Before I Fall (26 page)

At the top of the hill was the biggest rock I’d ever seen. It curved upward and out from the hillside like the potbellied hull of a ship, but it had a top as flat as a table. I don’t remember much about that first trip other than eating Oreos, one after another, and feeling like I owned that whole portion of the woods. I also remember that when I came home, my stomach cramping from all the cookies, I was disappointed my parents hadn’t been more worried about me. I was positive I’d stayed away for hours and hours and hours, but the clock showed I’d been gone less than forty minutes. I decided then that the rock was special: that time didn’t move there.

I went there a lot that summer, whenever I needed to escape, and the summer after that. One time I was lying stretched out on top of the rock, staring at the sky all pink and purple
like the stretch taffy at carnivals, and I saw hundreds of geese migrating, a perfect V. A single feather floated down through the air and landed directly next to my hand. I christened the place Goose Point, and for years kept the feather in a small, decorative box wedged into one of the stone ridges running along its underbelly. Then one day the box was gone. I figured it had been blown away during a storm, and searched through the leaves and undergrowth for hours and, when I couldn’t find it, cried.

Even after I quit horseback riding, I climbed up to Goose Point sometimes, though I went less and less. I went there one time in sixth grade after all the boys in gym class rated my butt as “too square.” I went there when I wasn’t invited to Lexa Hill’s sleepover birthday party, even though we’d been partners in science class and spent four months giggling over how cute Jon Lippincott was. Each time I came back home, less time had passed than I expected. Each time, I still told myself, though I knew it was stupid, that Goose Point was special.

Then one day Lindsay Edgecombe came into Tara Flute’s kitchen when I was standing there and put her face to mine and whispered, “Do you want to see something?” and in that moment my life changed forever. Since that day I’d never once been back.

Maybe that’s why I decide to take Izzy there, even though it’s absolutely freezing outside. I want to see if it’s still the same at all, or if I am. It’s important to me, for some reason. And
besides, of all the things on my mental checklist, it’s the easiest. It’s not like a private jet’s just going to park itself outside my house. And skinny-dipping now will get me arrested or give me pneumonia or both.

So I guess this is the next best thing. And I guess that’s when it starts to hit me: the whole point is, you do what you can.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” Izzy’s bobbing next to me, wrapped in so many layers she looks like the abominable snowman. As usual she has insisted on accessorizing, and is wearing pink-and-black leopard-spotted earmuffs and two different scarves.

“This is the right way,” I say, even though at first I was positive we were in the wrong place. Everything is so
small
. The stream—a thin, frozen black trickle of water, and cobwebbed all over with ice—is no wider than a single step. The hill beyond it slopes gently upward, even though in my memory it’s always been a mountain.

But the worst part is the new construction. Someone bought the land back here, and there are two houses in different stages of completion. One of them is just a skeleton, rising out of the ground, all bleached wood and splinters and spikes, like a shipwreck washed up onto land. The other one is nearly finished. It’s enormous and blank-looking, like Ally’s house, and it squats there on the hill like it’s staring at us. It takes me a while to realize why: there are no blinds on any of the windows yet.

I feel heavy with disappointment. Coming here was obviously a bad idea, and I’m reminded of something my English teacher, Mrs. Harbor, once said during one of her random tangents. She said that the reason you can never go home again—we were studying a list of famous quotes and discussing their meaning, and that was one of them, by Thomas Wolfe, “You can’t go home again”—isn’t necessarily that
places
change, but that
people
do. So nothing ever looks the same.

I’m about to suggest we turn around, but Izzy has already leaped across the stream and is scampering up the hill.

“Come on!” she yells back over her shoulder. And then, when she’s only another fifty feet from the top, “I’ll race you!”

At least Goose Point is as big as I remember it. Izzy hoists herself up onto the flat top, and I climb up after her, my fingers already numb in my gloves. The surface of the rock is covered with brittle, frozen leaves and a layer of frost. There’s enough room for both of us to stretch out, but Izzy and I huddle close together so we’ll stay warm.

“So what do you think?” I say. “You think it’s a good hiding place?”

“The best.” Izzy tilts her head back to look at me. “You really think time goes slower here?”

I shrug. “I used to think that when I was little.” I look around. I hate how you can see houses from here now. It used to feel so remote, so secret. “It used to be a lot different. A lot better. There weren’t any houses, for one. So you really felt like
you were in the middle of nowhere.”

“But this way if you have to pee, you can go and knock on someone’s door and just ask.” She lisps all of her
s
’s:
thith
,
thomeone
,
jutht
,
athk.

I laugh. “Yeah, I guess so.” We sit for a second in silence. “Izzy?”

“Yeah?”

“Do—do the other kids ever make fun of you? For how you talk?”

I feel her stiffen underneath her layers and layers. “Sometimes.”

“So why don’t you do something about it?” I say. “You could learn to talk differently, you know.”

“But this is my
voice
.” She says it quietly but with insistence. “How would you be able to tell when I was talking?”

This is such a weird Izzy-answer I can’t think of a response to it, so I just reach forward and squeeze her. There are so many things I want to tell her, so many things she doesn’t know: like how I remember when she first came home from the hospital, a big pink blob with a perma-smile, and she used to fall asleep while grabbing on to my pointer finger; how I used to give her piggyback rides up and down the beach on Cape Cod, and she would tug on my ponytail to direct me one way or the other; how soft and furry her head was when she was first born; that the first time you kiss someone you’ll be nervous, and it will be weird, and it won’t be as good as you want it to be, and that’s
okay; how you should only fall in love with people who will fall in love with you back. But before I can get any of it out, she’s scrambling away from me on her hands and knees, squealing.

“Look, Sam!” She slides up close to the edge and pries at something wedged in a fissure of rock. She turns around on her knees, holding it out triumphantly: a feather, pale white, edged with gray, damp with frost.

I feel like my heart is breaking in that second because I know I’ll never be able to tell her any of the things I need to. I don’t even know where to begin. Instead I take the feather from her and zip it into one of the pockets of my North Face jacket. “I’ll keep it safe,” I say. Then I lie back on the freezing stone and stare up at the sky, which is just beginning to darken as the storm moves in. “We should go home soon, Izzy. It’s going to rain.”

“Soon.” She lies down next to me, putting her head in the crook of my shoulder.

“Are you warm enough?”

“I’m okay.”

It’s actually not so cold once we’re huddled next to each other, and I unzip my jacket a little at the neck. Izzy rolls over on one elbow and reaches out, tugging on my gold bird necklace.

“How come Grandma didn’t give me anything?” she says. This is an old routine.

“You weren’t alive yet, birdbrain.”

Izzy keeps on tugging. “It’s pretty.”

“It’s mine.”

“Was Grandma nice?” This is also part of the routine.

“Yeah, she was nice.” I don’t remember much about her either, actually—she died when I was seven—except the motion of her hands through my hair when she brushed it, and the way she always sang show tunes, no matter what she was doing. She used to bake enormous orange-chocolate muffins, too, and she always made mine the biggest. “You would have liked her.”

Izzy blows air out between her lips. “I wish nobody ever died,” she says.

I feel an ache in my throat, but I manage to smile. Two conflicting desires go through me at the same time, each as sharp as a razorblade:
I want to see you grow up
and
Don’t ever change.
I put my hand on the top of her head. “It would get pretty crowded, Fizz,” I say.

“I’d move into the ocean,” Izzy says matter-of-factly.

“I used to lie here like this all summer long,” I tell her. “I’d come up here and just stare at the sky.”

She rolls over on her back so she’s staring up as well. “Bet this view hasn’t changed much, has it?”

What she says is so simple I almost laugh. She’s right, of course. “No. This looks exactly the same.”

I suppose that’s the secret, if you’re ever wishing for things to go back to the way they were. You just have to look up.

THROUGH THE DARK

I check my phone when I get home: three new text messages. Lindsay, Elody, and Ally have each texted me the exact same thing:
Cupid Day <3 U
. They were probably together when they sent it. That’s a thing we sometimes do, type up and send the exact same messages at exactly the same time. It’s stupid, but it makes me smile. I don’t reply, though. In the morning I sent Lindsay a text letting her know she should go to school without me, but even though we’re not fighting today, I felt weird tacking our usual “xxo” at the end. Somewhere—in some alternate time or place or life or something—I’m still mad at her and she’s mad at me.

It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It’s never occurred to me before; I’ve never been able to see it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, like maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.

Maybe Lindsay and I are best friends and we hate each other, both. Maybe I’m only one math class away from being a slut like Anna Cartullo. Maybe I am like her, deep down. Maybe we all are: just one lunch period away from eating alone in the bathroom. I wonder if it’s ever really possible to know
the truth about someone else, or if the best we can do is just stumble into each other, heads down, hoping to avoid collision. I think of Lindsay in the bathroom of Rosalita’s, and wonder how many people are clutching secrets like little fists, like rocks sitting in the pits of their stomachs. All of them, maybe.

The fourth text is from Rob and it just says,
R u sick?
I delete it and then shut off my phone.

Izzy and I spend the rest of the afternoon watching old DVDs, mostly old Disney and Pixar movies we both love, like
The Little Mermaid
and
Finding Nemo
. We make popcorn with extra butter and Tabasco sauce, the way my dad always makes it, and hunker down in the den with all the lights off while the sky outside grows darker and the trees start to whip around in the wind. When my mom comes home we petition her for a Formaggio Friday—we used to go to the same Italian restaurant every Friday night and that’s what we called it, because the restaurant (which had checked red-and-white plastic tablecloths and an accordion player and fake plastic roses on the tables) was so cheesy—and she says she’ll think about it, which means we’re going.

It’s been forever since I’ve been at home on a weekend night, and when my dad comes home and sees Izzy and me piled on the couch, he staggers through the door, clutching at his heart like he’s having a heart attack.

“Is it a hallucination?” he says, setting down his briefcase. “Could it be? Samantha Kingston? Home? On a Friday?”

I roll my eyes. “I don’t know. Did you do a lot of acid in the sixties? Could be a flashback.”

“I was two years old in 1960. I came too late for the party.” He leans down and pecks me on the head. I pull away out of habit. “And I’m not even going to
ask
how you know about acid flashbacks.”

“What’s an acid flashback?” Izzy crows.

“Nothing,” my dad and I say at the same time, and he smiles at me.

We do end up going to Formaggio’s (official name: Luigi’s Italian Home Kitchen), which actually isn’t Formaggio’s (or Luigi’s) anymore and hasn’t been for years. Five years ago a sushi restaurant moved in and replaced all of the fake art-deco tiles and glass lanterns with sleek metal tables and a long oak bar. It doesn’t matter, though. It will always be Formaggio’s to me.

The restaurant is super crowded, but we get one of the best tables, right next to the big tanks of exotic fish that sit next to the windows. As usual my dad makes a bad joke about how much he loves
see
-food restaurants, and my mother tells him to stick to architecture and leave comedy to the professionals. At dinner my mom’s extra nice to me because she thinks I’m going through breakup trauma, and Izzy and I order half the menu and wind up full on edamame and shrimp shumai and tempura and seaweed salad before the meal even comes. My dad has two beers and gets tipsy and entertains us with stories about
crazy clients, and my mom keeps telling me to order whatever I want, and Izzy puts a napkin over her head and pretends to be a pilgrim tasting California rolls for the first time.

Up until then it’s a good day—one of the best. Close to perfect, really, even though nothing special happened at all. I guess I’ve probably had a lot of days like this, but somehow they’re never the ones you remember. That seems wrong to me now. I think of lying in Ally’s house in the dark and wondering whether I’ve ever had a day worth reliving. It seems to me like living this one again and again wouldn’t be so bad, and I imagine that’s what I’ll do—just go on like this, over and over, until time winds completely down, until the universe stops.