How We Fall (13 page)

A man climbed out—the man who’d come to the produce stand and the pool.

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How we Fall

He took off his sunglasses and went in to the gas station.

He was probably mid-thirties and not very tall. “I’ve seen him around a lot.”

“Maybe he’s visiting somebody.”

“Do you need gas? I want to check out his truck.” We were maybe thirty feet away and I could see something sticking up in his back seat. I didn’t like the look of it.

“Yes, because the natural response to seeing a strange man lurking around is to go snoop in his truck.” We climbed in to the car and Claire drove across to the gas station. We pulled up to the other side of the pump where the truck idled. He’d gone inside.

“We’re in public. We’ll be fine.” I said the words like I knew what I was talking about.

Claire started filling her tank while I gathered up fast food trash from the car floor to have an excuse for being next to his truck. Claire’s car was almost as messy as Sylvia’s. The garbage can stood right between our vehicles.

The windows weren’t tinted. In the backseat of the cab was propped a compound bow, at least a dozen heavy aluminum-shafted arrows, a cooler, and a pair of expensive-looking bin-oculars.

“Well?” Claire hissed.

I scrambled back to the car. “Let’s go.”

She paid at the pump as he walked out of the convenience store, carrying a gallon of water and sliding on his sunglasses.

We shut the car doors and he stared at us through the windshield as he walked past.

Claire pulled out of the gas station and turned right; the truck turned left.

“There’s a nasty-looking compound bow and a pair of bin-oculars in his back seat.”

“Maybe he’s a hunter,” Claire said.

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“Nothing’s in season right now. He doesn’t have any camou-flage stuff, no hunter’s orange on anything, no boots.”

“Who knows. People do strange things.”

That was exactly my concern. Someone driving past my house with a compound bow doing strange things.

We hadn’t gone a mile before I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the white truck a half-mile back. “Claire.

Look.”

She glanced up. “Maybe he lives out this way.”

“He turned the other way out of the gas station. He would have had to turn around immediately to be this close behind us.”Maybe he wasn’t following us. Maybe he had some reason to be out here.

Claire pushed the automatic door lock and we drove in silence for the next three miles. The white truck hung back, still behind us. Claire turned off the blacktop and onto our gravel road. The parents should be home by now, so there wasn’t much he could do on our own property. She parked but when I reached for the door handle, she said. “Don’t get out. Wait a minute.”

The truck crawled past our house but kept going.

“There’s nothing down that road,” I said. We sometimes got traffic past our house, but not often. The road connected to the blacktop highway a few miles down. Sometimes people used it as a shortcut, especially neighbors driving farm equipment and trying to stay off the main road. Unless he was after trees and cows, it would be a fruitless drive.

Thinking he was following us was silly. He was probably using the road for a short cut.

I turned to Claire before getting out of the car. “Please don’t tell anyone about me and Marcus. Let me figure out what to do.”

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How we Fall

She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “I won’t tattle. Not if you’re ending it.”

I didn’t have a choice. Just that morning I’d told him we could keep going, but I couldn’t keep this up with him if I had to get over him.

We went inside to find all the cousins up and running around the house. The parents sat around the kitchen table with their coffee. Green tea for Uncle Ward and Aunt Shelly.

“Claire, honey!” Mom stood up and everyone said hi to Claire and I just kind of stood there. I could hear Marcus in the living room, talking to someone. I recognized her voice, and it made me feel sick. Why now? Why before I’d had a chance to talk to him about Claire walking in on us? Why right after I’d discovered the one thing I didn’t want to do was exactly what I had to do?

“Now, no teasing,” Mom said. “Marcus has a friend over. Be nice.”

I definitely wouldn’t be teasing him.

Crossing the living room was necessary to get to my bedroom. Marcus and Sylvia sat on the couch, playing a card game on the coffee table with Chris, Candace, and Angie. He looked up as I walked past.

“Hey,” he said. His eyes searched mine, glanced over to Claire, and then back to me. “Want to play?”

I did not. “That’s okay. Have fun.” Why was she even here?

Sylvia sat next to him, smiling like she hadn’t made my day exponentially worse simply by being there. One leg was crossed over the other, her small feet sporting a pair of cork-heeled platforms. She laughed at something, and, ever so casually, touched his knee.

Yesterday, that would have made me want to smack her. But today—no, today it still made me want to smack her.

I closed my door and sank down onto the bed. My phone 88

Kate Brauning

beeped a moment later.

You ok? How’d it go?

Maybe this was good. He’d have a distraction for when I told him we had to be done.

I turned the TV on so I wouldn’t have to hear Sylvia giggling in the living room and spent the rest of the afternoon hating how much I wished he was still in here watching
Casablanca
with me
.

The TV flickered black and white. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” Rick said.

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When someone tapped on my door an hour later, I thought it would be Claire, but instead Marcus stepped in. “Hey,” he said.

“I take it you and Sylvia are getting along.” I paused the movie. My eyes had to be red, and my head hurt.

“Oh. I guess. She was bored and asked if she could come over. Doesn’t really know anyone in town yet.”

“Are you sure that’s why she came over?”

He sat on the edge of the bed and smiled half-heartedly.

“You mean, she might have a secret mission? I guess she could be casing the house for a burglary.”

I sat up. Screw him and his never saying what he meant.

“She likes you.”

His expression faltered. “Really.”

“Yes, really.” I was being unpleasant, but I felt unpleasant. I pulled a pillow onto my lap.

He looked down at his hands and the smile left. I looked down at my own hands and played with my fingernails.

His face went blank. “She just came over to hang out,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Don’t worry about it. That pretty much summed up Marcus.

Sometimes that was great, but sometimes it meant he landed himself in a mess. And he had, even though he didn’t know it yet. Sorting this out wasn’t going to be fun for anyone.

He looked down again. “How’d it go with Claire?”

I played with the hem of the pillowcase. I didn’t want to talk to him about it right then, not with Sylvia hanging over my 90

Kate Brauning

head. “She says it’s a bad idea and wants us to quit, but she’s not going to tell. For now, anyway.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah.” Neither of us wanted to say anything else. One wrong phrase, and we’d be asking each other if we should call it off now. As much as I needed to tell him we were done, I couldn’t right yet. I wasn’t ready.

Even if we could have done something, there was no problem here to handle. Just the simple, awful truth. I wasn’t fifteen, this wasn’t a crazy dare, and it couldn’t be fixed.

A dozen things could have happened. I could have asked him what was wrong, why he was looking at me that way. He could have moved closer and told me what he was thinking. I could have told him I loved him. But instead he stood up, hesitated in the middle of the room, and then walked out.

I thought I’d felt sick before, but this ache in my stomach felt like an actual wound.

Less than a minute after Marcus left, Claire came in. Knowing her, she’d been listening in the hall. “Are you okay?” she said.“So you admit you were listening in.” I didn’t appreciate her invading my privacy, but it was an invasion I was used to.

“My sister’s in love with our cousin. Of course I was listening.”

“Claire. You can’t do that. It’s rude.” Sometimes I felt like the more mature one, but it wasn’t really true. Claire just didn’t care much for social conventions like knocking before opening doors or, in general, respecting anyone’s privacy.

She glanced at the TV. “I never understood why you like these old movies so much.”

“They’re interesting. Complex.” Especially Hitchcock. I needed to watch
Psycho
again. I hadn’t seen it in a while because Marcus didn’t like it.

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How we Fall

“Slow, you mean.”

“Not all of them.” Going from my life to the world of, say,
My Fair Lady
could be a bit of a culture shock, but I enjoyed it.

I liked their traditional, old-world charm. Plus, they were mine and no one else in the family watched them.

Claire wanted to talk more about Marcus, but I didn’t. Having her here made me pull myself together. I yanked the blanket around me and turned the volume up a little. She narrowed her eyes, but then lay down on the bed beside me. “So what’s this one about, anyway?”

“A lot of things. Rick, mostly.”

A strange thought occurred to me, so I reached for my computer. Maybe I could find out if Sylvia had actually gone to Ellie’s school before moving out here.

But Google wasn’t cooperating. Sylvia had no Facebook page I could find, no Twitter, and not even an old Myspace profile.

She didn’t come up connected with a search for St. Joseph, Missouri, or any other local search terms I could think of. A Sylvia Young theater school in London, a Sylvia Young from Geor-gia, and information on Sylvia Plath were all I could find. The internet hadn’t heard of her.

I closed my laptop harder than necessary.

• • •

I pulled my hair into a ponytail and slid on my running shoes. I whistled for Heidi, clipped a leash on her collar, and hit the road.

I’d gotten used to it, but running on gravel was a unique 92

Kate Brauning

experience. Not only was the road uneven because of potholes and washed-out edges, but since the center was graded higher than the edges, one foot always hit slightly higher ground than the other. Larger rocks were always an ankle-turning peril, as were potholes hiding under the fine bits of rock and dust. But running still seemed like the best way to get over being in love with my cousin, so I ran.

Heidi trotted along beside me, glancing at me every once in a while as if she were wondering why we weren’t going any faster. Chris ran with her more than I did, but today I wanted the company. Her heavy tail swished side-to-side as we ran.

I’d never had to get over a guy before. Introverted as I was, I rarely put myself out there to be noticed. I wasn’t shy, exactly, I just didn’t find the same thrill in social events that Claire did.

Guys had asked me to school dances, and I’d gone to a few, but before the evening was over, Marcus and I usually ended up sitting on a picnic table outside, laughing about someone being high or drunk or both. No matter who else was around, we’d always gravitated toward each other.

Kelsey and Hannah made me jealous. They were so normal, with their part-time summer jobs and single-family homes.

They had nothing to hide. No major topics to avoid when they talked to their friends. No reason they couldn’t giggle about their crushes to each other.

About two miles past our house, I nearly tripped on the leash when Heidi stopped running and woofed. The creek cutting through our ten acres meandered down here through a stand of pines and knee-high chicory. New tire tracks ran the ten yards from the road out to the trees, and faded green fabric flapped in the breeze not far into the pines.

“Come on.” I twitched the leash and Heidi trotted beside me into the pasture. A tent. Whatever vehicle made those tracks wasn’t here, so hopefully no one was inside the tent. Beer cans 93

How we Fall

littered the grass, and a protein bar wrapper fluttered silver, caught on a rock in the water.

The tent wasn’t huge—a standard canvas single-person thing. The area around it hadn’t been mashed flat, so whoever it was hadn’t been staying there for very long. The tent flap was closed but unzipped. Any smart camper would have zipped it to keep raccoons out. I pulled the flap aside. A backpack and a sleeping bag lay inside. Two one-gallon water jugs sat on the sleeping bag. The overflowing backpack was stuffed with tshirts, jeans, and protein bars. Men’s jeans. No women’s clothing.Maybe he was hunting out of season. He could be homeless, but the jeans were an expensive brand and looked almost new.

Across the creek, the tall grasses rustled. I stood straight up.

A rabbit burst from the grass and dashed along the bank.

No axe-murderer, thank God.

Glancing behind me every few steps, I walked back to the road, tufts of grass catching my sneakers and weeds stabbing me in the ankles. Heidi whined and tried to pull back to the rabbit trail, but I could just imagine someone pulling up as I was about to leave.

The run back seemed to take twice the time it had taken to get down there. I usually didn’t run four miles and I had been sweating and desperately sucking in air for far too long by the time I was halfway home. A cramp in my side demanded I slow down and walk the rest of the way.

A crowd of people stood in the driveway. The parents stood in a circle looking worried, while Claire, Chris, and Marcus crouched by his truck. “What’s going on?” I asked. If all four of the parents were there, something had to be wrong.

Marcus looked up. “Someone slashed my tires.”

His rear tires rested on their rims, stab marks in the tire walls.