“You okay?” Brynn asks. I’m going to have to dig up my old list of all the ways that words can turn to lies, make some amendments to it. I don’t bother answering.
Inside, the smell of mold and wet and rotting cardboard is worse than ever. Or maybe it’s just that everything’s worse. I grab an armful of stuff from the side table, including a framed picture of me dressed as Odette in my dance school production of Swan Lake, grinning at the camera, dressed in tulle and pointe shoes and a frosty tiara, and turn right back around, stalk across the driveway, and heave it all up into the Dumpster. Goodbye. Another armful—mail and a carved figurine of a rooster and a dozen loose keys in a basket and an orchid in its clay pot, miraculously blooming despite the chaos—and outside I throw it in a long arc, like a longshoreman tossing catches of fish. Not until I grab the side table itself does Brynn say something.
“Are you sure . . . ?” she starts, but trails off when I give her a look. Brynn and I should never have stopped being friends. We must be the two most screwed-up people in Twin Lakes. Maybe in all of Vermont.
When the side table goes into the Dumpster, it splinters. Two crooked legs stick up over the lip, like an iron cockroach trying to claw its way to safety. The Dumpster’s nearly full already. And suddenly it hits me how hopeless it all is: the house is still swollen with trash. Like a dead body bloated with gases. Even from outside I can see the Piles shouldering up against the downstairs windows, the curtains going black with slime. I haven’t made a dent. The tears come, all at once, like a stampede, and I stand there crying in front of the stupid Dumpster with my house coming down behind me.
I don’t know how long I’ve been standing there when I notice a cop car: swimming slowly, sharklike, down the street. It stops just next to the driveway. I turn away, swiping at my eyes and cheeks. But when the cop climbs out, long-legged and narrow-faced, like a praying mantis, he heads straight for me.
“Hello,” he says, all toothy smile, pretending not to notice I’ve just been sobbing alone on my front lawn. “You must be Mia Ferguson.”
“Can I help you?” I say, crossing my arms. He looks familiar, but I can’t figure out why.
“I’m looking for Brynn McNally,” he says. “Seen her recently?”
What’s she done now? I almost ask. Luckily, my throat chooses the right time to close up.
But a second later Brynn bursts out of the door—like she does, like even air is a major barrier—maybe just because she’s sick of being inside with the smell, and the cop says, “Ah,” like he’s just solved a math problem.
Brynn freezes. “What is this?” she says. “Who are you?”
“Afternoon,” he says. I imagine the swish-swish of curtains opening across the street, neighbors peering out, wondering what we’ve done now, whether we’re finally going to get it. “Was hoping we could have a little chat. Name’s Officer Moore.” He pauses, like the name should mean something.
And then it does: Moore. As in Heath Moore. Brynn must make the connection at the same time. She looks furious.
“You’re Heath’s older brother,” she says.
“Cousin,” he corrects. His cheeks are round like a baby’s, and swallow his eyes when he smiles. “Sorry to bother you ladies,” he says, hitching his belt higher, like we’re in a cowboy movie. “I’m here about a missing phone?”
In sixth-grade history we studied the fall of Rome. We charted all the factors that led to the collapse of one of the most powerful empires of all time. Corruption. Religious tension. Gluttony. Bad leadership. Little arms pinwheeling out from the central fact: over a hundred years, from superpower to sad little collection of city-states.
But no one ever tells you that sometimes disasters can’t be predicted. They don’t throw shadows of warning over you. They don’t roll like snowballs. They come like avalanches all at once to bury you.
Look at Pompeii, a city singed to ash in a single day. Or the way a first frost slices the heads off everything but the sturdiest flowers.
Look at the human heart. Think about the difference between alive and not. One second that little fist is going and going, squeezing out more time. And then it just quits. One beat to the next. Second to second.
One. Sound and noise and motion. Two. Another thump. Three.
Nothing.
Fifteen minutes later, Brynn is sitting in the front seat of the cop car, looking like a prisoner. Heath Moore, apparently too afraid to confront one of the Monsters of Brickhouse Lane himself, sent his cousin to do the dirty work. Officer Moore went directly to Brynn’s house, where he informed Brynn’s very confused mother that her daughter had stolen a phone during an altercation at Summer Marks’s memorial.
Brynn’s mother insisted she was at Four Corners. Four Corners insisted that Brynn had been signed out several days ago by an Audrey Augello. Officer Moore, no doubt thrilled that his missing-phone case had turned into a missing-girl case and sensing the opportunity to do something other than throw teenage boys in the drunk tank for the night, tracked Brynn down to my house after learning we’d been seen together.
And now Brynn is going home.
I’m still standing on the front lawn. The sun is high above us, like a ball lobbed up in the blue, and I feel just like I used to during curtain call, with all the stage lights bright and blinding and the applause already waning—an urge to laugh, or scream, or keep dancing, anything to keep the silence from coming.
When Officer Moore starts his engine, Brynn finally looks at me. For a second her face is blank, closed up like a fist. Then she brings a hand up and I think she’s going to try and say something. Instead she presses her palm flat on the glass. I bring my hand up too, just hold it there, even as the squad car pulls away and Brynn drops her hand, leaving a ghost imprint on the glass, even after they’re gone and the noise of the engine has faded.
Across the street, the curtains twitch. Someone is definitely watching. Just because, I take a bow.
“Show’s over,” I say out loud, even though no one’s around to hear me.
Inside, I stand in the dimness of the front hall, squinting at the Piles, trying to imagine them as something beautiful and natural, stone formations or ancient gods. But it doesn’t work this time. I see only trash, rot, mold webbing through the whole house. Maybe I’ll never even go to college. Maybe I’ll stay here forever, slowly yellowing like one of the old newspapers my mom refuses to throw away, or turning gray as the walls are now.
Owen’s voice is still echoing in my head. I did. I did. I did.
Strangely, the urge to cry has vanished. The urge to clean, too. It’s too late anyway. There’s no point. There was never any point.
“Sorry, Summer,” I say into the empty hall. Something rustles in another room. A mouse, probably. I close my eyes and imagine I can hear the amplified chewing of termites in the wood.
I must have been crazy to think that Owen would ever want me now. Grown-up Owen with his cute little accent and his Boy Scout look, off to NYU and girls with pixie-cut hair and J.Crew smiles, girls with vacation homes in Cape Cod and the Hamptons, girls who aren’t all jumbled up and split apart. Maybe my mom hasn’t been collecting all this time but reflecting. Mirroring our chaos. The chaos inside.
There’s a sudden pounding on the front door. Brynn. Maybe she left something. Maybe she catapulted out of the cop car and came running back. For a second, I even hope she did.
Instead my dad is on the front porch, waxy-faced, sweating.
“Mia.” He says my name as if it’s an explosion. “Mia. Oh my God.”
“Dad.” Then I remember that the door is open—just a crack, not enough for him to enter, not enough for him to see—and I try to slip outside. But he has his hand on the door, and he stops me.
“Where have you been?” He looks like he hasn’t slept. His hair is sticking straight up, as if a giant has grabbed him by the roots and tried to lift him off his feet. “I was this close to calling the police—tried you at least twenty times—phone went straight to voice mail—”
“My phone was dead. That’s all,” I say.
But he just keeps talking, leapfrogging over half his words so I can hardly piece together what he’s saying.
“—came by last night—house was dark—been calling for two days—phone off—”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I—I wasn’t feeling good. But I’m fine now,” I quickly add. I’m worried he’s about to have a heart attack: a vein is standing out in his forehead, throbbing as if it, too, is very upset.
Finally my dad runs out of anger—or out of air—and stands there panting, the vein still beating a little rhythm in his forehead. “Well, Jesus, Mia. Open the door. I’ve been terrified—your mother and I both—”
“You called Mom?” All this time I’ve been talking to my dad through a narrow gap in the door and angling my body so he can’t see inside. Now I slip onto the porch, closing the door firmly behind me. No way am I letting Dad inside. Dad’s never been inside, not since he left.
“Of course I called your mother. She’s on her way home from Jess’s house now.” Dad frowns, and looks a little more like my dad, the stern podiatrist—I’m pretty sure that even as a kid he liked to dress up in suits and diagnose people with acute tendonitis. His eyes go from me to the door and back again. “Come on,” he says, in a normal tone. “Let’s go inside. I could use a glass of water.”
“No!” I cry as he reaches for the door handle. Instinctively, I flatten myself against the door, keeping it shut.
My dad’s fingers are wrapped around the door handle. “Mia,” he says, in a low voice—someone who didn’t know him might think he was being casual—“what are you hiding?”
“I’m not hiding anything.” But suddenly the tears are back. Traitors. They always come at the worst moment. “Please,” I say. “Please.”
“I am going to open this door, Mia.” Now my father’s voice is barely more than a whisper. “I am going to open it in three seconds, do you understand me? One . . . two . . .”
I step away, hugging myself, choking on a sob that rolls up from my stomach.
“Three.”
For a long second, he doesn’t even go inside. He stands there, frozen, as if he’s fighting the urge to run. Then he lifts a hand to his mouth—slowly, slowly, afraid to move, afraid to touch anything. “Oh my God,” he says.
“I’m sorry.” I bend over and put my hands on my knees, sobbing in gasps. I don’t know what I’m sorry for, exactly—my mom, because I didn’t protect her; my dad, because I couldn’t stop it. “I’m sorry,” I say again.
He barely seems to hear me. “Oh my God.” A few feet inside and his foot squelches on something sticky. He flinches. Another step. Crackle, crackle. Old magazines snap underfoot. Even from outside I can make out the Piles, pointing like fingers toward a heaven that doesn’t exist, and all I can think is how mad he’s going to be, and how mad Mom’s going to be, and how I’ve messed up everything, even things that were messed up from the beginning. And I can barely breathe, I’m crying so hard: a broken girl with a broken heart living in a broken house.
“Mia.” Then my dad turns around to face me, and I’m shocked to see not anger but a look as if someone just tore his heart out through his chest. I’ve never seen my dad cry, not once, not even at his own mother’s funeral—but now he’s crying, fully, without even bothering to wipe his face. Then he’s rocketing out onto the porch again and has picked me up like I’m still a little kid, so my feet lift off the ground and his arms are crushing my ribs and I’m so startled that I completely forget to be sad.
“It’s okay, Dad,” I say, even as he cries in big, long gulps. We’ve switched roles. Now he’s the one apologizing.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he keeps saying, over and over. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”