When the Sky Fell on Splendor

by Emily Henry

  I opened my eyes.

  Wayne was crumpled in the corner, his massive hands covering his face as silent sobs heaved through him. Arthur knelt and touched his back.

  Wayne looked at my brother; my brother looked at Wayne. “I wrote that for her,” Wayne wheezed. “Some of it, but not all. It was her song. It sounded like her.”

  “She loves you,” Arthur said.

  “She did,” Wayne said. “She’s gone.”

  “Yes,” Arthur said.

  In profile, my brother looked more like a child than he had even when we were kids: that eager swoop of his nose, the furry jut of his eyebrows and sun-dappled freckly skin, the way his wide mouth opened in a breathless circle. “She’s not here anymore, but wherever she is, she loves you.

  “She came to us,” Arthur said. “I don’t understand how, but she did. She fell out of the sky, and she left pieces of herself in all of us, and when I saw you—I could feel it right away, what she’d given to me . . . I know everything you mean to her, and everything she wants for you. I don’t have the memories, but I have the feelings.” There were tears in Arthur’s eyes now. “I know you were always there. You never let her down.”

  Wayne’s features pinched as he looked down to the scar on Arthur’s forearm, which had shrunk to little more than a purple blot between his thumb and forefinger.

  Wayne shifted back from him and reached for the hem of his own sleeve. He pushed the flannel to his elbow, revealing an intricate pattern of scars that extended beyond where we could see. He reached for the other sleeve and pushed that up too, and we stared as he undid the topmost button of his shirt and pulled it down enough for us to see the tail end of more purple scars, like octopus appendages clinging to his skin.

  “It was worse,” Wayne murmured. “In the beginning. It’s been shrinking some every day since it happened, since I found it.” The eyes I’d always thought of as cold and dead turned to me. They were dark but full of life, so much pain and hope that I shifted under their weight.

  I saw what I’d missed before. The hollowed-out cheeks, the dark circles, the pale sheen of his skin. Wayne wasn’t a monster; he was sick, in pain.

  Like I had been every time the power coursed through me.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, folded into a smooth square. He held it out to Arthur, and Droog licked affectionately at the man’s wrist.

  “I’d never drawn a day in my life,” Wayne said. “And then, a couple of weeks ago, I was out in the woods. Kids kept knocking down my fence, but there was nothing I could do without involving the police. So I took to walking the perimeter. That’s what I was doing when I saw it fall, this disc, filled with light. And when I touched it, something strange happened. Something . . . extraordinary. It was nighttime when I found it, and then I blinked and it was dusk.”

  Arthur took the paper and began gingerly unfolding it.

  “You were out almost twenty-four hours?” Levi asked.

  “He got a whole consciousness,” Sofía said. “Each of us, we only got a sixth. Not to mention whatever stray bits hit the cows and the birds, and Droog.”

  Arthur had the paper unfolded now. His shoulders hitched and his eyes scrunched tight, his hand covering his face as a silent wave of tears hit him.

  “Arthur?” I whispered.

  He shook his head, unable to speak, and blinked against the tears streaming down his cheeks as he held the paper out to me.

  I moved forward in a trance to take it from him, and a sound died in my throat.

  I clutched my necklace, but I was unmoored anyway as I stared at the drawing. Understanding crashed over me, but I was too scared to accept it. The pain would tear me in half if I was wrong.

  The sketch was of me and Arthur, like the ones in the cellar. Much younger, mid-jump, hovering over my bed, the Milky Way painting half-visible across my ceiling.

  “I couldn’t stop drawing them,” Wayne said. “I didn’t know what it meant. I knew who you kids were, but not why it was happening. I thought maybe it was guilt, about the accident. That it was driving me out of my mind. Or maybe I had some tumor pressing just right on my brain.”

  I was barely hearing it, barely aware of Sofía and Levi and Remy and Nick crowding around me to see the drawing.

  I stared at the initials scrawled in the corner.

  M.S.

  The drawings in the cellar weren’t stolen. Wayne had done them, the same way he’d built the spiral, the same way Nick had played the song.

  With someone else’s memory.

  I looked toward the sculpture, the massive Fibonacci spiral, proof the universe was in order, that some things might change size but they never lost their true shape.

  That things could be hidden but never truly erased.

  He was here. Some part of him, a passenger in Wayne Hastings.

  “Mark,” I said.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  TEARS SLID DOWN MY cheeks, hitting the lead on the page, diffusing it, but I didn’t look away. I didn’t want to stop seeing it, to stop feeling both my brothers here with me.

  “We found the others in your cellar,” Arthur said thickly. “There must have been dozens of everyone else, even Droog. But there was only one of me.”

  “It was something about the eyes,” Wayne said. “I must’ve tried hundreds of times. I tried for days, but I couldn’t capture it.”

  Arthur closed his eyes and buried his face in the crook of his elbow.

  “I started to think it meant something,” Wayne wheezed, from physical pain or emotion. “That I was supposed to protect you or something, so I followed you one night, and you went to my old house. Where we lived when Molly was alive.”

  “You lived in the Jenkins House?” Remy said.

  Wayne nodded. “It was too much after I lost her. All the memories. The death threats and graffiti. I couldn’t blame anyone, but I wanted to be left alone. So I moved back here. I hadn’t been to that house until the night you found that disc, and I didn’t stay long then either. But the next day, I heard there’d been some kind of incident there. And it didn’t take me long to realize the same thing had happened to you that had happened to me. I didn’t know what to do, whether it was really dangerous, or what it meant. I didn’t know how to reach out to you, after everything that had happened. I tried to put it out of my mind. I focused on—on this instead.”

  He gestured toward the sculpture. “I didn’t know what it was, only that it mattered. Before I found the disc, I’d spent five years wanting to die. I wanted to forget what happened five years ago, but I couldn’t. This was the first thing that had mattered in a long time, but when I finished it . . . I just wanted it all to be over. I heard the tornado sirens, and I thought maybe it could finally be. I could stay up here and wait.”

  “It was really an accident then?” Remy said.

  “Why weren’t you there?” Nick demanded.

  Wayne’s forehead creased as he studied Nick’s expression. “You had someone there . . . at the mill, the day of the accident.”

  Nick shifted minutely between his feet. “My dad.”

  “Nick Colasanti,” Wayne said. “You look like him.”

  Nick’s shoulder jerked like he was trying to bat away a fly without using his hands. “Why weren’t you there?” The wind was picking up again, rising to a fever pitch, and Nick had to shout to be heard over it.

  Wayne’s brow wavered. His voice cracked on her name. “Molly.” It took him a moment to say anything else. “She was a sleepwalker, real bad. Would do things like turn on the oven and try to climb the ladder to her tree house. My wife and I, we started keeping locks on everything, but if she knew where the keys were, sometimes she’d just take them off anyway.

  “We even turned her doorknob around so we could lock it from the hallway at night, keep her inside. She had her own bathroom, th
ough.” He paused, eyes scrunching shut. “My wife woke up to the sound of the tub running.” His voice rose as he forced out more. “When we got there, she was lying in the tub, still in her pajamas. But we thought we got there in time. She coughed up the water. She woke up, and we were so happy. So relieved. But a few days later, Molly was sick, burning up. She had a fever of 103.”

  He let out a gusty breath, drew another in. “I called in to work sick. Took Molly to the hospital. But it didn’t matter. We lost her anyway. We lost her. And then six months later . . . my wife was gone too. Cancer.”

  No one spoke for at least a minute as Wayne gathered himself in the renewed vengeance of the storm. Nick was staring at the floor. Levi stood beside him, a hand clamped on his back.

  “It’s not like I think two bad things cancel each other out,” Wayne said. “People always say they don’t want anyone to feel bad for them, but is it so bad to want that? Is it so evil to want anyone on this earth to love, or even like, you, enough to care that—that”—he clamped his hand hard over his heart, and his voice came out threadbare—“you hurt too.

  “I never felt like I deserved forgiveness, and I knew no one would ever love me like my kid did. I just wanted anyone to know me well enough to know how sorry I’d always be. It’s selfish, but I wanted someone to know I’d lost her.”

  Nick’s wiry arms crossed. He stared down at the crown of scraggly hair bent in front of him. “What did the song mean?”

  Wayne lifted his face and blinked against the tears clouding his eyes. “I wrote it when she was born. Was as close as I could get to explaining how she made me feel.”

  Nick’s lips pressed together as he considered. “Then I do know you,” he said. “I know you pretty damn well, Wayne.”

  Art touched the last blot of his scar. “And I love you.”

  “And I forgive you,” Remy said.

  My throat felt tight, a physical resistance to saying the words I needed to get out. The tears kept spreading out across the drawing I was holding with a death grip. “I don’t believe there’s a reason all those bad things happened,” I whispered, forcing my gaze up to Wayne. “The accident, or your daughter’s death. Sometimes shit just happens. Horrible, cosmic-level shit.

  “But maybe sometimes things do happen for a reason too. In the gaps between all that. Like maybe the world tries to repair itself, to heal or just, like, adapt. What happened wasn’t your fault. A million different things had to go just wrong for that accident to happen, and I don’t have a good reason it worked that way. But a million different things had to happen just right for us to be here right now too. For me to be standing next to this”—my voice broke—“piece of Mark. For us to have him back for even one minute. And that’s . . .” I searched for a word that would capture it, that even stood a chance at gesturing toward the enormity of it all.

  “Extraordinary,” Arthur whispered.

  All around the room, chins dipped in solemn agreement.

  “Do you think there are others?” Nick asked, turning his eyes to the ceiling as if he could see the stars far above the green-glowing sky. “Out there? Or maybe even others that crashed here.”

  I knew what he was thinking, knew that it must hurt for him and Sofía and Remy and Levi to be in this room without the people they’d lost.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Wayne’s eyes glazed; he was half listening at most. “She went to Jenkins. She went right home.”

  The wind screeched through the house, and the walls bowed outward, like an inflating balloon. Overhead, a beam snapped, and a collective scream went up around the room as it speared the floor beside the spiral.

  The door ripped off the hinges and flew past Levi, clipping his side before smashing up against the hole in the roof then dropping back down.

  “Get out of here!” Wayne screamed just as half the roof peeled back like aluminum foil.

  Outside, the woods looked like a shag rug beneath a high-powered vacuum. A shovel flew past the window, followed by a sheet of red-painted wood that might’ve been a wall from our shed.

  “IT’S HAPPENING,” Remy screamed. “THIS MUST BE WHAT I SAW.”

  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 who
le 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.

  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.