When the Light Went Out

by Bridget Morrissey

  “Please stay,” Nick pleaded. Panic set fire in the blacks of his eyes. He’d already seen what I had yet to notice.

  Marley’s hand was no longer held high. It was wrapped around her back to join the other. She looked at once vulnerable and fearless, standing tall on her parents’ bed in her bright red bikini. I leaned all my weight to one side so I could see what she was holding.

  “It’s not loaded. I checked,” she whispered, showing us the gun.

  10

  In sleep, I fell. Down and down from heights unquantifiable. Once awake, I remained suspended, like I’d tripped but the ground never caught me. When I entered the kitchen, Dad and Aidy put an abrupt stop to their hushed conversation.

  “Morning,” I said to them both.

  “I made pancakes,” Dad said. “They’re on the counter.” As I prepared a plate for myself, he stood to hold a private conference with me, mere feet from Aidy, who did her part and pretended not to be interested. “Were we not clear about the rules of your punishment?”

  I might have cowered in the face of his intimidation, but I could always see what was meant to be hidden, like the way his hand did not firmly hold the refrigerator door. How his eyes searched the space around my body, incapable of keeping me in clear view. “You were,” I said with a smile.

  He wanted to ask where I’d been the night before, but I’d given him kindness when he expected a challenge. He didn’t know what move to use next, so he said, “Don’t let it happen again,” and patted my back. On his walk back to the table, he reconsidered, adding, “Looks like Camp Califree’s got some new staff. The woman I spoke with on the phone said they’ve made quite a few changes since you were last there. They’ve completely redone the ropes course, apparently.”

  It was a smart play, but I was in no mood for a real match, so I nodded and said, “Cool,” in the type of voice adults use to mock teenage apathy.

  I sat next to Aidy and poured syrup over my chocolate chip pancakes. Dad sipped at his coffee. After a weighted beat, I said, “You look nice today.”

  “We’re meeting three investors for lunch this afternoon. Have to give them the goods.” Knowing that statement was as dignified an exit as any, he let it simmer, then kissed our foreheads and said his goodbyes. “Enjoy your day indoors. Maybe you can get to cleaning up the mess you made in my garage. We should’ve given those bikes to Goodwill a long time ago.”

  Ha.

  Once Dad left, Aidy started tapping her fingers on the table to fill the silence. She liked to test my mood by testing my patience. She used small motions, thinking herself unobvious.

  “I’m all good,” I said to her.

  “Dad told me he’s having Mr. Jimenez watch the house.”

  “To make sure we don’t leave?”

  “Yeah,” she said as she phased out her finger tapping. She sighed into her last bite of pancake, covering the bottom of her face with a hand and grabbing for her napkin after each bite, chewing like her presence offended the world.

  “Perfect,” I muttered. Another obstacle to face.

  An expectant quiet simmered. With Aidy and me, fights somehow made us closer. The extra layer of friction between us played out like a game we both won. The person who first made it better got the pride of being the bigger person. The other person got the satisfaction of surrender.

  Through shielded mouth, Aidy surprised me by saying, “We’ll use the back door.” She was trying to be the one to make it better between us.

  “You still want to do the Adventure?” I asked, needing the satisfaction of her surrender.

  With a careful dab at her lips, she cleaned off her last bite of food and stood to put her plate in the dishwasher. “We have to make sure we don’t go onto Albany. At least not until the first intersection. Mr. Jimenez won’t notice. It’s not like he ever leaves his house.”

  “So we’re going the Marley way.” I was careful not to sound too interested. I thought Aidy would be done with all of it. I certainly didn’t think she’d want me to come with her. Then again, I’d proven to know more than her. She needed me.

  If they wanted to finish, they all needed me.

  “Mm-hmm,” she answered in a measured tone.

  Bursting, I shoveled down the last of my pancakes and dialed Ruby on the house phone. She’d meet us at Cadence Park in a half hour.

  Aidy and I went into our rooms to change. We both emerged in jean shorts caked with mud that could never be washed out. Shirts that smelled like they’d been folded away for years.

  I felt renewed. I could get the Adventure back. Prove to Aidy it was all for something different.

  Going the Marley way meant crawling through the hole we dug under our wooden fence; sprinting full speed through the yard of the haunted house next to ours; hopping over Miss Sherry’s chain-link fence; marching through the cluster of trees in her yard; shimmying under the hole we made on the other side, the one we couldn’t get quite deep enough, and that always made our clothes filthy; pressing against the wooden planks of the next fence to keep from getting scratched by the shrubbery forming a perimeter around Marley’s yard; jumping over Marley’s gate; taking the walkway between her house and the one on the corner, and following until it spit us out on Arbor Street. A complicated path that had become an exact science once upon a time, well-worn from constant use.

  As we emerged onto Arbor Street, we headed toward Harrison’s. His house was across the intersection, on the other side of Albany. Out of Old Mr. Jimenez’s sight.

  Nick lived diagonal from Harrison. Through many different distractions—skipping and jumping and humming and being a generally annoying little sister—I’d taken care to keep Aidy from remembering this fact. It was easy to do. We’d all gotten very used to ignoring the entire idea of Nick Cline. He went to his different school. He lived on a different schedule. Even though he was only a block away, he was more of a ghost to me than Marley would ever be.

  “Do you want Mr. Jimenez to catch us?” Aidy whisper-yelled as we sprinted across Arbor.

  “Oh, please! He’s so old; he can’t hear anything anymore!” I screamed back.

  We skipped up onto the sidewalk. My eyes were on my feet, watching as I toppled off the tips of my toes. Aidy’s steps fell out of sync with mine. She’d noticed something across the street.

  Nick.

  He kneeled in his driveway, pumping air into the tires of his old bike.

  Our sister rhythm slowed. I quit humming. Aidy took a sharp left into Harrison’s driveway. I turned right.

  “Ollie,” Nick said as I walked up, genuine surprise in his voice.

  My hands dug into the pockets of my jean shorts. There was stray change in the left side, along with a pen that had dried out. The right had bits of shredded paper. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “I didn’t hear from you yesterday,” he said. “I was gonna ride over to your house.”

  Uneven heat spread through me, overcooking my center. I suppressed a smile. I wanted to look at him, but out in the open like that, I couldn’t bring myself to add any time toward taking in his face. “Good thing you didn’t. We’re under house arrest.”

  Nick laughed. “Seems to be going well.”

  “Old Mr. Jimenez is supervising. Can’t get anything by him.”

  “Definitely not.” Nick looked left, then right, filling time with movements, contemplating what to say. Finally, he asked, “What’s the house arrest for?” He squinted, fighting daylight to see me better.

  You and Marley, I thought to myself. The only two people ever getting me into trouble. “A few things,” I said instead. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Not until Saturday, at least.”

  “Why?”

  “No work for my parents then.”

  He held his hand up to shield the sun. “That gives me five days.”

  “Us,” I corrected, playing the game be
tter than him. “That gives us five days.” I used the brightness of the sun as an excuse to close my eyes and settle.

  Nick laughed again. Our interaction seemed to keep him in a constant state of confused amusement. I wished it did the same for me. “Quick!” he yelled, startling me. “Be a girl under house arrest!”

  I folded my arms. “That’s not the game, and you know it.” When he didn’t budge, I relented. I sat crisscross on the pavement and examined my fingernails. “Quick! Be a boy fixing his bike!”

  He scooted away from his real bike, instead miming a wrench, turning it over and over in the air. “This spoke.” He wiped sweat from his brow. “Always giving me trouble.”

  I couldn’t give in. It was too easy. I had to fight him at every turn. “Oh, there’s dialogue now?” I asked, standing again. The sun’s warmth glowed red through my closed eyelids. If I watched him, I would cave.

  “The rules are always changing, Ollie. Quick! Be a person who tells me what she’s doing with the rest of the day.”

  My heels snapped into the earth, denting the ground with the force of the motion. I opened my eyes, seeing Nick see me. I wouldn’t lie to him. “Meeting Ruby at the park. She’s got the box.”

  Nick stood. “Can I come?”

  The older I got, the more the desire to make a mess became an active choice. And it was a choice I could taste in my spit. Salty and metallic. “Sure,” I said. Bringing Nick along was not playing fair. If Aidy and I remained locked in battle mode, neither of us benefited. Fights were only satisfying in the aftermath.

  But I couldn’t deny that Nick started this with me. No matter how everyone else tried to revise history, he was an Albany kid like the rest of us. If we were going on an Adventure in the name of Marley Bricket, Nick deserved to be a part of it.

  “Let’s go.” I pointed to Harrison’s house.

  Nick tossed his bike into his open garage, and we walked across the street. It felt so surreal to be together, knocking on Harrison’s front door—once for all clear—like it was only another Adventure day. Like, if we pretended hard enough, we could actually erase the vacant years between us.

  Harrison’s mom answered the door. “Hello, Ms. Shin,” Nick said, as formal and polite as always.

  The softness in his voice melted into her like butter. She hugged him tight. “It’s so good to see you,” she whispered into his hair. She let go, taking him in, then hugged him again. “Harry! Aidy! Nick and Olivia are here!” She turned to me. “Staying in or going out?”

  “Out,” I said. “Cadence Park.”

  She hugged me as tight as she’d hugged Nick. She loved to bake, I remembered, smelling the flour on her. My eyes suddenly watered as she continued to squeeze me as if I were her own child. As if she loved me as I was, not for what I pretended to be.

  I’d made myself forget her baking. Her white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies. The three-tiered strawberry cake she made for my tenth birthday. She’d covered the cake in lavender frosting and made a fondant lion for the top, my name in lavender letters running across the crown of the lion’s glorious mane. My parents hadn’t asked her to make it; she brought it over to my party unprompted and without fanfare, setting it down in secret and refusing to take credit for its majesty. I knew it was from her because days before, she’d asked me my favorite animal. She wouldn’t accept I love all animals as an answer.

  “There isn’t one you like more than the others? Like me, I love otters.” She had a beautiful laugh, musical and easy. “Their little whiskers make me happy.”

  I’d always fancied myself a lion. Drove Aidy up a wall when I’d walk around our house on all fours, roaring at her. Refusing to speak. She’d assume I was pretending to be a house cat and would tell me to go live under a porch with the other strays. I could never get her to see the world as grandly as I did.

  “A lion,” I’d told Ms. Shin that day.

  Right then, she’d mussed up my hair until my bangs pointed toward the ceiling. “Ah, yes. There it is. Your mane,” she’d said, grinning. She winked at me as she pressed my hair flat. “Go play now.”

  I’d roared at her as I left.

  When she released our hug, I resisted the urge to tousle her hair like old times. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I don’t care what the other people here say. This is what you all should be doing. Harry’s been inside all day since he got back from college. He should be getting sunshine. That’s what everyone forgets. You kids were out getting sun and fresh air every single day.”

  She was making a reference to the Marley day. We were not the only kids in Cadence to be unsupervised during summertime, but we were the most famous. The rest of the town held airs of superiority over our families. Opinions on the rightness of our parents’ actions were shared freely and often. They were forever branded the Albany parents, code for negligent.

  “It’s so good to see you,” I told her, using the voice that made me sound like an adult. The one I used at all the memorials. She didn’t attend them, so she didn’t know.

  Harrison and Aidy came from the hallway. Harrison kissed Ms. Shin’s cheek. “Bye, Mom. Love you.”

  “Be good,” she said to us as we left, patting my head two times more than she pat the others. On a whim, I flashed her my claws.

  With a wide grin, she clawed back.

  Tension wrapped taut around Nick, Aidy, Harrison, and me. One millisecond of attention toward it, and we would all snap in half. We invented the longest, most out-of-the-way route to the park, letting the need to avoid Mr. Jimenez take all of our energy, even though deep down we all knew we were putting an obscene amount of work into hiding from a man who had become so withdrawn since the Marley day that he sometimes got the mail in his underwear, seeming to forget he could be seen.

  It was such sweet, tangible relief to finally arrive at Cadence Park. I basked in its plastic glory: The sun scorching the red slide, making it unusable. Two young kids running across the blue bridge. Ruby sitting on a swing, holding Marley’s box.

  I felt another twinge of victory. Aidy was outnumbered. I had more allies. I tried not to let it make me too bold, but I couldn’t help but jog over to Ruby.

  “Where are your bikes?” Ruby asked as we hugged.

  “We couldn’t take them through the Marley way.”

  “Ah. Bigs and Teeny aren’t coming,” she told me. I should’ve been upset, but without them, the balance stayed tipped in my favor. “Not yet,” she clarified. “They have these things called jobs.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “I think it’s sort of like when I babysit my brothers. Except you get paid.”

  Aidy walked up, Harrison and Nick right behind. “I was hoping they’d be off today. I wanted to ask if their aunt is hiring.”

  Harrison touched her shoulder. “At her hotel?”

  “No, I wanted to ask if she’s hiring somewhere else.” She brushed him off, her voice oozing with sarcasm. “Yes. At her hotel.”

  “Why do you need a job, anyway?” I asked.

  “Mom and Dad want me to find something paid to do for the, uh, rest of summer.”

  I perked up at this information. So far, I knew that Aidy had some sort of conflict with our parents. Now, a requirement to find another job before she went back to school. I bookmarked the knowledge, promising to return to it when I had more time.

  “Why didn’t you ask them about it when we were at the memorial?” Harrison asked. “We were talking about their work before Olivia…gave her speech.” Without meaning to, he cut the conversation off at the jugular. He must’ve forgotten I was there until it was too late, and he had to course correct.

  I wondered what he would’ve said if I wasn’t around.

  Before Olivia…caused a scene? Before Olivia…ruined everything?

  Swollen with all the words I kept inside, a sound kind of like eh snuck out of my mo
uth.

  Ruby laughed. Her quick clip of amusement read like an admission of the awkwardness that consumed all of us.

  “Hey,” Harrison said. His tone was strange and soft.

  I turned around to find Aidy crying. She caught my gaze then walked off in the direction of the bowl. Harrison started to follow. “Don’t,” she warned him, the blow as heavy and blunt as a hammer.

  I knew my cue.

  I always did.

  I followed her. She stopped when she reached the sewage tunnel. It looked grosser in the daytime. Especially the dampness in the middle—a dark pool of mysterious liquid with no pleasant explanation for its presence.

  “You’ve got to stop doing this,” she told me as she sat on the edge of the tunnel entrance, careful to avoid the suspicious wetness.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, playing innocent.

  “Hurting people then acting like nothing’s wrong.”

  Here, conversation built momentum easily.

  I said, “I never told you I’d stop talking to Nick,” which made Aidy toss her hands up and sigh out, “Forgive me for hoping Ruby knocked some sense into you.”

  She knew it was a ludicrous statement, so I called her out on it with a “Why does it bother you so much anyway? It’s not your life.” It’s one of the worst points to argue, because it discredits people for caring, but I was working on impulse, and didn’t have time to craft a response with more care.

  Aidy knew it wasn’t my best work, so she got smarter with a “You act like you’re the only one who notices things.”

  I gave that my most incredulous “What does that mean?” response.

  Our walk to the park had been the cautious uphill climb of a roller coaster. Now we were flying down, breathless and unsettled.

  “It’s not good for you to be around him.”

  “How could you possibly know that? I don’t even know that. I haven’t been around him in years.”

  Aidy buried her hands in her hair. “We’re running in circles with this. Go ahead and remind me why you haven’t seen him. What was it again?” She went right where I knew she’d go with it. As if she didn’t drive the point home hard enough the night before. “Oh yeah, that’s right. He shot Marley then ran away. You were never the same after that.” She stopped. Restarted. “You’re not the same.”