The Edge of Falling (23 page)

We round the corner, and then we’re in her room. It’s empty, of course. No more rocking chair. No easel. No line
of clogs or toy chest or coat rack where she used to hang her rain slicker, the yellow one with the polka dots that looked like little stars. It’s still carpeted, though, and her drapes are still hanging—big, pink, and billowy. Our mom picked them out. Hayley hated them.

Astor and I stand in the doorway, and when he takes my hand, it startles me. I feel like a ghost here. Like Hayley: untouchable in my translucence.

“Where did they take her things?” he asks me.

“I don’t know.” I have no idea what Peter did with everything. Where they shipped it. Whether they threw it away or sold it. I think about those clogs and that slicker. The thought of someone else wearing them, or worse, them lying at the bottom of a land-fill, makes my insides feel like they’re being wrung out.

Astor tugs me by the arm to the center of the room. He paces around, peers out the window. I’m watching him, trying to read him—any sign of what he might do. Then he goes over to the closet and opens it. “Hey, Caggie,” he says. “Looks like they missed something.”

I walk toward him slowly. My feet feel like they’re made of lead. I hate this. I hate that we are here. He picks up a box. The standard shipping size—two by two by two.

Astor sits down on the floor, pulling me down next to him. He flicks his lighter again, but it doesn’t illuminate that
much more—my eyes are almost entirely accustomed to the darkness now.

He runs his forefinger along the seam. Wiggles the tape loose.

“Stop,” I say, but he doesn’t listen.

I can hear the waves crashing. They sound closer than I remember.

He pulls back the top, and then we’re both peering inside. It’s filled with what looks like trash: Q-tips and a rubber duck and nail-polish remover. I pick up the rubber duck, turn it over. I don’t remember Hayley having this. These must be things Peter didn’t feel were worth storing.

I’m relieved. It could have been photos. It could have been clothes. The box could have opened and smelled like her.

But then I see a black Mary Jane poking out from the bottom. One of the shoes we bought for her Eloise birthday party. I fish it up. I cup it in my hands. I cradle it there, like an antique—something fragile and expensive.

Astor sets the box down. “How does it feel?” he asks me.

“What?”

“Being here.”

I force myself to look at him. “Like I miss her,” I say.
Like hell,
I want to add.

“Are you sorry we came?” He runs his eyes over my face. I feel like they leave track marks.

I gawk at him. “You didn’t give me any choice.”

He leans over to touch me, but I slide back. I think his fingers will be cold. All at once, I don’t want them near me.

“Caggie,” he says. “It’s okay. I understand.”

I just keep staring at him. It’s like I’ve never seen him before.

Something is starting to form, bloom in my stomach and climb up to my heart. Astor hasn’t asked me to talk about Hayley, he hasn’t wanted to know how I’m doing with her death, with what happened in May, but what he’s required has been worse. He’s offered his loss up like a diamond. He’s given it to me, the way Peter gave me his watchful eye, the way Claire gave me her concern. But simply understanding doesn’t make it better. Darkness stacked on darkness just makes it that much harder to find the light.

I don’t want to live in this place. I don’t want my life to be an addendum to her death.

Astor is edging closer to me, and I know, all at once, that there is a good chance I won’t make it out of here. That we either won’t leave here alive or we won’t go back. There are some things from which we don’t recover—some places that, once visited, cannot be forgotten. But there’s something I can do to move forward. I can tell the truth. I can set the record straight.

Suddenly the images of last May are too much to bear, so vivid that if I close my eyes I’m afraid they’ll capture me. That
I’ll never escape the memory. But I need to tell someone. Someone needs to know. I’ve stayed silent, but look where silence has gotten me. Pushing everything away, running, is what has brought us here. I’m ready to stop. Even if we don’t come back, at least the truth will.

I touch my thumb to my pocket. I pray.
Please, Claire, hear this. Please, Claire, you need to know.

I take a deep breath. “You read those articles about Kristen?” I say. “About what happened last May?”

Astor doesn’t move, not even to nod, but I press on. I have to tell her.

“I didn’t save her,” I say. “I couldn’t have saved anyone. That was the whole point.”

I never thought I’d say this out loud. I thought I’d take this secret to my grave. But now that I’ve started down the road, I know there is no going back. My words are strong, set, hard—like pieces of clay baked in an oven. They’re ready to come out.

I look at Astor. His eyes are unblinking. I imagine I’m talking to Claire when I say, “I went up to the roof that night because I didn’t want to live anymore. I went up there to jump.”

My memory flashes, calls up the imprinted scene in my mind. Me climbing over the railing. It had all just come apart that week, the grief that I had been trying to keep down low.
The things I had been trying to push out into the ground through my feet. I was barely surviving, and then Trevor broke up with me and I felt like I had lost everything. That there was no point in existing anymore. I remembered the police officer’s comment:
For the rest of her life, that girl is going to wish she had died instead.

He was right. But I couldn’t take her place. I could only join her.

Jumping was secondary. Like an afterthought. The only thing that mattered was getting up on that roof.

I know it sounds stupid, unbelievable, even, but I didn’t think too much about it. I figured if I got up there, on that ledge, what would need to happen would happen. There was a man who jumped from his terrace in Abigail’s building fifty years ago. He lived four floors below her penthouse, and he died on the spot. I remember reading about it in a book of news clippings my dad kept in his study. I figured I didn’t have to worry about that part. It would get the job done.

Was I going to jump? The honest answer is that I don’t know. I’m not sure. What I do know is that the ledge felt like the only place where I might have a shot at peace. It was the only place in the whole city I felt like it might be quiet. That I might escape the cruel memories that attacked my mind daily—every second, every moment. What came after being up there I couldn’t quite get to. I just knew that if I was closer
to the edge, there’d be more space. From past and present. From the things I had done and hadn’t done. On that ledge there wasn’t room for anything else, not memories and not regrets. There wasn’t room for anything but this one thing, this one act of over and out. This space—the middle between living and dying.

Kristen just showed up. I was standing on the edge, looking down, watching the cars swaying beneath me, when I heard her behind me.

“Mcalister. Don’t.” That’s what she said.

I turned around, just enough to tell her to go away. “You don’t have to be here,” I said.

“Please give me your hand.” She acted like she hadn’t even heard me.

I remember she seemed tall on that roof. Strong. Not the small midwestern girl who sat in the back of English class. She was a warrior up there. She might have been a hero.

“Give me your hand.”

I didn’t move. I wasn’t sure how. When you have that much adrenaline pumping through your body, it’s hard to make it do anything. The connection between your brain and limbs loosens—there isn’t the same call and response. There wasn’t space to feel anything up there, not even fear. I don’t think I was sure, if I jumped, whether I’d fall or fly.

Kristen climbed over then. She just stepped up to the wall and dropped one leg over, then the other. In hindsight she should have kept one foot planted on the other side; she should have straddled the stone railing. But I think her body was doing the same thing mine was. It was reacting. She was fearless.

She climbed all the way over so we were both standing on the ledge. No more than sixteen inches wide. Foot. Foot. Foot. Foot.

She took my hand. I let her.

“Just step over with me,” she said. She touched my leg like she wanted it to follow her. “You’re going to be okay,” she said. It wasn’t the first time she said it.

“One, two, three.” She made a move to lift her foot, and so did I, and they knocked each other. Just a tap, but the shift in balance made her step sideways. Except there was no sideways. There was only sixteen inches and then air.

Our hands were still locked, and I felt her body drop, the snap of contact through our palms, and then my body following, catapulting forward. Down.

I reached around and grabbed the wall. Held on for dear life. She screamed. People came running.

“You’re going to be okay,” I said. The same words, slipped, mirrored. I don’t know whether they were out loud or not. But I know she heard them. I’m sure of it.

I’ve never used that much strength. I pulled like I was pulling her out from quicksand. Or water. Like I was dragging her out from the bottom of a pool.

*    *    *

I blink and look at Astor. He’s watching me with a quiet fascination, like he’s sorting through my words. Organizing and categorizing them.

“ ‘The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one,’ ” Astor says.

It’s a line from
The Catcher in the Rye
. I just look at him. It’s like I’m seeing him for the first time. The real him. The boy who never got over the loss of his mother. Who holds her memory embalmed, like a stuffed deer head on the wall.

And suddenly the thing that binds us, that holds us together, breaks like a rope that splits at the seam.

“Grief isn’t a cause, Astor.”

Once I say it, the fear begins to evaporate. The fear I’ve been holding since that day, here, in January. The fear I’ve had coming out here—what he’ll do. Because for the first time tonight I realize that what he’s capable of doesn’t matter. What matters is me—what
I
can do.

“We’re the same,” Astor says.

“No,” I say, “we’re not. We’re nothing alike. You haven’t let go.”

He leans forward. “And you have?”

I look at him. Hard. “I’m about to.”

He stops for a split second—poised, hovering—and then: “This will help.”

In the next moment, three things happen.

The first is that Astor takes his lighter and holds it out in front of him. Like an offering. Like a candle on an altar. I know what he’s going to do before he does it, but I’m not quick enough to stop him.

The second is that I hear voices shouting my name from outside. Voices I recognize. Voices that sound like home.

The third is that Astor takes the shoe out of my hands, drops it into the box, and sets the lighter flame to the edge of the cardboard.

I just sit there for a moment, watching him. So this is it. This is the inherent bad that was always going to come of tonight. I knew we might not make it back. I knew tragedy might strike again here, but I didn’t know what form it would take.

Fire.

And then the box explodes. It goes up like a bomb, catapulting us back, away from each other. There is no more time for thought. I cover my face with my hands.

Astor shouts from the other side. There are pieces of
cardboard everywhere, and they’re catching the carpet—a meteor shower of fire. I know what has done it. The nail-polish remover. I remember learning about it in some home safety course we had to take at school. The most flammable everyday substances. It was number two.

I quickly scan my brain to see if I have any information stored there that might help me figure out where there is a fire extinguisher. But I come up empty. And the fire is moving faster than the answers.

As the pieces of box catch the carpet, they ignite. They go from embers to full-on flames in no more than a moment. Astor and I are now on opposite sides of a wall of fire. Did he want this? Did he know that that one little lighter would make this big of an impact?

It’s then that I jump to my feet.

You think true moments of terror, real instants of adrenaline, only come a few times over the course of one’s lifetime. But this is the third this year. Life doesn’t deal everyone an even hand; it’s just not how it works. My brain knows the drill. It’s like my nervous system has shut down. It’s too overloaded. By what I’ve just confessed. By the reality of these flames that continue to lick higher.

But something is different this time too. That panic that’s crowded me, that’s sat on my chest like a trash compressor and squeezed, is lessening. Even standing here in
this split second, calling to Astor, I don’t feel afraid. I know something now that I didn’t before. I know that my life doesn’t have to be about what happened. What I failed to do.

It can be about what I will.

“This way!” I bellow to Astor. I wave my arms above my head and gesture for him to follow me. There is a slice of open air between the fire and doorway that he could slip through, but it’s closing quickly. He has to act now. The flames are growing, climbing higher and higher, like some crazed animal that has just been set free. They catch the curtains, transform them into smokestacks. They scramble like they’ve been waiting a long time to be released.

But Astor doesn’t move. He’s frozen. And the look in his eyes is one I recognize immediately. It’s the same one that stared back at me in the mirror for almost a year. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know how to move. He hasn’t figured out how to save himself.

“Astor,
now
!”

Fire is loud. It wails and screeches and howls. It cracks things, breaks them into pieces. Drowns out noise. Voices.

But I know he can hear me. I can tell by the way he isn’t trying to understand me. He’s just not moving.

“Astor!” I scream it again.

The flames lighten, for just a moment, like the exhale of
the tide before a massive wave, and I know it’s over. It hits me like the moment I realized that was Hayley at the bottom of the pool. But this time there is no windfall of recognition. No moment of pause.