The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(70)

“I don’t want to hide your scars,” I told Jillian. “I want to show you as a whole person. Just like anyone else.”

“You want to show my schizophrenia.”

“Yes.”

She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. Her eyes darted away, and a small line formed in the middle of her forehead. I knew decisions stressed her out because her mind tangled up all the possible outcomes, but no way was I doing this without her permission.

After biting on her nails and taking several drags off her cigarette, she finally asked, “If you’re going to im-m-mortalize me, can you make my hair longer?”

“Any way you’d like it.”

“Okay, then. Jack can show you pictures of how it used to be. That’s how I like it.”

“Yep, I can show her,” he confirmed.

“All right,” she agreed with a shy smile. “I’ll do it. Where do you want me to sit?”

29

After my session with Jillian, I hugged Jack good-bye. Knowing we might not see each other for a while made leaving him excruciating. I squeezed him harder and tried to think up excuses not to let go.

“I keep going back to that first night we met at the bus stop,” he said against my hair as he held me. “And, you know, I think I wanted you from the first time you laughed. But now it’s so much worse. Now I need you.”

“I know,” I whispered.

“It scares me how much. How are we going to fix this?”

“If your father sends you away, I won’t let you go without a fight. I’m willing to do something drastic.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

He didn’t, either. His parents controlled his bank account, and I had a whopping eight hundred dollars in savings. What could we do? Drop out of school and run away? Even though my brother possessed zero pride, getting booted from community college and squatting at Mom’s the last couple of years, that definitely wasn’t me.

And it wasn’t Jack.

All we could do was wait. And hope.

So I watched him walk to the parking garage, my heart breaking a little. Then I pulled myself together. And after checking in with Mom at the ER, I went home with my sketches and notes from Jillian, and I laid them out on my bed with the crinkled, torn drawings from Minnie. I still had a few old canvases down in the garage. One of them was barely used—just a few old brushstrokes. I remembered it well. I’d started working on it the day my parents had their big blowout. Mom had found pictures on Dad’s phone of him and Suzi vacationing together at a cabin in Big Sur. Heath was still a senior in high school, and we were living in our old house. We’d stayed up half the night on his bed with our ears against the wall, listening to our parents fight in the room next door. Dad left a week later.

But even though the canvas brought back bad memories, it was still usable. A coat of gesso and it was blank again. My portable easel was still perfectly functional, and most of my paints weren’t dried out. I carted them all up to my room and set them up in front of Lester. After a few measurements, I sketched out a silhouette of Jillian and started working.

Four days. That’s how much time I had left until the show deadline. So I called up Ms. Lopez and explained the situation, and after a few more phone calls, I’d found three coworkers who were willing to cover my shifts.

So I started painting.

After the first day, Mom and Heath started popping in to see my progress.

On the second day, Mom opened up both the X-ray doors and watched me from the living room, bringing me tea and my favorite treat: pecan rolls from Arizmendi Bakery off Judah and Irving Streets—right down the street from the Golden Gate Park entrance where Jack painted BLOOM. She finally asked me why I was working with fragments of the cadaver drawings. “It doesn’t look like the same body,” she said.

“It’s not.” And partly because I wanted to offer her something honest as a show of good faith (and partly because I had nothing to lose), I told her the story of Jack’s sister. About everything Jack and his family had gone through, and why he’d been doing the graffiti, and how he’d confessed it all to his parents, and that his father was threatening to send him away.

She quietly listened to every word without comment. No consolation. But no admonishment, either. Just poured me more tea, promising that the Vincents’ secret wouldn’t leave her lips, and told me to keep painting.

On the third day, I had the house to myself because Mom and Heath left to have dinner with Noah and his parents, an hour away in San Jose. I painted the entire time they were gone.

On the last day, when Mom was getting ready for work, the doorbell rang. I wiped paint off my hands and answered it, surprised to see Jack’s friend Andy standing on my doorstep wearing an Isotope Comics T-shirt. His labret stud was now blue.

“Hey there,” he said brightly. “Jack sent us out on a mission to find your house.”

“Found me. Who’s ‘us’?”

He tipped his tousled head down the stairs toward the curb, where a beat-up yellow car idled. One tiny arm stretched from the passenger window and waved. It took me a second to spot the pink-and-purple hair, and I realized it was my favorite person, Sierra.

I waved back.

“He wanted me to bring you this,” Andy said, handing me what looked to be a plastic bag wrapped into a palm-sized wad and wound up with a whole lot of packing tape.