Noah and I are outside Guillermo’s studio. He wanted to come with me, but now he’s fidgeting. “I feel like we’re betraying Dad.”
“We asked Dad.”
“I know. But I still feel like we’re supposed to challenge Garcia to a duel in Dad’s honor.”
“That would be funny.”
Noah grins and shoulder-bumps me. “Yeah, it would.”
I get it, though. My feelings about Guillermo kaleidoscope from hating him one minute for destroying our family, for breaking my father’s heart, for a future that’s never going to happen—and, what would’ve happened? Would he have lived with us? Would I have moved in with Dad?—to adoring him the next moment, like I have from the very first time I laid eyes on him as Drunken Igor and he said he wasn’t okay. I keep thinking how strange it is that I would’ve met Guillermo and Oscar if Mom had lived too. We were all heading for each other on a collision course, no matter what. Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.
Guillermo’s not answering the door, so Noah and I let ourselves in and make our way together down the hallway. Something’s different, I notice, but only realize when we get into the mailroom what it is. The floors have been mopped, and unbelievably, the mail’s been cleared out. The door to the cyclone room is open and inside is an office again. I go to the doorway. In the center of the room, the broken angel is upright, with a stunning crack zigzagging across her back beneath her wings. I remember Guillermo saying the cracks and breaks were the best and most interesting parts of the work in my portfolio. Perhaps it’s the same with people and their cracks and breaks.
I look around the mail-less, dustless space and wonder if Guillermo’s opening up the studio again for students. Noah’s standing in front of the painting of the kiss. “That’s where I saw them that day,” he says. His hand touches a dark shadow. “This is The Wooden Bird, you see it? Maybe they went there a lot.”
“We did,” Guillermo says, coming down the stairs with a broom and dustpan.
“My mother painted this,” Noah says to him, no question in his voice.
“Yes,” Guillermo replies.
“She was good,” Noah says, still facing the painting.
Guillermo puts down the broom and dustpan. “Yes.”
“She wanted to be a painter?”
“Yes. Deep down, I think so.”
“Why didn’t she tell us?” Noah turns around. There are tears in his eyes. “Why didn’t she show us anything?
Guillermo says, “She was going to. She was not happy with anything she make. She wanted to show you something, I do not know, perfect maybe.” He studies me, crosses his arms. “Maybe for the same reason you did not tell her about your sand women.”
“My sand women?”
“I bring from home to show you.” He walks over to the table where a laptop sits. He clicks the pad and a spread of photos appears on the screen.
I walk over to the computer. There they are. My flying sand ladies washed ashore after years at sea. How can it be? I turn to Guillermo, realize something remarkable. “It was you. You sent in the photos to CSA?”
He nods. “I did, anonymously. I feel that is what your mother want me to do. She was so worried you would not apply. She tell me she was going to send herself. So I do it.” He points to the computer. “She love them very much, how carefree and crazy they are. Me too.”
“She took these pictures?”
“No, I did,” Noah says. “She must’ve found them on Dad’s camera and downloaded them before I deleted them all.” He looks at me. “The night of that party at Courtney’s.”
I’m trying to take all this in. Mostly that Mom knew something about the inside of me that I didn’t think she did. It’s making me feel weightless again. I look down. My feet are still touching the floor. People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn’t. It continues and is ever-changing.
I realize Guillermo’s talking. “Your mother was so proud of both of you. I never know a mother so proud.”
I glance around the room, sensing Mom so much, certain this is what she wanted. She knew we each held an essential part of the story that needed to be shared. She wanted me to know she saw the sculptures and only Guillermo could tell me that. She wanted Guillermo and Dad to hear the truth from Noah. She wanted me to tell Noah about CSA and maybe I wouldn’t have found the courage if I hadn’t come to Guillermo, if I hadn’t picked up a chisel and hammer. She wanted us in Guillermo’s life, and he in ours, because we are, each one of us for the other, a key to a door that otherwise would’ve remained locked forever.
I think of the image in my mind that got me here in the first place: Mom, at the helm, steering us across the sky, keeping the course. Somehow, she did it.
“What am I, chopped liver?” It’s Grandma!
“Of course not,” I tell her without moving my lips, thrilled she’s back and back to normal. “You’re the bee’s knees.”
“Damn straight. And for the record, as you’re so fond of saying, missy, you, young lady, do not make me up. How presumptuous. No idea where you picked up that thankless trait.”
“No idea, Grandma.”
Later, after he sets up Noah with canvases and paint—Noah couldn’t resist when Guillermo offered—Guillermo finds me in the yard, where I’ve started on the clay model for Mom’s sculpture. “I never see anyone paint like him,” he says. “He is an Olympian. It is incredible to watch. Picasso, he once paint forty canvases in a month. I think Noah might in a day. It is like they are already finished and he is just delivering them.”
“My brother has the ecstatic impulse,” I say, remembering Oscar’s essay.
“I think maybe your brother is the ecstatic impulse.” He leans against the worktable. “I see a few pictures of you two when this small.” He lowers a hand to the ground. “And Dianna, she always talk about Jude and her hair. I would never know, never ever would I think that you . . .” He shakes his head. “But now I think to myself of course you are her daughter. Noah, he look exactly like her, it hurt me to look at him, but you. You look nothing, nothing like her, but are so, so much like her. Everyone is afraid of me. Not your mother. Not you. You both just jump right in.” He touches his chest. “You make me feel better from the very first instant I catch you on my fire escape and you talk about the flying brick.” He covers his brow with his hand and when he lifts it, his eyes are red-rimmed. “But I understand if . . .” He falters, his face clouding with emotion. “I want very much for you to keep working with me, Jude, but I understand if you do not want or if your father do not want you to.”
“You would’ve been my stepfather, Guillermo,” I say as my answer. “And I would’ve made your life mis-er-a-ble.”
He drops his head back and laughs. “Yes, I can see it. You would have been the holy terror.”
I smile. Our connection is still so natural, though now, for me, it’s tinged with guilt because of Dad. I turn back to my clay model, start caressing my mother’s shoulder into shape, her upper arm. “It’s like some part of me knew,” I tell him, working the bend of her elbow. “I don’t know what I knew, but I knew I was supposed to be here. You made me feel better too. So much better. I was so locked in.”
“This is what I think,” he says. “I think maybe Dianna, she break your bowls, so you come find a stone carver.”
I look at him. “Yeah,” I say, the back of my neck tingling. “Me too.”
Because who knows? Who knows anything? Who knows who’s pulling the strings? Or what is? Or how? Who knows if destiny is just how you tell yourself the story of your life? Another son might not have heard his mother’s last words as a prophecy but as drug-induced gibberish, forgotten soon after. Another girl might not have told herself a love story about a drawing her brother made. Who knows if Grandma really thought the first daffodils of spring were lucky or if she just wanted to go on walks with me through the woods? Who knows if she even believed in her bible at all or if she just preferred a world where hope and creativity and faith trump reason? Who knows if there are ghosts (sorry, Grandma) or just the living, breathing memories of your loved ones inside you, speaking to you, trying to get your attention by any means necessary? Who knows where the hell Ralph is? (Sorry, Oscar.) No one knows.
So we grapple with the mysteries, each in our own way.
And some of us get to float around on one of them and call it home. We visited The Mystery this morning and Dad hit it off with the owner, Melanie—I mean really hit it off. They’re having drinks this evening on the deck of the ark. To discuss the sale, he told us, trying to hide the super-kook grin.
I wipe my hands clean on a nearby towel, reach in my bag and take out Guillermo’s copy of Mom’s book on Michelangelo.
“I stole it. I don’t know why. I’m sorry.”
He takes it from me, looks down at Mom’s picture. “She call me that day from the car. She sound so upset, so very upset. She say she need to see me later to talk. So when Noah come here and tell me . . . I am sure this is what she was going to say to me: that she change her mind.”
On my way out, I stop to visit with the angel and make my last wish. For Noah and Brian.
Best to bet on all the horses, dear.