Tumble & Fall Page 5

  The doors open onto a smooth, stone patio, lined with sturdy wooden lounge chairs. The chairs are arranged at precise intervals, surrounding a bean-shaped infinity pool. The water is perfectly still and artificially turquoise, a shimmering frame that mirrors the garden behind it.

  Caden blinks purple sunspots from his eyes.

  “You’re up.”

  He jumps at the voice, knocking against the ceramic lip of a massive potted fern. The wind rustles and through the leafy fronds he glimpses a pair of long, tanned legs, outstretched and bent at an easy angle. Two narrow feet wiggle back and forth, light purple polish glinting in the sun.

  Caden slowly sidesteps the plant.

  “Hey,” say the legs.

  For the first time all morning, Caden hopes that he’s really awake. He knows that he’s staring, but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to look. “Hi,” he squeaks. He clears his throat and tries again. “Hi,” he says, this time too loud and drawn out across many ridiculous syllables.

  The woman—girl? Dark, oversize glasses shield her eyes and make it hard to guess her age—pushes herself up to her elbows and smiles.

  “Caden, right?” She pushes her glasses up into her hair. Her eyes are brown, but not a boring brown. A light, full brown that looks like melted pennies, flecked with orange and green. She’s definitely older than he is. Not by much. Twenty-four, he guesses, though he has no idea why.

  “Hi,” he says, for the third time. “I mean,” he stumbles. “Yeah.”

  “I’m Sophie,” she says, holding out her hand. Caden shakes it, grateful for another opportunity to look at her face. Her hair is honey-colored and pulled back in a low, loose ponytail. It drapes over one shoulder and curls up like an inverted question mark, circling the dip in her neck. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  Sophie lets her hand fall onto her bare stomach, tanned and toned and still wet from a swim. Caden averts his eyes to the top of his shoes and wishes they were cooler, or at least less grimy and gross. “Finally?” he manages. “Who … I mean … where am I? What is this place?”

  Sophie chuckles. “I ask myself that every day.” She fumbles with something on the ground and Caden hears the snap of a bottle of sunscreen. He keeps his gaze trained on the grassy cracks between the stones as she rubs lotion onto the bronzed top of her shoulders.

  If this isn’t a dream, he thinks, it must be some kind of a prank. Somebody has kidnapped him primarily in order to mess with him. His eyes dart around the pool, to the corners of the arbor overhead. Surely there are cameras, somewhere. Somebody’s twisted idea of end-of-the-world reality TV.

  Instead of cameras, he sees a shadow, stretched long from behind another wall of potted shrubbery.

  “We’re over here,” Sophie calls, without looking up.

  A man turns the corner. If it weren’t for the hat, Caden might not have recognized him right away. He’s slender, and much taller than Caden remembers, with smooth, expensive-looking skin and sharp green eyes. The hat is wool with a short leather brim, and not at all weather-appropriate. It’s the same hat he wears in the pictures, the pictures Caden used to say good night to. The pictures he used to stupidly ask for help, before he grew up and realized that nobody was listening.

  Caden hears his pulse, his blood a rushing river, flooding in his ears. The woman on the chair is moving. She kisses the side of the man’s neck on her way back inside.

  “Looks like you guys have some catching up to do.” She smiles at Caden before disappearing into the kitchen.

  Caden feels suddenly hot. There’s something fierce and glowing inside of him, like a light or a magnet.

  “What am I doing here?” he hears himself asking. His hand flutters at his side, like a foreign object he can’t control.

  Caden’s father crosses his arms and leans back against the planter. He narrows his eyes into discerning hyphens. “You’re smaller than I was, at your age,” he says, angling his head to one side. His shoulders are too broad for his frame, and his forearms are covered in thick, dark hair. “Shorter, I mean.”

  Caden feels his spine straightening. His breath catches in his throat and the glowing thing inside of him changes, like a flickering flame, though he can’t tell if it’s getting bigger or going out. It’s like a thirst and he almost thinks to ask for water, until he swallows. Tears, he thinks. He feels like crying.

  “Caden, I know this wasn’t the only way to do this—”

  “Do what?” Caden coughs, which is better than crying, though he doesn’t like the girlish squeal in his voice. He takes another breath. “What do you want from me? Why am I here?”

  His father doesn’t move or speak. He stands and stares, just like he does in the photographs, two-dimensional and somewhere else.

  Caden feels his hands moving again, and he stuffs them into his pockets. He’s surprised to feel the jangle of his house keys inside. His house. Where he should be. This is all really happening. He’s been kidnapped by his father. Literally: kidnapped.

  It’s absurd. Caden almost laughs. He takes a steadying breath and eyes the French doors behind his father. “I always knew you were an asshole,” he says evenly, a new strength finding him. “But I didn’t realize you were completely insane.”

  Caden shakes his head and pushes past his father, toward the open living room. It’s not a dream, or a movie. It’s real life, and he can leave whenever he wants to.

  Just as he reaches the door, a second man appears from nowhere. Caden sees the watch first, then the man’s giant, solid torso blocking his path.

  “Easy, now, pal,” the man says, holding up a fleshy hand and pressing it firmly into Caden’s shoulder. Caden squirms out of the man’s heavy grasp and turns away from the house, running past the pool, toward a low, stone wall.

  But the man follows, shoving himself between Caden and the wall. He holds his arms wide, like he’s attempting to corral a wayward bull. Caden bolts through a gap in the shrubs. He can outrun this guy, no problem. But his shirt snags on a spindly branch, and there’s a hand on his back, a thick, sweaty arm scooping him at the waist and leveling him, horizontal.

  “Where do you want him?” the man asks. His breathing is jagged, his shoulders shudder as he pants. Caden tries to wriggle free, but it’s no use. He starts to feel dizzy, blood rushing to his head. He stares at the shiny tops of his father’s shoes as the man carries him, like a piece of living luggage, back inside the house.

  ZAN

  Two things people make time for at the end of the world: free food and a party.

  Miranda has been on the Community Center board since Zan was in preschool, organizing fund-raisers, art shows, and live music. This is the first time more than a small, devoted group of gallery coworkers and local divorcees, lonely and bored on a Saturday night, have shown up. Zan can tell that her mother is pleased, though she hasn’t stopped moving around long enough to really show it.

  The second band of the night is playing on the makeshift Center stage, a group of stoner guys Zan knows from school. One of them sporadically strums a heavily stickered mandolin, another sits behind half a set of drums, and a third is doing some kind of unidentifiable yell-rapping. It’s like an afterlife drum circle with Jerry Garcia and that guy from Sublime. On weed.

  “What is this?” Daniel, Zan’s father, asks, rearranging the tray of organic cupcakes that Miranda and Zan spent all morning baking. He points at the stage with frosting on his finger. “Not bad.”

  Zan smiles. Her father tries very hard to be hip, open-minded, slow to judge. He considers himself one of the “cool” teachers at school, the kind that kids actually want to hang out with. His shaggy gray hair is always tousled in a sort of old-man mullet, and he wears the same leather jacket every day, even in the middle of summer. Zan pretends he annoys her, but they both know they’re a team.

  “It’s not bad,” Zan allows, filling paper cups with glugs of homemade hibiscus iced tea. “It’s a disgrace. My eardrums are crying.”

 
Daniel taps his foot defiantly, his hard, weathered face a scrambled mix of phony enjoyment and fear. Out of nowhere, Miranda pops between them, her sunken cheeks flushed from walking in tight circles around the room. “How’s it going here?” she asks, quickly surveying the spread. “Do you need more napkins? There’s another box in the kitchen. Are people reusing their cups?”

  Miranda reaches forward to rearrange the trays and Zan stares at the swinging tail of her mother’s long, graying braid. “What does it matter if people recycle anymore?” she grumbles. She doesn’t mean to say it out loud. Her father’s foot stops tapping and Miranda’s shoulders tense. Zan wishes immediately she could take it back.

  She steels herself for a lecture. A reminder that “Everything matters.” That “Nothing is certain. We’re here until we’re not.” That “Living clean is living well. And we’re all still living, aren’t we?” Lectures that started long before the announcements, the panic, the endless waiting.

  But Miranda’s shoulders relax. She passes the clipboard to Zan’s father. “Daniel, I’ve been working on getting sign-ups for help with your installation. Why don’t you see who you can nail down outside?”

  Daniel wipes a few telltale cupcake crumbs from the corner of his mouth and takes the clipboard. He gives Zan a warning glance as he passes, and Zan feels herself shrinking even smaller.

  Miranda arranges the remaining brownies and cookies in precise little rows before clapping her hands together and glancing warily at the stage. “This is awful,” she sighs. “I’m going to ask somebody to turn down the amps.”

  Zan watches her mother stalk across the crowded room. She wonders if she’s ever felt as strongly about anything as the way Miranda feels about, well, everything. Maybe Leo, but that’s it.

  Leo’s face flashes in her mind and she feels her heart swell, then stick. Vanessa. She has the Grumpy’s receipt in her pocket, hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it and what it could mean. Her mind loops in vicious circles. It’s nothing. He ran into somebody he knew before he left. A friend of Amelia’s, maybe, or his mom. Somebody who worked at a bookstore off-island, someone with access to a rare, out-of-print collector’s item. He said he’d call to pick it up.

  Nothing.

  Or maybe it was something. Something more. Something she can’t even imagine, something that rips the air from her lungs when she even begins to see it.

  No. It was nothing. Zan pours more iced tea. A never-ending drum solo rattles her bones and she looks for her mother. As soon as Miranda comes back, Zan will sneak outside for a break, where she can take a full breath and maybe even hear herself think.

  * * *

  “What are you doing out here?”

  Zan jumps to her feet, wiping the dirt from the back of her white mini-shorts. A dark silhouette shuffles toward her, across the spotlit green of the tennis courts. She doesn’t recognize Nick until he’s only a few feet from where she stands, frozen at the end of the net.

  “I thought you were on refreshment duty,” Nick says with a toothy smile, leaning into the sturdy post with one hand. His short blond hair looks wet and sticks to his forehead in choppy triangles.

  “Hey,” Zan says, looking down at the tops of her worn suede sandals. “I didn’t see you inside.”

  Nick shrugs. “I got antsy, went to the beach.” He tosses his head back in the direction of the path to the ocean. Zan remembers their Community Center Camp days, when Nick and Leo would talk her into skipping out on whatever bizarre homemade craft project Daniel had prepared. They would start running on the other side of the courts, snaking through the tall grass, across the dirt road, and all the way to the beach. They wouldn’t stop until they were underwater.

  “How are you doing?” Nick asks. He’s using the voice, the “I really sincerely mean it” voice. But from Nick, it’s okay. Usually she wants to shrivel up and vanish when people look at her that way, like she’d ever in a million years say anything other than “Fine” or “Hanging in there,” her two automatic replies.

  But Nick deserves to ask, mostly because he already knows. He knows she’s just as lost as she was ten months before, when they sat together on Leo’s mom’s couch. Besides, with Nick, it isn’t a voice. Nick really sincerely means everything that he says, which is one of the reasons Zan has always had a hard time understanding how he and Leo could be so close.

  “I’m okay.” Zan shrugs. “Basically just trying to ignore all of the obnoxious comments Leo would be making if he were here.”

  Nick smiles, pulls in some air between his teeth. “Yeah, he wasn’t really into the jam-band thing, huh?”

  “No.” Zan laughs. “He wasn’t.”

  There was a period of about a month after the funeral when Zan and Nick hung out all the time. It was the height of hurricane season, and without ever saying anything about why, they started meeting up at the beach, watching the diehards get tossed around the angry surf; not talking, not crying, not pretending to be anything but the empty human shells they’d suddenly become.

  And then, as abruptly as the quiet comfort of their routine began, it ended. School started. Zan spent all of her free time reading Leo’s books, and Nick went back to work, fishing with his dad. They’d barely run into each other since.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” Nick says now, his big blue eyes looking into hers. Leo used to say that as far as Nick was concerned, you could never have too much eye contact. At first, Zan thought it was creepy. Even now that she knows it’s just the way he is, ever-present and alert, it makes her borderline uncomfortable, like it’s a test that she’s destined to fail.

  “Yeah,” Zan says, scuffing her sandal against the asphalt. “It’s weird, all this…”

  She trails off, not exactly sure what she’s saying. All this what? The fact that even though people are freaking out, stockpiling like they’re headed into a war, nobody has any idea what’s going on? Or the fact that whatever happens, Leo is still dead, and always will be? The fact that maybe the rest of them will soon be, too?

  “Totally,” Nick agrees. “My dad is still committed to the full-time denial route. We’re out on the boat every morning at four-fifteen, like nothing’s changed.”

  “Maybe he has the right idea,” Zan says. “I mean, if the rocket thing works…”

  “That’s exactly what he says.” Nick smiles and picks at a flaky piece of skin peeling from the bridge of his nose. His cheeks are freckled and pink. “He’s actually looking forward to the day when everyone else realizes how much time they’ve wasted sitting around doing nothing.”

  Nick tries hard to sound teasing, like he sees his dad as a simpler version of himself, but Zan can hear the respect in his voice. Nick is looking forward to that day, too.

  Zan leans against the net. It’s been years since she held a tennis racket, but her skin still bristles at all of the things they are doing wrong. Wrong shoes on the court; carelessly stretching out the net. She wishes she didn’t keep so many rules alive inside of her. Leo used to say she and Miranda were more alike than she thought. Nothing made her more furious.

  Nick tucks his hands into his pockets and looks over his shoulder at the glowing windows of the Center’s main building. A new band has started, a bunch of old guys with fiddles and guitars. “Guess I should head back,” Nick says with a smile. “Good to see you, Zan.”

  He leans in to give her a quick hug, crooking his elbow around her neck and awkwardly pulling her in. Zan flops an arm halfheartedly around his waist—she’s never figured out how to hug boys she’s not in love with—and pulls back to watch him go. There’s something about seeing him walk away that makes her start to panic, like she’s already lost her chance. Like the question she wants to ask and also doesn’t want to ask will never be answered.

  “Nick,” she calls out. “Wait.”

  Nick turns and walks back, his eyes already searching hers with alarm. “What’s up?”

  Zan reaches slowly into her pocket. For a moment she allows herself to
hope the receipt won’t be there, that she’s left it at home, in the book, or maybe it fell out somewhere on the way. But the flimsy paper sticks to the top of her damp fingers and her heart sinks as she pulls it out. She stares at it for a quiet moment before passing it to Nick.

  “I found this in one of Leo’s books,” she explains, watching Nick’s face pucker as he tries to read the numbers and scrawled ink. “It’s dated the day that he died.”

  Nick swallows, the lump of his Adam’s apple suddenly clear and pronounced. He flips the page over to the side with the handwritten note. Zan immediately wishes she could rip the paper out of his fingers.

  “I don’t know,” she says, backtracking. “I’m sure it’s nothing, I just thought, you know, since you were the reason he went out that night…”

  Nick doesn’t move. His eyes stay trained on the smudged black print, but the air around him feels different. Charged.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean, I didn’t mean that it was…”

  Nick puts a hand on the side of her arm and she stops talking. Right after it happened, she was careful with her words, sensitive not to say anything that might betray the way she sometimes felt. If only you hadn’t cared so much about your stupid boat. If only you hadn’t asked for his help. If only you’d waited the night.

  “Nick,” she starts again. “I’m so sorry.”

  Nick shakes his head, his hand still on her shoulder. “No,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry. I should have told you before…” He passes her the paper. His voice sounds cool, far away and different.

  “What do you mean?” Zan asks. She crumples the receipt and watches as Nick’s hands return to his pockets. He’s staring at the clean white lines of the court. Zan’s stomach twists and coils. “Told me what?”

  “I lied,” he says, so quietly it’s almost lost in the amplified chords of the music behind them. “I promised him I’d never say anything, before he left, and when he didn’t come back, I didn’t know what to do.”