When the Light Went Out

by Bridget Morrissey

  “I really can’t talk here,” he continued. “I don’t want to yell.”

  Our sweaty palms got stuck in the clasped position. And I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind. I hated myself for my severe lack of minding. Even more for letting the hand-holding be accompanied by walking. The blare of the music faded to a low thrum as we reached a hollowed alcove between twin cedars behind City Hall.

  As if we traveled time in the distance between the building and the trees, we became like the little kids we once were, watching our old neighborhood friends from a place out of their reach. The tent was still in plain view, stark white against the blackened night around us. Soft string lights lined its perimeter, casting a dreamy glow on Aidy and Harrison making small talk with the Campbell twins, Bigs and Teeny.

  My dear Ruby stood alone at the edge of the parking lot, legs crossed over one another as she smoked one of her pointless cigarettes. Her eyes were trained on the people walking up. Earlier in the day, I’d told her to stay outside the tent until I arrived. In all the spectacle of the actual event, I’d forgotten to find her. There she was, waiting for me. Like always.

  The rest of our old friends would never bother to do that. No surprise. They always noticed my presence; never seemed to notice my absence.

  It was a testament to my resilience that I didn’t end up as the odd man out in the years after Marley’s death. Nick explained to everyone what happened that day. How I resisted. It didn’t change the fact that the whole town—and our whole group—wanted it to be me who pulled the trigger. I was an Elmer’s Glue addendum to my older sister’s friends. An eleven-year-old girl who could never get it right for most of them. Always making things bigger than they were. Whatever I happened to be on any given day, I was always too much of it. Too sensitive. Too tough. Too imaginative. I was the one who had to go everywhere, “because our parents said so,” the ultimate indisputable argument to a group of unsupervised kids. Ranked eighth out of eight in terms of importance.

  1. Marley (15 years old)

  2. Aidy (14 years old)

  3. Teeny (13 years old)

  4. Bigs (13 years old)

  5. Harrison (14 years old)

  6. Ruby (12 years old)

  7. Nick (11 years old)

  8. Me (11 years old)

  An order as fixed as Earth’s rotation.

  I was the youngest, the most emotional, perceived as the general worst to most everyone else in the group. But I was the one who saw what happened that day. The witness, not the villain or the victim. I was the one who got the task of representing the tragedy. Representing our whole group: the kids of Albany Lane.

  I was the one who’d spent the last five years carrying Marley everywhere I went.

  July 11

  Five Years Prior

  An antique clock in the shape of a birdhouse hung over the couch in Marley’s living room. The small, stuffed bird that lived inside burst out every hour on the hour. I’d studied him often over the years, waiting for his grand appearance every time the big hand landed on twelve. He was an odd-looking thing. He had a mottled brown underbelly and a grayish-brown chest. A distinctive black plume jutted out from the crown of his head, with a matching black bib under his beak. His front door would swing open, and he’d slide forward on his perch to chirp out his cheery tune, a brassy smattering of notes that had gone flat over the years.

  Marley’s bedroom was down the hall from the clock, which meant that most of the time the bird’s warbling couldn’t be heard when her door was shut. In the dead stillness of the early morning of July 11, the bird sang me awake. Five a.m. on the dot.

  I wiggled from my sleeping bag. Marley’s room was filled with the restful breaths of the four girls and three boys who were still asleep. I tiptoed over them, careful not to wake anyone. By the time I made it into the living room, the plump, feathered thing was retreating, back to sleep for another fifty-nine minutes. I climbed up onto the couch to press my face against the glass. What happened to the stuffed bird while he sat inside that dark box? Did he listening to the tick of the hand as seconds passed? Did he watch the clock’s cogs grind?

  My breath fogged up my view. I pulled up my sleep shirt to wipe away the imprint of my nose. Once again I smashed my face against the clock’s. The white behind the Roman numerals had yellowed over time. I looked past it, staring into the small hole in the center, my vision blurring until finally, something clicked into focus—the glass eyes of the stuffed bird, amber-rimmed with onyx pupils. I stared at him and he stared back, both of us unflinching.

  The ticking clock told me it had been fifteen seconds of this standoff between the bird and me. The air felt like sandpaper on my eyes. Tears formed above my lower lashes. I would have to blink. I was only human.

  The bird would win.

  As I prepared to surrender, giving myself three more ticks of the clock before I would cave, the bird’s eyes moved. He glanced to his left, his glass eyes growing small and worried as he examined a corner of the interior only he could see.

  I blinked. I couldn’t wait any longer. When I opened my eyes again, I couldn’t find the bird inside his house anymore. All I saw was yellowed paper and the blurred hands of the clock, continuing to move.

  2

  Whenever Aidy talked about Marley in public, she’d say, “On July 11, I lost my best friend.” That word always struck me—lost—like Marley was nothing more than a misplaced sock or a wallet buried in the bottom of a giant purse. It bothered me, not because it wasn’t true, but because it was. When Marley died, she didn’t leave. She was right there, but not in the way we’d been used to seeing. If only everyone else would have looked a little harder, they’d know she hadn’t gone anywhere. But they left her lying dead on the floor of her parents’ bedroom. They buried her and painted pictures of her and carried wallet-sized photos in their pockets to prove to people that they knew true grief. They lost sight of her and all she was. It was I who had to pick Marley up and place her on my shoulders, carrying what no one else could.

  After Marley died, I was the only one who found her.

  So when Nick muttered, “Did you hear what I said?” as if he was afraid to say Marley is everywhere again now that it was quieter, my heart tried to reassure my pulse that it wasn’t possible. Nick was like everyone else. He’d lost her too.

  I sat shoulder to shoulder with him—this boy whose name I used to scribble on every spare piece of paper I could find—trying to decide which version of Olivia best suited a situation so complicated. I could put on an easy mask and make him feel strange and small for saying something as absurd as Marley is everywhere. Or maybe I’d get up and walk away, offended by his very presence.

  In trying to decide, my free hand found a stick lying on the ground. I needed something to hold. Nick’s skin touching mine burned so bright that it stunned me. For the first time in the five years since she died, what Marley wanted from me wasn’t clear.

  Nick coughed, clearing his throat to make himself braver, and said, “Earlier, in the tent, did you hear me?”

  My ears grew hot. It wasn’t right. Marley had let me go five years without him. I’d lived through 1,825 days of Nick shipped off to his alternative school and me stuck pretending for people who didn’t understand. A full 43,800 hours of her guiding me through every step of my life as her proxy. I wrote her name in the dirt with my stick and jabbed the pointed end into the ground after drawing the last letter; a period for a girl who never dealt in sort-ofs or maybes.

  M-A-R-L-E-Y.

  “Why now?” I asked aloud. To him or to her, I didn’t know, but I could guess the answer anyway. Because it’s been five years.

  As if that was really any answer at all.

  Nick sat slack-jawed, chewing on words that wouldn’t come. Another minute to add to the 2,628,000 that had passed between us in silence. He rapped his knuckles a single time against the wood of the tree bes
ide him.

  Once for all clear.

  When we used to search our houses for interesting findings, someone usually had to stand guard. Make sure our parents weren’t going to find us rummaging through their belongings. That someone was first me—the aforementioned youngest and worst—but I failed the job so often that Marley had no choice but to let me pass Nick in seniority rankings. He became our official watchman, and I became investigator number seven: best known for unearthing an old love letter written for Harrison’s mom and a stack of vintage Playboys in the Campbells’ garage. I loved my job, but Nick’s—though unwanted by everyone—was most important. The sound of his single knock on the door meant we were safe to discover more secrets. Once for all clear. Twice for get out of here.

  “I did hear you,” I finally said. This was Marley’s work. Nick’s knock on the wood, an unconscious declaration of safety. “And I know. She never left.”

  “You’re the reason I came here,” Nick said to me, like there was a reason before that he’d misinterpreted. He craned his head back to see the sky. His face had ridges and grooves smooth enough for water to trickle across in steady rivers. I carved a picture of it into my palm with my fingernail, trying to remember him in his older form, in case this moment was the last we’d ever share.

  The day of the accident, I made the choice to carry Marley with me always. I couldn’t leave her. Nick made the choice to run away. He became a shadow on my life; our town. The usually right boy who made one very wrong choice and decided to take up residence there permanently. But here he was, drinking in the night, sitting right beside me. Telling me I was why he’d shown up.

  So much for making him insignificant.

  Words had been what protected me. Say I’m okay and I am. Tell the world I don’t care about Nick and I don’t. Always bending lower than the truths I didn’t want to share. Never losing the game of limbo. But by the dried-up creek behind City Hall, between the dying cedars that leaned into one another like lovers touching foreheads, I couldn’t find a single protective syllable with more power than my own mysterious feelings.

  Feelings.

  Of all the things to take me down.

  Nick angled himself toward me. I scooted closer. He moved his hand to make room. My head inched toward his shoulder. Every centimeter was its own revelation. I didn’t have to force anything. Didn’t have to pretend. Didn’t even have to speak. Maybe the past really doesn’t have to matter, I thought as I laid my head on Nick’s collarbone. If this is all there is, then this is enough.

  I started to tilt my face inward. He started to tilt his down.

  Wind rustled through the trees, the exact pitch of Marley’s mischievous, musical laugh. It broke our shared peace like a book falling off a shelf. Nick tensed. He looked at me with eyes that said what words couldn’t. That was her.

  I scooted away. The change in distance between us was only inches, but felt suddenly insurmountable. It was all too much.

  “I should go back inside,” I said.

  Nick stood and reached for my hand again, tilting his head toward the glow of the party. I was so used to being able to see right through people. Knowing exactly what truth would keep the real me disguised. Not with Nick. I couldn’t make sense of a single thing he did.

  “Walk in with me?” he asked.

  I couldn’t help but grab on to him. It had been so long since I’d gotten myself into real trouble.

  Upon seeing Nick and me, Ruby’s cigarette fell from her hand. Her fingers flopped around like live wires as she tried to find it. “Been a while,” she coughed out to Nick as we came closer. Smoke released in a cloud around her face. “Need a cigarette?” Her focus flickered between the ground and the sight of Nick Cline’s hand in mine.

  He shook his head no.

  “Fair enough,” she said.

  Ruby’s black clothes and winged eyeliner and wine-colored ombré hair and occasional nervous cigarette habit all served to disguise how time treated her appearance like a well-preserved relic. Not much ever changed about Ruby Marquez. Soft brown skin and eyes that never judged, even when they probably should, she was the better half of me—only a year older but light-years wiser—yet still young somehow. It might’ve been the kindness in her heart. She picked trash up off the street, no matter how much it seemed to multiply. Looked people in the eye when they asked how her day was going. Hugged with a ferocity and intention that shot through you like a lightning bolt. Or maybe it was the unnatural gruff of her voice, a rasp she’d had all her life that was exactly as she was, too old for someone who looked so young. Or maybe it was me that kept her frozen in time. I was the childhood friend she never gave up on, even when the others did their best to stay cordially distant.

  She was my only remaining ally in a post-Nick world, and here was that very Nick, holding my hand after five years of avoidance, and still she couldn’t be bothered to put limitations on her love for me. She smiled at us and asked, “Headed back in?”

  I gave her a nod I knew she’d read as significant.

  A few purposeful foot stomps later, she found and extinguished her burning cigarette. “Cool. Let’s go in together.”

  I became a chorus of dancing nerve endings, alive and sparking, coiling around Nick’s rough hand and Ruby’s warm arm and an invisible Marley slung over my shoulders.

  Back under the tent, disheartened glares met me. It was all the adults that patted their own backs every memorial by being kind to me, the girl who ran screaming down Albany Lane the day Marley died. I shattered their expectations by aligning myself with the very trouble they believed they’d exorcised from my life.

  They were nothing more than a shapeless entity until my eyes adjusted. I homed in on my parents’ horrified expressions. Is Olivia holding Nick Cline’s hand? I told you last week that I had a bad feeling about today, they said to each other through panicked gasps. The familiar unease of disappointing them came through like a crack in a window.

  Across the tent, Aidy was still wrapped up in what was surely a riveting conversation about college life. That was all she ever talked about since coming back to Cadence after her first year. She made big gestures with her hands as Harrison watched her intently. Bigs and Teeny nodded along, their eyes following her every wrist flick. In all my years of Marley guidance, I still couldn’t get those Campbell twins to listen to me like they did my big sister. Any conversation we had seemed to be stamped with the words OBLIGATORY KINDNESS DUE TO FAMILIAL RELATION TO SOMEONE WE STILL LIKE AND RESPECT.

  My prolonged staring drew Aidy’s attention over to me. She tugged on the sleeve of Harrison’s light-blue chambray. Aidy was tall, but Harrison Shin had always been a few inches taller. They’d gone through puberty in perfect synchronicity, never straying too far from who they were to each other when Harrison moved to the neighborhood all those years ago, his mother a first-generation Korean American who’d grown up in Cadence herself and his father gone from a short battle with lung cancer. Aidy grew a chest, and Harrison grew muscles. Her voice dropped, and his did too, the two of them flawlessly key-changing from harmonized soprano and tenor to harmonized alto and bass. The neighborhood sweethearts, through and through.

  Aidy tugged again on Harrison’s sleeve, and he leaned over to kiss her forehead. When she swatted him away, he looked around, holding his chin high to survey for trouble. His focused stare caught the attention of the Campbell twins, who turned their puzzle-piece bodies around to see if they fit together when inverted.

  If there was ever a more complementary pair than Aidy and Harrison, it was Bigs and Teeny Campbell, born two minutes and fourteen seconds apart, which seemed to be the longest stretch they ever spent away from each other. Teeny never let us forget that she was actually the larger one at birth. Born first, with dark brown skin, a full head of pitch-black hair, and a wail that made their mother cry tears of joy and their father high-five the nurses. It was such a
famous story in the Campbell household, we all knew to chime in with the line, “When Teniyah Campbell spoke, the world listened,” right before the part about Bigs arriving so small and silent they didn’t let his parents hold him, worried something was terribly wrong. It turned out that he was fine. He knew, even at birth, that his sister was the one meant to do the talking for both of them.

  All four of them caught sight of Ruby, Nick, and me in the crowd. The seven of us were the remaining kids of Albany Lane. Oldest versus youngest on either side of the tent, locked in a battle of stares.

  If only they could see my upper hand. I had Marley.

  I always had Marley.

  “We should sit,” Ruby said, daring to wave at the older kids. She led us over to a table near the DJ, where sound swallowed all possibility of conversation. A brilliant move on her part. It was a silent crusade we’d embarked upon. Discussion would only shatter the illusion that we’d meant it to be this way all along.

  Nick tried to loosen his grip on my palm. I squeezed tighter.

  The lights in the tent flickered.

  Almost show time.

  It’s hard to say what purpose Marley’s memorial served outside of fund-raising for Cadence’s police department. Certainly not that of healing for those most affected by her death. Once a year, Officer Bricket, who had retired, had to get out the shaving razor and make himself presentable enough to walk up on stage and deal with the fact that he was out of town when his daughter was killed with his gun. Ms. DeVeau, formerly Mrs. Bricket, had to make a production out of finding a seat as far from her ex-husband as possible. If ever the two came close to one another, someone swooped in and redistributed the crowd.

  The lighting changed under the tent once more, casting the audience into darkness. A spotlight shone on Mayor Bayor walking out onto the makeshift stage. After introducing himself, he held for an abnormal amount of applause. No one found his presence to be the gift he thought it was, or his name as clever, but if ever the response came close enough to satiating him, it was year five. Hands slapped together with the fury of flags caught in a windstorm. Fix this, Mayor Bayor. Don’t let our Olivia be ruined by Marley’s murderer. Accidental murderer. But you know what we mean!