Tumble & Fall (33 page)

“It’s okay, Nick,” Zan interrupts. She hasn’t had much time to think about the way they left things on the mainland. She’d been too busy feeling guilty, or thinking about Joni, to wonder about Nick. Now, as she tries to help him out of another awkward apology, she realizes she’s doing it as much for her as for him. She wants to take Joni’s advice, to move on, not spend the whole day reliving something she regrets. But it’s easier when she doesn’t have to think about it, or see Nick up so close. “You don’t have to say anything.”

“No.” He shakes his head. “It’s not okay. I thought it wasn’t going to be weird, that we’d wake up yesterday and everything would go back to normal. I figured we’d just keep looking for, whatever we were looking for, and it would be like nothing happened. But it wasn’t.”

He crosses his sunburned arms over his chest and leans back against the cliff. Tiny pebbles of clay trickle down from the spot where his shoulders meet the rocks, a delicate avalanche that ends in a gritty pile between his feet.

“It was weird. Because I got weird.” He clears his throat. “I guess I was mad that you still cared about learning the truth. I thought that whatever happened, with us, you know, I thought it would be enough to make you forget.”

Zan hugs her knees into her chest. “Forget what?”

“I don’t know,” Nick says. He rubs his forehead with one hand, leaving a faint trail of red dirt caked into the skin around his hairline. “Leo, I guess.” He shakes his head. “I know. It’s the worst. But I guess I … I guess I thought you knew…”

“Knew what?” Zan asks. The air around them feels suddenly cooler, and she looks up to see a cluster of dark gray clouds moving quickly toward them.

Nick looks down at the tops of his freckled feet. “I’ve liked you my whole life, Zan,” he says. “Since we were little. Since camp. Since before camp, probably. I guess it’s more than liking, since it never went away, but it doesn’t matter. You were always Leo’s. And Leo was always my best friend.”

Zan stares at his profile, waiting for him to laugh or tell her that he’s kidding. Nick, who never seemed to care one way or the other about any girl, or anything other than fishing or his friends, had felt this way about her, all this time?

But he doesn’t laugh. The corners of his mouth turn down and little lines appear around his nostrils. “It gets worse,” he says quietly. “The only reason I really wanted to help you do this, help you find the truth about where he was that day, and what he was doing, was because I hoped it was something bad.”

A sharp gust of wind picks up the loose clay and sand, swirling it into mini-tornadoes around their legs. “I hoped whatever it was would make you want to forget him, and I wanted to be there when you did.”

Zan hugs her goose-pimpled arms around her waist. She remembers that day in his truck, how persistent he was that they start looking. Did he already know what she would find?

She wants him to leave, but can’t find the words to say it. She can’t look at him, either. She stares instead at the flurry of small, messy waves, kicked up from the sudden, bold wind.

She feels Nick’s hand on the side of her arm and she jumps. “Here,” he says. His palm is closed tight and slowly he opens his fingers. Threads of silver glint in the sun as he holds out his hand. “You forgot this.”

Leo’s necklace. Zan takes the chain, the cool pendants pressed inside her palm. Nick must have picked it up when she’d dropped it in the store.

“I’m really sorry, Zan,” Nick says. “I wanted you to know that.”

Zan stares at the shiny charm letters. She nods. “It’s fine, Nick,” she says, her voice quiet and small. “Really.”

She feels Nick standing behind her for a long moment. He shuffles sideways and plants his hands on the sturdy wall, hanging his legs down over the side. Out of the corner of her eyes she can still see his head, peering up at her from behind the rocky ledge. “I hope so,” he says. His voice is lighter and he sounds more like himself, as if that was all he needed. To say it out loud. Zan feels, for a moment, something like jealousy. If only she could talk to Leo, apologize to him the way Nick has apologized to her, and know that she’d been heard, really heard. Maybe that would be enough.

Zan turns and catches Nick’s eye. He’s looking at her the way he always has, like he wants to know everything that she’s thinking, or like maybe he already does. He smiles. “Because I have a feeling wherever we end up, Leo’s going to be there, waiting. And I’m sure he can still kick my ass.”

Zan feels an almost effortless laugh bubbling up in her throat. Nick holds up a hand, a simple wave goodbye, or the ultimate surrender, Zan isn’t quite sure which. He hops down to the path and she listens to his footsteps disappear into the thick woods, winding down the sandy trail to the beach.

Zan unhooks the clasp on the chain. She reaches behind her neck and fumbles blindly until she feels the delicate parts line up with a quiet click. Her fingers flutter over the charms dangling against her collarbone. The “L” for Leo falls slightly beneath the others, tilted at an angle, and nearest to her heart.

SIENNA

“Where’s Ryan?”

Sienna looks up from the armful of long, gnarly branches she’s collected from the path behind the beach. Dad stands at the beginning of the trail, wiping a thick gloss of sweat from his forehead with one sleeve. They’ve been hard at work building an arbor, which has so far entailed gathering wood and carrying it in wobbly bunches to the top of the bluff with the clearest view of the ocean.

Ryan is in charge of making piles of like-proportioned twigs and branches, a job he seems to relish—at least he had, until he disappeared.

“I’ll find him,” Sienna offers, grateful for the excuse to give her back and arms a break. The branches aren’t so much heavy as they are cumbersome to carry, with awkward offshoots and scratchy patches of dead growth that rip into the skin of her forearms. She brushes the dirt and splinters from her palms and starts down the path for the beach. Maybe Ryan has moved his piles somewhere nearer to the bluff, or maybe he’s taking a break himself.

The beach is already getting crowded. People from the neighborhood have started to arrive with contributions to the food table, or blankets and chairs to spread out in the sand. To an outsider, it might look like any summer’s night at any beach with a worthwhile view of the horizon, where people gather for picnics or to play games before applauding the sun’s dramatic descent.

The bluff Dad and Denny have chosen for the wedding is off to one side of the main trail from the parking lot. It’s raised just slightly above the shore, so that the view of the beach is long and pristine, but it’s still just a short and easy walk to the water. Sienna remembers using the bluff as a landmark when she was little and the walk from the car had seemed never-ending. She knew as soon as she saw the narrow trail at the end, the grassy hill with the cluster of beach plum bushes and a flat, sandy clearing on top, that the ocean was just on the other side.

The piles of wood are here, where they’re supposed to be, but Ryan is not.

The ground is cool and damp beneath her bare feet, and she walks quickly, careful to avoid the exposed roots and wedges of driftwood strewn along the path. She’s walking toward home, certain she’ll find Ryan, scared and overwhelmed, crouched over a book in his bed.

Ahead, near the bus stop, a crowd has gathered. Instinctively, she scans the bodies for Owen’s tall frame. She wishes more than anything she could make him appear, just by wanting it badly enough.

What if Dad is right, she wonders. What if she really was—is?—in love with Owen? Where does that leave her now? What is this steady churning in the pit of her belly? This warm but threatening ache that sits, like a sleeping tiger, on her chest? Is this more love?

Or is this the other side. The loss of love. A broken heart.

Sienna keeps her head down as she walks past the bus stop. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see that the group is all hunched over something, behind the wooden shed. She’s almost around the corner when she hears a voice, small and excited.

“Sienna!”

She turns and the crowd parts. At its center is Ryan, on his knees in the dirt, waving at her with both arms. “Quick! You have to see this!”

Sienna jogs over as the crowd pulls back to let her through. “Where have you been?” she asks, trying to sound stern but unable to hide the relief in her voice, relief that he isn’t paralyzed by fear, or alone.

The group of kids around him are all staring intently at a spot on the ground. “I was looking for wood for the arbor,” Ryan explains, “and all of a sudden, the ground started moving.”

Sienna crouches beside him. At first glance, it does look like the dirt is rippling beneath their feet. But as she looks closer, she sees that it’s a long, slow-moving procession of caterpillars, inching up the hill and away from the beach.

“They’re going somewhere safe,” Ryan says. “To be together. It’s their animal instinct. They know that something is happening, just like we do.”

Sienna puts an arm around Ryan’s shoulder and pulls his head beneath her chin. She breathes in the little-boy scent of his hair.

“Come on, Ry,” she says, as the crowd disperses, heading back toward the beach. “Dad’s waiting.”

She leads Ryan by the hand through the beach parking lot. The trail breaks off in a V, one side winding down to the ocean, the other a smaller path crisscrossed by roots and covered in pine needles. Sienna’s stomach flips.

“I’ll meet you down there, okay, Bud?” Sienna squeezes Ryan’s shoulder as he shrugs and follows the crowd to the water.

Sienna walks briskly, ducking through crooked branches and wiping wisps of cobwebs from her hair. The sun falls in patches on her arms and legs as she picks up into a run, her feet landing firmly between the knotted roots. Her heart races and a silent prayer loops through her mind.
Please let this be the way.

Ahead, the trail tapers off. She sees the familiar opening, the long wooden dock. She holds her breath as she steps over the fallen tree trunk, the pond stretching out, quiet and still before her.

Her heart sticks. There’s nobody there. She walks slowly to the end of the dock. She stands, her arms hugged tight around her waist. Of course he hadn’t come back.

There’s a rustle in the trees behind her. “Mind if I join you?”

Sienna turns fast to see Owen walking out of the woods, pine needles stuck to his hair. His clothes are wrinkled and his eyes are dark and glassy. It looks like he’s been up all night.

“Owen,” she gasps. She runs to him on the dock. As soon as she’s close enough to touch him, she has no control over anything, not her feet, not her arms, which are reaching out to Owen’s shoulders, not her body, which falls on top of his in a sloppy, gangly heap.

Owen laughs and steadies himself on his heels, holding her around the waist. “Hi,” he says into the side of her neck.

“Hi,” she laughs back.

“I can’t believe you found this place again,” he marvels, looking out over the pond.

“Best-kept secret.” Sienna shrugs and smiles before nibbling the corner of her lip. “What are you doing here?”

Owen leans against the worn dock footing and looks up at her. “I left right after you did. I wanted to come find you last night, or first thing this morning, but…” His brown eyes twitch and he looks suddenly panicked and afraid. “I didn’t know what to say.”

Sienna puts a hand on the top of his head. His long, dark hair is coarse and dry. He moves away from her gently, shamefully, like he doesn’t deserve her affection. “I can’t believe I let you go,” he says. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“I do.” Sienna shrugs.

“You do?” he asks.

Sienna nods. “You were a part of something, up there. It was something you needed to do.”

“No.” Owen shakes his head. “I thought it was, maybe. But the only thing I need, right now, is you. As soon as you left, I knew it. There was no way I was going to not be with you today. I know we still don’t know each other that well, but…”

“We do,” Sienna stops him. “We know enough.”

Owen smiles, the first real smile she’s seen. “So you’re not mad? Even about all that shitty stuff I said?”

Sienna shakes her head. “No,” she says. “A lot of it was true. And some of it was stuff I should have told you. Stuff I probably would have told you, if we had more time.”

“You could tell me now,” he suggests, leaning easily back into the dock.

Sienna considers this. She could tell him everything. About Mom, what she was like and how she died. About everything that happened afterward. The pills. The hospital. She could tell him, and he’d understand. He’d hold her and tell her that he loved her and maybe they would feel closer, after, because he knew her more.

But she meant what she’d said. They knew each other enough. And she knows enough about herself to know that she really would tell him someday, if it turned out that they had a someday, after all.

Not today, though. Today isn’t about reliving, or explaining, or trying to make sense of things in the past. Today is about who she is now, and who she has standing beside her. Owen. Ryan. Dad. Even Denny.

Her tribe.

Sienna smiles at Owen and wedges a hand onto his shoulder. She hops back to the ground and holds both of his hands in her own. “Maybe tomorrow,” she says, with a hopeful smile.

Owen drops her hands and holds her face close to his. “Tomorrow,” he agrees.

THE BEACH

CADEN

Leaving the house feels hurried and strange.

Carly has everything packed, the salad and plastic cutlery for the potluck dinner, and her backpack of supplies: a blanket, a Multi-Tool, extra batteries, a flashlight.

Caden bit his tongue when he saw her packing that morning. He’d wanted to ask her exactly how much good she thought a plastic flashlight and a screwdriver would do in the event of an actual asteroid strike. But he could see how badly she needed to feel useful.

He wonders now what it is about some people that makes them want to
do
things, to move so fast, in times like this. He’s glad these people are out there—even people like his father, who try to do too much, and move too fast—but he’s relieved not to be one of them.