When the world tips over, p.37
When the World Tips Over, page 37
The pain in his chest was knife-sharp now.
He had an impulse to piss all over the room, to lay claim to every last bit of it.
He ran his hand across the armrest of an oversized yellow leather couch. In front of it was the large low wooden coffee table with stacks of more books and albums as well as half-played games of backgammon and Scrabble. There was a deck of cards, with a scorecard beside it: Cassidy and Dad followed by two long columns of numbers, written in what must be Cassidy’s handwriting – or he supposed it could be his father’s, referring to himself as Dad. Her dad. He didn’t even know his own father’s handwriting. His father and Cassidy had probably been playing this card game for weeks. Next to that was a vintage record player that was spinning. He had the overwhelming and unsettling sensation being in this room that this was where he’d belonged all these years, where he would’ve felt at home. But he hadn’t been wanted here. It was worse than being rejected by Wynton and Dizzy because he’d always felt alien from them. His father and Cassidy seemed to be made of the same stuff he was, people who read like others breathed. Cassidy had had these books, these games, this music, this sunlight, this man, and he hadn’t. His stomach heaved and he had to breathe through it so he didn’t vomit all over the table, all over their beautiful father-daughter life.
He was a speck of dust, that’s how little he mattered here.
He walked over to a wall where there was a framed photograph of Cassidy. She was sitting on a boulder in a river, her hair blond then and tumbling down her back. She seemed pensive and Miles wondered what she was thinking about. He wanted to traipse around in her mind for days, for years. How could he not have noticed how alike they looked? Except for the hair, his dark like their dad’s, hers maybe light like her mother’s? Who was her mother? And how long had Cassidy known about them, her half siblings in Paradise Springs? Because clearly, she knew. Had she just found out? Did she still think her father’s name was Dexter? Where was her mother now? Had Cassidy come down to Paradise Springs to meet them all, but then chickened out? Had she wanted to tell Miles in the orange truck that day who she was? Miles sensed now that she had. Repeatedly. God, it was so obvious in hindsight. Of course she was his sister. She’d felt like the other half of his soul.
And Dizzy was right. The Fall family stories were Cassidy’s stories too. That’s how she even knew about the purple, green, and blue stripes of his bedroom walls. Her father probably relayed them to her around this very table with a fire roaring, and she’d transformed them into the magic-infused tales she told Felix. He remembered her saying, Sometimes I don’t even read in order, just read some from one book, some from another, whatever, all night long. Like all – and I mean all of everything – is just one really long story.
He was glad he was in the really long story with her now. Even if her fuckface father refused to be a father to him, to them. He realized he was grinding his teeth and stopped just as he heard heavy steps clomping down the stairs, and then there was his father at the bottom of the stairwell holding Sandro in his arms.
“Sandro was hiding under my bed,” the man said. “I was bringing him out to you.”
Miles examined the unfamiliar man’s familiar face from across the room – it took his breath as it had outside. Miles was a slighter, younger replica of this man: same model, different year. It was eerie, like he was looking at himself in the future. He wondered if his father also frequented The Gloom Room. He thought yes. (And Alonso Fall too, for that matter, because what was up with the period when he became a fountain of darkness?)
Sorrow seemed to be all over his father, in his posture, in his stare that in this moment was devouring Miles, making him feel woozy, unsteady on his feet, unsteady in soul. Yes, Miles had futilely searched wine notes and written emails to an imaginary dad over the years, but he wondered now how much of the yearning at the core of his being, the feeling of emotional exile, all the lonely hope-bitten hours, were because this man had left him. What if the deep-seated fear that there was something wrong or askew at his core began with this man’s rejection and was only reinforced by his siblings? This revelation jarred him. Because what if he’d had it wrong all these years and it was his father, not Wynton, who was the Big Bang of Miles’s damaged psychic universe? And probably Wynton’s too.
No, not probably, definitely. His whole life, Wynton had carried the hurt and rampaging anger that Miles was only experiencing today for the first time. Because not until being in this upside-down ship of a room full of books and music and love, until being in the man’s presence, did Miles understand what Wynton always knew – just how much they’d missed out.
There was a tight ball of pain in Miles’s throat and a yearning the size of a continent in his heart.
Miles’s gaze drifted to Sandro, so at home in his father’s arms.
Traitor.
Sandro didn’t respond.
What the hell, Sandro?
Nothing.
You’re going to pretend you can’t hear me now?
Still nothing.
Why are you ignoring me?
Sandro turned his snout to Miles but didn’t make eye contact. Because I’m staying, Miles, and I don’t know how to tell you. I’m staying with Beauty.
Beauty? What? He’s Beauty!? You’ve got to be kidding me, Sandro. Beauty’s my father? I thought Beauty was another dog!
Your father used to sleepwalk all around our property, then crash in the vineyard under the moon. My human-mom Rory called him Sleeping Beauty.
How come you never told me?
You never asked!
Can he hear us?
I don’t think so. Beauty and I never communicated this way.
Miles couldn’t stop himself. You love him more than me?
Don’t ask me that.
I don’t need to now. You just told me.
Blood sped through Miles’s veins as he absorbed this, as he looked at his father standing there with Miles’s very own face plastered on his skull as he held in his arms Miles’s very own surrogate dog and best friend on this earth. Sandro’s snout was tucked under the man’s chin. He looked more content than Miles had ever seen him because this man with Miles’s own private face was the love of the dog’s life.
This dog who didn’t love Miles enough to stay with him just as this man hadn’t.
Everything Miles had prepared to say evacuated the premises. His temperature began spiking, his thoughts were in a blender. He felt like he could break rocks with his hands. He glanced over at the photograph of the man blowing out birthday candles with his pretty teenage daughter and a proud smile on his fatherly face and a dam burst. Geysers and geysers of betrayal and anger and lifelong hurt erupted in Miles, putting his previous furies to shame. He could barely see, barely breathe, thought his head might fly off his neck. Because how dare this man – this Big Bang of damaged psychic universes – have Miles’s face! How dare he have all these books! How dare he raise another child! How dare he play cards with her for weeks on end! How dare he not try to save Wynton’s life!
How dare he steal Miles’s dog!
It was too much!
Everything was too much!
“Fuck. Off. Both. Of. You. Shitheads,” Miles said, not only for himself, but for Wynton and Dizzy too, savoring each word in his mouth, making each last. “Have a happy life together.”
And he was gone.
Cassidy
When you have a yellow house, a mountain bike, a mailbox with a bird feeder on it, a smartphone, a father in a cowboy hat, an address on Dandelion Road in a town called Whispering River, a kitchen you make meals in with a funny gangly vineyard manager named Nigel, neighbors named Mrs. McGerald on one side and The Heredias on the other, two horses (Chet and Billie), two pigs (Mingus and Parker), three chickens (Coltrane, Monk, Rollins), a front stoop you sit on with your dad at sunset where he tells you why pinot noir is the heartbreak grape and how the great wines are love stories in bottles.
When you have a bedroom with a window seat and purple curtains, a real bed, a town square with a main street with Becky who works at the bakery and Ami at the hardware store. When you go to high school and dance classes and cross-country practice and the mall. When you have sleepovers, slouch in rowdy classrooms, hang by the school fountain, party with people your own age by a river. When you’ve logged onto and streamed so many useless things. When you’ve baked pies and ordered pizzas and popped popcorn and blown out birthday candles. When you have a last name.
You start to forget what it was like before.
I start to forget, Wynton, how it was to hop out of Sadie Mae after hundreds of miles of sun-blind driving onto rubbery car-legs, my neck cracking as I lift my sundress over my head and let it fall behind me as I tear across burning sand, hand in hand with my rosy maple moth of a mother, both of us yelping and whooping our way to the swimming hole we’ve been talking about for ten straight hours, imagining how it will feel to plunge into the cool water and then we’re there, on the ledge of a rock cliff counting: three, two, and we’re both too excited to wait to one, so we jump into the air, and when our desert-heated bodies sink into cool blue water, it’s religion. Because like my mother promised, there were times, that, without a doubt, The Divine Force ate us up like tacos.
I forget when I’m trudging through the vineyard with my father popping grapes into my mouth, when he teaches me how to ride a horse, how to play guitar, how to drive a car (legally), how to know the difference between hard bop and West Coast jazz.
I forget when I ride horses with my dad up to the ridge where I feed Billie apples out of my hand, Billie, who’s become my horse; and as my father and I sit quietly in the sun, I realize I feel more like myself when I’m with him than when I’m alone, which is strange because with Marigold I never felt like myself, never felt like I had a self apart from her.
I forget as his mystery takes the place of hers, when I find the wedding band in his pocket with its inscription: You are my forever, my always, my only, even though he’d told me he never married, had no one in the world but me.
I forget when I watch him staring at a wall like it’s a horizon, when I hear glass shattering in his office in the converted barn and I spy through a slot in the wood my father breaking wine bottle after bottle, hurling them at the floor, while Nigel, at my side, tells me it happens sometimes. I find myself forgetting when he closes himself off in his bedroom for whole weekends and I wonder if he’s in The Silent World, if I’m ruining his life now like I did Marigold’s.
I forget when he asks me my favorite color and I tell him – the same as the word love: purple – and he exclaims that I’m a synesthete like him because he sees music as colors and it feels like the coolest club ever to belong to and I wonder if Marigold ever paid attention to anything I did or said because how could she have missed this?
I forget as I plod down the halls at school with best friends Olan and Summer, when we three get our belly buttons pierced, get tattoos of blue birds on our thighs, when we dye each other’s hair red, then blue, then pink, then go all-out rainbow, when we three stay up baking brownies, when we sneak bottles of my father’s wine out of the house to drink by the river, where I tell them how my mother abandoned me, walked off into the night, didn’t even take her toothbrush, when I tell them what happened with The Man in the Coats, and they put their arms around me and comfort me and then tell me their own impossible stories and my arms wrap around them.
I find myself forgetting at parties, where I’m kissing first Denver Cho, then Scott Swan, then Riley somebody, though nothing comes of those kisses because I’m pining away for Peter the pizza deliverer who was the boy who watched me from the tree when I crashed Purple Rain into the gully in the Land of the Nakeds, the boy who ignores me no matter how many Denvers or Rileys I kiss, no matter how many pizzas I order, until he finally stops ignoring me, and then I forget some more and we’re on our way to our senior prom.
But the thing is, Wynton: Even with all the forgetting, my mother has become my shadow, my witness, my rage, my enemy, my ally, my yearning, my joy, my language. I get tattooed on my arm the quote everyone thinks is by Walt Whitman but is just a paraphrase of a quote by him: We were together, I forget the rest. I love these words, they are my faith. And I need faith because those years with Marigold broke something inside me and it is a permanent kind of broken.
In a faraway land in the time of forever, there was a mother and a daughter, I write before I go to bed each night and the words flow. I show my mother/daughter stories to no one because this is where I sneak up on her (“Oh there you are!”) and despise her and love her, where she and I are same-souled again, and when I get the postcards, one from India, one from Bali, one from the Camino de Santiago in Spain, I toss them into her old bag of words and retreat to my closet where there is that Marigold-spot on the wall and I punch it and punch it and punch it until my knuckles bleed.
Miles
Miles swung open the passenger door of the truck and hopped in. “Let’s hit it,” he said.
“Where’s Sandro?” asked Felix.
“He’s staying,” Miles said.
Felix lifted his shades, made eye contact with Miles. “Um. Dude. You sure?” The very obvious unspoken words hanging between them: He’s not your dog to give away.
“Couldn’t be more sure.”
Felix’s concerned gaze – like should he drive straight to a psychiatrist’s office? – lingered on Miles for a few moments, then he lowered his sunglasses, lit up the engine, and pulled onto the road, somehow knowing not to ask how it went inside the house. Miles thought again about Felix saying that when he reads or watches a movie, he moves in. That’s what he’d done with Miles’s life in the last twenty-four hours – he’d moved in, and Miles didn’t want him to move out. He dismissed the morbid thoughts from last night. Of course Felix wasn’t dying. Jesus. What the eff had he been thinking? About anything.
Dizzy’s face was puffy from crying and her glasses were smudged and crookedly resting on her nose. Her hair looked as if she’d put her finger in a socket. How could a father not love this child? The image of her on tiptoes peering the wrong way through the peephole of the shut door assaulted him and made ice-hot heat flush through him. He hated the man for that, for so many things. God. Dizzy motioned for Miles to bend down, then cupped a hand around her mouth and whispered into his ear, “Did Sandro tell you he wanted to stay?” Miles couldn’t have been more shocked if his sister had suddenly spoken to him in Sanskrit. How could Dizzy possibly know this wholly secret thing about him? He nodded and then she nodded back at him, sympathy on her face. She leaned in again, whispered, “That’s so sad and you were already so sad.”
Oh man. He put an arm around her and pulled her in tight and the three of them drove in an unwieldy silence out of Whispering River toward the hospital where Wynton quite possibly lay dying. They were too destroyed to even rejoice about their new half sister. The shiny brass trumpet lay quiet and songless on the dashboard.
“What a jerk,” Miles said, but it came out flat, false.
“He didn’t seem like a jerk to me,” Dizzy said. “Not on the inside.”
Miles sighed. The rage was receding now, and without it, all that was left was confusion, turmoil, his mind suddenly the messiest drawer imaginable, one that doesn’t shut. In the photographs with Cassidy, their father looked like such a proud everyday dad. A good dad. But he’d shut the door in their faces! What piece of the story was Miles missing? He stared out the window at the streets that must be so familiar to his father, wanting back in that upside-down ship of a room, despite everything. It was pathetic. He felt magnetized to the man, helpless. He despised his father, could taste it in his mouth, and at the same time, Miles never wanted to let him out of his sight again. He wanted to sit on him or tie him up and make him play cards on the yellow leather couch. He wanted to jump into the photographs on the walls and never come out of them. He wanted to hide under the man’s bed like Sandro had.
He wanted his dog back!
There was a splintering pain in his chest now. He could barely tolerate it.
He felt like birds were pecking at his mind.
And now he was having trouble with his whole body, being in it, making it sit in the truck. Dizzy released herself from his embrace as he shifted this way and that. Why did his limbs feel so excessively long suddenly? So ungainly? How did anyone deal with having these ridiculous appendages? And this head? Just bobbling around on his neck like this? It was unbearable. He felt like he had twenty elbows, fifty knees, four heads as he readjusted and readjusted and readjusted, until they were about to enter the ramp for the highway home, and Miles said, “So sorry, Felix, but we need to go back.”
Miles
When Miles walked through the door of his father’s house for the second time, he had no words prepared, no idea what was going to happen. He remembered learning in physics that the strongest magnet ever built had 100,000 times the magnetic field of Earth itself.
That giant magnet was his father, and Miles was a tiny metal shaving.
The man was sitting on the yellow couch with Sandro as if waiting for Miles, as if he’d decreed his return, and maybe he had. The same jazz music filled the room. The expression on the man’s face was softer, less walled up than it had been earlier. His eyes were red-rimmed. Had he been crying? Miles hoped so. He motioned for Miles to sit but Miles shook his head even though his legs felt weak and wobbly.
He thought of the epic tantrum he’d thrown earlier – two of them now! – not to mention that he’d told the man to fuck off and called him a shithead. Embarrassment eked its way through him, but indignation too. Hell if he was going to apologize. Still, he’d never acted that way in his life – like a petulant child. Maybe the little boy he used to be had blown back through time at the sight of the man who’d left him. The man, who, Miles somehow knew, had loved Miles for the first years of his life because the memory of it was in his bones though he never knew it until now.
