When the world tips over, p.36
When the World Tips Over, page 36
Feeling eyes on me, I looked up and met my mother’s gaze. She was smiling. Perhaps she’d heard me laugh, a rare occurrence those days. My father was sipping wine, eyes closed, delight on his face, oblivious to anything but his palate. My gaze then traveled to Victor, and my breath hitched. He was leering at us – no, not at all of us, at Theo. There was way too much wolf in the look.
It was in that moment I knew something was gravely wrong in the Fall family. I had an overwhelming impulse to throw myself in front of Theo to protect him from his father. Instead, I pulled the soufflés from the oven. “One for them, one for us,” I said to Theo and Clive. “Oh. And one thing you should know. They’re said to be aphrodisiacal.”
Both of the Fall boys smiled.
And so it began.
So, it all began.
– B
Kids –
I can’t stop writing. I want to be there again. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than I was that first summer in Paradise Springs. I’d been so lonely and lost, so angry in my bones, just seething with the unfairness of the world and always having to keep it in, and then, there were your dad and Clive, the Fall boys.
I spent the day after I met them staring out the window, willing them both to come back. Which they did that afternoon. They returned for a soufflé to bring to their mother in the hospital, and soon after that: It was Bernadette and the Fall boys. The Fall boys and Bernadette. Sitting three in a row at the movies, on a boulder high up on the ridge, in a field staring at God in the form of a brown cow. Me always in the middle, Clive on one side, Theo on the other.
“Do you think your brother Christophe is still here, like his spirit?” Theo asked me one day. The three of us were lying on our backs in a high grass meadow, full of yellow jackets and daisies, watching the pink streamers left over by the sunset ripple across the sky. Their mother Eva was out of the hospital and doing better, but the inevitability of her death was always with them. I’m certain that was what made the three of us such fast friends. You can tell when death is near people. You can see it on a face, hear it in a voice. It’s like grief is an exclusive club and members recognize each other as easily as if they were wearing name tags. We three were VIP members that summer.
“My father says Christophe visits him in the kitchen,” I said. “But I don’t think he visits me.” I ran my hands over the scratchy grass. “It’s weird. I guess I think he has powers or something though, like he’s the conductor of our lives now. I think he made us leave the city and move here, made Sebastian’s Spanish Bakery be vacant and for sale, made you guys come in. I think he wants the three of us to be friends—” At that, to my surprise, at the same moment, from opposite sides, both Theo and Clive touched my hand.
“We’re only friends with you for the soufflés,” Theo said, turning his head toward me and smiling. He rolled onto his side. “And because we needed a sister.” These words. These words of Theo’s, to this day. I felt something long forgotten opening up inside me: joy. I had an impulse then to touch Theo’s face. What if I had? Would things have turned out differently? I think maybe so. But I left my hand by my side. “You know what’s strange?” Theo said. “I’m pretty sure I saw Mom’s ghost the other night. I sleepwalked and woke up in the hammock and she was standing in the field. I went to her, but she disappeared. I wasn’t dreaming either. I know it doesn’t make sense because she’s not dead.” The word yet hovered in the air. I wanted to reach for Theo’s hand. Again, I didn’t.
It was getting dark, the meadow filling with shadows.
Clive stood. “Let’s go swimming,” he said, his voice breaking. “Let’s fucking jump in the river.”
“Ever swim at night?” Theo asked me. “We have the best spot. Jeremiah Falls. It’s off Hidden Highway. We’ll have to hitchhike there. My truck’s dead.”
I, of course, had never swum at night. Or hitchhiked. Or had two friends like Theo and Clive.
For the first time in a long while, I felt lucky. That night we swam in the river until there wasn’t a trace of death left on any of us. I think of that night often, all of us young and alive in the moonlight.
It was weeks later I learned more about Victor.
We were crashed in the Fall vineyard in our sleeping bags under a full moon. I thought we were outside for fun but would soon understand that Theo and Clive had started to sleep in the vineyard to avoid their father.
I remember that night so clearly, the intimacy of it. The way all our voices intermingled in the dark, like our spirits were braiding together. By then, I felt like I could trust them with anything. And they must’ve felt the same about me, because after a lull in conversation, Theo said to Clive, “Can I tell her?”
“Tell me what?” I asked.
“I won’t if you don’t want me to,” Theo said.
“It’s okay.” Clive said. “She’s our sister now.”
Again, these words.
Theo sat up so he was half in, half out of his sleeping bag. “Our dad taught us to fight,” Theo said as coyotes howled in the distance. “Both wrestling and boxing. We’ve been fighting each other since I was seven and Clive was six.” Clive rolled onto his side in his bag. The moon was bright enough to see the despair in his face. “It used to be fine,” Theo went on. “Like fun. I mean, Dad’s always made us compete with each other, for everything. Like when we were little, he’d tell us he only had one hug and whoever told him a better joke would get it.”
Clive said, “Theo would tell the worst joke, something that didn’t even make sense, so I’d get the hug.”
“Or Dad would drop us off at Pan’s Ridge,” Theo said. “And he’d tell us whoever got home first would get to go with him to town for an ice cream.” There was a bitterness in Theo’s voice I’d never heard before. I thought then of the way Victor had glowered at Theo in the café so many weeks ago. “Our mom hates it,” Theo said. “Hates all of it so much.”
“I always fell for it,” Clive said. “I always wanted the ice cream or the hug, wanted to win, which I always did, not realizing until I got older that Theo was letting me. But we’d have these epic battles.”
“Yeah, Clive’s scrappy,” Theo said warmly. “But I did always let him win.”
“Not always!”
“Always, Clive,” Theo said. I remember looking at Theo in this moment and thinking how he looked aglow in the moonlight. So many times since, I thought this same thing. “But since Mom’s been in the hospital, Dad’s been … I don’t know what’s going on. The other night he got us out of bed to fight and when we got in the ring – our ring is the living room, we move the red couch – he started saying these totally awful things to get us riled up, so we’d take it out on each other. It was sick.”
“What kind of things?” I asked.
“It’s me who got so riled, Theo. Not you.” Clive sat up, flailed his arms helplessly. “I was trying so hard not to let Dad get to me, but he was saying how everyone likes Theo more. How Theo’s better than me at everything. He said I was pathetic, useless. He said—”
“He didn’t mean it,” Theo said, cutting Clive off. “He only said that shit so you’d—”
“What? So, I’d whale on you?” Clive exhaled loudly, miserably. “It worked. Theo wouldn’t fight back. He faked it, kept it together no matter what Dad said, but I lost it—”
“It’s okay,” Theo said to Clive. “You didn’t hurt me.” I sat up too then, a queasy feeling in my stomach. “He wants us to hate each other, and the closer we are, the more it pisses Dad off.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why would any father want his kids to hate each other?” I was horrified. “He can’t make you fight each other. Can’t you just say no?”
“We tried that,” Clive said. “The next night, it happened again. Theo said he didn’t want to fight me anymore. Dad went crazy.” Clive turned on his flashlight and pointed it at Theo’s chest. “Show her.”
Theo lifted his shirt to reveal a blue galaxy streaming across his side. “Dad shoved Theo into the banister when he was trying to get away.” Clive looked at his brother and said, “It won’t happen again though. Dad’s just upset because of Mom.”
“It’s going to happen again, Clive.” The way Theo said this sent a chill through me.
“Has your dad hurt you before, Theo?” I asked.
Clive’s body clenched. Theo studied Clive, then shook his head.
But Theo was lying.
That night, I stayed awake long after they both fell asleep, watching how they turned toward each other in their slumber, how Theo’s arm settled protectively on Clive. I had the sense then that Theo would do anything for Clive. Anything.
And then the wildest thing happened.
Theo rose out of his bag and began sleepwalking deep into the vineyard, holding his trumpet in his hand. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t even known he had the trumpet with him.
I woke Clive.
I’d never seen a sleepwalker before, couldn’t believe how gracefully he was moving down the row of grapevines. Clive and I scrambled after him like two uncoordinated crabs. At first, we couldn’t stop giggling, tripping, bumping into each other, while Theo sailed effortlessly through the night, negotiating roots and rocks as if he were wearing night-vision goggles.
Half boy, half wind, I thought, watching Theo, and when he got to the edge of the vineyard, he brought the trumpet to his lips and started playing. In his sleep! My spine tingled. Clive and I followed Theo up and down the rows, the music – jazz maybe? Classical maybe? – floating in the air, until the first sprays of morning light filled the sky.
Once a year on the Jewish high holy days, back then, my family road-tripped to the one temple in the area, which was over eighty miles away. At the Yom Kippur service, I’d spend my time scoping out the other kids who were as bored as I was with all the standing and sitting, the incomprehensible Hebrew, not to mention that we were all starving from the fast. I never felt God there or in Clive’s cow or anywhere. I figured if he existed, he would’ve shown himself when Christophe died. Before he died. He would’ve saved my brother.
But there in that vineyard with Theo sleep-playing this dream-music and Clive by my side, for the first time in my life, I felt a presence of something I only had the word God to describe. It felt like a divine hand had landed on my shoulder. Clive smiled at me, and I knew he was feeling it too. Something more.
More world, I remember thinking. More and more and then some more world. (Be on the lookout for these moments, my children.)
“Look,” I whispered to Clive, pointing to the end of the row. A black dog, several squirrels, and two deer were poised there like they’d been called by the music. “I wish we had this on video,” I said to Clive. “He’s not going to believe this.”
“I don’t believe this.” Clive’s voice was filled with awe.
Theo stopped playing then, concert over, and lowered to the ground, curling up, the waning moonlight finding him so that he glimmered there in the dirt. Clive and I huddled together, watching as the animals slowly approached Theo and then sat down around him.
“What’s happening?” Clive whispered.
“He’s magic,” I said.
“I think there’s something wrong with me,” Clive whispered. “Don’t make fun of me, Bernie, but I feel like I love him too much. Like it makes my chest kill.”
I wanted to say, Me too, but held it in.
This night might have been the night I fell in love with your father. It is one of my favorite memories.
Clive pointed to the menagerie with Theo curled up in the middle of it. “That black Lab Sandro is the Bells’ dog, but he sneaks into Theo’s room at night. And sometimes birds fly to his window and perch there on the sill while he sleeps,” Clive said.
“Really?”
“Girls too. They camp out in the tree outside his window.”
“Why?” Ugh. I did not like this idea.
Clive shrugged. “One girl, Lucinda Paul, wouldn’t leave until he said he’d take her to some dance.”
“Did he?”
“Yeah. But just to stop Dad from calling her parents about the tree thing.” He gestured toward Theo. “Dad says mean things to me, but it’s Theo he hates. He won’t let Theo play the trumpet in the house, says it hurts his ears, but always sings along when I play the piano or guitar or whatever. He never goes to Theo’s track meets or comments on his perfect report cards, but if I get a C, he makes sundaes.” Clive turned to face me. “We played hide-and-seek this one time when we were little, and my dad found me and took me to town for an ice cream. We just left Theo in his hiding spot. For hours. I went along with it, thought it was so funny until we got back. I found Theo still hiding in the laundry basket. He was crying, and Theo never cries. He wouldn’t talk to me for days.” Clive’s gaze dropped to his feet. “Those days were the worst of my entire life. Not lying.”
“I get it,” I said. Looking at Theo sleeping on the ground surrounded by animals, I understood how someone’s world would go dark without Theo.
And I was right. It has.
– Mom
Miles
Miles spent his whole life hiding his emotions only to have them all tornado out of him at once on meeting his father. He didn’t know what to do with himself as he walked back to the truck, could barely keep his skin on. Dizzy and Felix were already inside the cab. Miles called for Sandro and climbed in the truck to see Dizzy hugging the trumpet tightly to her chest, devastated.
“We don’t need him, Diz,” he said.
“We actually do. Didn’t you feel it?”
He had felt it. It, for him, being everything. “But we have the trumpet,” he said, trying to make her feel better. “That’ll work, right?”
She looked at him like he was boneheaded. “We need him with us because he’s our father, Miles.”
He studied his little sister. She was wearing this heartbreak differently than the heartbreak of previous days. The perpetual bubble of optimism that made Dizzy Dizzy had burst and hopelessness had invaded her tiny body. It was in the slumped shoulders, pained eyes, downward tilt of her neck. He couldn’t bear it. What kind of dipshit father did this to a little girl? His little girl? Closes a door on her? How dare he? His fists were two grenades at his sides.
He leaned out the truck, unclenched his jaw, and called for Sandro again. Then he called the dog from inside his head. They had to get out of there already. Where was Sandro? He never took off like this.
“Why doesn’t he want to be our father?” Dizzy said softly.
“Only an idiot wouldn’t want to be your father,” Felix replied. Miles smiled at him, so grateful he was there. He had an urge to give him something, like the Golden Gate Bridge or Mount Everest. But what must he be thinking of all this? Of Miles’s epic meltdown?
“Be right back,” Miles said. “Going to get Sandro.”
“Can we talk about something else for a second?” Miles heard Felix say to Dizzy as he hopped out of the truck. “Like how awesome it is that Cassidy’s your half sister.”
Tenderness crushed Miles at these words. Felix was probably the most badass big brother. Miles slowed to hear Dizzy’s response. “It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said solemnly, then added, “I guess that’s how she knows our family stories, because they’re her family stories too.”
Now Miles was being clobbered with affection for Dizzy, but as he continued down the path, that affection began morphing into anger, and then several steps later, into a wild flailing rage with teeth and claws. The closer he got to the yellow house, more and more blood-red words filled his head – he was going to rip his father apart with them. Because what kind of monster was the man? How could he do this to Dizzy? How could he not want to see his son whose heart had just stopped? And what was wrong with Miles that he felt sick with need for this man and at the same time like he might possibly kill him? Also, who would believe that coming out to his sister would be the least consequential thing to happen to him in the past couple hours?
As he approached the door, Miles heard jazz. Had it been on this whole time? He hadn’t noticed it before. He didn’t knock or ring the bell. The door was ajar, probably from when the man watched them leave, thinking he was done with them.
Well, sorry, Charlie, not so fast.
Miles pushed the door open and walked into a massive room with a vaulted wood-beamed ceiling. His father wasn’t there. Neither was Sandro. He shouldn’t be there either, he knew that. He felt like a burglar in the airy space that was brimming with the rich luxurious sound of trumpet, bass, piano. So inappropriate, Miles thought, as was the sunlight pouring joyfully through the large windows. At the far end of the room was a wall of shelved books that had an attached ladder to reach the highest volumes. So many books. And to his left was a similarly shelved wall with a ladder, but the shelves were filled with vinyl.
Miles’s hungry eyes took in the room, vacuuming up the man’s life, inch by inch. On the other side of the living room area was a large dining table with a computer open on it, and behind that, a wine refrigerator with hundreds of bottles inside. To his right was a fireplace large enough for Miles to crouch in. He scanned the photos on the mantel. His father and Cassidy on horses. His father and Cassidy in the vineyard. His father and Cassidy around this very coffee table in front of the couch, on it a lopsided birthday cake crowded with candles. His father smiling from east to west about to blow them out. He hadn’t seen the man’s smile yet and it pierced Miles’s heart. As did the evidence of his love for another child. How come he could be a father to her and not to them? There were no photos of Cassidy when she was little and none with a mother, a wife, or girlfriend. He didn’t know how old Cassidy was either. Had his father had an affair? Or was Cassidy from before he married their mom? Or could she also be their mother’s child? No, that didn’t seem possible.
