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“I don’t know. I wish you would have witnessed it. Everyone around the backyard saw it. Maybe ask Casey or Jessie.” They’re cousins of ours on our dad’s side.
“I wouldn’t read too much into it. It’s just mom being mom.”
That normally explains almost anything of Evelyn James, but I can’t put my finger on it.
Ash looks like he’s a deer in the headlights as some of my parent’s neighbors have cornered him. “Let me go rescue Ash. He’s rattled by mom’s weird reaction, like she already hates him.”
“I’ll catch up with you later, then. I better start the grill, since Mom and Dad aren’t down here.”
I move toward Ash and tactfully rescue him out of the snake pit. I never saw it going down this way. “Hey, come with me,” I offer, extending my hand, and he takes it as we climb the steps to the second floor.
I open up my room, still decorated like it was when I left for college at the age of eighteen.
“I thought you could use a break. Fuck, Ash. I’m sorry about my mom.”
He shrugs his shoulders. “It’s fine. I can’t imagine it has anything to do with me. She saw me for all of ten seconds.”
I tug him onto my twin-sized bed, pulling him against the wall, his head leaning against my shoulder.
“Hey, I have a question for you. There was a man with a purple T-shirt, glasses, and a straw hat, under the large tree near the back fence—who is that?”
“Ah, if I’m thinking right, that would be my Uncle Jim. He’s not really my uncle. Mom was an only kid, and Jim is her cousin. They’ve always been close, like siblings, because they’re all they had growing up. Why do you ask?”
“He looks familiar, but I can’t place him. I’m usually great with faces. Horrible at names. Maybe he just has one of those faces.”
We’re quiet for a couple minutes. I’m wondering if he fell asleep when he pops out of the bed like a fucking jack rabbit. “What is that?”
He steps slowly toward a piece I made when I was nine years old.
“Oh, yeah. That was what I was telling you about the other day, the art project I’m working the kids up to. I saw something similar at the science center on my ninth birthday.”
I continue to explain how I was enamored by it, and came home that night and tried to replicate it. But he’s lost in his own world, staring as though he’s seen it before.
23
Ashton
Noah is speaking.I hear his voice, but the words aren’t permeating my mind. I’m tuning him out—everything after ninth birthday, science museum, and art project. My mind is transported back to the day I stood next to a boy close to my age, and we talked about how this very item could be made at home. I exchanged words with this kid for less than two minutes while he mostly explained what to do, counting all the colors. He encouraged me, telling me that it would be easy.
“Ash, you okay?” he questions.
“You said you saw this at a science center. On your birthday?” I ask.
“Yeah, not just a science center but the one near what used to be Key Arena, where the Pearl Jam concert took place. Why?”
I can’t begin to say what triggers random memories. But something this bright and vivid has prompted me to remember it now, so distinctly.
“My mom worked on my birthday, when I turned nine, and she promised to take me to the Seattle Center the next day. I’d never been in the Space Needle before. But first, she surprised us with tickets to the science center. And I remember seeing something similar, and this boy, close to my age, was counting the colors, telling me how to make it.”
I’m staring at almost the mirror image of what I remembered sixteen years ago. “Was that you?” I ask, my finger touching each color of the open sunlight piñata I remember from so long ago
I can feel Noah’s stare on me, and he begins to speak. “I vaguely remember a kid saying he couldn’t do it and I said...”
“It’s a pattern, see. You just have to count the number of colors, and repeat.”
We say the words at the same time. My mouth opens, and my entire body begins to prickle with goose bumps. “Is that even fucking possible? What are the odds, Noah?” I’m in awe, as I am with most things when it comes to my growing relationship with him. “And hell, Noah, this is amazing, and you’ve had it for sixteen years?” I ask.
“Well, this was my fourth attempt. I had to figure out how to hollow out the middle to make it 3-D. It’s what I’m trying to teach the kids.”
