Ruin Falls

by Jenny Milchman

  “Hey!” she cried. “Let go of my—”

  The crowd was parting now, some studiedly ignoring whatever situation had developed, others observing it avidly.

  “He yours?” the man called out to Liz.

  She suddenly felt hollowed out and weary, spotting the fat leather wallet the man held in the hand he wasn’t using to grasp Reid. Papers bulged out; the wallet’s contents were disarrayed.

  “I’m so sorry,” Liz said, walking forward, knowing what must have happened, but feeling no ability to deal with it. “If you look, I think you’ll find that nothing’s missing.”

  The man let go of Reid, who shuffled in Liz’s direction, eyes downcast. The man’s frown appeared less angry now than bewildered.

  “He likes to see if he can take them,” Liz tried to explain. There was no good explanation, of course, although she had often been compelled to give one. “He’s not actually trying to steal anything.” She paused. “He always gives it right back.”

  The man kept silent for a beat. “Boys will be boys,” he said at last.

  Liz secured Reid by the arm, imprisoning him only a little less tightly than the man just had. They went to join Paul, who had come to a resigned halt a few feet away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “One near car crash, one child almost arrested,” Liz said, a parody of a checklist. “I’d say we’re on vacation.”

  The Starbucks seemed less tempting behind her, its aroma slightly sickening. The children were standing in front of a machine that dispensed toys in plastic bubbles. Their expressions looked both dazed and dazzled by the unfamiliar carnival wares, but any minute now they were going to run back, asking for quarters.

  Paul was distracted. He looked at her, and when his reply came, it was half-scoffing, half-joking. “Come on. That driver was just a little reckless. And Reid is still a free man.”

  But Liz felt too tense to laugh.

  When Reid was two years old, he’d begun taking things out of Ally’s nursery. They’d chalked it up to jealousy over the new baby, but the practice hadn’t stopped with time. In fact, it’d gotten worse, or perhaps a more accurate way of putting it was to say that Reid had gotten better. Instead of impossible-to-conceal stuffed animals and blankies, an ear or corner of which always protruded from wherever Reid stowed his booty, small objects such as bracelets and billfolds started disappearing. He had a gift for sleight of hand. He’d once removed his teacher’s earring as she bent down to grade his test.

  The littlest pickpocket, they called him, during the time when all this seemed funny.

  Liz and Paul had taken their son to a psychologist, and then a psychiatrist. Both doctors terrified them with a list of warning signs to look out for: fire-setting, cruelty to animals. They didn’t seem to grasp, even after observation, that Reid was basically a sweet boy, protective of his sister, still innocent himself. The professionals seemed to regard Liz and Paul with a mute sort of pity whenever they sought to describe their son.

  But Reid honestly seemed more gifted than sociopathic to Liz. She supposed anyone would say the same of their child. Everybody had a gift these days; no one was average. Well, Reid had his problems, and he certainly wasn’t on top of his compulsion to relieve objects from their owners. But he never kept the things he stole, save for the occasional stick of gum, or the fruit snacks he’d swiped from Liz’s purse earlier that day. Reid seemed more interested in practice, in diligently perfecting his craft.

  Liz made a mental note to propose magic again. It had been the therapist’s suggestion—a way to channel Reid’s passion into something a little more appropriate. In the past, Reid had dismissed the idea with a decidedly teenaged snort. Magic isn’t real, he’d said. You just make things disappear for pretend.

  The return trip across the parking lot felt like an Olympic sport given the completely unanticipated heat. The air was like wet towels upon them, and the kids dragged their feet. Only the promise of turning on the air-conditioning, an oddity where they came from, got Reid and Ally to move. At home, Liz worked outside all summer long. She was unprepared for how a thirty degree leap in temperature, going from indoors to out, could make your body instantly sag.

  Their car gave off a baking heat despite having rested for only ten minutes under the sun. Liz dabbed her forehead and vented her underarms in her tee. The kids looked flushed and overheated.

  When she opened the door, Ally let out a little shriek, dropping her seatbelt buckle, and Liz took over so that the children didn’t burn their fingers. She pulled spare shirts out of the suitcase and placed them behind each child on the blistering seats. Then she sat down herself.

  Paul got in without making a move to turn on the engine.

  “Paul?” Liz said. “It’s pretty hot in here.”

  Her husband didn’t reply.

  “You tense, honey?” Liz asked. “Nervous about seeing your father?” She reached across the seat to touch her husband’s shoulders, then started. “My God. Your back is like an iron rod.” She began to rub.

  Paul’s face had gone similarly steely. Liz continued to compress the flesh by his neck, although his expression made her hand falter.

  He seemed to sense it, deliberately softening his gaze. “I’m sorry.” The two words sounded strange, as if he had pills in his mouth. “Maybe I’m feeling like I guilted you into this trip. Played the parents-getting-old card.”

  “No, honey.” Liz shook her head. “You didn’t. I’ve never gotten to see where you grew up. And it will be good for the kids to see another kind of farming.” She didn’t often think of what she did as farming, but the goods grown in her gardens had acquired a unique value compared to what she was seeing on this drive.

  “A crueler kind,” Paul said ruefully. “The rainbow chard you put in at Roots dies a lot more peacefully than my father’s cattle.” His mouth twisted, a sudden spasm.

  Paul almost never talked about his father. They rarely saw the man, and the times they had, he and Paul didn’t speak. It was going to be a strange vacation, although Liz imagined the children would run interference, along with Paul’s mother.

  “Swiss chard,” Liz corrected gently. “I didn’t put any rainbow in this year. Remember what happened last fall?”

  Paul was quiet.

  “Paul?”

  “Ah yes,” he said. “It wasn’t much of a rainbow. More like monochrome chard.”

  Liz laughed. It had been a while since her husband had made her laugh, but this was now twice in one day. Her earlier flash of anger began to ebb away.

  “I have an idea,” he said.

  “All ears,” Liz said.

  She turned around, surprised they hadn’t been asked yet why they weren’t moving, or pelted by demands for the promised air-conditioning. Both kids were woozy and drifting toward sleep. Liz tipped her head back, but the upholstery produced an instant slick of sweat. She leaned forward, fanning her neck.

  “We got a late start. The kids are going to be cranky, and I don’t want them to greet their grandparents that way.”

  Unspoken was the fact that neither child had seen Paul’s parents for years.

  “Okay …” Liz said.

  “Why don’t we drive a little while longer, then get a hotel room? We’ll have one less day at the farm, but everyone will arrive in better shape.”

  Paul typically railed against the environmental impact of hotels. All that laundry, the waste involved in the free breakfasts he wouldn’t eat anyway. His making such a suggestion had to be a sign of how the prospect of seeing his parents was throwing him.

  He placed a hand suggestively on her leg. “We could even get a suite.”

  Something else they hadn’t done much of lately.

  Liz lifted her head. “That would be nice.”

  “Nice?” Paul finally started the engine. Baked air gusted through the vents. “What is that, monochrome wife?”

  She laughed again. Three for three. “Okay, okay. That would be loin-stirringly good. Let’s do i
t. Let’s go to a hotel.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Paul made the reservation from the car. A chain hotel, whose name appeared on yet another of those blue signs, and thus wasn’t far off the road. The parking lot shimmered with heat, and light glared off the windows as the building rose, but there was welcome shade under an overhang at the entrance.

  They let the kids sleep a few extra minutes, engine running, air on, while Liz fetched a trolley from the vestibule, and Paul got their bags out of the trunk. Perspiration appeared on his brow and in ovals under his arms as he worked; Liz leaned limply against the car, chiding herself for the position of ease when there was much to be done.

  The temperature hardly seemed to drop despite the dying sun in the sky.

  Paul squinted into it, slamming the trunk shut, and Liz went to nudge Ally awake. Her daughter’s eyelids shot up like shades; Ally had this way of reentering the world from sleep as if she had never left it. She would slip into conversations mid-breath.

  “Mommy?”

  “Yes, sweetie?” Liz stroked Ally’s feathery hair out of her eyes. Her daughter’s scalp was sweaty.

  “Sometimes I worry about Reid.”

  “About Reid?” Liz glanced across the seat. Reid’s head lolled back, his sleeping face so open and revealed that it seemed her son could hide nothing. Not the objects he took, nor the source of his sadness about the end of life. “Why are you worried about Reid, sweetie?”

  Ally took in a rippling breath. “I don’t know.”

  It was clear she knew something, though.

  Paul made an impatient gesture, swiping his brow with the back of one hand. “Hey. I’m dying out here. I forgot what this felt like.”

  Liz nodded quickly, holding up one finger. The car was heating up; they couldn’t stay long. She looked down at Ally.

  “Maybe he’ll get into trouble. Like with that man in the—the place where you buy food that’s bad for you. Or for some other reason.”

  Liz felt a flick of relief that she couldn’t identify. “Oh, sweetie. I don’t think you have to worry about that. Really. I think Reid will be fine.”

  Paul opened the door on the other side of the car. He woke Reid, trundling the boy forward, while Liz got out the cooler. They could eat dinner in their room. Liz half carried, half marched Ally across the parking lot. The doors to the hotel slid open, air-conditioning a welcome reprieve. The kids came to life, and began running laps around the lobby while Liz handled the process of checking in.

  “Look, Mommy, there’s candy machines!” Ally said.

  “I bet I could get something out of one of those,” Reid mused, a few feet away.

  “Come on!” Liz heard Ally say behind her. “Let’s go!”

  “Reid?” Paul was rearranging things on the trolley. “No taking any—”

  “I was just joking, Dad.”

  The two kids walked off. Liz allowed herself the indulgence of watching them for a moment, feeling the trace of a smile. Ally reached out and fingered the leaves of a potted plant, which even from here Liz could tell was fake. Her daughter looked dismayed by her finding, before hurrying to catch up with her brother.

  “Sir?” A bellhop came up to Paul. “May I bring that upstairs for you?”

  The woman behind the front desk slid Liz’s credit card back, along with a little envelope with two key cards in it. “This is your room number,” the woman said, pointing to the digits on the envelope without saying them aloud. A security measure, Liz realized.

  Paul turned to round up Reid and Ally, forgetting to respond to the bellhop.

  “Thank you,” Liz said. “That’d be—” And then she paused.

  “This way, ma’am,” the bellhop said.

  Liz had the sudden, purest desire to send this man away. She didn’t want him handling their things, and she didn’t want him to see their room, let alone their children. He was a nondescript man, in the flat expanse of middle age, with eyes of neutral blue, and a thinning cap of hair. The uniform he wore was a little dingy, as if the hotel didn’t bother to replace them as often as they might. The bellhop’s only notable feature was a thread-thin mustache.

  “We can take care of it,” she said. “Thank you, we’re fine.”

  She glanced around for her husband, who was answering a text as he ushered the children back from the vending area. Probably one of his students. Even on vacation, Paul’s students—disciples was more like it—couldn’t leave their guru alone. Paul drew closer, sliding his phone back into its clip. He wore his connection to the rest of the world as if he were a surgeon or a cop instead of a college professor in a rural agricultural school.

  Liz started to push the trolley forward. It was awkward and unwieldy, the wheels swiveling instead of straightening out.

  “Ma’am?” the bellhop said. “Let me.”

  Paranoid, Liz told herself. This day has made me crazy.

  A long drive with two children, that near miss on the highway, Reid’s episode of thievery. The heavy wet heat of a summer spent anywhere outside the Adirondacks. It was ridiculous to worry about a bellhop in a chain hotel. Liz fell into step behind the man, tugging Ally along with her, and pretending not to see the glimmer of wrapper sticking out of Reid’s back pocket. How had he done it? Neither child had any money on them. Then the elevator arrived, and the kids were excited enough by the ride that both stolen candy bars and strange-looking bellhops were forgotten.

  THE COURT ORDER

  Abby Harmon sat at her kitchen table, staring down at two things. The envelope that had arrived today, hidden between the usual sliding pile of junk, like a snake in a thicket of grass. And the text message she’d just received.

  Envelope.

  Text.

  Two very different roads, each wending away into a thicket of its own.

  If she did what the letter inside the envelope compelled her to do, Abby could envision the next several years of her life, and the prospect made her cringe. The next several years of Cody’s life, actually. How old would he be when they finally emerged? Eight? Nine? Half again as old as he was now, years lost, and that was presuming a happy ending.

  If there wasn’t a happy ending, then they would lose a lot more than years.

  A fan rattled on the counter, coming around again to unleash its hot breath upon her. Hot air that moved was hardly better than hot, still air. It wasn’t supposed to hit temperatures this high up here, certainly not at night. The person who had just messaged her was right—things really were getting apocalyptic. Abby blinked sweat from her eyes.

  She looked down at the sheet of paper. An ounce of wood pulp. Such a light, ephemeral medium—a match would turn it to curled, gray shreds inside of a second—to be the bearer of a blow that could destroy her whole life.

  And then the text on her phone. Which would bring about an end even less predictable.

  “Mama?”

  Abby jumped in her chair, a flimsy metal thing that rocked back under the force of her sudden movement. She’d had to look for a furnished rental since she couldn’t take any of her own things, stealing away like a captive during the brief hour Bill spent at the gym. They’d left the city when he got a job that allowed him to work from home—just one more way to keep an eye on her and Cody. And going back for her stuff was an encounter that she couldn’t risk.

  Even this letter, written by a third party, was too close to her husband for comfort.

  Abby steadied the chair, and brushed her hair out of her eyes. How long had it been since she’d styled it? She used to give herself a blowout every other day like clockwork, even after they moved. None of the women did that here, but Bill had insisted. Now Abby couldn’t recall the last time she’d washed it, and the strands hung lank and deflated against her sweaty face.

  “Mama?” Cody said again.

  “Yes, Bun?” She had no idea where the pet name had come from. She only knew that it seemed to soothe Cody, and that Bill didn’t use it. He preferred real titles to endearments.


  “I had a bad dream again.”

  Her little boy’s face withered, as wrinkly as an old man’s. Abby had a vision of years passing while she and Bill wrangled things out in court, Cody’s story changing in the telling as his perspective broadened with time.

  She held out her arms, and he ran to her. His back was sweaty through the polyester of his pajamas. They had to make them flame-retardant, as if fire were the danger children were most likely to run into. This pair was a size 3T, bought over a year ago, then. Which Pixar movie had been available for streaming, and consequently Cody’s favorite film of all time? Abby looked down at her silently stroking hand. Lightning McQueen. She couldn’t even remember seeing the second Cars movie. So many elements of your child’s life were lost. Who recalled why one particular pair of pajamas hanging on a rack at The Children’s Place had to be purchased, just had to be, to a tune of jumping up and down and long, drawn-out pleases? And yet those things made up a childhood. Abby shivered, right there in the stifling kitchen, and squeezed her son to her.

  “You’re warm,” Cody murmured, an echo of Abby’s tone whenever he ran a fever.

  Abby released him. “Feel better now? Dream all gone?” Better not to ask who—or what—had visited Cody in his sleep. They had learned not to talk about the dreams.

  Cody’s damp head nodded against her.

  She glanced down again. The letter with its declarative, impossible to ignore injunction. And the phone with its invisible, intangible connection to a whole other world.

  Abby rose with her little boy in her arms. “I’ll tuck you back in.”

  After laying him down on top of the limp, creased sheet—how she wished that sheet were crisp and cool, that Cody might need a light blanket as the night hours wore on—Abby drew the hollow door shut. Another thing she had learned: not to pull too hard on the weightless doors in this place. They splintered.

  A few short weeks and a lifetime ago, she’d had rough-hewn beams and wood paneling in the house that they’d built.