I'll Give You the Sun (40 page)

“You found Ralph!” Noah croaks out and then doubles over again. Dad's wheezing-laughing so hard he's succumbed to the floor.

How I'd rather join my ark-mates than hear what I'm about to hear.

• • •

I
follow an uncharacteristically grim Oscar out onto the front stoop.

I want to put my arms around him but don't dare. This is a good-bye visit. It's engraved all over his face. He sits down on the step and puts his hand on the space beside him so I'll join him. I don't want to join him, don't want to hear what he's going to say. “Let's sit on the bluff,” I say, also not wanting Dad and Noah spying on us.

He follows me around to the back of the house. We sit, but so our legs don't touch.

The sea is calm, the breakers shuffling into shore without conviction.

“So,” he says, smiling a cautious smile, which doesn't suit him. “I don't know if it's okay to talk about this, so stop me if it's not.” I nod slowly, unsure of what's coming. “I knew your mother well. I felt like she and Guillermo . . .” He trails off, regards me.

“It's all right, Oscar,” I say. “I want to know.”

“Your mum was around when I was at my worst, jonesing all the time, bouncing off the walls, afraid to leave the studio because I'd use if I did, afraid of the grief that was leveling me without the booze and drugs to mask it. The studio was different then. G. had tons of students. She used to paint there and I'd model for her just so she'd talk with me.” So Noah was right. Mom was a secret painter.

“Was she Guillermo's student?”

He exhales slowly. “No, she was never his student.”

“They met when she interviewed him?” I ask. He nods and then is quiet. “Go on.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, please.”

He smiles a truly madhouse smile. “I loved her. It was she more than G. who got me into photography. The strange thing is we used to sit and talk in that church where you and I first met. That's why I go there so much, it reminds me of her.” This makes the hair on my arms rise up. “We'd sit in the pew and she'd go on and on about her twins.” He laughs. “I mean
on and on and on
. Especially about you.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes. I know so much about you, you have no idea. I've been trying to reconcile the two girls in my mind. The Jude your mother talked about and the CJ I was falling in love with.” The past tense hitches on my heart. “She always joked that I wasn't to meet you until I'd been sober for three years and you were at least twenty-five because she was certain we'd fall head over heels in love and that would be that for both of us. She thought we were kindred spirits.” He takes my hand and kisses the back of it, then rests it back on my lap. “She was right, I think.”

“But what? Because the
but
here is killing me, Oscar.”

He looks away from me. “But it's not our time. Not yet.”

“No,” I say. “It is our time. It's absolutely most definitely our time. I know you know it is too. It's Guillermo making you do this.”

“No. It's
your mother
making me do this.”

“You're not that much older than me.”

“I'm three years older than you, which is a lot now but won't always be.” I think how much less the three years between him and me seem than the years between Zephyr and me seemed when I was fourteen. I feel like Oscar and I are the same age.

“But you'll fall in love with someone else,” I say.

“It's much more likely you will.”

“Not possible. You're the guy in the portrait.”

“And you're the girl in the prophecy.”

“
My
mother's prophecy too, it seems,” I say, taking his arm, thinking how strange it is that I gave Oscar a note Guillermo meant for my mother, like the words had fallen through time from them to us. Like a blessing.

“You're still in high school,” Oscar's saying. “You're not even sodding legal, which didn't occur to me until Guillermo pointed it out a few hundred times last night. We can be great friends. We can bounce around on Hippity Hops and play chess and I don't know what.” There's hesitation, frustration in his voice, but then he smiles. “I'll wait for you. I'll live in a cave. Or become a monk for a few years, wear a robe, shave the head, the whole bit. I don't know, I just really need to do the right thing here.”

This is not happening. If ever there was a moment to press
PLAY
, it's this one. Words start tumbling out of me. “And the right thing is turning our backs on what might be the love story of our lives? The right thing is denying destiny, denying all the forces that have conspired to bring us together, forces that have been at work for years now? No way.” I feel the spirits of both Sweetwine women who came before me uprising inside me. Hear the sound of horses galloping through generations. I go on. “My mother, who was about to upend her life for love, and my grandmother, who calls God himself Clark Gable, do not want us to run away from this, they want us to run toward it.” My hands are getting involved in the soliloquy thanks to Guillermo's tutelage. “I ended the boycott for you. I gave up practically the entire
world for you. And for the record, a sixteen-year-old girl and a nineteen-year-old guy are probably at the exact same maturity level. Furthermore Oscar,
no offense, but
you're frightfully immature.”

He laughs at that and before he knows what's happening I push him down and climb over and straddle him, holding his hands over his head so he's helpless.

“Jude.”

“You know my name,” I say, smiling.

“Jude is my favorite of all the saints,” he says. “Patron saint of lost causes. The saint to call on when all hope is gone. The one in charge of miracles.”

“You're kidding,” I say, letting go of his hands.

“I kid you not.”

So much better than traitorous Judas. “My new role model, then.”

He inches up my tank top and there's just enough light from the house so that he can see the cherubs. His fingers trace their shapes. He holds my gaze, watching what his touch is doing to me, watching how it's making me free-fall. My breathing's getting faster and his eyes have gotten wavy with desire. “I thought you had impulse-control issues,” I whisper.

“Totally in control here.”

“Is that so?” I slip my hands under his shirt, let them wander, feel him tremble. He closes his eyes.

“Oh man, I bloody tried.” He swings his hand around my back and in one swift move he's leaning over me, and then he's kissing me and the joy I feel and the desire I feel and the love I feel and feel and feel—

“I'm crazy about you,” he says breathlessly, the bedlam in his face at an all-time peak.

“Me too,” I answer.

“And I'm going to be crazy about you for a very long time.”

“Me too.”

“I'm going to tell you the things I'm afraid to tell anyone else.”

“Me too.”

He leans back, smiles, touches my nose. “I think that Oscar is the most brilliant bloke I've ever met, not to mention, way hot, and ladies and gentlemen, what a lean he has.”

“Me too.”

“Where the hell is Ralph?” Prophet squawks.

Right effing here.

• • •

N
oah and I are outside Guillermo's studio. He wanted to come with me, but now he's fidgeting. “I feel like we're betraying Dad.”

“We asked Dad.”

“I know. But I still feel like we're supposed to challenge Garcia to a duel in Dad's honor.”

“That would be funny.”

Noah grins and shoulder-bumps me. “Yeah, it would.”

I get it, though. My feelings about Guillermo kaleidoscope from hating him one minute for destroying our family, for breaking my father's heart, for a future that's never going to happen—and, what would've happened? Would he have lived with us? Would I have moved in with Dad?—to adoring him the next moment, like I have from the very first time I laid eyes on him as Drunken Igor and he said he wasn't okay. I keep thinking how strange it is that I would've met Guillermo and Oscar if Mom had lived too. We were all heading for each other on a collision course, no matter what. Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.

Guillermo's not answering the door, so Noah and I let ourselves in and make our way together down the hallway. Something's different, I notice, but only realize when we get into the mailroom what it is. The floors have been mopped, and unbelievably, the mail's been cleared out. The door to the cyclone room is open and inside is an office again. I go to the doorway. In the center of the room, the broken angel is upright, with a stunning crack zigzagging across her back beneath her wings. I remember Guillermo saying the cracks and breaks were the best and most interesting parts of the work in my portfolio. Perhaps it's the same with people and their cracks and breaks.

I look around the mail-less, dustless space and wonder if Guillermo's opening up the studio again for students. Noah's standing in front of the painting of the kiss. “That's where I saw them that day,” he says. His hand touches a dark shadow. “This is The Wooden Bird, you see it? Maybe they went there a lot.”

“We did,” Guillermo says, coming down the stairs with a broom and dustpan.

“My mother painted this,” Noah says to him, no question in his voice.

“Yes,” Guillermo replies.

“She was good,” Noah says, still facing the painting.

Guillermo puts down the broom and dustpan. “Yes.”

“She wanted to be a painter?”

“Yes. Deep down, I think so.”

“Why didn't she tell us?” Noah turns around. There are tears in his eyes. “Why didn't she show us anything?

Guillermo says, “She was going to. She was not happy with anything she make. She wanted to show you something, I do not know, perfect maybe.” He studies me, crosses his arms. “Maybe for the same reason you did not tell her about your sand women.”

“My sand women?”

“I bring from home to show you.” He walks over to the table where a laptop sits. He clicks the pad and a spread of photos appears on the screen.

I walk over to the computer. There they are. My flying sand ladies washed ashore after years at sea. How can it be? I turn to Guillermo, realize something remarkable. “It was you. You sent in the photos to CSA?”

He nods. “I did, anonymously. I feel that is what your mother want me to do. She was so worried you would not apply. She tell me she was going to send herself. So I do it.” He points to the computer. “She love them very much, how carefree and crazy they are. Me too.”

“She took these pictures?”

“No, I did,” Noah says. “She must've found them on Dad's camera and downloaded them before I deleted them all.” He looks at me. “The night of that party at Courtney's.”

I'm trying to take all this in. Mostly that Mom knew something about the inside of me that I didn't think she did. It's making me feel weightless again. I look down. My feet are still touching the floor. People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn't. It continues and is ever-changing.

I realize Guillermo's talking. “Your mother was so proud of both of you. I never know a mother so proud.”

I glance around the room, sensing Mom so much, certain this is what she wanted. She knew we each held an essential part of the story that needed to be shared. She wanted me to know she saw the sculptures and only Guillermo could tell me that. She wanted Guillermo and Dad to hear the truth from Noah. She wanted me to tell Noah about CSA and maybe I wouldn't have found the courage if I hadn't come to Guillermo, if I hadn't picked up a chisel and hammer. She wanted us in Guillermo's life, and he in ours, because we are, each one of us for the other, a key to a door that otherwise would've remained locked forever.

I think of the image in my mind that got me here in the first place: Mom, at the helm, steering us across the sky, keeping the course. Somehow, she did it.

“What am I, chopped liver?” It's Grandma!

“Of course not,” I tell her without moving my lips, thrilled she's back and back to normal. “You're the bee's knees.”

“Damn straight. And
for the record,
as you're so fond of saying, missy,
you,
young lady, do not make me up. How presumptuous. No idea where you picked up that thankless trait.”

“No idea, Grandma.”

Later, after he sets up Noah with canvases and paint—Noah couldn't resist when Guillermo offered—Guillermo finds me in the yard, where I've started on the clay model for Mom's sculpture. “I never see anyone paint like him,” he says. “He is an Olympian. It is incredible to watch. Picasso, he once paint forty canvases in a month. I think Noah might in a day. It is like they are already finished and he is just delivering them.”

“My brother has the ecstatic impulse,” I say, remembering Oscar's essay.

“I think maybe your brother
is
the ecstatic impulse.” He leans against the worktable. “I see a few pictures of you two when this small.” He lowers a hand to the ground. “And Dianna, she always talk about Jude and her hair. I would never know, never ever would I think that you . . .” He shakes his head. “But now I think to myself of course you are her daughter. Noah, he look exactly like her, it hurt me to look at him, but you. You look nothing, nothing like her, but are so, so much like her. Everyone is afraid of me. Not your mother. Not you. You both just jump right in.” He touches his chest. “You make me feel better from the very first instant I catch you on my fire escape and you talk about the flying brick.” He covers his brow with his hand and when he lifts it, his eyes are red-rimmed. “But I understand if . . .” He falters, his face clouding with emotion. “I want very much for you to keep working with me, Jude, but I understand if you do not want or if your father do not want you to.”