find the brake as we jounce up onto the pavement, and Grand says “Oh!” half wounded, half appalled, like someone’s just burped into her champagne glass.
“Sorry.”
“Doing just fine, Ansel,” Mr. Carson says. I bite my lip and press down on the gas again as we ease forward, creeping to the end of Hill Street until we crawl to a stop. I put the blinker on and look both ways, then ease out onto Main Street, jerking the wheel a little to line us up with the white dotted line. There are a few cars parked on the other side of the street, but none on this side to worry about sideswiping. Truck tires whirring easily over the asphalt, I point us towards the end of the street, only a few blocks to go until the curve in the dirt road leads up the hill home. Next to me, Grand is seething, but I grip the steering wheel harder and lean forward, craning under the windshield until the light reaches my face.
Must have been a quick hit to the driver’s seat buckling grey matter, or so they all think. It’s the only reason they can figure why I don’t speak. All of them forgetting the one time I opened my mouth and the words came out sloshed and tumbled, how the quick eyes of the doctors caught across the room. I looked to her to know my thoughts, explain for me, but she stepped back as they wheeled me away, stuffed me inside machines, and then I knew. And the severing of that line with her thinking was worse than the severing of my spine. How to explain? They don’t know how speaking scatters thought like buckshot, or how much thinking every day you have to do when half of you is unfeeling, concentrating on anchoring in place. Like legs dipped in sunlit water, how I always confuse the real with reflection. Neither flesh feels, so how can you trust your eyes to tell? Why I’m in the habit of looking deeper than looking, to see what’s fleeting and what’s taking root. How the world tries to tear your attention away from even yourself, it seems. Better to be careful. Better to stay lip-locked against idle chatter that untethers.
Six
Izzy’s temperature is down to 100˚ so I give her two more aspirin then wander town for a few hours, hoping I’ll run into Everett. When I finally walk back into the house that evening the first thing I hear is Izzy crying. I bolt upstairs and through the door to where she’s bent close over the heavy art book, her tears raising measles on the slick paper. She looks up at me and heaves, the book so heavy it hits the floor beside her bed with a ceiling-rattling shake. Then Grand is calling up the stairs and Izzy’s screaming and scribbling on her notepad, tearing pieces off and handing me bits of sentences.
Hiding this from me
You have been telling didn’t tell me
All of this for how long years
And years all these long gone dead
They knew how to see beneath
surfaces I thought only I knew
Have to see everything have to now
So far behind hurry hurry
She lets out little shrieks as she writes, and all I can do is take the scraps of paper, watching the snot running into her mouth as she rips and keeps writing, gauzy hair standing out from her scalp, the walls all around us retracting. The book will hardly shut when I pick it up for all the bent and twisted pages, and Izzy holds her hands out so hungrily I shove it at her then take a few steps back.
She flips to a page and jabs her finger at a painting and flips again so fast the pages tear. “This painting, Izzy?” She nods and flips again, jabbing a finger and flipping before I can see and pointing, flipping, pointing, riffling through the pages like she’s lost something and then she wraps her arms around the book, hefts it to her chest and rocks. I sit on the edge of her bed and put my arms around her but she pushes me away, then shoves the book off her lap until it crashes to the floor. The house shudders and when I put my arms around her again she’s limp in my arms for a second, then starts pinching and scratching and shrieking. “Izzy, calm down—you’ll make yourself sick,” I say, grabbing her hands and holding her tight until the fight goes out of her and she sags against me. Her hands drop in worn-out heaps and she sobs into my shoulder.
“What on earth is all this racket about?” Grand is in the doorway, her eyes blazing.
“It’s okay, Grand—I’ve got it.” She stands there for a minute as I’m rocking Izzy then flashes me a disgusted look and slams the door to our bedroom. “Izzy, show me again,” I say, when she settles into sniffling and deep shuddering breaths. “Can you show me again?”
She sits up and I set the book back in her lap. She wipes her eyes with flat palms, turns through the pages and points at bright lines of ocean-tumble swirling color. “Van Gogh,” I say. “Okay, what else.” Taking little hiccupping gasps, she flips a few pages deeper into the book and points to more neon noxious color and little light dabbles. “Derain. Got it.”
She reaches for her notepad and carefully prints, And all the other wild beasts.
“Like who?” She turns the page and jabs her finger at magenta old lady wallpaper and a turquoise window escape. “Matisse.” She nods. She keeps flipping and points to Picasso, Braque, Dali, Chagall, then shuts the book and looks at me. “All right, Izzy.” I run my hands down her arms. “I’ll get everything I can.”
I’m thinking she’ll smile at me now, but Izzy fixes me with a hard stare like she’s trying to bore some sentence into my skull. I wait, and listen, but nothing comes, and Izzy’s mouth twists into a grimace. Holding the notepad out to me like a police badge, she’s written, You get everything.
“Okay, Izzy, I’ll do what I can.” She shakes her head and shrugs my hands away and suddenly she’s still. She’s looking at me so dead center I think she might bite. You get me everything—you owe me all of it.
I stare at the words you owe me, you owe me all of it as Izzy’s eyes bore into me. All my days of wandering downtown, breathing sunlight in through the pores of my skin and running, swimming, wandering as far as my legs will carry me, days when I walk and walk against the worry of Izzy’s fever climbing higher and higher, stretching the tether between us so thin my chest feels tight with the constriction, all these days rise like an oily bubble beneath my ribs, bob up and lodge in my throat, and I turn, run, pound downstairs and out the door, outside.
All I can think is keep going farther, past the hotel, farther, until there’s a hidden beach I hardly ever go to, my legs rubbery as I pick down the cliff between sharp rocks to the wide sand. I take off my shirt and shorts and run in, swimming then beating against the water until I’m so far out everything is silent and I can just float, the ocean holding me up so steadily I hardly even feel I have a body.
Sky and black water surround me and my ears fill with rocking waves, with night the color of a hole I can drop down into, and none of it, nothing is with me. I let the dark erase me, push my mind over maps and pictures of far-off places. I’m hovering above the narrow walled streets of some Moorish city but somewhere distantly Izzy’s shrieking so I push further into the dark, the old stone permeated with smoke rising off of lit embers, the clank clank of a metal smith echoing between women swaying past in long caftans. Like the eye of the filmstrip I watched in World Cultures class, I swoop down in between the women and brush past bolted doors where the sounds of children bounce around like voices down a well and I round a corner and swoop up again. Up above the stacks of square, whitewashed houses, then down to the cobblestones: smoke, clank clank, language I can’t speak.
It’s cold and I can’t tell where the sky begins and the water ends. My eyelids, my whole body is heavy so I kick back towards shore, working against my loose limbs.
