“You eat, you help.”
* * *
They say one day when the Big One hits, all of this will just cave into the ocean, all the beauty and the rocks and the grass and the homes and the people. Our house is made of glass and wood so that you’re inside and outside all at once. It’s loosely modeled after a Case Study House by a very famous architect that my mother loves. Once, she took Jo and me for a Saturday drive to tour all the Case Study Houses, which are famous historical houses designed by famous architects all around the city. I think she wanted us to love those gleaming corners as much as she did, to understand how the right beam could make you feel closer to the very universe itself, but mostly Jo and I complained about how hot it was, and I had attitude all day because I was missing a birthday party for this girl I didn’t even particularly like. “I don’t understand why we’re spending the whole day paying to look at other people’s houses. It’s so dumb,” Jo whined. Still, we spent the day wandering through great modernist boxes, light and dark, with their big open glass windows and plywood and steel and concrete, the stuff of the houses themselves kinda like the three of us together, our parts both knowable and unknowable to one another. Eventually, Jo and I stopped sulking and started to marvel at the way all that glass in those fancy houses refracted the light in colors across our skin; and instead of being little assholes, together we chased rainbows. Anyway, if there’s a Big One, we’re definitely goners. On days like these, even the gusts against the glass feel as though, if they keep on hard enough, the entire house will collapse on all of us fragile in it. The roof feels like the safest place to be sometimes. Jo and I used to stand on the edge and dare each other to jump.
Courtney calls, and I climb out onto the roof for some privacy. Sometimes I see my parents as shadows at my door, listening. The roof is safer for secrets.
“Are you in a wind tunnel? Good Lord.”
“Eye of a hurricane, actually.”
“Are you in trouble?” she says.
“Lucia didn’t tell them.”
“God, I wish I had a Lucia,” Courtney says. “I’m grounded, but not until after prom.”
“That’s not too bad, right?”
“I can’t go to any of the after-parties, though.”
“That totally sucks.”
“Yeah, but, like, I went to them last year… so I guess it could be worse.”
“Totally.”
* * *
From my perch on the roof, I can see into my sister’s room. Inside, my mother takes a book off Jo’s shelves, then another and another. My father comes in, and the two of them say something to each other, come to some sort of agreement, and then he too begins to take books off Jo’s shelves. Then they’re not Jo’s shelves at all, they’re just planks of wood in need of a purpose. My mother takes down a Purple Rain poster. My father takes down Jo’s seventh-grade photo.
“This calc homework is ridiculous. Have you finished it?” Courtney says.
“I haven’t looked at it yet.”
Together, my parents remove a customized trophy case with Jo’s Model UN trophies. They get more and more frenetic, swept up in the act of removal as they take things off the wall and throw them on the floor. I can’t tell if they’re laughing or crying or both.
“So, problem eight says, ‘The graph of the function f is show in the figure above. For how many values of x in the open interval (−4, 4) is f discontinuous?’… like, I don’t get it.”
“I don’t have my book out here with me.”
When they tire, my parents sit down together in the middle of all the things that make up my sister’s life and look at each other. There are patches of bright where the wall hasn’t seen the light of day in years. The room is exposed and raw, and I’m embarrassed for them and it. Lucia appears in the doorway, and my parents look up startled, caught.
“And problem nine says…”
Courtney’s looking for me to feed her the answers, like I’ve done for most of our lives. But I don’t know how I’m supposed to tell her the answers when I don’t have them yet myself.
“Shit. Gotta go,” I tell Courtney, and start to crawl back to my room before anybody notices. I drop the phone on the roof with a thud, and it starts to slide down and off. I grab the phone and yank it up, but the damage is done.
They look out at me. My father wades through Jo’s things on the floor to get to the window, which he slides open.
“You get your little ass off that roof right now, young lady.”
“What are you doing?”
“We told you and Jo not to go out on that roof ever again.”
Jo fell off once. We were up here together in the sun and then, like that, she fell into the bushes below and then hit the ground hard. She fractured several ribs and broke her arm and scraped her skin so hard in several places that she wasn’t brown anymore but red. She spent several months in a neon-pink cast that she let me draw on with Technicolor Sharpies when I was bored. Jo fell, but I thought I saw her rise onto her tiptoes and lean forward. I thought I saw her close her eyes and lift off. But I know nothing.
In the hospital, when they were setting her arm, my father held her tenderly against his chest and sang “Isn’t She Lovely” while she cried.
“Daddy, that’s Stevie’s absolute worst song,” Jo stopped crying for a second to say.
“Girl, is you crazy?” my father said, which is how we knew he was dead serious, ’cause he very rarely uses the vernacular.
Then Jo started to laugh until the doctor yanked her arm back into place. Then she screamed into Daddy’s armpit while he held her tighter against his beating heart.
“What are you doing to Jo’s room?” I ask my parents.
“Jo doesn’t live here anymore,” my mother said.
* * *
Lucia has a stack of People magazines on the bed and we pore over them, imagining other people’s lives as our own. Lucia loves Princess Diana, and People keeps speculating that she and Prince Charles might be getting divorced. Lucia’s dark hair is cut exactly like Princess Diana’s, and my mom’s is too, so that my two mothers are each other and somebody else all at once. The idea that it’s 1992 and we still have kings and queens and people born into being the heads of entire countries is weird to me, but I think my mom and Lucia both like how Diana looks good in Givenchy and happiest as she holds the brown orphans others have left to die.
“How is she?” Lucia folds laundry on the bed next to me. I place my whole head in the laundry basket. I love the smell of fresh laundry, the heat against my skin, those few moments when the clothes are like the sun instead of just another pair of faded pajamas. Lucia swats me away.
“It’s been a shitty month. Her dad keeled over from a heart attack, and there’s family drama. ‘Diana pleaded with nearby photographers to “please, just leave us alone,”’ ” I read.
“Smartass. Your sister.”
“Crazy,” I say. “Can we talk about something else?”
“You need new friends.”