We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(76)

Brock says his year at Hidden Beach healed him. He found people who didn’t care that he had ever been Sammy, and he stopped thinking of himself as a has-been. He says he reached all the way sober, the kind where he doesn’t think about starting up again anymore, which lots of people aren’t lucky enough to get to. He burned the donkey skin he used to live inside.

Now he’s got a regular job as the voice of a teen superhero in a cartoon. He does a lot of auditions and books parts now and then in TV shows and movies. He takes yoga, takes Glum on long runs, and is learning to surf.

He lives with Meer in a skylit loft apartment, right on Venice Beach. It’s not so far from Saar’s bungalow, so it’s easy for us to be together when I’m home on college breaks, since I still live with Saar when school isn’t in session. Odd as that domestic arrangement may seem, he is now my dad-type person.

Meer has become surprisingly interested in investments, in the sale of various Cello paintings, and in the charities he supports—arts education and solutions for food insecurity in particular. He has opinions about cryptocurrency. It’s as if the energy he spent collecting purple rocks and drawing on his skin is now channeled into making good use of his famous-dad inheritance.

He also apprentices with a tattoo artist who has a shop on Abbot Kinney. And he has a cute boyfriend, a senior at Occidental who studies poetry and surfs on the weekend and rides a bike everywhere in the LA traffic.

Last spring, Meer helped arrange a retrospective of Kingsley’s work at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum borrowed Lost from me, Selkie Child from Tatum, and Sammy from Holland’s mother. They also sourced paintings from a number of big collections, so Persephone Escapes the Underworld was on loan from St. Louis.

The display of her image in this celebrated exhibition was enough to get my mother to fly in from Mexico City. It was the first time I had seen Isadora in person since she left.

I was nervous. And still angry.

But it was good to see her—to feel her soft skin against my face when we hugged, to see the way she lights up a room, and to meet her boyfriend for the second time.

I don’t feel like she’s my family anymore.

I mean, she is. We will always have our blood tie. But blood ties are just what you make of them.

We didn’t talk about anything important.

She didn’t say she was sorry.

I didn’t try to make her, since it’s pretty much against her philosophy.

I think you can decide to be obligated to someone. You can decide they are worth the commitment and the devotion. And when that’s what you’ve decided, you step up for them. You offer backup. The commitment doesn’t have to last forever, but if you act like it matters enough to last, it has a chance of lasting.

My mother doesn’t really do any of that. She is too caught up in her own sparkle, too enamored of her own next adventure. She went back to Mexico City after the show. I have no idea how long she’ll stay there. Maybe only till a new guy comes along. She isn’t going to change.

Holland wasn’t able to come for the opening of the exhibition. She was busy studying at Brown University and generally winning without trying, which is how things go for her. But she and Winnie have finally realized they’re in love with each other, and since Winnie is in LA taking acting classes and trying to break into Hollywood, Holland will be out here for the summer so they can give the relationship a try. She’s also coming to see us—me and Meer. She and I text all the time, keeping up the new family ties we’ve created when the previous generation severed them. I’m conscious of the drops of Sinclair blood that tie us all together, but that’s not enough to make a family. It takes some effort.

Money keeps coming in as Gabe continues to sell Kingsley’s paintings. And Meer doesn’t want or need all his inheritance, so he set up trusts for me and for Tatum. It’s enough to pay for school, and for much more after that. So much, I hardly know how to even think about it.

He offered the same to Brock, but Brock refused it. He says living rent-free in Meer’s apartment is more than enough. So Meer gave him three paintings for a birthday present, did all the paperwork, and wouldn’t take them back.

Down in Irvine, Tatum and I rent rooms in a large house full of other students. I’m near the end of my junior year, learning 3D computer modeling and video game design, but also taking World Mythology, Modern Jewish History, and a class about bees. Tatum spent the first two years at a community college and now he’s getting a certificate in herbalism at a school half an hour away.

We can walk from our place to the ocean.

He does it every day. He comes home with the scent of the sea on his skin.





72


In my sketchbook, and for my thesis next year, I’m building a game.



* * *



—

It’s called Chandelier. You begin adrift

on a raft in a storm.

Soon you come to

a seemingly abandoned castle that is half filled with water.

You begin to make your way through.

Some levels are only damp, with water leaking from their ceilings in a drizzle.

In others, the water is deep enough to swim in.

Still other rooms require you to navigate in your seal body,

which makes you submersible without breathing for long periods of time.