Falling Harder

PART I

Prologue

Nadia

Where am I?

If I had to
do it all over again, go through all of the pain and torment and heartbreak,
just to meet him? I would.

A frustrated,
ear-splitting scream rises just beyond the thin walls of my social worker’s
office. I whip my face toward the unearthly sound, paralyzed between wanting to
help whoever’s in such great pain, and wanting nothing more than to run for my
life—or at least, what’s left of it.

“Should we...do
something?” I ask, my voice trembling.

My social
worker, a pretty but worn woman in her mid-thirties, seems barely to have
noticed the disruption. She rests her elbows on the scuffed desk before her and
looks at me with resigned compassion.

“You’re not used
to chaos, are you?” she asks me. Her peculiar, blunt question catches me off-guard.

“N-no,” I
stammer, folding my hands in my lap, “I, uh, guess not.”

I’ve been told
that I can call this woman by her first name, Amy. But I can’t bring myself to
address her as anything other than Miss MacCoy. My parents didn’t raise me to
be so casual with adults. The fleeting thought of my mom and dad sends a
slicing agony ripping straight through my core. Their sudden, unjust death is
still too raw, too fresh, for me to deal with all at once

“Nadia,” Miss
MacCoy says gently, “I’m going to be very honest with you, now. This
transition...it’s going to be harder on you than it is on most of the kids we
see come through.”

“But why?” I
ask. “What makes me so different than the others?”

“Your
case...it’s not typical of what we deal with,” Miss MacCoy tells me. “Most of
the kids that come through here are orphans. Others have been taken out of
dangerous homes. Some are dangerous themselves. But you...you’re a rarity.
You’ve spent the first twelve years of your life in a loving, functional home.
By all rights, you should still be there. But...things have a way of turning
sour, even for perfectly good people.”

I swallow hard,
gulping back the tears before they can overtake me again. I’ve spent the last
week sobbing myself to sleep. It’s a wonder that I haven’t been reduced to a
dried-up husk, wrung of each and every drop of water. Never in my short life
have I known pain like this before. Pain that doesn’t have any edges, pain that
is simply bottomless. And why would I have? Up until now, everything’s gone...perfectly.  

My name is Nadia
Faber. I’m twelve years old, and I’ve lived in Evanston, Illinois since I was
born. I had a mother, once, and a father too. My parents loved me more than
anything in this or any other universe, but now they’re gone. This is not the
way my life was supposed to go. What’s left in their wake was never the life
they intended for me.

Miss MacCoy
pushes a box of tissues across her old, dusty desk. The simple gesture of
kindness opens the floodgates, and another surge of tears spill down my cheeks.

“You’ve had a
pretty long week, huh?” she asks.

“You...have
n-no...idea,” I choke, wiping away the tears as quickly as I can. As nice as
Miss MacCoy seems to be, I don’t want to appear weak in front of her.

“I don’t mean to
upset you,” the social worker goes on, “I just want you to be prepared for what
comes next.”

“What’s that?” I
ask, forcing my voice to be even.

“Well,” she
says, leaning back in her ancient office chair, “Normally, in a situation like
yours, we’d contact the legal guardian that your parents declared in their
will. You’d go stay with that person, and most likely be adopted by them.”

“But
that’s...not going to happen for me, is it?”

“I’m afraid
not,” Miss MacCoy sighs. “You see, Nadia, your parents never drew up a will for
us to go by. I’m sure they never anticipated that they’d need to consider
another guardian for you. This can happen with accidents like theirs. Usually,
we can find some family member or other to get in touch with, but your
family...it was really just the three of you.”

“Just the three
of us,” I say quietly, “Just the three of us in the whole wide world.”

I imagine that
my parents had families, once—mothers and fathers, a sibling or two. But those
people are thousands of miles away, across the sea, living in some country
whose language I can’t even speak. I wouldn’t know my grandparents if I passed
them on the street—if they’re even still alive, that is.

My mother and
father came to America when they were eighteen years old. They spent their
childhoods in Eastern Europe, which is as specific as they’ve ever been with
me. Their accents, the language they used to whisper to each other, the few
recipes and traditions they brought with them were never talked about directly
in our home. It’s like they arrived in the United States and decided never to
look back, like they were afraid that if they mentioned their old home, the
past would swallow them up for good. I don’t know anything about my heritage.

God, now I can't
get the thought of that night out of my head.

I’d been woken
by the sound of my babysitter sobbing. We’d fallen asleep on the couch,
watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but now I was alone in my family’s
living room. I could hear my sitter, Sarah, on the phone in the kitchen. She
was barely forcing words out between her jagged gasps.

“Are you
sure...it’s them?” she cried, the telephone cord tangled up around her legs.
“You’re absolutely sure?”

I padded over
the kitchen, the blue light of the TV casting its unsettling glow over the
darkened house. Even though I didn’t know what was going on, there was a
roiling uneasiness in my gut that I couldn’t explain if I tried. From the
moment I cracked open my eyes, I knew that my world was on the brink of
collapse. The seams of my entire life as I knew it were straining against
impending tragedy, and I was powerless to stop it. All I could do was put one
slipper-clad foot in front of the other, and force myself not to crumble.

Stepping into
the warm light of the kitchen, I caught Sarah’s eye. Her face was streaked with
runny mascara, her eyes red and puffy from crying. The stern line of her mouth
wobbled tremulously as she saw me, and I could practically hear her heart
breaking across the room.

“Sarah?” I said,
taking a step forward. “Sarah, what happened?”

She ran to me,
letting the phone dangle down from its cord. Sarah wrapped me up in her thin,
quaking arms, smoothing my hair down with desperate strokes.

“I’m so sorry,”
she whispered, over and over again. “I’m so sorry, Nadia. I’m so, so sorry...”

The ring of the
doorbell interrupted her sorrowful litany. I glanced toward the front hallway,
feeling the closeness of despair. Whatever lay on the other side of that door
was more staggering, more scary than anything I’d ever met. Pulling myself away
from Sarah, I made the long trek toward the door. The journey of a few small
steps seemed to take a decade. Maybe my parents would be standing there when I
opened the door, with some idea as to what in the world was going on. Surely,
they could tell me why I felt so terrified.

I pulled open
the front door of our home flipped on the swinging light over our porch. My
eyes widened into saucers as I took in the two uniformed officers standing
before me. I’d seen enough made-for-TV movies to know what was going to happen
next.

“Nadia Faber?”
said one of the officers, taking off his hat. “Can we come in?”

Dumbly, I
stepped aside. The two burly men stepped over the threshold of our home. They
traded an uneasy look before turning their eyes to me.

“Where are my
parents?” I asked them. I don’t know why I bothered—part of me must have
already known.

One of the
officers sighed lightly and kneeled down beside me. I knew he was trying to be
kind and comforting, but I couldn’t help but resent the gesture. It was like
he’d been through this a thousand times before, like I was just one more in the
long line of people who he’d had to visit like this. I wanted to throw my hands
over his mouth to keep the words in. Maybe, if he never got around to his
answer, it would never come true. But my hands weren’t fast enough.

“Your parents
were in an accident, Nadia,” he said, laying a big hand on my shoulder.
“Someone ran a red light and slammed into the side of their car. We believe
that the other driver may have been intoxicated, but we don’t know for sure. We
haven’t caught him, or her, just yet.”

“Are they...in
the hospital?” I asked, “Can I see them? Can you take me there?”

“We can,” the
officer said, “But Nadia...I’m afraid that your parents didn’t survive the
crash. There was a pileup, and their vehicle was flipped over. I’m so sorry,
but both of your parents have passed away.”

For the life of
me, I don’t know where my next question came from. “Did it happen fast?” I
asked the police officer.

The man shot a
pained look back at his partner. I could see them silently deliberating whether
or not to tell me the truth.

“Please,” I
said, “I want to know.”

“They, uh...they
were alive when the paramedics arrived,” the man said, unable to meet my eyes,
“They were trapped inside the vehicle.”

“For how long?”
I demanded. I was already spiraling through the unfathomable anguish opening
before me. I had a bizarre, masochistic urge to lose myself as far as I could
ever go. I wanted to travel each and every inch of the pain that was waiting
for me there, wanted to make sure that I went the whole length of it. I wanted
to make sure that this moment would be the worst of my life, so that forever
after I could at least tell myself that things were getting better.

“They were most
likely conscious for a half hour after the crash,” the man said softly. “For
that time, at least, there was...pain, I’m sure. But they’re free now, Nadia.
They’re in a better place.”

A strangled
laugh escaped my throat, and the man backed away from me an inch. I’m sure I
looked a fright, twelve years old and in my nightie, cackling bitterly in the
face of my parents’ death.

“Better place?”
I scoffed, “There’s no such thing.”

My parents
hadn’t raised me to believe in God, or religion, or happily-ever-afters. I knew
the truth that no euphemism could cover up. My parents were gone forever, and
there was nothing that I could do to change that. I hadn’t even gotten a chance
to say goodbye.

I marched into
the kitchen and found Sarah crying over the sink. Matter-of-fact as ever, I tugged
on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She blinked up at me, looking dazed and beside
herself.

“I’m going to
ride in the police car to the hospital,” I told her, “You can go home if you
want. I’ll be OK.”

Without waiting
for her response, I walked back out to meet the officers. They showed me
outside to their sleek, shiny car and helped me into the back seat. We drove to
the hospital, the car’s sirens silent. My neighborhood raced past the window,
so many streets and corners I knew so well. But every single sight I’d
memorized by heart looked different, now.

I felt as though
I’d never seen any of it before in my life. My entire mind was numb and blank,
shut down in the face of what had happened that night. I know now that I was
trying to stave off the inevitable as long as I possibly could. I made it as
far as the hospital, as far as the room where my parents were lying, unmoving
and departed.

“Could you leave
me alone?” I asked the sea of grownups hovering around me. One by one, they
exited the hospital room. One foot in front of the other, I made my way toward
my parents. They looked so peaceful, like they were simply napping on their
hospital beds, catching some shuteye at the end of a long night.

It seemed so
impossible that they were really gone, that they would have left me alone in
this strange, unfamiliar world, that I convinced myself for a second that the
doctors and police officers had been mistaken. Earnestly, I grabbed for my
mother’s hand.

Her fingers were
stiff and cold. And in that moment, I knew beyond doubt that it was all true.
The universe of hurt that had sprung up inside of me burst. A big bang of
anguish and fear and anger tore me open as I fell to my knees between my
parents’ beds. I finally let myself weep for them, and for me, everything we’d
lost and everything that was sure to come. 

It felt like
hours before someone poked their head in to check on me. I’d cried myself to
sleep on the floor of the hospital room, they said. I was carried away from my
parents by unknown arms, whisked away into a world I couldn’t ever have
imagined.

It’s hard to
believe that only a week has passed. In a week, I’ve seen both my parents
buried, have been pulled out of school and my home, and finally found myself
here: in the foreign office of a nice-looking woman whose job it is to
determine my future.

“So what happens
next?” I ask her, trying to be brave.

She leans
forward and lays her hand on mine. “A foster home,” she tells me. If only I
could have guessed what those three words would come to mean.