The Edge of Falling (18 page)

With Astor it’s different. He changes me, or I change him. I’m not sure. All I know is that when I’m with him, I feel like I’m a part of something else. I feel, for the first time since Hayley died, like I’m not alone.

“I think I love you, too,” I say.

He runs his hands up my back. “There is a lot of thinking going on here.”

I put my hands on his shoulders and let him kiss my neck. “Yeah, what should we do about that?”

He exhales. “What do you want to do about it?”

I know what I want to do. I’ve known since the first time he walked me home. I want to be close to him, as close as two people can be. Now I know what has happened to him, too. And it’s this reality that tugs me closer to him, pulls me down on the blankets with him. Something deep and important and eternal. Something that cannot be taken away.

I feel like I can’t breathe, but I don’t care. I want him to crush me. To breathe through me, for me. Trevor tried, so did Claire, but they failed because you can’t breathe for someone whose needs you don’t understand. It’s like giving blood type A to an O negative. It doesn’t work.

I think, in that moment, lying under him, that Astor could save me. He could save me with the sheer magnitude of what it means to understand. And I’d let him.

I wake up in Astor’s bed, my dress on the floor, the sheets tangled around me. The clock reads 6:58 a.m., which means if I leave right now I’ll still have time to grab my bag at home before school. I roll over. He’s sleeping next to me—his face in the pillow, his hand outstretched toward the floor like he’s reaching for something.

I crawl out of bed slowly, put on my dress, grab my bag, and edge toward the door. He doesn’t move when I open it, and I can still hear him lightly snoring when I’m on the other side.

I sneak down the hallway and into that formal foyer. The only sound in the entire town house is my own breathing, light and short. I’m not sure why I feel like I’m escaping.

I nearly make it to the door when something stops me cold. A man’s voice coming from behind the living room door, no more than five feet from me. He’s talking loudly, animatedly, like he’s not aware he lives in a museum. I was right: This house definitely carries an echo.

“This wasn’t supposed to be a permanent solution!” he bellows.

The door is only a few feet away, but I can’t seem to make my legs move to get there.

“I told you he needs that. Are there no records in your office?”

My hands feel numb, and when I look down, I see that they’ve started to shake. They vibrate back and forth, and I clasp them together to stop them from moving. I’m afraid they’ll hit something. An expensive lamp. A hidden light switch. I just need to get to the door.

“He isn’t stable here,” he says. “He needs help. I thought you fucking offered that!”

I hear the phone slam down, and at the same time I bolt for the door. I tear it open and run down the steps and sprint the three and a half blocks home. I don’t stop to look whether his father has heard. If he’s opened the door. I knock into people on Park Avenue. I whack a woman’s handbag off her arm and a little girl starts crying. I mumble an “I’m sorry” over my shoulder.

When I get back, safely locked inside our town house, I’m panting, and my feet, stuffed into last night’s heels, are searing pain.

Peter is in the kitchen, a mug of coffee in one hand, a
New Yorker
in the other. Something about the way he’s sitting, quiet, unmoving, makes me think that he’s waiting for me. Between everything that’s happened since I saw him, I completely forgot he was even in town.

“You scared me,” I say. My heart is still hammering, and my neck is damp, like I’ve just woken up from a nightmare. I drop my bag down on the counter next to him and go to pour myself a glass of water. When I turn the tap, my hands are still trembling.

“Where were you?” he asks. He folds the magazine down on the counter. I hear it drop.

His voice sounds rough, gravelly, and I know without looking at him that his eyes are bloodshot. He didn’t sleep last night. Maybe he waited up at the counter. I wouldn’t put it past him.

“Nowhere,” I say, letting the water continue to run. It fills the glass and then begins spilling over. I don’t turn it off.

“You didn’t come home,” he says. “Obviously you were somewhere. “

I take the glass and pour out the top, turning the faucet off. “I was with Astor, okay? What are you, Mom?” I wonder
if either Mom or Dad is here. If Dad stayed after dinner last night—I doubt it. He hasn’t been known to want to wake up in the same house with me this year.

I hear Peter sigh behind me and the clamor of his cup on the marble. “I don’t like him.”

I spin around. “You don’t have to. And that’s so lame, Peter. You don’t know him.”

“Yes, I do.” He pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

“You pulled his name up from Prep?” I say. “Come on.”

“I remembered,” he says. “Astor was his middle name. He used to go by Charles, before they moved to Africa.”

“London,” I correct.

Peter snorts. “Whatever.”

I round on him. “They left because his mom died. Whatever you think you know, you don’t know anything.”

‘They left because he turned into a fucking psychopath.”

I take a step back. Peter rubs his forehead and sighs. “I’m sorry, Caggs. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but—”

“Just shut up, okay?” I say. I can’t help it; I’m starting to scream. “His mother
died.
She died, Peter. And shockingly, he actually felt it. He understands how
I
feel. You’d know what that was like if you had stopped for two goddamn seconds to mourn Hayley.”

Peter slides off the stool and stands. “I don’t want to see
you get caught up in this,” he says calmly. “He’s not a good guy. He’s disturbed.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “You think if people aren’t all sunshine and flowers then they’re not good, but you know what? Some people actually feel real pain.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Peter takes a step toward me. Instinctively I take one forward too. I’m angry. It’s shocking. Startling. But I’m hit with the resentment I feel toward him and have felt since he left in September. I’m angry that he was able to be there this summer. I’m angry I’m the one who has to carry the weight of the memory of her last moment.

“You never even grieved,” I say. “You just went out there this summer like nothing ever happened.”

“I told you I was packing the house up,” Peter says. His voice is low and even, but I can tell it’s taking effort to maintain. “Someone had to do it.”

“I’m glad you were up to the task.”

He exhales sharply. “I’m not going to fight you on this.”

“Because you’re scared?” I ask. “Because you know I’m right?”

“Because no one is right,” he says. “I’m not going to use Hayley as some kind of moral scale. It isn’t fair.”

“To who?”

“To her.”

He shakes his head slowly; then he picks his coffee cup up off the counter and leaves the room.

I run up the stairs into my room and yank off my dress. I pull a scrunched uniform skirt from a drawer and yank a button-down out of a dry-cleaning bag. I knot my hair into a clip and slide some low boots on. I don’t catch Peter on the way out, and I walk to school in a daze, cursing him the whole way. He thinks he’s so morally superior because, what?
Because he isn’t the one that’s responsible for her death.

Then there is Astor.

There are a million things that phone call could have been about, of course. It might not have even been about Astor. But I can’t seem to come up with a satisfactory alternative to the fact that his father wants to send him away.

His father doesn’t get it, just like mine doesn’t. Like Peter doesn’t. Like my mother doesn’t. I just want to see Astor. He’ll explain his dad. He’ll tell me it’s just another one of his plans, that he wants to move to Prague for business and wants to make sure Astor is taken care of. I can see it now.
He’s just been worried since Mom died,
Astor’ll say.
He wanted to send me somewhere; he thought they could help with that. It’s a crazy plan, but he dropped it when I told him I’m happy here. With you.

Yes, it will all be okay.

But he doesn’t show up at school, and by fourth period I’m not as convinced of my own story. I start to panic. The
story starts to morph. What if his father got to him? Should I have stayed? Warned him? What if they came today to take him away?

I call his cell phone, but it just rings and rings. No voice mail even.

At lunchtime when Abigail asks me to come sit with them in the library, I tell them no. It’s starting to get chilly out, the first gusts of early winter wind, and the button-down isn’t exactly doing it. I stand by the gates the entire lunch period, seeing if I can spot him around the corner. Twenty minutes in I decide I’m just going to go back to his house. I can’t take it. I don’t know what my plan will be once I get there, but I know I need to go. I can’t sit around waiting for him to disappear. I need to get there before something happens.

Panic starts to rise in my abdomen and travel up my chest. I’m about to clear the gates when I hear a voice behind me.

“Caggie, hang on.”

I spin around to find Trevor. He’s wearing his North Face fleece over his uniform; he holds two sandwiches in one hand. I didn’t notice it last night, but I see now that his hair is longer. It hangs down a little too far in front. If we were together, I’d have him cut it. I used to do that. Whenever his hair got too long, I’d make an appointment for him at my mother’s salon. Sometimes he went to Supercuts, but they always made it too short, and Trevor has the nicest hair—it’s soft and silky, like
butter. You’d think it could melt when you touch it.

So we’d go to Oscar Blandi, this incredibly ritzy salon on Madison Avenue, and talk in fake British accents all the way there. “Darling, do you think they’ll have the proper champagne today? I simply cannot get my hair cut without a good bottle.” Then I’d sit next to him in one of those swivel chairs and read trashy magazines until he was done. I wonder if he remembers that when he’s shaking his hair out of his eyes. I wonder if he’d go alone.

“I brought you this,” he says, extending a sandwich to me.

I look at it in his fingers. Tomato and mozzarella. My favorite. My heart is still racing from Astor, from imagining him on a plane out of here. “Hey, are you okay?” Trevor asks me. He moves closer and puts a hand on my arm. “Caggs?”

“I’m not hungry,” I manage.

“What’s going on?” His hand is still on my arm and he moves it up to cup my shoulder. His touch is soft, familiar. “Caggie, please talk to me.”

I shake my head, unable to say anything at all.
I hate my brother. I slept with Astor. Someone is going to take him away.

“Hey, hey.” Trevor moves his arm around my back, and then he’s hugging me. I let him. I even tuck my face into the space between his shoulder and neck. “It’s okay,” he whispers.

I feel my body relax, like the strings that hold me together have slackened off. A marionette unaccompanied. Like last
night, my body remembers. It folds into him. It reminds me I’ve been missing this.

But then memory flares. All the things that happened between us. All the things that happened last night. This morning. The fact that I still need to get to Astor. Astor—the one who has actually been there for me.

“I’m fine,” I mutter, breaking us apart. “Thanks.”

“You left pretty quickly last night,” he says.

I look at my shoes. I bite my lip.

“Hey,” he says. His tone is lighter. “I was thinking of leading today’s
Journal
meeting with the interview idea. Get the ball rolling on that. What do you think?”

Going to the
Journal
is the last thing on my mind. “I don’t know,” I say.

“I thought maybe you’d be back in this week,” he counters. “Maybe you changed your mind?” He’s talking slowly, like he’s weighing his words first. Seeing how heavy they are, what impact they’ll make.

“I haven’t,” I say. “I’m sure Kristen’s doing a fine job anyway.”

Trevor nods once. “So that’s it?” He frowns and I see his lightning scar. Whenever he squints and his forehead smooshes together, he gets a little crinkle down it in the shape of a lightning bolt. I used to call him Harry Potter.

“It’ll be better without me,” I say. I look past him when
I say it, out toward Fifth. I know without seeing that he’s gawking at me, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide. Even thinking about it makes me annoyed. But when I glance back a moment later, he’s calm and still.

“I thought you wanted this,” he says.

“I did.”

He pauses. Inhales. “The
Journal
was important to you.”

I cross my arms. “A lot of things were important to me.”

“Come on, Caggs, don’t do this. Don’t throw all that away because—”

“Because?”

“Because of him,” he finishes. “He’s not worth you, Caggie. And you know it.”

I snort. I feel like laughing. Hysterical, manic bursts. “This has nothing to do with him. If you’re jealous, Trevor, maybe you should remind yourself that you’re the one who ended things.”

He shakes his head. “I’m not jealous.”

Something inside me sinks. It makes me even angrier. “Because you don’t even care enough to feel that. Got it.”

Trevor gapes at me. “How could you say that? Do you have any—” He exhales, stopping himself. “I’m not jealous, because I know he doesn’t have you. Not in any way that matters.”

“I slept with him,” I say. I can see the words settle on
Trevor, sink into him like teeth. “Last night,” I continue. “After you asked me to stay with you, I slept with someone else.” I cross my arms. I can feel my face heat up.

He swallows, but he keeps his eyes on me. “If you still want to be on the
Journal
, come today,” he says. “Otherwise Mrs. Lancaster is going to take it to mean you’re off.”

He turns and starts walking, back inside Kensington. I don’t wait to watch him. I turn too, and race in the other direction. I hail a cab. “Sixty-Eighth and Lex,” I tell the driver. Whatever panic was distracted by seeing Trevor has resurfaced. I just have to get to Astor. To make sure he’s still here.