Tumble & Fall (3 page)

“Anyway. I’m late for dinner.” Amelia turns and shimmies down the path, lowering first one foot and then the other. “Maybe I’ll see you around?”

Zan looks up just in time to see the end of Amelia’s long braid disappearing down into the grassy trail. “Thanks,” she tries to call after her, but the words are stuck in her throat. “Thank you,” she whispers again. She wipes at her eyes with the heels of her hands and looks out at the water. The clouds are on fire, broken threads of orange, pink, and yellow. The sun has already set.

*   *   *

Miranda is outside when Zan gets home, lowering boxes full of produce into the backseat of Zan’s car. “You forgot again, didn’t you?” she says flatly as Zan crunches up the gravel walk. “It’s your night for deliveries. We’re late for a committee meeting at the Center, or I would have already done them myself.”

Zan stares longingly past her mother’s clenched fists, back at the farmer’s porch and open screen door. She was hoping to curl up with the book in bed. Maybe she’d read it again. Maybe she’d just keep staring at the cover, holding on to the last book Leo held ten months earlier, on the night that he left her for good.

“People are depending on us, Suzanne. You know the rations are all processed junk, and there are some people who can’t get downtown to wait in line, even if they wanted to.” Miranda slams the back door and folds her arms around her still-slim waist. She’s wearing the floor-length jumper, a black-and-white striped and shapeless thing with big silver buckles that Zan has seen in pictures from her mother’s New York City days. It’s the kind of outfit Miranda used to wear with chunky combat boots or dangerous stilettos, but now pairs with a sweater and sensible flats.

“I know,” Zan says quietly. She slides into the driver’s seat and fishes for her keys in the cupholder. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

The car smells of dirt and cilantro, and as Zan pulls out of the driveway she wonders again if anybody is actually eating this stuff. She thinks of the people she sees through windows on her route, the housebound elderly couples anxiously watching the news, the young single moms who seem to be constantly chasing their wired toddlers around the kitchen, or bribing them into the bath. She can’t imagine what these people do with the bags of fresh greens she leaves at their doors. She wouldn’t blame them for tossing it all in the trash.

Zan starts down the hill at the top of Amity Circle, where the dirt road bends and meanders in both directions, all the way down to the beach. There are seven stops she has to make before turning around at the bottom, where the chalky dirt turns to smooth black pavement, and five more houses to hit on her way back up.

She has it down to a science: make as little noise as possible pulling in the driveway, leave the car running, knock twice on the door if it’s closed (or not at all if it’s open), and hurry on her way. The only exception is Ramona.

The house at the bottom of the circle is hidden and set back from the road, though Miranda likes to say it’s not hidden enough. It’s an old, falling-down ranch with missing shingles and a colorful collection of trash cans, usually overturned by greedy raccoons in the night. It’s by far the most ramshackle house on the road, but Zan likes to think that with a fresh coat of paint, a quick clean, and some basic landscaping, it could almost be considered cute.

Zan turns off the car and grabs the biggest box from the back. The sliding door is open, as usual, and she pulls at the screen with a satisfying swoosh.

“Ramona?” Zan calls into the quiet of the kitchen. The sink is stacked full of dishes, crusted with bits of pasta sauce and stray noodles, and there’s a forgotten mug of coffee, now cold, on the counter. Zan remembers the nights when she’d come looking for her half sister, Joni, and find her and Ramona in a halo of smoke on the back porch, whispering. The place was never exactly tidy, but it couldn’t have been as bad as this. “Hello?”

Zan opens the fridge and begins unpacking the lettuces, spinach, and kale, shoving aside six-packs of cheap beer and bottles of empty condiments that leave filmy rings on the shelves. When the bag is empty, she peers around the corner, into the darkened living room. The TV is on, a talk show rerun reflected in flickering blue in the big picture window. Ramona is sprawled out on the couch, her head lolling on a cushion with her mouth puffed open, like a fish. Her knee twitches and she stretches in her sleep, turning her face to the wall.

Zan stands in the doorway, looking at the pile of Ramona’s wild red curls. Joni used to say that Ramona had to be the world’s most stunningly beautiful alcoholic. Zan is inclined to agree.

The toilet flushes at the other end of the hall and a door creaks open. Zan takes a step back into the kitchen and holds the bag closer to her chest. Caden doesn’t look up.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize she was sleeping,” Zan says, gesturing at the couch.

“She’s not sleeping, she’s passed out,” Caden corrects as he walks into the living room. He kneels on the carpet to tug at the slippery sleeve of a windbreaker, stuck beneath one leg of the couch. “There’s a difference.”

Zan forces a smile. Caden looks thin, almost unrecognizable as the little boy she used to follow home from the bus stop after school. The only things that haven’t changed are his wavy mop of dark red hair and the tear-shaped birthmark near the top of his left cheek. His green eyes used to catch the light when he was up to something, but lately they’ve looked empty and flat.

“I left some stuff in the fridge,” Zan says as Caden rifles through Ramona’s purse, left open on the table. He pulls out a wad of singles and keeps looking. “I’m pretty much done, I could stay and cook something if you want…”

“No thanks,” Caden grumbles, shoving the bills into the pocket of his loose-fitting jeans. “Carly will be home soon. She’ll figure something out for Sleeping Beauty, if she ever wakes up.”

Caden pauses on the other side of the sliding glass door, and it takes a moment for Zan to realize that he’s waiting for her to leave. She hurries out to the porch and he slams the door shut behind her. He jogs to the road and waves an arm high over his shoulder, all before she has a chance to offer him a ride. He always says no, but it makes her feel better to ask.

*   *   *

Zan stares at the book on her bed, warily, like it might actually start talking.

Her parents are still out. She’d felt relieved to see the empty garage and hurried upstairs to her loft, skipping the leftovers she knew her mother had stored in the fridge and taking the crooked steps three at a time.

The loft has low, pitched walls and no real windows. When Zan was little, this was Joni’s room. She remembers sitting on the beanbag chair in the corner while her half sister stood on the bed, waving illicit smoke from her American Spirits up through the dusty skylight. She’d stare at the clouds and talk about all of the places she was going to visit when she finally got off this “Godforsaken rock.” She promised that Zan could come visit.

After Joni ran away, Zan tried to find a picture of the two of them. In the only one her mother hadn’t stashed away in the basement, they’re at the fair, Zan hugging the neck of the stuffed giraffe Joni won on the rope-ladder race. Zan is blinking and Joni is staring off into space, but Zan framed it anyway and set it out in plain view, at the center of her bedside table.

Next to the photo is another in a frame: Zan’s favorite shot of Leo. He made the frame himself, from scraps in his dad’s woodshop last Christmas. They’re at the beach. She’s leaning on his legs, his head tucked in the crook of her neck. A tangled strand of her wet, dark hair runs like a scar across his forehead. They look happy, full, attached.

Zan looks from Leo to the book on her bed and flips open the cover. In the top corner of the title page, there’s a pencil scrawl: “$3. Used.” Zan turns another page and a flimsy piece of paper flutters to the ground.

She bends to the floor to pick it up, recognizing the faint printed numbers on one side. A receipt. She squints to get a better look, but the letters and numbers have faded. Ink bleeds through from the other side and she turns the paper over in her palm. Written in dark black pen is a series of numbers, separated by dashes. A phone number. Beneath them, one word: “Vanessa.”

Zan holds the paper out, as if it might make more sense seen from a different angle. Vanessa? She doesn’t know any Vanessas. Leo didn’t know any Vanessas, at least not that he ever talked about. Why would he know a Vanessa and not tell her?

Zan shrugs. There’s a new tightness in her stomach, but she breathes it away. The receipt must have been left in the book by a previous owner. A previous owner who met a Vanessa and asked for her phone number. A previous owner who probably never called.

She folds the paper back inside the book, closes it, and holds it in her lap. She takes a few breaths and tries to talk herself into doing something else. Taking a shower. Reading a book.

A different book.

Quickly, she pulls out the receipt and flicks on the lamp at her feet, holding the paper under the light and looking closer at the faded blue ink. She can just barely make out the word at the top. “Grumpy’s.” A chill spikes the hairs on the back of her neck. It’s their favorite hangout, a coffee shop in town. Her chest tightens and she thinks of their table, the one on the porch, the mismatched chairs and the porcelain creamer in the shape of a cow.

She is ready to tuck the receipt back between the pages when she notices the printed date. The numbers are light and sketchy, but under the lamp she begins to make them out. This time, she gasps.

It’s a date she knows too well. The date Leo was supposed to take her to the last movie at a film festival in town, a documentary about the importance of keeping bees. The date his best friend Nick asked him to do an emergency favor, something having to do with a part for Nick’s boat in New Bedford. The date Leo said yes, because it sounded like an adventure and Leo always said yes to adventures, and what’s the big deal? They’d catch the movie on DVD, and since when did she care so much about bees?

The date he left in the rain, and never came home.

Zan slams the book shut. Before she knows why, she flicks it like a Frisbee across the room, where it skids along the floor and stops at the wall with a dull, lifeless thud.

CADEN

Caden called it.

Not that anybody will believe him, and not that he cares if they do or they don’t. He knows what he knows, and he knows that he knew. He knew the world was ending.

It all started back in the seventh grade. He managed to convince Dr. Stratton, the craggy-faced earth science teacher with bushy gray eyebrows that moved like baby squirrels when he talked, to let him write his final report on black holes. This was before the big growth spurt, before his skin cleared, before he gave up video games and comics and calling the hallway closet his “lab.” This was before he started hanging with the Roadies, the kids who live all the way across town, in the island’s only public housing development. The kids whose parents don’t care how late they stay out, or what they smell like when they get home.

Caden doesn’t have parents. He has Ramona. Yes, she gave birth to him. Yes, she gives him the money he needs, when he needs it (meaning he takes what he needs from her pockets and purse). But parental, she is not.

He has a dad, too, or used to. A guy who always wore a wool hat—the newsboy kind with a short, stiff brim—in pictures, and, for a time, sent him useless crap like personalized key chains and packs of candy cigars on his birthday. Caden doesn’t blame Ramona for trying so hard to forget him, though it’d be nice if she did it someplace else. There are days when she transitions from deathly hungover to semi-sober to blackout drunk without ever leaving the sofa. There are nights like this one, when Caden walks three miles by himself without a flashlight, just to get out of the house.

He crosses the street at the end of Amity Circle and cuts through the path to the beach.

Black holes. It wasn’t the black holes he cared about. It’s what he learned when his research went off track. He was Googling for hours in the back of the library, waiting for Ramona to remember to pick him up. It was all over the Web back then. NASA and the budget cuts. People screaming online that asteroid research would be the first to go. With slashed funding, would there be enough attention paid to predictions, to tracking the routes and habits of all of those massive chunks of space-waste, some the size of small planets, hurtling around in no particular orbit?

Caden wasn’t the only one who had a feeling that Persephone was going to be a problem. He read about scientists in the 1800s tracking her orbit and making predictions about a potentially destructive return. A century later, when she did come back, she was even closer. Scientists adjusted their calculations, and the overwhelming consensus was that her next visit would be the last. At the very least, she would do severe localized damage, interrupting satellites, making mass communication and air travel next to impossible, and putting on one hell of a show.

At the very worst, it could be the end. The end of everything. But that was all they knew, back then.

Caden went home that night and booted up the old desktop computer he’d salvaged from the freebie pile at the dump. He’d logged in to his online journal and typed quickly: “We’re all going out with a bang.”

Walking along the beach after dark, it’s hard for him to imagine that all of this could be gone. Gone
how
, nobody will say. But Caden has looked into this, too. First: water. Massive tsunamis if an ocean took a direct hit, washing away entire coastlines. Then: fire. The displaced embers of Earth’s very core, falling chunks of flaming hail. And last but not least: ice. A frozen planet, shrouded in clouds of debris, hidden from the life-giving forces of the sun.

Not that any of them would necessarily be around to witness it. They could all be gone, the way of the dinosaurs. But still, it seems impossible as he walks under the quiet glow of the moon, beside the soft, steady roll of the waves. It seems impossible that even this beach, this beach that he knows like his own backyard, could be the first to turn against him.