Neither of us says anything.
Four minutes later we pull up at a town house. He hands the cabdriver a ten-dollar bill, and we slide out. “Home sweet,” he says. “Come on.”
The nerves I felt in the cab seem to be hot-wired once we step outside. Fired up and ready. I’m not sure what I’m expecting inside, but if he’s had something to hide, aren’t I about to find out what it is? Astor propels me forward. We climb the stoop steps, and then he punches in a code, 0215, and the door clicks unlocked. February fifteenth. I think it’s his birthday.
The foyer is impressive. Bigger than ours by at least ten feet. It’s more formal, too. It looks a little like those sitting rooms you see on tours of old palaces—the ones that are staged to look like what might have been during the time period. Bedrooms and living rooms for people who died decades ago. Maybe even centuries.
“This way.” He leads me up a wide marble staircase that spills into a long hallway. It looks exactly like a hotel floor.
Identical doors marching away in both directions.
“Is anyone home?” I ask. I keep my voice quiet. His house seems like it would carry an echo, and since I’ve never met his parents, I don’t exactly want to run into them in their house at nine o’clock at night heading into their son’s room. “No,” he says.
I edge myself closer to him as we move down the hallway.
It’s not that the house isn’t well lit, it is, but it feels dark.
Almost haunted.
“In here.” He opens one of the matching doors and holds it while I step inside his bedroom.
The contrast is drastic between his room and the rest of the house. While the hallway is bold—all reds and golds and grays—his bedroom is a soft blue. It’s also fairly small. Four walls, a closet on one side, and a desk on the other. There is
something old about the room—it feels like it’s been worn in. The curtains look like they haven’t been replaced since he was a baby, and the lampshade is yellowed at the base. I pick up a pad of paper on his dresser and run my hand over the embossed letters.
AWC.
“So this is it,” he says. “You know everything about me now.” I laugh. “This is everything?”
“I already told you about the Annie thing, okay?” Astor confided that when he was younger, he used to watch Annie on repeat. I’ve already promised to take him to see it on Broadway. He sits down on his bed, and I hear the springs creak under him. “You’re tough to please.”
I make my way around the room. I walk gingerly, like if I step too hard or move my hands too quickly I’ll upset the air molecules, and things will appear different than they really are.
I note his bed: pressed white cotton, the expensive kind my mother buys. Probably Pratese or Frette. His desk: rolltop, light wood. The top is up, and there is a picture inside of him and a woman. I move closer and pick the frame up.
“Come here,” he says at the same time as I ask, “Who is this?”
He’s quiet behind me, and I turn around, the photo in my hands. It’s clearly him, but he’s young, maybe four or five years younger than he is now. He’s smiling up at the woman, his arms around her middle.
He looks at the photo, then at me.
“Your mother?” I say. I know just by asking that the real question is something else. Maybe I’ve known all along; I’ve just been too scared to say it out loud.
He looks up at me and smiles. “Yeah,” he says. And then: “Well, it was.”
There is a code among people who have lost someone close to them. You don’t have to watch your words. If you screw up, if you say the wrong thing, it’s okay, because you’ve lost someone too. You’ve had someone die on you. You know there are no right answers. Just worse and worse. But you have the right to ask, if you want to. I don’t know why, but you do.
I go over to him, sit right down on the edge of the bed and take his hand in mine.
“She died,” he says. “Cancer. It was five years ago.” I keep still and quiet, like he’s a deer I don’t want to run. He shakes his head. “It was a long disease; she was sick for a year, even longer.” He squeezes my hand. “It’s strange, isn’t it? I still sometimes expect her to walk through the door.”
This is why he hasn’t made me talk about Hayley. He knows what it feels like to experience grief, the kind that kills.
“Yes,” I say. “It is.”
“It changes you,” he says. “I mean, I’m not the same person that I was before. Nothing is the same. I tried to explain that to people. To my dad, even—”
All at once, I take his face in my hands. I just put my palms right on his cheeks and search his eyes with mine.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. Because I am, and I know—all of it. The blame. The guilt. The longing. The distance that death creates between the people who are still here.
He covers my hands with his. “Thank you.”
“Is that why you moved to London?”
He nods. “Yeah. We moved right after. My dad wanted to stay in New York, but it . . . didn’t work.” He looks at the floor, then back up at me.
I run my thumb across his cheek. I don’t know what to say, and I understand, slowly, that I don’t actually have to say anything. I understand him. In a way I’ve never been understood. The reality of this loss, of what it means, is like a string that ties us together. The grief weaving its way from my heart to his.
It’s like we’re connected by this black core, this ground zero of humanity that’s raw and human and strong and fragile all at once. It’s life itself—the promise of death, just a heartbeat away, folded into every moment.
“Hey,” he says into my ear. He places his hands on either side of my face and brushes my hair back. “Can I tell you something?”
“Please.”
He keeps his head down so I can’t see his lips, just feel them. “I think I’m in love with you.”
I swear, my heart stops. Like a car slamming on the brakes at a red light. “You think?” I manage.
He pulls back. Smiles. “What do you think?” I told Trevor I loved him immediately. After six days. And then we said it all the time. Constantly. At night on the phone, at school, in the mornings when we saw each other across the park. I meant it too. I did. I loved him. I loved how safe he made me feel, and how well he knew me. I loved that he could anticipate things. Like whether I wanted chocolate ice cream after school or movie tickets to a chick flick I’d never admit I wanted to see.
With Astor it’s different. He changes me, or I change him. I’m not sure. All I know is that when I’m with him, I feel like I’m a part of something else. I feel, for the first time since Hayley died, like I’m not alone.
“I think I love you, too,” I say.
He runs his hands up my back. “There is a lot of thinking going on here.”
I put my hands on his shoulders and let him kiss my neck. “Yeah, what should we do about that?”
He exhales. “What do you want to do about it?”
I know what I want to do. I’ve known since the first time he walked me home. I want to be close to him, as close as two people can be. Now I know what has happened to him, too. And it’s this reality that tugs me closer to him, pulls me down on the blankets with him. Something deep and important and eternal. Something that cannot be taken away. I feel like I can’t breathe, but I don’t care. I want him to crush me. To breathe through me, for me. Trevor tried, so did Claire, but they failed because you can’t breathe for someone whose needs you don’t understand. It’s like giving blood type to an O negative. It doesn’t work.
I think, in that moment, lying under him, that Astor could save me. He could save me with the sheer magnitude of what it means to understand. And I’d let him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I wake up in Astor’s bed, my shirt on the floor, the sheets tangled around me. The clock reads 6:58 a.m., which means if I leave right now I’ll still have time to grab my bag at home before school. I roll over. He’s sleeping next to
me—his face in the pillow, his hand outstretched toward the floor like he’s reaching for something.
I crawl out of bed slowly, put on my dress, grab my bag, and edge toward the door. He doesn’t move when I open it, and I can still hear him lightly snoring when I’m on the other side.
I sneak down the hallway and into that formal foyer. The only sound in the entire town house is my own breathing, light and short. I’m not sure why I feel like I’m escaping.
I nearly make it to the door when something stops me cold. A man’s voice coming from behind the living room door, no more than five feet from me. He’s talking loudly, animatedly, like he’s not aware he lives in a museum. I was right: This house definitely carries an echo.
“This wasn’t supposed to be a permanent solution!” he bellows.
The door is only a few feet away, but I can’t seem to make my legs move to get there.
“I told you he needs that. Are there no records in your office?”
My hands feel numb, and when I look down, I see that they’ve started to shake. They vibrate back and forth, and I clasp them together to stop them from moving. I’m afraid they’ll hit something. An expensive lamp. A hidden light switch. I just need to get to the door. “He isn’t stable here,” he says. “He needs help. I thought you fucking offered that!”
I hear the phone slam down, and at the same time I bolt for the door. I tear it open and run down the steps and sprint the three and a half blocks home. I don’t stop to look whether his father has heard. If he’s opened the door. I knock into people on Park Avenue. I whack a woman’s handbag off her arm and a little girl starts crying. I mumble an “I’m sorry” over my shoulder.
When I get back, safely locked inside our town house, I’m panting, and my feet, stuffed into last night’s heels, are searing in pain.
Peter is in the kitchen, a mug of coffee in one hand, a New Yorker in the other. Something about the way he’s sitting, quiet, unmoving, makes me think that he’s waiting for me. Between everything that’s happened since I saw him, I completely forgot he was even in town.
“You scared me,” I say. My heart is still hammering, and my neck is damp, like I’ve just woken up from a nightmare. I drop my bag down on the counter next to him and go to pour myself a glass of water. When I turn the tap, my hands are still trembling.
“Where were you?” he asks. He folds the magazine down on the counter. I hear it drop.
His voice sounds rough, gravelly, and I know without looking at him that his eyes are bloodshot. He didn’t sleep last night. Maybe he waited up at the counter. I wouldn’t put it past him.
“Nowhere,” I say, letting the water continue to run. It fills the glass and then begins spilling over. I don’t turn it off.
“You didn’t come home,” he says, eyeing my dress.
“Obviously you were somewhere. “
I take the glass and pour out the top, turning the faucet off. “I was with Astor, okay? What are you, Mom?” I wonder if either Mom or Dad is here. If Dad stayed after dinner last night—I doubt it. He hasn’t been known to want to wake up in the same house with me this year.
I hear Peter sigh behind me and the clamor of his cup on the marble. “I don’t like him.”
I spin around. “You don’t have to. And that’s so lame, Peter. You don’t know him.”
“Yes, I do.” He pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.
“You pulled his name up from Prep?” I say. “Come on.”
“I remembered,” he says. “Astor was his middle name. He used to go by Charles, before they moved to Africa.”
“London,” I correct.
Peter snorts. “Whatever.”
I round on him. “They left because his Mom died.
Whatever you think you know, you don’t know anything.”
‘They left because he turned into a fucking psychopath.” I take a step back. Peter rubs his forehead and sighs. “I’m sorry, Caggs. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but—”
“Just shut up, okay?” I say. I can’t help it; I’m starting to scream. “His mother died. She died, Peter. And shockingly, he actually felt it. He understands how I feel. You’d know what that was like if you had stopped for two goddamn seconds to mourn Hayley.”
Peter slides off the stool and stands. “I don’t want to see you get caught up in this,” he says calmly. “He’s not a good guy. He’s disturbed.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “You think if people aren’t all sunshine and flowers then they’re not good, but you know what? Some people actually feel real pain.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Peter takes a step toward me. Instinctively I take one forward too. I’m angry. It’s shocking. Startling. But I’m hit with the resentment I feel toward him and have felt since he left in September. I’m angry that he was able to be there this summer. I’m angry I’m the one who has to carry the weight of the memory of her last moment.
“You never even grieved,” I say. “You just went out there this summer like nothing ever happened.”
“I told you I was packing the house up,” Peter says. His voice is low and even, but I can tell it’s taking effort to maintain. “Someone had to do it.”
“I’m glad you were up to the task.”
He exhales sharply. “I’m not going to fight you on this.”
“Because you’re scared?” I ask. “Because you know I’m right?”
“Because no one is right,” he says. “I’m not going to use Hayley as some kind of moral scale. It isn’t fair.”
“To who?”
“To her.”
He shakes his head slowly; then he picks his coffee cup up off the counter and leaves the room.
I run up the stairs into my room and yank off my dress. I pull a scrunched uniform skirt from a drawer and yank a button-down out of a dry-cleaning bag. I knot my hair into a clip and slide some low boots on. I don’t catch Peter on the way out, and I walk to school in a daze, cursing him the whole way. He thinks he’s so morally superior because, what? Because he isn’t the one that’s responsible for her death.
Then there is Astor.
There are a million things that phone call could have been about, of course. It might not have even been about Astor. But I can’t seem to come up with a satisfactory alternative to the fact that his father wants to send him away.
His father doesn’t get it, just like mine doesn’t. Like Peter doesn’t. Like my mother doesn’t. I just want to see Astor. He’ll explain his dad. He’ll tell me it’s just another one of his plans, that he wants to move to Prague for business and wants to make sure Astor is taken care of. I can see it now. He’s just been worried since Mom died, Astor’ll say.
He wanted to send me somewhere; he thought they could help with that. It’s a crazy plan, but he dropped it when I told him I’m happy here. With you.
Yes, it will all be okay.
But he doesn’t show up at school, and by fourth period I’m not as convinced of my own story. I start to panic. The story starts to morph. What if his father got to him? Should I have stayed? Warned him? What if they came today to take him away?
I call his cell phone, but it just rings and rings. No voice mail even.
At lunchtime when Abigail asks me to come sit with them in the library, I tell them no. It’s starting to get chilly out, the first gusts of early winter wind, and the button-down isn’t exactly doing it. I stand by the gates the entire lunch period, seeing if I can spot him around the corner. Twenty minutes in I decide I’m just going to go back to his house. I can’t take it. I don’t know what my plan will be once I get there, but I know I need to go. I can’t sit around waiting for him to disappear. I need to get there before something happens.
Panic starts to rise in my abdomen and travel up my chest. I’m about to clear the gates when I hear a voice behind me. “Caggie, hang on.”
I spin around to find Trevor. He’s wearing his North Face fleece over his uniform; he holds
two sandwiches in one hand. I didn’t notice it last night, but I see now that his hair is longer.
It hangs down a little too far in front. If we were together, I’d have him cut it. I used to do that. Whenever his hair got too long, I’d make an appointment for him at my mother’s salon.
Sometimes he went to Supercuts, but they always made it too short, and Trevor has the nicest hair—it’s soft and silky, like butter. You’d think it could melt when you touch it.
So we’d go to Oscar Blandi, this incredibly ritzy salon on Madison Avenue, and talk in fake British accents all the way there. “Darling, do you think they’ll have the proper champagne today? I simply cannot get my hair cut without a good bottle.” Then I’d sit next to him in one of those swivel chairs and read trashy magazines until he was done. I wonder if he remembers that when he’s shaking his hair out of his eyes. I wonder if he’d go alone.
“I brought you this,” he says, extending a sandwich to me.
I look at it in his fingers. Tomato and mozzarella. My favorite. My heart is still racing from Astor, from imaging him on a plane out of here. “Hey, are you okay?” Trevor asks me. He moves closer and puts a hand on my arm. “Caggs?”
“I’m not hungry,” I manage.
“What’s going on?” His hand is still on my arm and he moves it up to cup my shoulder. His touch is soft, familiar.
“Caggie, please talk to me.” I shake my head, unable to say anything at all.
I hate my brother. I slept with Astor. Someone is going to take him away. “Hey, hey.” Trevor moves his arm around my back, and then he’s hugging me. I let him. I even tuck my face into the space between his shoulder and neck. “It’s okay,” he whispers.
The Edge of Falling Page 14
