The Edge of Falling

For Raquel Johnson, Melissa Levick, and Melissa Seligmann who make all my stories those of friendship

Then perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

—James Baldwin

“Do you think if I practiced every day I could fly?”

“No,” I say, “but you’d probably get taller.”

Hayley looks at me with a mixture of annoyance and amusement. She’s only eight, but she knows I’m joking. She’s like that, wise beyond her years. Able to pick up on the things even the rest of us sometimes can’t.

“I’ll bet you could,” Mom says.

Dad raises his eyebrows, and Peter laughs. “Do you know how much Mom loves you?” Peter asks.

“How much?” Hayley says. She holds her arms out to measure.

“Seems about right.”

Dad laughs; Mom kicks Peter under the table.

Hayley goes back to eating her dinner—potatoes and
salmon. Green salad. Peter starts talking about the track meet next week; Dad says he canceled a flight, he’ll make it there after all.

Mom and I talk about back-to-school shopping. She asks where I want to go. We’ll make a day of it, she says. We’ll get our hair done too.

Then Hayley clears her throat, loudly. We all look over. Her eyebrows are knit together, her lips puckered. She looks concerned, focused, but then again, that’s kind of her resting state.

“I bet I could,” she says. She nods her head down low. If we were strangers, we’d probably think she was done. But then she picks her head up. Her eyes are big, bright. They could lead you home in darkness. “The only thing is, if I got lost, who would find me? None of you know how to fly.”

Most great works of literature have a hero at their core, but this story is an exception. What happened in May doesn’t make me a hero; in fact, it makes me the furthest thing from one. What do you call someone who masquerades as a hero? My grandfather had a word for that: phony.

My name is Mcalister Caulfield, I live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and this is my story.

Up here, power reigns supreme. Popularity is determined by it. Entrée to clubs and schools and organization boards is determined by it. Even friendship, if you’re most of the girls in my soon-to-be-senior class. Power—and of course it doesn’t hurt to have model looks, either.

I don’t, as my mother puts it, “care enough.” I’ve always been naturally thin, so I have that going for me. But I’m short,
too short, and my blond hair doesn’t exactly cascade down my back. It’s curly at best, frizzy at worst, and rarely thick enough to wear down. While most girls in my junior class spend their Saturdays getting blowouts, I’ve always opted for the park and a book. That makes me sound clichéd already, but I can promise you this story is more complicated than that. I wish it were just about a poor little rich girl with literary ambitions, but that’s not at all the whole truth.

Here’s what the gossip papers have been chatting about all summer: In the spring I saved a girl’s life. She was hanging by a thread on the terrace of a New York apartment building, and I pulled her to safety.

The headline from the
Post
read:
A NEW HERO—LITERARY GOD’S NAMESAKE SAVES A LIFE.

This wasn’t the first time people associated me with that character. Is it true? Was my family somehow the inspiration for his story? That would be impossible to tell. And I wouldn’t, anyway. Tell, I mean. This is my story. Not his.

Anyway, this girl, the one I supposedly saved—I wasn’t friends with her. In fact, I was only at this apartment in the first place because my mom had pressured me into going out that night. Abigail Adams, my classmate and our neighbor, was having a party. My mom said I should go.

My mother didn’t used to be like this. Before Hayley, she would have understood why I didn’t want to go to Abigail
Adams’s. She might have even agreed. But it’s like something broke in her, snapped. The thing that made her who she was just stopped functioning. She became generic. She became like every other mother on the Upper East Side of New York City.

When my mother tells the story of what happened last May, she says I ran out the door that night like I was on a mission, like I already knew there was some girl hanging over concrete on that terrace. This could not be further from the truth. I dragged my feet to that party. I dragged my feet one door to the left.

I didn’t save her either, but we’ll get to that.

Everyone calls me Caggie, by the way, so you should feel free too. My dad came up with the nickname. I’ve had it since I was a baby. My grandfather ended up marrying a girl from New York named Julie and having two children: my father and uncle. My uncle lives in California and has since before I was born. He’s never been married, and he has this gigantic house in Malibu that he’s never properly decorated except for the artwork on the wall. No couches, but he has a Renoir painting.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked if I could move in with him.

Then there’s my father: married to a fellow Yale grad at twenty-three, an Upper East Side penthouse, a son and a
daughter, the same skin-and-bone arms that were bestowed upon him at birth. There used to be more things too, like a Hamptons house and Hayley, but not anymore. Not since January.

“Darling, come here a moment.” My mother speaks incredibly quietly for someone who wants your attention as quickly as she does.

“Mm-hmm.” I wander into the kitchen and find her all elbows on the counter, flipping through a catalog. She has on a turtleneck, which is only important to note because it’s sleeveless. Which is, quite possibly, the most ridiculous garment a person could own. Particularly in the dead of summer. Are you beginning to get a clear picture of my mother here?

She doesn’t look up right away when I come in. She’s always doing stuff like this: calling you to her and then ignoring you once you get there.

“What’s up, Mom?” I ask, hopping up onto a counter stool.

She sighs and slowly turns the page of the catalog she’s holding. Then she slides her glasses off her face and folds them down. You could fly to London in the time it takes my mother to begin a conversation.

“I’m considering going to Barneys this afternoon,” she says. “Would you like to join me?”

My mother is always considering things, never doing them. She’s been this way forever. I have absolutely no idea how she ended up married to my father. She rarely answers a question decisively one way or the other. Do you have to say “I do” in a church? Do they take “I’ll consider it”?

“Not really,” I say. “I have homework.”

“It’s summer, darling.”

I shrug and play with the end of my T-shirt. “They gave us a reading list.”

My mother squints at me. “School starts tomorrow, Mcalister. Don’t you think it’s a little late to be beginning that?”

“Just finishing up,” I say.

My mother knows this isn’t true, but she’s not going to push it. Just like I’m not going to push her on where Dad has been all summer. I know he doesn’t want to be here. I know he doesn’t want to be with us—well, with me. But how could we possibly talk about that? There are certain things better left undiscussed, now.

“Is Trevor back?” she asks me.

The question startles me, and I place my hands flat on the marble counter. It’s freezing. This house is always freezing. “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe.”

My mother bobs her head, but she doesn’t look up. “So that’s that, then?”

I don’t answer. No way am I spending the last day of summer talking about Trevor Hanes.

“No to Barneys,” I say.

She goes back to flipping through her catalog, and I hop down from the counter and over to the refrigerator. There is nothing in there except for butter and bottled water, though. Our housekeeper usually does the shopping over the weekend, and whenever Peter is home, food is scarce. The thought enters my mind that maybe he’s back.

Peter is my brother, and he left last year for college. We’re pretty close. Or we were before January. He spent this summer at the beach house with his friend. None of my family besides Peter has been back there, and I have no idea why he’d want to go. If I’m honest with myself, it’s been upsetting me. Going to the ocean, cooking in the kitchen, reading in the living room. Splashing around in that pool like nothing happened. An image of Peter lounging on a deck chair flashes in my mind, and my chest fills with rage. I can see the stone tile surrounding the pool, the monogrammed Ralph Lauren towels folded up in rolls. The crisp water bottles with their tops snapped off sweating on the wooden side tables. A lot of details.

That’s the thing about these memories: They won’t fade.

“Is Peter staying here before he goes back to school?” I ask my mom, still staring at the bottled water and butter.

“Think so. His things are here.”

“And the fridge is empty,” I mutter.

I hear the catalog fold closed behind me and imagine my mother straightening out, rolling her neck from side to side, the bangles on her arm clanking together. “You sure you don’t want to come?” she says.

“I’m sure.”

“Suit yourself.” My mother is also the kind of woman who says “suit yourself” in a way that makes it very clear that that is the exact opposite of what she means.

She slides out of the room, her stilettos clicking on the ceramic tile. They sound loud, jarring. They echo.

I remember when it wasn’t like this. When you couldn’t hear heels in this house. When conversation didn’t sound like staccato notes on a piano. But that was a while ago now. When there were more people here besides mom and me. When there were still things to talk about that required more than a few words.

As soon as she’s gone, I close the fridge and look at the clock: eleven thirty a.m. For some reason, the time reminds me of Trevor. Not that everything doesn’t remind me of Trevor lately. Eleven thirty was the time we used to go to brunch on Sundays. He’d show up and ring the doorbell, even though I had said a million times to just come in. “My parents don’t care,” I used to tell him.

“But I do,” he’d say.

He was like that, formal in ways that I didn’t think mattered. My parents loved that about him, though. My dad once told me that Trevor was the kind of guy who made it okay not to worry.

He was wrong, though. There was plenty to worry about with Trevor.

After what happened that night at Abigail’s in May, I lost Trevor, but I got something too. Something I never really wanted. Recognition. The kind that belongs on a milk carton. I became someone people looked up to. Someone they wanted to be around, hang out with, talk about. I became the most popular girl in our junior class. Because if there’s one thing my school, Kensington, loves more than money, it’s the feeling of being close to greatness. Like I said: power. They wanted to be close to me. Everyone but Trevor, that is. After last May, Trevor couldn’t have gotten far enough away.

My cell phone starts buzzing on the counter; the ringtone is the soundtrack from
The Lord of the Rings
. It’s supposed to be ironic, but no one really gets it.

CLAIRE HOWARD
, the screen reads.

Claire is the one person in the universe whose behavior around me hasn’t changed this year. I was popular once before, for a heartbeat, when Claire went to Kensington, but then she moved downtown with her parents the summer
after sophomore year and that went out the window. She switched schools, which is basically unheard of—no one leaves Kensington. But Claire is nothing if not one of a kind.