An hour’s passed and I’ve just done a handful of searches. I look back over the pages and pages that Bailey did, and wonder again when she did it all and where she did it, maybe at the computer lab at the State, because how could I not have noticed her bleary-eyed at this computer for hours on end? It strikes me again how badly she wanted to find Mom, because why else would she have devoted all this time to it? What could have happened in February to take her down this road? I wonder if that was when Toby asked her to marry him. Maybe she wanted Mom to come to the wedding. But Toby said he had asked her right before she died. I need to talk to him.
I go downstairs, apologize to Gram, tell her I’ve been emotional all day, which is true every freaking day lately. She looks at me, strokes my hair, says, “It’s okay, sweet pea, maybe we could go on a walk together tomorrow, talk some—” When will she get it? I don’t want to talk to her about Bailey, about anything.
When I come out of the house, Toby’s standing on a ladder, working on the trellis in the front of the garden. Streamers of gold and pink peel across the sky. The whole yard is glowing with the setting sun, the roses look lit from within, like lanterns. He looks over at me, exhales dramatically, then climbs slowly down the ladder, leaning against it with arms crossed in front of his chest. “Wanted to say sorry … again.” He sighs.
“I’m half out of my mind lately.” His eyes search mine. “You okay?”
“Yeah, except for the half out of my mind part,” I say.
He smiles at that, his whole face alighting with kindness and understanding. I relax a little, feel bad for wanting to behead him an hour before.
“I found this notebook in Bailey’s desk,” I tell him, eager to find out if he knows anything and very eager not to talk or think about yesterday. “It’s like she was looking for Mom, but feverishly, Toby, page after page of possible pseudonyms that she must have been putting in search engines. She’d tried everything, must have done it around the clock. I don’t know where she did it, don’t know why she did it…”
“Don’t know either,” he says, his voice trembling slightly. He looks down. Is he hiding something from me?
“The notebook is dated. She started doing this at the end of February – did anything happen then that you know of?”
Toby’s bones unhinge and he slides down the trellis, and drops his head into his hands and starts to cry.
What’s going on?
I lower to him, kneel in front of him, put my hands on his arms. “Toby,” I say gently. “It’s okay.” I’m stroking his hair with my hand. Fear prickles my neck and arms.
He shakes his head. “It’s not okay.” He can barely get the words out. “I wasn’t ever going to tell you.”
“What? What weren’t you going to tell me?” My voice comes out shrill, crazy.
“It makes it worse, Len, and I didn’t want it to be any harder for you.”
“What?” Every hair on my body is on end. I’m really frightened now. What could possibly make Bailey’s death any worse?
He reaches for my hand, holds it tight in his. “We were going to have a baby.” I hear myself gasp. “She was pregnant when she died.” No, I think, this can’t be. “Maybe she was looking for your mom because of that. The end of February would have been around the time when we found out.”
The idea begins to avalanche inside me, gaining speed and mass. My other hand has landed on his shoulder and although I’m looking at his face, I’m watching my sister hold their baby up in the air, making ferret faces at it, watching as she and Toby each take a hand of their child and walk him to the river. Or her. God. I can see in Toby’s eyes all that he has been carrying alone, and for the first time since Bailey’s death I feel more sorry for someone else than I do for myself. I close my arms around him and rock him. And then, when our eyes meet and we are again there in that helpless house of grief, a place where Bailey can never be and Joe Fontaine does not exist, a place where it’s only Toby and me left behind, I kiss him. I kiss him to comfort him, to tell him how sorry I am, to show him I’m here and that I’m alive and so is he. I kiss him because I’m in way over my head and have been for months. I kiss him and keep kissing and holding and caressing him, because for whatever screwed-up reason, that is what I do.
The moment Toby’s body stiffens in my arms, I know.
I know, but I don’t know who it is.
At first, I think it’s Gram, it must be. But it’s not.
It’s not Big either.
I turn around and there he is, a few yards away, motionless, a statue.
Our eyes hold, and then, he stumbles backward. I jump out of Toby’s grasp, find my legs, and rush toward Joe, but he turns away, starts to run.
“Wait, please,” I yell out. “Please.”
He freezes, his back to me – a silhouette against a sky now burning up, a wildfire racing out of control toward the horizon. I feel like I’m falling down stairs, hurtling and tumbling with no ability to stop. Still, I force myself forward and go to him. I take his hand to try to turn him around, but he rips it away as if my touch disgusts him. Then he’s turning, slowly, like he’s moving underwater. I wait, scared out of my mind to look at him, to see what I’ve done. When he finally faces me, his eyes are lifeless, his face like stone. It’s as if his marvelous spirit has evacuated his flesh.
Words fly out of my mouth. “It’s not like us, I don’t feel – it’s something else, my sister…” My sister was pregnant, I’m about to say in explanation, but how would that explain anything? I’m desperate for him to get it, but I don’t get it.
“It’s not what you think,” I say predictably, pathetically. I watch the rage and hurt erupt simultaneously in his face.
“Yes, it is. It’s exactly what I think, it’s exactly what I thought.” He spits his words at me. “How could you… I thought you—”
“I do, I do.” I’m crying hard now, tears streaming down my face. “You don’t understand.”
His face is a riot of disappointment. “You’re right, I don’t. Here.”
He pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket. “This is what I came to give you.” He crumples it up and throws it at me, then turns around and runs as fast as he can away into the falling night.
I bend over and grab the crumpled piece of paper, smooth it out. At the top it says Part 2: Duet for aforementioned clarinettist and guitarist. I fold it carefully, put it in my pocket, then sit down on the grass, a heap of bones. I realize I’m in the same exact spot Joe and I kissed last night in the rain. The sky’s lost its fury, just some straggling gold wisps steadily being consumed by darkness. I try to hear the melody he wrote for me in my head, but can’t. All I hear is him saying: How could you?
How could I?
Someone might as well roll up the whole sky, pack it away for good.
Soon, there’s a hand on my shoulder. Toby. I reach up and rest my hand on his. He squats down on one knee next to me. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly, and a moment later, “I’m going to go, Len.” Then just the coldness on my shoulder where his hand had been. I hear his truck start and listen to the engine hum as it follows Joe down the road.
Just me. Or so I think until I look up at the house to see Gram silhouetted in the doorway like Toby was last night. I don’t know how long she’s been there, don’t know what she’s seen and what she hasn’t. She swings open the door, walks to the end of the porch, leans on the railing with both hands.
“Come in, sweet pea.”
I don’t tell her what happened with Joe, just as I never told her what has been going on with Toby. Yet I can see in her mournful eyes as she looks into mine that she most likely already knows it all.
“One day, you’ll talk to me again.” She takes my hands. “I miss you, you know. So does Big.”
“She was pregnant,” I whisper.
Gram nods.
“She told you?”
“The autopsy.”
“They were engaged,” I say. This, I can tell from her face, she d
idn’t know.
She encloses me in her arms and I stay in her safe and sound embrace and let the tears rise and rise and fall and fall until her dress is soaked with them and night has filled the house.
I do not go to the altar of the desk to talk to Bailey on the mountaintop. I do not even turn on the light. I go straight into bed with all my clothes on and pray for sleep. It doesn’t come.
What comes is shame, weeks of it, waves of it, rushing through me in quick hot flashes like nausea, making me groan into my pillow. The lies and half-truths and abbreviations I told and didn’t tell Joe tackle and hold me down until I can hardly breathe. How could I have hurt him like this, done to him just what Genevieve did? All the love I have for him clobbers around in my body. My chest aches. All of me aches. He looked like a completely different person. He is a different person. Not the one who loved me.
I see Joe’s face, then Bailey’s, the two of them looming above me with only three words on their lips: How could you?
I have no answer.
I’m sorry, I write with my finger on the sheets over and over until I can’t stand it anymore and flip on the light.
But the light brings actual nausea and with it all the moments with my sister that will now remain unlived: holding her baby in my arms. Teaching her child to play the clarinet. Just getting older together day by day. All the future we will not have rips and retches out of me into the trash bin I am crouched over until there’s nothing left inside, nothing but me in this ghastly orange room.
And that’s when it hits.
Without the harbor and mayhem of Toby’s arms, the sublime distraction of Joe’s, there’s only me.
Me, like a small seashell with the loneliness of the whole ocean roaring invisibly within.
Me.
Without.
Bailey.
Always.
I throw my head into my pillow and scream into it as if my soul itself is being ripped in half, because it is.
Bailey, do you love Gram more than me?
Nope.
Uncle Big?
Nope.
What about Toby?
I don't love anyone more than you, Lennie, okay?
Me, too.
That's settled then.
You'll never disappear like Mom?
Never.
Promise?
God, how many times do I have to say it:
I will never disappear like Mom. Now, go to sleep.
(Found on a takeaway cup, Rain River)
(Found scrawled on the branch of a tree outside Clover High)
(Found written on a desk, Clover Public Library)
Part 2
Len, where is she tonight?
I was sleeping.
C'mon, Len.
Okay, India climbing in the Himalayas.
We did that one last week.
You start then.
All right. She's in Spain. Barcelona. A scarf covering her head,
sitting by the water, drinking Sangria, with a man named Pablo.
Are they in love?
Yes.
But she will leave him come morning.
Yes.
She'll wake up before dawn, sneak her suitcase out from under the bed, put on a red wig, a green scarf, a yellow dress, white pumps.
She'll catch the first train out.
Will she leave a note?
No.
She never does.
No.
She'll sit on the train and stare out the window at the sea.
A woman will sit next to her and they'll strike up a conversation.
The woman will ask her if she has any children, and she'll say, "No."
Wrong, Len. She'll say, "I'm on the way to see my girls right now."
(Found on a piece of paper stuck between two rocks at Flying Man’s)
Iwake up later with my face mashed into the pillow. I lean up on my elbows and look out the window. The stars have bewitched the sky of darkness. It’s a shimmery night. I open the window, and the sound of the river rides the rose-scented breeze right into our room. I’m shocked to realize that I feel a little better, like I’ve slept my way to a place with a little more air. I push away thoughts of Joe and Toby, take one more deep breath of the flowers, the river, the world, then I get up, take the trash bin into the bathroom, clean it and myself, and when I return head straight over to Bailey’s desk.
I turn on the computer, pull out the notebook from the top desk drawer where I keep it now, and decide to continue from where I left off the other day. I need to do something for my sister and all I can think to do is to find our mother for her.
I start plugging in the remaining combinations in Bailey’s notebook. I can understand why becoming a mother herself would have compelled Bailey to search for Mom like this. It makes sense to me somehow. But there is something else I suspect. In a far cramped corner of my mind, there is a dresser, and in that dresser there is a thought crammed into the back of the bottom-most drawer. I know it’s there because I put it there where I wouldn’t have to look at it. But tonight I open that creaky drawer and face what I’ve always believed and that is this: Bailey had it too. Restlessness stampeded through my sister her whole life, informing everything she did from running cross country to changing personas on stage. I’ve always thought that was the reason behind why she wanted to find our mother. And I know it was the reason I never wanted her to. I bet this is why she didn’t tell me she was looking for Mom like this. She knew I’d try to stop her. I didn’t want our mother to reveal to Bailey a way out of our lives.
One explorer is enough for any family.
But I can make up for that now by finding Mom. I put combination after combination into a mix of search engines. After an hour, however, I’m ready to toss the computer out the window. It’s futile. I’ve gotten all the way to the end of Bailey’s notebook and have started one of my own using words and symbols from Blake poems. I can see in the notebook that Bailey was working her way through Mom’s box for clues to the pseudonym. She’d used references from Oliver Twist, Siddhartha, On the Road, but hadn’t gotten to William Blake yet. I have his book of poems open and I’m combining words like Tiger or Poison Tree or Devil with Paige or Walker and the words chef, cook, restaurant, thinking as Gram did that that’s how she might make money while traveling, but it’s useless. After yet another hour of no possible matches, I tell the mountaintop Bailey in the explorer picture, I’m not giving up, I just need a break, and head downstairs to see if anyone is still awake.
Big’s on the porch, sitting in the middle of the love seat like it’s a throne. I squeeze in beside him.
“Unbelievable,” he murmurs, goosing my knee. “Can’t remember the last time you joined me for a nighttime chat. I was just thinking that I might play hooky tomorrow, see if a new lady-friend of mine wants to have lunch with me in a restaurant. I’m sick of dining in trees.” He twirls his mustache a little too dreamily.
Uh-oh.
“Remember,” I warn. “You’re not allowed to ask anyone to marry you until you’ve been with her a whole year. Those were your rules after your last divorce.” I reach over and tug on his mustache, add for effect, “Your fifth divorce.”
“I know, I know,” he says. “But boy do I miss proposing, nothing so romantic. Make sure you try it, at least once, Len – it’s skydiving with your feet on the ground.” He laughs in a tinkly way that might be called a giggle if he weren’t thirty feet tall. He’s told Bailey and me this our whole lives. In fact, until Sarah went into a diatribe about the inequities of marriage in sixth grade, I had no idea proposing wasn’t always considered an equal-opportunity endeavor.
I look out over the small yard where hours before Joe left me, probably forever. I think for a minute about telling Big that Joe probably won’t be around anymore, but I can’t face breaking it to him. He’s almost as attached to him as I am. And anyway, I want to talk to him about something else.
“Big?”
“Hmmm?”
/>
“Do you really believe in this restless gene stuff?”
He looks at me, surprised, then says, “Sounds like a fine load of crap, doesn’t it?”
I think about Joe’s incredulous response today in the woods, about my own doubts, about everybody’s, always. Even in this town where free-spiritedness is a fundamental family value, the few times I’ve ever told anyone my mother took off when I was one year old to live a life of freedom and itinerancy, they looked like they wanted to commit me to a nice rubber room somewhere. Even so, to me, this Walker family gospel never seemed all that unlikely. Anyone who’s read a novel or walked down the street or stepped through the front door of my house knows that people are all kinds of weird, especially my people, I think, glancing at Big, who does God knows what in trees, marries perennially, tries to resurrect dead bugs, smokes more pot than the whole eleventh grade, and looks like he should reign over some fairy tale kingdom. So why wouldn’t his sister be an adventurer, a blithe spirit? Why shouldn’t my mother be like the hero in so many stories, the brave one who left? Like Luke Skywalker, Gulliver, Captain Kirk, Don Quixote, Odysseus. Not quite real to me, okay, but mythical and magical, not unlike my favorite saints or the characters in novels I hang on to perhaps a little too tightly.
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “Is it all crap?”
Big doesn’t say anything for a long time, just twirls away at his mustache, thinking. “Nah, it’s all about classification, know what I mean?” I don’t, but won’t interrupt. “Lots of things run through families, right? And this tendency, whatever it is, for whatever reason, runs through ours. Could be worse, we could have depression or alcoholism or bitterness. Our afflicted kin just hit the road—”
“I think Bailey had it, Big,” I say, the words tumbling out of me before I can catch them, revealing just how much I might actually believe in it after all. “I’ve always thought so.”
“Bailey?” His brow creases. “Nah, don’t see it. In fact, I’ve never seen a girl so relieved as when she got rejected from that school in New York City.”