I'll Give You the Sun (25 page)

A comfortable quiet falls over us. Really comfortable, like we've lain on filthy floors corpselike together for several lifetimes now.

“The poem was by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” I tell him.

“‘How do I love thee?'” he croons. “‘Let me count the ways.'”

“That's the one,” I say, thinking:
He's
the one. And some thoughts once thought are very hard to unthink. “It
is
kind of like being on the beach,” I say, growing more and more elated. I roll onto my side, cradle my head in my hand, and secretly stare at Oscar's madhouse face. Until he pops open an eye and catches me admiring him—you are so busted, his smile says. He closes the eye. “Shame you're not interested.”

“I'm not!” I cry, falling back down on the sandy beach. “Artistic curiosity is all. You have an unusual face.”

“And you have a mind-blowingly beautiful one.”

“You're such a flirt,” I say, effervescing.

“It's been said.”

“What else has been said?”

“Hmm. Well, unfortunately, it's been said very recently I stay away from you or I get castrated.” He sits up and spins his hands in the air like Guillermo.
“Castration, Oscore! Understand? You have seen me use the circular saw, yes?”
He relaxes into being himself again. “Which is actually why I've come in here waving the white flag. I have this way of ruining things and I don't want to ruin this. You're the first person besides me who's made G. laugh in years. That he's teaching again is a miracle. We're talking loaves and fishes, CJ. You've no idea.” A miracle? “It's like you've cast this spell on him. Around you . . . I don't know . . . he's
okay
again. The guy's been bloody ferocious for a very long time.” Is it possible I'm Guillermo's meadow like he's mine? “Plus we now know you
both
converse with invisible mates.” He winks. “So”—he presses his hands together—“per your request and his, this is how it's going to be from now on. When I want to ask you to abandoned buildings or kiss those lips of yours or stare into your otherworldly eyes or imagine what you look like under all those baggy drab clothes you're always hiding in or ravish you on some grimy floor like I'm desperate to this very minute, I'll just bugger off on my Hippity Hop. Deal?” He holds out his hand. “Friends.
Just
friends.”

Talk about mixed signals; he's like a roller coaster that talks.

No deal, no way. “Deal,” I say, and take his hand but only because I want to touch him.

Moments tick by, our hands clasped, electricity jolting wildly through me. And then he's pulling me slowly toward him, looking into my eyes even as he just swore he wouldn't and heat's bursting in my belly, radiating everywhere. I feel my body opening. Is he going to kiss me? Is he?

“Oh man,” he says, letting go of my hand. “I should probably go.”

“No, don't. Please don't go.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.

“How about I sit over here, then, where it's safer,” he says, scooting a few feet away from me. “Did I mention I have impulse-control issues?” He smiles. “I'm having a particularly strong impulse, CJ.”

“Let's just talk,” I say, my heart rate off the charts. “Remember the circular saw?” His laugh cartwheels across the room. “You have this great laugh,” I blurt out. “It's like wow, it's—”

“You're not helping things. Please keep all compliments to yourself. Oh!” He's coming toward me again. “I know! An idea.” He pulls my hat down so it covers my entire face and half my neck. “There,” he says. “Perfect. Let's talk.”

Except I'm laughing now inside my hat and he's laughing outside of it and we're getting carried away, far away, and I don't think I've been this happy maybe ever.

It's very hot and steamy to laugh out of control inside a wool hat, so after a time I lift it up and see him there, his face splotchy and eyes watering from truly losing it, and I'm filled with something I can only describe as recognition. Not because he looks familiar on the outside this time, but because he feels familiar on the inside.

Meeting your soul mate is like walking into a house you've been in before—you will recognize the furniture, the pictures on the wall,
the books on the shelves, the contents of drawers: You could find
your way around in the dark if you had to

“So if you're full of it ninety-eight percent of the time,” I say, collecting myself. “What about the other two percent?”

The question seems to suck all the residual laughter out of his face and I'm immediately sorry I asked. “Yeah, no one meets that guy,” he says.

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Perhaps you're not the only one in hiding.”

“How come you think I'm in hiding?”

“Just do.” He pauses, then says, “Maybe it's because I've spent a fair bit of time with your photos now. They speak volumes.” He looks curiously at me. “But you could tell me
why
you're in hiding.”

I consider it, consider him. “Now that we're friends,
just
friends. Are you the friend I call if I find myself in possession of a dead body and a bloody knife in my hand?”

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.