When the Sky Fell on Splendor(100)

Maybe sometimes Mark came home.

The tornado’s shrill had dropped a decibel, and there were more sirens in the distance. Ambulances, fire trucks, police cruisers.

“Agent Rothstadt,” Levi whispered.

“Agent Rothstadt?” Wayne asked.

“We sort of . . . posted video of . . .” Levi was explaining, but consciousness was drifting in and out of my reach.

I was tired. And my stomach hurt, and my mind spun. I wanted to stretch out, but we were crammed into the metal spiral. Their voices came to me in murmurs, the wind still screaming over them at times. I tried to keep my grip on them, to stay awake, but I was losing the battle.

Someone started saying my name, shaking me. I tried to promise I was okay, but my brain and body felt like mush.

“COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP, WAYNE,” a gruff voice was shouting from somewhere below us. “THIS IS THE POLICE.”

“Are they in there?” another said from behind the door, a familiar one, dry and masculine and ragged with fear. “Are my kids in there?”

I wanted to say, Don’t be afraid. Sometimes things just break but they’ll always heal just a bit, and they’re never lost entirely.

“Sir, try to remain calm,” a woman was telling the frightened man, and though I couldn’t picture her face, I knew she was sandwiching her words between sharp smiles. “We’re going to ensure your children get the best care.”

“FRANNY?” the man screamed. “ARTHUR?”

I wanted to comfort him, but I couldn’t. My body was slipping away from me.

The last thing I heard was Arthur saying, “It’s him! He came for us!”





THIRTY-SIX



BEFORE THERE WAS LIGHT, there were fingers in my hair, breath on my cheek.

There was the steady hum of air and a meek beep.

Next, I had eyes. Eyelashes too, and then there was light, catching the blond fringes of them, turning them into feathery rainbows slanted across my vision.

Before anything else came—the bed beneath me, the window to my left or the sunflowers fixed in a pink vase—there was his face, rectangular and sun-browned with a constellation of moles trailing from the corner of his mouth up to his ear.

“Dad?” It hurt to speak.

He smiled.

“Am I dreaming?”

He cupped my face in his calloused hands. “Franny-girl.” He kissed my head five times in a row. “My Franny.”

He leaned forward and curled one arm over my head, wrapped the other around my waist like he was building a cave around us. On the other side of the bed, Arthur was asleep in a chair, his mouth lolling open against the hand he’d propped between his face and the wall.

As if he felt me watching him, his mouth shuddered with a yawn, and his eyes slitted open. “Franny!” He leapt up, then dragged the chair closer to the bed and sat again, giving me his hand.

“What’s wrong with me?” I asked.

Dad laughed and swiped tears away from his eyes. “Mostly dehydration. You’re always forgetting to drink water, baby.”

“Art?” I said. “Where are the others?”

“Safe,” he promised. “The waiting room.”

“And . . . and Wayne?”

Dad pulled back but kept a hand on me. “He told Agent Rothstadt everything.”

“Everything?” I said. “I don’t . . .”

Arthur coughed. “About our video. That he was the one who found the—satellite that fell, and that when he told us about it, we made it into an episode, for The Ordinary.”

“I didn’t even know you knew that man,” Dad said, halfway between bewilderment and embarrassment.

In profile, he looked sort of like Arthur, small and vulnerable.

“We knew his daughter,” I said.

Dad smiled. “She came to the mill with Mrs. Hastings sometimes at lunch. Quite the piano prodigy. Molly was a sweet kid.”

Molly. Something, a half-formed thought, itched at the back of my mind. Something from last night, about the tornado.

The tornado.

How had Molly known about it? If she was just a person, who’d died years ago, how had she known? About Mark’s Fibonacci spiral built on the second floor of Wayne Hastings’s house? About what her father was going through? About the storm?

The questions batted around like sluggish moths inside my skull. Right now I was incapable of answering them. Possibly I always would be.

I eased myself up, and Dad hurried to fluff the pillows, piling them up behind me.

It was strange, the three of us being here. There were still pieces of us we so badly wished each other could see and yet couldn’t make ourselves ask for, and there was anger and resentment and it still all hurt, but right now, we were here, and if we stayed long enough, things might start to heal, even a little bit.

I glanced toward the door. “Can we visit Mark?”

“We should wait for the doctor,” Dad said. “Make sure everything’s kosher.”

“Well, I’m going.” I swung my legs to the side of the bed, forcing Dad back a bit.

Art jogged around the bed to offer me his arm. My ankle was wrapped, and the swelling had gone down, but it still hurt and I had to lean against him as I made my way to the door. Dad stepped aside to let us pass, then followed tentatively.