The Theory of Everything
for Claire, thank you for always inspiring me
and
for Tori, forever ago
Chapter One
"The Woman with the Red Umbrella"
(Batty-11, Jane-17, Skye-17 (almost 18), Rosalind-19)
Our story begins as they usually do, with a boy and a girl and an odd circumstance. The way in which our story unfolds however, is uniquely its own.
Our story begins with a man sitting in the backseat of a taxicab on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street. The man is young. The arms on his jacket are a bit too short and his nose is slightly crooked. The man first sees her through a grimy taxicab window that seems to obscure the beauty of everything in the grey city but no, no. Not her. When he first sees her, his chin is resting on the cracked vinyl of the door and his nose is pressed into the glass so that it turns up a bit, like children do to amuse their friends on the other side. When he first sees her, the red umbrella catches his attention but the look on her face makes his head snap up and bump ungracefully against the doorframe. Her mouth… goodness that mouth. Mouth like the latch on a locket. Mouth like it's going to rain. Mouth like a chrysanthemum. Snapdragon, thistle, marigold mouth!
The woman is running, rounding the corner onto Seventh Avenue with her clothes flying and her red umbrella above her acting more like a parachute in the cold wind than it should. She is grinning like a small child, gleeful and terrified like you might be in a game of tag. Her tongue pokes out of the corner of her mouth in determination, and his heart stutters a bit in his chest. He realizes that she is running toward the bus stop almost immediately, because he had chased down a few buses at that corner himself.
He is waving his hands then, rather pointlessly in the air, at the girl, at the cabbie, at this girl. When he finds his words he tells the cabbie to stop, thanks, and yes I realize we have only gone maybe forty feet or so and no, keep the change. And then he stumbles out of the cab and onto the wet streets of New York, New York.
The woman is still running and the bus, hulking on the corner like a thing alive, was belching steam into the cold misty air. Martin suddenly found himself running too, the water on the pavement soaking the bottom of his pant legs. Then, in a great culmination of sound and motion, Martin and the woman both reached the bus, just as it shuttered to life and the doors started to swing shut...
Martin threw out his hand and caught the doors at the last moment, squishing his fingers slightly before forcing the doors open again. The woman was laughing from behind him.
"Goodness. Thank you."
"You're welcome."
With a quick step she was up and retreating into the belly of the beast, handing a small shiny coin to the bus driver with that laughing voice like wind chimes. He cursed himself as she walked away. What luck! He helped the girl of his dreams slip from his fingers!
"Are you coming?" he heard a small tinkling voice ask from inside the dark bus. He looked up to see her looking at him.
"Where are you going?"
"Does it matter?" she asked, her mouth - god, her mouth - curving up into a small smile.
Martin simply grunted and followed her in.
Several stops later, she was laughing at his quiet jokes and the way his glasses sat askew on his nose. Several more stops and she touched his knees with a silent reverence. When she finally whispered that the next stop was hers, she produced a pen and wrote her telephone number in the curve of his wrist. As she walked away from him down the isle he called after her.
"You never told me your name!"
"It's Elizabeth."
Elizabeth. The first time he whispered it, it tasted like the next seventy years of his life in his mouth.
(Seventy years cut to twenty-four, twenty-four long enough for a thousand lives to be lived in between.)
Dear reader, this is a story that starts and pumps and stops like a heart, and there is very little you can do about any of it (the pumping, the stopping - both can be so violent).
…
Skye was standing with the hot sun on her back, cloaked by a small cloud of dust. There was blood in the dirt and blood on her teeth and her knuckles connected with his jaw sending him to the dirt of the old school yard. Pain erupted in her hand and blood dribbled from his chin down her wrist. Her head was buzzing like a traffic light at midnight. Sweat dripped into her eyes as his friends jumped to separate them. Before they could pull her off, Skye spat in the dirt and with a feeling of grim triumph, walked away.
When Skye dropped Batty off at the elementary school for the last day before summer break holding another girl's hand and grinning from ear to ear, Skye half expected this - the teasing, the crestfallen eyes, the bloodied lip. She also fully expected it to never happen again.
When Skye jumped the chain link fence to rejoin Batty on the sidewalk beside the school, Batty's eyes were wide and she looked positively horrified that Skye had just beaten up one of her classmates (albeit a very tall fifth grader). Skye rolled her eyes and took her hand because really, was she all that surprised? They walked for a few blocks like this, in the stifling heat and silence until Batty stopped dead in her tracks.
"Skye? Am I odd?"
Skye licked her chapped lips and struggled against the reeling head of the rage she felt in her chest. She suddenly felt very young, like she was eleven years old and kneeling in front of her younger sister in the grass in front of a mansion in the foothills of the Berkshires. Eleven-year-old heart the size of a fist, always swinging. Batty, alligator teardrop eyes and crumpling butterfly wings…
Skye rolled her tongue over her teeth, tasting the coppery slickness there and then knelt down in front of her sister, because even at eleven years old (heart like a fist, fist clutching another girl's hand), Batty was much shorter than Skye.
"No, stupid. You're perfect."
…
And so Skye saved the day again, because Skye has always been brave. Batty was sitting on the back steps with Rosalind and Jane sitting on either side of her. Rosalind was holding a cold, damp towel to her lip and Jane was fretting.
"Why didn't you say anything?" Jane asked, and Rosalind shot her a dark look that told her to be quiet.
Batty shrugged. "I'm not very brave," she mumbled against the towel.
"I don't think that's true," Rosalind said, but Batty was pretty sure she only said it out of sisterly obligation.
Inside the house, Batty could hear Alec's booming laughter and a party popper being opened (probably courtesy of Ben). The Tiftons were in town for Skye and Jeffrey's high school graduation. She looked out across the yard where Skye was standing across from Jeffrey, wild hair like a mane, heart like a lion's. Skye was the kind of brave that made itself known. She wore it around her shoulders like a cloak, and Batty swore she could almost see it settling around her collarbone, shimmering and unbreakable. It was something in her steel blue eyes, something in her gait, something in her swollen knuckles… Like now, when Skye turned hard on her heel and marched Jeffrey out the side gate in the direction of Quigley Wood, something about her radiated a confidence that Batty was nearly certain she would never possess.
…
Skye was laughing and racing ahead of Jeffrey, barefoot through the woods. The path had been beaten down by her own feet so many times before that the path had become worn and well defined. The woods around them blurred green and brown as they raced on. Jeffrey let out a whoop behind her that sent the cardinals scattering and fluttering around the canopy in a tizzy. Skye looked over her shoulder at him, laughing again at the goofy look of satisfaction on his face. "Come on!" she shouted, jumping over the creek at a particularly narrow part and charging up the bank on the other side. She hadn't done this in years. The last time she had been here she had taken Batty, who insisted upon going slowly, picking their way through the trees. The sun peeked through the leaves above them and fell hot against her back and a cool wind wound its way around her shoulders. Everything smelled of leaf rot and damp wood, and for the first time in a long time, the decay was on the outside. Skye could breathe a little easier.
Skye didn't stop running until she came to the double row of overgrown lilacs, where she turned around and walked backwards to watch Jeffrey's face as they came upon the ruined house in the woods. He wore an expression of awe and exhaustion, and she grinned. If Skye were a more sentimental person (which of course, she wasn't), she might wish to freeze this moment in time forever; chests heaving with effort, sweat making their shirts stick to their backs, his eyes looking young and wild like they were when they first met, before he was soft and doughy-eyed. It was good, and Skye wanted to curl up and die in it.
Skye came to the clearing where the foundations of the ancient house stood and stepped forward to lead Jeffrey through the gap where the door once was. She stopped in the middle of the old house and gestured around her.
"This place must have burned down years ago. Now it belongs to the birds and the rabbits." A cardinal swooped down from the top of the chimney as if to prove her point. "It's kinda my special place."
Jeffrey let out a low whistle and stooped down to run his fingers over the stone.
"Why are you showing me this?"
Skye sighed and blew a long breath out between her teeth. "I'm extending an olive branch."
"You're what?"
"It's a peace offering, stupid. I mean, we're still best friends, right? After everything?" After stair-top conversations and phone-whisper confessions?
"Oh," he said. "Of course." But Skye saw his eyes say something different than his mouth, and she lurched forward to catch his sleeve before he could turn away from her and rearrange his facial features into careful indifference again.
"Jeffrey." She whipped him around to face her with a sharp tug at his shirt. "You said you were over it."
"I never said I was over it, I said I would stop bothering you about it," he said, mouth twisting bitterly. A surprisingly cool wind blew across the clearing, making the hair that usually lays flat against his forehead stand out at an odd angle.
"Well, get over it. I told you it wasn't going to happen." She was trying to sound angry, but her voice was desperate. Why couldn't he understand?
"I know Skye."
"Then why are we still doing this?"
"Because I can't. Okay? I can't." Why can't she understand? She was twisting his sleeve hard enough now that it hurt. Everything hurt.
She looked down but her iron grip remained solid. "Don't say that," she said.
Jeffrey sighed. "Skye, let go of me."
"Not until you let go of me," she said. He knew what she meant.
"No."
Skye twisted his sleeve harder and made some inhuman noise in the back of her throat before she wrenched him forward and kissed him hard. It was an angry kiss. It was a surprising click of teeth and lips that were hard and tasted metallic. It was two hearts clenching painfully and curled fingers digging into wrists. She kissed him because she was seventeen and reckless, young and angry, and because even with her mouth open against his, he was her best friend and she needed him to understand. She ripped her mouth away after impossibly long seconds, and when his eyes slid open to look into hers, her thunderstorm eyes flashed betrayal. In that moment he knew. Finally, he knew.
…
In truth, her heart is a heart held in a hand that's balled into a fist.
There is no release in this analogy and no release in her love.
In truth, her heart was a heart always and forever her own.
…
Skye didn't go home. Instead she wandered through the town; along the deer trails in the woods, through backyards, along sidewalks until she got to where she didn't know she was going. It was fitting though, she supposed, for her feet to take her here. After everything (after stair-top conversations and house-ruin kisses) she felt that she needed to lay a great something to rest. What better place to bury your almost-ghosts than a cemetery?
Skye climbed over the brittle rod iron fence and caught her pants just once on the intricate ironwork. The air was cooler here than it had been in the woods, something about the thick shade and cold bodies.
She picked her way through the dandelions and thistles to where the familiar headstone stood guard under the shade of a maple tree. She dropped to her knees with a soft thump in the dirt and she forced herself not to think about the bones beneath her. The stone, though worn smooth with age hadn't changed over the years and Skye took comfort in this, reaching out to trace the letters there that her fingers knew well ( R).
She and her sisters visited here often, but it was always alone and never something they talked about. Skye only knew about their visits by the things they left behind. Rosalind, for example, left fresh bunches of primroses from the woods every Tuesday during the spring and summer months. Jane left words – bits of poetry and prose - written on little scraps of paper and tucked into the crannies of the rock. Batty had been to their mother's grave exactly once, and Skye only knew this because Batty asked her to drive her there once a few years ago. Skye had been curious enough to oblige without complaining, and remembered waiting in the idling car in front of the old church as Batty scampered around the back to the graveyard gate like it was yesterday. Batty left nothing, or so Skye thought. (Though the churchgoers swore that if you listened closely, you could hear the little tune that Batty had left dancing through the trees that day.) And Skye? Skye left fistfuls of frustrations. After all, they say that her mother had the same obdurate spirit as her, so Skye figured she would understand.
Today, she left a memory of a kiss and melting green eyes, forcing it from her body into the ground where she was hoping she could leave six feet under (Silly girl, don't you know how ghost haunt? How dirt and death don't make a difference?). It wasn't very scientific, but for once Skye didn't care. When it came to her mother, Skye was every bit a blind believer as the churchgoers. When she felt satisfied – foolishly, blindly – that the thing was buried from sight, she sat back on her hands and let the cool air wash her of the woods and his hands.
The day was beautiful; warm where the sun fell in patches on the grass, cool where the shade fell in the negatives, insects and birds teeming at the edge of the forest. Skye could feel the bitterness in her bones fading as he slipped from her mind. As her gaze floated around she spotted a man standing in the shade of the elm near the gate. It was her father, looking ghostly and surreal in the hazy light, his arms behind his back. Skye wondered for a brief moment if he was an apparition of sorts, the bit of his spirit that he laid to rest with her mother. Ridiculous thoughts! How illogical! This was the first time Skye doubted that seeing was really believing and she left this little betrayal of science with her mother, buried in a grave of its own.
She rose to her feet and went to him. Never mind how he knew she was here, he always seemed to know anyway. When she reached him he wrapped an arm around her shoulder and they walked slowly through the cool graveyard, through the kissing gate and to the pickup truck that her father had bought off of Aunt Claire for four hundred dollars when Flashvan finally broke down.
As Skye was buckling her seatbelt, he looked at her carefully for a long moment before turning the key in the ignition and bringing the sputtering truck to life.
"Want to tell me how, exactly, you made a teenage boy cry?"
Skye huffed. "Daddy, don't ask such absurd questions."
He shook his head fondly, wearily, and didn't ask again.
…
That night when she fell into a restless sleep, Skye dreamed of a burning house and a boy inside that she couldn't get out. She lied down next to him and watched the firelight dance on his familiar face until it over took both of them in a flash of light and heat. The last thing she saw was the smoke in his eyes before she woke up.
No one who loves either of them speaks of the "graduation party incident" and the sore festers.
...
Author's note: So I wrote this several years ago and found it recently on my laptop, largely unedited and unfinished. I spent the summer fixing it up for you all but I left a lot of the original content as a bit of a tribute to my younger self. The story is often a bit out of character, something I have become much better at as I have grown older, but I apologize in advance for that. It was almost entirely written before The Penderwicks in Spring came out so it's not in compliance with that. Also note that the first part of each chapter is written as a flashback - I hope this is clear.
The whole story has been written, so updates will depend on the response that I get. UPDATES WILL HAPPEN ON ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN FIRST. I'd love if you would check out the story over there (my username over there is janependerwick). Love you all.
