The Moment Before (9 page)

“What.”

“Brady. I’m not so sure you want to hear what’s on her phone.”

“Oh, come on. Some bullshit sexy talk from that bonehead formerly known as her boyfriend. I can take it.”

“It’s not that. Look. Sit down.” Connor points to a rotted log.

I keep standing. “What’s the big mystery?”

He sighs and looks off in the middle distance, like people do when they’re searching for the right words. “Sabine told me some stuff, you know, in the weeks before that day.”

“Like what?”

“Like … oh, man. This is hard.”

“Stop it Connor. C’mon it’s getting late.”

“She, well, she was in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” I’m thinking, maybe she got caught cheating on a test? Or maybe there’s some MIP thing we never knew about. “I mean, it’s no secret she liked to party.”

“Your sister was, um, she was pregnant.”

The words
sister
and
pregnant
, so weird side-by-side that way. Sabine was on the pill. I thought. “Really? But …”

“Well, here’s the thing. I knew she suspected she was knocked up, but she didn’t know, or she told me she didn’t know for sure. But the thing is, Nick? Well he was on her case about gaining weight. She went off the pill because she thought it was making her fat.”

I sit down on the mossy log now, my head and my feet are both pounding. Connor reaches into his pocket and pulls out Sabine’s purple-covered phone. “On the voicemail, apparently she had an appointment to, you know, abort it. They were calling to confirm. But that’s not really the worst.”

I’m still in shock over hearing Sabine was pregnant. “What do you mean, ‘the worst’?”

Connor gazes down at the Forest. He’s not looking at me when he says, “Nick, he threatened her. A lot.”

“
Threatened
her?”

Connor shakes his head. “He’s such an asshole.”

I stand up and grab the phone from him, punch in my birthdate, and listen to Nick call my sister the worst names imaginable. He tells her she’s cheap. That she is trying to trap him. That she’s ruining his life. That he’s not even sure it’s
his
. One horrible, horrible message where he says,
You’re a skanky little whore. If you’re pregnant, there’s no knowing who the father is.
And,
All you are is a trashy little social climber. You come from nothing, and you’ll end up with nothing.

All of this, days before he shows up at our house in tears, pledging undying love, falling apart on our front stoop, overtaken by grief.

My face must be turning colors, because Connor says, “Wow, Brady, you OK?”

I close my eyes, anger charging through me like steam in a teakettle. I hold the phone in the air, the offending instrument. “Connor, what the hell? I mean, if I let Mom and Dad know about Sabine, it’ll really crush them. But I want them to hear this. I want them to know what kind of a shit Nick is. I want everyone to know.”

Connor nods. Looks down. “Yeah.”

And then it hits me. The pieces come together. “You didn’t drop her. She passed out. From the pregnancy. She fainted. Oh, Connor, we have to let people know.”

“She was a little woozy, but that’s not what happened. Your sister? She was so competitive. It wasn’t enough to do one flip, she had to do two. I told her not to, I told her, especially with the way she was feeling, but she had to prove something. Especially to that Dickwad.”

I close my eyes and see her up on top of the world, before she fell. It was a preview of their routine for State. It all comes clear. Sabine wanted to win it for them, the second year in a row. But I didn’t know. Nobody knew that she was planning to do an extra flip. Right before she fell, everyone’s phones up in the air to capture it, a zillion iPhones poised, and Sabine, imagining herself going viral, flying and spinning and tucking. Her athletic, amazing body, hurling itself through the air on the way to Connor’s arms. Instead, she became the cheerleader who broke her neck.

And me, in La La Land, gazing off at something else entirely. Why wasn’t I watching her when it happened? Why didn’t I try and stop her?

Connor sighs. “I still fucked up, Brady. I should have moved three more inches. I would have caught her then.”

It’s so easy to find the right words to comfort Connor. Much easier than to forgive myself. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t. That extra flip, the way she always had something to prove. To her. To Nick. To the world.”

Connor shrugs. The earring glints in the dying light. Another evening in the woods with this boy. I don’t think about it, just reach out and touch the little jewel coming off Connor’s lobe, like a little kid in a gift shop grabbing stuff they’re not supposed to. My fingers brush his chin and there’s just the tiniest sandpaperiness there. A jolt of something hits me in the gut. It makes me nervous, and I’m not sure why. “I’ve got to go,” I tell him, and we start walking back down the trail.

We walk back down the trail, past the Witch’s House where there are no park ranger types, no people of any sort. Balch Creek is flowing hard just below us, but we can’t see it, as dusk has settled, and any daylight left is just what reflects off of some white granite boulders. The water rush sound accompanies us back to civilization. My feet hurt a lot now, but I have to stride big to keep up with Connor; we need to get out of the forest before it’s pitch black.

He still has a little deodorant smell, but now it’s mixed with a spring soil scent. Our shoulders are nearly touching. I’m aware of how close my hip is to his hip. The jelly feeling in my gut is both lower and higher now—traveling like water on tissue. We haven’t spoken a word to each other since leaving the clearing. Finally, house lights glow ahead of us. He says, “My parents are pretty close to sending me away.”

My ears lock down on those words, my throat closes around them. I’m aware of sweat, suddenly, little dots of it at my temples, on my palms. A heartbeat tries pumping blood around, as though I’m a deer in a fight-or-flight stance. “Why?”

Stupid question, I know, but it’s all that manages to come out of my closed-up throat.

“It’s the classic stepfather scene. All he needed was one more reason to hate my guts. My dad lives over in Bend, they want to send me there.”

“But I thought,” I stammer, “you were going to BALC?”

“Yeah, well, guess not.”

In the rising moonlight, the shadows on Connor’s face make a jigsaw line from his forehead to chin. I want to capture it so bad that I can almost feel the shape of a charcoal stick in my hand, a blurred edge of gray on canvas. Again, Sabine’s earring, the silver of it, catches white light. I swallow, and have to hold myself back from running my fingers up and down the length of his face. It’s that beautiful.

“When?” I manage, my question a whisper.

“Soon, maybe. I’m looking for a construction job or something. Digging ditches, whatever. I’ll be eighteen in a few months, if I had money saved up, I could live on my own. Or travel, you know?”

That Connor Christopher really believes this makes me want to hug him. “Connor, I think we need to set the record straight. About the accident. Your parents, the school, they’d reconsider.”

Connor shakes his head. “Here’s the thing. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me. I can live it any way I want. Sabine doesn’t have those options.”

I think of the Classics in Context class, Mrs. McConnell and her duplicity versus integrity lecture. “That’s very Faulknerian of you,” I tell Connor.

He stares at me like I’ve lost my mind. “You’re such a nerd, Brady. You’re like the opposite of your sister.”

That should hurt my feelings, what he just said, but it doesn’t. Being around Connor makes me feel
real
er, somehow. There’s some sort of truth serum thing happening to me, and I’m not afraid. Of anything. I say, “Sabine and me, we’re Irish twins, you know.”

“I don’t know what that means, but I do know that Sabine thought you were wicked smart. Like, over the top.”

“She said that?”

“All the time,” Connor says, grinning. And I notice for the first time, there’s a dimple on the earring side of his face.

“She talks to me,” he says.

This is uncanny; I want more. “Like, what do you mean? Has conversations with you—from the great beyond?”

“Not lately. But until about a week ago, it was like she would guide me. I’d hear her voice talking me in or out of things.”

We’re almost at the bus stop now, and I start to feel panicky. I want to keep talking to Connor Christopher. “Connor…” I say, standing stock still right there on the sidewalk.

The way he looks at me when I say his name, it’s like Sabine’s inside him. For a tiny second, I really believe that she is. “Same,” is all I can manage to say.

I see the 15 bus chugging toward us. “You gonna get on?” I ask.

“Nah. I’m gonna keep walking. I’m in no hurry to get back to it. My folks are like so shitty right now, it’s best I get home after they’ve gone to bed.”

I nod, but I’m sad. If I weren’t already way late and my feet weren’t killing me, I’d walk over the hill with him. It’s a good six or seven miles though, so I wave goodbye like a kindergarten kid getting on a school bus. And I’m not even embarrassed by my dorkiness.

My cell phone has eight voicemails on it. Dad, Martha, Mom, Mom, Martha. A few from some kids in my art class. On the bus toward downtown I delete them all without listening. I’m feeling bold, but also, I don’t want to hear any other voices beside Connor’s right now. I’m replaying our conversations and my body is doing the weird crush thing—the funny belly, lava-like heat. A lightness. I totally get why people in musicals break into song when they feel this way. So weird. This boy, I hated his guts a week ago. The this-way-and-suddenly-that-way of it all. Like Sabine, cheering one second, dead the next. Life and death rubbed up against each other, a paper-thin border between them.

I dial her number now, and she’s back, telling me to give her a “G.” Her breathless voice, never stopping for air. She lived in fast-motion to the end. Her cheer against my ear, I close my eyes and picture her in her final minutes. A bunch of cells dividing inside of her. A combination of her and Nick. Nick, who told her she was ruining his life. Nick, who sobbed at her service, telling my parents that he really thought they’d marry someday. Why didn’t she tell me about Nick? About getting pregnant? In my head, I ask her this over and over.

She was odd that way, though. So forthcoming about losing her virginity, but taking some pill to calm her nerves. Her and Martha, always pushing the edge, and then needing something to settle them down. I remember a few days before the accident, Sabine, Martha and I rode the bus downtown to Pioneer Square. They ordered triple espressos, stirred in some brown sugar, and slammed them. On the bus home they were so amped up, they both popped little white pills. Up:Down. Crazy.

I wonder what it would be like to crave the spotlight. To want people to watch and admire you. Maybe that’s why Sabine had so many secrets. She needed to keep some things locked in a place where only she had the key.

There’s no way Martha knew. There can’t be. She wouldn’t have told Martha and not me.

There are only a handful of us on the bus when it pulls into the downtown corridor. With the twin phones, one in each hand, I step out onto the street where a shopping-cart woman is picking through the barrel of a public trash bin. The homeless woman, who looks sixty, picks up her head and smiles at me. She says, “You gotta spare dollar for a grandma?”

I return her smile and shake my head, thinking of Nona. Nona would be crushed to think of Sabine dying not a virgin—pregnant, no less. She and her countless rosaries: the black one, the mother-of-pearl one, the one supposedly blessed by the Pope. “We pray to the Virgin, Brady,” she’d said, pulling me down next to her in front of a stand of votives at Saint Mary’s. “Sabine, she died a pure girl. The Virgin protects her own.”

It seemed ludicrous to me that Nona and her religious ilk thought of Jesus’ mother as someone who’d never had sex. Virgin:Whore. Another paper-thin border.

The 44 stops in front of me, the door gasping open. I’m a solitary rider on this bus, and it lurches along Broadway, winds around the maze of streets to Barbur, and by the time we’re near my stop, I’ve listened to Sabine’s demanding me to have a great day a dozen times. The thirteenth time I hear her, I leave a message. “Are you OK, wherever you are?” I say into the tiny speaker of my phone.

My blistered feet are swollen out of my shoes by the time I round my corner and my driveway looms into view.
Safety, danger, safety, danger,
in my head as I walk by the lawns. My house looks different somehow, as I walk toward it. Then it hits me why. Sabine’s Volvo. It’s gone.

Mom’s sitting at the kitchen table with some documents in front of her, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. She doesn’t look up when I enter. Dad’s in front of the TV in the adjoining room. He clicks it off and comes into the kitchen, where I’m rooting around for leftovers in fridge. Nothing. Onto the cereal cabinet then.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demands, slurrily.

I don’t have to get any closer to know that if I did, I’d smell beer or whiskey off of him.

“I had to meet someone,” I say. “A school thing.”

He slams a fist down on the kitchen counter. “I pay your god damn phone bill every month, I expect you to call when you’re out late. You had me worried sick.”

“Sorry,” I mumble, and pour milk into a bowl of All Bran and Lucky Charms.

Dad grabs the spoon out of my hand and wags it at me. “What is going on, young lady?”

Mom slaps her pen down. “John, please. Yes, Brady, we left you several messages. It’s common courtesy.”

So many places I could go with this, I know. What to say. What to leave out. I squeeze a fist into my hand like I’m about to punch someone. My feet throb. “I was asked by my teacher, to go to Mrs. Cupworth’s house with her. There’s a to-do about the prize. I’ve been thinking, these last few hours, about how to handle it.” And then, for good measure, and because I want to know if I, too, can play a bluffing hand, I add, “Sorry I didn’t check in. My phone died.”

“See, I told you, John. What do you mean, a ‘to-do?’”

“Some people,” I begin, “seem to think that the prize was given to Martha instead of me because if they gave it to me, it would look like hush money.”

“What people?” says Mom. “That’s ridiculous. I told you the whole lawsuit theory was half-baked in therapy the other day. Mr. Field showed me your grades, Brady. That’s why. That’s the only reason why.”

Dad is trying to catch up. He’s still wagging the spoon in mid-air. “You should have borrowed someone’s phone. Don’t they have landlines in those West Hills estates?”

“So, have you decided yet? About suing?” I want to know.

“Your father and I are at an impasse in regards to that,” Mom says, her dagger-eyes peeking over her glasses at Dad.

Dad, spews, “Making her do those ridiculous stunts—that scorpion move. If for no other reason, I’d like to make people aware. Prevent another father from having to bury his daughter.”

Before I can stop myself, I say, “We didn’t bury Sabine. We burned her.”

“Brady!” Mom cries.

In one fluid motion that only an ex minor-league baseball pitcher can pull off with grace, Dad flings my cereal spoon across the room, and backhands me right across the face.

The pain cracks through me, but I take it. I’ll have a child-services-sized bruise blooming on my cheek by morning, and I’m glad. I stand there glaring at my father, who is not yet remorseful, but I know soon will be.
Rager:Regretter
, says the voice of Sabine.

“Where is Sabine’s car?” I demand.

My father’s hand pulsates into a fist and out of it. “I gave it to Nick,” he says, before striding out of the kitchen and through the door to the garage.

I’m still in shock, my cheek stinging, when the sound of garage door ratcheting along its chain fills the room. Then Dad’s revved engine, and the squeak of tires burning rubber down the length of our drive.