“The very
moment I put hammer to chisel with the intention of finding NoahandJude, my
mind goes to the day Noah almost drowned.
Mom had just died. I was at the
sewing machine with Grandma Sweetwine, one of her very first visits. I was
working on the seam of a dress, when it’s like the room shook me, that’s the
only way I can describe it. Grandma said: Go,
only it was more like a tornado blowing the world at me. I flew out of my
chair, out of the window, slid all the way down the bluff, my feet touching the
sand as Noah hit the water. He didn’t come up. I knew he wasn’t going to. I’ve
never been scared like that before, not even when Mom died. There was boiling
liquid in my veins.
I ram the chisel with the hammer,
watch a corner of the stone break off, watching myself rush into the surf that
winter day. I swam fast as a shark despite my clothes, then started diving down
where he sank, gripping armful after armful of water, trying to think about
currents and riptides and maelstroms and everything Dad had ever taught me. I
let the rip take me, dove down again, up and down, until there was Noah
floating faceup, alive, but not conscious. I dragged him to shore, swimming
one-armed, sinking more every stroke with the weight of him, both our lives
pounding inside me, and then on the beach, I beat his sternum with shaking
hands, blew breath after terrified breath into his cold clammy mouth, and when
he revived, the second I knew he was okay, I slapped him as hard as I could
across the face.
Because how could he have done this?
How could he have chosen to leave me here all alone?
He told me he hadn’t been trying to
kill himself, but I didn’t believe him.”
I chose this passage from the book
from when Jude was carving a stone sculpture of her and Noah together. Her
instructor, Guillermo, had told her that she would find in the rock, what she
could find in her heart. So, to put emotion into her work, she recalled the
story of the only time in her life when she had been in the world without Noah.
This was when he had drowned and almost died. She was terrified because, since
they are twins, they had always been there for each other, and she didn’t want
to lose him.
When Jude talks about how it was one
of her grandmother’s “very first visits,” she means one of her very first
visits from the dead. Her grandmother’s ghost visited her after she died, and
it was one the first times that had happened.
Noah was trying to kill himself
because everything had seemed to go wrong. His mother had died, his family was
torn up and he loved a boy he didn’t think would ever love him back.
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