I'll Give You the Sun (17 page)

Dad says, “Jude, you really—” But what I'm certain is to be another artichoke lecture about my bible-thumping tendencies or my long-distance relationship with Grandma (he doesn't know about Mom) is cut short because he's been shot with a stun gun.

“Dad?” His face has gone pale—well, paler. “Dad?” I repeat, following his distraught gaze to the computer screen. Is it
Family of Mourners
? It was my favorite of the Guillermo Garcia works I saw, very upsetting, though. Three massive grief-stricken rock-giants who reminded me of us, the way Dad, Noah, and I must've looked standing over Mom's grave as if we might topple in after her. It must remind Dad too.

I look at Noah and find him in the same condition, also staring intently at the screen. The padlock is gone. A red glow of emotion has taken over his face and neck, even his hands. This is promising. He's actually reacting to art.

“I know,” I say to both of them. “Incredible work, right?”

Neither of them responds. I'm not sure if either of them even heard me.

Then Dad says brusquely, “Going for a walk,” and Noah says equally brusquely, “My friends,” and they're gone.

And I'm the only bat in this belfry?

The thing is: I know I've slipped. I see my buttons popping off and flying in all directions on a daily basis. What worries me about Dad and Noah is that they seem to think they're okay.

I go to the window, open it, and in come the eerie moans and caws of the loons, the thunder of the winter waves,
stellar
waves, I see. For a moment I'm back on my board, busting through the break zone, cold briny air in my lungs—except then, I'm dragging Noah in to shore and it's again that day two years ago when he almost drowned and the weight of him is pulling us both under with each stroke—no.

No.

I close the window, yank down the shade.

If one twin is cut, the other will bleed

Later that night when I get on the computer to learn more about Guillermo Garcia, I find that the bookmarks I saved have been deleted.

The
Family of Mourners
screensaver has been changed to a single purple tulip.

When I question Noah about it, he says he doesn't know what I'm talking about, but I don't believe him.

• • •

N
oah's party's raging all around me. Dad's off at his parasite conference for the week. Christmas was a bust. And I just made an early New Year's resolution, no, it's a New Year's
revolution,
and this is it: to return to Guillermo Garcia's studio tonight and ask him to mentor me. So far since winter break began, I've chickened out. Because what if he says no? What if he says yes? What if he bludgeons me with a chisel? What if the English guy is there? What if he isn't? What if
he
bludgeons me with a chisel? What if my mother breaks stone as easily as clay? What if this rash on my arm is leprosy?

Etc.

I put all such questions into The Oracle a moment ago and the results were conclusive. No time like the present, it was decided, egged on by the fact that people from Noah's party—Zephyr included—kept knocking on my door, which was locked with a dresser in front of it. So out the window I went, sweeping the twelve sand-dollar birds I keep on the sill into my sweatshirt pocket. They're not as lucky as four-leaf clovers or even red sea glass, but they'll have to do.

I follow the yellow reflectors in the middle of the road down the hill, listening for cars and serial killers. It's another white-out. It's way spooky. And this is a really bad idea. But I'm committed to it now, so I start to run through the cold wet nothingness and pray to Clark Gable that Guillermo Garcia is just a regular sort of maniac and not a girl-murdering one and try not to wonder if the English guy will be there. Try not to think about his different-colored eyes and the intensity that crackled off him and how familiar he looked and how he called me a fallen angel and said, “You're her,” and before too long all that not-thinking has gotten me to the studio door and light is pouring out from beneath it.

Drunken Igor must be inside. An image of him with his greasy hair and wiry black beard and blue calloused fingers fills my head. A very itchy image. He probably has lice. I mean, if I were a louse I'd choose him to colonize. All that hair.
No offense, but
ick.

I take a few steps back, see a bank of windows on the side of the building, all lit up—the studio space must be back there. An idea begins to take shape. A great idea. Because maybe there's a way to spy inside his studio undetected . . . yes, like from that fire escape in back, I think, spotting it. I want to see the giants. I want to see Drunken Igor too, and from behind glass seems perfect. Brilliant, really. Before I know it, I'm over the fence, and hustling down a pitch-dark alley, one in which girls get bludgeoned with chisels.

It is very unlucky to fall on your face

(This is an honest-to-goodness entry. The wisdom of
Grandma's bible knows no bounds.)

I reach the fire escape—alive—and start climbing, mouse-quiet, toward the light blaring from the landing.

What am I doing?

Well, I'm doing it. At the top of the stairs, I squat down and scoot like a crab under the windows. Once I've cleared them, I stand back up, hugging the wall as I peer into a huge brightly lit space—

And there they are. Giants.
Giant
giants. But different from the ones in the photographs. These are all couples. Across the room, enormous rock-beings are embracing as if on a dance floor, as if they've all frozen mid-move. No, not embracing, actually. Not yet. It's like each “man” and “woman” were hurling themselves at each other passionately,
desperately,
and then time stopped before they could make it into each other's arms.

Adrenaline courses through me. No wonder
Interview
had him taking a baseball bat to Rodin's
The Kiss
. It's so polite and, well, boring, in comparison—

My train of thought's interrupted because bounding into the large space as if his skin can't contain the uproar of blood within is Drunken Igor, but utterly transformed. He's shaved, washed his hair, and put on a smock, which is spattered with clay, as is the water bottle he's holding to his lips. There was no mention in his bio that he worked in clay. He guzzles from the bottle like he's been wandering the desert with Moses, drains it, then tosses it into a trash can.

Someone's plugged him in.

To a nuclear reactor.

Ladies and gentlemen: The Rock Star of the Sculpture World.

He moves toward a clay work-in-progress in the center of the room and when he's within a few feet of it, he begins circling it slowly, like predator on prey, speaking in a deep rumble of a voice I can hear through the window. I look at the door, assuming someone's about to follow him in, someone immersed in this conversation with him, like the English guy, I think with a flutter, but no one joins him. I can't make out a word of what he's saying. It sounds like Spanish.

Maybe he has ghosts too. Good. Something in common then.

All at once, he seizes on the sculpture and the suddenness of the action makes my breath catch. He's a downed power line, the way he moves. Except now the power's been cut and he's pressing his forehead into the belly of the sculpture. No offense (again), but what a freak. He has his large open hands on each side of the work, and he's just staying like that, unmoving, as if he's praying or listening for a pulse or totally out of his gourd. Then I see his hands begin to move slowly up and down and across the surface of the piece, dragging clay off, bit by bit, throwing fistfuls onto the floor, but as he does this, he never once lifts his head to look at what he's doing. He's sculpting
blind
. Oh wow.

I wish Noah could see this. And Mom.

Eventually, he steps back in a stumbling kind of way as if pulling himself out of a trance, takes a cigarette pack out of a pocket in his smock, lights up, and, leaning against a nearby table, he smokes and stares at the sculpture, tilting his head from left to right. I'm recalling his bonkers biography. How he came from a long line of gravestone cutters in Colombia and began carving at the age of five. How no one had ever seen angels as magnificent as his, and people who lived near the cemeteries where his statues watched over the dead swore they heard them singing at night, swore that their heavenly voices carried into their homes, their sleep, their dreams. How it was rumored that the boy carver was enchanted or possibly possessed.

I'm going with the latter.

He's the kind of man who walks into a room and all the walls fall down.
Agreed, Mom, which puts me back at square one. How am I going to ask
him
to mentor
me
? This him is far more frightening than Igor.

He flicks his cigarette on the floor, takes a long sip of water from a glass on the table, then spits it from his mouth onto the clay—ah, gross!—then he works the moistened section furiously with his fingers, his eyes now glued to what he's doing. He's lost in it, drinking and spitting and molding, drinking and spitting and molding, sculpting like he's trying to pull something he needs out of the clay, needs badly. As time passes and passes, I begin to see a man and a woman take shape—two bodies tangled up like branches.

This is wishing with your hands.

I don't know how much time goes by as I and a handful of enormous stone couples watch him work, watch him rake his hands, dripping with wet clay, through his hair, over and over again, until it's not clear if he's making the sculpture or if the sculpture is making him.

• • •

I
t's dawn and I'm sneaking back up Guillermo Garcia's fire escape.

Once on the landing, I again crawl along under the sill until I'm at the same vantage point as last night, then rise just enough to see into the studio . . . He's still there. I somehow knew he would be. He's sitting on the platform, his back to me, head hung down, his whole body limp. He hasn't changed his clothes. Has he slept at all? The clay sculpture beside him appears to be finished now—he must've worked all night—but it's nothing like it was when I left. No longer are the lovers entwined in each other's arms. The male figure's on his back now and it looks like the female figure's wrenching herself out of him, climbing right out of his chest.

It's awful.

I notice then that Guillermo Garcia's shoulders are rising and falling. Because he's crying? As if by osmosis, a dark swell of emotion rises in me. I swallow hard, accordion my shoulders tight. Not that I ever cry.

Tears of mourning should be collected and then
ingested to heal the soul

(I've
never
cried about Mom. I had to fake it at the funeral. I kept sneaking into the bathroom to pinch my cheeks and rub my eyes so I'd look right. I knew if I cried, even one tear: Judemageddon. Not Noah. For months, it was like living with a monsoon.)

I can hear the sculptor through the window—a deep dark moaning that's sucking the air out of the air. I have to get out of here. Tucking down to leave, I remember the lucky sand-dollar birds still in my pocket from last night. He needs them. I'm lining them up on the windowsill, when out of the corner of my eye, I catch a quick flash of motion. His arm's whipped back and is starting to reel forward—

“No!” I shout, not thinking and slamming my own hand into the window to stop his from making contact and sending the anguished lovers tumbling to their death.

Before I fly down the fire escape, I see him staring up at me, the expression on his face turning from shock to rage.

• • •

I
'm halfway over the fence when I hear the door horror-movie-squeak open like it did the other day and see in my periphery his immense frame emerge from it. I have two choices. I retreat back into the alley and get ambushed or I jump onto the sidewalk and make a run for it. Not much of a choice really, I think, as I land feet first—
whew
—but then stumble forward into what would've been an extremely unlucky face-flop had a very large hand not reached out and iron-gripped my arm, restoring my balance.

“Thank you,” I hear myself say.
Thank you?
“That would've been a bad fall,” I explain to his feet, quickly adding, “You can't imagine how many brain injuries happen from falling and if it's frontal lobe, well, forget it, you can just kiss your personality good-bye, which really makes you wonder what a person is if they can just become someone else if they bonk their heads, you know?” Whew—on a roll, off to the races, put on this earth solely to soliloquize to his ginormous clay-covered shoes. “If it were up to me,” I go on, kicked into some heretofore unknown gear, “which of course nothing is, and if it didn't present such a total fashion conundrum, I'd have us all in titanium helmets from womb to grave. I mean,
anything
can fall on your head at
any
time. Have you ever thought about that? An air conditioner for instance, one could just drop out of a second-story window and crush you while you're minding your own business shopping for bagels on Main Street.” I take a breath. “Or a brick. Of course there's the flying brick to worry about.”

“The flying brick?” The timbre of his voice has a lot in common with thunder.

“Yes, the flying brick.”

“A flying brick?”

What, is he dense? “Sure. Or a coconut, I suppose, if you live in the tropics.”

“You are off the rocker.”

“
Your
rocker,” I say quietly. I still haven't raised my head, think that's best.

A lot of Spanish is coming out of his mouth now. I recognize the word
loca
quite a few times. On the exasperation scale, I'd say he's at a ten. His smell's very strong,
no offense, but
we're talking total sweaty ape. Not a whiff of alcohol on him, though. Igor's not here, this maniac's all Rock Star.