When the Sky Fell on Splendor

by Emily Henry

  “Agent Rothstadt,” Levi whispered.

  “Agent Rothstadt?” Wayne asked.

  “We sort of . . . posted video of . . .” Levi was explaining, but consciousness was drifting in and out of my reach.

  I was tired. And my stomach hurt, and my mind spun. I wanted to stretch out, but we were crammed into the metal spiral. Their voices came to me in murmurs, the wind still screaming over them at times. I tried to keep my grip on them, to stay awake, but I was losing the battle.

  Someone started saying my name, shaking me. I tried to promise I was okay, but my brain and body felt like mush.

  “COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP, WAYNE,” a gruff voice was shouting from somewhere below us. “THIS IS THE POLICE.”

  “Are they in there?” another said from behind the door, a familiar one, dry and masculine and ragged with fear. “Are my kids in there?”

  I wanted to say, Don’t be afraid. Sometimes things just break but they’ll always heal just a bit, and they’re never lost entirely.

  “Sir, try to remain calm,” a woman was telling the frightened man, and though I couldn’t picture her face, I knew she was sandwiching her words between sharp smiles. “We’re going to ensure your children get the best care.”

  “FRANNY?” the man screamed. “ARTHUR?”

  I wanted to comfort him, but I couldn’t. My body was slipping away from me.

  The last thing I heard was Arthur saying, “It’s him! He came for us!”

  THIRTY-SIX

  BEFORE THERE WAS LIGHT, there were fingers in my hair, breath on my cheek.

  There was the steady hum of air and a meek beep.

  Next, I had eyes. Eyelashes too, and then there was light, catching the blond fringes of them, turning them into feathery rainbows slanted across my vision.

  Before anything else came—the bed beneath me, the window to my left or the sunflowers fixed in a pink vase—there was his face, rectangular and sun-browned with a constellation of moles trailing from the corner of his mouth up to his ear.

  “Dad?” It hurt to speak.

  He smiled.

  “Am I dreaming?”

  He cupped my face in his calloused hands. “Franny-girl.” He kissed my head five times in a row. “My Franny.”

  He leaned forward and curled one arm over my head, wrapped the other around my waist like he was building a cave around us. On the other side of the bed, Arthur was asleep in a chair, his mouth lolling open against the hand he’d propped between his face and the wall.

  As if he felt me watching him, his mouth shuddered with a yawn, and his eyes slitted open. “Franny!” He leapt up, then dragged the chair closer to the bed and sat again, giving me his hand.

  “What’s wrong with me?” I asked.

  Dad laughed and swiped tears away from his eyes. “Mostly dehydration. You’re always forgetting to drink water, baby.”

  “Art?” I said. “Where are the others?”

  “Safe,” he promised. “The waiting room.”

  “And . . . and Wayne?”

  Dad pulled back but kept a hand on me. “He told Agent Rothstadt everything.”

  “Everything?” I said. “I don’t . . .”

  Arthur coughed. “About our video. That he was the one who found the—satellite that fell, and that when he told us about it, we made it into an episode, for The Ordinary.”

  “I didn’t even know you knew that man,” Dad said, halfway between bewilderment and embarrassment.

  In profile, he looked sort of like Arthur, small and vulnerable.

  “We knew his daughter,” I said.

  Dad smiled. “She came to the mill with Mrs. Hastings sometimes at lunch. Quite the piano prodigy. Molly was a sweet kid.”

  Molly. Something, a half-formed thought, itched at the back of my mind. Something from last night, about the tornado.

  The tornado.

  How had Molly known about it? If she was just a person, who’d died years ago, how had she known? About Mark’s Fibonacci spiral built on the second floor of Wayne Hastings’s house? About what her father was going through? About the storm?

  The questions batted around like sluggish moths inside my skull. Right now I was incapable of answering them. Possibly I always would be.

  I eased myself up, and Dad hurried to fluff the pillows, piling them up behind me.

  It was strange, the three of us being here. There were still pieces of us we so badly wished each other could see and yet couldn’t make ourselves ask for, and there was anger and resentment and it still all hurt, but right now, we were here, and if we stayed long enough, things might start to heal, even a little bit.

  I glanced toward the door. “Can we visit Mark?”

  “We should wait for the doctor,” Dad said. “Make sure everything’s kosher.”

  “Well, I’m going.” I swung my legs to the side of the bed, forcing Dad back a bit.

  Art jogged around the bed to offer me his arm. My ankle was wrapped, and the swelling had gone down, but it still hurt and I had to lean against him as I made my way to the door. Dad stepped aside to let us pass, then followed tentatively.

  He seemed somehow smaller, more vulnerable than I remembered. A gooey little human like humans were wont to be.

  Arthur knew the way, like he’d kept the hospital’s floor plan perfectly preserved in his memory for all this time since he’d decided to stop visiting.

  Mark’s room looked as it always had, four different shades of blue like some modern interpretation of the ocean. Mark looked like he always had too.

  Art and Dad and I lined up, down the length of his bed, and stared for a minute.

  “Hi,” I said. “It’s us.”

  Arthur’s shoulders hitched beside me. He closed his eyes, and without looking over, Dad draped an arm around him.

  “I hope you come back to us, Mark,” I said. “But if you can’t, we’ll be okay. We won’t stop loving you, or each other. And someday we’ll find you. Someday we’ll find you, Mark, like you found us.”

  I thought I felt him then. Not there, in the room, but somewhere.

  Sometime. Three feet and five years away, maybe, or in a place that only looked dark and silent from the outside, but inside was brimming with light and sound. There were things we couldn’t understand. Places where the laws of physics broke down.

  I thought about the still pool Molly had remembered diving into, all the rest of the light falling toward it, pulled by its gravity.

  I thought about my brother sitting at a kitchen table, ruffling my hair with pizza-greased fingers, promising me there was nothing to fear in the universe’s mysteries: that if I were to fall in a black hole, I’d see whole histories of planets and moons and stars, all playing out at once, and might even get popped back out on the other end in some point of space-time before those things had even fallen in.

  Nothing in this universe could ever be deleted, only hidden.

  Maybe Mark could be here, in this bed, and inside Wayne Hastings, and somewhere else all at once. Maybe Molly could be here, buried in the cemetery where her father left fresh flowers in the middle of the night, and somewhere out there, diving into a pool where time flattens out and all the secrets of the universe are stored.

  Existing in a way our gooey human brains couldn’t handle without turning to soup.

  Streaking through darkness, lighting up a corner of the vast universe.

  It was extraordinary, but no more extraordinary than the fact that I’d been lucky enough to have two brothers and parents and a Remy, a Sofía, a Levi, a Nick, and a border collie mix named Droog.

  How many billions of things had to happen just right to give me this ordinary life.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THERE WERE SIX OF us, crammed into an ugly Geo Metro, cruising down Old Crow Station Lane. The eager gold beginnings of this year
’s cornfields whipped past, and the cold clear headlights divided the velvety dark. The stars were all out, or rather we could see them.

  Nick was driving, because he’d bought Remy’s car off him when Remy bought a gently used minivan, and Levi had scored shotgun because we needed him to curate the playlist. Droog was getting old, her joints didn’t work quite like they used to, but she still always rode in Nick’s lap, though now she preferred the comfort of curling up and sleeping over the rush of the wind snapping past her open window.

  And that left Remy, Arthur, Sofía, and me crammed into the back, half my upper body hanging out of the car and the breeze ruffling my hair across my face.

  “And I used to get shit for driving too slow,” Remy said, pushing my hair behind my ear.

  “Don’t talk to Grandpa while he’s driving,” Sofía said. “He can already barely tell what he’s doing up there.”

  “Hey now,” Nick said, rubbing the soft curve of his cheek. “I drive slow because of all the precious cargo.”

  Remy scoffed. “You drive slowly because now you own the car.”

  “Extremely true,” Levi said, and started a Cranberries song.

  The headlights flashed over the green NOW LEAVING SPLENDOR sign, and Nick whooped and thumped the roof of the car. “Yeah, buddy!” he cried. “So long, assholes!”

  “You say that now,” Arthur said, “but if you ever leave, you’ll miss this place.”

  “Awhhhhh,” Nick cooed. “Do you miss us, Arty?”

  Arthur shrugged. “There’s no Waffle House near my school.”

  “Yeah, it’s the waffles,” Remy said. “Unparalleled waffles.”

  We pulled onto the bridge over the train tracks, where we’d once watched sleek semitrucks skirt past, and followed the wooded road until it dead-ended into another, a couple of metal towers poking up from beyond the wall of corn.

  We turned and slowed by Jenkins Road, decelerated to a crawl but didn’t stop.

  We hadn’t heard from Wayne since that day. He’d been so sick then, it was hard to imagine he could survive whatever Agent Rothstadt had planned for him, but I held on to the hope that he was somewhere.

  There were foreclosure signs stapled to his run-down fence and front door, an unnecessary formality. The tornado had left little of the house intact. These days it looked like the ruins of a medieval castle, with the way the door rose from the glass-dusted floor, cupped by the jagged arch of one of the remaining walls.

  Our house hadn’t fared much better. It was lucky Dad had gone to the police station, looking for us. Lucky we hadn’t been at home.

  Lucky.

  But then there was Wayne, who’d climbed into the back of a Suburban and been driven away from the remnants of his home.

  He got what he needed, Arthur sometimes told me when he caught me thinking about it, and ran a hand over my back. He looked back at us, right before he got into the car, and I knew he got what he needed.

  Whenever he said this, I remembered that day at the park, when we shot our first episode: Sheriff Nakamura, sitting on a park bench, staring toward the wooded trail as we crowded into it, his eyebrows dented and one corner of his mouth lifted. Like he was seeing the ghost of someone he loved.

  Not like it didn’t hurt. Not like he’d gotten everything he wanted, but like when he looked at Remy, moving down that sunlight-dappled path, he had everything he needed.

  That was all we could hope for. Still, as Nick pressed the gas and we sped away from the Jenkins House, I thought about Wayne crashing headlong into the dirt of his home, snorting it up into the back of his nose and tasting it between his teeth, letting home fill his senses.

  I looked up and searched the sky for a falling star.

  Whether I could see any or not, I knew there were lights out there, blazing through the dark.

  And then I looked back down at Splendor, stretched out around me.

  The air was warm and sticky, Sofía’s rosewater floating on the breeze. The faint moo of sleepy cattle drifted up at our backs, and the rutted road unspooled in front of us, like it knew where we needed to be.

  Sometimes a black hole rips through your life. Something—maybe even the thing you love the most—implodes, collapses right in front of you. And the gravitational force of the thing it forms is so strong it pulls on everything else, warps the very fabric of your little place in space-time.

  It bends the past around you so it keeps repeating, and you can’t see what comes next.

  You’ll want to run from it. You’ll want to escape before it can suck you into its darkness.

  But black holes don’t really suck. And whatever falls into them isn’t really gone.

  Even the light is just hidden. Just for now.

  When I think of Mark, I picture him falling, diving headfirst toward the mysteries of the universe, a smile wide across his face. As he nears the event horizon, he moves slower and slower, and then he stops. Hovering, frozen.

  There he is, in my sight, forever. And even while that’s true, he’s also somewhere else. He’s crossing an invisible threshold, and there, then, he sees it.

  The answers. The past. The future. The light.

  Everything, all at once.

  He laughs. I know he laughs.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, I’d like to thank my amazing agent, Lana Popović, who has been such a champion of this book, and of me, since the very beginning. Working with you has been a joy and an honor, and I can’t thank you enough.

  Thanks also to my wonderful editor, Marissa Grossman, whose keen eye and brilliant mind were essential to this book’s development, and to Alex Sanchez, another indispensible set of eyes and hands that coaxed this book into shape. Huge thanks as well to Ben Schrank and everyone else at Razorbill, especially Jennifer Dee, Corina Lupp, Phyllis DeBlanche, Vivian Kirklin, Abigail Powers, and Marinda Valenti. Thank you all for the parts you played in bringing this book to life, beautifying it, and getting it into the hands of readers. It means so much to me.

  Thank you also to Bri Cavallaro, my one-person competition cheerleading team, and to Parker Peevyhouse, Jeff Zentner, Janet McNally, Anna Breslaw, Bethany Morrow, Kerry Kletter, Shannon Parker, Marisa Reichardt, Candice Montgomery, Tehlor Kay Mejia, and all the other supernaturally kind and talented YA people who make this a place I love being. I hope I know you in all the parallel universes where I don’t have this job too.

  Thank you so much to Jordan, my de facto first reader, one of my biggest and best supporters, the reader I most truly aim to please (if you are happy with a book, then I know I will also be).

  This book is about family, and I couldn’t have written it without mine. Thank you to my grandparents, my parents, my brothers, my sisters, and all the weirdos I was lucky enough to love and be loved by while growing up, especially the Frisches and Sjogrens, who let us run wild through their homes.

  And finally, thank you to Joey: You have beautiful hair and are so, so nice, and I love you.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Emily Henry is the author of The Love That Split the World and A Million Junes. She is a full-time writer, proofreader, and donut connoisseur. She studied creative writing at Hope College and the New York Center for Art & Media Studies, and now spends most of her time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the part of Kentucky just beneath it. She tweets @EmilyHenryWrite.

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