I'll Give You the Sun

THE HISTORY OF LUCK

Jude

Age 16

When I wake up, Noah’s already gone, like usual these days, so I can’t tell him what I need to or ask him all that I want to. The irony of this is not lost on me. Now that I want more than anything to confess about CSA, I can’t. I check LostConnections.com, where there’s still no response from Brian, then grab Oscar’s leather jacket, my sketchpad, and head down the hill.

Soon after I arrive, I’m tapping my foot nervously on the floor as Guillermo opens my sketchpad on the large white drafting table in the center of the studio. I want him to like the studies of Mom’s sculpture and I want him to agree to the piece being done in stone, preferably marble or granite. He flips through the first studies quickly, back views. I’m watching him and can’t tell what he’s thinking, but then he stops at the frontal view and inhales sharply as he raises a hand to his mouth. That bad? Now he’s trailing a finger over my mother’s face. Oh yes, of course. I’d forgotten that they met. I guess I nailed the likeness. He turns to me and his expression causes me to jerk backward.

“Dianna is your mother.” He doesn’t so much speak the words as becomes them.

“Yes,” I say.

His breathing has gone volcanic. No idea what’s happening here. He returns his gaze to the sketches, touching them now like he wants to peel them off the page.

“Well,” he says. The skin under his left eye won’t stop twitching.

“Well?” I ask, confused and getting frightened.

He closes the pad. “I don’t think I can help you after all. I will call Sandy back, recommend someone else.”

“What?”

In a cold, closed voice I’ve never heard before, he says, “I am sorry. I am too busy. I was wrong. It is too distracting to have someone here so much.” He won’t look at me.

“Guillermo?” My heart’s shaking inside my chest.

“No, please go. Now. You must. I have things to do.” I’m too stunned to argue. I take my pad and start for the door, hear, “Do not come back to my studio.”

I turn around but he’s facing the opposite direction. I don’t know why I glance up at the window to the fire escape, maybe the same sense that someone’s watching me that I had while working outside yesterday. And I’m right, someone is watching.

Looking down on us with one hand pressed to the glass is Noah.

Guillermo turns to see what I’m looking at and by the time we both look back at each other, Oscar has walked through the studio door, his face shining with fear.

A moment later, Noah blasts into the studio like a lit stick of dynamite, then freezes as he scans the room. Guillermo’s face is unrecognizable—he’s scared, I think. Guillermo is scared. Everyone’s scared, I realize. We are four points in a rectangle and three of those points have these wild panicked eyes on me. No one’s saying a word. It’s clear everyone knows something I don’t and if their expressions are any indication, I’m not sure I want to know what it is. My eyes dart from one of them to the next and back again, not understanding, because, what—or more accurately, whom—it seems, each one of them is afraid of is: me.

“What?” I ask finally. “What’s going on? Someone tell me, please. Noah? Is it about Mom?”

It’s mayhem.

“He killed her.” Noah’s finger is pointed at Guillermo, his voice trembling with anger. “If it wasn’t for him, we’d still have her.” The studio begins to pulse, to rock beneath my feet, to tip over.

Oscar turns to Noah. “Killed her? Are you crazy? Look around you. No man has ever loved a woman more than he loved her.”

Guillermo says softly, “Oscore, be quiet.”

The room’s really swaying now, swinging, so I find the only thing near me and lean against it, the leg of a giant, but immediately lurch back because I swear it shuddered—it moved—and then I’m seeing it. The giants are stomping and roaring to life, hurling their colossal bodies into each other’s arms, fed up with spending eternity frozen, always a breath away from their heart’s desire. Split-aparts, all of them, now throwing themselves together. Each couple spinning across the floor, arm in arm, turning and turning, causing tremor after tremor inside me, as things start adding up. It wasn’t my age that freaked Oscar out last night. It surely wasn’t. It was the family photograph. And what turned Guillermo into Drunken Igor was nothing but the anniversary of my mother’s death.

Because she is Dearest.

I turn to Noah, try to speak. “But you said . . .” is all I can get out before my voice gets sucked back in. I try again. “You told us . . .” I still can’t finish and then all I can say is, “Noah?”

This is what he’s been keeping from me.

“I’m sorry, Jude,” he cries. And then it’s as if Noah really and truly is busting through stone, as if his spirit’s rising up as his back arches, his arms suspend behind him and he says, “She was on her way to ask Dad for a divorce so she could marry . . .” He turns to Guillermo, meets his eyes. “. . . you.”

Guillermo’s mouth has fallen open. And now my words are coming out of it. “But Noah, you said . . .” His stare could burn a hole in granite. “You told me . . .” Oh, Noah—what did you do? I can tell Guillermo’s trying to tamp down the emotion in his face, hide from us what is swelling from the very core of him, but it’s starting to seep out of him anyway: joy, no matter how belated.

Her answer was yes.

I need to get out of here, away from all of them. It’s too much. Too, too much. Mom is Dearest. She’s the clay woman climbing out of the clay man’s chest. She’s the stone woman he makes again and again and again. She’s the color-drenched faceless woman in the painting of the kiss. Her body turns and twists and bends and arches facelessly over every inch of the walls in the studio. They were in love. They were split-aparts! She was never going to ask Dad to come home. We were never going to be a family again. And Noah’s known this. And Dad doesn’t! Finally my father’s perpetually perplexed preoccupied expression makes sense. Of course he doesn’t understand. For years, he’s been trying to compute a mathematical problem in his head that does not compute. No wonder he walks the soles off all his shoes!

I’m staggering down the sidewalk, sun blinding my eyes, careening from car to telephone pole, trying to get away from the truth, from the frenzy of emotions chasing me down. How could she have done this to Dad? To us? She’s an adulterer. She’s that girl! And not in the good way, not in the badass way! And then, something occurs to me. This is why, after she died, Noah kept telling me I didn’t understand how he was feeling, that I didn’t know Mom like he did. Now I get it. He was right. I had no idea who Mom was. He wasn’t being cruel. He wasn’t hogging her. He was protecting her. And Dad and me. He was protecting our family.

I hear quick frantic footsteps gaining on me. I pivot around, knowing they’re his. “You were protecting us? That’s why you lied?”

He reaches for me but doesn’t touch me. His hands are manic birds. “I don’t know why I did it, maybe I wanted to protect you and Dad or maybe I just didn’t want it to be this way. I didn’t want her to be this way.” His face is flushed, his dark eyes storming. “I knew she didn’t want me to lie about her life. She wanted me to tell the truth, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell the truth about anything.” He looks at me so apologetically. “That’s why I couldn’t be around you, Jude.” How did Noah and I ever get so locked up in secrets and lies? “It was so much easier just to blend in than to be me, to face . . .” He’s stopped talking, but there’s definitely more and I can tell he’s gearing up to say it. I’m seeing him again like I did in the studio, like a figure busting out of rock. It’s a jailbreak. “I think I lied because I didn’t want it to be my fault,” he says. “I saw them together that day. I followed her and I saw them. And that’s why she got in the car. That’s why.” He’s starting to cry. “It’s not Garcia’s fault. I want it to be his so it doesn’t have to be mine, but I know it’s mine.” He’s holding his head like he’s trying to keep it from exploding. “I told her I hated her before she left, Jude, right before she drove away. She was crying. She shouldn’t have been driving. I was so angry at her—”

I take him by the shoulders. “Noah.” My voice has returned. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t.” I repeat the words until I’m sure he’s heard them, believes them. “It wasn’t anyone’s. It just happened. This terrible thing happened to her. This terrible thing happened to us.”

And then it’s my turn. I’m being shoved forward, shoved right out of my skin with just how terrible—Mom ripped out of my life the very moment I needed her the most, the bottomless unconditional shielding sheltering love she had for me taken forever. I let myself feel the terrible, surrender to it finally instead of running from it, instead of telling myself it all belongs to Noah and not to me, instead of putting an index of fears and superstitions between me and it, instead of mummifying myself in layers of clothing to protect myself from it, and I’m falling forward with the force of two years of buried grief, the sorrow of ten thousand oceans finally breaking inside me—

I let it. I let my heart break.

And Noah is there, strong and sturdy, to catch me, to hold me through it, to make sure I’m safe.

We take a long winding way home through the woods, tears streaming down my face, words out of his mouth. Grandma was right: A broken heart is an open heart.

“So much was going on then,” Noah’s saying. “More even than—” He flicks his wrist in the direction of Guillermo’s studio. “Stuff with me.”

“And Brian?” I ask.

He looks at me. “Yeah.” This is the first time he’s admitted it. “Mom caught us . . .” How could so much have happened to both of us in one week, on one day?

“But Mom was okay with it, wasn’t she?” I ask.

“That’s just it. She was totally okay with it. One of the last things she said to me was how wrong it is to live a lie. How it’s my responsibility to be true to my heart. And then I go and turn her life into a lie.” He pauses. “And my own too.” He grabs a stick off the ground and breaks it in half. “And I totally ruined Brian’s life.” He breaks the stick into smaller and smaller pieces. There’s torment in his face, shame.

“No you didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ever heard of Google?”

“I did that once, twice actually.”

“When?” Twice. OMCG, only Noah. He’s probably never been on a social network in his life.

He shrugs. “There wasn’t anything.”

“Well, there is now.”

His eyes widen but he doesn’t ask me what I know, so I don’t offer, figuring he wants to find out for himself. He’s increased his pace, though. Okay, he’s speed-walking now to The Oracle.

I stop. “Noah, I have something to tell you too.” He turns around and I start talking—it’s the only way. “I have a feeling after I tell you this, you’ll never speak to me again, so first I want to say how sorry I am. I should’ve told you ages ago, but I was too afraid I’d lose you forever if I did.” I look down. “I still love you the most. I always will.”

“What is it?” he says.

I am my brother’s keeper, I tell myself, and then I just say it. “You didn’t not get into CSA. What I mean is you didn’t apply. That day?” I take a breath and blow out the words from the darkest place in me: “I never mailed your application.”

He blinks. And blinks. And blinks some more. His face is blank and I don’t know what’s happening inside him, when all of a sudden he throws up his arms and jumps into the air and his face is awash in rip-roaring joy—no, ecstasy: This is ecstasy.

“Did you hear me right?”

“Yes!” he cries. Now he’s laughing wildly and I’m sure he’s lost all his buttons until out of his mouth flies, “I thought I sucked! I thought I sucked! For so long. I thought it was only Mom seeing them that made them any good.” He arches his neck back. “And then . . . I realized, it doesn’t matter.”

“What doesn’t?” I look for anger or hatred in his face, but there’s none. It’s like the betrayal hasn’t registered. He’s only elated.

“Come with me,” he says.

Fifteen minutes later, we’re on an abandoned construction site looking at a crumbling cement wall. On it, in a rage of colors, is . . . everything.

There’s NoahandJude spray-painted from behind, shoulder to shoulder, our hair braided together into a river of light and dark that wraps around the whole mural. There’s Brian in the sky opening up a suitcase full of stars. There’s Mom and Guillermo kissing into a tornado of color at The Wooden Bird. There’s Dad emerging from the ocean like a sun god and morphing into a body made of ashes. There’s me in my invisibility uniform blending into a wall. There’s Noah crouched in a tiny space inside his own body. There’s Mom’s car bursting into flames as it busts through the sky. There’s Heather and Noah riding a giraffe. There’s Noah and Brian climbing a ladder that goes on forever. There are buckets and buckets of light pouring over two shirtless boys kissing. There’s Noah swinging a baseball bat at Brian who shatters into pieces. There’s Noah and Dad under a big bright red umbrella waiting out a storm. There’s Noah and me walking along the path the sun makes on the ocean but in opposite directions. There’s Noah being held midair in the palm of a giant and that giant is Mom. There’s already me surrounded by Guillermo’s stone giants working on NoahandJude.

There is the world, remade.

I take out my phone and start snapping pictures. “So gorgeous, Noah. So, so gorgeous. And it will get you into CSA immediately! I’m giving up my spot for you. I’ve already sent an email to Sandy about it. We three have a meeting Wednesday morning. He’s going to die. It doesn’t even look like spray paint, I don’t know what it looks likes except incredible, so, so incredible—”

“Don’t.” He grabs my phone to stop me from taking any more pictures. “I don’t want your spot. I don’t want to go to CSA.”

“You don’t?”

He shakes his head.

“Since when?”

“Since right this minute, I guess.”

“Noah?”

He kicks his foot into the ground. “It’s like I forgot how awesome it was before I cared if I was any good or good enough to get into some stupid art school. I mean, seriously, like who fucking cares?” The sun’s hitting his face. He looks clear, self-possessed, older, and for some reason, I think: We’re going to be okay. “It’s so not about that,” he continues. “It’s about magic.” He shakes his head. “How could I have forgotten that?” His smile’s as loopy as it was when he was drunk last night. I can’t believe he’s smiling at me like this. Why isn’t he furious with me? He goes on. “When I figured out you were going to Garcia’s”—Is that why he was going through my sketches that day?—“I knew everything was about to blow up, all my lies. And it’s like I blew up. Finally. I couldn’t just paint in my head anymore.” Aha! “I had to tell the truth out loud, somewhere, somehow. I had to let Mom know I heard her that day. I had to apologize to her, to Brian, to you and Dad, even to Garcia. I used the emergency money Dad left, bought all this spray paint, remembered this wall from running. I think I watched every video ever made on spray painting. First attempts have been painted over and over and—hey . . .” He tugs at my sleeve. “I’m not mad at you, Jude. I’m not going to be either.”

I can’t believe this. “Why? You should be. How can you not be?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m just not.”

He reaches for my hands, takes them in his. Our eyes meet and hold, and the world starts to fall away, time does, years rolling up like rugs, until everything that’s happened unhappens, and for a moment, it’s us again, more one than two.

“Wow,” Noah whispers. “IV Jude.”

“Yeah,” I say, the enchantment of him feeding my very cells. I feel a smile sweep across my face, remembering all the light showers, the dark showers, picking up rocks and finding spinning planets, days with thousands of pockets, grabbing moments like apples, hopping fences into forever.

“I forgot this,” I say, and remembering practically lifts me off my feet, lifts us both off our feet.

We. Are. Off. Our. Feet.

I look up. The air’s shimmering with light. The world is.

Or I’m imagining this. Of course I am.

“Feel that?” Noah says.

I did not imagine it.

For the record, woohoo! Not just art, but life—magic.

“Let’s go,” Noah says, and we’re running together into the woods like we used to, and I can see how he’ll draw it later, with the redwoods bowing, the flowers opening like houses for us to enter, the creek following behind us in winding wending color, our feet inches above the ground.

Or maybe he’ll do it like this: the forest a blur of green over our heads while we lie on our backs, playing Rochambeau.

He picks rock. I pick scissors.

I pick paper. He picks scissors.

He picks rock. I pick paper.

We give up, happily. It’s a new age.

Noah’s looking up at the sky. “I’m not mad, because I could’ve just as easily done it to you,” he says. “I did do it to you. Just in smaller ways. Over and over again. I knew how you were feeling at the museum all those weekends with Mom and me. I knew how left out you felt all the time. And I know how much I didn’t want Mom to see your sculptures. I made sure she didn’t. I was always afraid you were better than me and she’d realize.” He sighs. “We got all messed up. Both of us.”

“Still, CSA was your—”

He interrupts. “Sometimes it felt like there wasn’t enough of Mom to go around.”

This thought silences me and we’re quiet for a long time after that, breathing in the scent of eucalyptus, watching the leaves fluttering all around us. I think about how Mom told Noah it was his responsibility to be true to his heart. Neither of us has been. Why is it so hard? Why is it so hard to know what that truth is?

“Does Heather know you’re gay?” I ask.

“Yeah, but no one else.”

I roll on my side to face him. “So can you believe how weird I’ve gotten and how normal you’ve gotten?”

“It’s astounding,” he says, which cracks us both up. “Except most of the time,” he adds, “I feel like I’m undercover.”

“Me too.” I pick up a stick, start digging with it. “Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people,” I say. “Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time.” Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.

He grins. “Each new self standing on the last one’s shoulders until we’re these wobbly people poles?”

I die of delight. “Yes, exactly! We’re all just wobbly people poles!”

The sun’s setting and the sky’s filling with pink wispy clouds. We should be getting home. Dad returns tonight. I’m about to say so when Noah speaks.

“That painting in the hallway of his studio. The one of the kiss, I just saw it for a second, but I think Mom made it.”

“You do? I didn’t know Mom painted.”

“Neither did I.”

Was that her secret? Another secret? “Like you,” I say, and something clicks into place, perfectly into place. Noah was Mom’s muse. I feel certain of it, and unbelievably without jealousy, understand it.

I flop onto my back again, dig my fingers into the loamy soil and imagine Mom making that incredible painting, wishing with her hands, being that in love. How can I be mad at her for that? How can I be mad at her for finding her split-apart and wanting to be with him? As Guillermo said, the heart doesn’t listen to reason. It doesn’t abide by laws or conventions or other people’s expectations either. At least her heart was full when she died. At least she was living her life, busting out of its seams, letting the horses gallop, before she had to leave.

Except, no.

Sorry.

How could it have been okay for her to break Dad’s heart like that? To break all the promises she made to him? To break up our family? Then again, how could it not be okay if she was being true to herself? Argh. It was right and wrong both. Love does as it undoes. It goes after, with equal tenacity: joy and heartbreak.

Her happiness was his unhappiness and that’s the unfair way it was.

But he still has life and time to fill it with more happiness.

“Noah, you have to tell Dad. Right away.”

“Tell Dad what?” And there is our footstep-less father looking down on us. “This is a sight for sore eyes, sore, tired, traveling eyes. I saw you two running into the woods hand in hand when I drove by in the cab. It was like a time warp.”

He joins us on the forest floor. I squeeze Noah’s hand.

“What is it, son? What do you need to tell me?” Dad asks, and my heart spills over with love.

Later that evening, I’m sitting in a chair as Noah and Dad move swiftly around the kitchen making dinner. They won’t let me help even though I’ve promised to retire the bible. Noah and I made a deal. He’ll stop jumping off cliffs if I stop bible-thumping and suspend all medical research, effective immediately. I’m going to make a giant-size, paper flying woman sculpture out of each and every bible passage. Grandma’s going to love it. It’s the first idea I put in that blank idea pad I’ve been carrying around since I started CSA. I’m going to call the piece: The History of Luck.

When Noah told Dad the truth about Mom and Guillermo hours ago in the forest, Dad simply said, “Okay, yes. That makes more sense.” He didn’t burst out of granite like Noah or have oceans break inside him like I did, but I can see that the storm in his face has quelled. He’s a man of science and the unsolvable problem is solved. Things finally make sense. And sense to Dad is everything.

Or so I thought.

“Kids, I’ve been thinking about something.” He looks up from the tomato he’s chopping. “How do you feel about moving? Not out of Lost Cove but to another house. Well, not to just any old house . . .” His smile is ridiculous. I have no idea what he’s going to say. “A houseboat.” I can’t decide what’s more amazing: the words coming out of Dad’s mouth or the expression on his face. He looks like the unicycle-riding super-kook. “I think we need an adventure. The three of us together.”

“You want us to live on a boat?” I ask.

“He wants us to live on an ark,” Noah answers, awe in his voice.

“I do!” Dad laughs. “That’s exactly right. I’ve always wanted to do this.” Really? News to me. Um, who is this man? “I just did some research and you will not believe what’s for sale down by the marina.” He goes to his briefcase and pulls out some pictures he must’ve printed from the Internet.

“Oh wow,” I say. This is no rowboat. It is an ark.

“An architect owned it previously,” Dad tells us. “Renovated the whole thing, did all the woodwork and stained glass herself. Incredible, isn’t it? Two stories, three bedrooms, two baths, great kitchen, skylights, wraparound decks on both floors. It’s a floating paradise.”

Noah and I must register the name of the floating paradise at the exact same moment, because we both blurt out, imitating Mom, “Embrace the mystery, Professor.”

The name of this houseboat is The Mystery.

“I know. Was hoping you wouldn’t catch that. And yes, if I weren’t me, if I were you, for instance, Jude, I’d be certain it was a sign.”

“It is a sign,” I say. “I’m in and I’m not even going to mention one of the thousand potential hazards of houseboat living that have flown into my head.”

“What kind of Noah would I be?” Noah says to Dad.

“It’s time,” Dad says, nodding at us.

Then, unbelievably, he puts on some jazz. The excitement in the room is palpable as Noah and Dad continue chopping and dicing. I can tell Noah’s painting in his head while Dad rhapsodizes about what it will be like to dive off the deck for a swim and what an inspiring place it would be to live if only anyone in the family had artistic inclinations.

Somehow it’s us again, with a few motley additions to our wobbly people poles, but us. The imposters have left the premises.

When we returned from the woods, I found Dad in his office and told him about Noah’s CSA application. Let’s just say, I’d rather spend the remainder of my life in a medieval torture chamber rotating from Head Crusher to Knee Splitter to The Rack than see that look on Dad’s face again. I didn’t think he was ever going to forgive me, but an hour or so later, after he talked to Noah, he asked me to go for a swim with him, our first in years. At one point when we were stroke for stroke in the setting sun’s glinting path, I felt his hand squeeze my shoulder, and as soon as I concluded he wasn’t trying to drown me, I realized he wanted me to stop.

Treading there in the middle of the ocean, he said, “I haven’t exactly been there for—”

“No, Dad,” I said, not wanting him to apologize for anything.

“Please let me say this, honey. I’m sorry I haven’t been better. I think I got a little lost. Like for a decade.” He laughed and took a mouthful of salt water in the process, then continued. “I think you can sort of slip out of your life and it can be hard to find a way back in. But you kids are my way back in.” His smile was full of sadness. “I know how crushed you’ve been. And what happened with Noah and CSA . . . well, sometimes a good person makes a bad decision.”

It felt like grace.

It felt like a way back in.

Because, as corny as it may be: I want to be a wobbly people pole that tries to bring joy into the world, not one that takes joy from it.

Bobbing there like buoys, Dad and I talked and talked about so many things, hard things, and after, we swam even farther toward the horizon.

“I’d like to help cook,” I tell the chefs. “I promise I’ll add nothing bible-y.”

Dad looks at Noah. “What do you think?”

Noah throws me a pepper.

But that’s the beginning and end of my culinary contribution, because Oscar has walked into the kitchen in his black leather jacket, hair more unruly than usual, face full of weather. “Sorry to interrupt,” he says. “I knocked, no one answered. The door was open . . .” I’m having déjà vu to the time Brian walked into the kitchen when Mom was baking. I look at Noah and know he’s having it too. Brian still hasn’t responded. Noah spent all afternoon with The Oracle, though. He knows Brian’s at Stanford. I can feel all the news roiling inside him, the possibilities.

“It’s okay. We never hear the door,” I say to Oscar, walking over to him and taking his arm. He stiffens at my touch. Or maybe I imagined it? “Dad, this is Oscar.”

Dad’s once-over is not subtle or generous.

“Hello, Dr. Sweetwine,” Oscar says, back to being the English butler. “Oscar Ralph.” He’s holding out his hand, which Dad shakes, tapping him on the back with the other.

“Hello, young man,” my father says like it’s the 1950s. “And I’m emphasizing the man part intentionally.” Noah laughs into his hand and then tries to pass it off as a cough. Oh boy. Dad’s back. Present and accounted for.

“About that.” Oscar looks at me. “Can we talk for a moment?”

I did not imagine it.

When I reach the doorway, I turn around because I’m hearing odd strangled noises. Dad and Noah are both doubled over behind the counter in hysterics. “What?” I ask.

“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.

Noah 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.”

“You would’ve been my stepfather, Guillermo,” I say as my answer. “And I would’ve made your life mis-er-a-ble.”

He drops his head back and laughs. “Yes, I can see it. You would have been the holy terror.”

I smile. Our connection is still so natural, though now, for me, it’s tinged with guilt because of Dad. I turn back to my clay model, start caressing my mother’s shoulder into shape, her upper arm. “It’s like some part of me knew,” I tell him, working the bend of her elbow. “I don’t know what I knew, but I knew I was supposed to be here. You made me feel better too. So much better. I was so locked in.”

“This is what I think,” he says. “I think maybe Dianna, she break your bowls, so you come find a stone carver.”

I look at him. “Yeah,” I say, the back of my neck tingling. “Me too.”

Because who knows? Who knows anything? Who knows who’s pulling the strings? Or what is? Or how? Who knows if destiny is just how you tell yourself the story of your life? Another son might not have heard his mother’s last words as a prophecy but as drug-induced gibberish, forgotten soon after. Another girl might not have told herself a love story about a drawing her brother made. Who knows if Grandma really thought the first daffodils of spring were lucky or if she just wanted to go on walks with me through the woods? Who knows if she even believed in her bible at all or if she just preferred a world where hope and creativity and faith trump reason? Who knows if there are ghosts (sorry, Grandma) or just the living, breathing memories of your loved ones inside you, speaking to you, trying to get your attention by any means necessary? Who knows where the hell Ralph is? (Sorry, Oscar.) No one knows.

So we grapple with the mysteries, each in our own way.

And some of us get to float around on one of them and call it home. We visited The Mystery this morning and Dad hit it off with the owner, Melanie—I mean really hit it off. They’re having drinks this evening on the deck of the ark. To discuss the sale, he told us, trying to hide the super-kook grin.

I wipe my hands clean on a nearby towel, reach in my bag and take out Guillermo’s copy of Mom’s book on Michelangelo.

“I stole it. I don’t know why. I’m sorry.”

He takes it from me, looks down at Mom’s picture. “She call me that day from the car. She sound so upset, so very upset. She say she need to see me later to talk. So when Noah come here and tell me . . . I am sure this is what she was going to say to me: that she change her mind.”

On my way out, I stop to visit with the angel and make my last wish. For Noah and Brian.

It’s Thursday, two weeks later, and Dad and I are on the front stoop, peeling off our wetsuits. He swam, I surfed, or more accurately, I got rag-dolled wave after wave—totally amazing. As I dry off, I’m keeping my eyes glued to the trailhead across the street because I feel fairly certain the five p.m. rendezvous spot is in the woods where Noah and Brian spent all their time that summer.

Noah told me he found Brian’s address online and sent him a series of drawings he did—around the clock like a maniac—called The Invisible Museum. A few days later, there was a response to his post on LostConnections. It said: I’ll be there.

Last week, Noah received an invitation to attend CSA, based on the photos of his mural I took. I told Sandy I’d give up my spot for him if necessary. It wasn’t. Noah hasn’t decided what he’s going to do.

The sunset has turned the sky into a carnival of color as Noah and Brian walk out of the forest, hand in hand. Brian notices Dad and me first and shrugs his hand away, but Noah immediately finds it again. At this, Brian’s eyes squint up and his face cracks open in a heart-crushing smile. Noah, like always around Brian, can barely keep his head on his neck, he’s so happy.

“Oh,” Dad says. “Oh, I see. Okay. I didn’t realize. I thought, Heather, you know? But this makes more sense.”

“It does,” I say, noticing a ladybug has landed on my hand.

Quick, make a wish.

Take a (second or third or fourth) chance.

Remake the world.