When the Light Went Out

by Bridget Morrissey

  Mr. Bricket found us right as the lock gave in to me. He stepped into the doorway of Marley’s unlit bedroom. His eyes did not fall onto Nick and me, but the room itself, as if it had newly been revealed to him as existing at all. I grabbed the notebook and folder from the drawer. There was a box still left behind. Before I could reach for it, Nick took a deep breath and grabbed it.

  We bolted.

  We headed toward the hilly part of Albany Lane. Both of us were fixed on a destination we didn’t have to discuss. Every place held a purpose for the Albany kids. Cadence Park had always been our sacred meeting ground: a wide-open space for the eight of us to gather and consider all we’d learned that day. Nick and I found our way to it in bursts—sometimes sprinting, sometimes jogging, sometimes walking so slow that every strike against the pavement echoed. Neither of us spoke.

  The park sat in front of a bowl-shaped divot of land that could’ve been a lake if it were anywhere other than California. Instead, the bowl held nothing but wilted grass and an exposed sewage tunnel frequented by homeless people looking for overnight cover. That night, the bowl sat unoccupied.

  “What just happened?” Nick asked as he tossed himself onto his back to recover, panting from the marathon we’d done in silent unison. “We both knew we should go here.”

  “I know.” It didn’t need to be spoken, but our unpracticed connection stood to gain a little attention since being reignited. Somehow, the air smelled like the water that never filled the bowl. Salty as the ocean west of us. Expanding into my chest. Filling me up.

  I was shaking.

  “He let us go,” Nick whispered. “I even hit my shoulder against him when we were leaving.” He shot upright. “Do you think he followed us?”

  “No.”

  Nick collapsed back down. “I can’t believe this.”

  His eyes, always so focused, found mine. Under his unfaltering stare, I issued myself a challenge: If I could last ten seconds holding his gaze, we would never hurt each other again. Pressure built in the back of my head. He could see. All of it. His face in my heart. Marley in the curve of my slumping back. With a careless flick of the head, I looked to the swing set in the distance.

  I’d lasted three seconds.

  The rules of my self-appointed challenge weren’t clear, I assured myself. It’s not like the entire fate of something could be determined by small inconsistencies between plan and execution.

  Marley, neglected too long, pressed into my spine until my shoulder blades pinched together like wings connecting. “What is she for you?” I asked Nick.

  He considered this with the carefulness I forgot I remembered so well. He tilted his head back and forth, seeming to empty his ears of any thoughts that didn’t attend to the question at hand. “At first it was noises, mostly. It was so loud when it happened. It used to be too much for me after that. Fireworks and stuff. But then I decided that…no, I realized that when I’d hear a balloon pop or something, it was her. Yelling at me to get it together. I don’t know why, but it helped me to think things like that.” He paused. “She yelled at me a lot.” Pinches of amusement tugged his cheeks into his eyes.

  Nick Cline was smiling.

  And so was I.

  The surprising burst of joy erased itself from his expression, replaced with his patent-pending stoicism. “I really screwed up.”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “Ollie…”

  “Don’t.”

  His eyes wanted to find mine again. Maybe the challenge was a collective ten seconds of looking at him, added up over our entire lifetime. For a fraction of a quarter of a millionth of a second, I stole a look. The years of silence between us wanted to be seen, acknowledged, discussed, dissected.

  “Why was I the reason you came tonight?” I asked, desperate to steer the conversation.

  “Because you’re the only one who’d understand. Or wouldn’t think I was making it up, at least. And I was right. You got it before I even explained it. No one else would ever believe that.”

  I gave myself another eighth of a second’s worth of staring.

  “Ollie, it’s so much stronger now. I was eating cereal last week, and a song started playing on my shuffle. It was the one that was on when—”

  He didn’t have to finish that sentence. I couldn’t remember what specific song was playing, not the name or who sang it or even what it sounded like, but I knew that if I ever heard it again, I’d somehow know every word. And more than that, I’d know it wasn’t only a song on shuffle.

  “I tried to skip it, but it kept coming on. Every few songs, it would play. Then my phone shut itself off.” He paused, probably expecting me to say something about glitches or coincidences. When I didn’t flinch, his eyes flashed with recognition. He remembered what it was to have someone truly understand, no matter how implausible something sounded. “Yesterday I was getting a T-shirt off the shelf inside my closet. Same place I always keep my shirts. I accidentally knocked the whole stack down. A wallet size of her school photo was at the bottom of the pile.”

  He was keeping his examples pretty safe. It was in the way his jaw wouldn’t quite relax. How every sentence ended with an uptick, like a comma left hanging without words to follow. She was more to him, but he couldn’t push it too far. He didn’t want to be adrift.

  I decided to throw him a life raft. If he, too, had woken up drowning in Marley that morning, he deserved a better way to float through the remainder of the night. “I take her with me everywhere,” I admitted. I’d told that to everyone. Counselors, therapists, my parents, my sister. Ruby. They said they understood. They even said they believed me.

  “It’s normal to keep someone in your heart after you lose them. To want to honor them,” they’d said.

  But they didn’t know. Not like Nick did.

  “I know you do,” he said. “I do too.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. No crying. I couldn’t give any more away. How was Marley no longer only mine?

  “I knew if I could just talk to you,” Nick whispered. “I was so afraid to talk to you.”

  I stared at the ground. Don’t, don’t, don’t, I chanted, willing Nick to stop trying to discuss it. You cannot break what is already broken. You can only make it harder to reassemble.

  “How’d you know she had that drawer?” he asked.

  I looked at Marley’s belongings from the drawer, scattered around me like a salt circle. “The Adventure,” was all I said. I opened up the notebook I’d carried with me on our run and pushed the pages of it through my fingers like a flipbook. One contained sloppy writing that looked as if it had been scribbled with the wrong hand.

  Everything is Something.

  I flipped the pages once more. Some sheets were ripped out. Some had imprints of words once written on the pages above. The second-to-last sheet had a single sentence in neat block letters.

  THE TOWN HOLDS THE ANSWERS.

  It’s time to get everyone together, I thought to myself.

  Nick read over my shoulder. His breath was warm behind my ear. Steady. “We can’t do this alone,” he said. It was like he was inside my thoughts.

  Do what? I wanted to ask, but it was futile. I knew what he meant. No Marley adventure was ever complete without all the kids of Albany Lane. It surprised me he would come to that conclusion so quickly. And that he would want to see everyone else after we’d all shut him out for five years. I had to remind myself I didn’t know him anymore. That he was a wild card who seemed to be reading my mind, and that shouldn’t be as comforting as it felt.

  “I’ll call Ruby,” I told him. I should’ve resisted involving everyone so quickly, but it would’ve been too easy. I was done with easy. We’d already started. We had to see it through.

  Ruby would spread the word to the rest. She would make them come.

  Wordlessly, Nick collected the folder, and I t
he notebook and the box. We didn’t look over any of it. It wasn’t yet time. Instead, we tucked everything into our old safe spot inside the sewage tunnel, like the old days. Still papering the circumference of its entrance were some of our group’s pictures and plans, the details of which had faded long before we returned to remember their existence. Nick touched them anyway, feeling for what he could no longer see.

  We walked up the bowl and over to the swings. I made quick work of my call to Ruby. “Tell them it’s about Marley and it’s urgent,” I said. Details would bog everything down.

  “I’m on it,” she told me, never requiring much context before diving headfirst into action.

  Nick and I sat on the plastic seats and generated small swings. Wood chips worked their way into our shoes. Time bent back and forth between the past and the present. He’d always been gone. He never left. I’d always been gone. I never left. Young Ollie wrote our initials somewhere on the legs of the swing. My eyes sought to find the spot, to prove to myself that I always knew we’d be back here. To challenge the other challenge I’d issued myself. We wouldn’t hurt each other. We were kids, but we weren’t young anymore. If we wanted to build a new world for ourselves atop the wreckage of our past, we could do it.

  Couldn’t we?

  After a long bout of quiet, much longer than most people could sustain, Nick dared to speak. “I’ve really missed you.”

  Ruby rolled up over the hill as he finished his sentence. My voice quavered as I announced, “Ruby’s here,” as if he couldn’t already see her. As if that was all that needed to be said.

  She tossed her bike onto the ground and filled the space of the third swing in one unbroken sequence. “I’m scared. But I’m excited.” Her breath betrayed the ease of her action. “Everyone was talking about your exit after you left.”

  Running out of the memorial already felt like another life. It was the last action of the Olivia who had been created in the five years since Marley died. When Nick and I sprinted down the streets of Cadence, I’d shed that layer of me like a snake molts.

  I still looked the same, but everything was different.

  “I’m sure they were glad to have something new to talk about,” I said back.

  Ruby and Nick both laughed.

  The three of us swayed back and forth. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t unmarry my swing from Nick’s. Ruby shot me a look. I squinted as if I didn’t know what she meant. She clarified by glancing toward our synchronized swinging. I rolled my eyes, even though I’d noticed it too.

  The Campbell twins came next. “I told everyone they had to use their bikes,” Ruby said as Bigs and Teeny pedaled up. “I said it was a Marley thing.” She smiled to herself. “Can’t believe that worked.” Even without knowing, she could sense what needed to happen.

  When we were kids, Ruby loved to pedal at the back of our flock, blasting music from an iPod in a cup attached to her handlebars, always screaming the lyrics louder than the singer. Between choruses, she’d beg us to ride all the way to the southeastern edge of Cadence, where the train tracks disappeared into weeds and a handmade sign read THE POINT OF NO RETURN. Rumor had it, there was quicksand beyond the sign. We never went far enough to know for sure. Ruby always asked anyway. It was enough for her to get us onto our bikes for a long ride.

  When we’d get home after a long day of pedaling around the southeastern border, Aidy would say she thought Marley made the sign herself, “to keep things interesting.” I thought it didn’t matter who made it, because it was interesting, and interesting was the best way to entertain ourselves on hot summer days when we had nothing better to do. The sign was like the longest running adventure of all.

  No one but Ruby had touched their bike in five years.

  “I can’t believe it either,” I said to her as we watched the Campbells ride over to us.

  The twins, officially Xander and Teniyah Campbell, had their nicknames written on baskets in front of their handlebars, a remnant from when they received the bikes for their tenth birthdays. Immediately after Marley’s accident, their parents enrolled them in a private school a few towns over. Their bikes were locked up against a fence along the side of their driveway. It was a reminder for the rest of us: Bigs and Teeny were not gone, but things were not to be as they once were. The rules had changed. No more pedaling across Cadence at all hours.

  Bigs looked mighty on his small bike. He was a linebacker of a human, capable of tossing other players like discarded toys. I’d heard he was a great sportsman, but football wasn’t what put him in the local newspaper so frequently. He’d taken to making miniatures out of polymer clay. So far, he’d done a replica of Cadence that sat inside City Hall, as well as a rendering of an amusement park, complete with a Ferris wheel that actually spun. Last I read, his skills had earned him a full scholarship to an art school in one of the flyover states.

  Teeny maintained the height that defined her, but puberty and years of dance had carved her shape into something impressive and hard-earned. Even the way she rode her bike looked powerful, her back arched as she lifted herself from her seat, braids cascading down her back, blowing with the wind, whipping around her face but never obscuring her view. She didn’t bother to pedal. She rode the momentum down the last part of the hill, lifting her hands off the bars because she could. She dismounted from her bike without breaking speed, a flawless leap that looked as impossible as it was. The bike’s wheels rolled until the ledge around the wood chips stopped them.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  Bigs propped her bike back up and placed his beside it.

  “I’ll explain once everyone’s here,” I told them.

  The twins climbed the ladder beside the swing, sitting side by side on the edge of the rattling plastic bridge.

  Aidy arrived moments later. Harrison trailed behind her. Swap out his usual athletic wear for dressy casual, toss ten inches of height and a good sixty pounds of muscle onto him and it was the same well-worn sight we all knew. Harrison Shin, for as long as he’d lived in Cadence, had always been a clip behind my sister. As the two of them pedaled closer, I realized Harrison was riding my bike: a lemon-yellow Schwinn with a bumblebee sticker on the left handlebar.

  Our bikes used to be our flags in the sand wherever we went, declaring that area our territory for the day. We were a pile of bikes in someone’s driveway, outside someone’s store, in the always-empty parking lot of Cadence Park.

  But for years, mine and Aidy’s had sat behind dozens of boxes in our garage, buried to keep us from the Cadence we once roamed without restriction. For the same reason as the Campbells, Aidy and I were forever banned from using them, as if being able to pedal all over our town was the reason Marley stole her father’s gun and died.

  The strange thing was, our parents didn’t get rid of our old Schwinns. It would be too much to give away something they’d spent a good deal of money on, even if they could get some money back by selling them. The bikes sat among other unusable things we didn’t need but would never part with, giving my parents a twisted sense of pride in their punishment.

  Aidy had broken a years-long rule to retrieve them.

  Before Marley’s death, it never would’ve occurred to our parents to take away the Schwinns. We could use them to run to the store and pick up bread and eggs for them, or to get far away from the house when they wanted space. Taking them away afterward was the only resonating punishment they’d ever given us.

  Then again, everything after Marley’s death had a way of resonating.

  Aidy and Harrison rode over the ledge and onto the wood chips. Harrison treated my bike as a motorcycle, bending his elbows and leaning forward like he might speed off when the light turned green. Aidy stayed at attention. Parks closed at dusk. She didn’t want to be breaking rules. Yet here I was—her little sister, sticking her hand in the cookie jar again.

  I cleared my t
hroat. “We found a few Marley things.”

  “Where? Why? How?” Harrison asked for Aidy, who’d already trained her eyes on the legs of the swing set, zoned out on the HARRISON + AIDY FOREVER she’d scribbled there so many years ago.

  The first thing Marley ever taught me was that it never mattered what I said, but how I said it. In a solemn tone, I reminded the group, “It’s been five years,” using the same reasoning I’d sighed over only hours before.

  Matters concerning Marley needed no real preface anyway. That’s why they all came, on bikes no less, leaving the memorial in the chaos of my speech’s aftermath. Even after five years, the promise of knowing more about Marley Bricket was always enough to do anything.

  “We didn’t want to keep going alone,” Nick added.

  “Now you two don’t want to go do things on your own? That’s funny,” Teeny said. “Guess someone has to die for you to learn your lesson.”

  A tiny bubble of old Ollie popped up inside me. My fists tightened and my stance widened. I bit down on my cheek until the urge to overreact passed. In stony silence, I filtered through many reactions until I settled upon the one that never failed me. “I’m sorry,” I said to her.

  She didn’t respond, which was as good a stalemate as any.

  “There’s a notebook, a folder, and a box,” Nick told the group. Everyone, except for Ruby, stared at him like he was an even greater mystery than what we’d found. EXILED GROUP MEMBER REAPPEARS AFTER FIVE-YEAR ABSENCE.

  Aidy folded her arms. “How did you get all of this stuff?”

  The tides stood to turn with every sentence. Keeping the group united hinged upon revealing just enough to keep everyone interested without upsetting anyone’s moral compass. Aidy would leave if she knew I broke into Marley’s house. The rest of the older kids would do whatever Aidy did.

  I pulled out one of my stronger tricks: a related statement that could be interpreted as a direct answer. “Everything’s in the sewage tunnel,” I said. Like magic, they all followed me without further comment toward the how of it all.