Every Visible Thing, page 27
His mother nudges the backs of his sneakers with her clogs. “You’re getting so tall,” she says sadly.
“Do I look like him?” Owen says. He tenses, ready for her anger.
“You do,” she says. “You all do.”
His mother holds on to him so tightly he can barely breathe. He doesn’t dare tell her to let go.
epilogue
the fureys, 1986
On the days that they have family therapy, Lena comes by to pick her brother up. Most days Owen meets her outside, but there are some, when it’s raining or cold or he’s lingering by his cubby, when she has to walk through her life to get to him. She lopes—tall, lanky, and severe, with close-cropped hair and a look she thinks is adult weariness, but is not—past the carpeted pit of the kindergarten, the tiny water fountains and open classrooms of the first through third grades, the cafeteria and the nurse’s office and the gym, up the stairs and past Mr. Gabriel’s sex ed class, the World War II timeline, and the auditorium that hosts band practice, school plays, and dances for seventh and eighth grades. Boys and girls half her size part their ranks to let her by. The ones who have siblings just like her at home barely look up, but the other children stare back in awe, because to them the concept of a teenager is still shrouded in mystery.
Sometimes she brings Jonah with her, which makes everything easier. Owen has been hard. Her parents are nervous and careful and suddenly eager to talk, but Owen, after her eight weeks away, and a summer of close supervision, is suspicious. As if the person they sent back is not the sister he remembers. He likes Jonah and laughs more easily with him around. Jonah tells her it will take time. The same thing happened with his family. Owen has to recover from the thought of losing her.
They walk to the T station, shuffling combat boots and sneakers through orange and red leaves, stirring up smells that make them remember. They take the train downtown, exiting at Longwood Medical. Jonah stays aboard, heading to Kenmore Square to shop for records. Lena and Owen walk past flower shops, cafés, and doctor’s offices, past whole hospitals devoted to cancer, diabetes, or women. Their parents, coming from the med school and an office building at Copley, meet them in the lobby of Children’s Hospital, by the gift shop. For the first instant, when they are pushing through the revolving door and their parents are stepping forward to meet them, Lena always feels as if they are about to be introduced. As though one of the white-coated men or women speed-walking by will stop, point with a pen, and announce: This is your family. But then her father will ask about school, and her mother will use two fingers of each hand to swiftly tuck Owen’s shirt in, and Lena will remember exactly who they are.
After the meetings—which are hard because Lena keeps rediscovering, every week, like a secret that has outgrown its hiding place, how angry she really is, and worse, how angry they are at her—the Fureys go home. They do homework, take baths and showers, do laundry, eat dinner, watch TV. Lena tries to make Owen laugh, because he’s still in the habit of looking more serious and doomy than he actually feels. After dinner, their father will play cards or chess with Owen while Lena sits at the other end of the table looking at her negatives. She was given a camera for her birthday and takes pictures all the time, to make up for the ones she lost. She prefers taking pictures of objects, things and their shadows, because things do not pose or lie or try too hard to smile. But she also takes pictures of her parents, and Owen, and the family reunions at her grandmother’s house. Somebody has to.
They go to bed early now, lights out, doors cracked open to let in the air. Occasionally, one will meet another prowling the halls, recovering from a dream, checking the beds, listening for breathing, relocking the back door. But mostly they sleep, saving their energy for everything they have to do during the day.
In the hallway, next to the print of a Byzantine seraph with dark eyes like pocks covering his six massive wings, is a small matted and framed quote. It is the epigraph to their father’s book, which has been accepted by his publisher and is due to come out next Christmas.
Every visible thing in this world is put in the charge of an angel.
—SAINT AUGUSTINE, EIGHT QUESTIONS
Sometimes, when Lena stands there, under the wings and eyes, if she is very still, she can feel a hint of what Owen has told her about, a heaviness, a fluttering noise, a smell that has been gone for years. After it is over, she will think she imagined it. But while it is happening, she has the oddest sensation. She feels as if she is more than one soul occupying the same space. She can feel herself at every age, Owen alone in his room, her mother taking a stranger’s pulse, her father trying to read a book on the train. She can see her entire family, not as if she is watching them from above, but as if she is all of them, looking out from within.
Even the one who is missing.
About the Author
lisa carey is the author of The Mermaids Singing, In the Country of the Young, and Love in the Asylum. She lived in Ireland for five years and now resides in Portland, Maine, with her husband and their son.
WWW.LISACAREY.COM
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PRAISE FOR
Lisa Carey and Every Visible Thing
“An emotionally compelling novel…. Bracing insight and sensitivity…. Every Visible Thing is a dramatic reminder of just what a corrosive mixture grief and silence can be.”
—Washington Post Book World
“What I love about Lisa Carey’s books is the way she manages to interweave magical elements without the story ever, for a moment, seeming contrived or strained. Her characters are absolutely real; it’s a rare writer who can depict the voices of children and teenagers with such pitch-perfect accuracy. Everything that happens to them, even the most fantastical, the most gut-wrenching and tragic, seems inevitable and true. I read Every Visible Thing just like I read all Carey’s other books, late into the night, loath to put it down even to sleep. And the book has lingered in my imagination ever since I finished it. It is a remarkable feat.”
—Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
“Powerful…. This intimate study of family dysfunction combines with an intense look at adolescence…. Carey’s compelling, dark, and frightening story does promise a glimmer of hope.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Prose that blossoms like a bruise, both aching and vivid…heartbreaking and, ultimately, redemptive. A-.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Heartfelt…. In less capable hands, the story of a family torn apart by a runaway teenager…could turn mawkish…. Carey details the Fureys’ disintegration and tentative steps toward rapprochement.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Carey skillfully unfolds…a compelling, believable portrait of the confusion of adolescence.”
—Associated Press
“Graceful, affecting…rewarding, suffused in lucid grief and delicate longings.”
—Publishers Weekly
also by lisa carey
LOVE IN THE ASYLUM
IN THE COUNTRY OF THE YOUNG
THE MERMAIDS SINGING
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EVERY VISIBLE THING. Copyright © 2006 by Lisa Carey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition DECEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780061976919
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Lisa Carey, Every Visible Thing
