Tumble & Fall (2 page)

“So,” he says again. Sienna looks out at the water. It’s choppier than she would have imagined, sharp little whitecaps rolling over the glassy blue-gray.

“I have some news.” His voice cracks, but she’s still staring at the ocean, waiting to see the first shadows of land. This was the other game they played. Dad would claim to see the contours of the island first, long before the route they were traveling made such spotting humanly possible.

“It’s pretty exciting, and I’ve been really looking forward to telling you, but I wanted to do it in person, so…” Dad shifts closer to the window so that she has no choice but to look him in the eyes.

“What’s up?” Sienna asks. He turns back to the water, and behind the sharp profile of his nose, her nose on his face, she sees it: the snaking line of the harbor town, the scattered rooftops, the bridge, and the boats. “There it is!” she calls out, even though it’s clear she’s the only one playing.

“Sienna,” Dad says quietly. Her stomach flips and wrenches. She can count on one hand the number of times he’s called her by her real name.

Sienna, your mom’s going back into the hospital.

She’s gone, Sienna, I’m sorry
.

She half expects to see tears when she looks back at his face, the tears that, when she was younger, seemed to be constantly pooling at the corners of his light blue eyes, rarely spilling over but always there, a watery threat. But all she sees is the same shaky smile.

“I’m getting married.” His eyes are staring into her face like she’s one of those 3-D pictures, like he’s waiting for the real Sienna to pop off the page. The TV blurs behind him, everything blurs, until his face looms, distorted and unsteady, like a giant parade float. “Nobody you know, I don’t think. Her name is Denise. I was doing some work pro bono for the Boys and Girls Club. She’s on the board of directors. It hasn’t been long, but … well, with all that’s going on…”

He lowers his voice and gestures outside, which is, she’s noticed, what people do when they talk about what’s happening. As if Persephone—the mile-wide asteroid poised to collide with some unlucky part of the planet, strong enough perhaps to knock them all off of rotation and into some eternal darkness they can’t begin to understand—is nothing but an oblivious child, just out of earshot.

“We’re going to do a ceremony, and a big party afterward. Next week at the house. Denny’s never been to the island before—”

“Denny?” Sienna spits before she can help it. Her voice trembles from the racing of her pulse and she watches her fingers shake. She tries to freeze them with a sharp, steady gaze.

Dad coughs, a stalling clear of his throat. “I thought it would be nice for us all to spend some time together,” he says. He reaches across the table and covers her trembling wrists with his hands. She tries to swallow but her throat is scratchy and dry. She wants to rip her hands away. Instead, she tenses the muscles of her forearms, pressing her fingers deeper into the table.

She feels tricked. He knows she won’t put up a fight. She’s done her fighting. Sienna was the one who had always fought to keep them together. And when it wasn’t enough, when nothing got better, when things inside of her only got darker, she fought against the darkness. She fought until it was too much, and then she gave up.

And now she’s back, with new meds, new “coping strategies.” Just in time to wait for an asteroid, and a wedding. She isn’t sure which is worse.

Sienna carefully frees one hand and takes a long sip of soda, realizing after she’s swallowed, after the cool, bitter foam has coated her tongue, that she’s grabbed his beer instead. Dad raises one eyebrow high above the other. “Something you picked up in rehab?”

She draws the back of one hand slowly across her mouth, refusing to let him see her smile. The boat shudders and shakes, the doors folding open as they pull into the dock. A hurried voice on the PA directs all passengers back to their cars. Sienna stands first and Dad touches her shoulder, pulling her in for an awkward sideways hug. “It’s a good thing,” he whispers into her hair. “I promise.”

She follows him down to the car, where they sit and they wait in a new kind of quiet.

ZAN

“I know, I know, I’m super late. I’m sorry.”

Zan pauses at the bottom of the rocky ledge, stepping out of her flip-flops and looping them around one finger. She is racing the sun—if she gets to their spot before sunset, they’ll have plenty of time to talk before dark, before the mosquitoes swarm her ankles and her mother starts to wonder where she’s been.

“I’ve been trying to get out of there since three o’clock. I swear Miranda thinks she’s running some sort of factory in our house. I thought when she closed the gallery she’d chill out or something, just work in the garden and read and listen to music—you know, the stuff she said she wanted to do when she retires. I mean, if ever there was a reason to force retirement I’d say the end of the world is it, right?”

Zan catches her breath at the top. She drops her shoes and heavy canvas bag into the sandy patch between two rocks and scales the tallest boulder up to the point, where she has the clearest view. The ocean stretches out for miles, the red clay rocks of the beach below changing colors as the waves roll in and retreat, leaving behind a labyrinth of shallow, misshapen puddles. Just beyond the next cliff, sprawling summer estates jut out toward the horizon. Leo likes to laugh about how expensive it must be, pretending to own this view, when they’ve always been able to get it for free.

“Which isn’t to say that she’s not doing those things,” Zan goes on, her voice a sharp trill. “She’s doing the shit out of them, like some kind of neo-hippie drill sergeant. She has a calendar on the dry-erase board in the kitchen now. There are allotted times for everything. Feeding the animals, harvesting—fine, I get it, but ‘Free Read’? ‘Correspondence’? It’s like a boarding school in nineteenth-century England. I can’t stand it.”

Zan stretches her legs out from one rock to the other, tensing and releasing the short, sturdy muscles in her thighs. She wishes for the gazillionth time that she had legs like Miranda, her mother, who used to be a dancer, as she allows exactly nobody to forget. Long, graceful legs with narrow, lovely knees, instead of her own stubby calves and wide, boxy ankles. Leo says he loves her just the way she is, his little spark plug, hard to spot in a crowd but near impossible to push over.

From the bag, she pulls out a bottle of champagne—the good stuff, stolen from a crate in the basement, left over from a gallery opening where, as usual, the guests were outnumbered by hopeful bottles of booze. She bites into the foil and spits it out, uncoiling the wire and tugging at the chubby cork.

“I have no idea what I’m doing.” She laughs, embarrassed, as always, not to be an expert at something the first time around. Eventually, the cork pops free, not arcing out into the distance as she’d hoped, but sticking in the cup of her palm. She tosses it into the sand.

A soft, steamy fizz puffs into the air and she lifts the bottle to Leo’s rock, her toes still grasping to hang on to the bumpy surface. “Bet you thought I forgot. What with all of the commotion. Did I tell you my dad is building some kind of art machine? It’s an installation piece. He’s working on it day and night. I have no clue what it does, something about guilt and forgiveness, something totally weird, I’m sure.”

Zan rests the bottle on her lower lip and breathes in the sharp scent of the champagne. She takes a careful sip, a few sticky drops landing on the top of her thigh. She wipes them up with the hem of her denim miniskirt, Leo’s favorite.

“Two years,” she says. “Two years ago, I sat right here and waited for the sun to set, thinking that you’d have to come in eventually. I had no idea how long you’d stay out there; that just because all of the other surfers were trudging out of the water didn’t mean you were close to done. I must have sat here for an hour, getting eaten alive, with my dumb little notebook, scribbling stuff down for that lame article I was writing. I can’t believe I talked Miss Kahn into running it. ‘Born to Surf.’ And I can’t believe you agreed to answer my questions. Even if you did make me promise not to write about your secret spots. I kept my promise, didn’t I? And it was a pretty good profile, if I say so myself. I still read it sometimes. I practically have it memorized.”

Zan takes another sip, a bigger one, and closes her eyes as the bubbles pop all the way down, warming her insides and bouncing around in her stomach.

“He did, too, you know.”

The voice floats up from a lower ledge. Zan shifts to her knees, peering out over the edge of the cliff as Amelia hoists herself up.

Zan feels her face getting hot. She’s already brimming with excuses, but nothing makes sense. She’s sitting barefoot at the top of a cliff, chugging champagne from a bottle and talking to herself. It seems a lot to explain to anyone, let alone to Leo’s little sister.

“Don’t worry.” Amelia sighs, out of breath from the climb. She wipes her hands on her long cutoff shorts. Zan can’t help but think that the very same shorts would be closer to capri pants on her. Amelia is a head taller than Zan and then some, which might not be especially noteworthy—everyone is taller than Zan—except that Amelia has just finished the seventh grade. “I used to talk to him all the time.”

Amelia sits on Leo’s rock with her back to the water. She tilts her chin up at the underbelly of the cliff, where shrubby branches stretch up and over their heads. Zan fights the urge to ask her to move. Or to leave.

“Not anymore, really, but for a while it was, like, every night. It’s weird, right? Just because he’s gone it doesn’t mean you don’t still have stuff to tell him.”

“It’s our anniversary,” Zan hears herself saying, as if it makes a difference. “I mean, it would have been.” Usually she’s good about catching her tenses in public. Her mom has corrected her a few times, and Zan has laughed it off as best she could. Inside, though, she felt like she’d been cut open with a knife, her secrets slithering into the sun like restless snakes.

Amelia cocks her head to one side like she’s adding up a long list of numbers in her head. She reaches into her faux-leather backpack. Zan recognizes it as a birthday present from Leo, probably the last gift he ever gave. He’d ordered it from an eco-friendly Web site after Amelia became a vegetarian and vowed to wear only hemp shoes.

Zan tucks the bottle of champagne behind her rock and digs it into the sand. When she looks up, Amelia is passing her a square of something loosely wrapped in a brown paper bag.

“I thought maybe you’d be here,” Amelia says. She doesn’t look away until Zan has taken the package and opened it. “It’s something you should have.”

Zan reaches into the folds of the thick paper and pulls out a tattered paperback book.
The Rum Diary
by Hunter S. Thompson, a book Zan already owns. Leo bought her a copy the second month they were dating. It wasn’t really her thing, too gruff and drug-addled and mean, but she loved that Leo loved it. That he wanted her to love it, too.

“Thanks,” Zan says, laying a palm over the water-stained cover. “I’m just about done with the rest.”

After the memorial service, a perfectly Leo-esque hodgepodge of surfers, greasy-haired kids from the skatepark, jocks, part-time librarians, and heartbroken teachers, Leo’s mom had presented Zan with five enormous boxes of books. Leo had an obsession with used bookstores, and once he’d exhausted his favorite sections of the two small shops on the island, he’d drag whoever was willing along on mainland excursions. To Boston, Providence, the Cape. He’d hit as many as he could in a day, and spend hours flipping pages on the invariably gray and threadbare carpets. Zan could close her eyes and see the way he looked, hunched over a rare edition of essays or poems (the Beats, Bukowski, Brautigan) or an illustrated copy of some dense classic he’d read a thousand times.

The boxes sat in Zan’s closet for a few months, until she decided to push her way through them, one book at a time. That’s why she started coming back to their spot, the very place she used to sit in awe as he ranted or raved about whatever he was reading. The very spot his ashes were scattered. Now it was her turn. She’d show up, hoping to impress him (she knew it was crazy) with her scathing feminist criticism of D. H. Lawrence. When she started to run out of books, she got nervous and slowed down. What else would she say to a rock?

But Amelia was right. The fact that he wasn’t there in body hardly mattered. There were still things to talk about. There would always be things to say.

“This is really nice of you,” Zan says again, turning the book over and glancing up at Amelia. Zan wishes she’d called her, at least once, since the accident. Leo would have liked that.

Amelia nibbles at the inside of her cheek and presses her long fingers into the crevices of the rock. She’d played center on the basketball team this year, Zan remembers, noticing the broad expanse of her palms.

“Mom kept it on purpose,” Amelia says, almost apologetically. “I guess she thought it would tell her something. But so far, it hasn’t had much to say. And besides, it would probably be talking to
you
, you know, if it did.”

Zan flips superficially through the book’s thick pages, cool and stiff at the binding. She tries to imagine Leo’s mom, a sunny dental technician unabashedly obsessed with pop stars and boy bands, poring over half-fictionalized accounts of a drunken journalist wasting time in the tropics.

“It’s the last one,” Amelia says quietly. “I mean, it was Leo’s last one. It was in the truck, that night…”

Zan freezes, her fingers stuck between two pages, her pulse pushing in like the tide in her ears.

“That’s why I thought you should have it.” Amelia stands, her tall, distorted shadow falling across the pebbled sand. “Mom doesn’t know I’m here. She’s, you know, busy, these days, so I didn’t think she’d notice. But I had this feeling, like I had to give it to you … like Leo was telling me it was the right thing to do. Do you ever feel like he’s telling you things?”

Zan looks down, hoping to hide the hot tears that have sprung out of nowhere, blurring the black-and-white image on the book’s ratty cover. She’s imagining how the book sat, probably wedged against the console of Leo’s truck, the way it must have gotten tossed around when he spun out in the rain. Did it come loose when the cab struck the telephone tower, the one so poorly and strangely disguised as a tree? Did it fly over the guardrail with Leo? How long before somebody picked it up?