The Edge of Falling (22 page)

I hate this thought for creeping in. I hate it like I hated every single person who told me after Hayley died that they “were there.” I resent it, but that doesn’t stop it from coming: Maybe Astor’s father is right. Maybe he needs help.

“I need to disappear,” he says.

“London?”

He looks at me like he can’t believe what I just suggested. “To who?”

“Friends?” I mumble. I’m losing ground. Standing on quicksand. I can tell he has something else in mind, something that is absolutely, unquestionably, not an option.

“I don’t want to leave you,” he says.

“I don’t want you to either,” I say. They’re just words. I don’t even know if they’re true.

He pulls me close again. “What do you want to do?” I whisper. I just want him to ask already. Get it out in the open. I know it’s coming.

He says it so quietly, so gently, that the words don’t make an impact at first. They slip in on silk.

“Your beach house.”

It’s like all the air gets sucked off the street. I can even hear it whoosh away.

I don’t respond, just swallow.

“No one is there,” he says. “It’s empty; they’d never even know.”

I shake my head. “I’m not going out there.” That place is a tomb. It’s a grave site. It isn’t a house; it’s the scene of a crime. In my head, when I think about it, I think maybe it doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe it died with her. The only time I’ve talked about the house with him is when I’ve been complaining about Peter. The fact that he’s stored the information makes my chest feel tight.

“Caggie, please. If we don’t leave, he’s going to send me away.” His eyes are fired up, raw. It’s like he’s come apart at the seams—even his clothing, normally pressed, even, buttoned, has come undone.

I try to move around him, toward the door. The air hasn’t returned to the street, and I have the stupid, pathetically hopeful thought that maybe there is air inside. Maybe I’ll be able to breathe if I just shut the door.

“Just get on a flight somewhere,” I say, fumbling with my keys. “Where does he want you to go, anyway?” But I know. Of course I know. The same place where everyone thought Kristen was this summer. Somewhere they send people who need help.

He grabs my shoulders and spins me around. “He’ll track my credit card. I just have to disappear. Just until we can figure out what to do next.”

“Are you asking me to run away with you?” But it isn’t like when he asked me to go to Paris, or Rome. This isn’t romantic. This is desperate.

“Come on, Caggie. What is here for you, anyway?”

My keys are rattling in my hands. Shaking against each other. And when I open my mouth, my words do the same. “I can’t go there, Astor.”

“You can,” he says. He takes my hand in his. Covers it. “I’ll be with you. We’ll do it together.”

“No,” I say. I shake my head; my shoulders are quaking. I feel like one of those bobblehead dolls that bounce around on people’s desks. “I can’t.”

He keeps his eyes on me but wraps our fingers together. Threads his through mine. “Please,” he says.

I can feel him looking at me, but I keep my gaze down, on our interlaced hands, the keys between us. I can see them wink in the sun, like a penny on the sidewalk. Like the glint of a bracelet at the bottom of a pool. I already know, even before I answer, that I won’t use them.

I won’t be going back inside.

Because I understand desperation. There is no reasoning with it. It doesn’t respond to rationalizations. I could stand
on my steps and give him every possible excuse and new plan. I could buy him a plane ticket to India myself. But it won’t matter. He’s made up his mind. The only place he’s going to feel safe is the beach house. Have I mentioned yet? Grief makes you crazy.

“How do you want to go?” I ask. My voice sounds small, resigned. Like it belongs to someone else.

“I’ll drive,” he says. “I have a car here.”

I know that I’m headed straight for disaster. But I do it anyway. I don’t know what the alternative is. Just like on that roof, there isn’t a choice here. It’s forward. And forward is east. The thing about loss, huge grief, is that it can make you feel so blank you become untouchable. It can make you feel like you have nothing left to lose.

Astor is driving too fast. It’s getting dark on the highway, and although I know the roads well, I also know the Hamptons are a dangerous place to be reckless on the road. A whole bunch of weekend drivers, people who aren’t used to being in cars. Dinner parties, alcohol. It’s a perfect storm for collisions, and they happen all the time.

“Slow down,” I say for what feels like the hundredth time. My words get swallowed up by air. All the windows are down.

Astor seems in a trance. He has for the past hour. Nervous, focused. He barely talks except to occasionally ask me if we’re on the right road, if there’s a shortcut I know about. If we turn left here, will we still get there?

I have my elbow set in the crease of the open window, my head resting in my hand. I’m keeping my eyes on the road,
trying to avoid the memories that come like hot pokers to the skin.

The last time I drove here, Hayley was next to me in the passenger seat. It was about the same time, dusk, but it was probably a bit earlier given how soon the sun sets in January. The roads had been icy—there had been a snowstorm the weekend before—but the day we drove out, January third, was sunny and all the snow melted. I remember because Claire wanted to sit on her roof and see if we could catch a tan.

“It’s still going to be like thirty degrees,” I said.

“The sun doesn’t care whether it’s cold or not—it still shines.”

The sun does still shine. It did that day and the day after, too. I remember waking up in a hospital and seeing it through the windows, pouring in through the translucent curtains.

People think tragedies are blurs, that they fade together like a film dissolve, but that’s not at all how it goes. The memories are sharp, jagged. When you call them up, they could slice right through you.

Hayley was chatty in the car. Too chatty. She wanted to talk about things I didn’t, like where I wanted to go to college. I didn’t know. The University of Iowa, or somewhere in California, I thought. Close to our uncle. The beach. Somewhere “out west.” It’s funny to remember that moment before, to think I was trying to escape something even then.
That running from everything didn’t begin with her death.

Hayley was also curious about Trevor. She always was. She wanted to talk about him all the time. I remember she was disappointed he wasn’t coming out until Saturday morning. I think she had a crush on him. Whatever that means for a ten-year-old. She looked up to him. He would bring her books, talk to her about her painting. Sometimes I think he came over just to see her, and Hayley loved it.

She was smart—far beyond her years. She could hold her own in any discussion: politics, literature, whatever. My parents always wanted to test her IQ—my mom thought she should skip a grade—but Hayley would never let them do it. I think her secret fear was being different from people, separate. She wanted to be involved in everything, even if it didn’t concern her. She was independent, but she wanted us around. She wanted company.

I wince as the memory comes back—sharp and cold and as biting as a fresh icicle straight through the heart. I see myself pulling her out of the pool. I see her gray lips. I watch myself hold her in my arms. In her moment of death she was alone. I wasn’t there to keep her company. To tell her that it was all going to be okay. That’s the thing I regret most. That she died alone.

My phone rings and it shocks me upright. My hand hits the window edge and I yank it back, rubbing it down on my leg.

“Who’s that?” Astor wants to know.

He glances at me, his hands tight on the steering wheel.

I reach down and pull open my bag. On the screen I see Trevor’s name flashing. I want to pick it up so badly. My finger itches to hit the green button, but I know I can’t. Not now. I should have listened when he told me all of that on the sidewalk. I should have let him hold me. Make me stay.

“No one,” I lie.

“Obviously someone is calling, Caggie.” There is an edge to his tone, a second layer that makes my insides feel cold. It’s so stupid that I’ve never thought of this before. That it’s only come to me in the front seat of his car, speeding toward Hayley’s grave, but here it is: I don’t trust him.

I know what it’s like to be where he is. Right on the edge. Anything is possible when you think nothing is left anymore.

“It was just Abigail,” I say, hoping my quick breath doesn’t give me away. “We’re partners for a history project.”

He places his free hand on my shoulder. He exhales like he’s been holding his breath for hours. “Sorry,” he says.

I feel his hand on my arm like the wind. It makes my hairs stand on end, my goose bumps rise up like speed bumps.

I smile back. “We’re almost there,” I say.

He turns up the music, something low and melodic. I keep my cell phone in my hand. I want to call Claire, Trevor, Peter. I want to hear their voices, to tell them where I am. But
I can’t. Not with Astor. He’s not stable, and now I know he never was. It didn’t start on the sidewalk a few hours ago. It didn’t even start with that room in his house. It has just floated up to the surface tonight after being buried for months.

Here’s the other thing about grief: It will stay as long as you let it. And if you find someone who wants to hold on too, it will bind you to them. It’s fitting, really, how desperately grief does not want to die.

“No one can know where we are,” Astor keeps saying.

He swings left and I gesture up ahead. The road splits, and our driveway is down the right-hand side. The ocean side.

I’ve imagined coming here so many times since January. What it would feel like to turn down this familiar road. To see the headlights sweep left and then settle on our house: gray shingles, white beams, wraparound porch. You can’t see the pool from the driveway. It’s out back—an infinity pool that seems to run straight into the sea.

“Not too shabby,” Astor says.

The house will be boarded up, but I took our spare key. The one Peter and I have kept hidden underneath the flower pot on our front stoop. Peter had it made so we could come out here without our parents knowing. Weekend parties, overnights when I would sneak Trevor up and Claire would cover for me, saying I was sleeping at her place downtown. I was surprised to find it there, although I don’t know why. It’s
not like either one of us has had to use it recently. Not until today, anyway.

Astor kills the lights in the driveway and leans across the seat to me. I can feel the cell phone in my palm, and I squeeze it. Willing it to transport me somewhere far away from here.

He hovers over me. “Hey,” he whispers.

What was once sexy, heady, now feels claustrophobic. This car is too small for both of us.

He places a hand on my cheek. Moves farther in to kiss me.

“We made it,” I say, because I have to say something.

My voice shakes.

He notices.

“Are you okay, Caggs?” His lips are at my ear.

A flare of anger ignites inside me like a firecracker. Anger at him for using my nickname. Anger at myself for thinking he knew me. For letting him in and ending up back here.

“Let’s just go,” I say.

He kisses my cheek, then opens the door. I wait for him to come around, and in the time he does, I hold the number 2 key down on my phone. It’s Claire’s speed dial. I turn the volume down low and pray she picks up. Pray she listens.

Then I slide the phone into my skirt pocket, speaker facing up, and get out of the car.

There is a stone pathway to the front door that usually lights up as soon as you step out of the car (it’s set to sensors),
but tonight it doesn’t. “The electricity must be off,” I mutter.

Astor takes his lighter out of his pocket and flicks it, a lick of flame igniting his features. “Got any candles?” he asks.

I slip the key out of the opposite pocket, the one without the phone, and feel my way to the front door. I slide it in. It gives easily.

The moon off the water illuminates the house, and I see that it’s been emptied. There is a sunken living room that used to have two facing couches with a glass coffee table in the middle. The coffee table had floating shells framed in it, something Peter and I had made for Mom on her birthday a few years ago. All the shells we found on our beach—the Hamptons doesn’t have too many, so there were big pieces of beach glass in there, too. I remember the coffee table books, one about French cooking and another about interior design, all with uncracked spines. There were shelves on the walls with family pictures and a mantel with two candelabras, purchased on my mother’s trip to Belgium.

Now there is nothing here. Not even the light smell of lilac and lavender and garlic that always seemed to linger, even if we hadn’t cooked in the house in weeks.

Astor comes up behind me and slips his hands around my waist. “Give me a tour,” he murmurs into my ear.

“There isn’t much to show anymore,” I say. I’m sure with his arms around my chest like this, tight, pulled, that he can
feel my heart beating. It’s pounding, erratic, like it’s attempting to claw its way out of my body, scramble along the floor, and escape out to the dunes.

“What used to be here?” he asks.

I loop his arm over my head, out from me, and step down into the living room. “The kitchen is that way.” I gesture right, toward the French doors. We both look down at the empty room, the wood island stranded in the middle of the tile floor like a shipwrecked man.

My eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and when I look at Astor now I can see his features. I never noticed how sharp they were. Chiseled. Like he’s been cut from marble.

“Where was Hayley’s room?” he asks.

I knew he was going to ask. Astor isn’t interested in the family room. He doesn’t want to know where we used to keep the board games. But the words still feel like fingers crawling up my spine.

“This way.” I swallow.

I lead him away from the kitchen and through the sunken living room, the hallway that used to be lined with family photographs—ones of us swimming in our summers here. I see them like negatives on the walls: Hayley with her giant heart sunglasses on, slipping down her nose. Hayley wearing her water wings, nowhere near the pool.