Where the Staircase Ends (24 page)

And then I saw the thing that I should’ve seen all along. I was ashamed that I had to climb so high and so far to see what had been right in front of me the entire time.

I saw Sunny on the night of The Fields, her hair dripping wet with pool water as she wandered around the house looking for me and Justin. She stopped when she walked into the Africa room, listening to the sounds of our voices out on the roof. She sat down on the bed when she heard Justin say he didn’t like her, and I saw her hands ball up into fists as she listened to him say the only reason he even talked to her was because she was my friend. She heard him tell me I was
better than all of this
, and even though he didn’t exactly say “Taylor is too good for Sunny,” it’s what she heard. And she didn’t hear me deny it. I didn’t correct Justin or tell him that he was wrong. Instead she listened as I told him my theory about the fly. She heard me say that she was a big buzzing distraction, keeping me from all the great things I could have done if she hadn’t been in my life.

I watched as tears welled up in her eyes just before she punched the lamp and sent it crashing to the floor, the sound of broken glass punctuating her anger like an exclamation point. She ran out of the room and down to the party, where she found Logan standing by himself in the kitchen. She whispered in his ear and took his hand, leading him into her bedroom.

“We don’t need them,” she said. “Let’s show them how much we don’t need them.”

In the morning, after he left and she was alone in her bed, the shame washed over her like an ocean, so deep she thought she might drown.

Blink.

Sunny was stretched across one of the lawn chairs in her backyard. Her face was pale and unsmiling as she watched Jenny execute a series of butterfly kicks down the length of the pool. Jenny slapped her palm against the wall and popped out of the water, her head bobbing up and down as she frowned in Sunny’s direction. She waved her cast triumphantly in the air, this time wrapped in a thick layer of plastic wrap to protect it from the water.

“Why are you defending her?” Jenny asked. “Considering everything she did to Logan, is it that hard to believe she’d get it on with a teacher?”

Sunny looked down at her hands, swallowing back the lump forming in her throat. She hadn’t meant for it to get so out of hand. She didn’t mean for it to go so far.

“Regardless of what happened between Taylor and Logan she would never do
that
. She thinks Mr. Thomas is disgusting. Can’t you see? Tracey is lying and using this as an opportunity to make people forget about what a skank she is.”

“How do you know? It seems to me there are a lot of things we didn’t know about Taylor. I really don’t understand why you’re getting so defensive, anyways. She’s getting exactly what she deserves.”

Sunny swallowed thickly, her eyes lingering on the empty lounge chair I usually claimed during our summertime tanning sessions. There was a sour taste in the back of her throat. She felt like she was going to be sick.

“What if I told you none of it was true?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “What if I told you that I made it all up?”

Jenny doggy paddled to the edge of the pool and gripped the blue tiled rim. “What are you talking about?”

Sunny stared into space until her eyes lost focus. She licked her lips. “Tracey was going to tell the store manager I stole the pills. They would’ve called the police, and Tracey would’ve told
everyone
. I didn’t know what to do. I panicked. And then the lies just kept tumbling out of my mouth … ”

Pool water dripped from Jenny’s curls as she pulled herself out of the water. Her feet slapped wetly against the concrete when she stomped towards Sunny’s chair, determination pulsing from her narrowed eyes.

“Listen to me.” She grabbed Sunny’s shoulders and shook her back to reality. “I’m going to pretend I never heard that, okay? And you can never tell anyone else what you just told me, do you understand?”

“Why?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer. “She doesn’t deserve this. I do.”

“Do you want everyone to hate you? Do you want to be a social outcast? Because that’s exactly what will happen if people find out that you lied about your best friend. No one will ever believe anything you say again, and you will have no one. Do you understand me? No one.”

Fear bubbled inside Sunny, and beneath that I could feel the suffocating loneliness that she fought so hard to hide from everyone. It was
horrible
. I could barely breathe for it. How had I never noticed it before? It was a living thing inside of her, with hands that squeezed her and feet that ran sprints up and down length of her body. Its voice was deep and gravelly, whispering hotly in her ear.
You will always be alone. No one will ever love you. Your mother left because she didn’t love you. Your father can’t stand the sight of you. Do you really want the rest of the world to know what you did? To see you for what you really are?

Her loneliness was all-consuming, and as she listened to Jenny, it drowned out the rational part of her brain that wanted to do the right thing. At least she had Jenny. As long as she had
someone
she could keep the loneliness at bay. If everyone found out and hated her because of it …

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she said to Jenny. “But I don’t want everyone to hate me.”

“Then we’ll just pretend this never happened. Your secret’s safe with me, but you have to promise me you won’t ever mention it again. Okay?”

Sunny nodded. “I promise,” she said, shaking off any remaining inclinations she might have had to tell the truth. She stood up, straightening her shoulders as a wicked grin spread across her face. “I bet I can do more flips then you can.”

“No way. I’ll totally kick your ass.”

The girls dove into the pool, leaving Sunny’s confession behind them.

Blink.

I was back on the steps, the rain pounding against my skin like nails.

I was Sunny’s best friend. I was her buoy against all the bad things in her life—the mother who abandoned her, the father who might as well not be there. She was like part of my family. Hell, she
was
my family. What did it feel like, listening to her crush and her best friend rip her apart? How much did it hurt when she heard me say I’d be better off without her in my life? As soon as I thought of the question, the answer was there, as clear as if I’d plucked it straight from Sunny’s head. I was like her mother. I was like her father. Everyone she ever loved left her because she wasn’t good enough for them. I was one more person to add to the growing list of people who had abandoned her, only I was worse than all of them, because I promised I would never leave her.

I cried. I couldn’t help it. My tears mixed with the rain, and my sobs sailed away on the gusts of wind, drowned out by the cracking thunder. I wished I hadn’t seen it. I wished I was still ignorant to Sunny’s motives. I wished I didn’t know how she interpreted the conversation with Justin, or how alone she really felt.

“Please,” I whispered to the storm. “Please. No more.”

Before Sunny, my world was bland. Without her, I would have always colored inside the lines, which by all appearances may have made for an easier life, but it would not have been a life without Sunny.

I would have given anything to take back the last few weeks and tell her I was sorry, to tell her what I really saw when I looked at her. Sunny would always be my best friend, but I’d never get to tell her. She would never get to know how much I loved her.

More images flashed behind my eyes. My parents. Sunny. Alana James. Brandon Blakes. Logan. Jenny. Amber. Justin. All of them swirled around me like the storm clouds, and all of them were tinged with regret and longing.

Regret was an angry monster. Regret was the storm that swirled around me, pushing me against the steps as I rocked myself back and forth.

“Please. I’m sorry. I wish I could take it all back. I wish … ” I whispered to the storm, my words drifting unheard onto the stairs. “Please forgive me. Please make it stop. Please just make it stop!”

And just like that, it stopped.

The thunder stopped, the rain halted, and the cold wind was replaced with the warmth of a sunny afternoon. When I finally lifted my head from out of my hands, I saw that the sky was back to its perfect cornflower blue. There were no clouds; there was no wind. My clothes and hair were perfectly dry. It was as though the storm never happened.

I sat there for a few minutes before trying to stand. My legs were shaky and my eyes raw and itchy from crying so hard. Slowly, I eased myself up off of the step. My breath caught in my throat.

A few steps ahead of me there was a door.

I rubbed my eyes a few times to make sure it wasn’t a mirage, but when I opened them again it was still there, as real as anything. Has it been there all along? Was it raining so heavily that I wasn’t able to see it?

It didn’t look like anything special—just a plain white wooden door with a brass knob, like you’d find inside someone’s house. It was set inside a blue wall, but as I looked out past the stairs the wall seemed to become part of the sky, so I couldn’t tell if the wall was the sky or the sky was the wall or if they both melded into one continuous space.

I climbed the remaining steps and stopped in front of the door. There was a peephole in the center, staring back at me like a small, round eye. The afternoon light reflected off the glass circle, and for a second I got the impression it blinked at me. Was there someone on the other side of it, watching me?

I reached my hand out toward the knob, but then stopped. It felt strange to open it and walk through after everything that had happened.
Should I knock first
?

I lifted my fist up, but before my fingers hit the wood I heard a click. My stomach did a double back handspring as I watched the brass knob slowly turn.

The door opened outward a few inches, creaking as though it had rusted over from waiting for me so long.

A soft, warm light filtered through the open space between the door and the wall. It was brighter than the sunlight and warmer than the air around me. It shimmered, glittering against the air as though made of something more substantial, but so clear and sharp that it split the air into tiny particles of color, like the light itself was a prism of glass refracting everything that filtered through it into tiny rainbows. It was as brilliant as the trail left by the dragonfly, and for a moment I wondered if it had been around me the whole time. Maybe the staircase was a veil I had to lift to see the real wonder awaiting me.

A hand slowly emerged from the opening. It glowed like the light spilling from the crack in the door, but I couldn’t tell if the light caused the hand to glow or the hand created the light. The skin was the color of wet sand, not white or black, but somewhere in between it all. Small, square nails sat atop of each finger, neatly trimmed and manicured into perfect little window-shaped tips. The hand flipped over so that it was open, palm up. Normally alarm bells would have gone off inside my head, screaming
stranger danger
! But I was not afraid.

I placed my hand inside the stranger’s, feeling the warmth of their skin against mine.

In that moment, it hit me like a jolt of electricity. Fire and ice raced through my veins all at once, and the sensation of being filled with something warm and harmonious rolled across my body like waves against a shore. And just like that, I got it. Oh man, did I get it. I could barely see through the tears in my eyes, and yet I saw so much. Like how there was forgiveness enough for all if we only asked, and how we were all exactly where we were supposed to be even if it didn’t feel that way.

Everything stretched out before me, perfect, seamless, and uncomplicated, exactly like I’d asked for the night when I’d watched the stars from my bedroom window and wished to disappear. But underneath it there was something else—regret? Longing? I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but then the hand squeezed mine and I understood.

I had a choice.

Two paths stretched out before me. One was paved with the easy escape I’d wished for, where Sunny would become the ellipsis where my life left off and the world would keep on moving even though I was no longer a part of it. The other path led me back to everything I’d wished so desperately to leave behind—back to the very place I wanted to escape, where people believed I was a horrible person and Sunny was no longer my best friend.

But was it really even a choice?

I barely had time to think my answer when suddenly I felt myself tumbling backwards. The door, the hand, even the constant gray-blue of the stairs and the sky began slipping from my grasp, flaking away like dried paint from a wall.

Wait
!
Wait, don’t let me forget. Please don’t let me forget.

I tried to hold on to something, anything, that would help me remember everything that happened on the stairs, but a thick fog filled my head, swirling like the storm that ravaged the steps only moments before.

Then the darkness swept me away completely, and I thought of the last line of Emily Dickinson’s Fly poem:

And then the Windows failed – and then

I could not see to see.

My eyelids are two-thousand-pound boulders sitting on my eyes. They hurt along with every inch of my body, even my hair. (Is it even possible for hair to hurt?)

At first I think I’m in my bedroom, but the sheets are too scratchy, the pillow too flat. Then I register the steady
beep, beep, beep
of a machine and smell the acrid scent of bleach and alcohol, and realize I’m in a hospital bed.

I make a half-ditch effort to open my eyes and catch a thin swath of light and movement on the other side of the room. My parents’ voices fill the space, talking in whispers. They must not know I’m awake.

Everything in my body wants to return to the deep slumbering place I woke from, but I feel a tug in my chest. Like there’s something I need to do.

I try to open my eyes again, this time using everything I have to keep them from shutting. The world is a watery Monet, but I can just make out my mother’s face, my father’s salt-and-pepper hair, and maybe (maybe?) a flash of red.