I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(8)
“All?” I asked, smiling.
“All,” said my mother, sternly. “So remember: butterfly effect.”
And—boom—there he was with his sudden white smile and careless hair, casting his rangy shadow across the picnic table: Deveroux Tremain. Cornelia’s science-loving stepson. My friend for the past four years; my boyfriend for the five years before that, although boyfriend had always felt like too fluffy a word for what Dev had been to me. Starting at the age of thirteen, I had loved him so truly and easily and thoroughly that for five years, “in love with Dev” was my ordinary state, and it was only later, when we shifted—jarringly, painfully—to friendship, that I recognized it as a state of grace.
We were fifteen the first time he tried to explain chaos theory to me. It was late June of the first entire summer I spent at Cornelia and Teo’s house in Wilmington, Delaware. I’d spent chunks of summers at their house before, along with some spring and fall breaks, and at Christmastime, they would drive to Virginia where I lived with my mother in the same neighborhood as Cornelia’s and Teo’s parents.
Cornelia had come into my life when I was eleven, although it’s far more accurate to say that I came into hers. Fell. Plummeted. A stunned, reeling, heartbroken child plunging headlong and out of nowhere into her urban, single-woman life of coffee shops and black-and-white movies and late nights whirling with witty conversation, and whom, without questioning or even stopping to think, she had reached out and caught. In the space of a few days my bipolar mother had had a breakdown and my estranged father had died, and, reflexively, Cornelia pulled love around me like a coat, tugged it shut, and did up the buttons, as if I belonged to her. And so I did.
Dev did, too, to her and to Teo, the father he’d discovered when he was thirteen. Between Dev and his mother, Lake, Cornelia and Teo, Cornelia’s and Teo’s parents, their brothers and sisters, my mother and me, we were a family, a sprawling, messy, glorious one, expanding like a galaxy over the years to include my stepfather, Gordon; Lake’s boyfriend, Bruno; Cornelia’s brother Toby’s wife, Ella; Cornelia’s brother Cam’s husband, Niall; and all manner of scrumptious children, including Toby’s son, Jasper; Cornelia’s sister Ollie’s son, Charlie; and Cornelia and Teo’s children, Rose and Simon, whom I loved beyond description.
That first full summer at Cornelia’s house returns to me in sparkling scraps, sensory flashes: backyard nights needle-pricked with fireflies; clonk of a basketball; my hands sliding under Dev’s T-shirt and up his back; chit-chit-chit of a sprinkler; the fragrance of sunscreen, citronella, chlorine on Dev’s skin; slap of playing cards on porch boards; the little matching valleys above Dev’s collarbones; shaving of moon resting on a rooftop; Dev’s slate-blue eyes; lumpy ground under my shoulder blades, my hand in Dev’s while the Perseid streaked the sky; and Dev at Cornelia’s kitchen table explaining chaos theory, the butterfly effect, his hands tracing “the sensitive dependence on initial conditions” in the air, his face the most alive thing I’d ever seen. It’s why I’d ask him about it, to see his face do that, but after a while, I fell hard for the idea itself, and for weeks afterward saw large and distant consequences in every slight motion: butterfly wings, yes, but also the flick of a squirrel’s tail, the snap of a branch under my foot, Dev’s quick over-the-shoulder glance at me when we rode our bikes. That Dev could brush my bare shoulder with his mouth and kick up wild weather years and miles away felt equal parts amazing and inevitable.
We weren’t in love anymore, but the thought of my friend Dev worked its own miniature butterfly effect, took the tension out of my backbone, and the day was suddenly not creepily picture-perfect but exactly the right amount of nice. I shut my eyes and felt the whole of the blue sky unfurling like a sheet under my breastbone. When I opened my eyes, Cornelia was smiling at me.
“The sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” she said. “He always lost me at the math. But until then, I was right there with him.”
“So was I,” I said.
Chapter Three
Edith
October 1949
It wasn’t the presence of dead, beautiful things that broke her; nor was it those glass eyes, pair after lightless pair. It wasn’t even the fact that her father would have worshipped this place, would have stood in the octagonal rotunda, hat pressed to heart, shy and devout as a pilgrim; she had only to close her eyes to see him there, sun—swirled with galaxies of dust—falling like snow through the domed ceiling’s oculus. No, what did it, knocked the breath from her body, were the labels, humble white rectangles in glass display cases, each offering its tiny, hard-won piece of truth: the common and binomial names of the bit of life next to it—iridescent beetle; dried fern; moth, fat bodied, wings decked with eyes—and the date and location of its finding.
It was October. In March, her father had suffered his first stroke. His neighbor, Gladys Polk, had found him lying on his side on the shore, his sketchbook ruined, his slack right cheek pressed into the spring thaw mud, and Edith had left her nursing job in Pittsburgh to move back into the little house in Connecticut, near Long Island Sound. He’d had the second stroke in June, more ravaging than the first. In mid-August, he had died, not peacefully. And yes, it was the end of suffering, the end of weakness, drooling, spoon feedings, and—so much worse than all the rest—his wild-eyed, fruitless clawing after words and memories, but, to her shock, the end of all this brought Edith nothing but intractable pain. She imagined she felt like a person struck by lightning. Worse than the grief was her shame that she couldn’t even be relieved for him, a state of affairs that didn’t last only because, eventually, nothing was worse than the grief. It became everything, every waking minute (if she could be said to be awake) of every day, an arid, tearless, terrible mourning.