Tumble & Fall Read online

  Dad clears his throat. “It’s the new Space Alliance. NASA with Russia and China. They’re sending a nuclear-tipped rocket directly into Persephone’s core,” he tells them. “It looks like they’re trying to blow the asteroid up.”

  “I thought they decided it was too risky,” Denise says quietly. Something about her has changed, Sienna notices. She looks smaller, like she’s shrinking into the furniture.

  “It is risky,” Ryan explains. “But it’s the only option left. Right, Dad?”

  Dad scans the rest of the article. “I’m not sure yet, Buddy.” He flips through the pages of the section, hurrying to find a continuation. He spreads his arms wide, accidentally knocking Denise’s glass onto her plate, her burger bun quickly drenched in lemonade.

  “Denny, I’m so sorry.” Dad grabs his napkin and sops up the leaking puddles of juice from the table.

  Denise doesn’t move and the spill begins to drip onto the tanned tops of her knees. Her glossy lower lip does an abrupt little quivering thing, and her eyes look like they are straining to stay focused on her plate. There’s a pause that feels too long, and then the squeal of her chair as it slides back across the polished floor.

  Dad stands and tries to stop her but she shakes her head and gestures for him to sit before rushing out of the room. The bottom step creaks loudly as she hurries upstairs.

  “What was that?” Sienna half mouths, half whispers across the table. Dad glances at the ceiling, following Denise’s footsteps as she shuffles down the hall, toward the master bedroom. The door clicks shut, and Dad exhales. He stares at the food on his plate. He looks suddenly tired and old.

  “This has all been hard on Denise,” he says quietly. “She’s … I don’t know. She’s scared.” Dad looks at the top of Ryan’s head, buried once again in the newspaper, and back at Sienna. “We’re all scared. But we’re all here together. And I’m just … I’m trying to make this a comfortable place for her. For all of us.”

  He doesn’t ask them to give her a break. He doesn’t have to. They finish what they can of the burgers in silence.

  * * *

  Sienna offers to do the dishes. The floorboards shift and groan and she can hear the gentle murmur of voices, Dad and Denise smoothing things over. First, there are flashes of shame, hot waves rushing to the back of her neck. She’s done enough damage already. The least she can do is let him be happy now. What if this—this time together in the place they’ve always loved—what if it’s all that any of them have left?

  But then, as she dips her hands in the warm, soapy water, something shifts. The dull, familiar ache in the pit of her belly, the steady burn of all the things she can’t have back. It’s not fair. It hasn’t ever been fair. And if this is really it, why should they have to share him? If everything’s so scary, why should any of them have to tiptoe around a stranger?

  Sienna hauls her bags up to the guest room at the top of the stairs. It’s her de facto bedroom, where she’s allowed to sleep when there aren’t any guests. (She tries not to think about what kind of “guest” that makes Denise.) Otherwise, she shares the middle room with Ryan, which isn’t so bad. There are two single beds built into the wall, meeting to form a giant L in the corner. He doesn’t snore or mess up her things. Mostly, she’s the one who has to worry about breathing the wrong way or accidentally messing up his.

  The guest room smells musty and damp. She pushes open the door to the upstairs deck, which wraps around the house and ends at a pair of sliding glass doors leading to Dad’s room, on the other side of the hall.

  Outside, she can hear the rhythm of the waves, the low howl of wind in the trees. The night feels cool and moist, like the inside of a cloud. She tries to remember the last time they were all here together. After Mom died, they stopped coming every summer. Dad said the old renters called, that they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Sienna was grateful for the story, but they all knew the truth. This was Mom’s place. It didn’t make any sense to be here without her.

  There’s a window open somewhere down the hall and Sienna hears a soft, conciliatory laugh. Before she can stop herself she’s imagining them brushing their teeth side by side, changing unabashedly in front of each other, climbing into bed. She feels suddenly seasick, not just nauseous or dizzy but like the house is actually floating, stubbornly bucking against stormy seas.

  She pads softly down the stairs and sneaks through the open front door. She’s not wearing shoes and the gravel pricks the soft bottoms of her feet. She crosses to the grass and walks along the road, letting her eyes adjust to the dark.

  She doesn’t know where she’s going, only that it’s time to leave. This happens a lot. Sometimes it feels like there are answers inside of her, answers to questions she doesn’t remember asking. The answer tonight is Walk. The answer six months ago was Wait until Ryan’s in bed. Dad’s sleeping pills are in a blue bottle, hidden behind a stack of self-help books on his bedside table. Swallow them with a big glass of orange juice. See what happens.

  She spent six months in the House trying to figure out the question she was answering that night. She’s still not sure what it was, but she has an idea. Something about how to make it stop. How to stop trying to fill up all of the spaces her mother left behind, without getting sick like her, too. It was impossible, so she decided to disappear instead. She’d be nothing, feel nothing. Nothing was better than not enough.

  As Sienna walks around Amity Circle, she considers the latest news. Another nuclear rocket. Another chance for people to get their hopes up. To pray. Sienna used to pray. After Mom’s last episode, after she flooded the kitchen, painted numbers on the walls, and locked them all out of the house, Sienna looked up to the sky. She prayed that things would change. That someday, they’d go back to the way they’d been before. She prayed for her mother back. There were even some days, when the meds kicked in, when her mom got dressed and knew who they were, that she thought somebody might be listening. Turns out, she was wrong. Now, especially now, she knows better than to ask favors from the sky.

  At the end of the road, she sees the covered shed. Sometimes there are bikes wedged up against the outside, but tonight it’s deserted. Dad says it’s a bus stop, but she’s never seen a bus, or a single person waiting for one to arrive.

  She pushes through the tall grass up the hill. There’s a crushed soda can in the dirt, a few cigarette butts, and a Kit Kat wrapper stuck in the slats of the old wooden bench. Behind the bench is a bulletin board. Lonely, leftover thumbtacks polka-dot the empty cork, a multicolored constellation.

  She sits on the bench and stares across the street, where the paved road starts and, on the other side, a covered path winds out toward the water. There’s a rustle in the trees at the bottom of the hill, and in the full-moon haze Sienna can barely make out the shape of a person at the end of a driveway. A light breeze moves the branches and a new pattern of dappled moonlight falls on the road. She realizes that she’s been holding her breath, like she’s caught in a game of hide-and-seek.

  “Somebody there?” a voice calls out. It’s a male voice, deep and low.

  Sienna stands up fast, like she’s in trouble. “Sorry,” she says. “I mean, yeah. I am. I was just…”

  The boy walks deliberately up the hill. Sienna sits back on the bench—he’s walking fast and it feels like the right thing to do. He’s tall and lean and he moves like he hasn’t stopped growing yet, like he hasn’t quite gotten used to the proportions of his limbs. “I thought so,” he says when he reaches the shed. Sienna still can’t see much of his face but it sounds like he’s smiling. “I saw your feet. What happened to your shoes?”

  He points at Sienna’s bare feet and she shrugs. “I forgot them,” she says. “My house is just down the hill.”

  The boy takes a step back and a patch of moonlight falls across his face. His hair is dark brown, thick and to his shoulders, but not scraggly or unkempt. His skin is creamy and his eyes are a warm chocolate brown, with a few oversize freckles on th
e bridge of his long, narrow nose. She looks away, hoping she hasn’t been staring, and knowing that she has.

  “Owen,” he says. “I live a few streets over.” He holds out a hand in the darkness, and slowly she reaches out her own, gripping his fingers to shake. She cringes when instead of an empty palm, her hand grasps a thin piece of paper. “It’s a flyer for this show we’re doing tomorrow night,” he says. “I’m supposed to be hanging them up.”

  Sienna looks at the flyer, feeling all of the blood rush to the tops of her cheeks. She wonders if he knew she was trying to shake his hand.

  “It’s at the Community Center in town. Kind of a Battle of the Bands type thing, except, you know, everybody wins.”

  Sienna holds the flyer into the light. It’s photocopied and black-and-white and there are a lot of hyphens and crazy-looking type. “Oh,” she says dumbly. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” Owen shuffles his feet and Sienna thinks he’s walking away, but when she looks up he’s still standing there, his arms crossed over the front of his navy-blue T-shirt. There’s a white emblem that looks like a wave peeking out over the tops of his tanned forearms, and beneath it the shirt says BALI. Owen cocks his head to one side and squints his eyes. “Sienna?”

  Sienna is so surprised to hear her name that it takes her a moment to recognize it. “Yeah,” she says at last. “How did— Do I know you?”

  “This is so weird,” Owen says, almost under his breath. “I was just thinking about you. I mean”—he clears his throat and shuffles his feet again—“not like, thinking about you, but I don’t know, something about being on this street…”

  His hands move quickly to his forehead, where he runs his fingers in long strokes through the roots of his hair. “Owen,” he says again, slowly, this time pointing to himself, to the empty blue space between the bubble letters on his shirt. “You don’t remember me at all?”

  Sienna shifts on the bench so that her back hits the wooden panels of the shed’s far wall. She’s trying to see him better in the light. “I don’t think so,” she says, hearing the familiar apology creeping into her voice. Val says not to worry, that it happens all the time. She says depression is a mental bully, co-opting more than its fair share of brain-space in order to make room for all of the compulsive negative thinking about things that will probably never happen, which makes it hard to remember some of the things that actually did. “Sorry,” she mutters softly. “I don’t.”

  “We were really little.” He sits beside her on the bench. The soft cuff of his T-shirt brushes the outside of her shoulder. “And I think my hair used to be blonder. At least it is in pictures. Sometimes I don’t really believe it was me.”

  He stretches his long legs out in the grass and crosses one flip-flop, tan leather with two red stripes, easily over the other. “We used to play together at the beach, every summer,” he says. “I probably had seaweed on my head most of the time.”

  Sienna smiles. “Seaweed?”

  “It was a phase.” Owen shrugs. He tilts his head to the side. “You don’t remember? You, me, and Carly?”

  “Carly,” Sienna repeats. The name feels comfortable and strange at the same time, like one of those words you read a lot but never say out loud.

  “Yeah,” he says, nodding at the hidden driveway across the street. “She lives right there. We were just rehearsing for tomorrow—she’s got this, like, unbelievable Janis Joplin–y voice, like sandpaper.” He shakes his head and she feels him turn to study her profile. “You know, I think we even used to have dinner at your house some nights. Your mom used to make those, like, popover things. She’s a really good cook, right?”

  He intertwines his long fingers together, cracking his knuckles all at once, a loud, resounding pop. There’s something about the noise that feels like she already knew it was going to happen, and something inside of her snaps. She remembers. There aren’t any flashes, no pictures or memories or scenes she can see, but she knows that she knows him. That she knew him, when she was young and Mom was a good cook and everything else was so far away.

  “Yeah,” she says vaguely. She feels lighter, almost relieved, before she remembers the question she was supposed to have answered. “I mean, yeah, she was.”

  “Was?”

  “She died,” Sienna says quickly, in the way she always says it, the steady voice that is meant to convey a range of non-emotions: stability, acceptance, perfectly all right. “A while ago. I was eight.”

  Sienna holds her breath, waiting for the wave of consolation she’ll have to nod through, preparing her subtly grateful half smile and the litany of follow-up assurances that everything is fine.

  “Man.” Owen knocks his head gently against the side of the shed. “That sucks.”

  He doesn’t look at her. She waits for him to go on; she waits to feel offended when he doesn’t. But he doesn’t, and she doesn’t mind.

  “So what are you guys doing back here now?” Owen asks. “I mean, most people are trying to leave the island these days. At least the people with other places to go.”

  Sienna shrugs. “I really have no idea,” she says. “I guess my dad’s an optimist.”

  Owen slaps absently at a bug on the back of his neck. He checks his hand for evidence. “Not that it matters much anyway,” he says. “I mean, if this thing hits … I’ve got a bunch of buddies building some type of amphibious boat. If you ask me, they’re the only ones who stand a chance.”

  The word amphibious scrolls through Sienna’s head and she smiles, imagining a bunch of Owen-clones riding the back of a mechanical frog. She thinks about the rocket in the paper and wonders if she should bring it up, but just the idea of the asteroid makes her veins twitch, her pulse race uncontrollably. Casual conversation about a nuclear space explosion isn’t really an option, just yet.

  “I should get going,” Owen says. “My parents are all worked up about family nights these days; they made me promise I’d come straight home. We’ve been playing the same game of Monopoly for, like, weeks.”

  Sienna has a weird panicky feeling in her stomach, like she wants him to stay and go at the same time. For months, she only spoke to people who were paid to listen, or to the other kids in Group—kids who refused to talk at all, or were awkwardly learning the language of recovery. How to assess their symptoms, manage impulses, regulate nonproductive thoughts. Small talk wasn’t exactly on the agenda.

  “Try to make it tomorrow night,” Owen calls as he shuffles down the hill, careful not to trip on any of the gnarly hidden roots. “It was really nice seeing you again.”

  Sienna thinks about calling out a goodbye, but quickly decides against it. She waits until she can’t see him anymore and then takes off toward her house. The walk home feels shorter and she’s halfway to the door before she realizes she’s still smiling.

  DAY TWO

  CADEN

  There’s an electric throbbing that wakes him, an obnoxious grinding noise that might be inside his head. He opens one eye and waits for the room to make sense.

  It’s oddly shaped, with dormer windows and steep, sloping walls. The sheets on the bed are clean, white, with lace at the edges. Caden’s faded black Vans hang limply from his feet. He’s wearing most of his clothes.

  The mechanical whirring stops. A vacuum, or a blender maybe. Downstairs? Which would mean that he is upstairs. He doesn’t remember stairs of any kind.

  He remembers running. The car. The men. And then, quiet. Darkness.

  Caden sits up too fast. The pounding in his head feels familiar: the thickness of a hangover, but worse. Way worse.

  He walks to the window and pulls back the sheer ivory curtain. The house is on a bluff, jutting out over the ocean. If he presses his face against the screen he can follow the curves of a paved, narrow road. At the end of the road is a stoplight.

  There are no stoplights on the island.

  The light in the room is soft and there’s something strangely familiar about the color of the walls, a green so pale
it’s almost white, and the dense, floral pattern on the bedspread. It’s like he’s dreamed of waking up in this room before.

  Or maybe he’s dreaming now.

  On the back of a chair by the door is his sweatshirt. He swipes it free and digs into the pocket for his phone. But all that’s left is a handful of sand.

  Caden swallows hard and looks back outside. He’s three stories up. There are a few sturdy-looking branches that might hold his weight. He tries to guess how quickly he could make it to the end of the road, the stoplight. The ground below is rocky and uneven. If he’s really dreaming, he’ll be fine. If not …

  The blender starts up again. There has to be an easier way out.

  He opens the door and peers down a long, quiet hall. He scans the walls for photographs or other clues, but there’s nothing but kitschy watercolors of boats, and hand-painted signs with feel-good quotes like “You and Me, By the Sea” and “It’s Never Too Late to Live Happily Ever After.”

  His head is still foggy and his feet feel stuck. He finds a bathroom and shuts himself inside. There are peach-colored soaps in the shape of scallop shells, and matching towels neatly stacked on a shelf. He looks at his face in the mirror, the dark circles under his eyes, the greasy red mop of his hair. His own reflection is by far the scariest thing in the room.

  He follows the grinding noise down a wide, marble staircase, around a corner, and into a kitchen, all shiny black countertops and sleek, modern appliances. There’s a small, plump woman in an apron, tilting a heavy blender over a row of glasses. Her bare arms are caramel-colored and her silky black hair is knotted in a bun.

  As if she’s been expecting him, the woman turns. Caden ducks quickly back into the hallway. He’s suddenly afraid. Is this a dream? How can he wake himself up? And if it’s not a dream, where is he, and how can he get the hell out?

  There’s a swishing sound behind him. The long panels of a floor-length curtain sway in the breeze, revealing a pair of white French doors, propped open just a crack. A misty light filters through. This is how it must be in dreams, he thinks. You ask for a door, and you get one.