Tumble & Fall (6 page)

There are no stoplights on the island.

The light in the room is soft and there’s something strangely familiar about the color of the walls, a green so pale it’s almost white, and the dense, floral pattern on the bedspread. It’s like he’s dreamed of waking up in this room before.

Or maybe he’s dreaming now.

On the back of a chair by the door is his sweatshirt. He swipes it free and digs into the pocket for his phone. But all that’s left is a handful of sand.

Caden swallows hard and looks back outside. He’s three stories up. There are a few sturdy-looking branches that might hold his weight. He tries to guess how quickly he could make it to the end of the road, the stoplight. The ground below is rocky and uneven. If he’s really dreaming, he’ll be fine. If not …

The blender starts up again. There has to be an easier way out.

He opens the door and peers down a long, quiet hall. He scans the walls for photographs or other clues, but there’s nothing but kitschy watercolors of boats, and hand-painted signs with feel-good quotes like “You and Me, By the Sea” and “It’s Never Too Late to Live Happily Ever After.”

His head is still foggy and his feet feel stuck. He finds a bathroom and shuts himself inside. There are peach-colored soaps in the shape of scallop shells, and matching towels neatly stacked on a shelf. He looks at his face in the mirror, the dark circles under his eyes, the greasy red mop of his hair. His own reflection is by far the scariest thing in the room.

He follows the grinding noise down a wide, marble staircase, around a corner, and into a kitchen, all shiny black countertops and sleek, modern appliances. There’s a small, plump woman in an apron, tilting a heavy blender over a row of glasses. Her bare arms are caramel-colored and her silky black hair is knotted in a bun.

As if she’s been expecting him, the woman turns. Caden ducks quickly back into the hallway. He’s suddenly afraid. Is this a dream? How can he wake himself up? And if it’s not a dream, where is he, and how can he get the hell out?

There’s a swishing sound behind him. The long panels of a floor-length curtain sway in the breeze, revealing a pair of white French doors, propped open just a crack. A misty light filters through. This is how it must be in dreams, he thinks. You ask for a door, and you get one.

The doors open onto a smooth, stone patio, lined with sturdy wooden lounge chairs. The chairs are arranged at precise intervals, surrounding a bean-shaped infinity pool. The water is perfectly still and artificially turquoise, a shimmering frame that mirrors the garden behind it.

Caden blinks purple sunspots from his eyes.

“You’re up.”

He jumps at the voice, knocking against the ceramic lip of a massive potted fern. The wind rustles and through the leafy fronds he glimpses a pair of long, tanned legs, outstretched and bent at an easy angle. Two narrow feet wiggle back and forth, light purple polish glinting in the sun.

Caden slowly sidesteps the plant.

“Hey,” say the legs.

For the first time all morning, Caden hopes that he’s really awake. He knows that he’s staring, but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to look. “Hi,” he squeaks. He clears his throat and tries again. “Hi,” he says, this time too loud and drawn out across many ridiculous syllables.

The woman—girl? Dark, oversize glasses shield her eyes and make it hard to guess her age—pushes herself up to her elbows and smiles.

“Caden, right?” She pushes her glasses up into her hair. Her eyes are brown, but not a boring brown. A light, full brown that looks like melted pennies, flecked with orange and green. She’s definitely older than he is. Not by much. Twenty-four, he guesses, though he has no idea why.

“Hi,” he says, for the third time. “I mean,” he stumbles. “Yeah.”

“I’m Sophie,” she says, holding out her hand. Caden shakes it, grateful for another opportunity to look at her face. Her hair is honey-colored and pulled back in a low, loose ponytail. It drapes over one shoulder and curls up like an inverted question mark, circling the dip in her neck. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

Sophie lets her hand fall onto her bare stomach, tanned and toned and still wet from a swim. Caden averts his eyes to the top of his shoes and wishes they were cooler, or at least less grimy and gross. “Finally?” he manages. “Who … I mean … where am I? What is this place?”

Sophie chuckles. “I ask myself that every day.” She fumbles with something on the ground and Caden hears the snap of a bottle of sunscreen. He keeps his gaze trained on the grassy cracks between the stones as she rubs lotion onto the bronzed top of her shoulders.

If this isn’t a dream, he thinks, it must be some kind of a prank. Somebody has kidnapped him primarily in order to mess with him. His eyes dart around the pool, to the corners of the arbor overhead. Surely there are cameras, somewhere. Somebody’s twisted idea of end-of-the-world reality TV.

Instead of cameras, he sees a shadow, stretched long from behind another wall of potted shrubbery.

“We’re over here,” Sophie calls, without looking up.

A man turns the corner. If it weren’t for the hat, Caden might not have recognized him right away. He’s slender, and much taller than Caden remembers, with smooth, expensive-looking skin and sharp green eyes. The hat is wool with a short leather brim, and not at all weather-appropriate. It’s the same hat he wears in the pictures, the pictures Caden used to say good night to. The pictures he used to stupidly ask for help, before he grew up and realized that nobody was listening.

Caden hears his pulse, his blood a rushing river, flooding in his ears. The woman on the chair is moving. She kisses the side of the man’s neck on her way back inside.

“Looks like you guys have some catching up to do.” She smiles at Caden before disappearing into the kitchen.

Caden feels suddenly hot. There’s something fierce and glowing inside of him, like a light or a magnet.

“What am I doing here?” he hears himself asking. His hand flutters at his side, like a foreign object he can’t control.

Caden’s father crosses his arms and leans back against the planter. He narrows his eyes into discerning hyphens. “You’re smaller than I was, at your age,” he says, angling his head to one side. His shoulders are too broad for his frame, and his forearms are covered in thick, dark hair. “Shorter, I mean.”

Caden feels his spine straightening. His breath catches in his throat and the glowing thing inside of him changes, like a flickering flame, though he can’t tell if it’s getting bigger or going out. It’s like a thirst and he almost thinks to ask for water, until he swallows. Tears, he thinks. He feels like crying.

“Caden, I know this wasn’t the only way to do this—”

“Do what?” Caden coughs, which is better than crying, though he doesn’t like the girlish squeal in his voice. He takes another breath. “What do you want from me? Why am I here?”

His father doesn’t move or speak. He stands and stares, just like he does in the photographs, two-dimensional and somewhere else.

Caden feels his hands moving again, and he stuffs them into his pockets. He’s surprised to feel the jangle of his house keys inside. His house. Where he should be. This is all really happening. He’s been kidnapped by his father. Literally:
kid
napped.

It’s absurd. Caden almost laughs. He takes a steadying breath and eyes the French doors behind his father. “I always knew you were an asshole,” he says evenly, a new strength finding him. “But I didn’t realize you were completely insane.”

Caden shakes his head and pushes past his father, toward the open living room. It’s not a dream, or a movie. It’s real life, and he can leave whenever he wants to.

Just as he reaches the door, a second man appears from nowhere. Caden sees the watch first, then the man’s giant, solid torso blocking his path.

“Easy, now, pal,” the man says, holding up a fleshy hand and pressing it firmly into Caden’s shoulder. Caden squirms out of the man’s heavy grasp and turns away from the house, running past the pool, toward a low, stone wall.

But the man follows, shoving himself between Caden and the wall. He holds his arms wide, like he’s attempting to corral a wayward bull. Caden bolts through a gap in the shrubs. He can outrun this guy, no problem. But his shirt snags on a spindly branch, and there’s a hand on his back, a thick, sweaty arm scooping him at the waist and leveling him, horizontal.

“Where do you want him?” the man asks. His breathing is jagged, his shoulders shudder as he pants. Caden tries to wriggle free, but it’s no use. He starts to feel dizzy, blood rushing to his head. He stares at the shiny tops of his father’s shoes as the man carries him, like a piece of living luggage, back inside the house.

ZAN

Two things people make time for at the end of the world: free food and a party.

Miranda has been on the Community Center board since Zan was in preschool, organizing fund-raisers, art shows, and live music. This is the first time more than a small, devoted group of gallery coworkers and local divorcees, lonely and bored on a Saturday night, have shown up. Zan can tell that her mother is pleased, though she hasn’t stopped moving around long enough to really show it.

The second band of the night is playing on the makeshift Center stage, a group of stoner guys Zan knows from school. One of them sporadically strums a heavily stickered mandolin, another sits behind half a set of drums, and a third is doing some kind of unidentifiable yell-rapping. It’s like an afterlife drum circle with Jerry Garcia and that guy from Sublime. On weed.

“What is this?” Daniel, Zan’s father, asks, rearranging the tray of organic cupcakes that Miranda and Zan spent all morning baking. He points at the stage with frosting on his finger. “Not bad.”

Zan smiles. Her father tries very hard to be hip, open-minded, slow to judge. He considers himself one of the “cool” teachers at school, the kind that kids actually want to hang out with. His shaggy gray hair is always tousled in a sort of old-man mullet, and he wears the same leather jacket every day, even in the middle of summer. Zan pretends he annoys her, but they both know they’re a team.

“It’s not
bad
,” Zan allows, filling paper cups with glugs of homemade hibiscus iced tea. “It’s a disgrace. My eardrums are crying.”

Daniel taps his foot defiantly, his hard, weathered face a scrambled mix of phony enjoyment and fear. Out of nowhere, Miranda pops between them, her sunken cheeks flushed from walking in tight circles around the room. “How’s it going here?” she asks, quickly surveying the spread. “Do you need more napkins? There’s another box in the kitchen. Are people reusing their cups?”

Miranda reaches forward to rearrange the trays and Zan stares at the swinging tail of her mother’s long, graying braid. “What does it matter if people recycle anymore?” she grumbles. She doesn’t mean to say it out loud. Her father’s foot stops tapping and Miranda’s shoulders tense. Zan wishes immediately she could take it back.

She steels herself for a lecture. A reminder that
“Everything matters.”
That
“Nothing is certain. We’re here until we’re not.”
That
“Living clean is living well. And we’re all still living, aren’t we?”
Lectures that started long before the announcements, the panic, the endless waiting.

But Miranda’s shoulders relax. She passes the clipboard to Zan’s father. “Daniel, I’ve been working on getting sign-ups for help with your installation. Why don’t you see who you can nail down outside?”

Daniel wipes a few telltale cupcake crumbs from the corner of his mouth and takes the clipboard. He gives Zan a warning glance as he passes, and Zan feels herself shrinking even smaller.

Miranda arranges the remaining brownies and cookies in precise little rows before clapping her hands together and glancing warily at the stage. “This is awful,” she sighs. “I’m going to ask somebody to turn down the amps.”

Zan watches her mother stalk across the crowded room. She wonders if she’s ever felt as strongly about anything as the way Miranda feels about, well, everything. Maybe Leo, but that’s it.

Leo’s face flashes in her mind and she feels her heart swell, then stick.
Vanessa
. She has the Grumpy’s receipt in her pocket, hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it and what it could mean. Her mind loops in vicious circles. It’s nothing. He ran into somebody he knew before he left. A friend of Amelia’s, maybe, or his mom. Somebody who worked at a bookstore off-island, someone with access to a rare, out-of-print collector’s item. He said he’d call to pick it up.

Nothing.

Or maybe it was something. Something more. Something she can’t even imagine, something that rips the air from her lungs when she even begins to see it.

No. It was nothing. Zan pours more iced tea. A never-ending drum solo rattles her bones and she looks for her mother. As soon as Miranda comes back, Zan will sneak outside for a break, where she can take a full breath and maybe even hear herself think.

*   *   *

“What are you doing out here?”

Zan jumps to her feet, wiping the dirt from the back of her white mini-shorts. A dark silhouette shuffles toward her, across the spotlit green of the tennis courts. She doesn’t recognize Nick until he’s only a few feet from where she stands, frozen at the end of the net.

“I thought you were on refreshment duty,” Nick says with a toothy smile, leaning into the sturdy post with one hand. His short blond hair looks wet and sticks to his forehead in choppy triangles.

“Hey,” Zan says, looking down at the tops of her worn suede sandals. “I didn’t see you inside.”

Nick shrugs. “I got antsy, went to the beach.” He tosses his head back in the direction of the path to the ocean. Zan remembers their Community Center Camp days, when Nick and Leo would talk her into skipping out on whatever bizarre homemade craft project Daniel had prepared. They would start running on the other side of the courts, snaking through the tall grass, across the dirt road, and all the way to the beach. They wouldn’t stop until they were underwater.

“How are you doing?” Nick asks. He’s using
the voice
, the “I really sincerely mean it” voice. But from Nick, it’s okay. Usually she wants to shrivel up and vanish when people look at her that way, like she’d ever in a million years say anything other than “Fine” or “Hanging in there,” her two automatic replies.