This Is the Story of You (7 page)

Right now, telling you this, I remember four years ago.
I am thirteen and Jasper Lee is six, and it is November. A steel-plate sky. A nude-tone beach. Dune grasses tall, scrawny, wheat-colored. The surfers are out by Cedars, catching the year's tallest risers. The diner is open, the hardware store, Malarky's Pub, Uncle Willy's Pancakes, the bank, Rosie's, the Roman Catholic, the Come as You Are, the St. Mark's Episcopal, Deni's dad still upright and in charge. The traffic lights on off-season blink.

“We should do it,” Eva says.

“Do what?” Deni takes the tease; she asks. We are at my house, back in the Zone. We're playing horseshoe toss with the stakes planted into the uptilt of the dunes. Deni is winning, Jasper Lee is keeping score, Eva is bored.

“End to end,” she says. “Main Street. Winner takes all.”

I cross the Zone, finagle the latch, dig into the trunk for the old dress-up things and grab the finest pair of wings—3-D and glitter, more ladybug than angel, bird, or fairy. “If we're doing it, we'll need some of this,” I say. There's a red-and-blue towel with wide stripes tossed over the picket fence, and I snatch that, too, and now the game is on, they understand—Eva unplanting the pair of Fourth of July pennants from the white-weave basket of my mother's bike and Deni running into the house and up the stairs and coming back down with that stuffed turtle I won at the Mini Amuse in her hands. “Mascot,” she says, her glasses pushed up even then are onto the top of her head.

We should do it. End to end.

Rite of passage, on Haven.

My house is at Mid. We'll start back at South, finish at North. These are the rules we give to ourselves. We single- file out of the Zone, in through the house, out onto the street. I've got Jasper Lee on piggyback and my skates by their laces around my neck. Deni stuffs the turtle onto the Gem's dashboard and pushes from behind. Eva carries her Taperkick board like a baby. We push, we roll, we carry four blocks west and ten blocks south, to Haven's farthest tip, where Atlantic City in the distance is every casino color inside a veil of gray.

Jasper Lee will go with Team Gem—a group decision. I knot the striped towel at his neck, lower him down into the passenger's seat, make sure his cape is fly-ready through the golf cart's open back end. Deni adjusts her turtle mascot: front-and-dashboard-center. Eva sticks the two pennant flags into her braids so that they flap like elephant ears on either side of her head, and now I've got my wings tied on, and we are ready, three across plus one, wheels drawn up to an imaginary line. End to end. Six miles, no sprint. Haven is as flat as God ever made a place. Our topographic troubles will be potholes and sand slides and all the roughened places on four-lane Main, where we will keep to the gold divider lines of the perfect center, Year-Rounder traffic beware.

“To the lighthouse,” Eva shouts. “Ready! Set! Now!” A turn of a key, a bend in the knees, a push, and we fly. Eva whooping and the Gem purring and my skates counting a steady
one-two one-two
glide
,
and you should see the cape on my super brother fly. Speed-skater style I crouch, adjust my wings, catch a ripple of November breeze, and maybe I'm medium good at most things, but I'm extra-large good at this. I'm crazy happy swift. The skates beneath me fly. The key bangs a bigger bruise above my heart. Eva, meanwhile, rides her Taperkick straight as a pin, her big pennants flapping like Dumbo ears. The Gem is all easy gleam, and Jasper Lee's super cape is flying and Deni's hands are on the wheel.

Six miles end to end, and the day is gray, but we are color, and the traffic is light, and it is yielding, and we are riding the divider lines, south to north, rite of passage. And when a car shows up it honks us on. And when a bike goes by, it rings its bell, and when Chang and Mario and some of the other O'Sixteens show up, casual at first, they run the golden center line behind us, yelping how it'll be their turn next, how they could beat us any day, you should have told us today's the day, until they tire of the chase, and Mr. Porter from Uncle Willy's comes out and stands on the sidewalk and salutes, like we are the parade, like he can remember, still, because he can remember, still, the day he went end to end, on his own.

The world runs different when you ride it through on wheels. The world runs medium blur, wet-paint style: Haven does. Houses on flamingo legs, houses spilled on pebble lawns, houses with their motorboats up front, like dogs on leashes, and then the swatches of retail, the red and orange of the
closed until next summer
signs, the high top hat of Rosie's, the plastic flowers in the barrels by the diner. The big orange Godzilla legs of the water tank. The Alice in Wonderland characters of the Mini Amuse, unwinterized. My ladybug wings are flapping flapping flapping. Eva is riding straight as a pin. Deni is talking mascot talk to the stuffed turtle, and the smile on my kid brother's face is ear to ear, it's everything, it's rite of passage now. His cape flying. His happy soaring. His difference invisible now, and to hell with iduronate-2-sulfatase enzyme, I remember thinking, to hell with recycling mucopolysaccharides, to hell with the name of the disease, to hell with taxonomy, there's no right name for everything that's wrong, don't put a number on Jasper Lee, don't put a percentage chance, just give him a wide-striped towel with a little shine and call it what it is: a super brother's superpower.

It was a gray day. It was November. The sun was waiting at the northern tip, behind the barbershop stripe of the lighthouse. Six miles is a lot of miles when all you've got is Modes and a center line. Six miles is lungs burning, feet blistering, one toenail turning blue, we never figure out why. Six miles is talking and whooping and smiling at first, and then it's a pretty kind of silence above the
whirr
of wheels. Six miles is winner take all, and we were winners, we took all.

We were hand in hand at the northern tip.

We were winners, four across the line, super cape and super mascot, ears and wings end-to-end flying. We were us. We were before.

In the early evening of the day that Jasper Lee couldn't come home, I cooked myself more eggs sunny-side up, like I said.
I poured milk into one of Mickey's glitter-glazed bowls and Friskies into the palm of my hand, and Sterling feasted. I left the dirty dishes in the sink because everything else was incredibly clean, and tomorrow would be another day.

We were supposed to have another day.

You know those sound machines that pretend to be waterfalls, log fires, whales? Right then the air outside sounded like machine rain on volume low. Like slosh, like slide, like someone shaking a sleeve full of beads. I climbed the stairs. I whistled
two three four
and Sterling came—her narrow body snaking between my calves, her whiskers like sugar that's been heated, pulled, and chilled. She said nothing on the stairs and nothing in my arms when I carried her from my room through the open door into the wet dusk. Beyond the balcony there were no stars, no moon, just rain.

The tide was halfway back and retreating. Far away, a yellow crack of lightning split the sky. The edge of that storm, I thought, blowing out to sea. I pictured it a hundred thousand feet high and a thousand miles wide and a storm eye the size of an island and pretty as a cathedral, because that's what Ms. Isabel had said, years ago—the eye of a storm is like a cathedral. She read it to us; I remember:
“It has been likened to a cathedral with sacred carvings on the walls, stately balconies protruding, even pipe organs reaching to the clear, blue dome above.”

Sacred carvings. Balconies. Pipe organs. The storm in retreat, putting on its show for the great whales and the ancient sharks and the hidden reefs, the vampire squid, the blob sculpins, the red-lipped batfish with its eyes like two domes. I thought of all those forecasters with their fancy weather machines, their computer models, their barometric reads, their promise: the storm headed the way of oblivion. They were, I'm telling you, sure.

No danger here.

No danger there.

Not the night I'm speaking of.

Sterling squirmed in my arms, tucked her head beneath my chin, kept herself out of the way of the rain. I thought of Jasper Lee and Mickey in the fake happy colors of Memorial, a line between them and the storm. Maybe Mickey was asleep in the visitors' chair. Maybe Jasper Lee was sleeping, too, the hospital gown with the blue snowflakes loose around his throat where the tube dug in. Or maybe the second patient bed in the double was empty, so Mickey was sleeping there, the curtain between the two beds drawn open and Mickey's flip-flops on the floor. Her knees would be tucked up, her body curved like a French
Ç
. Beep of the monitoring machines. Bar of light beneath the door, storm at her back.

There was the cool prickle of the rain in my hair, the tide going out, the soft flop of fish out in the watery sea. The wind curled and thickened and the birds flew low and dusk seemed loud to me. Sterling's tail was going
tick tick tick,
and her ears were cutting into the underbelly of my chin and her whiskers were quivery and now something
c
hanged,
something went wrong inside the wind, until Sterling herself was pushing against me, from me, her silver fur turning to muscle. I thought for sure that she was going to fly—out of my arms, over the deck, into the dunes, into the evening, her tail ticking. That she was going back to wherever she'd come from, and already I was sorry, holding her tighter, telling her don't go, then telling her, promising, that I'd find her true owner tomorrow.

That's when I heard them: footsteps in the sand. Footsteps coming from the other side of the blockading fence, then onto the invisible part of the beach, then cutting the corner and heading for the gangplank—our gangplank, the one with the ropy rails that bridged over the dune that kept our house safe from sea treachery.

It was only dusk, but I could not see. We were not alone.

My phone in my pocket and Sterling in my arms, my mind roulette-wheeled through the choices I had, the possibilities. Deni with more Friskies, but she'd have called. Eva with news of a lost city found or a boy named Shift, but she was a front-door friend. Old Carmen, but that was stupid, because Old Carmen kept her distance, Old Carmen came and went and bothered nobody; there was nothing I could imagine Old Carmen needing. And then I thought maybe Mickey and Jasper Lee had come home, but I only thought it because I wanted it, there was no chance of that; I froze. Nobody I could imagine was coming for me. But somebody was down there, under the deck, in the Zone.

“Lock the doors,” Mickey had said, but in Haven, off-season, we hardly did.
Lock the doors,
but now it was too late, too wet out there, and if I creaked just a little bit on that deck, if I moved, whatever had come would come for me. “Shhhh,” I told Sterling. “Shhhh.” The sound of feet on the gangplank going up, and then heading back down, and now the squeak of the shoes in the wet sand, and the sound of the rain in the breeze.

If I'd heard the back door open, I'd have 911'd. If I'd heard footfalls on the steps by the ceramic ladies, I'd have screamed. If I'd turned to find someone in the room behind me, I'd have bundled Sterling and taken a flying leap off the deck and into the dunes.

Nobody out there to hear me.

But that's not what happened. What happened is the footsteps stayed inside the Zone. What happened was a bumping and bending and rattling of things, a banging and sliding, a knocking of buckets against lids and tops against bottoms. Beneath the deck where I stood, someone was hunting, noisy and careless.

Ready.

Set.

Now.

Be still.

I held Sterling tight. I never dialed my phone.

I never heard the back door open or the stairs creak. I only heard, after too much time, the gangplank groaning again, the stranger leaving.

It was early dark by then. I strained but all I could see was the hunch of a figure lit up by a brand-new lightning strike. A figure fast receding.