I return home from the lunch shift to find Felix sitting at the kitchen table with my mom. They’re chatting over coffee in the easy way of old friends. My mom is wearing jeans and a button-down.
So apparently I’ve walked through a portal to the past. Like, almost eight months ago when I had a mom who showered and walked among the living.
Two months ago, I would have thought, This is a good step. But she’s psyched me out too many times. I know she’s putting on a show for Felix. It’s a show she can’t bother to perform for us, not even for one day.
“Hey, pal,” she says, sensing me in the doorway.
“Hey.” A single syllable from me could disturb the balance. That’s what it feels like, anyway. There’s this movie Leah loves. In it, the sorceress makes herself look like a princess. Except when she looks in the mirror, her true self reflects back. If I held up one of the stainless steel pots near my mom, she’d reflect back in pajamas with swollen eyes.
“I took my daughter’s good advice, Maní,” Felix says, gesturing at the papers laid out across the table. “Called your mama this morning for help with the books.”
“Is everything okay?” I ask. Even though I know he wouldn’t tell me anyway.
“It will be,” my mom says. “We’re going to head down to the restaurant and go through some papers there. Can you stay with the littles? Silas and Naomi should be home from work in an hour or two to take over for you.”
I narrow my eyes. I resent her telling me this like I don’t know. She’s not the captain around here, but she’s grabbing the wheel for Felix’s benefit. “Sure.”
Felix gathers up the papers, and my mom pecks me on the cheek as they pass me. I steel my body to resist jerking away. I don’t want her to pretend to get better. I want her to actually get better.
Some days I wish I could fall asleep and wake up in two or three years. Maybe I’ll be in culinary school. Maybe I won’t have to push our broken-down family along the road. Maybe, years from now, we’ll be fixed enough to move forward.
I nod off on the couch until Bekah complains about being hungry. I make chicken sandwiches and force everyone to eat side salads, too. Then Leah and I go to her room to play horses. Plastic horses have many personal accessories—brushes and flowers for their manes and ribbons for their tails. We’ve barely unpacked everything when I hear Bekah and Isaac bickering.
Then I hear something shatter. Shit.
“Stay here,” I tell Leah.
Downstairs, Isaac and Bekah are still fighting. They’re pulling the remote control between them, both flushed from anger and exertion. I’m relieved to see it wasn’t the TV they broke. It was a picture frame, facedown on the side table near their tug-of-war.
They see me and exclaim “He did it!” and “It’s her fault!” at the exact same time. I look between them, and Bekah says, “I was here first, and he knows I always watch this show!”
“That show is stupid, and there’s a show on about dinosaurs, and I told her about it last week!” Isaac makes another grab for the remote.
“Stop.” I hold my hand out. “Give me the remote. No one is watching anything because you guys are acting like five-year-olds.”
“But!” they both say.
“Now.” I rip the remote from Bekah’s hand and slide it into my back pocket. “You broke something, and it wasn’t enough to stop you? Do you understand how ridiculous that is?”
I lift the picture up gently, and no glass pieces fall out. It’s just cracked in the center from hitting the edge of the table, splintering off into several arcs of fragmented glass.
It’s my parents’ wedding picture. Glass is shattered over their smiling faces. And I’ll never see my dad smile at my mom like that again. I’ll probably never see my mom smile like that again, at anyone, ever. The best years of their lives are gone, and sometimes it feels like mine are, too. Like life will never be that good again. I didn’t even appreciate it at the time.
“The dinosaur show is educational,” Isaac begins, making his case, as if I’ll change my mind.
“Come on, Jonah! It’s bad enough that you guys made us get rid of cable!” Bekah shrieks, turning on me.
The broken picture has knocked the wind out of me. Hit me right where it hurt—in my own broken places. Part of me wants to sob. But instead, I yell, anger roiling up from inside me.
“Goddamn it. Are you two fucking kidding me?” My voice echoes against everything. I’m pushing air from my stomach. “You’re making this so much harder than it already is. Do you understand that I’m seventeen? I’m not a grown-up! And you’re down here . . . fighting like idiots and breaking Mom and Dad’s wedding picture. Look what you did!”
I hold the picture up, and Bekah’s eyes brim with tears. This should stop me, but it doesn’t. “You’ve got to stop being such assholes. Just stop. You are not the only people in this family, and the rest of us think about each other constantly. You only think about yourselves.”
They’re side by side, lips quivering and eyes wide. Tears streaming.
“Jonah,” Silas says, appearing in the doorway. He’s holding his work apron in one hand. “That’s enough.”
“I’m sorry,” I reply automatically to him, and I turn back. Isaac wipes at his cheek. I’m the shittiest brother of all time. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled. I shouldn’t have . . . I’m sorry.”
I’m off and running. Fleeing. The neighbors’ houses blur in my peripheral vision. Months of weight stacked on my shoulders finally broke me. My brothers and sisters—how much longer can we keep this up? My mom—what to do, whether to let her grief run its course or tattle to Felix. My dad—how it still sometimes doesn’t feel real that he’s gone. How it makes me question everything. On top of everything else, the restaurant—his one legacy, his life’s work—may or may not be struggling.
And me. What the hell am I doing with my life? If I have the same fate as my dad, I’ll be dead before my forty-second birthday. That used to sound old. Now it’s a little more than my current age doubled. And I’ve spent the past eight months just trying to get through each day. I have one more year of high school left, then what? My grades are decent but not spectacular. I have no particular skills to get a scholarship. I should be spending this year like everyone else—trying to figure it out.
I have basically two achievements in life: my perfect hollandaise sauce and the fact that I’ve helped take care of my family since January.
And I screamed at them. I called them assholes.
Maybe I shouldn’t be here, on Vivi’s front stoop. She’s been so low. But I need her right now.
I knock on the front door. On the outside, the house looks more like an office building. A big square with sharp edges. I knock again. No answer. So I start around the side of the house, to below her bedroom window. She’s usually blasting music in her room and can’t hear the door anyway. Her light is on, and her window is open.
“Vivi!” Nothing. “Viv!”
It takes me a few tries, but I launch some twigs until one sails through the window. If she’s not actually home, that will be confusing to come home to—twigs in the middle of your floor. But she pops her head out.
“Heyo, darling,” she calls down. She’s wearing huge earrings and a red wig with very straight edges. “Let yourself in—it’s open!”
In her room, Vivi is the center of a cyclone. A cyclone of art supplies, color and texture smeared around her. There’s a long strip of fabric half-fed through the sewing machine. A propped-up canvas with a few long drips of sea blue and curry yellow. Scraps of magazines splayed out on the floor. The TV is playing an old black-and-white film, but it’s on mute.
I’m relieved to see her feeling better. It’s like all her creativity was pent up, and now it has exploded everywhere.
“Hey,” I say, staying in the doorway for a moment. She waves with one hand but doesn’t look up from her spot in the middle of the floor. She’s wearing some kind of robe with droopy sleeves, like a wizard’s costume, and she’s taking a pair of shears to an open magazine. “I knocked a bunch.”
“Sorry, lovey-o, I guess I didn’t hear. My thoughts are so loud and jumbly that I can’t hear much else at all. They’re like wriggly puppies, all diving over each other to get my attention, ha.”
Sylvia herself is not diving at all but dozing on the bed. Vivi climbs to her feet. I expect her to put her arms around my neck, but she moves toward the canvas. I sit on the edge of her bed, which is covered in mangled blankets, scraps of fabric, and various buttons and jewels. With anyone else, I’d wait to be asked why I’m here. But it’s Vivi. I don’t need a reason. Nobody needs a reason in Vivi’s world, least of all Vivi herself.
Tilting her head, she smashes the paintbrush at the top of the canvas and watches as a glob of neon orange drips beside the blue and yellow. Then she smears the line, the brush making swipes against the canvas.
I don’t know how to bring up the reason I came here—the things I said to my family. Instead, another question pops into my mind. “Can I ask you something?”
“Always, darling, you know that. I’m a fountain of truth, splashing past each concrete tier until I hit the bottom and spout right back to the top.” She laughs to herself.
“Do you ever think of us, like, long term?”
“Well, sure,” she says. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. She doesn’t look back at me. “I’ve imagined us living together in a tiny apartment in a big city, like drinking coffee in bed and you kiss me on your way out the door to your job as a sous chef at some fancy restaurant, and I own a vintage shop where I alter the clothes to be more stylish and then sell them. And I keep some, let’s be honest. And, like, maybe I find out I’m pregnant, and at first we’re like . . . oh shit, because we’re so young, you know? But then we decide to go for it, and we have this baby boy who comes with us everywhere, and we just make it work, you know, like this little urban family.”
So she sees us together for a long time. It sounds like a nice life. Like a real possibility. She served it out just like that, something that could be my two- or three-year plan. A busy city to distract me, a job that keeps me interested, and a Viv to come home to.
She’s not done. “But you have to understand, darling, I imagine everything. I’ve imagined us moving to India, and I fall in love with the country, but you think it’s too hot and crowded, so you come back to the States. I stay and marry, and I spend my days wearing beautiful saris and perusing open-air markets for the most colorful fruits and lushest fabrics. I’ve imagined you go off to a really scenic college on the East Coast, with lots of oak trees and green lawns, and I visit you on campus but wind up having an affair with one of your professors, primarily on the desk in his office. I’ve imagined that you trash your life here and move to Jackson Hole to a remote cabin and, like, live off the land, and I pine for you my whole life but I know you’re a mountain man, and that’s not the life for me. Still, when it’s a snowy winter and there’s a fire roaring, I imagine you in a flannel shirt making forest delicacies in your rustic kitchen, and I wish I could transport myself to you just for the night.”
I mean, what do I say to that? I can barely keep up. I leave India or I go to a traditional college where Vivi cheats on me with an older man or I retreat to life in a log cabin?
“Not Japan for us, then?”
“Oh, darling, when I dream of Japan, I am always on my own. But don’t fret—maybe I can visit you in Jackson Hole! Over Christmas, that would be the best! That’s the one thing about Verona Cove that I can’t quite imagine, Christmas without a little dusting of snow. OH! We should have Christmas in July! Wouldn’t that be a gas, let’s do that right now! There’s got to be a holiday shop year-round, right?”
She turns to me, the painting all but forgotten. The costume, the darling, the be a gas lingo. It’s like watching old movies has caused her to develop a new facet of her personality.
“It’s August first,” I say.
“Is it?” She turns to me. “Well, I’ll be damned. Summer slipping through our fingertips, quelle tragique . . . alas. Next thing you know it’ll be back to school, and . . .”
Vivi takes a deep inhale. I take my moment to get a few words in. “I yelled at Bekah and Isaac.”
“I’m still thinking I might convince my mom to let me finish senior year here, which would be so fabulous, really . . .” She’s prattling on. I slide my palm around one of her arms. The touch makes her meet my eyes.
“Viv. Did you hear me? I screamed at my little brother and sister.”
I can barely see her blue eyes, blinking beneath the overpowering eye makeup. “Welllll . . . did they deserve it? Because sometimes you have to scream to be heard and sometimes you have to open your lungs and let the words fly because they’re inside you and have to get out, know what I mean? And—”
“No,” I say, defeated. I release her arm from my grasp. “No, they didn’t deserve it. They’re little kids! But I’m so tired of them fighting. I called them assholes.”
“Hey!” Vivi says. “Do you think the hardware store is still open?”
“What?”
“The hardware store. I have some stuff I need for projects, and I just want it now so I can keep working, and . . .”
She’s had a bad week. I get that. I’m relieved to see her up and about, but why the hell isn’t she hearing me? Maybe she needs it spelled out for her.
“Viv. I screwed up. Bad. I don’t know what to do.”
She tilts her head back, staring up at the ceiling. “My ceiling is driving me mad, being half-painted, so I should do that tonight, but I hate, hate, I mightily loathe doing the edges.”
All right, that’s it. I’m pissed. The one time I need to unleash, and she can’t even pretend to pay attention. “You know what, Viv? Fuck it. I don’t even know why I came here.”
“Such language, Jonah Daniels,” she says, though she seems unfazed. “You ain’t the only sucker with problems, honey child.”
“You’re acting crazy, all right? Are you drunk?”
“HEY.” She whirls on me, eyes blazing. Her fingers are snapping at her sides, over and over. Is she stoned? No. Too hyper. “I’m in the midst of a stroke of creative genius, and you cannot go flinging despicable words at me. I’m not drunk except on art and music and life.”
She’s lost me. I’m spooked, to be honest. I thought I was coming loose at the seams, but apparently Vivi is too. If she can’t turn off her Vivi-ness for a few minutes to help me when I really need it, then I’m done. “Forget it, Viv. I’m glad you’re having a great night. I am having a shitty night, but who cares about me, right?”
“UGH, Jonah, stop treating me like I am the antagonist in the play of self-pity that you are writing. I am not your bad guy, and I am not your princess. I am me, and I am my own. You cannot REDUCE me! So just STOP. KILLING. MY. CREATIVE. ENERGY.” The snap of her fingers, frantic now. “You can’t kill it! I’m having a breakthrough!”
Here’s what I learned from the past five minutes: you can’t out-crazy Vivi Alexander. On the grouchy to blissful spectrum, she spends zero time in the middle. She wallops me with the change in her moods like a one-two punch. Thrilled! Pissed! And right now, with her glare burning into my skin, she hates me. The feeling is mutual, and I slam the door behind me.
I’m at Felix’s house minutes later, buzzed on adrenaline. It was just instinct, coming here, and I have no plan. I have only the aftershocks of a meltdown.
The moment I turn to go, I hear Ellie’s voice. “Jonah?”
She’s standing at the side of the house holding a garden hose, half-lit by the setting sun. I want to take off running.
“I’m almost done,” she calls. “Wait one sec, okay?”
So I stay standing on the sidewalk like the jackass that I am. I watch Ellie spray the red dahlias and the gloriosa daisies with water. My mom used to garden. Watering the plants was one of my chores, too. Our yard is bare this year.
Ellie shuts off the water and coils the hose back up. There are a lot of reasons why I like Ellie—why I’ve always liked Ellie, even when it wasn’t cool to be friends with girls. She’s so nice that she could probably feed a deer out of the palm of her hand like one of the princesses in Leah’s movies. But, in junior high, I saw her punch Patrick Lowenstein in the stomach after he called her older brother a pussy. It wasn’t because she was sticking up for Diego. I know that because she yelled, “GIRL PARTS DO NOT MEAN THE SAME THING AS ‘WIMPY’!” right before her fist doubled Patrick over. I thought that was so damn cool.
“Hey,” she says, walking toward me. “I thought that was you. Do you want to come in? My mom could probably heat up din—”
“No,” I say. “No thanks.”
She stops in front of me. Her eyes shift across my face, left to right, reading me like a book page. Something is wrong—a lot of things, actually—and she sees it all over me.
“C’mon,” she says. I follow her to the front porch. It feels rude not to say hi to everyone while I’m here, but politeness is not happening for me tonight. Clearly.
Ellie pats the spot next to her on the porch swing, and I sit. She pulls her legs up, bare feet on the edge of the seat.
I square my feet on the concrete, propping my elbows on my knees. I can’t even look at her right now, so I press my hands into my face. “I screamed at Isaac and Bekah. I called them assholes. I made them cry. And then . . . Vivi . . . wasn’t even listening . . . God, I just . . .”
I want her to yell at me. Or, hey—she goes to church. Maybe she can give me a set number of Hail Marys to recite. This is my confession, and I want absolution.
Instead, Ellie rubs her hand across my back. For the first five seconds, her touch makes my muscles tenser than they already are. My chest heaves like I’m crying, even though I’m not, and I relax.
“Jonah, you’re such a good brother. We all snap sometimes. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“It is, though. I feel—”
“Guilty. I know. But they know how much you love them. I know you try to hide how stressed you are from the littles, but maybe they needed to see it, you know?”
My mom used to rub my back when I was little. And that’s the thing. Obviously I’m tired of being a stand-in parent. But I also miss having a parent. Sometimes I want to be the kid, embarrassing as that is. I know I’m seventeen. I shouldn’t need someone to rub my back and tell me it’ll be okay. That I’m not screwing up everything as badly as it feels like I am.
I still can’t quite get words out, so Ellie keeps talking, swiping the palm of her hand over my shoulder blades.
“You know, last year, I was studying for a huge math test, and Lina kept bugging me to play Legos with her. She kept interrupting: ‘Has it been an hour? Is it time yet?’ I was so exhausted and stressed. Finally, I told her to shut up and go away.”
At this, I glance over for a moment, less afraid to meet her eyes.
“She cried,” Ellie says. “And then I cried, because I felt so guilty.”
“Really?” Ellie, one of the nicest people I know, made her little sister cry, too?
“Really.”
“Ugh. I just don’t know how I’m going to face them.”
She shrugs. “You’ll go home and apologize. Try your best to explain why you reacted that way. They’ll bounce back—I promise.”
All I can think is, What if they remember this forever? What if I’ve spent so much time trying to make life okay for them and all they remember is me yelling that they’re assholes? “I hope so.”
“I think it’s time to talk to your mom.” Her hand stops in the center of my back. “Tell her you can’t handle this anymore. Jonah, I’ve known her my whole life. If she knew what this is doing to you and Naomi and Silas, it would crush her. She needs to get some help from an adult. A therapist or group.”
When I turn to look at her fully, she pulls her hand away. “Yeah. I know. That’s part of the reason I snapped tonight. Your dad was over at my house, and my mom was pretending to be fine. He had no idea. It pissed me off—that she can’t pretend for us, but she can pretend for someone else. So I can’t pretend anymore either. I can’t pretend like it’s okay anymore.”
I didn’t realize how true that was until I said it.
“I’m going to tell my mom she needs to talk to someone. Soon. If she doesn’t . . . I’m going to tell your parents what’s going on.” I swallow hard, and my Adam’s apple feels stuck. I hate the idea of giving my own mother an ultimatum. “I think . . . I think that’s what my dad would want me to do.”
Finally, I lean back on the porch swing, picking my legs up just a bit. The swing creaks as we rock back and forth.
When Ellie finally speaks, her voice is quiet. “I think so, too.”
“Thanks.” I mean, I don’t know what else to say. “I’m sorry I came over here and unleashed on you.”
Now that I’ve calmed down, I can’t believe that I raged over here like the Hulk or something, juiced up on anger. She was just going about her chores, and I staggered onto the lawn like a mental patient who flew the coop.
“I’m glad you did. Really, Jonah.” I look over at her, and I can tell that she’s hesitating. “If the situation were reversed—if I lost my dad, I mean—I think I’d lean on you guys a lot. Because our families know each other. And not in the way people at school know us. Like we know each other’s childhoods and quirks and, like . . . embarrassing moments and stuff.”
I’m living one of those embarrassing moments now. No matter how nice Ellie is about it, this situation is not cool.
We stand up, and she hit-pats the side of my arm because I think a hug would seem weird. I say “seeya” like a loser, like this was a totally casual hangout, and I start my walk home.
It comes out in a rush once I get home. I sit Bekah and Isaac down on the couch and say I’m sorry I lost my temper. That I worry about them and about Mom, and I miss Dad all the time. It felt like too much, and I snapped.
“You never talk about missing Dad,” Bekah whispers.
“Bek, of course I miss him. All the time. Every time you see me in the kitchen, with his pots and pans, I’m missing him.”
All this time, I thought talking about how painfully I miss my dad would put more weight on them. But they both look relieved, exchanging glances with each other.
“When you’re sad, you should say it,” Issac tells me. “We all should, okay?”
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
My phone wakes me up in the middle of the night, vibrating over and over. Five missed calls and seven texts, all Vivi. Wake up!! Helloooo, Jonah, c’mon. Come downstairs. Back door. I’m down here. Are you ignoring me on purpose? Jonah, seriously!!!!
Hold on, I type back, to buy myself some time. If I go down there, it might be a yelling match. Or she might just want to apologize. If I don’t go down there, she’ll probably either wake up my family or sneak in here anyway. Or both. I move slowly down the stairs, holding my breath and cringing at every tiny creak. I step out into the darkness of our backyard, making sure the door is unlocked.
“Finally,” Vivi says, too loudly. She’s wearing a costume. A fedora and a khaki trench coat, unbuttoned to expose a clingy nightgown. “Honestly, Jonah, I was almost to the point of moving on to someone else—I mean, way to make a girl work for it.”
“I’m still mad at you.” It sounds childish, but I don’t give a shit. She basically ignored me the one time in eight months that I’ve actually asked someone to pay attention.
“Good,” she says. “I mean, not good, but fine, whatever, I don’t care. I’m mad at you, too.”
“For what?”
“For being mad at me.” She moves so close that one of her feet is placed between my legs. Half her body is up against mine. Her hat brushes against my chin. She presses her lips against the base of my throat, warm and full. I know from experience that she left a red lip print behind.
“Viv, don’t. It’s not going to work,” I lie. Her perfume drugs me. It fills my nostrils and my lungs. I feel it enter my bloodstream, rushing through me.
“Okay,” she whispers, near my ear. She slides her hand behind my neck.
I struggle to keep my arms at my sides. “Not working.”
“Jonah . . .”
Her hands find my wrists, pulling them toward her. She slides my palms under her nightgown on either side of her silhouette, then up her bare hips. She’s not wearing anything underneath. Even when my brain is pissed at her, the rest of my body responds. My brain is mush now. She knows she’s got me.
Her mouth is on mine, and I kiss her back almost angrily. I feel her lips form a smile. My thoughts burst in and out, disjointed as she slides her hands across my stomach. Like she can’t get into my head, so she gets into my pants. I don’t want to feel like she’s doing this to keep me from being mad at her.
“Viv, I don’t want to be apologized to. Like this.” The words are hard to get out.
“Ha,” she says. “This is not an apology. Why would I apologize when I’m mad at you? But I don’t feel like fighting right now, Jonah. I’d rather take it out on you. Like. This.”
I move her onto the lawn until we’re behind the shed, hidden. She presses against me, hands in my hair. I try to pull back for half a second. There’s always this moment where we pause and look at each other with quick smiles. But tonight Vivi won’t slow down. And I think that’s why something feels off.
But then I don’t feel anything but Vivi.