Something Like Gravity

by Amber Smith

  I regretted not going to the beach with my friends. I was going to be feeling sad and crappy anyway; it would’ve been nice to at least feel that way in a different setting.

  I rode my bike down all the familiar empty streets, alongside the fields and small farms and sparse houses where nothing was ever out of the ordinary. I pedaled out a steady pace—not too slow, not too fast—one that I knew would get me home right as it would become too dark to see.

  Something was different when I approached my house. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, and then I realized: It wasn’t my house that was different; it was my neighbor’s. There was an extra car in the driveway, extra lights on in the house.

  It’s so pathetic that I know that.

  Even more pathetic, it actually made me feel excited for a second, the thought of something, anything, being different.

  I left my bike on the front lawn and tried not to make too much noise as I entered the house. Someone had left the kitchen light on for me. Mom, probably. It was barely even nine p.m., and they’d already sent themselves to bed.

  I understood, in a way. It was still weird to be at home without Mallory, because when she was here, she was always doing something interesting, talking about something fascinating, keeping us entertained with her daily revelations, her quirky observations. When she was around, you could almost forget how screwed up our family was, even back then.

  But there’s nothing like a tragedy to shine a spotlight on all of our already-weak places, like fractures in a bone that never quite healed. Some families might pull together in their grief and become stronger, but with mine, it just seemed to strain all those places that wanted so badly to snap.

  I opened the fridge, and there was the lunch I’d packed this morning. Sitting down at the kitchen table, I opened the crumpled brown bag, unwrapped my cheese sandwich, and ate it in silence, peeling the crusts away, as I always did. Mallory used to think I was weird for doing that. “Why don’t you just cut the crusts off when you make it?” she would ask me every time I ate a sandwich.

  I shrugged and whispered, out loud, “I don’t know.”

  Just then, I thought I heard footsteps creaking up the basement stairs. I stopped chewing so I could listen. Nothing. I swallowed. Then I heard the sound again, only this time the steps were retreating. Dad. He was probably coming up to use the bathroom. I almost wanted to call out, let him know it was just me in here. But I didn’t.

  So, I sat alone in the kitchen, the crunching sound of the little goldfish crackers between my teeth amplified inside my head. The whole rest of the house was dark. Dad was down in the basement with his tiny TV. Mom was upstairs in her bedroom with her romance novels. Our dog, Roxie, was no doubt in Mallory’s bedroom eternally waiting for her to come home each night.

  We couldn’t even blame our current state of affairs on Mallory. I still remember how my parents sat me and Mallory down and explained it, as if we were children. They said it was no one’s fault. But we knew exactly what had happened: Dad had cheated on Mom. Whether it was a one-time thing, like he swore, or a relationship, as she insisted, it didn’t matter. It was over. And everything that our lives had been before was over too.

  They said they hadn’t been happy in a long time, which was news to me—I’d thought they were really happy. I’d thought we were all happy. But Mallory wasn’t surprised. She had seen something I hadn’t. They said they were going to put our house up for sale; they were going to go their separate ways. They said we’d spend equal time with both of them. And they loved us.

  Then they did all kinds of repairs and updates on the house that they’d been putting off for years. Replaced the leaky roof, updated the plumbing, redid the kitchen, and renovated the inside of the old barn. New vinyl siding on the house and professional landscaping. They dropped the price, and dropped the price again. But it never sold, and now neither of them could afford to move out without the money from the house. So, Dad moved into the newly finished basement, and Mom had the new master bedroom with the walk-in closet and the claw-foot tub she’d always wanted.

  Mallory and I were supposed to share the barn, but it became hers. Her studio. Her sanctuary. She had her art. She had her dreams, her plans. Me, I never had much of a plan, didn’t have dreams, at least not the kind you need extra space to make come true. My dreams were more nebulous, less concrete. Did I want to get out of this town someday? Of course.

  But it’s hard to figure out what you’re supposed to be when you’ve never even really known who you were in the first place—that was something I’d realized only recently. Something I didn’t think my friends would understand. After all, I looked the same and dressed the same and talked the same as I always had. But I wasn’t the same.

  I crumpled up my brown bag and threw it into the garbage can under the sink. I took my sneakers off so I wouldn’t make any noise as I walked up the stairs to my bedroom. As I passed Mallory’s room, Roxie looked up quickly, then set her head back down on the blanket at the foot of the bed and sighed.

  I closed my bedroom door silently, peeled off my grimy Bargain Mart T-shirt, and got into my pajamas. I walked over to the window, like I did every night, even though the view never changed.

  But that night it had.

  It was too far to see clearly, but the door on the second floor was wide open; light from inside the room spilled out onto the wooden deck. There was someone out there. I watched for a while, but they didn’t move.

  I turned off my light, fell into bed, and stared at the ceiling, listening to the silence all around me. I really should’ve gone to the beach, I thought as I closed my eyes.

  CHRIS

  A DOOR SLAMMED SOMEWHERE. IT shook me awake, my brain and body scrambling to remember where I was. I lifted my head and looked at the old clock radio on the nightstand, its neon-green numbers blinking 12:00, 12:00, 12:00.

  The room came into focus in bits and pieces. The light was different here, slanting in through the slits in the blinds. And the morning sounds—they were different too. No garbage trucks rumbling or neighbors’ dogs barking, or car alarms being set off. Just birds: a whole orchestra of whistling and whispering, knocking and tapping, the call and response of an indecipherable language.

  I reached for the notebook I kept on the nightstand, the pen clipped to the cover, and I scribbled a note to myself to look up what kinds of birds live around here. Lots of the great scientists kept journals: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, countless others. I had a whole stack of full notebooks at home, hidden in a shoe box at the back of my closet. I kept thinking maybe someday I’d look back on them and realize I had some brilliant idea, the missing piece to a problem I would be trying to solve years from now.

  I wished I could’ve stayed in bed. But that would have been too much like surrendering. So I dragged myself up to my feet, opened the door, and stepped outside onto the deck. I heard voices down below, so I crept to the edge without the railing and leaned over to see. My mom stood there with her hands firmly planted on her hips, showered and dressed, as if she’d been up for hours and was ready to get this day over with. To get her time with me over with. Isobel hovered behind Dad, who was hunched under the open hood of her old station wagon. Then Dad moved around to the driver’s side and leaned in to start it. The engine choked and sputtered, and for a second I worried it wasn’t going to turn over, but then it roared to life.

  They all stood there, watching for any signs of malfunction. But it stayed strong. Dad nodded in approval, then looked to Mom.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  “I said fine.”

  Isobel glanced over her shoulder at that moment, as if she had somehow known I was watching. We exchanged a quick smile before I raced back inside to shower and get dressed.

  I went downstairs and I played the game. Acted surprised when Mom and Dad told me they’d let me use the car for the summer. Acted grateful when they said I could take it for a te
st drive by myself. Acted like they were being reasonable when they said if I wasn’t back in five minutes, they’d change their minds about the whole thing.

  Maybe I really was a flight risk. If I was, it was only because they’d kept me locked away like a prisoner for the last year. They thought they were protecting me—I got that. But what they didn’t get was that they were suffocating me in the process.

  • • •

  The station wagon was a total piece of shit. But it was my piece of shit now. Turning the key in the ignition that first time, feeling the car rumble to life all around me, was freedom.

  The car wasn’t so much a color, as it was rust and patches of faded paint. The old leather seats were so worn and soft and holey that the foam was popping through in a million different places. I flipped the visor down, and it nearly fell off into my lap. The AC didn’t work, and all I could smell was motor oil. I rolled all the windows down by hand, adjusted the mirrors, and had to really work the sticky gear to shift it into drive. My parents and Isobel all stood and watched as I eased the car down the gravel driveway and turned out onto the road.

  Once I was out of their view, I spun the dial on the radio, but all I got was static. I reached over and popped open the glove box—it was jammed full of papers and an assortment of dusty old cassette tapes that had to have been sitting there since the nineties. Their plastic cases cascaded onto the floor of the passenger side. I reached over and grabbed one of the tapes, tried to read the faded handwritten words scrawled on the paper label.

  I looked up just in time to swerve.

  MAIA

  I WOKE UP WITH THAT picture in my head. So I threw on a hoodie and rode my bike out to the gas station again. I brought Mallory’s camera with me again. Stared at the words again. Felt each one weighing down on me, again.

  The longer I stood there contemplating them, the less sense they made.

  “What do you want from me?” I said out loud.

  I honestly didn’t know if I was talking to Mallory or myself. I tried to take in a deep gulp of air, but it was laced with gasoline, and the smell went straight to my head. Suddenly a tidal wave of dizziness rolled through my whole body—it was either because of the gas fumes in the air or the fact that I was pretty sure I was developing an iron deficiency from trying to be vegetarian in a place that doesn’t do vegetarian.

  I looked at the wall again, the handwriting, the words, and I shook my head.

  I wasn’t sure what I actually believed about the whole life-and-death-spirit-world-afterlife thing. My parents’ approach to religion was pretty progressive; they wanted us to choose for ourselves. Dad is Christian, but not the church-every-Sunday kind of Christian. Mom is Jewish, but like Dad, not the temple-every-Shabbat kind of Jew. Combine those with growing up in Carson, a very church-every-Sunday kind of Christian place, and Mallory and I were sort of left to our own devices.

  Mallory had mixed and matched belief systems and had said recently that she felt more Buddhist than anything else. Me, I always thought of myself as a religious independent. I prayed. Sometimes, anyway. But it was always less to any specific entity and more of a just-putting-it-out-there sort of thing.

  Our family traditions were as follows:

  1. We had a small handcrafted wooden cross that always hung in the hallway, along with a mezuzah affixed to the doorframe outside on an angle.

  2. We celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah every year with both a tree and a menorah.

  3. Easter and Seder.

  4. Eggnog and Manischewitz.

  We kept things pretty basic. Focused on the holidays—light the candles, sing the songs, open the presents. It’s not like we ever really talked about the big-picture stuff. Like, hypothetically, if one of us were to die tomorrow, what do we all believe happens next?

  I breathed deep, in through my nose, out through my mouth. My dizzy spell was beginning to lift the way the sunlight had burned off the morning fog that clung to the road.

  I left without any answers, only more questions.

  On my way home the muscles in my thighs burned. I pedaled hard as I came up the hill. I knew I should’ve braked when I started to come down, but I pushed until the tires were spinning so fast, my legs were whipping around, feet flailing from the pedals. I squeezed the hand brakes too quickly, and for a moment I teetered back and forth, catching myself just in time.

  After coasting to a stop in the middle of the road, I planted my feet firmly on the ground and stared down the straight, narrow, two-lane road, struggling to catch my breath. I tried not to think about my house sitting there just another mile away, or my neighbor’s house, or the view from my window that never changed—this whole town that always stayed the same, save for my sister’s absence. All this wide-open space, sometimes it felt like there was nothing but me for miles. Sometimes I loved that feeling; other times it was hell.

  I focused on the breeze hitting my skin, the scent of rain on the air, the clouds collecting overhead. I watched as they moved faster: one dense gray fleet of clouds growing closer, eclipsing the soft white cottony ones that floated behind. Out of nowhere, a giant dark storm cloud was suddenly backlit by the sun, still hanging low in the sky. The silver lining shimmered around the edges, and I could feel it in my bones. Something was happening.

  This was another one of her pictures. Almost exactly.

  I reached around to pull Mallory’s camera out of my bag. The clouds seemed to be holding still, waiting for me. I quickly looped the strap around my neck and positioned the camera, adjusting the lens—the long road fading in the distance, the trees like a tunnel, and then the open sky with its competing clouds and magical light—this was practically the same picture I had seen pinned up on the wall of the barn.

  I lowered the camera for a second and closed my eyes. My hands went to their familiar spots on my handlebars, fingers fitting into the indentations imprinted in the foam. I steadied myself, filled my lungs with air, and tried to feel whatever it was she had felt.

  It was like I could taste everything—the sun, the clouds, the trees, the coming rain, the road, my past, my future—on my tongue. Mallory had been here. Now I was here. But somehow I never even heard the car coming.

  CHRIS

  I SLAMMED ON THE BRAKES. The tires skidded and spun and screeched. My body lurched forward against the seat belt before it slammed me back again. My heart was skipping beats, my hands sweating as they gripped the rubbery steering wheel.

  No impact, no crash, no screams. Those were the important things.

  But there, in the center of the road, inches from my front bumper, was a girl. She had one foot planted on either side of a bicycle that looked to be just about as old as this car, with a canvas bag strapped across her body and a big fancy-looking camera hanging from a strap around her neck.

  Perfectly still, she stared at me through the dirty windshield. I held my breath, waiting for her to freak out or go off on me. But she didn’t. There was something in her eyes I couldn’t read, an emotion on her face I didn’t know. Not surprise, and not fear. She was calm. I was the one who was scared—frozen scared.

  She removed her hands from the handlebars and lifted the camera in front of her face—took a picture. Then she lowered the camera again, and when she looked at me, for just a second, I thought I saw the beginning of a smile get caught in the corner of her mouth. She kicked her foot against the ground and took off without so much as a word.

  Shaking, I managed to turn the cumbersome vehicle around with something akin to a ten-point turn. Heading back the way I’d come, I left a wide margin of space between us as I approached her. I drifted alongside, watching her closely. She was sockless in a pair of grass-stained Converse, and I realized her pants were pajama bottoms. Underneath a faded hoodie that had “CHS” stamped across the back, her plain white tee was threadbare, like it had been washed a thousand times.

  She had thick, dark hair, pulled back in a loose braid that was coming apart. Either she hadn’t planned on being
seen or she just simply didn’t care. I always admired people like that; I wished I could get away with not worrying so much about what I looked like. Long dark strands of hair kept getting caught in the wind, whipping around her face and shoulders like ribbon, forcing me to notice the curve of her neck—it was long and slender. It made her look elegant, even in pajama pants.

  I stuck my head out the window and opened my mouth. I was about to say sorry, to ask if she was okay, but she looked straight ahead as if I wasn’t there. In profile, her jaw was set, determined in a way that made me not want to interrupt, even to apologize. It suddenly seemed like anything I could say wouldn’t be enough anyway.

  “Hey, I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “It’s fine!” she yelled, without even glancing over at me.

  “You’re okay?” I called out the window.

  But she didn’t answer. Instead, she stood up on the pedals and pressed forward even faster.

  I slowed to a stop and pulled off into the dirt by the side of the road. She looked back once as I watched her speed away. Just as she disappeared from sight, a raindrop hit the windshield.

  Part of me wanted to know where she was coming from, where she was going. But I turned the car off and took a deep breath. My neck ached, and it felt like the seat belt had cut right across my shoulder and torso. I pressed my hand against my chest; my heart was still racing and I could already feel the bruises blooming up under my skin, tender and sore. They weren’t bad, not the kind that settle in your bones. The memory of those kinds of bruises stole my breath for a second, icing my skin and raising the fine hairs on my arms. With a shiver, I shoved that old thought right back where it had come from.

  By the time I got back to Isobel’s, it was pouring. The three of them were still waiting on the porch when I pulled up the driveway. When they asked how the drive went, I left out the part where I almost killed someone.