Before leaving school I consorted with The Oracle: Google. Internet searches are better than tea leaves or a tarot deck.
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.
Dusk splatters pink and orange across the sky, beginning its languorous summer stroll. I hear the river through the trees sounding like possibility –.
He has on The Poor Motherless Girl Look – all adults get it at some point when they talk to me, like I’m doomed, shoved out of the airplane without a parachute because mothers are the parachutes.
I remind myself some girls deserve to be alone.
We were partners in sewing. And partners in luck-hunting: four-leaf clovers, sand-dollar birds, red sea glass, clouds shaped like hearts, the first daffodils of spring, ladybugs, ladies in oversized hats. Best to bet on all the horses, dear, she’d say. Quick, make a wish, she’d say. I bet. I wished. I was her disciple. I still am.
Remake the world.
Before they can grin there fake smiles, I mumble something about a toilet, laugh a second too late at some joke, and then, without looking back, I speed-walk to the house like someone whose heart isn’t shaking, whose eyes aren’t filling up, someone who doesn’t feel so sad.
I feel relaxed now, I mean supernaturally relaxed, like I’m left out butter.
If only the heart listen to reason, right?
Every morning she used to stand on the deck staring out at the water. The wind would stream through her hair, her robe would billow behind her. It was like she was at the helm of a ship, you know? It was like she was steering us across the sky. Every day it was like that. Every day I thought that. The image is always somewhere in my mind. Always.
Dad puts one hand on either side of the frame, filling the entire doorway, filling the Continental United States. How can I hate him and wish I were more like him at the same time?
I love you,” I say to him, only it comes out, “Hey.” “So damn much,” he says back, only it comes out, “Dude.
You duck! You flying yellow duck! And you took this long to tell me?!” When Sarah gets excited, random animals pop into her speech like she has an Old MacDonald Had a Farm kind of Tourette syndrome.
Moments pass, lots and lots of them, with us holding on, it feels like for dear life, or maybe holding on to dear life.
He was telling us that Thoroughbred racing horses have these companion ponies that always stay by their sides, and I remember thinking, That’s me. I’m a companion pony, and companion ponies don’t solo. They don’t play first chair or audition for All-State or compete nationally or seriously consider a certain performing arts conservatory in New York City like Marguerite had begun insisting. They just don’t.
I do not know why I do much of anything.
I push him down and climb over and straddle him, holding his hands over his head so he’s helpless.
But I don’t even care. I don’t even care that the sun’s going to burn out in a matter of years, ending all life on Earth, well, five billion years, but still, guess what? I don’t care. Well-being is a wonderful thing.
What slumbers in the heart is what slumbers in the stone, understand?