Tumble & Fall (27 page)

SIENNA

Sienna and Owen had camped far off in the woods, away from everyone, away from the coming news—good or bad—about the rocket. She had turned her phone off after saying goodbye to her father, and when she powered it on this morning there were no messages. This seemed like good news. But as Sienna and Owen hike back in to the brickyard, where most of the others have slept, she can tell something is up.

People are standing straighter, and some are crying; others have an empty, shocked look about them. By the time Jeremy runs back from the barn, Owen’s face is already hard and set, his shoulders pushed back and prepared.

“It didn’t work,” Owen guesses, before Jeremy has even said a word.

Jeremy nods, his eyes tired and his skin pale beneath the scraggly mess of his beard.

Owen looks frantically around the campsite, as if waiting for somebody to tell him what to do next. Sienna feels suddenly hot, and trapped in her own skin. She looks to Owen, expecting him to hug her, or tell her it will be all right.

There’s a commotion nearby, and Sienna grabs automatically for Owen’s hand. She needs him near her and doesn’t want to lose him to anybody else.

But this time it’s not a drunken disturbance. It’s a heated discussion between Rex and a couple of other men Sienna had seen the day before, building a set of stairs with their young sons.

“There’s just no way,” one man is saying, throwing an arm around his sons’ shoulders. “Maybe if we had another week…”

“Who knows what we have?” Rex yells, throwing up his hands. “You really think they know anything about when or where this thing will hit? Could be tomorrow, could be next year. Could be never.”

“Yeah.” The other man nods slowly. “But it’s a risk. And I got other kids, you know. My wife, she thinks I’m nuts. I can’t just leave them like this.”

“Tell you what,” the first man says, gripping Rex’s arm in his square, builder’s palm. “If nothing happens, we’ll be back tomorrow night. We’ll work until it’s finished. But for now, we’re going home.”

The men lead their sons over the ridge and toward the trail. Jeremy’s father spits into the woods behind them, tugging at the roots of his dark, curly hair. He seems so small from far away. Sienna wants to look away, but can’t.

She hears Owen’s breathing get heavy and rough. “What did people expect?” he says with a half-crazed grin. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? I mean, if everyone thought it was all going to just go away, what were they doing busting their asses for the last three weeks?”

Owen forces a harsh-sounding laugh. Sienna can hear the masked fear in his voice. She knows he’s only trying to stay focused, to keep himself, and everyone else, from sinking into a spiral of panic, or worse, despair. But still, she wishes he would take a moment to look at her, at least. She needs to know she’s still there.

He works quickly to stow the rest of his belongings in the tent before clapping his hands together and starting out toward the barn.

“Ready?” he calls to Sienna without turning around.

Sienna wants to say yes. She wants to be back up on the rafters, holding his hand, talking about what’s left to do before time runs out.

But the truth is that time is up. And it isn’t about what she wants anymore. It’s about what she needs to do, and where she needs to be. “Owen,” she starts.

He must hear it, something, in her voice. He stops and turns to face her slowly.

“Don’t say it,” he whispers.

Her arms hang loose at her sides and she wishes she could do something useful with them, wrap them around him, or pull him down the mountain and make him come with her, make him understand.

“I have to go home,” she says. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

Owen runs his long fingers through his thick, dark hair. “This is the only thing that makes sense,” he says. His body looks tight and condensed, like he carries a charge. “Don’t you get it?”

Sienna shakes her head. “I miss my family,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry. And I know that you want to believe that this is going to work, but…”

“I don’t
want
to believe it,” he says. “I believe it. That’s the difference between you and me.”

Sienna crosses her arms. She feels her breath getting choppy and hard. “What?”

“You can’t let yourself hope for anything, can you?” he asks. “You think that just because you’ve had some shitty luck, just because some bad things have happened to you, you can just close your eyes to everything good in the world. It’s like you’re afraid to imagine a happy ending, even when you have no choice. Even when it might save your life.”

Sienna lets his words hang, waiting to see if they’ll feel any different the longer they echo between them. “Shitty luck?” she repeats. It sounds almost like a bark.

“Yeah.” Owen nods. “Your mom died. And you won’t talk about it, but I know you’ve had a hard time. I’m sorry about that. It’s really awful. But really awful things happen all of the time. Another big one might happen tomorrow. And you can either stand up against it, prepare for it, put yourself in the best possible position to meet it head-on … or you can give up. Those are your choices.”

Sienna crosses her arms and looks farther along the ridge. A new crop of kids is taking down their tents, shouldering their bags, and starting for the trail. If she hurries she can join them, maybe hitch a ride into town.

“Sienna,” Owen says. He reaches for her hands, but she pulls them away. “Sienna, I’m sorry. Please. Don’t do this. You have to stay. I need you. I love you,” he says. “Please don’t give up.”

The words land like bullets, piercing her skin, burrowing into her heart. “I love you, too,” she says. “And I’m not giving up. I’m going home. I know you don’t think there’s a difference, and yesterday I probably would have agreed with you. But not today.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”

Sienna waits for a moment, wondering if there’s more for them to say. Owen looks at her, his eyes wounded and searching, before throwing up his hands. He walks quickly, each step more determined than the last, down the trail toward the barn. She waits until she can’t see him anymore, until he’s a speck on the sand inching toward the horizon, before she starts to cry.

ZAN

Highways are always the same. Even with so much traffic, there’s a comforting familiarity to a well-traveled route, the signs always in the same place, marking the same turns and towns, the landmarks and bridges and tolls. But as Nick turns off at their exit and they wind along the smaller roads through parts of Falmouth and into the harbor village of Woods Hole, it’s clear that a great deal has changed.

Everything is closed—the bank, the historical museum, the bagel places and seafood shacks—but that was to be expected. What Zan hadn’t expected was the dense cloud of panic that has crept out into the streets, seemingly overnight.

There’s something about the word
tomorrow
, she thinks. Tomorrow is the day they’ve been hearing about, every day, for the past six months. Even before there was an actual date, when it was a day that nobody could believe would ever come, it was still a day. An event. A moment in time that existed somewhere in the near-but-distant future, looming over their every thought, move, and prayer.

Today, that day is
tomorrow.
And tomorrow is definitely real. Too real. As soon as they pass the first gas station, Nick is forced to slow the car to a crawl. Not because of more traffic, but because of the hordes of people flooding the sidewalks and spilling out onto the road. It’s sort of like a parade except that nobody is moving. People stand outside of their houses, hugging each other, sitting on curbs or stoops. It could have had the same free-for-all, festival feeling that they saw in the city last night, but somehow, it doesn’t. There are too many tears, too much hand-holding and hard-set eyes. Even the kids look frightened. They’re doing their best to “play,” set up by well-meaning parents with toys and games, but it’s clear by the way they look over their shoulders that they, too, know something isn’t right.

“Jesus,” Nick whispers as they inch carefully forward. Every so often people glance at them through the windshield, confused, as if motor vehicles are a thing of some long-ago past. They shuffle slowly out of the way, too distracted to notice or care that their toes are inches from being run over. Zan feels the urge to wave, or roll down the window and apologize, as if they are the ones out of line.

Which, in a way, they are. What are they doing, so far from home? What did home even look like, today? Were people they knew doing the same thing that people were doing here? Milling around in the middle of the streets, just to not be alone?

Main Street is too much of a circus to drive down, so they park at the docks and walk. The stores here are closed, too, all except for one: a flag quivers in front of the jewelry store at the end of the block, yellow and white with a big blue moon at the center.

“Ready?” Ever since Zan listened to Amelia’s message Nick has spoken only in one-word sentences. At first, she tried to bait him with harmless conversation, but she could feel something charged and tense radiating between them, from the angle of his jaw, the death-grip of his long, freckled fingers on the wheel.

“Hope so,” Zan sighs. “You don’t have to come in, if you don’t want to.”

Nick holds the door open and follows her wordlessly inside the darkened shop. A tinkling chime announces their arrival, and the shadow of a small man moves behind a star-spotted curtain, draped from a doorway at the back.

Zan looks quickly around the shop. It’s an odd mix of cheap-looking jewelry—rotating stands of plastic earrings like you’d find in a store at the mall—and locked cases of elegant necklaces and rings. She can’t imagine what ever would have brought Leo into a place like this.

The shadow flickers and the curtain moves. “Hello,” the man greets them. He’s middle-aged, with an unfortunate comb-over that flutters like an underwater plant at the top of his head. “Can I help you?”

Zan holds her breath. There’s a long moment of quiet before she realizes she’s waiting for Nick to do the talking. She turns and finds that he’s no longer by her side, having stopped to linger over a rack of souvenir key rings by the door.

“Yes,” Zan forces herself to begin. “I mean, I hope so. I got a call, or, a friend of mine got a call from you, I think, about picking up an order?”

“Of course,” the man says. He ducks behind one of the glass cases and reappears with what looks like a miniature card catalogue or recipe box. He pops open a latch and begins flicking through the files. “I have so much stuff here. After the announcement, I couldn’t bring myself to close up without at least trying to get people what’s theirs.”

Zan nods, trying to appear grateful and impressed, when really she can’t imagine why he would bother. Isn’t there anything else he wants to be doing? And does he think people really care about their broken watches or reset rings the day before the end of the world?

“So…” The man raps his hands on the counter. “Your name?”

“Oh, right.” Zan shakes her head apologetically. “Sorry. It’s … Leo. Leo Greene.”

The man stops rifling through the index cards and lifts a light eyebrow. “You’re Leo Greene?”

Zan tries to smile. She feels her face blushing pink. “No,” she says carefully. “I’m, I was … I was a friend. He died.”

The owner’s eyes immediately soften and he looks at a spot above her head. “Oh,” he says. “I’m very sorry. Though, that explains a lot.”

Zan stares at him. “It does?”

The man nods and goes back to hunting through the box of names. “Yes,” he says. “He was in here, almost a year ago now, and he ordered a custom necklace. I don’t normally do custom jobs anymore, but he had this really unique idea, and you could tell he’d thought about it a lot. I hated to say no. So I told him I’d do it.” He pulls out a card and flattens it on the glass countertop. He circles a number in the corner with a pen and disappears again, this time to search through a low, hidden chest of drawers.

“He paid up front. And then he never showed up. I tried him on the number he gave me for months. I was pretty annoyed, you know. I just didn’t get it. He was so clear on what he wanted. But I could tell he had some personal stuff going on…”

“Personal stuff?” Zan asks. She feels the bizarre beginnings of a laugh in her gut. Of course a stranger, a man who had met Leo only once, would remember so much about a simple exchange that had lasted no more than an hour, over ten months before. It was Leo, after all. If nothing else, he made a serious impression.

The man straightens with a small orange envelope, the kind you’d use to leave a tip in a fancy salon. “He was on some kind of a mission.” The man shrugs. “After we worked on his design for a bit, he asked about a girl who used to work for me. I guess that’s how he found me in the first place, tracking her down.” The man opens a binder and scans through it for a list of names. “Best apprentice I ever had,” he muses. “Don’t know if he ever found her or not. Never heard from either one of them again.”

“Let me guess.” There’s a sharp voice from behind her and Zan almost jumps. She’s forgotten that Nick was even there. “Vanessa?” He spits the name so aggressively that Zan feels like saying it again, but nicer. She tries to give Nick a look but it’s as if he can’t see her anymore.

“Vanessa,” the shop owner repeats. “Yeah, that’s right.”

Zan doesn’t realize she is slumped against the edge of the counter until she feels hard angles digging into the side of her hip. “It is?” she asks quietly. She thought she was prepared for this, but something about hearing it confirmed by a stranger has made her sick all over again.

“At least, that’s how I knew her,” the man continues. He pushes the small envelope across the counter and turns the binder toward Zan, marking an “X” where he wants her to sign. “He called her something different, though. What was it?”

He wiggles the pen and Zan holds it in a daze. She moves it over the line, her signature practically illegible from the shaking of her hand.

“Julie? Joanna?” The man crosses his arms and stares at the floor intently. Zan stops with the pen in her hand. “Joni!” the man finally shouts. “He called her Joni. I remember because I wondered why she’d changed it. I used to love Joni Mitchell. And he said that’s who she was named after. Guess she had a sister named Suzanne, after a Leonard Cohen song.”