The Fallback Plan (16 page)

“You know,” I said. “It’s the suburbs. When you’re a kid, you can ride your bike and catch fireflies, but once you’re a teenager you realize there’s nothing to do, so you just, like, terrorize each other and count down the days until graduation.” I put one of the ice cubes in my mouth. “My best friend Summer and I—our backyards were caddy corner—made a plan to run away when we were in third grade. I packed a nightgown and a copy of
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
in my backpack and rode my bike to her house one night after dinner, but she cried when I got there, and said she couldn’t go through with it. That was right when her parents were divorcing, I think. Now she still lives with her mom.”

I waited for Amy to tell me that I also lived with my mom, but she didn’t appear to be listening. She unwrapped the Band-Aid from her finger, looked at what was underneath, and then rewrapped it.

“Do you know those Slurpees you can get from 7–11?” she said.

“Yeah?” I said.

“When we lived in Tucson, the high schoolers would buy them in those big plastic cups, and then drive around our neighborhood in their Jeeps and throw them at our heads, to knock us off our bikes.”

“To knock you off your bike?”

“I really banged up my knee once. Had to get stitches. I never told my parents the reason I fell, but eventually I stopped riding.”

Amy took a pack of cigarettes from her overalls and gestured that I should follow her onto the back porch. I carried the drinks.

“So you were happy? Chasing fireflies?”

“I think so,” I said. “I mean, when I was little, all my friends were like me. I didn’t have any other life to compare mine to, so yeah, I think I was happy. It wasn’t until middle school that I realized life wasn’t worth living.”

Amy laughed and exhaled through the side of her mouth. I’d said it to make her laugh, but I was also serious. Maybe she laughed because she knew I was serious.

“That’s why I like you,” she said. Her eyes sparkled even as she squinted behind the smoke. “You get it.”

I wasn’t sure what it was I got, but I nodded, so she would keep talking.

“First, we lived in Las Cruces,” she said. “Then Tempe,
Colorado Springs, Albuquerque, Tucson. My dad got a research grant and we stayed in Tucson the longest.”

“What did he research?”

“Obesity in Indian populations.” She inhaled. “He worked in a lab with mice. He’d let me come to work with him and draw them. I drew hundreds of mice. Thousands of mice. Mice in cages. Sometimes I dressed them; I drew them in little outfits and hats. My dad called last week to see if I wanted to bring May for a visit before summer’s over. My parents are retired now in Sedona. Have you been there?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t been anywhere.”

“It’s beautiful, like a red rock mirage. There’s a pool in their apartment complex. Everyone has a pool. If we lived there, May could swim every day and catch lizards and grow up to be a geologist or a physicist. She could work at the labs in Los Alamos. I could put canvas in the back of a truck and drive off to paint like O’Keeffe. Grow my hair long.”

“What would Nate do?”

“Nate has more roots here than I have,” she said.

Amy turned to look over her shoulder, but there was nothing unusual to see. Telephone poles stretched skyward at the far corners of the yard. Crows balanced atop the wires. The bees flew, fat and slow, above the potted nasturtiums on the back porch steps. Maybe Amy and Nate had bought this house, in this town, because here was a place
that was not a mirage. Here was an ordinary place where nothing extraordinary was ever supposed to happen, for better or for worse.

This was where May belonged. One extraordinary thing had already happened to the Browns; now, I thought, they would be untouchable. Like lightning only striking a tree once. I could imagine May walking to school with a purple backpack on. I could imagine her on a soccer team, her tiny cleats. I could imagine her dressed as a strawberry, riding a float in the Lilac Parade, waving to me in the crowd.

Amy leaned over the porch railing to ash her cigarette in the bushes. “What are you going to do?” she said.

“About what?”

“Are you going to be a screenwriter?”

“No,” I said. “That was just a joke. I’m actually hoping I come down with a chronic illness so I can apply for disability and live with my parents forever.” It sounded so stupid when I said it aloud.

Amy held out her cigarette. “Want help getting cancer?”

“Yeah, exactly, except I don’t think you can get disability if you have cancer?”

“Is that true?”

“I don’t know.”

“If the illness thing doesn’t work out, you can come to the desert with me and May. You can be the bohemian auntie.”

“Right. I’ll bring the peyote.”

Amy smiled. “Come on,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

• • •

I’d never tried to open it, but I knew which door led to the attic. Its doorknob was different from all the modern handles along the hall. This one was an antique. It looked like the head of a crystal scepter. There was even a sweet, old-fashioned keyhole, big enough to peer through.

“Do you have the key to the door?” I asked.

“No. The previous owners didn’t know where it was. But I installed my own lock on the inside, so no one can come in while I’m working.”

All I could think about was that Chevy Chase movie, the one in which he gets stuck in the attic and his family doesn’t even notice he’s missing. He spends the whole afternoon in his bathrobe watching old family movies until he falls through the insulation and almost dies. It’s my dad’s favorite. Every Christmas we watch it.

Amy turned the knob once to the left, once to the right, back to the left, and then shoved it open with her left shoulder.

“I used to hate that it sticks,” she said, “but we’ve never gotten it fixed in case May ever tried to wander up here.” She pulled a cord that turned on the first light above the
staircase. The stairs were much steeper than I’d anticipated. She went first.

“When you look at your house, you wouldn’t think there’d be room for such a large attic,” I said.

“What?”

Amy turned and looked at me over her shoulder.

I felt stupid for repeating something so inane. “I just said this is a pretty big attic.” Every step sounded like a hollow box.

Even though there wasn’t much light, I could already make out the dimensions of the room. It was a dream attic, a movie set attic. There was the window that faced the backyard, there were the two windows on the side of the house that opened onto a flat patch of roof that could be used as a little porch, and there, in the middle, was something very large and dark, some mass I could distinguish among the shadows, but didn’t recognize.

At the top of the stairs I opened my eyes as wide as I could, so my pupils would dilate.

“Give me just a sec,” Amy said. The floorboards creaked.

I knew she was probably looking for the light switch, but I wanted to see whatever it was before she let me. I wanted to be ready for the surprise by spoiling it. I needed to know what facial expression to prepare.

After a few more seconds in the dark, I could more clearly make out some kind of structure. It was a huge box. Did that make sense? A huge box? Maybe it was a cage.
But although the corners were squared, it seemed more shallow than deep, and certainly not deep enough to keep an animal. And why would she keep an animal up here? Maybe a centaur. I was freaking myself out.

I’d lost track of where Amy was. The only sound in the room was the sound of my breath. I took a couple steps farther away from the staircase, so she couldn’t come up behind me and push me down them like the opening scene of a Stephen King novel.

“Amy?” I said.

But before she could answer, I saw.

By the sudden illumination of hundreds of white Christmas lights, I saw a shrine, as wide as a living room wall. Amy had constructed it in the center of the attic, where the ceiling was highest. And then I saw that it wasn’t a shrine; it was more like a museum tableau. A theater set. The frame was made out of pieces of white wooden bars, haphazardly attached with nails, and bows made out of pink satin ribbon at the corners. The yellow wallpaper from the baby’s room served as the backdrop. There was a rocking chair against the wall, and floating above it: May’s doll, Emily, disfigured from being left in the rain, dressed in a white nightgown. She hung from the top of the frame by strings, like a deranged marionette.

Amy stepped into the room she’d built for herself and sat in the rocking chair.

“What do you think?” she asked, pulling the baby doll
down so she could hold her. The strings rattled in the pulleys.

I was still taking in the broken crib bar frame, which was practically unrecognizable as having ever been a piece of baby furniture; it was destroyed. The chainsaw. There was a title along the bottom of the frame, painted in gold cursive against blue, that read:
Woman Preparing to Wash Her Sleepy Child
.

“How did you do it?” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

Amy smiled with pride. “It looks just like it, doesn’t it?” she said.

“Like what?”

“The painting!” She posed with the baby, head down, and then looked back up at me, waiting for recognition.

I searched the catalog in my brain of every painting I had ever seen. Nope. Nothing.
Nada. Rien
.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I just don’t think I’ve ever seen it.”

Maybe the chainsaw is still up here
, I thought. Maybe because I didn’t recognize the painting, she’ll murder me.
If I die now I’ll have never even done anything worth mentioning
, I thought.
My obituary will just be my SAT scores
.

But Amy didn’t seem angry with me; she just seemed crushed, incredulous. “Mary Cassatt,” she said, and did her impression a second time. Of course I’d seen her mother and child paintings, but apparently not the one
she was trying to replicate with the ruins of her daughter’s nursery.

“Mary Cassatt,” she said again.
“Woman Preparing to Wash Her Sleepy Child.”

The bluish skin below her eyes made Amy look haunted, wounded, and I felt responsible. “Of course,” I lied. “Now I remember.” It was only a kind of lie, a kind lie, a white one. What did I know about Mary Cassatt? Art History 101: her childlessness. But Amy wasn’t childless. Amy still had a daughter.

“Do me a favor,” she said.

I took a step toward her. She stood up and took a step toward me, still holding Emily, and the strings rattled in their pulleys again. I took the doll from her arms and Amy went to stand in the place I’d just left. “Now sit in the chair.”

I sat in the chair. To my right, a blue washbasin rested atop a small stool. The tableau glowed with soft holiday light, and Amy stood in the darkness. I was reborn, an actress again. I was playing the role of my audience. I was playing Amy.

I cradled Emily in my arms.

Amy pressed her hands to her mouth and shook her head. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s what it was like that night.”

When May woke from her nap, she found me downstairs in the living room, staring uncomprehendingly at a copy of
The New Yorker
—some short story about an estranged couple and an elephant souvenir. My starring role in Amy’s tableau had given her the impetus to carry on, and I’d left her upstairs, to re-dress the doll, or string more lights, or maybe run the chainsaw just to break something apart. As I had come down the stairs from the attic, my hands were shaking.

“What are you doin’,” May said, climbing into my lap on the living room couch.

“Nothin’,” I said. “What are
you
doin’?”

“What are you
readin’
, I said,” she said.

“The New Yorker?”

“The noonyorker?”

“For people who live in New York. Who are fancy.”

May had recently proven her ability to read
Green Eggs and Ham
by herself, from start to finish. Of course I knew that she didn’t really recognize the words, that she had just memorized them sequentially like lines in a play, but words were now interesting to her. She understood that they were pieces of a whole, something worth paying attention to.

May nodded. “Spell it.”

“N-E-W.” I pointed to each letter on the cover.

“N-E-W,” she repeated.

“Y-O-R-K-E-R.”

“M-A-Y. H-A-M! I do not like that Sam-I-am!” She tucked her legs into her chest and threw her arms around my neck like a baby monkey.

“Jeeze Louise, how much do you weigh now? A hundred pounds?”

May ignored my question. She leaned in close and whispered in my ear, “I have a surprise for you,” her breath hot on my neck.

“Uh oh,” I said, “did you wet the bed?”

“NO!”

“Did you … find a panda in your closet?”

“No, come
on!
I’ll show you!”

I had had enough surprises to last the rest of the summer, if not my entire life, but I couldn’t blame May for how her parents burdened me with their confessions and exhibitions, their secrets and lies, and so I followed her back upstairs to her room.

She made me close my eyes before we entered.

“Don’t be scared,” she said.

“I wasn’t,” I said, “until you said that.”

I felt her small hand pulling mine toward the unknown. Bright sunlight spilled through the windows, and rosy spots danced in the field behind my eyelids. She pulled
me to the floor until I was kneeling on her rug. I heard a drawer open. Then nothing. An unsettling silence. I could have peeked, but I didn’t want her to catch me breaking the rules. I was imagining what it was she might have collected—a crop of kitchen knives, or Amy’s Joan of Arc and all the angels, or maybe a dead mouse or a live grasshopper in a jam jar, and then finally May clapped her hands.

“Okay! Open your eyes, Esther!”

At first, I didn’t know where to look. I looked at her face. Her eyes were sparkling, but her face was solemn. There was nothing spread across the rug, nothing out of place. Then May began to jump up and down and gesture toward the drawer itself, until I crawled close enough to look inside.