Tumble & Fall (22 page)

Caden feels a cool hand on the side of his face and turns to see a woman standing beside them. “Is that who I think it is?” she asks. She has dark, tanned skin like Arthur’s, and warm green eyes. Two little girls, wrapped in towels, run up alongside her, swinging her hands back and forth like she’s a machine. “Girls, he’s here!”

Arthur bends down and picks the girls up, balancing one on each hip. “Would you ladies like to say hello to your cousin?”

Suddenly, the splashing stops. There are no more squeals. The men stand frozen, drinks in hand.

Everyone has turned to look at Caden. He feels like he should say something, but he can’t imagine what.

“Hello!” the girls yell abruptly, in happy unison. The silence is broken and the crowd laughs, descending on him from all directions.

The woman, their mother, is first. “Hi, Caden,” she says, holding out her hand. “I’m sure you don’t remember me. Aunt Sarah. Arthur’s sister?”

Caden manages a smile and shakes her hand. “Hi,” he says. “I’m Caden.”

He’s swallowed in another burst of laughter and his cheeks start to burn. Of course they know who he is. He was part of the family, once, smaller than the little girls, wriggling in his father’s tickling grasp just as they are now.

Arthur passes through the crowd and continues the introductions. He guides Caden around by his elbow, his grasp warm and protective. One after another, new family members are paraded before him. Arthur’s brother, Louis, a dentist in Pittsburgh. Louis’s wife, Irene, and their heavily orthodontured preteen sons, Max and Liam. A couple of second cousins whose names Caden forgets before they’ve finished shaking hands. The little girls are twins, it turns out, Ella and Mae. Sarah’s husband is a bear of a man named Tobias. He sits ceremoniously at the head of the long patio table, like the Godfather.

Seated beside Tobias is an older woman with thick black hair heavily streaked with silver. A shiny gold crucifix dangles around her neck, twinkling in the moonlight. “Hi, Mom,” Arthur greets her, bending to kiss her cheek. “Look who I found.”

Arthur nudges Caden forward. The old lady grabs his wrists and shakes them gently. Her eyes are blue and watery and Caden worries for a second that she’s crying. “Caden,” she says. “Look at you.”

Caden smiles, because that’s what you do when an old person is holding your hands. At least, he imagines it’s what you do. He doesn’t have much experience with the elderly. Ramona’s father died when Caden was six and her mother lives in Key West. She sends Christmas presents and calls on their birthdays, but he usually pretends not to be home.

“The kids call me Nana,” she whispers to him, as if it’s top-secret information. “But you call me whatever you want.”

Caden nods. “Okay,” he says. There’s something dreamlike about her, about all of them, he realizes. Like he’s seeing a glimpse of the life he could have had, the people who would have surrounded him on holidays, special occasions. The people who would have seen him grow up. Now, he’s just an older version of the little boy they barely remember. He finds himself holding on to the old woman’s hands longer than he’d planned, as if she might disappear. As if they all might disappear, this family he never knew he had, like a fading hallucination, a mirage.

“Mom says we can go in, if you swim with us.” One of the girls is tugging on Caden’s wrist. He looks down and the other twin appears from behind his leg.

“Will you swim with us?” she begs.

Caden looks to Arthur, who lifts an eyebrow at the glassy water, egging him on. He doesn’t have a suit, but who cares. This time, Caden thinks, he won’t screw it up.

“Why not?”

He takes the girls’ hands in his own and leads them to the edge. Together, they jump in.

SIENNA

Sienna helps Owen gather splintered pieces of wood, adding them to the growing pile of kindling set back from the brickyard in the sand. All day long, people have been hauling enormous stacks of leftover materials and chucking them into the pit, preparing for the biggest bonfire the island has ever seen.

It starts with a mellow crackle, but by the time Sienna has made her third or fourth trip down from the cluster of tents the fire roars, wild and hungry. The heat comes off in cautionary waves, and Sienna blocks her face from the grayish clouds of floating ash. She passes her offerings over to Owen and hurries back up the sandy cliff, back to where his friends have gathered.

“Something’s wrong with your hands,” she hears a voice behind her. It’s Ted, and he’s pointing at her with a sloppy grin. “They’re empty!” He leans into one of the many cases of beer piled up beside his tent and tosses her two slippery cans.

She catches them, one in each hand, and smiles. “Thanks.”

Ted leans into his tent and grabs his guitar before heading off toward a clearing in the trees. Maggie is already up there, Sienna can see, playing drums on a makeshift set of overturned boxes and empty bottles, and a handful of other musicians—a banjo, it looks like, and a hulking upright bass, which Sienna can’t imagine was easy to hike with—are starting to warm up.

Owen tugs at her hair, planting a kiss on her forehead. “Hey,” he says, warily eyeing her double-fisted drinks.

“Here you go.” She offers him one. She doesn’t really feel like drinking. At home, she drank at parties when she was bored, or when there were things she wanted to forget, and she never much enjoyed it. Tonight, there’s an electric buzzing inside her, and she can’t imagine needing anything else to feel so alive. But she figures she’ll hang on to something, if only to avoid more attention from concerned onlookers, like Ted.

Owen takes the beer and rests it back on the top of the crates. “No thanks,” he says. “But you go ahead.”

Sienna smiles and adds her can to the pile. “No.” She shrugs. “I’m good.”

Owen grabs her by the hand and they start toward the music, which has grown from quiet plucking to a sudden, raucous performance, like magic. People are up and dancing, and they have no choice but to join in.

Sienna feels an anxious bubble in her chest. She hates dancing. She never knows quite what to do. But Owen makes the decision for her, placing one hand around her waist, and holding the other up to his chest, her fingers clenched tightly inside. They are the only people swaying like an old married couple, but somehow, it feels just right.

“Why aren’t you up there?” she asks him, nodding at the impromptu stage.

Owen laughs. “Some people think hiking with eighty pounds of musical gear on your back is a good time,” he says. “I’m not one of those people.”

Sienna smiles, her head falling easily into the space beneath his chin.

“And besides,” he says, his voice humming against her hair. “It’s sort of hard to play and dance at the same time. And I’d rather be dancing, with you.”

Sienna tilts her head up to his, leaning in for a quick kiss. Suddenly, she feels a sharp elbow in her back and is thrust forward, nearly knocking Owen into a tree.

“Watch it, Len,” Owen calls over Sienna’s head. Sienna turns to see a small group of guys, red-faced and wild-eyed, shoving each other on the edge of the cliff. Playful pushing has turned into angry shouting, and before Sienna knows what’s happening, Owen is at the center of the fray, holding his arms wide in an attempt to break the fighters up.

The scuffle continues, and Sienna watches as Owen gets knocked down. Her chest feels warm and achy, as if she had been pushed herself. The music comes to an abrupt end, and Maggie is by her side, clutching her by the elbow.

“Stand back here.” Maggie guides her, as the brawl intensifies and spreads out along the crater’s edge.

“What are they fighting about?” Sienna asks, searching the faces, some now bloodied and covered in sand, for a sign that Owen is all right.

“Who knows.” Maggie shakes her head. “They’ve probably been drinking all day. Everybody’s trying so hard not to feel things, you know? But really, we’re all scared. And it has to come out, one way or another…”

“Knock it off!”

Sienna turns to see a couple of older men, Rex and some of the other dads, sprinting up from the bonfire. They shove their way into the heart of the action and drag a few of the more aggressive fighters away by their elbows.

Sienna feels her pulse racing, her breath short and fast. Where is Owen? There’s a hand on her waist and she nearly jumps.

“Only me,” Owen says. There’s a red lump under one of his eyes and he’s holding the outside of his shoulder with his palm.

Sienna wraps her arms around his neck. “Are you okay?”

Owen nods through a wince. “Didn’t see that coming,” he says. Sienna feels her heart aching for him, not just because he’s hurt, but because he looks so disappointed, and even a little bit embarrassed. He’d wanted to show her a good time, she knows. This hadn’t been part of the plan.

She hugs him close and follows Maggie back toward the tents, where a smaller, more civilized group has regathered. They’ve started a campfire and Sienna helps Owen down to a spot on the soft, cool sand, as a couple of girls pass out the fixings for s’mores.

“Our hero,” Maggie says, giving his shoulder a light squeeze.

Ted looks up from his guitar. “Let me guess,” he says. “O-Man to the rescue again.”

The group laughs and Owen blushes. Sienna inches closer to him, careful not to jostle his wounded arm.

“Hey, remember when my brother brought those douche bags over to work on his house?” Maggie grabs a long stick from a pile and pierces it through the top of a marshmallow. “And they tried to take off with all his money, before the job was done?”

Jeremy laughs. “Owen let them get halfway up the ramp to the boat before he tapped the big one on the shoulder,” he says.
“Excuse me, sir,”
he mocks.

Owen buries his face in his hands.

“Who did you say you were?” Jeremy asks.

Maggie leaps forward, excitedly. “He said he was the family attorney! I have no idea how it worked, that guy could’ve wrecked you with one hand behind his back. But they got all spooked, and sure enough, they were back to work that afternoon.”

Sienna leans into Owen’s side. He looks at her and rolls his eyes, but she can tell he’s loving the attention. “You don’t mess with the Tribe,” he says, and shrugs.

Ted plays a few loud chords on his guitar and everybody toasts, holding up their drinks to the fire. Sienna smiles, but inside her is an uneasy shift. She hasn’t heard much about what Owen’s life was like before, back when they all were just regular kids, before they were busy building boats and waiting for the asteroid. She knows it’s ridiculous, but a part of her is almost disappointed. She had started to let herself think that she and Owen had met when they had, the way that they had, for a reason, and that nothing before that moment would ever matter again. They could both start over, and be nobody to anyone, except each other.

But here was a whole group of people who mattered to Owen, people who had their own stories about who he was. And none of them knew a thing about her. She could have been anyone. So what if she was the first girl he’d brought home, as Maggie had said.
They
were his home. Not her.

Sienna untangles her arm from Owen’s elbow and wraps it around her knees. She thinks about Ryan, alone in his room. She thinks of Dad, of everything she’s put him through. There’s a dull throbbing in her heart and she has to clench her teeth to keep from crying. Shouldn’t she be with the people who truly know her?

Ted strums a few more bars of a song before ending with a dramatic flourish. Everyone claps and cheers, and before she knows it, Owen is reaching across her lap for the guitar.

“Uh-oh,” Maggie says, cracking open a new beer. “Is it that time already?”

“Time for what?” Sienna asks.

Owen spends a few moments carefully arranging his injured shoulder while tuning the guitar with one hand. Maggie laughs. “Owen has a secret singer-songwriter fantasy,” she says as Owen reaches out a foot and playfully kicks her in the ankle. “He thinks he’s got this Bob Dylan thing going on, that nobody knows about. Except when we’re all together and he starts to serenade us for no reason…”

The group laughs and Owen interrupts them with a sudden strum.

“I am not serenading anybody tonight,” he says, his face serious, his eyes unblinking and calm. “It’s just something I wrote a few days ago, but if nobody wants to hear it…” Owen looks around.

“Oh, just do it already, we don’t have all night,” Ted says, tossing a marshmallow at Owen’s face. “Actually,” he reconsiders. “We do.”

Owen laughs and slowly starts playing, a simple melody floating up around them. He closes his eyes, in mock serenity, and Sienna forces a smile. She tries to ignore the unsettling feelings, the new uncertainty in the pit of her belly, and focuses instead on Owen’s hands, his fingers swift and steady on the strings. When he starts to sing, his voice is clear and unadorned, the kind of voice that makes you lean toward it to hear more.

“I met a girl, at the end of the world,

You’d probably think I was lying.

I knew her before, when we were both four.

Four rhymes with ’fore, you should try it.”

There are a few throaty chuckles around them, but Sienna can feel a shift in the group, as everyone turns to her. Her heart is pounding and she feels the tips of her ears start to burn.

“I’ve heard people say, don’t get carried away.

No need to take it so fast, boy.

But who cares about time, when the planets align,

Or maybe … you, me, and the asteroid.”

At this, the group erupts, holding up their drinks and cheering. Sienna feels her pulse settling down, and a smile springs to her lips.

“It’s a love story and it ends with a bang

A big one, but that’s how they all go.

I met a girl, at the end of the world,

Sienna, can I see you tomorrow?”

The last chords ring heavily around them, quickly drowning in heartfelt applause. Still seated, Owen takes a quick and modest bow before passing the guitar back to Ted. Maggie gives Owen’s good shoulder a gentle shove.