Aunt Claudine and her father remained in the house, even after that. She spent a few years in Connecticut at Miss Porter’s School for Girls, but returned to the island for good when she was nineteen. When her father died, she inherited the house. I often wondered what that must have been like, to grow up in the same space where your mother killed herself, to walk by that bedroom thousands of times over the years.
Aunt Claudine was my mother’s favorite relative. When Mom was ten, she went to visit her and found the bullet hole in the closet door. She said she could fit her finger inside it. From the pictures I’ve seen of Claudine, she looked like a neat and tidy woman with a short blond bob and three fat dachshunds that supposedly followed her everywhere. She dressed in button-down shirts and khakis, but according to my mom, she carried herself like royalty.
I wish I could ask Aunt Claudine if, looking back, there were signs leading up to what her mother did, but Claudine died before I was born. And maybe she noticed signs, maybe she didn’t. After all, Aunt Claudine was only five when it happened. Whatever memories of her mom, and the girl Claudine might have been if that gun had never gone off, went with her. She didn’t leave a husband or children behind, or anyone who could tell us why she stayed her whole life in that house on some island off the coast of Georgia.
It makes me wonder, Is this a defining moment for me? And if so, what will I do with all these pieces?
At some point I realize that I should keep moving. That lying here is only making it worse. So I pick up my phone. Saz has sent fifteen texts and left three messages. Instead of going downstairs to eat what my dad calls “breakfast for lunch,” like I have every Saturday morning for the past eighteen years, I turn the phone off and reach for the notebook and pen I keep on my bedside table. All my life, I’ve given stories to everything because I’ve felt that everything deserved to have a history. Even if it was just an old marble lodged into the basement wall. Where did it come from? Who put it there? And why?
The thing no one knows—I am writing a novel. A bad, overly long novel that I am in love with even though it has no plot and about seven hundred characters and I’ll probably never finish it. So far it fills three notebooks, and I am still going. One day I will either throw the notebooks away or type all these words into my laptop.
I open the notebook. Uncap the pen.
I stare at the page.
It stares back.
“Stop staring at me,” I tell it.
I write my name on it, just to show it who’s in charge here. Claude.
I circle it. Circle it again and again until my name looks like it’s trapped inside an angry cloud.
I write my full name. Claudine Llewelyn Henry. Llewelyn, as in my mom’s maiden name. I cross out the Henry and write: Claudine Llewelyn. Maybe this is who I’ll be from now on.
I reach for my phone, turn it back on, and call Saz.
“What did your dad want?”
“What?”
“Your dad,” she says. “What did he want?”
“Nothing. Just to talk to me about graduation. My grandparents are coming to visit us so they can hear my speech.” And I think, Oh, I’m really doing this. I am really not telling her. I look down at the inside of my arm, where I am pinching the skin so hard it’s turning blue.
“You sound weird. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m good. Just tired. I didn’t sleep much.” I think about telling her then, even though my dad said not to, even though my mom agreed I shouldn’t, about the bomb he just dropped onto my head and onto my heart. But that would make it real, and right now it doesn’t feel real. Instead I say, “What are you doing later?” Just to see what happens, I poke my skin with the tip of my pen, again and again, until the skin is blue all over from the ink, or maybe from bruises.
“Nothing. Right now I’m kind of half watching a movie and making a Leah Basco voodoo doll.”
“Can you get the car?”
“Probably. You can always come over here.” Saz lives three blocks away.
“Okay.”
“Or we can go to Dayton instead.”
I think of driving fast and turning the music up loud, loud, loud. “That sounds better.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
I look down at the notebook, where I’ve filled the page with my name. Claude three hundred times. At the little spots of blue on my arm.
“I’m sure.”
We hang up, and I prepare to wait in my room for the next five or six hours so I don’t have to sit downstairs and talk to my mom.
* * *
—
Saz drives. Her car is a five-year-old Honda that she shares with her brother Byron. We drive fast with the music up and the windows down, and we don’t talk about Yvonne or Wyatt or Shane. We let ourselves become part of the air and the night and the song, and we sing until we’re hoarse.
This is part of Saz and Claude, of two best friends growing up in a town that is too small. She was the first person who made me feel at home in Mary Grove. We bonded over the fact that neither of us was born here, and we became outsiders together. At ten, as soon as we discovered that we were both planning to be writers, we decided we were going to leave Mary Grove and be Big Deals out in the world someday. Leaving this town and Ohio behind was something we agreed was necessary to our survival. That’s when the list started—a list of everything we would do and accomplish once we were free. In fifth grade we formed an all-girl band so that we could leave sooner. We weren’t very good at playing music, but we were great at listening to it, and our love for all decades and genres brought us to Françoise Hardy and the yé-yé girls of the 1960s. These were women we learned about in seventh-grade French class who—in all their amazing, exotic Frenchness—transported us out of ourselves and away from our small Midwestern town and inspired an obsession with all things old and French.
In Dayton, we climb the steps of the Art Institute, which is closed tight but lit up on the outside. We sit huddled against the wind and the cold, even though it’s nearly summer. We watch the sky change from gray to gold to pink to navy. The moon appears, followed by the stars, which are too bright. There is something unfair about them.
At age eleven, when Saz concluded she was adopted because her small, quiet brothers and small, quiet parents didn’t begin to understand her, we decided she was a foundling instead. And even though I love my parents and I am exactly like them, split down the middle, I decided I might be a foundling too. In spite of Saz’s Lilliputian size and my too-long limbs, her brown skin and my freckles, her dark, straight hair and my electric orange mop, we told ourselves we were separated at birth, and the only explanation had to be that we were stolen from our real family. We created an entire written history for ourselves of our original parents, our original siblings, and the people who had stolen us. At thirteen, we made a plan—when high school was over, we would go to California and share an apartment and earn our living as writers. Over the years, as we became better and better friends, it was hard to tell where Saz began and I ended.