Tumble & Fall (11 page)

“I have to gas her up,” Nick says as they climb out of the truck. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Zan stands uncertainly at the edge of the dock. For all of the nights she and Leo spent keeping Nick company as he cleaned
My Girl
, or tinkered with some unidentifiable part or project, she’s amazed that she’s never actually stepped on board.

Unlike Nick’s truck, the boat definitely feels lived in. It’s not terribly unclean, but it’s clear that Nick and his dad spend a lot of time here, and that female visitors are few and far between. Zan steps around a few upturned crates, careful to avoid the murky water puddled in the corners. She finds a dry spot to sit on the bench near the raised, bulky motor. Half a dozen fishing rods are wedged into holders, jutting toward the sky like wiry antennae, and behind the steering wheel is a complicated-looking panel of knobs, buttons, and dials.

Nick attaches a hose from a diesel pump and hops onto the bow, busying himself at the console. Zan watches as he moves purposefully around her, checking hidden compartments and quickly untying gnarled ropes from the solid metal cleats. She’s never seen him so at ease. Even his posture is different, less rigid. He is unquestionably at home.

“Ready?” he asks, reaching to loop the hose back around the pump.

Zan nods and the engine sputters to a slow growl as Nick maneuvers through the harbor. The docks and moorings are at full capacity, and the boat glides carefully through the maze of buoys, toward the open water.

Zan lifts her head to the sun, the warm spray of sea air misting the tops of her cheeks. The early afternoon sun is high and bounces off the gleaming white of the hull as the water stretches out in mirrored sheets before them. Every time she goes out on a boat she wonders why she doesn’t do it more often. Suddenly, she is overcome with a feeling of relief. If she had stayed home, if she had said no, she would have missed what might be her last chance to be on the ocean this way. She wonders how many other things she’s already missed out on, by not saying yes more often.

Nick pushes a lever and the engine groans, a frothy wake bubbling up behind them. He looks over his shoulder and tips his head at the empty stool. “Come on up!” he shouts over the roar of the motor.

“Thanks for doing this,” she says, once she’s settled in beside him. His hands grip the wheel easily and he hooks his bare feet around the bottom of his chair.

“What?” he shouts into the wind.

“Thanks for the ride!” Zan yells with a smile.

Nick shrugs. “No problem!” He stares into the distance over her shoulder, and she turns to look, too. The island pulls away, its rocky shore dotted with houses, still and pristine as a painting. She can’t remember the last time she saw the island—her home for all of her sixteen years—this way. All at once, she understands why Nick would rather be here than anywhere else, floating in ocean and sky.

*   *   *

“What’s it saying?” Nick asks. The car, an old brown Saab that sputters and gasps with every shift of its ancient gears, rolls to a stop in the middle of an abandoned city intersection. The stoplight blinks from red to green overhead.

Zan tries refreshing the map on her phone for the billionth time. The cursor spins uselessly at the center of the tiny screen. They’ve been driving around the eerily quiet Boston streets for the better part of an hour, and she’s starting to think Nick’s master plan might have some gaps. “Nothing,” she says. “I told you, it’s not working.”

Nick stares hopefully up through the windshield, as if the street signs might tell him something new. “The circuits are probably overloaded,” he muses at the sky.

Zan double-checks her service bars, and sure enough, all she sees is a single dot, blinking uselessly in the corner. “It worked this morning,” she remembers, “when I called the bar.”

“That was on the island,” Nick says. “The city’s a different story.”

Zan looks at the useless phone in her palm, suddenly anxious to feel so disconnected. Maybe it’s better that way, she thinks. At least she won’t be tempted to call home.

Nick shifts back into first gear and the car bucks forward. “If I can find Tremont, I can get us there. I think.”

Zan stares out the window. The South End is a quaint, tree-lined neighborhood with even rows of short, brick town houses. Scattered among the residential blocks are condensed strips of bakeries, restaurants, and boutiques, most now closed if not boarded up and abandoned. Zan feels her grip tightening on the cracked leather of the seat, sticky beneath her sweaty knees. Of course everything is closed. What were they thinking?

“Don’t worry,” Nick says, glancing at the whitening tops of her knuckles. “It’s a bar. It will definitely be open.”

Zan tries to smile as Nick steers them through the narrow streets, made narrower by the double-parked rows of cars on either side. With nothing for people to do and nowhere for them to go, the city seems to be inhabited solely by illegally parked vehicles.

“That’s it!” Nick slams on the brakes and leans to look out through Zan’s window. There’s a thick patch of duct tape at the corner, where the side-view mirror has started to fall off, and he has to stretch around it for a clear view to the street. “Right?”

Zan follows his gaze. The bar is in the basement of a redbrick brownstone, with gold block letters spelling “LULU’S” over the door. Nick pulls up onto the curb at the end of the block, the front tires bumping against an overgrown sidewalk planter. He turns off the ignition. “Ready?”

Nick was right. The bar is serving, and it’s packed. In fact, it seems to be the only business open on the block, and even this early in the evening, people pour out onto the tiny stone patio. As they get closer, Zan hears the muffled sounds of a live band playing inside.

The room is long and narrow, with exposed brick along one wall and two dark mahogany bars tucked against a mirror on the other. At the far end, a small group of jazz musicians play on a stage the size of a love seat. The first thing Zan thinks as she squeezes behind Nick and into the lively crowd is that it’s just the kind of place Leo would have loved. She searches for a sign, some feeling or sense that he’d been there, that he’d stood exactly where she’s standing now. But all she feels is hot and claustrophobic.

Zan feels a nudge behind her and stumbles closer to Nick’s back. “Hey,” a voice calls out over her head. A guy with slick hair and a handlebar mustache pushes a flyer into her palm. “Sleep-In at the Common,” the flyer reads in photocopied print. “Epic slumber party tomorrow night.” He smiles at her. “Bring a tent.”

Zan folds the flyer into the pocket of her hoodie and searches to find Nick, lost in the crowd up ahead. The bartender, a middle-aged man with a low, round belly and thick wooden plugs pierced through each ear, works quickly and alone. To make his job easier, buckets of ice and bottles of domestic beer have been strategically placed along the bar. They seem to be free for the taking.

Nick shoves his way to an open spot and Zan hovers behind him. On either side, people are calling out orders, trying to get the bartender’s attention. Nick watches him hustle past four or five times, at first calling out a polite “Excuse me,” and working up to a more forceful “Hey!” Finally, and much to Zan’s surprise, he hoists the upper half of his body onto the bar and grabs the man’s fleshy upper arm.

“Watch it.” The bartender shakes Nick off and levels him with a warning glare. Nick hurries to unfold the receipt in his hand, slapping it on the damp edge of the bar.

“Vanessa!” he shouts over the persistent drink orders coming in all around them. “Does she work here?”

The bartender scoops four glasses full of ice and slams them behind the receipt. “Not anymore,” he shouts back, disappearing to hunt for a bottle on one of the low, hidden shelves.

Nick runs his hand through his cropped light hair. Before she knows how it happens, Zan is perched beside him, leaning over the bar to scream into the barman’s ear. “Please,” she says, her voice near breaking. “Can you tell us where to find her? It’s important.”

The bartender pauses, a bottle in each hand. He sighs and pours out each of the drinks before grabbing a pen from his shirt pocket. He bites off the cap and scribbles something on the receipt. “Last I knew she was living in Somerville,” he shouts. “If you find her, tell her she owes me an apron. I don’t care if the world is ending, those things are a bitch to replace.”

Zan smiles and feels like wrapping the man’s thick, sweaty neck in a hug. She flattens the receipt against her palm. A rowdy group of frat boys fill the bar, shoving Nick and Zan back into the crowd. Nick places a hand on the small of her back and leads her out of the fray. He stops to duck quickly between a couple engaged in a tearful, drunken debate, and reappears with four bottles of free beer hugged against his chest. Zan gives him a look and he shrugs—
Why not?—
as she follows him back through the open door.

CADEN

Caden stares out through the tinted windows of a sleek SUV. The industrial parks and water treatment plants lining the deserted highway slowly morph into clustered residential streets, until finally the familiar city skyline rises in the distance: the sun reflecting off the mirrored squares of the John Hancock building, the proud, boxy Prudential, and the weird spaceship dome beside it.

“Take the next exit,” his father quietly commands. A dark glass window, rolled halfway down, separates them from the driver. The driver, the same bearded man who was there the night Caden was taken from the beach, is named Joe. He’s not much of a talker.

Neither, it turns out, is Caden’s father. If Sophie was right, and the idea behind this trip had been some misplaced attempt at overdue father/son bonding, his dad sure had a funny way of showing it.

“You don’t have to call me ‘Dad,’” he’d said, apropos of nothing as they bumped over the abandoned construction on the Bourne Bridge. “Arthur is fine. In case you were … feeling conflicted.” Arthur looked out over the channel, his green eyes following the bubbling wake of a lone tugboat as it slid into the horizon. He pulled a file from his briefcase. “If you don’t mind, I have some work to do.”

Caden inched closer to his window, the cool artificial air from the vent blowing directly into the sleeve of his borrowed collared shirt. He’d been kidnapped for this? To sit in a temperature-controlled, chauffeured SUV, listening to the intermittent scribble of his father’s—
Arthur’s—
ballpoint pen, the quiet shuffling of papers as he moved them from one manila folder to another?

Caden closed his eyes.

When he opens them again, they’re outside Boston, the only big city he’s ever seen. When he and Carly were little and Ramona still had good days, she would take them on the bus for “adventures.” She’d drag them through countless discount stores, stocking up on undershirts and school supplies, and reward them with dumplings in Chinatown or steaming slices of pizza in the North End.

The day trips came to an abrupt stop when they got old enough to separate. One spring Saturday, after he’d taken Carly to feed the ducks and watch the street performers at Faneuil Hall, they’d waited for Ramona at their spot, the food court McDonald’s in Terminal C. She’d shown up late, slurring and disheveled, and Carly had propped her up with one shoulder, guiding her down the crowded aisle, as a busful of sympathetic passengers whispered and clucked their tongues. That was the end of adventures.

“Where are we going?” Caden asks now. He adjusts the seams of his new jeans, pulling the rough fabric away from his knees. The folders are closed on Arthur’s lap and he taps the pen gently against their fat, worn spines.

“It’s a surprise,” Arthur says, without the slightest hint of fun or fanfare.

As they pull off the highway, Caden presses his nose against the window. He’s disappointed to see that, aside from the eerie quiet that has fallen over the usually bustling streets, not much has changed. The homeless vets who stand between lanes of traffic at the light are still there, maybe a little less aggressive, a little more distractedly drunk. The buses and trains are all parked in the station, lined up along the tracks and snaking down the concrete ramps. The stoplights move more quickly through their cycles, pausing briefly on red before clicking back to green.

Caden isn’t sure what he had been expecting. Chaos, maybe. People sobbing in the streets, or looting, like the stuff he’s seen in places around the world on TV. Broken glass, babies crying, people sprinting through busted-down doors with stolen electronics.

There’s not a busted door or stolen good in sight. Only the sad shuffle of a few lost-looking men in suits; men who probably, like Arthur, had been unable to accept a sudden, mandatory day off.

They’ve been driving through the still city streets only a few minutes when Joe pulls the car down a side street, sidles up to the curb, and cuts the engine.

“Ready?” Arthur asks, hunching his tall frame to climb out of the car.

“Ready for what?” Caden asks. His father’s door slams in his face. Caden sits frozen in his seat.

Joe pops the trunk and goes around to the back, rooting around for a brown paper bag. He hands the bag to Arthur and snaps the trunk door shut before sliding back into the driver’s seat. Still, Caden doesn’t move. Arthur stands beside the SUV, looking up and down the empty street like he’s waiting for a friend to show up.

“He’ll win this game,” Joe says lightly. “He always does. Quicker you go in, the quicker we can all get something to eat.”

Caden sighs again and pushes heavily into the door, slamming it behind him.

Arthur walks a few feet ahead and Caden follows him around a corner. They turn down a narrow alley lined with souvenir shops and makeshift stalls, all shuttered and dark inside. Two hot dog carts appear to have rolled unattended into the middle of the street, and piles of foam fingers and blow-up baseball bats litter one section of the sidewalk. Caden looks beyond his father to where the towering green walls have stretched into view.

Fenway Park.

Caden went to a Red Sox game on a field trip in the eighth grade. That was the year he’d started hanging out with the Roadies, and a group of them were caught smoking butts in one of the outdoor stairwells. They’d spent the last three innings on the bus. Caden didn’t care. Once he’d grown out of Little League, he hadn’t been much into baseball, anyway. Even after the Red Sox stopped losing every game.