Tumble & Fall (32 page)

“Sure,” Sienna says. She watches Denny through the window, starting a salad. “She seems to be doing a lot better.”

Dad follows Sienna’s eyes and smiles. “Yeah,” he agrees. “It was tough for a while there, but she’s really been great. Even with Ryan.”

Sienna nods and Dad takes a deep breath, sadly shaking his head. “It’s hard, you know. We want to be there for you guys, we want to pretend like we’re not afraid, like we know what the hell is going on…” He sighs with a shaky half smile. “But the truth is we have no idea.”

Sienna tears a few long leaves from a flower stalk and wraps them around her fingers. “I know,” she says. “I never should have left, Dad. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Dad sits forward and palms the cap of her knee with one wide hand. “You’re here now,” he says, a grateful smile lighting up the corners of his blue eyes.

Sienna nods. She already feels the lump in her throat, but she pushes it away, determined not to be distracted by tears or emotion. “I want you to know,” she says quietly. “I think you were right.”

“Right about what?” Dad asks.

“About me,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking straight. If I had been, I never would have left you and Ryan.”

Dad clasps his hands together and leans forward in his chair. “Goose…”

“Dad, I’m just like her,” Sienna interrupts him, her voice cracking. “I know it. You know it. And, as much as I hope that nothing happens today, that the whole thing was some gigantic mistake and we just get skipped over, or passed by … part of me is kind of relieved it might be the end. Because I know what would happen. I know who I’d be.”

Dad clears his throat. She can see the beginnings of tears in his eyes, and she knows she should stop, she knows the last thing he wants to think about is Mom, or either of them being sick, but she can’t. “It’s just scary, you know. I was doing everything I could to get better. The House, and the meds … and I thought things were changing, and then all of a sudden, it’s like I had no control over anything again. Like I was just taken over by this thing, this thing that was so much bigger than I was, and bigger than anything I could ever think my way through, or talk myself out of. And no matter what I do, that thing always wins.”

Sienna sighs unevenly, desperately trying to steady her voice, to keep herself calm and stable. She looks at the patio stones, wishing she hadn’t said anything at all. Soon, it will all be over. What’s the use of talking about a future she probably won’t ever get to have?

“Goose,” Dad says again. Sienna looks up. It takes her a few seconds to make sense of what she sees on his face. He’s not crying. He’s smiling. And not a sad, helpless smile, or a smile because he doesn’t know what else to do. A real smile. He shakes his head and makes a strange noise. Sienna can’t be sure, but she thinks it’s in the family of laughter.

“Dad?” she asks. “Are you okay?”

Dad nods and covers his mouth with one hand, like he’s afraid of getting caught. He takes a long, deep breath and rubs his hands on his knees. “You know the story of how I met your mom, right?” he asks.

Sienna raises an eyebrow. Of course she knows the story. It’s her favorite. She used to make Mom tell it at least every other night. “Yeah,” she says uncertainly. “You were in law school and she was working in the library. You asked for a book that didn’t exist.”

“Right,” he says. She wonders if he’s going to retell it anyway. How he spent weeks inventing an amalgam of various textbook titles and contributor names, something that sounded realistic and would keep Mom busy, keep them busy together, for as long as it took for him to work up the courage to ask her out. “But I don’t think you know what happened afterward.”

“What do you mean?” Sienna asks. “You asked her out and she said yes. You dated for a while. You got married. You had kids.”

Dad squints into the sun and rolls up the thin sleeves of his button-down shirt. “Sort of,” he says. “I mean, that’s all technically true, but there was a whole other phase there in the beginning that was really, and I mean,
really
, intense.”

“Intense?”

Dad nods seriously. “It was awful. The loss of appetite, the endless nights of not sleeping a wink. The last-minute scheming and planning, anything for us to spend more time together. It was the first time I’d seen anything like it, this all-consuming, totally unpredictable, totally irrational obsession. It was … well, I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a sickness. I had no idea what to do. I was terrified.”

Sienna looks back at the ground, her eyes now wet and threatening to overflow. “I know,” she says, almost whispering. “That’s what I’m saying. I’m just like her.”

“Goose,” he says again, still smiling. “I’m not talking about your mother. I’m talking about me.”

Sienna looks up quickly. “You?”

Dad nods. “I was sick. We were both sick. We were crazy. We were in love,” he says. “And sometimes, that’s what it looks like. When you’re young, or even just out of practice, it can hit you like that. It feels like you’re going insane.”

Sienna thinks back to their fight in the front hall. She imagines Dad on her bed, counting her pills in his hand. “But … you thought I…”

“I know I did,” he says. “I was wrong. I was worried. I was afraid of losing you again, before I had to. But the more I think about it, the way you’ve been since you’ve been back, the way you just described how you feel … you’re not manic, Sienna. You’re not sick. You’re in love.”

Sienna looks at Dad closely. She tries to imagine him twenty years younger, following Mom in the library like a puppy dog, staying up all night wondering when he’d see her next. It’s hard, but if she really tries, she can see it. She remembers the way her parents used to bump into each other in the hallway, or on the stairs, far too often for it to be an accident. They’d always stay locked together, swaying for a moment, like they were dancing to music only they could hear.

“I’m not saying you’re not like her,” Dad says quietly. “You’re a lot like her. She was the most passionate, hard-loving, loyal person I’ve ever known. You’re all of those things.”

Sienna crosses her arms. “What about … what happened to me? What about what I did?”

Dad’s smile fades and he looks at her, strong and steady. “What happened to you is that your mother got sick. You lived with things that nobody should have to live with, saw things that nobody should see, at any age. It nearly killed me, Sienna, watching her go through all that. And I was a grown man, a grown man who knew what I was getting into. You were a little girl. If it hadn’t affected you in some horrible way, if it hadn’t made you question absolutely everything around you…”

Sienna doesn’t have time to stop the tears anymore. They’re falling fast, her nose wet and runny. Dad reaches across and pulls her head toward his. “You’re the strongest person I know. You kept this family a family, all by yourself. And when you needed me, when you needed somebody to take care of you, I wasn’t there. That’s my fault, Sienna. That’s where I went wrong. And it had nothing to do with you,” he whispers into her ear. “Okay?”

Sienna buries her face in her father’s shoulder, unable to speak. She doesn’t know if she believes him, but she almost doesn’t care.

Sienna wipes her eyes as Dad gets up to help Denny at the door. She’s struggling with a platter of sandwiches and fruit salad. Even Sienna is impressed at how appetizing she’s managed to make the rations and few staples they have left in the fridge look on one of Mom’s shiny silver trays.

Dad calls for Ryan and Denny sets the platter on the table. As she’s pouring the lemonade, Sienna’s gaze drifts over her shoulder to the muted blue of the hydrangea bushes that line the stone path.

She hops up with the scissors, crouching in front of the thickest blooms and snipping a handful of full, blue globes.

Ryan races to the table, bug book in hand, and Dad follows closely behind. Sienna joins them with an armful of flowers, adding them to the pile of delicate grasses and herbs on the table.

“These, too,” she says to Denny. She takes a tangy sip of lemonade and helps herself to a sandwich.

ZAN

Zan climbs barefoot to the cliffs, settling into her spot against the boulder.

From up here, she can see the long stretch of beach below, and the preparations already under way. At the inlet, Dad and a few former students are digging a pit in the sand where his Forgiving Wheel will soon sit on display. Mom and Joni are walking to Split Rock, already two tiny figures against the shiny backdrop of ocean and cloudless sky.

Mom and Joni are walking to Split Rock.
She squints harder to make out their shapes, identically tall, dark, and lean, as if maybe the whole thing has been a dream. No part of her had even dared to hope that Joni would actually come home, let alone suggest some time alone with Miranda. An afternoon mother-daughter stroll. Zan laughs. It’s nothing short of a miracle.

“Of course you can be dead and still pull off something like this,” she says quietly, to Leo’s empty rock beside her. She stares at the horizon, remembering how she used to imagine his face on the water, or try to redraw, in her mind, the way his body felt, slouched into the cliff against hers. Now she doesn’t see him at all. She feels him somewhere else, somewhere far away, but she knows that he can hear her. That he’s been waiting for her to come back.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But you already know that. I know you do. Joni says I shouldn’t beat myself up about it. That all this, everything that’s going on today, it’s making all of us do things we never thought we’d do. I guess for her, that means coming home. Whatever it takes, right?”

Zan smiles. She and Joni had stayed up all night in the loft, catching up and whispering secrets like it was the last night of summer camp, long after lights-out.

“She told me everything,” Zan continues, picking up a broken chip of red clay and smudging it into her palm. “How she was in New York, and then working at that jewelry store on the Cape. You found out about her new name, and tracked her down at Lulu’s. You told her how much I missed her. You begged her to come home.”

Zan hears her voice cracking and she shakes her head. Joni said they’d sat on the stoop on one of her breaks. At first, she’d tried to get Leo to go away. It had been so long, she’d explained, and she’d finally gotten a new start. New name, new job, new apartment. It had taken her years to convince herself that she was doing the right thing, that calling home would be too hard, too much of a reminder of who she was and what she was running away from.

“She said she couldn’t do it. But she liked you.” Zan smiles. “She said she felt how much you … how much we loved each other. You gave her that picture, the one of us on the beach. She cut me out and kept me with her, always. She knew you would look out for me. She knew I’d be okay. That’s why she didn’t come home.”

Joni’s face had crumpled when Zan told her what happened to Leo. How he’d been driving back to the boat, just hours after meeting her. She remembered the freak summer storm, the one that came with no warning. The bar had flooded, she said. Cars were stopped in the streets.

Joni had held Zan close. If she’d known, she said, she would have been there.

“I told her it was okay,” Zan sighs. “I told her I understood. But I don’t. Not really. I don’t understand why she did it. I don’t understand why, just because she hated it here so much, just because she was so mad at Mom for not letting her be who she wanted to be, she couldn’t call me. Not once, in seven years. She couldn’t write me a secret letter. Just to say hi, or let me know she was alive. I didn’t care where she was or what she was doing. I just wanted my sister back.”

Zan tucks her thick curls behind her ears and stretches her legs out across the rock. “You knew that,” she says to the gentle breeze, moist and warm off the blazing face of the cliff. “You knew that’s what I wanted, more than anything. And you found a way to make it happen.”

Something won’t let her say more. She wants to apologize again. She wants to get angry, to hate herself out loud for what she did. But instead, she takes a deep breath, inhaling the warm, thick air, the fresh summer smell of sea salt and wildflowers.

She isn’t sure how long she’s been sitting in silence when she hears footsteps on the path behind her. At first she thinks it’s Daniel, coming to nag her about shirking her setup duties. There’s a quick, muffled scamper, followed by a flustered whisper.
“Crap.”

Zan feels her breath stick in her throat. Nick. How did he know she’d be here?

He gets a steady foothold on the cliff and hauls himself up into view. “Hey,” he says, no doubt embarrassed by his less than graceful entrance. He swings his legs over the ledge and stands behind Zan’s shoulder.

She shields her eyes from the glaring midday sun. “Hey.”

“My dad and I were helping set up some tables for the potluck, later,” he says, nodding his head toward the section of the beach that Miranda has designated for food-related use. “I thought I saw you up here.”

Zan nods. She remembers the quiet afternoons they’d spent up here together last summer, missing Leo together. She doesn’t think she ever told him it was
their
spot. She wonders if he would have come if he knew about all of the nights she and Leo had spent together here, all of the nights she was “sleeping at a friend’s.”

“What’s it like down there?” she asks.

“Weird.” Nick shrugs. He pushes his hands into the pockets of his shorts and kicks at the rugged clay rocks with the edge of one flip-flop. “Everybody’s keeping busy, not really saying much. It feels funny setting up picnic tables just a few hours before…”

“I know,” Zan says. She inches over on her rock to make room. She wishes he hadn’t come up, but now that he’s here, she can’t exactly tell him to leave.

“That’s okay,” he says, noticing the empty spot beside her. “I’m too jumpy to sit, I think.”

Zan studies him. It’s true. His elbows shake a little bit at his sides, like he’s vibrating with some new, nervous current. He stares at the glassy surface of the ocean. “I just wanted to, you know, I can’t stop thinking about what happened, and…”