When the Sky Fell on Splendor(99)
His words played through my mind.
The roof was ripped off Wayne Hastings’s house. Its whole top floor was destroyed, and so was yours. Beams, hubcaps, pieces of refrigerators were everywhere.
“WE HAVE TO—”
I screamed and jumped backward as another beam sprang down to stab the floor in front of the doorway.
And then the walls were bowing again, the rest of the metal roof ripping away.
The piano went skidding across the floor, and I felt myself lift an inch off the ground as a gust batted at me.
Oh my God.
It was a tornado. All along what Remy had seen was this tornado, and we were right in it.
But how? How had Molly known about something that hadn’t happened, period, let alone when she was alive?
Someone grabbed my arm hard. Wayne, towering over me. “GET IN,” he screamed, dragging me toward the spiral. “HURRY!”
Nick was crawling in, followed by Sofía. Remy was trying to usher Levi in next, but he shook his head and pushed Remy through instead, screaming, “TOO BIG. I’LL HAVE TO DO THE OUTER RING.” He shoved Droog in next as Arthur crawled to the other side of the tunnel mouth, and Wayne pushed me, bent in half, through the wind.
It grabbed hold of me, started to buoy me up, but Wayne’s grip was firm, and then Arthur’s and Levi’s hands were reaching out and I stretched out my arms to them, and they caught me.
My brother’s fingers locked on to mine, and he pulled me into the metal with him.
We crawled as far in as we could, as fast as we could, packing ourselves into the tiny, dark space, and then Levi was wedging in behind us, and finally, Wayne turned sideways to form a wall against the mouth of the tunnel.
Art ducked his head and wrapped his arms around me, burying his face into my back. I reached out through the dark for the others’ hands, recognizing their individual grips on either side of me, Droog’s soft fur.
A vibration passed through the spiral as something heavy fell across its top, and then something else, which skidded over it with a deafening screech.
“IT’LL BE OKAY,” Wayne screamed. “YOU KIDS ARE GOING. TO BE. OKAY.”
The words turned in my chest like a skeleton key, unlocking something I’d managed to keep secret from myself, even while Remy and I whispered our fears back and forth on the moonlit train tracks. Wayne had sloughed all the mud and leaves I’d spent five years packing onto it away, and now my insides felt watery, loose.
You kids.
Kids.
Was that what we were?
Not ghosts. Not too much, too needy, too in the way, too selfish, not too afraid.
Just kids. Kids, pretending to be okay in a world that wasn’t.
I shut my eyes tight and tears squeezed out of them as I gripped my friends a little harder, as they gripped me a little harder.
I smelled Sofía’s rosewater, and then Remy’s bonfire, Levi’s Old Spice, Nick’s B.O., and Arthur’s cigarette smoke.
We knotted together like an onion, and we smelled like one, and I cried, because I was afraid, and because I was heartbroken, and because of all the kids like us, who’d lost the chance to feel safe in their smallness.
The girls left behind in hospital parking lots.
The boys who couldn’t make their moms smile.
The one who’d dreamed of being an artist.
The one who wanted to leave Splendor and see the world but loved his mother too much to do it; the one who wanted to keep her family safe so badly she stockpiled microwaves and sparkplugs; the one who dreamt of making characters, of filling up his empty house with stories that mattered and people who saw him and his very bright hats; the one who’d left behind a whole life in New York and didn’t give up on building a new one with us, even when we held her back and kept secrets and lied; the one who worried about his father out there in his police cruiser on long nights, but was too selfless to call him home.
The one who’d dreamed of being an astronaut, who never got quite what she needed, and the one who never gave up hope.
I cried for them and what we’d all lost, and for the drawings and what I’d lost, and because I was just a kid and I was scared, and I was also so fucking relieved not to be alone anymore.
I had them, and nothing could take them from me, even if it hid them.
The tight knot that had been caught in my chest was unfurling, my vision going soft-focus. Like relaxing even the tiniest bit had given my body permission to come apart.
I was tired, and my stomach hurt, and my head felt spinny.
“They went home,” I said, thinking about what Wayne had said.
Mark’s body was lying in a hospital bed eight miles from here and had been for five years, but maybe he wasn’t trapped there at all. Maybe he was free to wander, at least sometimes.
Maybe he flew across the sky in a fiery blue streak, hearing the sound of his own name spoken—calling him—by everyone who loved him. Maybe he landed in a still, dark pool and felt joy bubble through his non-body, or maybe sometimes he crashed into the papery, soon-to-be fall leaves a hundred yards behind the house we’d once run around in swimming suits, darting through the trail of sprinklers, the yard where we’d played hide-and-seek from the minute we got off the bus to the moment the porch lights flicked three times into the blue night, calling us home for dinner.
Maybe there were bits of him perched on eaves and phone lines watching the Splendor sunset turn the fluffy clouds the color of a Dreamsicle, and even if those bits flew into freshly Windexed glass panes or straight into the ground, then he would smell the wet dirt, feel it in his non-fingers, and taste it in his non-mouth.