He smiles. “Yes. I would not turn you in. No matter what.”
“I trust you,” I say, surprising myself, and from the expression on his face, him as well. Why I trust someone who’s just told me he’s full of it ninety-eight percent of the time I don’t know. “I wouldn’t turn you in either,” I tell him. “No matter what.”
“You might,” he says. “I’ve done some pretty terrible things.”
“Me too,” I say, and suddenly I want more than anything to confide in him.
Write your sins on apples still hanging on the tree;
when they fall away so do your burdens
(There are no apple trees in Lost Cove. I’ve tried this with a plum tree, an apricot tree, and an avocado tree so far. Still burdened.)
“Well,” he says, staring at his hands steepled in front of him. “If it’s any comfort, I’m pretty sure the things I’ve done are far worse than whatever it is you’ve done.”
I’m about to speak, to refute this, but the uneasy look in his eyes silences me. “When my mum was sick,” he says slowly. “We could only afford this day nurse. My mother wouldn’t go to hospital anymore and NHS wouldn’t cover it. So at night, I watched after her. Except I started gobbling down her pain meds by the handful. I was off my face all the time, I mean, all the time.” His voice has grown strange, tight, lilt-less. “It was just me and her, always, no other family.” He pauses, takes a deep breath. “One night, she took a tumble out of bed, probably she needed the bedpan, but then after she fell, she couldn’t get herself up. She was too weak, too sick.” He swallows. There’s perspiration on his forehead. “She spent fifteen hours on the floor, shivering, hungry, in excruciating pain, calling for me, while I was passed out cold in the next room.” He breathes out slowly. “And that’s just a starter anecdote. I have enough for a book.”
The starter anecdote has practically strangled him. And me too. We’re both breathing too fast and I can feel his desperation taking me over like it’s my own. “I’m so sorry, Oscar.”
That prison of guilt the counselor at school talked about, he’s in one too.
“Jesus.” He’s pressing his palms to his forehead. “I can’t believe I told you that. I never talk about that. Not with anyone, not even G., not even at meetings.” His face is in a whole different kind of turmoil than usual. “You see? Better when I’m full of it, isn’t it?”
“No,” I say. “I want to know all of you. One hundred percent.”
This unsettles him further. He does not want to be known one hundred percent by me, if his face is any indication. Why did I say that? I look down, embarrassed, and when I look back up I see that he’s rising to his feet. He won’t make eye contact.
“I need to do some work upstairs before my shift at La Lune,” he says, already at the door. He can’t get away from me fast enough.
“You work at that café?” I ask, when what I want to say is: I understand. Not the circumstances, but the shame. I understand the quicksand of shame.
He nods and then unable to help myself, I ask, “You said I was her, that first day in church. Who did you mean? And how could your mother have prophesized about me?”
But he just shakes his head and ducks out of the room.
I remember then I still have Guillermo’s note to Dearest on me. I scrolled it up and tied it in a lucky red ribbon. No idea why, until now.
To win his heart, slip the most passionate love note ever written
into his jacket pocket
(Writing scripture on the fly here. Should I do this? Should I?)
“Hey one sec, Oscar.” I catch him outside the door and brush a layer of dust off the back of his jacket. “That’s one dirty floor,” I say as I slip the hot burning words into his pocket. As I press play on my life.
Then I pace around the small room waiting for Guillermo to return so I can start carving, waiting for Oscar to get the love note and run to me or away from me. A valve has loosened inside me and some kind of something is escaping, making me feel entirely different from the boycotting girl who walked into this studio with a burnt candle in her pocket to extinguish feelings of love. I think of that counselor telling me I was the house in the woods with no doors or windows. No way to get in or out, she said. But she was wrong, because: Walls fall down.
And then at once, from across the studio, it’s as if my practice rock has gotten on a loudspeaker to inform me what’s inside it.
What slumbers in the heart, slumbers in the stone.
There is a sculpture I need to make first, and it’s not of my mother.
• • •
I’m surrounded by giants.
In the center of the outdoor work area is one of Guillermo’s massive couples but unfinished, and against the far fence is another mammoth work called Three Brothers. I’m trying not to make eye contact with them as Guillermo demonstrates different techniques on my practice rock. Let’s just say, they’re not the jolliest of giants, those three stone brothers. I’m wearing every piece of protective gear I could find: a plastic suit, goggles, and face mask, because I did some research on the health risks of carving stone last night and I’m surprised any stone sculptor lives past thirty. While Guillermo instructs me on how not to bruise the surface of the rock, how to use the rasp, how to do something called cross-hatch, how to choose the right chisel for each task and what angles are best suited for what kind of carving, I try unsuccessfully not to dwell on Oscar and the stolen love note I gave him. Probably not my best idea, both the stealing of the note and the giving of it. Impulse-control issues, clearly.
Trying to be subtle, I manage a few questions about Oscar in between others on chisel position and model building. I find out the following: He’s nineteen. He dropped out of high school in England and took the GED here and now is a freshman at Lost Cove U. studying mostly literature, art history, and photography. He has a dorm room but still sometimes stays in the loft.
However, I realize I’m not being as subtle as I think with my questions when Guillermo puts his hand under my chin, lifts my face so our eyes meet, and says, “Oscore? He is like my—” He brings his fist to his chest to finish the sentence. Like his heart? His son? “He fall in my nest when he was very young, very troubled. He have no one.” His face is full of warmth. “It is very strange with Oscore. When I get sick of every last person, I am not sick of him. I do not know why this is. And he is so good at chess.” He holds his head like he has a headache. “I mean so so good. It make me crazy.” He looks at me. “But listen carefully. If I have a daughter, I keep her in another state from him. Understand?” Um? Loud and clear. “When Oscore breathe in, the girls come rushing to him from everywhere, and when he exhale—” He makes a gesture with his hand to indicate all the girls being literally blown away, blown off, in other words: blown to bits. “He is too young, too dumb, too careless. I was the same once. I have no idea about women, about love, until much later. Understand?”
“Understood,” I tell him, trying to hide the sinking disappointment in my gut. “I will bathe in vinegar, down some raw eggs, and start looking for a wasp nest ASAP to put on my head.”
“I do not understand this,” he says.
“To reverse the leanings of the heart. Ancient family wisdom.”
He laughs. “Ah. Very good. In my family, we just suffer.”
Then he drops a bag of earthenware clay on my table and commands me to make the model, first thing, now that I know what hides inside the practice rock.
The sculpture I’m seeing is two round bubble bodies, shoulder to shoulder, every part of the figures, spherical and full, curved bulging chests pregnant with the same breath, heads tilting upward, gazes sky-bound. The whole thing about a foot across and high. As soon as Guillermo leaves, I start building, and before long, I forget Oscar the Girl-Exhaler and the heartbreaking story he told me and the way I’d felt in that jail cell room with him and the note
I put in his pocket, until finally, it’s just me and NoahandJude.
This is the sculpture I need to make first.
When I finish the model, hours later, Guillermo inspects it and then uses it to pencil different reference points on my practice rock that mark where I’ll cut in for “shoulders” and “heads.” We decide the boy’s outer shoulder is the first point of entry and then he leaves me to it.
It happens right away.
The very moment I put hammer to chisel with the intention of finding NoahandJude, my mind goes to the day Noah almost drowned.
Mom had just died. I was at the sewing machine with Grandma Sweetwine, one of her very first visits. I was working on the seam of a dress, when it’s like the room shook me, that’s the only way I can describe it. Grandma said: Go, only it was more like a tornado blowing the word at me. I flew out of my chair, out of the window, slid all the way down the bluff, my feet touching the sand as Noah hit the water. He didn’t come up. I knew he wasn’t going to. I’ve never been scared like that before, not even when Mom died. There was boiling liquid in my veins.
I ram the chisel with the hammer, watch a corner of the stone break off, watching myself rush into the surf that winter day. I swam fast as a shark despite my clothes, then started diving down where he sank, gripping armful after armful of water, trying to think about currents and riptides and maelstroms and everything Dad had ever taught me. I let the rip take me, dove down again, up and down, until there was Noah floating faceup, alive, but not conscious. I dragged him to shore, swimming one-armed, sinking more every stroke with the weight of him, both our lives pounding inside me, and then on the beach, I beat his sternum with shaking hands, blew breath after terrified breath into his cold clammy mouth, and when he revived, the second I knew he was okay, I slapped him as hard as I could across the face.
Because how could he have done this?
How could he have chosen to leave me here all alone?
He told me he hadn’t been trying to kill himself, but I didn’t believe him. That first jump was different than all the others that followed. That time he was trying to fling himself off the earth for good. I know he was. He wanted out. He’d chosen to leave. To leave me. And he would have had I not dragged him back.
I think the valve inside me that loosened during the conversation with Oscar has popped its gasket. I’m whacking the chisel with such force now my whole body’s vibrating, the whole world is.
Noah had stopped breathing. So there were these moments when I was in life without him.
For the first time. Not even in the womb were we apart. Terror doesn’t come close to describing it. Fury doesn’t come close. Heartbreak, no. There is no way to describe it.
He wasn’t there. He wasn’t with me anymore.
I’m starting to sweat in the plastic jumpsuit as I slam the hammer into the chisel with all the power in me, forgetting proper angles now, not caring about anything Guillermo just taught me, remembering only how my anger toward Noah wouldn’t go away after that. I couldn’t get rid of it and everything he did seemed to compound it. I went to Grandma’s bible, desperate, but it didn’t matter how many rosehips I put in my tea, how much lapis lazuli I hid under my pillow, I couldn’t get rid of the rage.
And I’m feeling it again, as I cut into the rock, as I drag Noah out of the ocean, as I rip into the stone, wanting us out, out of the treacherous water, out of this suffocating rock, wanting us free, when I hear, “So that’s why you did it?” It’s Mom and Grandma in unison. When did they become a team? A chorus? They say it again, their voices a duet of accusation in my head. “So is that why? Because it was right after that. We watched you do it. You didn’t think anyone saw. But we did.” I position the chisel on the other side of the stone and try to hammer away their voices but I can’t. “Leave me alone,” I hiss under my breath, peeling off the plastic suit, ripping off the face mask and goggles. “You’re not real,” I tell them.
I stumble into the studio, feeling rudderless, hoping their voices won’t follow me, not sure if I make them up or not, not sure of anything.
Inside, Guillermo is absorbed in another clay piece—so far, a man, all huddled up.
But something’s wrong in here too.
Guillermo’s bent over the bent-over clay man. His hands are working the face from behind and he’s talking in Spanish, his words growing more and more hostile. I watch in disbelief as he raises a fist and heaves it into the back of the clay man, leaving a hollow that I feel on my own spine. The blows come fast after that. The guy’s bloody ferocious, Oscar had said. I think of the punched-in walls of the cyclone room, the smashed window, the broken angel. He steps aside to inspect the damage he just inflicted, and as he does, he catches a glimpse of me and the violence in his fists is now in his eyes and directed at me. He puts his hand up and motions me out.
I back into the mailroom, my heart slamming inside my chest.
No, it’s not like this at CSA.
If this is what he meant about putting yourself into your art, if this is what it takes, I don’t know, I really don’t know if I’m up to it.
• • •
There’s no way I’m going back into the studio where bloody ferocious Guillermo is beating up on an innocent clay man or out on the patio where bloody ferocious Grandma and Mom are wanting to beat up on me, so I head upstairs. I know Oscar’s gone because I heard his motorcycle peel away over an hour ago.
The loft’s smaller than I’d imagined. Just a guy’s bedroom really. There are nails and thumbtack holes all over the walls where pictures and posters have been removed. The bookshelves have been ransacked. Only a few shirts hang in the closet. There’s a table with a computer and some kind of printer, maybe for photos. A desk. I walk over to the unmade bed, where he was hoping to dream about his mother earlier today.
It’s a tangle of brown sheets, one lone swirl of a Mexican blanket, a sad flat pillow in a faded pillowcase. A lonely-looking boy bed. I can’t help it; despite warnings and ghosts and shaky boycotts and cataclysmic girl-destroying exhalations, I lie down, rest my head on Oscar’s pillow, and breathe in the faint scent of him: peppery, sunny, wonderful.
Oscar does not smell like death.
I cover myself to the shoulders with his blanket and close my eyes, seeing his face, the desperate way it looked today when he told me what happened with his mother. He was so alone in that story. I breathe him in, all cocooned up in the place he dreams, tenderness crushing into me. And I understand why he shut down like that. Of course I do.
Opening my eyes, I see that on the bedside table, there’s a framed picture of a woman with long gray hair in a floppy white hat. She’s seated in a chair in a garden, a drink in her hand. There’s sweat on the glass. Her face is leathery from the sun and jam-packed with Oscar. She’s laughing and I somehow know she had the same breezy laugh he does.
“Forgive him,” I say to his mother, sitting up. I touch her face with my finger. “He needs you to forgive him already.”
She doesn’t answer. Unlike my dead relatives. Speaking of which, what happened to me outside? Like taking a chisel to my own psyche. That counselor said ghosts—she used finger quotes around the word—are often manifestations of a guilty conscience. Check. Or sometimes of a deep inner longing. Check. She said the heart overcomes the mind. Hope or fear overcomes reason.
After a loved one dies, you must cover every mirror in the house
so the spirit of the departed can rise—otherwise they will be stuck
forever among the living
(I’ve never told anyone this, but when Mom died, not only didn’t
I cover the mirrors, I went to the drugstore and bought dozens
of pocket ones. I left them all over the house, wanting her spirit
to get stuck with us, wanting it so bad.)
I don’t know if I make up the ghosts or not, I only know I don’t want to think a
bout what they just said to me, so I start perusing the titles of books stacked by Oscar’s bed. Mostly art history, some religion, novels. There’s an essay sticking out of one of the books. I remove it. It’s titled “The Ecstatic Impulse of the Artist,” and in the corner of the page it says:
Oscar Ralph
Professor Hendricks
AH 105
Lost Cove University
I hug the paper to my chest. My mother used to teach AH 105. It’s the introductory art history course for freshmen. Had she not died, she would’ve met Oscar, read this paper, graded it, talked to him during her office hours. She would’ve loved his topic: “The Ecstatic Impulse of the Artist.” It makes me think of Noah. He sure had an ecstatic impulse. It didn’t used to feel safe how much he could love a color or a squirrel or brushing his teeth even. I turn to the last page of the paper, where a big fat A is circled in red with the line: Entirely compelling argument, Mr. Ralph! It’s then that Oscar’s last name crashes into my consciousness. Oscar Ralph. Last name, first name, who cares? Oscar is Ralph! I found Ralph. I start to laugh. This is a sign. This is destiny. This is a miracle, Grandma! This is Clark Gable being very funny.
I get up, feeling worlds better—I found Ralph!—and peek over the railing of the loft to make sure Guillermo isn’t in the mailroom listening to me giggling up here all alone. Then I walk over to the desk because hanging on the chair is Oscar’s leather jacket. I reach in the pocket and . . . no note. Which means he got it. Which makes my stomach whirl.
I put on the jacket; it’s like climbing right into his arms and I’m luxuriating in its heavy embrace, its scent, when I glance down at the desk and see me. All over it. Photograph after photograph arranged in a row, some with yellow sticky notes on them, some not. The air starts to vibrate.
Above the whole thing on a yellow sticky note, it says: The Prophecy.
The first photo is of an empty pew in the church where we met. A sticky note on it says: She said I’d meet you in church. Granted, she probably said this so I’d go to church. I kept coming back to this one to photograph the empty pews.