When the Light Went Out

by Bridget Morrissey

  Aidy whispered my name as a start to a sentence she didn’t know how to say. More of my toxic sludge bubbled up like an adverse reaction to her. “The memorial was coming, and I knew people would make it a bigger deal than it usually is. Year five and all,” I said. “You’d all come in your nicest clothes and tell your nicest stories. But that would be it. You’d forget her again, maybe until year ten, when we’d all stand around as Mayor Bayor unveiled a bronzed statue of Marley in the park or something ridiculous.”

  It was a future we could both see, as absurd as it sounded. Cadence would never be done with Marley. I hammered down that imagined distance, trying instead to build an explanation Aidy could see just as well. “No, she wasn’t perfect. She could be mean and unfair. But so can you. So can I. It’s not right to box her into only one way of being. That’s not all she was. And it doesn’t make her worthy of forgetting.” I shook off the chill chasing my words. “I wanted you to say her name, out loud, in public, on a day other than July 11. I tried to remake what happened into something everyone would look at. One final adventure for the kids of Albany Lane. And it worked. Every single one of you started talking about her. Started remembering what we used to be.”

  Aidy buried her face in her hands.

  “Everything I used came from real things Marley had,” I said. “When I put it all together, I thought what we gathered up and all the places we went to would make you guys realize how much you missed her. How much we all missed each other. But you…” I stopped to wipe away my spit. I was talking faster than I could manage. “You made this whole into something else. You changed her.”

  Aidy pulled her hands away from her eyes, using them to instead cover her nose and mouth like a mask. “You don’t know where you end and she begins, do you?” Her phrasing took me by surprise. As I contemplated, she took my silence as confirmation. Her entire disposition morphed. “Olivia,” she said, treating my name like it was to be my North Star. “For you, we will finish this adventure, or whatever we want to call it now. For you, we will gather up the rest of this stuff, and we will decide for once and for all what we think happened to her. Okay?”

  All my life, I wanted to be seen as someone other than Aidy’s little sister. Ollie Stanton, the knock-kneed brat with mud on her clothes and a bad attitude on her tongue, always needing other people to clean up her messes. Yet I never stopped finding myself in that role. No matter how I staged the scene. What lines I fed to my costars. That was the part I kept playing.

  “When we do that, will it be enough?” Aidy asked, and I couldn’t help myself, I knew what I had to say, even if I wasn’t at all sure I meant it.

  “Yes.”

  Aidy’s arms extended toward me. I grabbed on and let her pull me back up. As our hands connected, the rest of our lives seemed buried in the connected imprint of our palms. We would die Big Aidy and Little Ollie, regardless of how I tried to swallow secrets to age myself faster.

  We walked down Arbor Street, window-shopping for signs of life inside the houses along the way, drinking in the small glimpses of the multitudes held in each. There were so many stories to know. I could reach and reach and never have all of them.

  We opened the haunted house’s gate. The front door was ajar. When we entered, we learned it was because the group had moved out of the upstairs bedroom. They were shadows scattered around the first floor, quiet as the night. Everything except the string lights and the sleeping bags had been brought downstairs and placed wherever must’ve been easiest for the carrier, creating trails of thought impossible to follow.

  I walked past the entryway and into the living room. Nick sat in the corner. When I got close enough to be sure it was him—not that it could be anyone else, but faces were just dark enough to be a bit unclear on everything—he stood and pulled me into his chest. My nose, barely functioning, could smell the sweat on him.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked.

  “No,” I admitted for the first time in years.

  He squeezed me tighter. “I know.” He kissed my hair. “It’s not.” He pressed his lips to my ear. “Do you want to go somewhere?”

  “We can’t leave,” I whispered back.

  “We won’t.” He lifted me up until my feet were no longer on the floor. “Quick! Be anywhere but here!”

  He spun us in circles. The room swirled until the walls of the haunted house fell down. With each revolution, we flattened another building in Cadence until the entire town had been ironed out, and it was only Nick and me holding each other in the middle of an empty desert, our hearts beating faster and faster and faster, Marley smiling through the countless stars above us.

  At once, he stopped.

  Everything crashed back into place, exactly as we’d left it.

  “Did you see it?” he asked, holding me as we swayed into the wall.

  “Always,” I breathed out.

  “Me too.”

  I looked past him to the room around me. The other faces clicked into focus. Ruby. Aidy. Teeny. Bigs. I scanned again, slower, coming up with same four. “Where’s Harrison?”

  “Right after you left, he took the map to go to all the other spots marked on it. He wanted to collect everything else you’d buried.”

  “Was I wrong to do this?” I asked.

  “I’m the last person who gets to decide what’s right or wrong.” He brushed his finger across my cheek. “But if you hadn’t started this, you and I wouldn’t be here. We’d still be lost.”

  Lost.

  Not Marley.

  But Nick. And me.

  We were the ones who were lost.

  Harrison dashed into the house with a full backpack on his shoulders. “Let’s go upstairs; it’s way too dark down here,” he said, out of breath. Shadows pushed out of corners to surround him. He looked around until he saw the one that made Aidy. “Unless we have the all clear to bring some lights downstairs?”

  She considered, then said, “Not a good idea. My dad actually knows we’re out right now, but there are other people that live on Albany who might be suspicious.”

  Harrison jogged the stairs two at a time.

  Before following him, Teeny snapped her fingers in my direction and said, “I swear on my life, if you do one more thing like you did earlier, I will run out that door and all the way home, and I will never ever look your direction again.”

  “That’s fair,” I told her.

  “Then let’s see what you and Marley made for us,” she said, taking her time walking up each step.

  Me and Marley. Both of us.

  I smiled at that.

  This was the cusp, a flicker, the edge of it all. And we were finally ready to tip. It only took everyone saying it many times for it to be true. That, I discovered, was the difference between plan and execution. There’s always a delay that can’t be accounted for, even when you plan and plan. The delay is the nuance of reality, as fine as the fabric on the pillow Marley held in front of her the day she died. Each fiber was important, different from the next. Each changed the impact of the bullet. Each was an essential part of the story.

  A hand pressed into the small of my back. “I’m right behind you,” Ruby told me.

  As I ascended, I tried to guess whose footprints were whose, despite sufficient disturbance to the dust on the staircase. The tracks were untraceable, yet they all led to the same place.

  Harrison emptied his backpack in the triangle of space between the string lights. “I think this is everything. I went everywhere on the map that we hadn’t been yet,” he said. He looked down at the pile, first smiling, his dimples pricking both sides of his face, making me ever so fond of him. Then he was crying, two perfect streams flowing right into the divots on his cheeks. “I tried to be as quick as I could. I used your bike, Ruby. I wasn’t in the right mind to drive. I hope that’s okay. I mean it’s done now, so I guess it has to be, huh? I�
�m sorry. It’s a nice bike. I can see why you like it so much.” His thoughts exploded out of him. “I wish you all had been there with me. I kept thinking that. Even though we know Olivia hid all of it, and it’s not the same kind of real we thought it was, I still wished you all were there.” His Adam’s apple disappeared and bulged, on and on, as he fought back tears. He looked at me and nodded. “But anyway, this is everything,” he repeated, then nodded again, remembering he already said that. His dimples danced across his flushed cheeks for one more embarrassed smile. “This is hard. Someone else take over.”

  There was a hesitation. Each body leaned, contemplating stepping forward. A room full of leaders, I thought, first as a throwaway observation, then as a revelation. Each person in the room did not just go along with the flow. Together, we created a flow in which we all decided to follow. When one person faltered, there was always someone else to step up and keep us charging forward. Each person was the lead character in their version of the story, the stakes highest for them, always guided by choice, above all. Even the feeling of obligation was a choice.

  They felt obligated to figure out what Marley had done—or what I had done, depending on how they saw it—but chose to pursue it. And these people, the kids I’d known my entire life, chose to stay long past knowing it was a bad, or at least a very complicated, idea. They chose me and my version of the story. Even chose to let me lead us to its ending, knowing any choice would’ve been correct, but I needed it most.

  I did. That was the truth. I needed to see I could be the youngest and still go toe-to-toe with the rest of them.

  I stepped beneath the triangle of lights. All around me, our Marley was in pieces. While I’d slept, Aidy must’ve given Harrison everything we’d already found, because at the bottom of the pile there was the trophy head, and Marley’s school picture, and the red notebook, and the wooden box. All three parts of Marley’s leather journal. The two I hadn’t yet rediscovered were stained with dirt, dug up from where I’d buried them. Everything else was illuminated by the resting firefly bulbs: a broken tiara, Officer Bricket’s old badge, Ms. DeVeau’s pearl necklace, a family photo from Marley’s eighth grade graduation. One dead iPod. All the letters I’d hidden in my bedroom.

  I was Houdini, standing before a rapt audience awaiting my final trick. But it was always Marley who told me how to perform. The last version of me that existed without her was Little Ollie, shrieking and crying for someone to fix the terrible mess she’d made. She flashed in front of me, examining the wreckage on her—Marley’s blood, already dried. Little Ollie held a wet towel, rubbing the blood into her skin. Painting herself with it until her mother called her name, telling her the shower was ready. I needed to accept that she would have to be where I began again.

  So I took Little Ollie’s hand and washed her skin clean of the blood.

  She was me.

  She always would be.

  The middle section of Marley’s journal sat highest on the pile. Holding it stopped my hands from shaking. The pages were familiar and still surprising, like remembering details of a movie I hadn’t seen in years. They told the story of a girl with a mother who expected a beauty queen at all times. A father who expected a level of respect no one could achieve. Sometimes Marley tried. Sometimes she rebelled. The real problem was, her father loved her, but he did not love her mother, at least not in the way married mothers and fathers were expected to love one another. But Ms. DeVeau loved images.

  And Marley loved adventures.

  She took her father to their shed every night and worked on a blueprint of Cadence, telling him it was a map for the Albany kids. She told Bigs it was a secret project.

  It wasn’t either of those things, I began to realize.

  One by one, the other Albany kids came closer to me. Where my arms were useless and weighted, incapable of letting go of the middle section of Marley’s journal, theirs picked up the letters and other parts of the journal, investigating and comparing, constructing a symphony of solving around me.

  Harrison held his Marley letter like the prize he wished it was. His hands trembled but his eyes held no malice. In spite of himself, he wanted for it all to be directly from Marley herself. “Did she ever actually say any of this?”

  Ruby held the last third of Marley’s journal. “She talks about all of us in this,” she told Harrison. “But it bounces around a lot. It’s like Olivia took the suggestion of what Marley said and turned it into something more concrete.”

  Harrison came near her to read over her shoulder. Ruby turned back a few pages to find the excerpt she wanted. “‘I wish I could be as still as Harrison,’” she read. “‘He’s there, doing his thing, living his life. Minding his business. Everyone notices everything I do. I can’t walk to the park without it being a whole event. Dad telling me my shorts are too short and I shouldn’t wear them because I’m better than that. As if that’s a thing. As if my clothing determines my worth. Mom telling me I shouldn’t wear them because they show off my cellulite. Little does she know, I like my cellulite.’”

  “Can I see?” I interrupted, so eager to figure out if the last section had the most answers that I couldn’t endure a single second more of not knowing. I’d read it before, but not since Aidy had planted the idea that Marley knew what she was doing the day she died. Ruby handed the journal over, another choice to let me have the moment.

  The first few pages were drafts of riddles and rhymes. The town holds the answers, Marley wrote over and over, testing out fonts, hunting for the pressure and size that best conveyed her intentions.

  Lists of potential items to hide, crossed out and written over so much the ink had turned smudgy. What if I give them a picture of myself and one of my trophies? Like I’m a human, not a trophy. Does that make sense? Everything is Something.

  I was her and she was me, trying to make sense of the important and the mundane, wondering how it all threaded together.

  Then it hit me. The purpose of the Adventure had nothing to do with the Albany kids at all. It was a plan to bring her parents back together. A plan as ambitious and outrageous as Marley herself. A plan she made in secret, without the other eyes and ears she’d always had as backup.

  It was so crystal clear now, reading it with our group. I found myself imagining the suggestions we would’ve given her. The thoughts helped steady me. Ruby would’ve reminded Marley, “Who you love is never the problem. It’s how you love them that matters.”

  Marley’s father did not love her mother like she asked of him.

  Still she loved him back.

  But Marley was a dreamer. She dreamed of a life where her parents’ fundamental differences could be fixed by a grand adventure down memory lane. She’d been running practice tests on us Albany kids for years. It was time for the real show.

  I’d taken her story for her parents and made it a story for our friends, but I, like she, could not find a way to make it work as planned. This was a girl who wrote, Everything is Something, then told Nick, “Nothing’s gonna happen,” knowing full well that even Nothing is Something, because Everything is Something, and oh how the world made no sense at all, and up was always down was always up again, and who could right it? Who could straighten it all out?

  Toward the end of the journal, her words became frantic, scattered, sprawling pages and crisscrossing thoughts, jumping from the Albany kids to her parents to her fears for herself. She did not want to be the person she was. She hated all the people who judged her. It came down to a simple truth I’d always known—Marley Bricket hated all the things she could not control. Which was everything but us, her loyal friends: leaders choosing to let her lead. Giving her that power because she needed it most.

  She wished, like Ruby read, that she could be as still as Harrison.

  As the entry went on, she wished to be as trustworthy as Ruby.

  As kind-hearted as Bigs.

  As assu
red as Teeny.

  As level-headed as Aidy.

  As selfless as Nick.

  As cunning as me.

  As her writing came to an abrupt end, about thirty empty pages between her words and the back of the journal, the last line read, I wish to stop wishing at all.

  She’d split my reality into so many parts, all ground into a fine powder by what seemed to be true. I passed the journal to Aidy and tucked myself into a tight ball, squeezing for relief. For a definite. For anything.

  My Marley was all the things I always thought she was. And yet so foreign. She seemed so young. She was so young. And so was I, I knew, no matter what I’d seen, or how I felt, or how I’d tried to bend time forward for myself and backward to keep her around. I’d never stop being the youngest in our group. But Marley would never stop being fifteen.

  How could that be right?

  Aidy finished reading the third part of the journal, stoic. “Regardless of everything Olivia did, it really might be true, after all,” she said, her voice a brushstroke, barely filled with paint, daring to add her words to the untouchable canvas that was Marley Bricket’s death.

  19

  There was the Marley we Albany kids knew. And the one her mom knew. The one her dad knew. The one both of them knew when together. Every version of Marley had different intentions. Different forms altogether. There was the Marley I saw in every primary color. The Marley I heard in the trees. The Marley in the stars, smiling at me. The Marley that came to Nick through music and sound.

  Somewhere in my quest to make everyone else remember the Marley we knew as children, I stumbled upon a Marley who needed help and didn’t know how to ask for it, too afraid to fail us by being seen as weak. As Aidy passed the journal around the circle, each person met this Marley, in all her wavering contemplations and self-loathing thoughts, tired of being what she was, and tired of thinking it at all, for she knew her life was a gift, but it was one she hadn’t asked for, and one she thought her parents wanted a return on, because their product wasn’t perfect.