Cristin Bishara - Relativity

“The library is the size of a bathroom stall,” I say. “The chem lab is totally outdated.”

“What can I do to cheer you up?”

“Move us back to California?” I give him a winning smile, and he laughs.

“How about ice cream?”

“No thanks. I’m not five years old.”

“With all this pouting, you sound like it.” Dad stops at a red light, one of the few traffic signals in Ennis. He rubs his temples. “I did some hunting around on the Internet. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History looks promising. Want to go tomorrow?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Although,” Dad says. There’s always an although , some caveat. “I’ve got to finalize a copywriting project first.”

“Of course.”

The copywriting is numero uno. That’s just the way it is. Oh well, who wants to go to a museum with Dad anyway, after what happened the last time? We were at the de Young in San Francisco, on a Saturday night in April. Behold the disastrous chain of events that ensued: (1) Dad spilled his wine on Willow’s Birkenstocks, (2) she laughed, (3) she wrote her phone number on the program, (4) after a couple of months of long-distance dating, Dad tried to convince her to move to California, and (5) Willow refused, making us move here.

“Did you know about Kandy?” I ask, putting my fists in front of my face and jabbing into the air. A one-two punch.

“No,” Dad says, watching the traffic light, still red. “But I’m not going to judge until I know the whole story. She might have been fending off the school bully.”

“I’m kinda thinking she is the school bully.”

Dad looks at me sideways. “Give her a chance,” he says. “It’s only been seven days.”

It’s just not possible. Seven days ago—that’s all?—I was drinking coffee shakes with George, in the back of the East Bay Café, in our usual spot on the leather couch. When I got there, he was hunched over his sketch pad, his colored pencils scattered across the coffee table. And when he saw me, he patted the couch, like always.

He’d been pissed. About Dad’s sudden marriage, the impulsive move. About me being told rather than asked that we were packing up and heading out.

And he couldn’t understand why Dad and I weren’t driving cross-country together. Why I was taking a flight by myself to Cleveland, while Dad was driving alone. A twenty-five-hundred-mile drive. Nine states.

“Holy crap. The photographs you could take!” George had thrown his hands in the air, exasperated. “To have a sketch pad in Nebraska. Are you kidding?”

“Utah’s got a couple of dinosaur quarries,” I’d said. “And we’d go right around Chicago and the Adler Planetarium.”

I knew I sounded nerdy, as usual, but George didn’t give me a hard time about it that day—or ever. Which is why I love him.

“Your dad’s clinical,” George decided.

“Bonkers.”

“Daffy.”

George pulled his iPhone from his pocket. “Thesaurus app,” he’d said. “He’s a lunatic, demented, cracked, brainsick, non compos mentis .”

“He’s got deadlines, so he can’t take a week off. He’s driving fourteen-hour days so he can get to Ohio by Monday.”

“No fun.”

“None of it.”

The traffic light turns green, and Ennis High recedes in my side-view mirror. Mr. Burton’s pickup bounces out of the parking lot and heads in the opposite direction. I stare at the photo of George in his Superman costume, while Dad yawns and strums his fingers on the Jeep’s steering wheel.

We drive in silence the rest of the way home. Home? It’s Willow’s home and Kandy’s home, but not mine, not Dad’s. Our home is across the bay from San Francisco, a little apartment in Walnut Creek with blue carpet, an always-cold swimming pool, and a Thai grocery store across the street.

I slam the Jeep door a little too hard. The house looms over me. Three stories of peeling paint, shutters that hang by rusted screws. Dense ivy strangles the porch columns. The front door is swollen with rot and age.

“Let me get that.” Dad gives the door a hard shove and it opens.

Inside, it’s quiet. Dad makes a beeline for his laptop, which is perched on the coffee table in the living room. Above the couch is one of Willow’s enormous oil paintings, gray with streaks of black and navy. It looks like a threatening rain cloud. I’m half tempted to get Dad an umbrella, but I suppose that would support his theory that I’m acting like a child.

“Where is everyone?”

“Kandy’s off somewhere getting her nails done,” Dad says. “Willow’s in her studio.”

“Looks like you’re busy too,” I say, motioning to the piles of paperwork.

He nods. “The label for the spinach-artichoke sauce is killing me.”

“A delicious source of iron?” I try. “A heart-healthy pasta topping?”

Dad wrinkles his nose. “That’s all been done before. I’m trying to create a story, something fresh.” He deepens his voice. “In the year 1864, an Italian farmer planted his first tomato plant.”

“When was the last time you slept? That’s a question for you, not a suggestion for the sauce label.”

“I tried last night.” He winks at me and starts shuffling through a stack of file folders.

“You should get some fresh air. Go for a walk or something.”

Dad gazes at the computer screen. “Hmm.”

“I’m going to unpack some more,” I tell Dad, though I know he’s just tuned me out. Click. Off. He’s in spinach-artichoke land, in Italy, in the year 1864. So I head upstairs to my room. At some point—maybe—it won’t feel horrible to call it my room. Right now it’s just walls, ceiling, and floor, in the wrong city, in the wrong state.

There are stacks of boxes labeled RUBY’S. I use a pair of scissors to slice through the tape on a smaller box. It’s crammed with DVDs and my old iPod. Plastic hangers go in the closet, and a lace-collared dress I should’ve never packed goes in the trash.

Under my suitcase, I find Physics of the Impossible , so I put it on the bookshelf, next to Kaku’s other books. Then I sort through a stack of laundry on my bed, and an unfamiliar hoodie surfaces. I hold it up to examine it, and a plastic drugstore bag—full of lipstick and eye shadow—spills onto the tangled sheets of my unmade bed. It must be Kandy’s.

I sift through the goo tubes. Several are red, and I have to laugh. I’m sure Kandy has no idea they make the red coloring from pulverized beetle shells. Yeah, you’re wearing a scale insect in the suborder Sternorrhyncha on your lips.

I walk across the hall to Kandy’s room and flinch at the sign on the door: GET LOST, GO AWAY, DIE. It wasn’t there yesterday, so I can only assume it’s for me. Gosh, I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I listen for a moment, trying to hear footsteps or voices coming from downstairs. Silence. No sign that Kandy’s home yet, so I open the door.

In contrast to the rest of the house, her room is bright with color. Three walls are red, the fourth silver. The red walls are covered with clippings from magazines. Mostly celebrity red-carpet photos. On the silver wall is a framed Wassily Kandinsky print. That’s who Kandy’s named after, which is just plain wacky. I mean, the guy was a Russian painter, no relation. He just happened to be the subject of Willow’s MFA thesis when she got pregnant.

I toss the hoodie and the bag of makeup on Kandy’s bed, then go to the window to look at an astounding oak tree that’s on the property behind us, about a half mile away. Kandy’s got a better view than I do, the best in the house. I’m guessing the tree’s eighty feet tall, maybe more. It’s crooked and magnificent, surrounded by acres of cornfields. I don’t believe in magic, but I do believe in jaw-droppers conjured up by Mother Nature. The Northern Lights, for one. Brachiosaurus standing forty feet tall, volcanoes spewing 2000-degree lava, the Milky Way containing 100 billion planets. All of it seems otherworldly, the stuff of pure imagination.