Tumble & Fall Read online

  Zan catches her breath at the top. She drops her shoes and heavy canvas bag into the sandy patch between two rocks and scales the tallest boulder up to the point, where she has the clearest view. The ocean stretches out for miles, the red clay rocks of the beach below changing colors as the waves roll in and retreat, leaving behind a labyrinth of shallow, misshapen puddles. Just beyond the next cliff, sprawling summer estates jut out toward the horizon. Leo likes to laugh about how expensive it must be, pretending to own this view, when they’ve always been able to get it for free.

  “Which isn’t to say that she’s not doing those things,” Zan goes on, her voice a sharp trill. “She’s doing the shit out of them, like some kind of neo-hippie drill sergeant. She has a calendar on the dry-erase board in the kitchen now. There are allotted times for everything. Feeding the animals, harvesting—fine, I get it, but ‘Free Read’? ‘Correspondence’? It’s like a boarding school in nineteenth-century England. I can’t stand it.”

  Zan stretches her legs out from one rock to the other, tensing and releasing the short, sturdy muscles in her thighs. She wishes for the gazillionth time that she had legs like Miranda, her mother, who used to be a dancer, as she allows exactly nobody to forget. Long, graceful legs with narrow, lovely knees, instead of her own stubby calves and wide, boxy ankles. Leo says he loves her just the way she is, his little spark plug, hard to spot in a crowd but near impossible to push over.

  From the bag, she pulls out a bottle of champagne—the good stuff, stolen from a crate in the basement, left over from a gallery opening where, as usual, the guests were outnumbered by hopeful bottles of booze. She bites into the foil and spits it out, uncoiling the wire and tugging at the chubby cork.

  “I have no idea what I’m doing.” She laughs, embarrassed, as always, not to be an expert at something the first time around. Eventually, the cork pops free, not arcing out into the distance as she’d hoped, but sticking in the cup of her palm. She tosses it into the sand.

  A soft, steamy fizz puffs into the air and she lifts the bottle to Leo’s rock, her toes still grasping to hang on to the bumpy surface. “Bet you thought I forgot. What with all of the commotion. Did I tell you my dad is building some kind of art machine? It’s an installation piece. He’s working on it day and night. I have no clue what it does, something about guilt and forgiveness, something totally weird, I’m sure.”

  Zan rests the bottle on her lower lip and breathes in the sharp scent of the champagne. She takes a careful sip, a few sticky drops landing on the top of her thigh. She wipes them up with the hem of her denim miniskirt, Leo’s favorite.

  “Two years,” she says. “Two years ago, I sat right here and waited for the sun to set, thinking that you’d have to come in eventually. I had no idea how long you’d stay out there; that just because all of the other surfers were trudging out of the water didn’t mean you were close to done. I must have sat here for an hour, getting eaten alive, with my dumb little notebook, scribbling stuff down for that lame article I was writing. I can’t believe I talked Miss Kahn into running it. ‘Born to Surf.’ And I can’t believe you agreed to answer my questions. Even if you did make me promise not to write about your secret spots. I kept my promise, didn’t I? And it was a pretty good profile, if I say so myself. I still read it sometimes. I practically have it memorized.”

  Zan takes another sip, a bigger one, and closes her eyes as the bubbles pop all the way down, warming her insides and bouncing around in her stomach.

  “He did, too, you know.”

  The voice floats up from a lower ledge. Zan shifts to her knees, peering out over the edge of the cliff as Amelia hoists herself up.

  Zan feels her face getting hot. She’s already brimming with excuses, but nothing makes sense. She’s sitting barefoot at the top of a cliff, chugging champagne from a bottle and talking to herself. It seems a lot to explain to anyone, let alone to Leo’s little sister.

  “Don’t worry.” Amelia sighs, out of breath from the climb. She wipes her hands on her long cutoff shorts. Zan can’t help but think that the very same shorts would be closer to capri pants on her. Amelia is a head taller than Zan and then some, which might not be especially noteworthy—everyone is taller than Zan—except that Amelia has just finished the seventh grade. “I used to talk to him all the time.”

  Amelia sits on Leo’s rock with her back to the water. She tilts her chin up at the underbelly of the cliff, where shrubby branches stretch up and over their heads. Zan fights the urge to ask her to move. Or to leave.

  “Not anymore, really, but for a while it was, like, every night. It’s weird, right? Just because he’s gone it doesn’t mean you don’t still have stuff to tell him.”

  “It’s our anniversary,” Zan hears herself saying, as if it makes a difference. “I mean, it would have been.” Usually she’s good about catching her tenses in public. Her mom has corrected her a few times, and Zan has laughed it off as best she could. Inside, though, she felt like she’d been cut open with a knife, her secrets slithering into the sun like restless snakes.

  Amelia cocks her head to one side like she’s adding up a long list of numbers in her head. She reaches into her faux-leather backpack. Zan recognizes it as a birthday present from Leo, probably the last gift he ever gave. He’d ordered it from an eco-friendly Web site after Amelia became a vegetarian and vowed to wear only hemp shoes.

  Zan tucks the bottle of champagne behind her rock and digs it into the sand. When she looks up, Amelia is passing her a square of something loosely wrapped in a brown paper bag.

  “I thought maybe you’d be here,” Amelia says. She doesn’t look away until Zan has taken the package and opened it. “It’s something you should have.”

  Zan reaches into the folds of the thick paper and pulls out a tattered paperback book. The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson, a book Zan already owns. Leo bought her a copy the second month they were dating. It wasn’t really her thing, too gruff and drug-addled and mean, but she loved that Leo loved it. That he wanted her to love it, too.

  “Thanks,” Zan says, laying a palm over the water-stained cover. “I’m just about done with the rest.”

  After the memorial service, a perfectly Leo-esque hodgepodge of surfers, greasy-haired kids from the skatepark, jocks, part-time librarians, and heartbroken teachers, Leo’s mom had presented Zan with five enormous boxes of books. Leo had an obsession with used bookstores, and once he’d exhausted his favorite sections of the two small shops on the island, he’d drag whoever was willing along on mainland excursions. To Boston, Providence, the Cape. He’d hit as many as he could in a day, and spend hours flipping pages on the invariably gray and threadbare carpets. Zan could close her eyes and see the way he looked, hunched over a rare edition of essays or poems (the Beats, Bukowski, Brautigan) or an illustrated copy of some dense classic he’d read a thousand times.

  The boxes sat in Zan’s closet for a few months, until she decided to push her way through them, one book at a time. That’s why she started coming back to their spot, the very place she used to sit in awe as he ranted or raved about whatever he was reading. The very spot his ashes were scattered. Now it was her turn. She’d show up, hoping to impress him (she knew it was crazy) with her scathing feminist criticism of D. H. Lawrence. When she started to run out of books, she got nervous and slowed down. What else would she say to a rock?

  But Amelia was right. The fact that he wasn’t there in body hardly mattered. There were still things to talk about. There would always be things to say.

  “This is really nice of you,” Zan says again, turning the book over and glancing up at Amelia. Zan wishes she’d called her, at least once, since the accident. Leo would have liked that.

  Amelia nibbles at the inside of her cheek and presses her long fingers into the crevices of the rock. She’d played center on the basketball team this year, Zan remembers, noticing the broad expanse of her palms.

  “Mom kept it on purpose,” Amelia says, almost apologetically. “I guess
she thought it would tell her something. But so far, it hasn’t had much to say. And besides, it would probably be talking to you, you know, if it did.”

  Zan flips superficially through the book’s thick pages, cool and stiff at the binding. She tries to imagine Leo’s mom, a sunny dental technician unabashedly obsessed with pop stars and boy bands, poring over half-fictionalized accounts of a drunken journalist wasting time in the tropics.

  “It’s the last one,” Amelia says quietly. “I mean, it was Leo’s last one. It was in the truck, that night…”

  Zan freezes, her fingers stuck between two pages, her pulse pushing in like the tide in her ears.

  “That’s why I thought you should have it.” Amelia stands, her tall, distorted shadow falling across the pebbled sand. “Mom doesn’t know I’m here. She’s, you know, busy, these days, so I didn’t think she’d notice. But I had this feeling, like I had to give it to you … like Leo was telling me it was the right thing to do. Do you ever feel like he’s telling you things?”

  Zan looks down, hoping to hide the hot tears that have sprung out of nowhere, blurring the black-and-white image on the book’s ratty cover. She’s imagining how the book sat, probably wedged against the console of Leo’s truck, the way it must have gotten tossed around when he spun out in the rain. Did it come loose when the cab struck the telephone tower, the one so poorly and strangely disguised as a tree? Did it fly over the guardrail with Leo? How long before somebody picked it up?

  “Anyway. I’m late for dinner.” Amelia turns and shimmies down the path, lowering first one foot and then the other. “Maybe I’ll see you around?”

  Zan looks up just in time to see the end of Amelia’s long braid disappearing down into the grassy trail. “Thanks,” she tries to call after her, but the words are stuck in her throat. “Thank you,” she whispers again. She wipes at her eyes with the heels of her hands and looks out at the water. The clouds are on fire, broken threads of orange, pink, and yellow. The sun has already set.

  * * *

  Miranda is outside when Zan gets home, lowering boxes full of produce into the backseat of Zan’s car. “You forgot again, didn’t you?” she says flatly as Zan crunches up the gravel walk. “It’s your night for deliveries. We’re late for a committee meeting at the Center, or I would have already done them myself.”

  Zan stares longingly past her mother’s clenched fists, back at the farmer’s porch and open screen door. She was hoping to curl up with the book in bed. Maybe she’d read it again. Maybe she’d just keep staring at the cover, holding on to the last book Leo held ten months earlier, on the night that he left her for good.

  “People are depending on us, Suzanne. You know the rations are all processed junk, and there are some people who can’t get downtown to wait in line, even if they wanted to.” Miranda slams the back door and folds her arms around her still-slim waist. She’s wearing the floor-length jumper, a black-and-white striped and shapeless thing with big silver buckles that Zan has seen in pictures from her mother’s New York City days. It’s the kind of outfit Miranda used to wear with chunky combat boots or dangerous stilettos, but now pairs with a sweater and sensible flats.

  “I know,” Zan says quietly. She slides into the driver’s seat and fishes for her keys in the cupholder. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  The car smells of dirt and cilantro, and as Zan pulls out of the driveway she wonders again if anybody is actually eating this stuff. She thinks of the people she sees through windows on her route, the housebound elderly couples anxiously watching the news, the young single moms who seem to be constantly chasing their wired toddlers around the kitchen, or bribing them into the bath. She can’t imagine what these people do with the bags of fresh greens she leaves at their doors. She wouldn’t blame them for tossing it all in the trash.

  Zan starts down the hill at the top of Amity Circle, where the dirt road bends and meanders in both directions, all the way down to the beach. There are seven stops she has to make before turning around at the bottom, where the chalky dirt turns to smooth black pavement, and five more houses to hit on her way back up.

  She has it down to a science: make as little noise as possible pulling in the driveway, leave the car running, knock twice on the door if it’s closed (or not at all if it’s open), and hurry on her way. The only exception is Ramona.

  The house at the bottom of the circle is hidden and set back from the road, though Miranda likes to say it’s not hidden enough. It’s an old, falling-down ranch with missing shingles and a colorful collection of trash cans, usually overturned by greedy raccoons in the night. It’s by far the most ramshackle house on the road, but Zan likes to think that with a fresh coat of paint, a quick clean, and some basic landscaping, it could almost be considered cute.

  Zan turns off the car and grabs the biggest box from the back. The sliding door is open, as usual, and she pulls at the screen with a satisfying swoosh.

  “Ramona?” Zan calls into the quiet of the kitchen. The sink is stacked full of dishes, crusted with bits of pasta sauce and stray noodles, and there’s a forgotten mug of coffee, now cold, on the counter. Zan remembers the nights when she’d come looking for her half sister, Joni, and find her and Ramona in a halo of smoke on the back porch, whispering. The place was never exactly tidy, but it couldn’t have been as bad as this. “Hello?”

  Zan opens the fridge and begins unpacking the lettuces, spinach, and kale, shoving aside six-packs of cheap beer and bottles of empty condiments that leave filmy rings on the shelves. When the bag is empty, she peers around the corner, into the darkened living room. The TV is on, a talk show rerun reflected in flickering blue in the big picture window. Ramona is sprawled out on the couch, her head lolling on a cushion with her mouth puffed open, like a fish. Her knee twitches and she stretches in her sleep, turning her face to the wall.

  Zan stands in the doorway, looking at the pile of Ramona’s wild red curls. Joni used to say that Ramona had to be the world’s most stunningly beautiful alcoholic. Zan is inclined to agree.

  The toilet flushes at the other end of the hall and a door creaks open. Zan takes a step back into the kitchen and holds the bag closer to her chest. Caden doesn’t look up.

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize she was sleeping,” Zan says, gesturing at the couch.

  “She’s not sleeping, she’s passed out,” Caden corrects as he walks into the living room. He kneels on the carpet to tug at the slippery sleeve of a windbreaker, stuck beneath one leg of the couch. “There’s a difference.”

  Zan forces a smile. Caden looks thin, almost unrecognizable as the little boy she used to follow home from the bus stop after school. The only things that haven’t changed are his wavy mop of dark red hair and the tear-shaped birthmark near the top of his left cheek. His green eyes used to catch the light when he was up to something, but lately they’ve looked empty and flat.

  “I left some stuff in the fridge,” Zan says as Caden rifles through Ramona’s purse, left open on the table. He pulls out a wad of singles and keeps looking. “I’m pretty much done, I could stay and cook something if you want…”

  “No thanks,” Caden grumbles, shoving the bills into the pocket of his loose-fitting jeans. “Carly will be home soon. She’ll figure something out for Sleeping Beauty, if she ever wakes up.”

  Caden pauses on the other side of the sliding glass door, and it takes a moment for Zan to realize that he’s waiting for her to leave. She hurries out to the porch and he slams the door shut behind her. He jogs to the road and waves an arm high over his shoulder, all before she has a chance to offer him a ride. He always says no, but it makes her feel better to ask.

  * * *

  Zan stares at the book on her bed, warily, like it might actually start talking.

  Her parents are still out. She’d felt relieved to see the empty garage and hurried upstairs to her loft, skipping the leftovers she knew her mother had stored in the fridge and taking the crooked steps three at a time.

 
The loft has low, pitched walls and no real windows. When Zan was little, this was Joni’s room. She remembers sitting on the beanbag chair in the corner while her half sister stood on the bed, waving illicit smoke from her American Spirits up through the dusty skylight. She’d stare at the clouds and talk about all of the places she was going to visit when she finally got off this “Godforsaken rock.” She promised that Zan could come visit.

  After Joni ran away, Zan tried to find a picture of the two of them. In the only one her mother hadn’t stashed away in the basement, they’re at the fair, Zan hugging the neck of the stuffed giraffe Joni won on the rope-ladder race. Zan is blinking and Joni is staring off into space, but Zan framed it anyway and set it out in plain view, at the center of her bedside table.

  Next to the photo is another in a frame: Zan’s favorite shot of Leo. He made the frame himself, from scraps in his dad’s woodshop last Christmas. They’re at the beach. She’s leaning on his legs, his head tucked in the crook of her neck. A tangled strand of her wet, dark hair runs like a scar across his forehead. They look happy, full, attached.

  Zan looks from Leo to the book on her bed and flips open the cover. In the top corner of the title page, there’s a pencil scrawl: “$3. Used.” Zan turns another page and a flimsy piece of paper flutters to the ground.

  She bends to the floor to pick it up, recognizing the faint printed numbers on one side. A receipt. She squints to get a better look, but the letters and numbers have faded. Ink bleeds through from the other side and she turns the paper over in her palm. Written in dark black pen is a series of numbers, separated by dashes. A phone number. Beneath them, one word: “Vanessa.”

  Zan holds the paper out, as if it might make more sense seen from a different angle. Vanessa? She doesn’t know any Vanessas. Leo didn’t know any Vanessas, at least not that he ever talked about. Why would he know a Vanessa and not tell her?

  Zan shrugs. There’s a new tightness in her stomach, but she breathes it away. The receipt must have been left in the book by a previous owner. A previous owner who met a Vanessa and asked for her phone number. A previous owner who probably never called.