Very in Pieces (25 page)

i.

SHE SLIPS AWAY IN
the night. The breath goes out and does not come back in.

ii.

I'd like to say I woke up in the middle of the night, shocked awake by the sudden loss, a ripple across the cosmos. I do not. I sleep a dreamless sleep and wake with sandy eyes.

When I come downstairs, Mom is on the couch. Dad is next to her, still pretending. They are both wilted flowers with red-rimmed eyes. Mom's hair is tousled; Dad sports the shadow of a beard. And it is in that moment, when I see their eyes, that I know.

I shake my head to keep them from saying it aloud, but
they do anyway. “Very,” Dad says, his voice even. “Last night Nonnie—it happened last night.”

“Don't tell me,” I say. I do not want to hear the words from him.

“She's gone,” Mom says, her voice hoarse. “She's gone away.”

There's all this language we use to avoid saying the truth, to avoid calling it what it is: passed, passed on, passed away, gone away, gone to a better place, left us. It's as if death is one big road trip and the rest of us are left behind.

My mind should not be spiraling out like this. It should be focused. I should be focused.

“Okay,” I say. Then again: “Okay. I understand. I'm going back to bed.”

iii.

I sleep. Deep beneath blankets, pillow over my head, I sleep. I do not dream. And when I wake it's like learning the truth all over again.

Nonnie is gone.

iv.

Outside the sculpture glints like broken bottles on a summer sidewalk. The pipes that made the flower stems are now
entwined, snaking around the bottle caps like the ivy that grows on the buildings of the college. The bird's nest is empty, one lone feather fluttering in the breeze.

It will have to be removed. Now that Mom will want to put the house on the market, the sculpture will have to be removed. Maybe there's a way to take it all off in one piece, to preserve it.

You always were my practical girl.

The words come unbidden. This is not how I want to remember Nonnie thinking of me. I want to think of our conversations in her room, painting her nails, driving around town. I want to think of her teasing me, not cursing me.

But maybe there is no escaping her words, because my next thought is: I will have to plan the funeral. Mom isn't able to. Dad will find a way to abdicate responsibility. So it will fall to me. I will have to find a funeral home. Unless they have already sent her body to one. Is it in the hospital morgue? Do hospitals even have morgues or is that just the thing of movies?

I don't know where Nonnie is.

I don't know where her body is resting, and I don't know where she wants it to be.

I hope she has a will with all the details laid out. She always was so particular. Yes, a will. Leave the decisions to someone else.

A breeze blows across the front of the house and the sculpture sighs.

i.

MOM HAS THE RED
afghan over her feet and calves. She's wearing a sleeveless silk blouse that has faded from black to gray, and I can see small pinpricks of goose bumps on her arms. It's like she has taken up residency on that couch. I wonder if she even sleeps in the bedroom anymore.

I sit down next to her and pull the blanket over both of us.

“Going to school?”

“I don't think so.” I had thought about it, but when I texted Britta and Grace to let them know about Nonnie, Britta said I should take as much time as I needed, and it made me feel like going was the wrong choice.

Mom laces her fingers through the holes of the afghan. “It could be something to keep your mind off of things.”

Things
. Nonnie would hate that we're using such an imprecise word to describe her passing away. Her death.

“You know what the last thing she said to me was?” she asks.

I shake my head, the semipermanent lump in my throat re-forming.

“She said she hoped I didn't dissolve. She said, ‘Don't dissolve, Annaliese. Those girls need you.'” She untangles her fingers from the afghan and wipes at her eyes. “‘Those girls need you,' she said. Not even a moment to let me grieve. Did she think I wouldn't grieve?”

“It's not like that. She said the same thing to me about Ramona, about how I would be okay, but Ramona would struggle. I think she wanted me to watch out for her.”

“You are not your sister's keeper. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

I glance toward the bookshelves. The books are more tumbled and out of order than usual, as if Mom or someone has been looking for something. And perhaps she has. Just the right book, just the right words to erase the ones that Nonnie left for her. “Those were her last words?”

“To me. Her actual last words were ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.' She must have planned that, don't you think?”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely. The question is, how long did she know? When did she choose it?”

“I don't know,” I say. One of the ice cubes in her glass cracks.

“You need me?” she asks. She looks at me. Her bangs are swooping down toward her bloodshot eyes.

“We do.”

“It's all just so jumbled up. Life is just a big jumble and we can write and paint and never make any sense of it.”

“I have something to show you,” I tell her.

“Can you bring it here?” she asks.

“It's up in Ramona's room.”

Maybe learning the truth about Ramona is too much to throw at her right after Nonnie's death, but it's too much for me, too—too much for Ramona. I can't carry it myself anymore, and Mom is all I have.

She unfolds herself from the sofa and follows me up the stairs. When we get into the room, she stops and stares, her eyes shifting left, right, up, and down as she takes it all in. She puts her fingers up to her lips, and relief swells over me like the tide in the bay. I'm not going to have to take care of this on my own.

We are still. In front of us is the tree. Behind us is the chaos of Ramona's room.

“I tried to talk to her about it, but, well, you know,” I say.

Mom sits down roughly on Ramona's unmade bed.

“She ripped all those pages out of Nonnie's notebooks and encyclopedias at school. I caught her doing it one day. I should've said something.” I nestle close to her on the bed, like I did when I was little. “She's going to be okay, right?” I've been silly to keep it from her for so long. Parents make things better. Even sad, damaged parents. They put the Band-Aids on and kiss your head, and sure, Ramona is probably going to need more than that, but at least Mom is involved now.

“She's brilliant,” Mom replies, shaking her head. “I thought
I . . .” Her voice trails off.

“This isn't brilliance, Mom. She's writing on the walls like someone in an insane asylum.”

“You don't understand, Very. It's not your fault. Your mind isn't wired like ours.”

Focus on Ramona. Just focus on Ramona.
“I think that she's depressed or something. Like she's, I don't know—she's there but not there.”

Mom shakes her head. “That's her creative space, the place she goes. There's this line between madness and creativity. If you can walk it, that's genius.” She points at the wall. “She's walking it. Her message, her impact—so precise.” She stands up, forgetting me, and walks around the room, letting her fingers linger on the wall. “I have to go,” she says.

She flees from the room, and I follow her downstairs. She crosses the first floor and flies up the second set of stairs to her studio, where I know I'm not supposed to follow. So I just stand at the bottom of the steps, looking up, waiting to be invited when I know I won't be. After a few moments, the crashes start.

ii.

Years ago I put glow-in-the-dark star stickers on my ceiling. I tried to peel them off, but they just left marks, so I let them stay. Now I stare at their uneven pattern, listening to the sounds from my mom's studio. They are muffled, but I can still hear
them: two crashes, then a pause, then three loud bumps, one after another.

A particularly loud crash makes me shudder. Then the noises stop, and I think maybe I can go see her. It's true she's made it clear that she doesn't want us in her studio, but everything's changed now, hasn't it?

So I climb the stairs.

Of course I shouldn't be surprised by what I see, not after all of the commotion. It is as if every inch of floor is covered by torn canvases, their frames splintered. She smashed some of the glass jars she uses for paints. The floor sparkles with the shards.

“Don't come in,” she says. “Your feet.” I'm not wearing any shoes. But I can't leave, not with the room like this. I sidestep shards of glass and splinters of wood. Mom stays by the window, looking out. Canvases are piled in the middle of the room. Picking one up, I smooth out what I can: it is Nonnie. A portrait made with heavy oils, the colors off so that her skin has a green hue, her hair almost purple, but there is no doubt who it is. Her eyes flash just right, as if she is composing a poem—or a quip—in her mind.

Another painting is bent in half, but I recognize this one right away, too: it is me. My skin is rosy—too rosy—and she has made me more beautiful. My hair is smooth and pretty—still long—and I purse my lips in a seductive manner. When I pick it up and see the lower half, I see that she has dressed me in a top with a plunging neckline. It is like she painted me the way she thinks I ought to be. I put my portrait on top of the one of Nonnie.

Digging through, I next find a Ramona painting. Mom has captured her younger than she is right now—probably eight or nine. She is laughing with her head tilted back, face bathed in the light of an unshown sun. That's the way Ramona used to be.

Then I find Mom's self-portrait. The colors are dark, ominous almost. You nearly can't see her face because of the shadows. But she is gorgeous. There is no doubt of that. And it is the most realistic. The jawline is absolutely correct, the fleck of gold in her eyes. I realize then that not all the glass is from the paint jars. Some is from a mirror. She studied herself to make this painting.

The other canvases are in various states of completion, but they are always of the four of us, and always playing the same roles: Imogene grotesque, me glamorous, Ramona in the sun, and Mom overshadowed.

“Mom, these are beautiful.”

“Don't lie to me.”

“I'm not lying.”

She smirks. “Derivative. David Hockney did it first and better.”

“Well.” I have no idea who David Hockney is. “There are only so many ways to do a portrait, right?”

“The thing about art is, it needs to be an original thought. Your grandmother had her words. I thought I had . . .” She shakes her head. “Your sister, she's an original thinker. The way she sees the world. If I could just get in her head for a day, an hour.”

Ramona doesn't need anything or anyone else inside her head. “I think she's breaking down.”

Mom tilts her head back and closes her eyes. “That's just what I was trying to say. All the best artists were a little crazy, a little depressed. Hemingway. Van Gogh, of course. Emily Dickinson. Plath; your grandmother. Your sister is lucky. If only I had been more touched.”

“Are you serious?”

“What do you even know of art? I didn't want them to be beautiful. I wanted them to be true.”

“But they aren't true at all.”

Damn it.

“That's not what I meant,” I say.

“It is. And you're right.” Mom crosses over to a sink and begins washing her hands, roughly rubbing them with the paint-stained bar of soap.

“Mom.”

Scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing until her hands are pink.

“Mom!”

“What?” She turns, sprinkling water out around her like a fan. The sun coming in the window catches it and it refracts the light into a hundred rainbows. We both stop, breathe in, as we watch it.

“What is so important now?” she demands.

Everything
, I want to say. Everything is important. “You painted us how you want us to be. That's its own truth, isn't it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, me sexier than I am. More like you. And Ramona, you kept her young, so she isn't a—” This time I stop myself from saying the word:
threat.

Mom dries her hand on an old dish towel. “And Nonnie? Tell me, what secret is hiding in those paintings?”

“I'm not trying to be mean, Mom. I'm trying to help.”

“So help me, Very. Oh, please do. Tell me what you see.”

“I see Nonnie as someone who shaped you, and, well, you're always painting yourself in shadows, so I guess you think she overshadowed you.”

“You think I'm that literal?”

“I don't know, Mom. You know I'm no good at this.”

She throws the rag onto the counter by the sink.

The sun is pounding through the windows that circle the turret. I have to squint my eyes against the glare and I start to sweat. “You can't change us by changing how you portray us.”

“Oh, can't I? What do you think Imogene did with me, Smart One? Trotting around her beautiful daughter. Using me to get into parties when no one wanted her there anymore? ‘Taste the wine, Annaliese. Tell them about the modeling you're doing, Annaliese.' Did she ever tell them about my painting? How do you think I ended up like this?”

“Like what?”

“For a smart girl, you miss a lot.” There's a small cosmetics bag near the sink, and she pulls out a tube of lipstick. She puts it on without a mirror, perfectly in place. Her gaze flits about the room, looking at everything but me.

“Not as much as you think.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“Anyway, right now, I don't really care about the problems you had with Nonnie. Nonnie's gone. Ramona's still here.”

Mom throws up her hands. “That's the problem, isn't it!” she cries out.

“What do you mean?”

Her body stills. She opens up the toiletry bag and pulls out a compact. Moving it around, she looks at her eyes, widening them, then narrowing them.

“Mom, what do you mean? You can't tell me you're jealous of Ramona?”

“Me? I was talking about you!” But her voice has lost her fire. I know I have caught her out.

She snaps the compact shut and drops it back in the bag. “I'm going,” she announces.

“Where?” I ask.

“I thought you had everything figured out.”

She strides past me and down the stairs. A few moments later I see her car driving down the driveway way too fast.

iii.

So I am alone in the house. The weight of it presses down on me.

I run out into the evening air. I want to be anywhere but here. I pull my phone out of my pocket. Dominic's number is
there in the missed calls. I could go to him. The phone is warm in my hand. Then it starts to vibrate.

How's it goin?

The text is from Christian. I just stare at it. I don't know how to respond. It would be pretty hard to sum up in a text message:
My lifes fallin apart. Nonnies gone. moms losin it. Ramona's craz, 2
. Not exactly my style. So I type:
Fine
.

Almost immediately, he responds:
Workin on chem. Want 2 come over?

My fingers are on the keys typing
Yes!
and
Getting into the car now
.
I will just go to his house, lie down on the floor of his furnished basement, and we'll spread out our books. I'll correct his math, he'll explain the reactions in a way that makes sense when it never does in class. Good and warm and comfortable. I can practically smell him—the Right Guard he uses and his cinnamon toothpaste.

I drive over there with the music off and the top down. The cool air cyclones around me, chilling my fuzzy head, and I don't think about where I'm heading and I don't think about what happened with Nonnie or what I did to Christian. I don't think about any of it.

When I get there, he is waiting for me. He smiles, cheeks pink, and I follow him to the basement. He turns and looks at me over his shoulder, still grinning ear to ear.

He doesn't know, I realize. He doesn't know that Nonnie is gone, and it's like a time warp, jumping back to when she was still alive. My heart races as if it could be true.

Downstairs, Christian has his chemistry book out, and a bowl of potato chips. “I thought this part might be hard for you.”

“Gee, thanks,” I say.

He punches me lightly on the shoulder, like we're old football buddies or something. “You're just better with the practical than the theoretical.”