there are all these ways to look at a poem. How we take our own views sometimes and impose them on a poem. The colors represent the lenses we see the poem through. Like ‘Hatred'—that could be about any two people, but because she's black, and the time period, we assume it's
about the legacy of slavery.”

“Or since so much poetry is about love, you might assume it's about a bad ending to a romantic relationship. But maybe it's just about friends,” Dominic says.

“Right. The core is still there, what the poet wrote, but no matter how careful and precise the poet is, all these layers get put on top of it.”

“It's kind of brilliant, Very,” Dominic tells me.

“Thanks,” I say. “The idea is that the trees are the poem, and the poet. The colors are the interpretation.”

“Wow,” Britta says. “Awesome job. Not that I ever doubted you.” She grins at me, and I find myself grinning back. Neither one of us had thought I'd be able to pull off the artistic part of the assignment. Only Dominic had thought so.

We're all sitting there smiling at one another, and I guess I should have known that things were only going so well because something terrible was about to happen.

Ms. Blythe walks over, her kitten heels click-clicking on the linoleum. She stops beside us, takes a deep breath, and says, “The office just called down. Your grandmother, she—” Ms. Blythe shakes her head. “Your parents want you to go to the hospital right away.”

I don't move. Don't shake. Don't stand. Britta and Dominic both put their hands on me.

“I can take you,” Dominic says.

I shake my head. “I need to find Ramona,” I say.

Ms. Blythe looks surprised. “She's not here today, Very.
She's on the absent list again.”

Again.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

I look at Britta and Dominic, who have the exact same expression on their faces. “I'm sorry; I can see if I can get back in time, or maybe Ms. Staples will let us—”

Britta squeezes both of my shoulders. “Just go, Very. Dominic and I will be fine.”

So I go.

ii.

Nonnie is there but not there. Her body is still. Every once in a while her finger twitches. A machine fills her lungs with air.

In out. In out.

Mom's face is long, haggard, dark circles under her eyes. Dad is unshaven. That he is here at all is a surprise. I do not look at his eyes. I try not to look at his hand on Mom's, the plagiarist sign of love.

Ramona is not here.

There's a vase of day lilies next to Nonnie's bed, the scent sickeningly sweet, overpowering the smell of cleaner, of medicine. I want to take those lilies and rip off the petals, the dusty yellow stamen. I want to throw the vase out the window and wait, wait for the crash of glass as it smashes on the pavement below.

We sit and watch. Watch nothing happening. Watch life slipping out of her.

iii.

When visiting hours are over, Mom sends me home. I say I will stay, but she is already curled up in the extra bed next to Nonnie's.

Dad left an hour before to check on Ramona. His belated concern will likely prove useless.

So I go outside and get in the Rapier, which is smelling less like Nonnie and more like me.

As I drive home, a group of college students saunters out into the road. I rub at some crust in the corner of my eye, waiting for the seemingly endless crowd of pedestrians to pass.

In the pack of people there is someone who, for just an instant, looks like Ramona. The girl is shorter, and has darker hair, but she has on a pair of hot-pink tights with saddle shoes—an outfit that I thought only Ramona could put together.

For her eighth-grade graduation, Ramona wore a white dress with black polka dots. It was too short. It only went to her midthigh, so she had put on turquoise leggings that were woven through with silver. She had twisted her hair into what looked like dozens of tiny knots on the top of her head. And then she'd put on lipstick in a deep red-brown that she'd bought in the section of makeup meant for African American women, not
pale white schoolgirls.

When she received her certificate, she did a curtsy and a pirouette. No one clapped or laughed. It was like they were collectively rolling their eyes at her.

And me. What did I do? I texted Britta and Grace:
Sister R continues to prove she is an alien changeling.

But maybe I should have been paying more attention. Maybe that was the first sign that things were not right, that she was alone and lonely. That she was wrapping herself in a web so no one would want to get close.

I pull the car up into the driveway.

She is slipping away. I can feel it. These memories are hooks in me and as she falls away, they tug themselves free.

Inside, the house is near silent. I want to apologize to Ramona. I want to tell her that I should have played her games.

I jog up our stairs, and, without even knocking, push open the door to her room. “Ramona, I—”

She is crouched on the floor working on a drawing of a huge oak tree, like the one at the top of our driveway in which she spends so much time. Its branches reach out across the span of one whole wall, and she's pasted torn pieces of paper as the leaves. Apples—no, plums—are falling from the limbs. She is working on the trunk, sketching its texture. But as I step forward, I realize she isn't drawing, she is writing.

All the lines that made up the bark of the tree are words, tiny written words.

“What are you doing here? I didn't say you could come in.”

“Ramona, what is this?”

“It's a tree.”

“Well, yeah.” I step closer still. “How long did this take you to do?”

“That's what you want to know?” Her body is tense, like the models of animals in the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Frozen, yet still, somehow, ready to move. As if she might jump up and run past me and out of the house—or attack me.

“I doubt you'd tell me anything else.”

Her body relaxes just a bit. “I don't know. A few weeks.”

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“I'm fine.”

“Are you really?”

“I said I'm fine.”

Yes, she had. And she can say it over and over and over again, but I don't believe her. I watch her for a moment longer. She doesn't move at all. I can tell she wants to keep working but won't do it with me in the room.

I examine the tree again. The leaves. They aren't paper. They are pages. Pages torn from books—the library encyclopedias she'd been shredding. My friends told me she was fine, and I believed them, not because she was okay, but because I didn't want to deal with her.

I could have said something then, or tried to force her to talk to me. And if I had tried, then what? Then she would have pushed back harder. She was even less interested in receiving my
help than I was in giving it. Still, I can't deny the pit of guilt that rests in my stomach. I could have done
something.
I could've taken Ramona to Ruby's when she asked, or to the library when she wanted to look up fairy tales. I could've done a stupid cooking class with her. All those times she asked, and I said no.

Some of the torn pages aren't from a printed book. They have handwriting across them. Nonnie's handwriting.

“Ramona, are those from Nonnie's notebooks?”

“Uh-huh.” She smiles, pleased with herself.

“You had no right to destroy her notebooks!”

“I didn't destroy them.”

“I came up here to try to talk to you like we used to and—”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When did we used to talk?”

I turn away, sharply. “That's not the point. The point is, you shouldn't have done that.”

“I think she might like it.”

“What do you know about it?”

She begins writing again. I move in so I can see what she is writing. It is the words to one of Nonnie's poems, which she wrote soon after Ramona was born:

2 little girls in pigtails and jumpers,

fat thighs, round tummies.

2 little girls with teeth not yet arrived,

lips round and red as cherries.

Someday hands will rake through that hair,

press over the thighs.

Hands not their own will travel

over the bodies,

a foreign land.

A land to conquer.

Plums to pluck

and devour

till the juices drip down

his chin.

Seeing the poem scrawled up on the wall makes me uncomfortable; I'd read it before, but back when I was far too young to understand the imagery.

“She used to come in and watch me sleep—she thought I was sleeping anyway—and just write and write and write. I can still hear the sound of her pen scratching the paper.”

Nonnie never did that with me. Maybe I was just a deeper sleeper than Ramona. My thought is hopeful, but I don't believe it.

“She told me that I had the real talent. That I was finally going to make something of the Woodruff name.”

“She told me that I was her practical girl.” I reach out and touch the wall at the place where a page is pasted.

“It's like the godmothers in
Sleeping Beauty
, how they bless the baby with graces. It's like a twisted version of that. Like she thought she could tell us who we were. Like we didn't have a choice.”

“Maybe we don't have a choice. Maybe it's just who we are.”

“I don't accept that. I don't accept that this”—she waves her arm around—“is the only way I will ever be.”

“What are you saying?” I step toward her, my hand extended.

“It doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. Can you leave me alone now?”

“Okay,” I say, but don't move. “If you want to talk, I—”

“Maybe later,” she says, and picks up her pen.

I can tell her about Nonnie, how she's doing worse, but it won't stop Ramona from scrawling on the wall. It won't even sink in.

I go down into the kitchen but don't get anything to eat. I just stand there, staring out across the silvery-green lawn. It's the in-between time, when day is finally about to give way to night, and all I can do is sit and wait for the change. All I can do is react.