Time all but stops inside my room. My phone died yesterday, and I haven’t bothered to recharge it. I haven’t left except to use the bathroom nearest to my room. But at least I showered, so nobody mind the sad blonde drawing all-black ensembles and sewing black netting onto a headband like I’m attending a funeral for the dad of my daydreams, the one who possibly lived on a houseboat with tapestries hung on the walls.
Today I’m sketching my own expressionless face, reflected back by my full-length mirror—wide-set eyes and unremarkable nose. I define my jaw, shading and erasing, my hair, my shoulders and the sweater that is slipping off on one side. The details have to be perfect. The shape of my lips, the yarn of my sweater. It takes minutes or hours or days.
When it looks like me, blank but sullen, I clip my self-portrait to the easel. Swipe two curves of runny black paint under my eyes, dripping down my cheeks. I blend purple and black and white, painting blooms of bruises on my shoulders. Like smudgy violets. I paint my lips ruby. Ruby—the word bites at me, and I push it away while I use too much paint, and it drips like blood from my mouth.
Then I cross out my eyes unceremoniously with black pencil.
Maybe I’ll glue things to it later.
Most mothers would, I assume, be terrified of this little portrait. Mine checks on me and, last time, put her hand on my shoulder, saying, “I’m so proud of you for using creative expression to handle these emotions.”
I know that.
Here is what also I know: my father is not a musician. My father was a graduate student, nearly finished with his PhD when he met my mother at a concert in Berkeley. He was almost ten years older than her, and she thought he was cerebral but in a very cool way. He had hair to his ears and a scruffy beard. He was out with the other econ almost-doctorates to celebrate one of their birthdays.
He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring that night. He should have been.
I have two half siblings. My half brother was two years old the night my mom got pregnant with me. He’s in college now. My half sister is three years younger than me. They don’t know I exist, except maybe now they do. They don’t feel like siblings because we don’t have anything in common except for half of our genetics. It sounds like a lot. But it isn’t.
He has paid child support my whole life. Some of it is in a fund I can use for college. Some of it, my mom used for groceries or to make rent when I was little, before the last few years when her painting took off. Once or twice, she used it to buy me a new coat or pay a babysitter while she was working an extra shift. She explained this like she felt guilty, but that’s ridiculous to me. I don’t even know how I feel about having his money. Part of me thinks he owes me that, at least—that he should make at least some nominal sacrifice for being such an incredible asshat to my mom and to me. Another part thinks I don’t want to take anything that is his. Ever.
I claw my fingers down the portrait, and my nails dig up thin lines of paint.
Because it’s too late. There are already things of his that are mine—my goddamn eyes, which I want to scrape out of my head after meeting him. Maybe every time in my life that I’ve been hideously selfish . . . maybe that wasn’t the teenage self-centeredness that my mom mutters about. Maybe that’s him shining through. Maybe I’m also genetically predisposed to be an abandoner, a narcissist, a liar.
“I am not sorry about you and never have been a single day in my life; do you hear me?” my mother asked, that fierceness in her voice imploring me to nod. I did hear her, and I do know this, that I am her world, as she has told me throughout my whole life. She cleared her throat. “But I am so very sorry you didn’t wind up with the dad you deserve.”
I keep thinking that I’m a different Vivi than I was just days ago, and I don’t know how to be the new version. I just know I can’t go back to the endless possibilities. I have an answer. And I wish it was a different one.
I’m not saying I hate Jim Bukowski because, you know, I try really hard not to have hatred in my life. It’s just . . . you know that Sunday-night feeling, where the dread of reality sinks in, that you’ve mismanaged your time and now the anxiety of homework and the wasteland of early mornings and school stretches ahead of you? Well, I hope he has that feeling every minute of every day of his entire life. That’s all.
When the doorbell rings, I slump down to answer it because my mom went out for a while. It’s Officer Hayashi, in full uniform, looking stern—all business—as if I summoned him here. “You haven’t been at breakfast.”
I stare back at him.
“Do you need anyone arrested on your behalf?”
Hmm, now there’s an idea. “Well, if you happen to be in Berkeley, you’re welcome to arrest my father. The official charge is being a shitweasel slash never wanting to know me and hating that I’m alive.”
“Sounds like a moron.” His eyebrows lower in this protective way that makes me think he might actually growl. And I guess I expect him to say that he’s sorry or that he thinks I’d be a great daughter to have. Instead, he straightens. “But that’s life. Gotta deal with what you got.”
Oh, is that all I have to do? If only someone had told me sooner! That I just have to deal with what I’ve got. Snap! I think I just did it. I narrow my eyes at him. “Do you even have kids?”
He ignores me, turning to go. “You need to eat and get some fresh air. Won’t do you any good locking yourself in your house.”
He’s gone before I think of a comeback, so I slam the door and make myself oily black coffee. I push the French press down harder than necessary.
“Oh good, you’ve emerged,” my mom says, keys jangling as she comes through the front door. I think it’s the third day after my misadventure to Berkeley. “Did you even remember I was going to pick up your birthday present this morning?”
I glance up from my coffee. She’s still standing in the entryway, and I can’t see what she’s holding over the kitchen ledge. When she leans down, I hear the scrambling of feet.
A wriggly white pouf of a dog, no bigger than a loaf of bread, bursts into the kitchen, and her tiny claws are clicking all over the kitchen floor. It’s love at first sight, and I gasp.
“Wait, really?” I scoop up the dog, and she’s so warm and squirmy, complete with two little pink bows on her ears. “She’s mine?”
I’ve wanted a dog since before I understood words and certainly since before I could speak. People say they don’t remember their earliest years, but I swear I remember being in a stroller and pointing at passing dogs, trying desperately to communicate that I want that thing to be mine.
“She’s yours. Her owner moved into a retirement community, and she had no one to take care of her. Her name is Sylvia.”
“Sylvia,” I whisper. She is a Sylvia, saucy but innocent, elderly with her white hair but young in spirit. She wastes no time licking my neck. Yes, a stuffed animal come to life to keep me company in my hollowness.
“Viv,” my mom says, smile fading a bit. “Sylvia is your dog now, so she’s your responsibility. You’re all she’s got. If for some reason you’re not around, I will not take care of her. I won’t feed her or walk her, okay? Do you understand?”
I narrow my eyes at my mother—clever woman.
Sometimes I think my mom doesn’t really know what to do with me. She got a whirling dervish of a daughter, and the best she can do is brace herself for the violent winds. I know what she’s telling me with this dog: don’t run away or end up in the hospital again. Now someone else’s life depends on me keeping it together. This little, innocent girl-dog, who is working her pink tongue around the back of my ears.
“Okay,” I say. I know it’s a trick or at least a trick wrapped in a present, but you know what? I will take it. “I understand.”
Upstairs, Sylvia roams around my bed, inspecting my stuffed animals at first and then lying down amid them. I place my head on the pillow right next to her, and it’s nice to have the company of someone who won’t try to talk to me or tell me what to do. She dozes off eventually, and her breath is so hot that she’s like a fluffy miniature dragon on my bed. When she hears a knock at the front door, she startles awake with a little bark. I’m not talking to Hayashi again.
I hear my mom’s footsteps, then my door creak open.
“Viv,” my mom says. “Jonah’s at the door.”
I give her this look like So? because I’m being horrible, and I don’t even care that I’m being horrible. I want to retreat into myself, and no one else is invited except for Sylvia.
“Viv,” my mom repeats. “Come on.”
She means: come on, don’t be rude, Jonah drove to Cloverdale for you, he loves you, he isn’t the enemy just because everyone else in the world is the enemy. I don’t feel like putting makeup on, and I don’t care if Jonah sees me bare-branched. Normally, I care a lot, but I don’t have the energy to be his Vivi today, not by a long shot. So let him see that my eyelashes are golden brown and not thick black, that my cheeks are actually fair and not flushed rose. I pick my cotton-ball doggie up so she’s resting on my arm. She seems right at home.
When I appear in the doorway, I can tell Jonah’s taken aback by my nude face because he’s never seen it. He’s not repulsed, I don’t think—just surprised.
I open the door a little more so he can see Sylvia.
“This is Sylvia. Sylvia, meet Jonah.”
“Hey,” he says. His grin makes him look younger, like Isaac. He holds his finger out for Sylvia’s inspection, and she sniffs at him. “She’s so cute.”
“She’s my birthday present from my mom.”
His smile drops away. “How are you?”
This feels weirdly formal, the tables turned—Jonah showing up at my house unannounced instead of me showing up at his. Only Jonah seems to hesitate, like maybe my sadness is too much to surmount. I can’t be his wings, the person who lifts him up from the sad days. I’m hopelessly earthbound, and I’m in no position to save anyone else.
“C’mon,” he says. He holds his hand out to me, palm up. I like a lot of things about Jonah Daniels, and some of those things are very shallow pleasures—his hair, his strong arms, those molten brown eyes. But I really love his hands, which are easy to underappreciate as a feature. Plenty of people have stubby fingers or knobby knuckles or shredded cuticles. You don’t really notice a pair of hands until two really good ones are holding yours. Jonah’s hands are square and tanned and smooth—really great boy hands.
I don’t want to leave my house, but this is Jonah’s allure: he is so handsome and so good, good enough to show up even knowing I might knock him backward with my shrewishness. And I can’t help but put my hand in his.
We let Sylvia romp through the mossy grass on the bluff overhanging the ocean. Behind us, flowering trees shed petals like tears. It’s my favorite spot in all of Verona Cove—the usual scene of my pill disposal—and perhaps the quietest place in this quiet town. But the bluff is noisy if you listen because it’s filled with the sounds of the natural earth. The sky is clear blue, the wind cool as it shushes low through the grass.
“Are you sure she’s okay off a leash?” Jonah asks, ever the conscientious grown-up.
“I’m sure.”
We sit near the edge but not too near, and about a foot apart from each other because I don’t feel like being touched by anyone or anything except the clouds. Jonah tells me about what the littles have been up to; he tells me about the restaurant changes under way, new wall paint and recipes.
“It rained for a few hours earlier this week,” he says, when I haven’t responded to any of his other soliloquys. “The day you were in Berkeley.”
I know this already because I could smell it on the earth. Jonah has been trying so hard today, like he’s approaching me from every different angle, searching for an entryway. When all I do is think about what he says instead of saying something in return, he tries another path, another topic. My soul, it is a labyrinth, and Jonah, he will find a way in. I have to admire this kind of fortitude, so I throw the poor guy a bone.
“You know,” I tell him, “in Botswana, the word for rain is the same as the word for currency: pula. It rains so rarely that the value of it is immense.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. And everybody knows about rain dances, but some cultures did other things to bring on rain for their crops, too. They knew which tribesmen were born during rainstorms, and during droughts they would send those men to wander in the wilderness. Like human good luck charms, searching for rain.”
“You know a lot about rain.”
“I know everything about rain.”
“Because you grew up in Seattle?” Jonah guesses, but I frown. “I can’t imagine the rain all the time.”
“Seattle isn’t even in the top ten rainiest cities. And—I’m telling you—the sunny days, they’re unrivaled. And even when it is gray, it’s still beautiful and it’s still home, and I love it.” I look over at him. “I would think you would understand that.”
He meets my eyes, and I hope he gets what I mean. “Yeah, Viv. I do.”
I know I’m being horrible—snippy and unyielding. Sometimes I can identify facts in my mind, but I can’t feel them. What I mean is, I know that I am not malnourished and I don’t have aggressive cancer. I sleep in a safe, warm bed at night, and I can eat ice-cream cones whenever I want. Even right this minute, I smell the salty ocean and wet sand in the breeze, which ruffles my hair. Cognitively, I recognize my good fortune. But I don’t feel lucky. I want to start my whole life again—like I want to float my soul back up to the cosmos and come down as a different girl, in a different life. Certainly with a different father.
“People have been asking about you,” he says. “Two months in, and you’ve got a whole town wrapped around your finger.”
I snort, thinking of my morning visitor. And the curiosity breaks my usual policy about meeting people’s ghosts for myself. Because Officer Hayashi wears a wedding band, but heartache rises off his skin like heat. “What’s Hayashi’s deal? He’s married, right?”
“Uh. Was. His wife and daughter died in a car accident when I was . . . seven? Eight? His daughter was in college at the time.”
My hand moves to cover my face, and I can barely whisper out the words. “Oh, good God. He lost his family?”
“His son is fine. He’s grown. Has kids, I think. He lives in Portland.”
Maybe I should be thinking that Hayashi had all the right in the world to tell me to deal with what I’ve got. But all I can think is that the world seems so pointlessly sad sometimes—so harrowingly, impossibly, uselessly sad.
I stare down at the ocean, which pools farther offshore but weaves in closer, between the craggy cliffs. To land squarely in the water, you’d need a huge running start and the wind direction working in your favor. A standing hop would plunge you straight into the rocks, but I can think of worse ways to go. It would feel like flying, like soaring, the wind barely resisting you, and you’d die on impact, or so they say. Still, God, the landing. I shudder to think.
“If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?”
Jonah is silent for a few moments, and I don’t turn to see his expression because I don’t care—if he’s shocked, if he’s judging me, if he’s offended, I don’t care. “Jesus, Viv. I have no idea. I’ve never thought about it.”
Ugh, of course he hasn’t, noble Jonah and his duty to his family.
“I’m just being hypothetical, Jonah.” Honestly, the sensitivity. Get over it, you know? I don’t appreciate how often people hide their scars and doubts. Really, it’s not fair to people who are struggling, to go on believing that everyone else just has it totally together and never has one bad thought in their lives. Like, I know you people sometimes lie awake at night torturing yourselves over the atrocities in this world and mortality and meaning. I know you’re not just daydreaming about riding a pink pony to your job as a cupcake taster. “Do you believe in heaven?”
I always think I don’t believe in God because I don’t go to church and I don’t care what people do as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. But if that’s true, then why do I mumble to a higher being sometimes? Please help me, I ask sometimes. Or I get angry at some unknowable form in the sky for my lot in life. This isn’t fair, I complain. You are not being fair to me at all. Sometimes I believe in reincarnation and sometimes I believe in the heaven that they tell little kids about, like golden streets and choirs in the clouds and being happy forever. Sometimes I believe in nothing at all because life can be such a wormhole of despair that I have to think we’re on our own.
“I want to,” Jonah says after a while.
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Yeah.” He sighs as if this thought has crossed his mind excruciatingly often. “I know.”
That’s it for Jonah, I think. I’ve sucked the energy right out of him—sapped his remaining ability to put up a cheerful front. If you want to push someone away, I strongly recommend rambling about death and theology. That oughta do it.
I watch the waves swell and break down the coastline, swell and break. My chest threatens to crack on the left side.
The heart is such a strange little beast—a lump of thick muscle with pipes sticking out. Sometimes I think my heart is made of rubber, and the world stretches it and twists so that it writhes in my chest and aches. This is why I have spent most of my time on this planet here but hurting. Sometimes I think a heart of porcelain would be easier. Let it drop out of my rib cage and break on the floor, no heartbeat, the end. Instead, I get a bouncy heart that bleeds when the world claws at it but keeps beating through the pain.
Near us, Sylvia sniffs the wildflowers. I scoot over to where Jonah’s sitting and position myself on his lap. I climb right in like a little kid, and he puts his arms around me, and I press my face into his warm neck. No matter what heaven you believe in, your time on this earth will end. What I’m saying is that you should listen—really listen—to the slosh of the waves and the distant call of Pacific birds. You should feel a boy’s pulse against your cheek; you should fill your lungs with ocean air. While you can, I mean. You should do these things while you still can.
“Hey, Jonah,” I whisper. “Can you sneak over and sleep in my room tonight?”
He thinks for a moment. “Yeah. Just tell Sylvia not to sound the alarm.”
That night, I let him in after my mom has closed her bedroom door, and we lie beneath tangled-up sheets. Sylvia’s fluffy body rises and falls at the end of the bed, where she is curled up like a powdered-sugar doughnut. Jonah and I are restless as we drift off—on a bumpy road to a peaceful destination. We curl together like heat rising from a teacup—swirls and arcs moving over each other, under each other, fluid and never still.
My head is against his shoulder, so I feel it when his breathing slows, and his lips barely part like a sleeping child.
“Jonah,” I whisper, just to check.
“It’s okay,” he says, eyes closed. He’s not even awake. “It’s okay.”
He says these words even in his sleep, like he has said them so often that it’s his mouth’s default sentiment. All this pain in his life, all this care he doles out to everyone else. And yet he still cracks his broken heart open even wider—wide enough to fit me, too. I wonder how much this must hurt him, the toll it must take to give more of himself to me when he already has so little left to give.
In slumber, his arm stays wrapped around me, encasing me for safekeeping. He would protect me even in his unconscious state, as we lie beneath my ceiling’s half-painted sky.
This thought is enough to swell my heart—to swell, and to break.