Tumble & Fall (25 page)

It was a mistake. Wasn’t it? Whatever happened … there are foggy gaps in her memory but she doesn’t think they slept together. She would have remembered that. Leo was the only person she’d been with, and surely, she’d remember the difference.

No. They didn’t. But still. It was a mistake.

Only, she doesn’t feel the way she would, the way she usually does, when she’s done something she hadn’t meant to do. Nick’s hand, held out to hers, doesn’t make her feel like she’s done anything wrong. Instead, it makes her feel like she wants to use it to pull him closer, like she wants to feel what he feels like, again.

She squeezes his wrist with her fingers and stretches her small legs across the gap to the dock. Her hand slips from his wrist to his fingers and he folds them tight in his palm. She thinks for a second that he’s going to let go. That he was just being polite. Maybe the mistake was his.

But he doesn’t. They begin to walk slowly down the trail, away from the pond and the nosy swans, beneath the tangled canopy of trees. Neither of them says a word, and Zan imagines what they must look like, walking through the park, comfortably quiet, hand in hand. A couple.

Nick glances over her head, an anxious flicker in his eyes. “Something’s going on,” he says, stretching to see up and down the winding pathways.

Zan squints in the sunlight. “What do you mean?” The park does seem much quieter than it had last night, but that was to be expected, wasn’t it? Last night was a celebration, a stop-time party before things got too real. This morning, this morning is when they’ll know for certain what to expect. And when to expect it.

“I don’t know,” Nick says. “It just feels different. And I heard some kind of commotion, earlier.”

He’s right. There’s an eerie quality to the stillness that feels like more than just morning-after calm. In the distance, a siren wails. A breeze picks up, tossing pieces of trash like confetti in the air around them. An empty bottle of wine rolls out onto the sidewalk. It feels like they are the only people awake. For a brief, panicky moment, Zan wonders if it’s possible that the asteroid strike has already happened, and she and Nick are the only ones left.

“Did you hear that?” Nick asks, stopping short where the sidewalk meets the trampled grass.

“Hey! Hey, you guys!” Somewhere behind them there’s a voice, frantic and high-pitched. “Hey. Wait up!”

Nick shields his eyes from the sun to get a better look. “I don’t believe this,” he says softly.

As the figure gets closer, Zan recognizes the shock of red, the sparkling gold shoes now clutched in the girl’s fingertips. In a park the size of a small town, Gretchen has found them. And she’s not alone.

“I thought that was you guys,” Gretchen says, leaning over to catch her breath. A layer of dirt and crisp leaves is caked into the back of her dyed blond hair, and grass stains streak the back of her dress. “I wanted you to meet my friend Jeff.”

A tiny man in a crooked red bowtie stands beside her. His features are small and delicate and there are dark circles drawn beneath his eyes. “It’s Jim, actually,” he says quietly, holding out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Jim, right, sorry!” Gretchen laughs. “Anyway, I was telling him about you guys, that you were trying to find a ride out of the city.”

“You were?” Zan asks, surprised. She is oddly flattered, and then a little bit sad, that on Gretchen’s one big night on the town, she managed to find time to talk about her random encounter with Zan and Nick, perfect strangers she’d allowed to ransack her home.

Jim nods. “I have a car,” he says. “I was planning on leaving this morning, but since the announcement…”

“What announcement?” Nick asks.

Jim and Gretchen share a look, and Zan realizes they are holding hands. “You didn’t hear it? The president’s speech … they played it on the PA at the Common.”

“No,” Zan says, her heart in her throat. “We must have been asleep.”

Jim seems to shrink even smaller. “Oh,” he says lightly. “Well, the rocket? It … didn’t work. Or, it did, but not enough. The asteroid broke apart, but the pieces are still headed this way. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, how big the impact will be. But it’s definitely happening. Tomorrow night.”

Zan feels a tingling in her feet, a dizzying lightness in her head and her knees. She’s leaning into Nick before she knows how she got there.

“Are you sure?” she hears Nick asking. He sounds like he’s underwater, like they’re all underwater, floating, not bound by the borders of their bodies.

Gretchen has her arm around Jim’s waist and he’s nuzzling into her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I thought everyone knew. I figured you’d already be gone, but if you still need a car…”

“Take mine,” Jim says, gazing into Gretchen’s bloodshot eyes. “I’m staying here.” She kisses him, and they tangle in a groping embrace. Zan looks at the shoes in Gretchen’s hands, glinting in the sun. She feels like she’s going to be sick.

“That would be great,” Nick says, clearing his throat in an attempt to kill the moment.

Jim pulls away and reaches into the pockets of his gray work pants for a key chain. There’s a library card attached to one end. “It’s the silver Prius,” Jim says. “Parked in front of the church on Arlington. Good luck.”

In an instant, Gretchen is hanging on to Zan and Nick, circling their necks and breathing into their ears. “Good luck, you guys,” she says. “And thanks.”

Before Zan can ask for what, Gretchen gives them a meaningful smile and grabs Jim by the hand. They stroll together back toward the park, the identical shapes of their small bodies moving in perfect, silent step, until they’ve disappeared behind the green wall of trees.

*   *   *

“My sister used to love these.”

Zan picks at a chocolate croissant in her lap. Just before they found Jim’s car, they’d passed an abandoned catering table, piled to the brim with pastries and fruit. A sign from a nearby bakery read: “Please Take!” and Nick and Zan, who hadn’t eaten since leaving the gas station, each stuffed their pockets with sweet, sticky treats.

“I always forget you have a sister,” Nick says, staring blankly at the brake lights of the car in front of them. The quiet Boston streets fed them quickly onto the turnpike, which was jammed bumper-to-bumper with people trying to get out of the city. They’d moved roughly thirty feet in the last two hours. Zan’s grumbling stomach was grateful for the snacks.

Zan nods. “Half sister, technically. Joni.”

“What happened to her? I never see her around anymore.”

“She ran away,” Zan says, licking chocolate from the sides of her lips. Joni used to peel back the dry outer layers and let Zan have the first bite, right into the center of warm, chocolate core. “When I was nine. I haven’t really talked to her since.”

It feels strange to be talking about Joni with Nick, but it feels even stranger not to be talking at all. Every so often, she feels her fingers groping for the door handle, jolted by the falling sensation she sometimes gets before sleep. The strange car, the traffic, the city around them, it all feels like a dream. A dream about the days before the end of the world. What other option is there? It can’t possibly be real.

And to make matters more confusing, she has no idea what to say to Nick. She feels too much, too many things at once to make sense of anything yet. She’s not as angry as she was, at least, and she doesn’t know why, but she thinks it’s because of Nick. He was exactly what she needed. She looks at the strong line of his chin, his sandy blond sideburns and long, dark lashes. It’s strange, that they’re together this way. But she can’t imagine being with anybody else.

“What?” Nick asks, his eyes darting at her sideways, a tentative smile parting his lips.

Zan laughs. “No,” she says. “It’s … it’s nothing.”

The smile spreads, his eyes soft and, she thinks, a little bit relieved. “Oh,” he says. “Okay.”

Zan stares ahead at the sky. There are a few wispy clouds that look like they’ve been painted onto the canvas of perfect, clear blue. It is impossible to think that something so serene and flawless could ever do anything to hurt them. In the quiet of the car, with Nick beside her, under the never-ending blanket of blue, she feels safe.

There’s a buzzing in her pocket and it takes her a moment to remember what it is.

“My phone!” she says. “I have service again.”

Nick looks at her suspiciously. “That’s weird,” he says. He digs into his pocket and pulls out his own phone, turning it on with his thumb. “Me too,” he says after a moment. “I guess things have quieted down, now that everyone is pretty much where they want to be.”

Zan stares at the screen in her hand—
6
New Voicemails.
Her stomach turns. She thinks of her parents, at home, and Joni, wherever she may be. Everyone else has already checked in with the people they love, the people they know will worry. She imagines all of the hundreds of thousands of phone calls that have been made, friends checking in with friends. Families making plans. Everyone saying the things they need to say before it’s too late. Everyone, except Zan.

She holds the phone to her ear and listens to the first message. She doesn’t recognize the number right away.

“Hi, Zan, it’s me, Amelia…”

It takes Zan a moment to remember who Amelia is, not because she’s forgotten her but because Leo’s sister is just about the last person Zan expected to be hearing from, at this second, in a car with Leo’s best friend.

“I hope you’re doing okay. I just wanted to tell you something kinda important, and I didn’t want to leave it on your machine, but, okay … we got a call today, Mom did, from this jewelry store on the Cape. It’s called Blue Moon? It’s on the little side road next to the boat, you know, near the Indian restaurant Leo was, like, obsessed with, remember?”

Zan feels Nick’s eyes on her profile as he jabs at the radio, searching for a clear station. She inches closer to the window. It’s suddenly as if Leo is sitting between them, perched on the console, crowding them out of their seats.

“Everything all right?” Nick asks. Zan holds up a finger and turns to look outside. But Leo is there, too.

“Anyway, the guy, the owner I guess, he said he was calling people about these leftover items, things that hadn’t been picked up, and he says he has something of Leo’s. Leo placed an order for something … he wouldn’t tell us what … but he was there, Zan. He was there the day that he died. I thought you’d want to know that. I don’t know why. Okay? I hope you’re not mad I called. Okay. That’s all. Bye.”

There’s a quick silence and then the voice mail cuts out, automatically moving on to the next message, an older one from her mother. Zan turns off her phone and tucks it back into her sweatshirt pocket.

“What’s up?” Nick asks, switching off the radio, satisfied that there is still nothing but static.

“It was Leo’s sister,” she says, her voice low and trancelike.

“Amelia?”

Zan nods. “She says they got a call from some jewelry store in Woods Hole. I guess Leo was there the day he died. He ordered something, and never picked it up.”

Nick’s hands are frozen on the wheel. Zan stares at the torn-up floor mat beneath her feet.

“Okay,” Nick says. He sounds different. Disappointed.

“Okay?” Zan repeats.

“Yeah.” Nick shrugs. “You want to go check it out, right?”

His voice is cool and raspy, like he’s trying to separate it from any part of himself that’s real. Zan stares at the side of his face, the pattern of light brown freckles near his chin.

She feels like she might be sick. Not
carsick
sick, but sick like her insides are being wrenched and twisted, like she has no control over anything anymore. She doesn’t know what she wants, but something tells her she doesn’t have a choice.

She knows she’s not going to like what she finds. Everything in her is telling her to forget it. Leo was cheating. Leo had secrets. Why would she put herself through anything else?

But the answer is in her, and she doesn’t have a choice. There’s a flicker of something, deep in her heart, and whatever it is, she needs to know.

“Yes,” she finally says, so quiet she isn’t sure that Nick’s heard her. “Yeah,” she says again louder. “If you don’t mind. I … I think that we should.”

CADEN

It’s afternoon when Arthur decides to move them all into the bunker. Tuckered out from a morning of eating and drinking, some of the uncles and older cousins have fallen asleep on the living room couches, their clothes rumpled and dirty among the embroidered pillows and rigid upholstery.

Caden keeps watch from the hall. Joe stands on the other side of the front door, the top of his egg-shaped head looming through the colored glass of a decorative window. Arthur stands with George near an oil painting of the ocean, centered on the far wall. Behind one corner of the gilded frame is a keypad, and as George punches in a quick series of numbers, the wall begins to move, pulling back on either side to reveal a small, steel elevator door.

Arthur looks around the room, quietly dividing the crowd into groups of three or four. The elevator, he explains, only holds so many people at once.

Caden’s head is spinning. All that separates him from being trapped in a bunker is that elevator door. He can’t do it. Even if it is the only way he’ll survive. He can’t spend the rest of his life, whatever that turns out to be, knowing that he’d left his family, his
real family
, behind. Yes, his family is broken, but they are his, and he needs to be with them. Now.

He hears a clattering of dishes in the kitchen behind him. He glances around eagerly, still hoping to see Sophie, who has been effectively MIA since brunch. There’s a sinking weight in Caden’s chest, a fear that she is already down there. That Arthur has locked her away in some dark basement room, and Caden will never see her again.

With Arthur’s back turned and Joe safely on the other side of the door, Caden steps silently into the kitchen. Luisa is packing a wine crate full of porcelain dishes, carefully folding each one in bubble wrap and fitting them neatly together.