Very in Pieces (6 page)

i.

THREE DAYS LATER MY
bruise is purple and tinged with blue. Nonnie says it looks like a mottled plum. I say it looks like hell.
A hell of a bruise
. I've figured out that if I part my hair more severely to the right it hangs down and mostly covers it, or at least puts it into shadow. My head still rings, which convinces Britta that I have a concussion, so she makes me promise to go see the nurse twice a day to get checked for continuing symptoms—sleepiness, headache, irritability, and a bunch of other things that seem fairly common among the general high school population.

Christian takes me for my first check before chemistry class, and then we head toward Mr. Tompkins's room. “If you still have the bruise for Halloween,” he says, “You could be Gorbachev and I could be Ronald Reagan.”

“I think Gorbachev's mark was more on his forehead, wasn't it?”

“And Reagan was white,” Christian says with a shrug. “I just want to do something clever. Something unusual. Guys are always so lame about it, and girls just use it to be trampy.”

“I could be sexy Gorbachev,” I tell him.

“That's an image I really don't need in my head.”

He holds the door to the classroom open for me. We share a lab table in the first row. Nurse's orders that I sit up front in all my classes, not like I would've been sitting in the back anyway.

Mr. Tompkins is writing a chemical equation on the board when we arrive. He wears khaki pants and a button-down shirt with a pink tie. He seems to have cut himself shaving—he has a nick right on his jawline, still red with blood. The smile he gives me when I come into the room is a mix of hope and guilt, like maybe he's realized it was a bad idea to convince me to take this AP chem class. “How's the head?” he asks.

“Prognosis is good,” I tell him.

“I think she's holding back this concussion by force of will,” Christian adds.

Mr. Tompkins slides his dry-erase pen into one of the loops on a tray that he wears, no joke, like a holster on his hip. Total nerd squad. But Mr. Tompkins is not a geek. He's young and handsome in a sort of hipstery way—heavy-framed glasses, grandpa cardigans—and more than one girl has professed her undying love for him on the stalls of the second-floor bathroom.

Adam Millstein comes in and nods at both of us. He's on the hockey team with Christian, but they don't really hang out
much, and now that Adam has maybe given me a concussion, I think he's too embarrassed to even talk to Christian.

Once class starts, some of the guys get Mr. Tompkins off-topic by asking about relativity and space travel and if you went out in a spaceship at the speed of light, when you came back, would anyone else even still be alive?

One time Ramona declared that she was on a solo space mission and we had to walk like we were in spacesuits, fighting zero gravity.

“If it's a solo space mission, then I wouldn't be there,” I told her.

She looked at me strangely. “Well of course you'd be there.”

We walked side by side. I'm sure we looked more like lumbering giants than weightless explorers. Mom saw us out on the lawn and she and Dad came out to the patio to watch. Mom held a hand up to shield her eyes. We floated over to them.

“We're on the moon,” I told her.

“Mercury's moon,” Ramona added.

“Mercury doesn't have a moon,” I corrected.

“Jupiter's moon,” she said, unfazed.

“I hear it's nice there this time of year,” Mom said.

“Oh it is!” Ramona agreed.

“Well then, I just may have to get in my rocket and join you. Coming, dear?” she asked Dad.

“Am I properly dressed?” Dad pointed at his bare feet.

“Oh, the moons of Jupiter are very casual,” Mom replied.

They buzzed around the lawn, and then, throwing open the
door of the imaginary spaceship, she called out, “Would you look at that view!”

They began to spacewalk with us. It was Ramona who got the giggles first. Little titters.

“Astronauts don't laugh,” Mom told her, straight-faced. “This is serious work.”

“It is,” Ramona agreed, and pressed her lips together.

It was no use, though. The titters boiled up in her again, and the next thing we knew, the four of us were on the ground, holding our stomachs. Dad rolled over to Mom and grabbed her in his arms so they were tumbling together across the lawn. “We have to rescue her!” Ramona called out. We leaped to our feet and ran over to them, trying to loosen Dad's arms from around her waist, but his arms were long, and we were ticklish. He embraced Mom with one arm while tickling each of us in turn until we all collapsed tangled together like mice in a nest.

We came inside and Nonnie had gone to the fish market and brought home lobster and steamers because “what's the point of living in New England if you don't get fresh seafood?” She got oysters, too, and we watched as she shucked them, jamming the knife between the lips of the shell and prying them open. Ramona's eyes grew wide. “Doesn't that hurt them?”

“Yes,” Nonnie said. “But we're going to eat them, which will hurt them even more.”

“And maybe we'll find a pearl,” Mom said.

Nonnie handed us each a shell. We slurped the oyster out of it; I don't think I even chewed before swallowing the slippery
mollusk. Ramona and I exchanged a glance as if deciding together what we thought. The flavor was salty and smooth and even a bit sweet. “I think I like it,” I said.

“Me, too,” Ramona agreed.

“Good,” Nonnie said. “I never trusted anyone who refused to eat an oyster.”

Looking back I wonder if she was teasing us somehow. Still, it was such a lovely day. We ate the lobsters out on the patio and Mom said it always felt like you should be hosed down after lobster, so Dad pulled out the hose and chased her all around. Then he set up the sprinkler, and Ramona and I ran through it just in the clothes we were wearing.

I should have collected these moments—pinned them down so they wouldn't slip away like nymphs disappearing back into the forest. But maybe Nonnie is right and you can't catch the light of fireflies in jars.

ii.

Why do you divide sin by tan?

Just cos.

We spend our first math team practice of the year telling math jokes. That's mine.

Ramona takes the bus home and I don't see her until I pull my car up the driveway. She's crouched on a large rock in a half circle of trees. It's like she is that space explorer again,
investigating the surface of a moon. I practically bound from the car and start lumbering toward her. “It's very nice on Jupiter's moon this time of year, wouldn't you say?”

She looks up, frowning. “What are you talking about?”

“Remember the day with the space walking?”

She shakes her head. I guess maybe to her all of the imaginary games ran together.

“Nonnie got us lobsters and oysters,” I prompt.

“I don't remember.” She looks into the trees. Her profile seems etched against the sky. Her narrow nose and her pouting lips are both pronounced. She's grown so thin it's like she isn't even there. The dark circles under her eyes are the only thing about her with any gravity.

“You really don't remember the oysters? We ate raw oysters for the first time.” She has to remember, doesn't she? It had been her game, her idea.

“I just don't, okay?”

Her tone is as sharp as a January icicle, so I say, “Okay,” and back away. Ramona grabs a low limb of an oak tree and begins hauling herself up and away from me.

Inside the house, I cross through our sunken living room and head for the library. It's a dark room, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on every wall and an old leather chair next to an ashtray stand.

From the library I can see into the sunroom. The plants are looking yellowish, and I think that I should water them, but I always seem to do it wrong. Too much. Too little. Even the
plants that can withstand some benign neglect can't seem to withstand me. Dad tried to teach me how to care for them. I remember hot Sundays in here as he told me the names of the plants—their scientific names as well as the ones he had created for them:
Bonnie, Buster, Thelonious.

The plants are better off without me, and I can't decide on a book from the library, so I go to the kitchen. There, I can see my mother through the window. She's sitting in the hammock. One long leg hangs down off the side, while the other is extended. She wears oversize sunglasses, like Jackie O, and the blond highlights in her hair catch the sun.

It's almost five o'clock, which Nonnie has always taken as a dictate for a cocktail, rather than a mere guideline. This is a lesson my mom has taken to heart. So I take out a glass, pour her some blueberry juice, and add a splash of vodka.
Summer's Twilight
is a good name for it, or
Power Punch
. I pour myself juice and water it down. Virgin. With a glass in each hand, I kick off my sandals and head out across the lawn. The air is heavy, and I feel like I'm swimming more than walking.

As I approach, she tucks her sketchbook against her side as if she doesn't want me to see it. When my sister and I were younger, she used to draw stories for us in her sketchbooks. Fairy tales in which the princesses wore haute couture gowns and the balls were high-society soirees.

“I made you a cocktail,” I say when I get close enough for her to hear me. “Cocktail” sounds so much more sophisticated than “drink.” “It's a Power Punch. Blueberries have those good
antioxidants, you know.”

“Hmmm. Thank you,” she says, raising her sunglasses. I should have gone with Summer's Twilight. I hand her the glass and she takes a sip as I lower myself to the ground. She uses her foot to rock herself back and forth.

“It's almost five,” I tell her.

“Mm-hmm,” she replies.

“I wasn't sure if you knew how late it had gotten.” It is possible that she's been in the hammock all day, her studio left empty, her paintings unpainted. I know better than to ask if she has anything planned for dinner.

“Slow summer days. That's what hammocks were made for.” She lets a smile drift across her lips like the brush of a kiss.

“Do you remember the day we pretended to be astronauts and then we had oysters with Nonnie?”

She takes a long sip and considers the question. “I think so.” She continues to rock in the hammock. “Why?”

I look down into my juice, blue like the lines on graph paper. “I just thought of it today, and I asked Ramona about it, and she didn't remember at all.”

“Well, our little one has an active mind. I'm sure some things just get tumbled together.”

“Are you worried about her at all?”

“Because she didn't remember one afternoon back when you were kids?”

“No, it's more than that, it's like—” But I'm not sure what it's like, because it's not like anything. And it's not just one thing. “It's like she's slipping away from us. She's, I don't know,
drifting.” As I say it, I can see her: we are back in space again, and she has cut the line that ties her to our ship. She floats away with her arms reaching back to me.

Mom lifts her sunglasses up and nestles them in her hair. It's a familiar gesture; she does it with her regular glasses, too, and I know it means she's really thinking about things. “Some girls just go through this emotional, creative phase. I'm sure I went through something similar.”

“What if it's more than that? What if it's—” But my worries about her are as nebulous as Ramona herself. There one minute and then, somehow, not.

“You don't need to worry about Ramona, Very. She's fine.”

We look at each other for a moment, and then I say, “Okay, you're probably right.”

I gaze down the slope of our lawn toward the bay and the water there.

“I ought to take a shower. This air is so sticky, I feel like caramel. Can you pull together something for dinner?”

“I'm going to Christian's,” I say, a decision made in that moment. I finish my blueberry juice in one big gulp, and then stand, expecting my mom to extricate herself from the hammock and come inside with me. Instead she lowers her sunglasses back down over her eyes and tilts her head up toward the sky.

Halfway back across the lawn, I turn around to see if she might be standing up, or looking at me, but her gaze is still trained upward. I wonder what she sees there in the clouds. I wonder if she's looking at anything at all.

iii.

Christian's family always has way too much food for dinner. His father subscribes to all these cooking magazines and is constantly trying new dishes. More often than not, they flop. It's better when his mom cooks. She knows all these great Korean recipes, but most of them take a long time, and she's got a job as a high-powered divorce attorney, so she only cooks for special occasions.

I check on Nonnie before I go. She's sleeping, but her mini-fridge is stocked with healthy heat-and-eat meals that her doctor recommended, probably because she realized how hopeless we all were. They're basically TV dinners and milk shakes, and Nonnie calls them her prison food, but she can make them herself, which seems to please her.

When I arrive, Christian and his parents are just sitting down to dinner. His little sister, he's told me, is at some band rehearsal. I slip into a chair next to Christian, wondering if he might lean over and whisper that he loves me again, right here in front of his parents. It wouldn't shock me. That's the kind of relationship he has with them. I bet he's even told them that we're having sex. I'm trying to figure out how I would respond to a public declaration of love. Would I repeat it back, affirming him like a woman who receives a proposal on the Jumbotron at a baseball game? Or would I make some silly joke? Quote Shakespeare to confound the table?
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.
What would Nonnie do? Probably just
laugh it off. He doesn't say it, though, which is oddly disappointing. Instead he tucks his foot under my ankle so it's like our feet are hugging.