Chapter Twenty-Three
Carl Sagan in a frame, photo by Margaret Vittorio: Pictures of Mars
Tiny Despicable Me Minion, photo by Margaret Vittorio: Pictures of Mars
It was a day I’d been dreading, February fourteenth, Valentine’s Day.
It had always seemed silly in so many ways—the forced declarations, the pink, the foil hearts of chocolates that tasted like their boxes.
But it didn’t seem silly that year. It seemed immensely heartbreaking.
A loud, lacy celebration of romance turned inside out to its opposite, a sorrowful hole of love-loss.
And I hadn’t fully realized that, either, the way there would be so many days on the calendar to dread, even fear.
Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, graduation, Christmas, the anniversary.
Another new year. I never noticed how many anniversaries a calendar held.
All the markings of how we matter to each other.
Beautiful when someone is alive, just cruel when not.
Oh, God. Your birthday. In the hierarchy of dread, it suddenly zoomed to the top spot.
That would be the worst one, wouldn’t it?
The day that marked the beautiful, promising beginning of you?
You were turning eighteen in May. It was confusing.
Did you still turn eighteen, even though you’d never turn eighteen?
What would it mean when I was twenty and then thirty and forty, and you were still seventeen?
I would change, but you wouldn’t, and neither would my feelings for you.
I’d have experiences, and you wouldn’t. I would graduate, and go to college, and maybe get married one day, and you wouldn’t.
I would get lines on my face, and my hair would turn gray, and yours never would, and I’d still love you, seventeen.
I had no idea how to understand a real human being frozen in time.
Part of me would remain frozen in that time with you, seventeen, too.
That was the only solution I could think of.
Valentine’s Day was a Sunday, and I stayed in bed, tormenting myself for the millionth time about that text and its unsolvable mystery, with my constant regret of breaking up, sort of, maybe not.
I couldn’t tell you how much I loved you on a day I was supposed to, on a day where it was easy, when flowers could say it, or a hand-drawn card, or a frosted cookie.
God, I needed to tell you! I needed to know that we were still together, connected, even now.
I needed this so badly. I would have to find a way, like the young woman and her dad’s records.
I could do something like that! I would do something like that, I vowed, as my anxiety laughed. Haha. Right.
I also wondered how Janite was doing on this Valentine’s Day.
She held your history of red construction-paper hearts and glue and glitter, but I was too much of a coward to reach out.
Even thinking about it—my panic rose. I couldn’t face how destroyed she must be, and I couldn’t imagine my guilty self even talking to her.
I wondered how Frank was doing, too. I missed him.
I started to text Sandrine that day, just to…
I don’t know. Be together with her, our two guilty selves with our love and the unknowable things that tormented us.
But it seemed so wrong, a text. Making a phone call to anyone but you had always been confusingly stressful for me, as you know, but now, with the fire wall…
Well, my devastation was overwhelming on its own, so Sandrine’s might tip me over.
Calling her required an epic pregame pep talk with my inner coach. Come on! Stop thinking about only yourself, you ungenerous scaredy-ass butthead. My inner coach was a meanie.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s me.”
“Hey,” she said. She knew better than to ask how I was doing, and so did I.
“I’m not sure what to say, but I just wanted to—” I was interrupted by…barking? Lots of barking. “Is that Frank?”
“A doorbell just rang on TV.”
“Is he staying with you?”
I knew what she was going to say before she said it. “He’s ours now. Mars’s VW is mine now, too. Aunt Janite’s moving. To Phoenix.”
“Still?”
“She’s been struggling, bad. She was taking sedatives after he died, but my mom got rid of them. She’s got a…history?”
“I remember.”
“She said she has to get out of here. She’s leaving next week.”
Next week? Already? I felt a messy rush of panic. If she was gone, you’d really be gone. Somehow, while Janite lived in your houseboat, you were still here. And if she left, so would my chance for…A goodbye? Closure? Forgiveness?
An answer, my worst, most selfish voice said.
Because if anyone knew whether you’d gotten my text or not, it would be her, there with you that night. Janite might have the information that would give me some peace, or no peace, but a resolution, at least. One week, and that chance would be gone.
A rush of urgency filled me. But the thought of seeing your mom filled me with dread.
How could I face her? I’d harmed your heart, and maybe broken it for real.
And I’d witness her grief. She was the woman who loved you every day of your life, and even before.
Who gave birth to you, and changed your diapers, and struggled to feed and house you and her; who watched you leave for kindergarten, and admired your school pictures, and, and, and…
All the way up to that last dinner the two of you had together.
She knew what it was, what you ate. She watched you eat it.
How could I even go to her with my own need?
My loss felt so small and unearned compared to hers.
I’d loved you for such a short time. We were together in ways only we could be, but this seemed so inconsequential compared to sharing every day, to sharing generations of DNA.
I didn’t understand, you know, what I had a right to, in terms of sorrow and devastation.
Janite’s loss was bigger, so mine felt like nothing in comparison.
It was embarrassing, unworthy, as if it hadn’t met the requirements of some impossible-to-understand ranking.
I remembered Sujia’s close friend Emily, who was with us one day when Sujia asked if I was doing okay.
Wait. How long did you know him? Emily had said, in that high-pitched way that conveyed a disbelief, a doubt, suspicion, even.
She was doing a mental calculation, indicating that the time we’d been together equaled zero on the allowable sadness scale.
She didn’t know me or you or us together; she wasn’t there in the forest that day, hadn’t danced to the Golden Record, or watched as you made the infinity symbol in the air, and loss didn’t follow the neat rules of an equation.
There is no calculus for what we are to each other, no number to apply to meaning or feeling or experience.
It was in my body, and was true and real because it was there.
It occurred to me then: We did the same thing about love.
We said you couldn’t feel it, it wasn’t real, depending on our own judgments, when what did we know?
How did we have any clue about another person’s heart? Tell me that.
“Wow,” I said. “Maurice didn’t mention it. About Frank.”
“It just happened. Aunt Janite, uh, came by last night, driving the VW. Bringing his crate and stuff. The dude, what’s his name. Jake. He’s allergic to dogs.”
I wanted to say, WHAT? She just dumped him on you? but instead, I just said, “Oh.”
“Come here, boo-boo,” Sandrine said. “What are you doing, huh?” I thought she was talking to me at first. “That’s you, Frank.
That’s not another dog; that’s you. He’s looking at himself in the long mirror, like he can’t understand who he is.
Totally baffled.” I could hear Sandrine smile.
“Come here, boy.” Now I heard him climb up, and her warding him off.
He was licking her face; I was sure of it.
Remember how wild he got, the moment he was allowed on your lap?
“Ouch, ouch, your toenails! Oh, God, his tongue went in my mouth!”
“Oh, yuck, Frank,” I said. But I was envious, and I could hear how glad Sandrine was to have him.
Frank’s little warm body, and his funny chin whiskers, and his soulful eyes—it was something she could do for you, and it was another way to be close to you.
I didn’t have many ways, aside from Sandrine herself.
Every now and then, I thought about joining the astronomy meetup, just to see Chester and Lily and all the people who meant something to you, but that would mean climbing the mountain on my own, the real one and the anxiety one.
Suddenly, I understood why people had funerals, even though your mom didn’t want one.
All the connections without calculations—they had a place to be together, to say, We have all loved, and will continue to love.
“I’ve got to go. I have to deal with this beast,” Sandrine said.
We said goodbye. But I felt for Frank. I felt like Frank—looking at himself in the mirror, sure that he was someone else. Wondering, no doubt, who he was, and how he got here.
One more week! Seven more days!
It was a last-chance thrum, and already, it was relentless.
Six more days, five. Four, three, two, one, like the blastoff of a rocket.
But I couldn’t do it. And then Janite was gone.
Of course, it was inevitable—I got a delivery to your dock. I almost asked one of the other drivers to swap. But when I checked the order again, I didn’t.
Mrs. Fosmire. An Arturo, medium.
Just there in the parking lot, before I even got out of my car, my heart was beating hard. I felt sick. You were everywhere—standing at the entrance, running out to meet me, kissing me goodbye, getting the mail, hauling your and your mom’s groceries down the dock in the big handcart.