Chapter Twenty-Four
Dog barking: Sounds of Mars
“Frank and Jesse James” by Warren Zevon: Music of Mars
Rain, thunder, lightning: Sounds of Mars
Leaf, photo by Margaret Vittorio: Pictures of Mars
“Baby, You Got Me” by Solar Flare: Music of Mars
“There she is!” Addison cupped her hand around her mouth. “Go, Maddie!”
“I can’t look.” Priya hid her eyes on my shoulder.
She got more nervous for Maddie than Maddie got during soccer, too.
Last year, when Maddie had a two-second part in The Matchmaker, Priya was so nervous, her hands gripped the railings of the theater’s woven red seats, and I could see her mouth move, urging the correct lines into Maddie’s mouth.
I’d gone with them to the track meet, dragged reluctantly around my wall.
Addison had pleaded, and then stooped to making me feel guilty.
We never see you. Do you still love me? She did it on purpose, and it worked.
I jammed my hands in my pockets. Somehow, I’d transitioned from sobbing every minute to this, moving around in this thick, anxious underworld, a slow, dark place where I forgot about things like clouds and sun.
A place that seemed even more perilous than ever.
Was Maddie’s shoe untied? She could fall.
She could hit her head on that sharp ledge thingy by the track right there.
What were they thinking, allowing a ledge like that? How dangerous.
It was incredible, the way your insides could control the outside, what the world even seemed like or actually was.
I’d forgotten about a lot of things: sky, trees, planets, little children.
I hadn’t babysat my nieces and nephew for months.
Baby Millie had started to walk, and I hadn’t even seen it.
The idea of playing dinos or running around and shrieking or hiding with Millie behind a curtain so Maya and Max could seek us, everything we used to do, seemed as impossible as flying.
“She’s next,” I said.
I squinched my eyes, and fine, okay! Her shoes were totally tied.
She wasn’t going to die right that moment, but my chest was getting that weird flutter again, so maybe I would.
I’d been trying to fight off these thoughts, that alarming squeezing in my chest, too.
Trying to stay present, to ask myself, Is it happening now?
as Winnifred Evans suggested, but the minute Maddie’s feet started to speed toward the high-jump pit, the protective walls crumbled, and there you were, running toward it, with your skinny legs.
Look at these babies. I never made it over the bar once.
Maddie didn’t make it over, either. The bar clattered down, and so did she.
“Ouch,” Addy said.
“Just tell me if she’s okay,” Priya said.
When you land on that thing on your back…Fuck, that hurts.
“She’s getting up. You can look,” Addy said.
Priya and I both opened our eyes. “Way to go, Maddie!” we yelled.
Priya flashed her two thumbs up, and Maddie flashed one back. “That takes guts, you know?” Priya was so proud. They were good to each other. Kind. A spiral of guilt and shame, an indefinable yuck, filled me. The slime trail of self-hatred, for sure.
I’m just going to go. I replayed it again and again in my mind.
I didn’t mean it, I shouted after you. I didn’t! I’m so sorry.
Going out in the world—it was just dangerous.
There were punishments everywhere, the things that might sink you.
How long would it be this way? Forever, it seemed.
My small, narrow life of school and Papa Angelo’s was perilous enough, but anything more opened me to things like the high jump.
Things like a couple in love, who would never do to each other what I had to you.
“Most inspirational,” I said, and Addy and Priya smiled. They didn’t realize I wasn’t even there.
The place I could go: Maurice and Sandrine’s apartment. It was always a shock, seeing your VW parked on the street in front. My brain and body would have a moment of forgetting, and would shoot me an ordinary lift of happiness that you were over at Maurice and Sandrine’s. That I would see you.
I’d head over after school, if I wasn’t working.
Just to hang out, even if they weren’t there.
If they were, Sandrine and I would play Mario Kart as Maurice made dinner.
We shared that Taco Time guilt and that maybe-breakup guilt with each other, confessed our terrible crimes again and again and heard them again and again, like two repentant prisoners sharing the same cell, sentenced for life, needing one piece of nonexistent evidence, just one, needing it so badly, to free us.
But more than that, even, we just shared you, Sandrine and me.
You were alive between us. That framed Golden Record that was in your room now hung next to Sandrine’s side of the bed, just as Carl Sagan’s compassionate eyes stared me to sleep on the nightstand next to mine.
“Come on, Frank!” I said. “What is going on? You’re never this quiet.
” He sat like a proper gentleman and stared at me.
Okay, what I was asking him to do was strange, I admit it.
How could he begin to understand what was required of him?
I tried again. I rang the doorbell, and then pressed record on my phone.
More staring.
Sandrine pulled into the driveway. She hauled her body up the sidewalk to the porch, a plastic grocery bag hanging off one arm.
It was a bag of boulders, by the look of it.
And she was wearing a hoodie made of the heaviest metals, shoes of cement.
Sandrine and I also shared the skyless, thick underworld.
She was wandering there, too, as lost as I was.
Solar Flare hadn’t done a gig since last December, and that recording deal from Sub Pop still sat unsigned.
It was April. In grief time, this was seconds.
In recording-contract time, it was years.
I’d heard Maurice talking on the phone to Dre, who was losing patience out of anxiety and a need to pay his rent.
Sandrine hadn’t gone to the astronomy meetups, either.
Chester had broken the news to them all, but Sandrine couldn’t bear to even take their calls.
That group, those nights on the mountain, looking in the direction of Voyager—it was more you than anything else.
“What are you two doing?” she asked. Frank jumped up on her knees. He was probably relieved to be saved from this confusing experience. Not meeting a person’s expectations can be so distressing.
“Trying to get him to bark.”
“Huh.”
“It’s for a…” It was the first time I said it aloud. “Project.” I blushed. It sounded silly.
“Oh, all right. Let me put the ice cream away, and I’ll help. It’s easy.”
I unloaded the milk and the bananas. There was a lot of ice cream. A lot. More than you’d ever imagine for two people, but I wasn’t judging. Whatever gets you through was my new motto.
“Okay, ready?”
“Just a sec.” I cued up my phone. One finger hovered over the video button; the other covered the lens. Sound only.
“Frank!” Sandrine made her voice all excited. “Squirrel!”
He raced to the front window, barking his head off. He was practically frothing, and a line of hair stood up in a ridge along his back.
“Wow, thanks,” I said after I’d gotten it. I felt bad for Frank at the false alarm, but he didn’t seem to care. Anything to liven up his day, I guess. I mean, the highlight was normally brown crunchy stuff twice a day, so…
“He freaks out whenever he sees one or hears the word. I can’t blame him, honestly.”
“Squirrels in hair. Total nightmare. Plus, that eek, eek sound they make.” I shivered.
“You never know what they’re going to do. Tiny mind like that? You know what I read once? In the UK somewhere, two squirrels boarded a train and started to attack rush-hour commuters. They refused to leave.”
“The commuters or the squirrels?”
“The squirrels, the evil motherfuckers! They had to cancel the train service. I remember that they used the word pandemonium.”
“Oh my God. Frank, you’re a hero.”
“What project?” Sandrine handed me an A&W and plunked on the couch with hers. When you’re sad, vegetables just won’t do the trick. They just won’t. Name one time broccoli cheered a person up.
“Um…” I wasn’t sure how to explain. My face flushed again.
How did I get myself here, to the point of sharing this with her?
I wanted to blame Frank. If he’d barked on command, we wouldn’t be here, or here yet.
I was suddenly extremely nervous. My project had been this quiet thing, between me and you only.
But even in its silence, I could feel it growing, becoming very important to me.
Becoming essential, let’s be honest. Essential enough to reveal.
“You can tell me,” Sandrine said. Her open expression, her own creativity, our mutual love for you, and guilt over you, and unanswered questions about you…
I could tell her. She was safe, and I loved her, and, of anyone, she would understand, but I was starting to sweat, actually sweat, and I felt a terror that made me wonder how she did it, wrote honest things and then shared those honest things, up on a stage.
This was me and her in her living room. “It, um, has to do with him, okay? Just to warn you.”
“Okay. Thanks for warning me. All right. Spill it.”
I opened the album on my phone. I hadn’t named it. It was just called Album. I turned the screen toward her. I thumbed through the photos. The pizza, the poster, the key chain. Rocks and shells. Carl Sagan. The photo of the leaf I took the other night before it crumbled and was lost.
At first, her eyes filled, but then she blinked and took my phone from me. She scrolled again, narrowing her eyes in appraisal. “Those are really good,” she said.
I snorted.
“Margaret. They are.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all. They’re really good.”
“I took that photography elective? And then I got out of Graphic Design so I could take Advanced Photography.”