Sprout

movies or Wikipedia. Because it’s not just about flesh. Bodies fitting together like puzzle pieces. There’s an alchemy that happens during sex that causes 1 + 1 to add up to so much more than 2, even as those halves meld in an almost magical way to form a single unit that’s more complete than either of them alone. I don’t know, maybe it’s just endorphins, but I’ve run an entire marathon and it didn’t make me feel that good (actually it pretty much made me feel like cutting my legs off, but whatever). And so anyway, yeah: sex. Awesome . But almost as great was the fact that Ty’s dad never even knew he left the house, which meant we were able to get together the very next day—by which I mean we were able to have sex again the very next day, because it turns out that one of the things about sex is that once you’ve done it you want to do it again and again. But at some point while we were at it the second time Mr. Petit discovered the missing pistol, which we’d forgotten by the riverbed. I didn’t see Ty for a whole week after he went home Sunday afternoon. Not after school, not in school either. The only reason I knew he was still alive was because he called me the third night. “I’m still alive,” was all he said before he hung up. When he came back to school he was limping, his bottom lip was split and scabbed and there were purple crescent bruises under both eyes. His fingers trembled as he handed his father’s note to Mrs. Helicopter in the front office.
    “She didn’t even read it,” he told me at lunch. “Just told me to get to class.”

The nidus and the nodus (no really, look ’em up)
    My mom was home for eight days after her cancer treatment failed. Because she was on morphine we were required to have a nurse in the house, although, once she’d shown us how to adjust the drip, she (the nurse, not my mom) spent most of her time in the dining room, drinking coffee and reading magazines and every once in a while responding to a text message, her phone muted so that the only sound was the mechanical clicking of the keys. My mom’d had a flood of visitors at the hospital, but now she sent everyone away except for her own mother and my dad and me. She said her goodbyes individually. To be honest I don’t remember most of what she told me. A lifetime of motherly advice packed into a few minutes, but what stands out is how tightly she clutched my hand—not like she was trying to pull herself up, but like she was trying to save me from falling. She squeezed my hand. She told me to be good. She told me to be happy. Told me never to put off till tomorrow what I could do today. Never to deny myself anything as long as it didn’t come at someone else’s expense. She squeezed so tightly. My mom and my dad were both atheists and the prospect of death didn’t change that. But my mom did say death had nothing do with her love for me: a mother’s love is just a fact in the world, she said, like the ground or the sky. It didn’t matter if she was alive or not, her love would always be there and I should always remember that. Always . Tell you the truth, it can be hard sometimes. Especially in winter, when the leaves have fallen and the vines that cover our house look like a raggedy old net and the trees look like so many prison bars. But it’s just then, just when I’m looking out the window feeling trapped by … by Kansas, I guess you’d say, it’s just then that I realize I’m squeezing one hand with the other, and I remember the feeling of her hand on mine. How tightly she squeezed. How hard she fought to keep me from falling into the abyss. A mother’s love. A fact in the world, even if she herself was gone.
    I’m bringing this up now because I originally started this chapter by saying that the week Ty disappeared was the longest of my life. But really, it was the second longest. The entire time he was gone, though, I couldn’t help but think he’d never come back, just like I’d believed my mom was never going to get out of the hospital. But it was worse than that. Because my mom did get out. She came home. But once she was home, a part of me wished she’d never left the hospital, because the only reason she returned was to say goodbye. To die. And I know the two situations are completely different, but after Ty showed up again I found myself swamped by those same feelings. The feeling that I only had him for a limited time. That I had to maximize every single second.