Chapter Twenty-Six
Birdhouse in an evergreen tree, photo by Margaret Vittorio: Pictures of Mars
Statue of Belief in Nathdwara, Rajasthan, India: Pictures of Mars
Mount Si, photo by Margaret Vittorio: Pictures of Mars
Circular dent in kitchen wall, photo by Margaret Vittorio: Pictures of Mars
“Oh, jeez, I screwed up. Let me try again,” Aunt Gwen said.
We were in her kitchen in North Bend. Just me and your aunt Gwen.
I’d never driven that far from home before on my own.
Oh, man—my anxiety was shouting. I had to brave I-5, and then I-90, that scary merging part near Factoria, and finally the stretch of freeway where the speed limit went up to seventy before I could finally take the exit to your aunt’s house.
But I did it—I made it. I was there. I’d have to drive home again, too, but the return seemed like nothing compared to the setting out.
The thing was, the problem was, your record would have to be more than you and me.
Way more, because you were, your life was.
And your record would have to have, deserved to have, the same hundred and sixteen photos, twenty-seven songs, and fifty-five greetings as the Golden Record you loved so much.
I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I didn’t know if I could do it.
But I knew I needed to do it. Badly. So, fine.
I would drive out there past the fire wall and see Aunt Gwen.
“Okay, no problem,” I said.
“Are you sure you want me to do this?”
“Very. I mean, if you’d rather choose something else…”
“No. It’s great. I’m just such a shit singer.
Sandrine must have gotten her talent from the other side of her family.
” Your uncle Bernard was a sweetie. It seemed like a miracle, how they were divorced a jillion years ago, but how he lived right nearby, in Issaquah, everyone friendly enough that I’d even met him with you those few times.
“It’s not the quality, it’s the…The.”
“Got it.” I couldn’t believe she understood what I meant, but she did.
Well, she was already following my page, so she likely more than understood already.
I was worried about what your family would think about my project, but your aunt loved it.
She liked every photo I posted, and each video of only sound.
And so had a few of your friends, Rainey and Ben.
Sandrine’s, too—people from North Bend you both knew.
My brothers weren’t much for social media, but Cora and Maeve were there.
It was wild, but your page had actual followers.
It was more than I deserved, that’s for sure. There wasn’t a photo of what I’d done to you.
Aunt Gwen took a big breath, ready for her performance.
“Hey, wait! Is that a deer in your yard?”
“Probably.” She seemed unimpressed.
I moved to the sliding door to look. “He’s eating one of your bushes.”
“She.” Aunt Gwen stood beside me now.
“She’s beautiful. Look at her. Deer are the top of nature’s quiet list, don’t you think? No, wait. Snow.”
“Quietly destroying my last rosebush.”
“Deer eating roses is like an illustration in a fairy tale. It’s a nature wonderland out here.
That is the chubbiest robin I’ve ever seen.
” On the way in, I’d also seen two rabbits on their front lawn.
And to our far right was the looming, majestic Mount Si, which just kept on being a mountain, no matter what.
It seemed like the worst thing and the best thing, the way life kept going forward.
“Do you know who made that birdhouse?” she asked.
“I think I do now. It’s pretty smeary.” I smiled.
“It was the first time he came to live with us. We got one for him and one for Sandrine. You basically hammered the sides together? But then he researched which colors would be best. Green, brown, gray—camouflage, to keep the birds safe. They love it. They pretty much ignore that one.” She pointed.
Whoa—it was painted in flashy rainbow hues.
I laughed. “That’s got to be Sandrine’s. It’s totally her.”
“And his was…totally theirs? The birds’, I mean. He was good at seeing people and animals.”
“There’s so much I didn’t know about him.” I pictured a little you with your black curls, concentrating hard on making that camouflage. “And will never know. But I can really see why he wanted to live out here after college.”
“He said that?” She looked so pleased.
“He thought Mount Si was like this big guardian. Watching over you guys in every season. Like this statue in India of this Hindu god? He’s got his leg crossed, so it’s sort of the same shape as Mount Si?
” I got my phone. Typed in the search bar.
Pulled up the image of the enormous Hindu god Shiva, smiling serenely toward the sky. You loved it.
“The Statue of Belief,” Aunt Gwen said. “Huh. It is the same shape as Mount Si. I guess there was a lot that I didn’t know, either.”
“Sometimes…” I wasn’t sure how to explain this. It was a confession. It wasn’t the confession, the big one, the one that weighed on me daily, all day, the new skin of guilt I’d grown over the old one, but just something I kept thinking about.
“What?”
“We were just getting started. I worry that I’ll never really know all the bad stuff about him, either.
” Aunt Gwen waited. She put her hands in her jeans pockets and just looked at me with her kind green eyes with the wrinkles at the corners, eyes that gave me a glimpse of what Sandrine would look like when she was older.
“I mean, he’ll always be so good and so perfect, a good and perfect no one else will ever be able to live up to, because we weren’t together long enough to see all the bad and real stuff. ”
“Like the way he gave too much to people sometimes? And could go on and on about the stuff that interested him to the point of head-throbbing-ness?”
“I already did see that.” I smiled again.
I loved this; I loved talking about you.
At school, this never happened. We talked about what wild and over-the-top way someone got asked to prom, or graduation ticket logistics, or about the most unfair final that was coming, an oral report entirely in French based on Les Misérables, but I never got to talk about you.
Still, it was also unnerving, the way we were talking.
What if you retreated into…fondness? That’s not a word I even usually use, but it was accurate, an old, cozy description that belonged in an attic.
Describing stuff you used to like but couldn’t remember all that well.
“Okay. How about the way he’d get so involved in one thing, he’d forget the other thing he’d be doing? So many burned baked items, and water faucets left on, and forgotten sports equipment. Or the way he’d fart as loud as possible to gross us out?”
“Didn’t know.” I chuckled. I guess you could keep learning about a person, even when they were gone. You could still keep talking to them, too. Like now. Like this.
“While eating.”
“Ooh. Ouch.”
“Or the way he’d lean back in the kitchen chair, even though I told him not to a hundred times?
And of course, he did fall once. Look at that wall right there.
It’s still got the indent to prove it.” I glanced over.
Sure enough, it was there. A slight hollow in the plaster, where the back rung of the chair had landed.
“And…I’d give anything to see him do that again. ”
We both stood there for a while, watching that robin trying to get big twigs into a little door. She kept at it and at it.
“Shall we?” Aunt Gwen asked finally.
“Let’s do it.”
“No one’s going to see me, right? My roots are growing out something terrible.” She ran a finger down the highway of her hair part. She looked beautiful to me, honestly.
“Just sound,” I said. “Ready?”
She nodded. I pressed the red record button.
“ ‘Husky fever!’ ” she sang. “ ‘I think it’s going around, and around, and around!’ ”
I wasn’t sure the photo of Mount Si was all that great. I took, like, twenty of them that day, after I left Aunt Gwen’s house. I stared up at that sheer rock, hoping it would guard me, too, even if I didn’t live in its shadow. The Statue of Belief.
All twenty—they looked kind of the same.
And certainly, they weren’t any more stunning than the hundreds of photos of the mountain other people took, professional photographers took.
They looked average, if you asked me. But a week or so later, I did what I’d been doing lately.
I got up my courage, and then I closed my eyes as Sandrine had before she sang.
I sent it to you first. And then, as if leaping, I pressed post.
It was such a shock, every time. Nearly fifty people liked it.
More followers were trickling in, and it was inexplicable, and nerve-racking, yet somehow okay, because they were your followers to me.
I guess it was what Sandrine had said, that when you give honest stuff, it’s felt. And if it’s felt, it has meaning.
Sandrine shared that photo, and so did Maeve.
And then a lot of followers appeared, people who were strangers, even, more new fans of Sandrine’s since the band started playing again.
Maeve’s mom group, too, and fans of Papa Angelo’s.
A classmate of yours from California. People who just saw my hashtags and who loved Voyager and the Golden Record.
People who were grieving, who had somehow found me, grieving.