When the Light Went Out

by Bridget Morrissey

  He began his recycled opening statements. “Let us remember our beloved Marley Bricket. The picture of youth lost. A heavenly reminder of all that needs to be made better about the world.”

  Everything but a person.

  I slinked my way up the edge of the tented room and over to the side of the stage. Right beside me, Marley’s mom shoved her chair so hard, it flew into the parking lot. “Don’t touch me!” she screamed.

  “Karen, I’m not. I’m just…” Mr. Bricket said. He tried to hush himself. He thought there was still a way to placate his ex-wife. “Come on now, give me a second here.” Because of Nick and me, the watchful eyes had drifted too far from the exes, who, much like unattended children, went straight to the very thing they knew they shouldn’t.

  “Karen, please,” Mr. Bricket pleaded. He made the mistake of taking a step closer to her.

  Ms. DeVeau grabbed her discarded chair. She threw it back toward Mr. Bricket. “I don’t know what the protocol is here, but this man needs to be taken away!” she yelled.

  Out of misguided respect, the news cameras trained themselves on the ground. No one in Cadence wanted to remember what Marley’s death actually did to the living.

  “Christ, Karen!” Mr. Bricket looked at two police officers—his former coworkers—walking toward him. “No, please don’t come over here. I’ll leave. I got it. Thank you.” He buried his head into his neck and started walking out.

  Mayor Bayor recovered with the exact amount of grace you’d expect from a man who’d led a one-sided mayoral campaign with the slogan: Taxpayer. Sax Player. Vote for Bayor. Your Number One Mayor. Three generations of Bayors had ruled our forgotten freeway town. There was no skill set required to take the title. A lucky last name, a Cadence address, and an uncontested race did the trick. Mayor Bayor wiped forehead sweat onto the sleeve of his jacket. The streak left a California-shaped wet mark below his right elbow. He couldn’t find his place in his speech, and heaved and hmmed until it seemed easier to surrender. “Let’s bring it back to what matters, yeah?” he said to cover. “You all know her. You’ve grown to love her.” A dig I did not miss. “Cadence’s very own Olivia Stanton!”

  A hand pulled me back from walking up the stairs. Ms. DeVeau. The line of her lipstick went above her actual lips. The miscalculation of it transfixed me. “A young lady should not be up to such unbecoming things,” she warned.

  As I shrugged off Ms. DeVeau, I caught sight of Marley’s empty, foam-board smile by the dessert table. On the other side of the tent, her new, oil-stained smile was propped up on an easel next to the DJ. I smiled back—at first out of habit.

  Then out of joy.

  All my life I’d been loyal to her, waiting for this moment. Carrying her when she couldn’t go anywhere anymore. Honoring her by copying her words, her mannerisms, her bravery, and her poise. Mimicking her ability to spin tall tales with believability and ease. Chasing her grand schemes.

  I knew in my heart she was challenging me, but I couldn’t quite see how yet.

  I needed to take a risk. Make my move.

  “Good evening, Cadence,” I started, unable to make out the faces in the crowd through the harsh glare of the spotlight. Instead, I looked up, feeling Marley’s scattered, star-teeth smile in the unseen sky above me.

  She was everywhere.

  “Marley never left us,” I said into the mic, a bit too close. My last word caught reverb that rang out like a siren. “You’re all liars for pretending she did.”

  The crowd let out a collective gasp. With one sentence, I’d erased years of work at crafting a palatable image for them. I was once again the messy little girl they all tried to forget, no longer masked by well-worded sentiments and Marley’s hand-me-downs. I’d worn the truth down until it fractured completely.

  I knew my cue. I always did. It was a performance Marley Bricket would want, and it was a performance I gave. Eyes welling, I ran down the center of the tent until I found the parking lot on the other side. To the crowd, I’d regressed.

  To Marley, I was exactly who I was supposed to be.

  She’d always been an obvious girl with a knack for the sleight of hand. Even when you watched her closely, you still missed what she was trying to do.

  Like she’d done every summer when she was alive, she set out game pieces without giving all of the rules. The pageantry of her memorial, the chaos of her parents’ behavior, the unexpected arrival of Nick Cline—they were all pieces of the puzzle.

  It was time for her final adventure to begin.

  July 11

  Five Years Prior

  “Ollie, what are you doing?” Marley asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, hurrying down from the couch cushions. It wasn’t clear who was intruding upon who. Marley always went to sleep last and woke up first. Somehow, I’d beaten her to waking.

  “I hate that thing,” she told me, pointing to the birdhouse clock. “My great-great-grandpa made it. My dad’s mom’s dad’s dad, or something. All I know is that he died way before my dad was even born. I don’t think we should have to keep it. But apparently, we have to.”

  “It’s pretty weird,” I said.

  “I guess it’s our state bird in there. A real California quail that my great-great-grandpa taxidermied up. Nice, huh?”

  She walked to where I stood. The two of us turned to examine the clock, our heads tilting as the thinnest of the three hands ticked down each second.

  “That bird’s still alive, you know,” Marley said. Her lips spread into a sly smile. “Come on. Let’s go watch the sun rise.” She’d slept in nothing but a giant white T-shirt. It hit her at the shins and hung off her right shoulder, the sleeve so wide and long on the slouching side that it reached down to her wrist. She could pull her arms inside and make a blanket out of it if she wished.

  I wanted to be covered like that. Fabric that could wrap around me until I was swaddled like a baby. I didn’t like being eleven. The world felt too big. The bird was dead but still alive. I’d seen it for myself. Marley knew it too. How did Marley know everything?

  Neither of us had anything on our feet as we walked out her front door and down her driveway. The night before, Aidy and Teeny had braided the girls’ hair. Marley’s long french braid, blond and delicate, hit her exposed collarbone and snaked down the front of her shirt. It had stayed perfectly maintained, as if she hadn’t slept at all. Unlike me, who tossed and turned at night. No one but Nick would ever put their sleeping bag beside mine. Not even Ruby. She was already a light sleeper, and my apparent thrashing didn’t help the matter.

  My two french braids had more hair outside of the plaits than in. Exactly like I felt. Straggly and messy and always finding a way to climb beyond the parameters I was given.

  “I don’t want to walk all the way to Cadence Park,” Marley announced.

  The sky, like a healing bruise, had started to lighten. “Where do you want to go?”

  “I need to think.” She turned onto Arbor Street. We were headed toward the abandoned train tracks. It was the only place worth going when walking east.

  “What do you need to think about?” I dared to ask. She looked sideways, taking in my every feature. I fixed my posture and lifted my chin, only seeing her through my peripherals. Glancing her way would show her I cared too much about hearing her answer.

  “I have to figure something out. I’m doing the Adventure differently this year.”

  “Really?” I tripped over my own eagerness, stubbing my toe on a crack in the pavement.

  A few years back, she’d started something she only ever called the Adventure. It was always a scavenger hunt of sorts, sending the eight of us all over Cadence in pursuit of a goal Marley never fully explained. She said we’d know when we got there. The Adventure happened every year, right around the middle of summer. Marley would show up to Cadence Park with crossword puzzles to do or riddles to
solve and she’d say, “It’s time.”

  The actual adventure itself was already different every year. Calling attention to that would only make her less likely to explain when she meant, so I bit my tongue. The only constant there’d ever been was that one thing was supposed to lead to another, and another, on and on until we reached her final destination or goal. Whatever it was. No one ever made it far enough to even know.

  Instead, every year it became a game centered on who would be the last to give up altogether.

  “I bet it will be great,” I decided to say. “It always is.” When it came down to it, we all liked having something to do. Summers in Cadence could be listless, swelling too large with the unexplored possibilities around us.

  “You’re sucking up. You guys all hate it a little bit.”

  “Not me,” I protested. “Everyone else fights too much. Especially the year you made us break up into teams.”

  Marley hurled a cold, choking laugh at me. “You literally pulled Aidy’s hair that year.”

  It had been Aidy, Bigs, Nick, and Ruby on Team One and Teeny, Harrison, and me on Team Two. Marley had intentionally broken up all the strongest pairings, and she wouldn’t listen to any arguments about the fact that Team One had more people. They found her first clue, a ribbon tied around her mailbox with BUGS HIDE THERE, CHILDREN PLAY THERE, WE HATE IT THERE written on it. They were supposed to leave it for our team to find, and they didn’t. They figured out Marley meant the pointless, fake playground ship at Cadence Park. Aidy bragged long and loud about making it past the first round so much faster than us.

  I did what I had to do to defend my team.

  “Forget I said anything.” Marley picked up her pace. “Trust me. The Adventure is going to have a different purpose this year.”

  A small pebble imprinted onto the bottom of my foot. I didn’t dare dust off my arch and remove it. If I broke pace, Marley would leave me behind, and she wouldn’t bother to look back.

  3

  If silence could be seen, the particular quiet of the moments following my speech took the form of an ominous figure in the corner of a dark room, lurking and unknowable. The eerie quiet chased me as I ran away from City Hall and into the surrounding area. Crooked palm trees and flickering streetlamps loomed overhead like the world beneath them was hollow, and I was all that lived inside it.

  I moved so easily. Too easily, I realized. Marley wasn’t with me. At least not that I could tell. She’d become such a part of me that even in her absence, I felt her like a phantom limb. I never knew where she went when she left. Or if she never left and I sometimes forgot how to hear her. Neither thought gave me much peace. What if I lost her one day too? Became like the rest of them, blissfully unaware of what was right in front of me. I second-guessed myself long enough for Nick to find me riding the current of the ditch alongside the road.

  “Ollie! Wait up!” he yelled.

  I slowed at the sound of his voice. He sprinted faster.

  It felt so good to hear a different kind of worry attach itself to my name. And to hear it come from Nick Cline of all people.

  When he caught up, he grabbed me tight. I breathed into his shirt. The fabric stopped the flow of air in my nose. That’s how far inside of him I tried to burrow. Because I was not the one who would slip away. If anyone ever bothered to pay attention, I always existed as a gallery of my own heartbreak, displaying Nick Cline on the shelf right below Marley. My hands clutched his shirt so tightly that the fabric nearly ripped.

  He didn’t hear the story of Marley’s death.

  He lived it.

  I knew this, but I’d let myself rework my truth into something that looked nicer for the general public. The reality was, Nick Cline did what Marley asked of him. Just as I did every minute of every day that followed.

  We had been two magnets pulled apart by something bigger. All it took was being in the same room again to remember the power between us when united. As children, the Albany kids—aside from Ruby—hated that Nick never voted against me when it came to choosing something to do. That we seemed to understand each other without words.

  Together, we’d always been unstoppable.

  We started to run, fast and recklessly. Cadence belonged to only us. We grabbed on to it the same way we grabbed hands. For the first time in years, I let myself scream. I decided I could be sixteen and tear the fabric of the night with the power in my lungs. My hysteria could dance out all the way to the open desert framing our town.

  High on it all, sprinting so fast the ground seemed to disintegrate, Nick yelled, “Let’s go somewhere,” ready to run until we didn’t recognize a single thing around us. Our feet lifted from the ground, taking us up into the sky as we stepped from cloud to cloud, enveloped by the magnificence of unfiltered starlight. “There’s nothing beneath us,” he said.

  “Nothing,” I echoed.

  At that, Marley’s bony feet kicked into my heels. I screeched to a startling halt, gravity hurling me back to reality. As frustrating as it should’ve been, I felt nothing but sweet relief. She was back. She was watching. She still cared about what I did. To keep ahead of her nipping steps, my hand broke from Nick’s.

  Marley chased me toward the cluster of sister houses we’d always known as home. I knew better than to try to run away. I could never leave her adventures behind.

  “Follow me,” I called out to Nick. Right as my lungs began to burn, our pace evolved into a cautious trot. Then a secretive tiptoe. Three houses from my own, down the driveway, past the locked gate, Marley urged me over her fence and into her backyard.

  The aboveground pool in the backyard didn’t exist anymore, remembered instead by a sad circle of brown grass traced into the lawn. Without it, the yard somehow looked smaller. Only a measly red shed to keep it from complete despair.

  “What are we doing?” Nick whispered.

  Inch by inch, I pulled on Mr. Bricket’s unlocked sliding door.

  Nick grabbed my shoulder. “Ollie, hold on.”

  Marley never issued a challenge without a pledge of allegiance. Even on the day she died, she’d made our group choose between swimming at her house when we weren’t supposed to, or sitting inside my house watching movies, like we’d all told our parents we were going to do.

  “Sorry,” I said to Nick.

  Marley always won.

  The sliding door rumbled as I pulled it open. Not loud, but not quiet either. I approached the master bedroom, slow-motion skating down the hall to avoid creaks in the floor. The shadow of a seated Mr. Bricket stretched out onto the new hardwood to my right. If I moved as a blur, chances were good he wouldn’t notice me. His shadow shape told me he held his head in his hands.

  On the tips of my toes, I leapt across the doorway. My heart started beating so hard, it felt like it might break through my sternum. The hallway was dark, but I found my way to Marley’s room without an issue, still pattering along on the balls of my feet.

  Why now? I asked her. I wasn’t ready for the Adventure to begin.

  A hand brushed my hair. I gasped, half expecting to find Marley behind me. “Sorry. I can’t really see,” Nick breathed. I pressed my hand into his chest to collect myself. “Hey,” he whispered. “I’m here.”

  The weight of his nearness threatened to crush me. He said, “I’ll keep watch,” just in time, pulling Marley’s door closed to give me the space I needed.

  I exhaled.

  Inside Marley’s world, I felt safe, as if I’d walked into a memory I could never outgrow. Save for the clothes Ms. DeVeau dropped at my doorstep almost five years prior, Marley’s bedroom remained unchanged. The air held faint traces of the sugary sweet perfume she left as a fog over every room she entered. Magazine pages remained collaged over her walls, framing the vanity that carried the keys to crafting her many identities. Her collection of plush pillows, in blushing pinks and soft blues, stayed compos
ed like an editorial spread. Her nightstand had three drawers, the bottom of which was padlocked. This was where the Adventure started.

  It’s time, isn’t it? I asked.

  A single gentle knock came from the closed door. Once for all clear.

  The nightstand’s padlock did not cooperate with my tugging. I knew it required a key, but I didn’t have one to use. Even with the all clear, time was still precious. I looked around the room for something heavy. My eyes were beginning to adjust, and the night-cloaked furniture took on more color, as if it existed in the space between Kansas and Oz. A shelf above me held trophies from the many pageants Marley entered. Most were golden plastic and left behind thick dust outlines when moved. One had real weight. A “Most Photogenic” award Marley won when she was six. It jingled when I picked it up, and as I turned it over to examine why it was so much heavier than the others, coins and bills fell out of a jagged hole in the top. The figure had no head.

  Two knocks on the door. Twice for get out of here.

  I bashed the “Most Photogenic” award into the padlock, finally making a sound louder than the escalating beat of my heart. Nothing happened.

  Two more quick, urgent knocks on the door.

  Again, I bashed the trophy into the padlock. Nick opened the door and closed it behind him. “What are you doing?” he gasped. I hammered at the lock with the relic in my hands. The two would not do for each other what I needed. Nick tried to pick me up. “Ollie-we-have-to-go-we-will-try-again-her-dad-is-coming!”

  I pounded until I’d hit my own hand more than the lock itself. Loose change flew out of the golden man like confetti. I didn’t do things halfway. Giving up was not an option. Every summer I was always the last to surrender, no matter how far I’d fallen behind the others.