When the Light Went Out

by Bridget Morrissey

  Ms. DeVeau’s Marley was a house. And the idea of a town. Broader than the Marleys I knew, but still the same girl. Facets of the prism I’d never examined. There was still so much to know about Marley Bricket.

  “Anyway,” Ms. DeVeau said, pulled back from the edge of her memory. “Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Finish the adventure.”

  I shrugged. “Kind of hard to tell.”

  “If it’s my daughter’s plan, it’s never done.”

  A phone started ringing. It went on for three long, shrill shrieks before Aidy realized it was hers. “Dad left it for me on the counter,” she said, fumbling around in her purse. “I totally forgot.” Harrison’s name flashed up on the screen. “I’m going to grab this, if that’s all right,” she told Ms. DeVeau.

  Marley’s mother flicked her wrist, happy to gain an unexpected moment to gather herself. “Go ahead.” She blotted her eyes with the edge of a napkin.

  “Hello?… What do you mean?… Where at?… We’re still here, but I think we’re done… Okay… Yeah, we’ll come right over.” Aidy hung up and looked at me, her eyes so wide that pink veins were visible.

  “What did I tell you?” Ms. DeVeau said with the ghost of a laugh.

  We thanked her for the lemonade. I promised to come by and help with the garden. Aidy complimented her hat. Ms. DeVeau stood in repose, lips pressed into teeth, barring her from saying any more. When I turned around to steal one last glimpse, she was standing in her door frame, a hand across her chest, clutching at her heart.

  I couldn’t keep up with Aidy. She glided, using the many inches she had on me to her full advantage. She went fast, but she wouldn’t run. Every time her pace came close, she did a little hop to slow up.

  “What is it?” I begged. She wouldn’t answer.

  Into the mouth of the haunted house we went. We hurried up the stairs and down the hall to the bedroom.

  Nick and Harrison stood over a floorboard that had been wedged loose. In his hands, Nick held a yellowed piece of loose-leaf paper.

  “On the map,” Harrison panted out. “Was this place marked?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “What did you put here?”

  I pulled open cabinets in my brain. Shuffled through piles of memories. Had I forgotten this place? I hoped Aidy would hold her party here. That’s what I planned around its marking on the map.

  “Nothing,” I said, touching my lips as the syllables released, taking shape in front of me. I didn’t do this. Marley did. Marley did. Marley did.

  Nothing was happening.

  It was real.

  Nick cleared his throat and began to read.

  Dearest Nicky Cline,

  Do you hate it when I call you Nicky? I should stop, but I can’t help it. Adults break hearts. I want you to stay a boy forever. You can’t, though. You have to grow up. If it’s not me that makes you, someone else will. That’s how it works, my friend. Somebody somewhere decided that long before you or I ever came around. It’s like heartbreak was designed into the fabric of the universe. It gets us all eventually.

  I always make you stand guard. That doesn’t mean you should stop being an investigator, though. If you watch and you search at the same time, you’ll already know what it is you’re going to find, because you’ve been paying closer attention. Know what I mean?

  I’m sure you don’t. I’m making zero sense.

  Anyway, I’ve hidden this letter for you. It’s the end of the Adventure, and it’s perfect, because you will never find it. You have absolutely no reason to come up here. Our visit to this house was less than exciting. I really hoped you guys would like it, but you didn’t get it all. That’s how it goes sometimes when it comes to our group.

  That’s okay. I still like it. I can sit here and think without being distracted. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been sneaking into vacant houses to clear my head. This place has become one of my favorites. Sometimes I can hear the Stantons next door. Otherwise, it’s perfectly still. Nothing but me and my thoughts.

  Wow. How perfect. Right at this moment, I can hear Ollie screaming at Aidy. They must be outside. She’s yelling something about it not being her turn to vacuum. It’s kind of hilarious.

  Okay. They went back inside.

  It’s quiet again.

  I’m writing these words to you because then they are permanent, even if you never read them. Maybe that’s all it takes to make sure they come true. My thoughts will crumble through the floorboards and seep into the ground, out and back into the universe again. They’ll reach you wherever you are. They’ll stop you from being broken by someone else.

  I choose to write to you because you’re different. You look in ways other people don’t. Ollie does too, but a lot of the times, she’s wasting that by looking too much at me. I’m not anyone she needs to copy. Trust me.

  Okay. I can’t lie. It’s flattering. I don’t hate it. I think she’s about five trillion times smarter than me, and I’m afraid of what that means. Heartbreak might soften her. It honestly might help. Not that you should be the one to do it. Don’t go getting ideas.

  I know one day it’ll happen with you two. You guys are practically babies, and it’s so obvious even my mom’s noticed, and she’s never paying attention to anyone but me and my magnificent shortcomings. But I mean it when I say you shouldn’t be the one to break Ollie. Let me handle it. I’ll figure out a way to do it better. Everyone has their eyes on you when she’s the one to watch.

  So watch. Do your job. But don’t forget to search.

  See what I mean? It’s a complicated thing.

  Promise me you’ll consider your choices before you make them. One second could create the moment that breaks you forever. I’m trying to stop it, and I already know I’ll fail. So when it happens, I hope someone can find a way to mend you. I’d like to believe we can’t be broken beyond repair.

  And since this is the end, I’ll tell you the truth about the Adventure. It isn’t actually supposed to have an end. If I gave you guys a prize and said it was over, we wouldn’t have anything to chase. So I make sure you guys never reach it.

  Right now you’re thinking: Marley, what are you talking about? You just told me this was the end.

  Well, Nick, I’m a woman of my word. Every year I promise that there’s a prize, so I created one, but I’ve hidden it so well you won’t ever find it. Muahaha.

  May you search for years and years.

  Our whole lives, I hope. We, the kids of Albany Lane, will always search. And we will always have each other. That’s way more than most people can say.

  Nothing is ever gonna happen to change that.

  Love always,

  Marley Bricket

  21

  Using the long, looped cursive I could never successfully replicate, Marley Bricket left a letter for the one person I hadn’t. The girl who wished to stop wishing put one wish into the world. Her words did in fact seep into the ground. They spread to the house next door, where a little girl with big ideas waited with her ear pressed to the soil.

  I took the wish and made it my own.

  “I found it,” Harrison told me as soon as I finished reading Nick’s letter. “I didn’t even mean to. I was doing exactly what I’m doing right now”—he was kicking—“and a floorboard wiggled.” He stopped moving. “I get it,” he said to me. “Why you did everything you did.”

  Aidy cranked her neck so fast, her ponytail lashed her own face.

  “Okay, not everything,” Harrison clarified. “But why you’d go in her room and look at her stuff and all that? It’s kind of like sitting in silence. Like in the tunnel. Once you do it for long enough, you can hear the noise you didn’t notice before. That’s what it was like being with her stuff too. Even being near it. When I was out last night trying to find where you hid all of it, I
just stopped and listened. I could imagine where Marley would put it. I don’t want to say I heard her, but yeah, like I said, I get it.” He gave me a cautious half smile, raising the side of his face that was turned away from Aidy. “Earlier, I was up here by myself, looking around and thinking about her. Boom, the floorboard comes loose.”

  My mouth wiggled, trying to decide if he got a smile back. My lips folded inward and spread anyway. He did understand, in his own way, and because of that, he found a piece of the real Marley no one ever knew about.

  He found the end of the Adventure.

  The four of us sat up in that room for a while, taking turns passing the letter back and forth, not saying anything. I think we were all imagining ourselves as Marley, trying to hear the world around us as she once had.

  Eventually, Aidy put an end to it. “We have to finish Dad’s to-do list,” she whispered.

  We left the haunted house and went back to our own, spending the rest of the afternoon ticking off items on my dad’s list, as uneventful as it was productive. Nick kept his letter in the back pocket of his jeans. Seeing it sticking out, a tiny triangle of our Marley meant just for him, filled me with hope.

  Everything was something.

  I’d been right all along.

  My dad came home early. First, he inspected my lightly bruised face, accepting my half-truth about falling while outside; then, he inspected our house, most impressed at the sight of my bedroom carpet, marred only by the small cigarette mark Ruby had burned into it all those years ago.

  Mom came home sometime after, trailing happy tears from top to bottom. A clean garage! My neat bedroom! Even my bruises did not deter her. She was so pleased, she invited Harrison and Nick to stay for dinner.

  Despite my best efforts to stay grounded, I drifted up one last time, so high above reality I could do nothing but watch us all as we sat around the dinner table making small talk. It was a perfect window into the life we might have had. A world where Marley would be eating dinner three doors down from us, home from college for a few weeks. Her great-great-grandfather’s birdhouse clock would chirp out its hourly greeting, that California quail celebrating his temporary freedom right as Marley would back her chair away from the table.

  “I’m going over to the Stantons’,” she’d tell her dad.

  “Be home before midnight,” he’d tell her.

  “Dad, please. I’m an adult now.”

  “I know, but you’re still my baby girl.”

  I never had to close my eyes to see it, but I needed to close them to erase it. Squeezing tight, I releasing that imagined life like a balloon, letting it float off without me attached to it. When I opened my eyes again, Nick placed his hand atop my leg and squeezed three times.

  I put my hand atop his and squeezed back.

  We finished our meal. Nick offered to wash the plates. Harrison offered to take out the trash.

  “Time for the boys to be on their way,” Dad said when their voluntary chores had been completed.

  Aidy and I escorted them to our front door.

  “Thanks,” Harrison whispered to me. “I needed this.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Bro.”

  “Nah,” he responded with a laugh. He gave me a quick, committed hug, then kissed Aidy on the cheek. “Love you,” he told her. He ducked his head and took a left, off to his spot along Albany Lane.

  “Love you too,” she replied.

  The three of us watched his shadow disappear into the night. Aidy turned to Nick and me. Her lips squeezed tight as she swallowed back what looked like tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it’s not enough, but I am.” She left before she got any more emotional, bounding up the stairs and into her bedroom.

  Nick and I stepped outside. We craned our heads to see the sky above us. No matter how I squinted, my Marley was indecipherable among the blur of stars.

  “Do you feel her anymore?” I asked him.

  “Not like I did before.”

  “Me neither. But I know she’s still there.”

  “I do too.”

  Nick and I stayed like that, standing side by side, gazing at the stars, until my dad came out to say Nick needed to go home.

  Nick kissed my cheek. “Goodbye, Olivia,” he said.

  “Goodbye, Nick.” He turned left, crossing Arbor Street and jogging into his house along Albany Lane, the last of Marley’s chess pieces to be returned to position.

  When I went back inside, I learned Dad didn’t buy the last-minute Hail Mary save I’d pulled off. He put more stock in Aidy’s words from the night prior, and explained to me that I needed to pack a bag for camp. Aidy came downstairs to stand beside my dad, her eyes pained but certain. Plans had been made, and there was no room for changes in execution.

  “You need to be there, Olivia,” she said. “You need to find yourself again.”

  So, I’ve been going through the same motions I did five years ago. Taking the classes, speaking with new therapists and counselors and support groups. Swimming. Eating a thousand of the little yogurt parfait cups they make. The new ropes course is nice, my dad was right about that.

  It’s not the same as it was five years ago when I balled my fists and shouted, “You don’t understand,” every time they tried to tell me my Marley was a coping mechanism. A response to the trauma I’d suffered. Everything but a person.

  Now I’m using my time here to find my own interests again. Make the most of the next few weeks posted up in cabin four. The other people here, as young as seven and as old as seventeen, are all the strange kind of normal, which is to say they’re the kind of people I appreciate. I don’t mind Camp Califree. In fact, I quite like it.

  It’s never been about hating it.

  It’s always been about leaving home.

  But I have to remember who I am without Marley on my shoulders. Even though I don’t carry her anymore, I still keep her with me in different ways. And I want my family and friends to see that it’s okay for me to do that. I want to iron out all the kinks in my truth and present them with something that’s completely mine.

  I want to show my sister, who held me so tightly when I left and whispered to me, calm as the sky before a tornado, “Let yourself heal.”

  I want to show my parents, who kissed my forehead and waved me off, then leaned into one another like bookends without a book to hold.

  I want to show the other kids on Albany, who write me letters and send me gifts. The rock from Ruby sits beside me now. She drew a star on it for me. And a tiny letter M.

  I want to show everyone, from the other residents of Cadence to complete strangers, that things that are lost are not gone.

  I’d never been on an airplane before I came here for the first time. When I’d watch one fly overhead, I didn’t consider a person inside it, pressing their forehead against the window, seeing the towns below as nothing more than colors and shapes: beige square, green circle, jagged brown triangle.

  On my way here for the second time, I realized that below me, someone must be standing there watching like I used to, full of hopes and dreams and wishes and wants, pains and truths so large they could reach up and touch my plane. No matter how hard I looked, I never saw that person. They never saw me.

  Both of us were there.

  It’s up to every one of us to realize that a white sliver in the sky is not only an airplane, and the earth below it is not only colors and shapes. It is people inside of people inside of people, all of us filled with pieces of the ones who came before us. We hold on to their strengths and their weaknesses. Their memories. Their laugh. Their scent. Their spirit.

  Believe me.

  Just believe at all, because it always takes more than one person to strengthen the power of something. If ever someone stops believing—gives up hope and accepts that someone is lost forever—there is another person who ha
s to try harder. Hold on tighter. Sometimes too tight.

  The beautiful thing is, if the person who gave up finds the courage to return, to pick back up what they’ve tried to leave behind, the load is lighter for all.

  I want everyone to remember that.

  There’s so much to remember, isn’t there? How can we ever keep track of it all?

  With the help of others, of course.

  In the endless stream of things to keep track of, my name and my story might get misplaced as years pass. But by being here now, I will remain somewhere inside of everyone I’ve ever met. I will be remembered through them in ways they might not notice. They will pass me on to their family and friends. I’ll go out and out until I’ve touched all corners of the earth, just by stepping outside of my small town and into the bigger world. I will not look the same as I do to myself or those that know me. But I will be in every beige square and green circle, waving my arms at the people inside the planes overhead.

  Marley’s wishes are now my wishes are now my friend’s wishes are now the next person’s, and so on and so on.

  That’s how I will send Marley out of Cadence and into the world she never got to meet. That’s how I will set her free, remembered as she was, not by what happened to her. She existed in every corner of this story, and now she exists in new shapes yet to come, reaching further than she ever could’ve imagined on her own, finally cashing in the pennies and dimes she saved inside her trophy.

  From now until forever, the world will never be without Marley Bricket.

  Acknowledgments

  For a while, this story wanted to press on all my bruises and pour salt in all my wounds. But I’m writing my thank-yous, which means this book and I finally set aside our differences and started working together. It also means you, dear reader, are in possession of a very specific, jagged, tender, emotional, imperfect piece of my heart. It will never stop being a surreal, gratifying thrill to know you are here.

  My agent, Taylor Haggerty, you handle my freak-outs and my celebrations with poise and care. I am forever grateful you plucked me out of your slush pile all those years ago. You are the best teammate in this publishing adventure.