Boomerang by Noelle August Read Free Book Online

off the wrong breaker, putting my dad in contact with a live wire, he’s physically incapable of sitting for more than two minutes. He hands me the spoon and threads a precarious maze of light umbrellas, coiled electrical cords, and boxes of props that look like they come from a production of Lysistrata set on the moon.
    Ducking behind my mother, he wraps his arms around her and nuzzles her neck. “This one said no to me about a hundred times before she gave me a yes.”
    “What are you talking about?” I say. “You got pregnant with me on your first date!”
    “Yeah, but it took me a hundred tries to get to that date. No wonder we were so goddamn randy by then.”
    Laughing, my mom tilts her head up and draws him in for a kiss—my cue to gather up the shreds of my psyche and flee.
    I grab my camera from the hall closet, where I’ve stashed it since some party guest of Sky’s used it to shoot a highly meaningful vignette about his balls.
    Heading through the sunny Tuscan kitchen to Nana’s suite, I snag an apple from the basket, peek through the stacks of mail to see if anything’s for me, and put aside my mom’s copy of Aperture to steal later.
    Nana’s TV is set a notch past ear-splitting, so I knock vigorously and then open the door.
    I find my grandmother in underwear and sneakers, trying to wrestle into silk pajama pants, the only thing she’ll wear these days because, she says, everything else makes her legs itch. About a hundred bobby pins stud her wavy hair—also auburn out of a box—which means she’s just had it washed and set.
    “Oh, good, you’re here!” she exclaims. Behind the thick lenses of her eyeglasses, her lively hazel eyes look clear, focused, and I’m thankful for that.
    Sometimes, it feels like Nana’s on a boat, and I’m on the shore, waving goodbye and watching her grow smaller and smaller in the distance. I can’t swim out after her, and I can’t bring her back. I can only capture the parts of her that remain in sight.
    I shake off my gloom.
    “Hey, Nana!” I give her a kiss on her cool papery cheek and then coax her back into a chair. “Let me help.”
    She lets me take off her shoes and then steps into the pajama pants, which I draw up her legs and then, lifting her from her chair, secure around her waist. I tug the drawstring tight, like she likes it, aware of how hollow-boned and small she feels to me these days.
    “Is the top in here?” I ask, going to her closet.
    But she just shrugs and gives me a look that tells me she’s lost the thread. I find a soft cotton top in midnight blue with tiny white hibiscus spilling down the sleeve and help her into it, buttoning the buttons for her.
    “I’m glad you brought that,” she says, gesturing at the video camera I set down on her bureau. “They told me to film my things in case the girl comes back and takes them.”
    “What girl? Who told you?”
    “The girl they have come help me.”
    She must mean one of her aides, though I can’t imagine any of them stealing from her.
    “Can we start?” she asks. “Bring me my purse.”
    I do and turn on my camera, focusing on her crisp bed linens to help me adjust the white balance and then opening the iris to let in a little more light.
    She fishes around and pulls out a long strand of pearls with a diamond pendant in the symbol of a chai —the Hebrew symbol for life.
    “Stan brought this back from Israel,” she says, and I film her as she worries the beads, drawing them over and over again through her fingers. “He spent three hundred dollars on them, a fortune in those days.”
    “I guess he thought you were worth it, Nana.”
    She lets herself smile, though it collapses into a frown, and she shoves the beads at me. “Take them.”
    “Oh, no.” I lay them in her lap, placing her hands back on top of them. “They’re yours. You keep them.”
    She rolls them up and drops them back into her purse, which she snaps shut and hugs against her chest. “I just don’t