When We Collided(58)

I hold the picture up, and Bekah’s eyes brim with tears. This should stop me, but it doesn’t. “You’ve got to stop being such *s. Just stop. You are not the only people in this family, and the rest of us think about each other constantly. You only think about yourselves.”

They’re side by side, lips quivering and eyes wide. Tears streaming.

“Jonah,” Silas says, appearing in the doorway. He’s holding his work apron in one hand. “That’s enough.”

“I’m sorry,” I reply automatically to him, and I turn back. Isaac wipes at his cheek. I’m the shittiest brother of all time. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled. I shouldn’t have . . . I’m sorry.”

I’m off and running. Fleeing. The neighbors’ houses blur in my peripheral vision. Months of weight stacked on my shoulders finally broke me. My brothers and sisters—how much longer can we keep this up? My mom—what to do, whether to let her grief run its course or tattle to Felix. My dad—how it still sometimes doesn’t feel real that he’s gone. How it makes me question everything. On top of everything else, the restaurant—his one legacy, his life’s work—may or may not be struggling.

And me. What the hell am I doing with my life? If I have the same fate as my dad, I’ll be dead before my forty-second birthday. That used to sound old. Now it’s a little more than my current age doubled. And I’ve spent the past eight months just trying to get through each day. I have one more year of high school left, then what? My grades are decent but not spectacular. I have no particular skills to get a scholarship. I should be spending this year like everyone else—trying to figure it out.

I have basically two achievements in life: my perfect hollandaise sauce and the fact that I’ve helped take care of my family since January.

And I screamed at them. I called them *s.

Maybe I shouldn’t be here, on Vivi’s front stoop. She’s been so low. But I need her right now.

I knock on the front door. On the outside, the house looks more like an office building. A big square with sharp edges. I knock again. No answer. So I start around the side of the house, to below her bedroom window. She’s usually blasting music in her room and can’t hear the door anyway. Her light is on, and her window is open.

“Vivi!” Nothing. “Viv!”

It takes me a few tries, but I launch some twigs until one sails through the window. If she’s not actually home, that will be confusing to come home to—twigs in the middle of your floor. But she pops her head out.

“Heyo, darling,” she calls down. She’s wearing huge earrings and a red wig with very straight edges. “Let yourself in—it’s open!”

In her room, Vivi is the center of a cyclone. A cyclone of art supplies, color and texture smeared around her. There’s a long strip of fabric half-fed through the sewing machine. A propped-up canvas with a few long drips of sea blue and curry yellow. Scraps of magazines splayed out on the floor. The TV is playing an old black-and-white film, but it’s on mute.

I’m relieved to see her feeling better. It’s like all her creativity was pent up, and now it has exploded everywhere.

“Hey,” I say, staying in the doorway for a moment. She waves with one hand but doesn’t look up from her spot in the middle of the floor. She’s wearing some kind of robe with droopy sleeves, like a wizard’s costume, and she’s taking a pair of shears to an open magazine. “I knocked a bunch.”

“Sorry, lovey-o, I guess I didn’t hear. My thoughts are so loud and jumbly that I can’t hear much else at all. They’re like wriggly puppies, all diving over each other to get my attention, ha.”

Sylvia herself is not diving at all but dozing on the bed. Vivi climbs to her feet. I expect her to put her arms around my neck, but she moves toward the canvas. I sit on the edge of her bed, which is covered in mangled blankets, scraps of fabric, and various buttons and jewels. With anyone else, I’d wait to be asked why I’m here. But it’s Vivi. I don’t need a reason. Nobody needs a reason in Vivi’s world, least of all Vivi herself.

Tilting her head, she smashes the paintbrush at the top of the canvas and watches as a glob of neon orange drips beside the blue and yellow. Then she smears the line, the brush making swipes against the canvas.

I don’t know how to bring up the reason I came here—the things I said to my family. Instead, another question pops into my mind. “Can I ask you something?”

“Always, darling, you know that. I’m a fountain of truth, splashing past each concrete tier until I hit the bottom and spout right back to the top.” She laughs to herself.

“Do you ever think of us, like, long term?”

“Well, sure,” she says. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. She doesn’t look back at me. “I’ve imagined us living together in a tiny apartment in a big city, like drinking coffee in bed and you kiss me on your way out the door to your job as a sous chef at some fancy restaurant, and I own a vintage shop where I alter the clothes to be more stylish and then sell them. And I keep some, let’s be honest. And, like, maybe I find out I’m pregnant, and at first we’re like . . . oh shit, because we’re so young, you know? But then we decide to go for it, and we have this baby boy who comes with us everywhere, and we just make it work, you know, like this little urban family.”