Chapter Fifty-Four
FIFTY-FOUR
After his dad’s accident, the evening after the friends had sat in the chapel in the hospital, Joar almost killed himself in the car. Well, it was actually Ali who did it, the goddamn lunatic. That was the evening she told them her dad had gotten a new job, in another town, far away. Her dad owed money to the people around there, he always did, and now they were rude enough to want it back.
Joar blinks up at the sky there on the roof.
“I didn’t cry after my dad’s accident. And I didn’t cry that night with Ali either. I don’t know if that hurt her. I should have said something smart, but all I could say was that it was… good. Because she could never live in this town, not as her full self, she couldn’t be… everything she could be, not here.”
“What did she say?”
“That I could fucking go to Hell if I wasn’t going to fucking miss her. So then I told her the truth: that I would never fall in love with anyone again. And then she kissed me. She had only done that once before. Afterward of course she said it was me who kissed her, but she was out of her damn mind…”
Louisa is lying down, so she has to wipe the tears out of her ears.
“So the two of you were a love story.”
“She’d have punched you in the face if she heard that,” he laughs.
“Why couldn’t she stay with you?”
“Her dad needed her,” Joar says, as if it were obvious.
“You’re all the same, all of you. You can’t abandon people who need you,” Louisa says.
“You’re one of us,” Joar replies, and that sets a new record for the kindest thing he’s said to her.
“What happened with the art competition?” she asks.
So he tells her: About how he and Ali were out driving all evening. How they stopped the car on a hill not far from the house where Joar and Louisa are sitting now, and fell asleep there in each other’s arms. They spent one entire night together, some people might think that doesn’t sound like much, but they can never have been properly in damn love. Most people have never had a hint of how that feels.
Ali drove on the way back, Joar taught her. She drove roughly as well as she had been able to swim the first time he met her, so they almost crashed, heading at full speed straight toward a brick wall. She stopped abruptly just at the last moment, Joar screamed out loud and she stared at him, sweaty and happy, with her big, wild eyes, and yelled:
“Now you know!”
“What the hell are you talking about, you psychopath?” he yelled back.
Then she leaned against his neck so that he disappeared in all her hair, and she said:
“Now you know that you don’t want to die either. You’re not allowed to, okay? If you die before I come back here, I’ll beat you to death!”
“Come back here?” he teased. “Why would you come back here? Aren’t you going to live in a big house with someone ordinary?”
“One day maybe we can be ordinary enough, you and me,” she whispered.
They stopped by the sea, Joar collected driftwood, that was how he made the frame for Kimkim’s painting. Even when it was hanging in an exclusive art auction twenty-five years later, it still smelled a little of the sea.
When they got back home they met Ted and Kimkim at the crossroads and went back to Joar’s. They cleaned the apartment, because Joar wanted it to look nice when his mom came home from the hospital. Ali wasn’t all that great at cleaning, so she sorted a box of old toys, although she mostly just played with them. She held up a Superman figure and asked: “Why does he wear a cape, actually? It doesn’t have any powers, he can fly without it, can’t he?”
It was Kimkim who replied:
“I think it’s because it’s hard to draw movement. So when the people who made him up had to draw that in the comic, they needed the cape to show that he was… moving.”
“Oh!” Ali said, the way you do if you understand absolutely nothing.
So Kimkim tried to demonstrate by taking his shirt off and running around the room with it behind him, but he wasn’t looking and ran into a wall. It was actually very dangerous, because Ali almost suffocated with laughter. Then Ted said he’d read that Superman’s cape was actually a blanket. It was the one his mom had wrapped him in when he was little and his parents had sent him away in the rocket to Earth. That was such a heavy thought that they all just lay on the floor staring up at the ceiling.
“Will you forget me if I move?” Ali eventually asked.
“Definitely!” all her boys replied.
“You’re so damn mean,” she laughed.
“Forget you?” Ted mumbled. “We can’t even remember a life before you turned up. How could we forget you?”
She lay there for a long time before she promised:
“I believe in you. I trust you. I’ll never trust anyone again the way I trust the three of you.”
“Me neither,” Ted said.
“Me neither,” Kimkim said.
“Nerds,” Joar said.
“You’re a nerd,” Ali said, and held his hand.
They lay there like that for several hours, next to each other on the floor of Joar’s room. Then they framed Kimkim’s painting.
Joar clears his throat on the roof.
“That’s probably… damn… I don’t know how to say it. That’s, like, one of my strongest memories. I thought about it every night in prison when I was trying to sleep.”
Louisa is silent for at least twice as long as she usually manages, then she says:
“Fish read in a book that in Heaven, you get to choose one moment from your life. Your best moment. And then you get to feel like that forever. She said it doesn’t matter if we live till we’re eighty then, because that’s just lots and lots and lots of nows. And one single really good now is enough.”
“I had a lot of nows. Millions,” Joar says gratefully.
Then he tells her how Ali asked:
“Do you think there’ll be good food at the party when your painting wins the competition?”
“Of course there’ll be good food. Rich people fucking love food,” Joar said.
“Hope there’s Champagne, then I can get as drunk as a skunk,” Ali giggled.
“What date is it?” Ted asked.
“What?” Joar said.
“I mean… what date is the competition? When we have to hand the painting in?”
They hadn’t even thought of that. Joar flew up and started hunting through drawers and bookshelves. He had hidden the newspaper containing the announcement, so he wouldn’t accidentally wipe himself with it the next time the toilet paper ran out, but he had hidden it too well. So he went around and around the room in a rage over how damn smart he’d been. When he eventually looked under the last thing in the last drawer, and there it was, he leafed through it so fast that he tore the pages. Then he saw the date and breathed out so heavily that he almost fainted.
“A week from now,” he gasped.
His three friends looked over his shoulder. It was the first time any of them had actually seen the announcement, and they would remember that moment as if the floor had vanished beneath them. Joar thought he had read it so many times that he had memorized every word, but even so, he had missed the most important thing. None of the others dared say anything, so in the end it was Ali who said, in slow despair:
“But it says… maximum age thirteen, Joar.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It says you have to be… thirteen or under,” Ted repeated.
“What the hell does that mean?” Joar wondered furiously, as if his brain couldn’t even comprehend the meaning of the numbers.
“It’s a competition for children,” Ted said.
“We aren’t children anymore,” Ali said.
“I cried then,” Joar says quietly up on the roof.