Carry the Sky Read online

  Advance Praise for Carry the Sky

  “Lyrical, moving, and hauntingly beautiful, Kate Gray’s Carry the Sky winds between two voices, Taylor and Song, both navigating the narrow lanes of St. Timothy’s boarding school where they teach, both hitting the walls that surround them. One uses science to make sense of loneliness, loss, and desire—the other uses the beat of a rower’s oar in water. Together these two outsiders struggle to move past mourning, to seek hope as they crack open their insular world. Carry the Sky is full of unforgettable characters and images, each word carefully chosen, like a perfect fold in a paper crane, creating a

  graceful neck, strong tail, and mighty wings, perched on the edge

  of the page, ready to take flight.”

  – Hannah Tinti, bestselling author of The Good Thief

  and co-founder of One Story

  “Carry the Sky is as intricate and precise as the paper cranes its characters fold. It comes as no surprise that Kate Gray is a poet as well as a fine novelist. Here we are surely in a poet’s hands, her lyricism and attention to detail elevating the boarding-school narrative to something heartbreaking and truly universal.”

  – Cari Luna, author of The Revolution of Every Day

  “The people in Kate Gray’s intricate, visceral, and heartbreaking novel Carry the Sky armor themselves. Cocooned in sport, science, manipulation, power, privilege, or eccentricity, they face the fragility of their invented safe spaces when love, sex, violation, and obsession strip them to their most intimate selves. I can’t say enough good things about this sizzling, deeply profound, poetic work.”

  – Davis Slater, author of Selling Sin at the Hoot-Possum Auction

  “In the small, close world of a boarding school, three broken people circle each other, drawing closer to the tragedy that will move them all, finally, beyond their private sorrows. Three voices, three stories, and we are caught up in those stories as they are slowly revealed, like shards of a shattered mirror, one piece at a time. There is huge humanity in this novel. It is shockingly beautiful. Kate Gray is relentless.”

  – Joanna Rose, author of Little Miss Strange

  “Carry the Sky is a dazzling narrative mosaic about innocence lost, the ghosts we grieve, and the emptiness of some forms of discipline and delineation. Kate Gray gives us a ‘page-turner’ in the best sense: you’ll want to read both fast and slow, moving back and forth through this fearlessly told story, savoring.”

  – M. Allen Cunningham, author of

  The Green Age of Asher Witherow and Lost Son

  “In Carry the Sky, two lonely hearts beat: Taylor Alta’s in time to a cox’n’s chant, and Jack Song’s to the mathematical pulse of physics equations. Both are misfits in the moneyed, J.Crew world of St. Timothy’s, an exclusive boarding school where the privileges of the old boy network threaten to trump right and wrong. This smartly told story kept me turning pages late into the night, and reaching for the book as soon as I woke up. Kate Gray’s prose sings as she gives us schoolyard bullying, unrequited love, unresolved grief, adolescent desire running amok, and adult desire scarcely contained.”

  – Stevan Allred, author of A Simplified Map of the Real World

  “Whether it’s the loss of a loved one, suddenly or as the result of illness, or the loss of our true selves in order to conform to others’ expectations, all loss is painful and deep. Kate Gray’s stunning debut beautifully shows us that grief is the great equalizer of our shared human experience.”

  – Edee Lemonier, reviewer, The Reading and Writing Cafe

  “Gray’s poetic sensibilities crystallize in her prose. Under her careful hand, wild curls become a mask, hope is personified in the ‘sunflower face’ of a friend, and a lone goose in the sky evokes a blend of longing, loneliness, and loss. Often, her carefully rendered imagery and symbols purposefully repeat throughout the text, calling back to and layering on top of each other, slowly building mood and meaning.”

  – Alicia Sondhi, reviewer, Foreword Reviews

  More reviews and coverage at forestavenuepress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  © 2014 by Kate Gray

  All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form, with the exception of reviewers quoting short passages, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9882657-6-9

  Ebook ISBNs: 978-1-942436-09-6, 978-1-942436-10-2, 978-1-942436-11-9

  Distributed by Legato Publishers Group

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014936499

  First edition 2014

  Printed in the United States of America

  by Forest Avenue Press LLC

  Portland, Oregon

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  Cover design: Gigi Little

  Interior design: Laura Stanfill

  Copy editor: Tracy Stepp

  Forest Avenue Press is grateful to Literary Arts for the 2014 Oregon Literary Fellowship that helped finance this publication.

  Forest Avenue Press LLC

  6327 SW Capitol Highway, Suite C

  PMB 218

  Portland, OR 97239

  forestavenuepress.com

  Contents

  Taylor / First Light

  Song / Skin Drag

  Taylor / Not Air, Not Water

  Song / Ls Are the Hardest

  Taylor / Out Loud

  Song / Newton’s First Law

  Taylor / Eight Moving as One

  Song / Earth Calling

  Taylor / Fresh Water Pond

  Song / Flight

  Taylor / Small with Him

  Song / Balance

  Taylor / The Pair

  Song / Specimen

  Taylor / Birch Bark

  Song / Torch

  Song / Pressure in Contained Area

  Taylor / Close Call

  Song / Inert Force

  Taylor / Simplified World

  Song / Electric Charge

  Taylor / Sunflower

  Song / Particles in Turbulence

  Taylor / White on Black

  Song / Phoenix

  Taylor / All the Sky Gray

  Song / The Mass of the Earth

  Taylor / Rokkaku

  Song / Study Hall

  Taylor / Plato’s Face

  Song / Vacuum

  Taylor / Contagion

  Song / Suction

  Taylor / The Switch

  Song / Happy

  Taylor / Beets

  Song / What Makes Good Luck

  Taylor / Breakfast

  Song / The Science of Loss

  Taylor / Sand

  Song / Earth on Us

  Taylor / Nothing to Say

  Carla / Tape #1, Side A

  Song / Sneaker Wave

  Taylor / The Turbine

  Song / Not There

  Carla / Tape #1, Side B

  Song / Resistance

  Carla / Tape #2, Side A

  Taylor / Finish Line

  Carla / Tape #2, Side B

  Song / Angle of Re-entry

  Taylor / River, Tide, Ocean

  Song / Equal and Opposite

  Carla / Tape #2, Side B, Continued

  Song / Consequences

  Taylor / Kinds of Cold

  Song / Boundaries and Bending

  Taylor / River

  Taylor / 1984

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author/ About the Illustrator

  Author Kate Gray in Conversation with Jeb Sharp, producer of PRI’s “The World”

  Reading Group Questions

>   for Katherine Venable Liddle

  1960–1984

  Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

  than the breathing respect that you carry

  wherever you go right now?

  – William Stafford, “You Reading This, Be Ready”

  from The Way It Is

  Taylor / First Light

  One foot in the single shell like a blue heron lifting off water, I pushed off from the dock and lowered myself into the seat. In twenty strokes I cleared the cove. In twenty more strokes, I was full speed on the racecourse. No basic progression through arms, arms-and-back, arms-back-and-legs. Flat-out explosion on the foot stretchers, the balls of the feet, the body compressing and releasing, catching the water and gliding, recovering, the hands crossing, then rising out to the catch, dropping in, and feet pressing everything I had, everything I wanted, against the stretchers. Five hundred meters and my lungs cramped. My rating at thirty-eight strokes per minute, the sweat starting down my neck, between my breasts.

  At 750 meters, Alex Jeffers, the boys’ coach, passed me going the other way, halfway through his piece. His eyes glazed, his cheeks red and sunken, he was finishing. I was beginning. As we hurled ourselves in opposite directions, each body getting smaller, we gave one nod to the other.

  Catch, release, my legs springing flat, my feet letting the seat roll back almost to the stops, I sprang. Sculling is repetition, legs driving the stroke, arms continuing momentum, each stroke an effort to overcome the body’s want: to stop, to sink, to split in two. At the end of the lake, I let my shell run. My blades out of the water, hands crossed in my lap, elbows out, my abs holding my back extended at an angle, the scull glided. Bubbles rushed the round hull, no other sounds. With oars as wings, I flew over the water until momentum slowed, and I tucked the oar handles under my arms, bent my knees, and slid my seat up the tracks so I could hug my knees. I was a ball on water. A woman in a single scull. Alone.

  No matter where I looked for you, you weren’t there.

  The cottonwoods made the air sticky, almost sour. The banks of the lake showed where water used to be. In late August, the banks of the lake were sharp drops in the mud. Little moved. First light spread into the far trees.

  At the end of the lake, when first light made birches more yellow than white, I yelled, “Give. Her. Back.”

  Song / Skin Drag

  Ten minutes more. At 10 p.m. I’m off duty. Usually I’m frantically grading fifteen lab books, but classes haven’t started yet. The first lab books of the year, tedious, some disastrous. And here’s a knock on the door.

  “Door’s open,” I say. I don’t get up from my desk.

  “Mr. Song?” someone says. His voice is high, a Second Former. The door opens slowly.

  “Mr. Harney, King of the Almost-in-Bed,” I say. Maybe he’ll about-face, go to bed. One never knows with the Second Formers what sets them off. They cry if I look at them. They cry for their mothers. They scream at their mothers on the phone. I can’t believe the way St. Timothy’s treats them: cubicles like rat mazes. Each boy behind a curtain, poster board for walls, one big, open room, the school too cheap to make real rooms. In all its wisdom, the school brings them here a week early to “bond,” the littlest here along with the jocks who are never around, always out on fields and lakes, doing their jockly double-sessions. Thirteen-year-old boys, first time from home, babies really, packed like rats.

  This one is more mouse than rat.

  “Mr. Wrong,” he says. Not funny. What is he up to? This kid. “I need help.” He’s in a gray turtleneck and gray sweats. His hair is sticking straight up. Bad personal hygiene, a bad sign.

  “What can I do for you, Kyle?” I try his first name.

  “You know physics, right?”

  “Yes, that’s what I teach.”

  “Then, you know stuff like how long it takes for a brick to hit the ground if you drop it, like from the second floor of the dorm, right?”

  “Sure.” Where did he get a brick?

  “What about a feather?”

  “Gravity is gravity, but that’s a little different,” I say, but before I can factor in wind and weight, he keeps going.

  “What about a body? Would that be different? Would a body be like a brick or a feather?” Pointy face. Blue eyes like the eyes in the Wyeth mural downstairs, but smaller.

  “Kyle,” I say, “Mr. Inquisitive, what’s a Second Former like you asking questions like this right before curfew? Don’t you have books to read? Don’t you have countries to conquer? Hasn’t the sun already set on the British Empire?”

  He looks down at the beige carpet. “Yes, sir,” he says. His eyes look up for a second to check my eyes. “No, sir. The sun never sets on the British Empire.” A little joke. A little smile. Then, he looks down again, says with a big voice, “I’m Imperial. I’m a Light Brigade.”

  “Okay, then, General Light Brigade, to bed.”

  He turns around, as if dismissed, a soldier. His back straight, he clicks heels, the socks he pretends are boots. Pulling diagonal from a belt he doesn’t have, he draws the royal saber he also doesn’t have.

  “Charge,” he yells, and he hurls himself against the closed door, his arm still raised, his chin smashed to the side. A loud crash. Motion acted upon by imbalanced force. He has no sense.

  “Mr. Harney,” I say.

  A jock down the corridor yells, “You okay, Mr. Song?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Kyle says. He makes a show of staggering back from the door. The saber in his right hand, he reaches for the doorknob with his left. As soon as the door is open, he leads with his saber, yells, “Charge” over and over, “Charge” as he runs down the corridor. “Charge” again and again. Down the corridor the boys from their rooms respond “Shut up” and “Dweeb” and “You’re dead.” The school year has certainly begun.

  The door doesn’t shut.

  Carla passes through the door before it shuts.

  “Carla, you can’t,” I say. She closes the door. She is motion unimpeded.

  “Before you say anything,” she says.

  We didn’t see each other over the summer. I could have written her, but after Rehoboth, I had no words. Now she is a Sixth Former, eighteen years old. Is she taller? She’s tan. She’s thinner. Her curls are everywhere, hiding her eyes. From the door, she takes three steps toward me, puts three fingers on my lips.

  Three fingers, cold. Her pale fingers, the last joint long. The pad of her middle finger crosses both my lips, fits into the crown of my upper lip. Cold and warm at the same time. Enough pressure to keep my words in my mouth. Something solid, no matter how slick, like a finger, meeting some vapor, like my breath, no matter how rapid, creates friction, and the boundary layer between the solid and the gas is the skin. The difference in velocity between the solid and the gas is skin drag.

  She follows her fingers with her lips.

  Taylor / Not Air, Not Water

  That morning before any of the girls in the crew arrived, I looked for you in the boathouse. You were in the fog over the cove, the wax smell of the boathouse after the bay doors swung wide, Kaschper eights and fours stacked, the light off their honey hulls. You were everywhere and not there.

  If I could have talked with you, I would have told you about the cornfields of the Garden State before the long bridge into Delaware, how blond they were in the sun. I would have told you about the mud, how sludgy it smelled, all churned up and dry after John Deere tractors towed big, spiral blades. The flat pastures after the Delaware Memorial Bridge stretched a long ways, so different than the rolling hills in our college town. A week ago I had driven down a flat black driveway through maple trees, through lawns cut close, to a place I had never been before, a job I had never done. This year, 1983, you and I had talked about the U.S. and the Soviets aiming straight for each other full speed with warheads fully loaded. And we knew there was nothing we could do. And even though I told you about this job when I g
ot it, my first teaching job, there was already so much more to tell. At the end of this driveway in Surrey, Delaware, the main building of the boarding school, St. Timothy’s, was stone block this way and stone block that way. The campus was stone buildings, slate walkways, and lawns sloping down to a lake. A lake shallow and wrong. After one week, this job felt like hurtling headlong at something hurtling toward me.

  Sixty years ago the Du Ponts built this lake. The Du Ponts built this school for farm boys to learn Chaucer, to learn rowing, to learn ways of tending corn. I was hired to tend both the boys and girls whose families now owned those farms. I would have told you I didn’t know how to tend.

  When 1983 began, we were both twenty-three years old, and if you had been in the smell of the wax on the rowing shells, in the still air this morning, I could have let loneliness be its own thing.

  But you weren’t there, and I kept walking to the end of the dock.

  Two years ago, you and I sat back-to-back at the end of a dock like this one, jutting out into a different lake, Lake Onota in Massachusetts, where our college crew practiced. At sunset the lake turned from turquoise to jade to black. It was so still that night that the air and water were the same: same color, same temperature, same texture. Your long, strong back lining up with mine, our shoulders wider than hips. Rowers make unusual girls. Usual girls have hips wider than shoulders. That day we had raced and won. That night we talked well into dark. The only difference between the night air and the water was stars.

  “Did you see it?” I said.

  “There,” you said. You pointed where the shooting star had been.

  It was no stretch to imagine the wish you had. The tall and blond Mark, the type of dancer people circled on a dance floor, his Michael Jackson moonwalk a perfect blend of grace and mechanical motion. Your first date you ran to my room to tell me. For months we talked about whether or not you should sleep with him until one day you stopped talking about it, one day either you did or you realized how the possibility killed me.