The Year We Fell From Space

by Amy Sarig King

  “Who hugs you when you cry?” she asks.

  “I don’t cry,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay,” she says. She waits a few seconds. I finally sit back down in the chair and I look over at the whiteboard. Jan’s looking at it, too. “Can I tell you what I think?”

  I nod.

  “I think you’re putting everyone before Liberty. I think you’re a really helpful girl and you were probably already putting your family before yourself long before your dad moved out. I think you can’t see this because you’re so used to it,” she says.

  “Please stop calling me Liberty. I’m sitting right here,” I say.

  “Sorry,” she says. “But do you see what I mean? Because you’ve lived with parental depression your whole life, you’ve probably been doing this your whole life. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess.” We never really talk about Dad’s depression, so this is weird.

  Jan says that maybe I’m hiding my feelings. She says maybe I’m scared to peek out from my shell—like a turtle. I don’t say anything. I don’t think I’m a turtle. I think I’m pretty good at showing my feelings. I got here by throwing a toaster, anyway.

  She says, “I have homework for you. Nothing big, but it can be hard.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want you to let people in your life deal with their own messes. If your sister is sad, let her be sad and don’t try to make her happy.”

  “That’s mean,” I say.

  “How will she learn to make herself happy if you’re always doing it for her?”

  “I—” I stop myself because I have no idea how to answer her question.

  “Let them be them. You be you. Promise me that you’ll think about it,” she says. She looks over at the whiteboard. “Is that the Big Dipper?”

  “Yep,” I say.

  “It’s accurate?” she asks.

  “Did you think I just put dots up there without knowing what they were?”

  She shakes her head like she can’t believe it. “I’m concerned about what’s going on at school. Have you told your mom? Does she know about this Leah girl and how no one talks to you?”

  “She knows a little bit.”

  “I think you should tell her everything. She can talk to the principal,” she says.

  “I’ll talk to her,” I say, but I don’t mean it. Next year is middle school. More kids from the other elementary schools and I’m sure I’ll find a friend.

  That night, I can’t sleep right. I keep thinking about Leah Jones and Mom telling the principal. I can’t tell Ms. S. what’s going on. It just wouldn’t be right.

  Anyway, things at school are a little better than January. Some people in my class are even trying to talk to me again. I bet they’d let me sit at the cafeteria table, but I still eat lunch with Malik. He’s the only one I trust.

  Leah’s missing ring story has died down. No one ever found it and Leah’s mom must have figured out how to be okay with that. People have to be okay with all kinds of things.

  Missing rings, missing fathers.

  Things go missing all the time.

  Except I know where Dad is.

  And I know where the ring is, too.

  Jilly has started her countdown to the last day of school on the chalkboard in the kitchen.

  “Forty-two days left!” she says.

  School ends on June 14 this year.

  The whole month of April, we didn’t go camping once. Which is weird because that’s when we’d usually start. Mom was still testing out the boots and other gear she got from work by walking around Lou’s fifty acres and pitching tents and stringing flysheets in the backyard. Wasn’t the same. One day I came home and she had three sleeping bags in the living room. She said we were going to pretend-camp.

  Definitely wasn’t the same.

  Now it’s May. Forty-two days until the last day of school. One hundred and five days since the beginning of our fall from space.

  And now you think I’m a thief.

  But I didn’t steal anything.

  Misplacing and stealing are two different things.

  We were supposed to stay with Dad this weekend—we haven’t seen him since the baseball game three weeks ago. It was supposed to be our first official all-weekend stay in the new bunk beds, but he called Mom five minutes ago to tell her he can’t do it. Again.

  Mom was supposed to go hiking with her friends. Her pack was by the back door ready to go—next to our backpacks. When she hung up with Dad, she slung all three packs onto her back, dropped ours in our rooms, and went to her room to unpack hers.

  “You okay?” I ask when she comes downstairs.

  “Fine. How are you two?”

  Jilly gives a thumbs-up and I say, “Good.” Her face looks concerned. I add, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Totally fine,” she says. “But I want to get outside. How about we go to the hill together tonight?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t really feel like it.”

  “You could make a map!” she says. With an exclamation point. As if that’s exciting.

  Once Jilly is in bed and snoring, we go to the hill.

  Mom likes to just lie here and stare. I do too. I have paper in front of me and a pencil in my hand, but I don’t want to draw. I want to tell Mom about Leah, mostly, but I don’t know how to bring it up.

  “What’s that one?” Mom asks.

  I look toward where she’s pointing. “What’s it look like to you?”

  “A giraffe.”

  “Then it’s a giraffe,” I say.

  “Isn’t there already a giraffe up here?”

  “Yours looks more like a giraffe than that one.”

  “What’s the bright star on his head?” she asks.

  “Arcturus.”

  “It’s amazing that you know all this at your age.”

  “I was raised by you,” I say.

  “Your dad gave you the stars, Lib. That’s his thing.”

  Silence.

  “He’s been so weird,” I say. “Especially when he took us to the baseball game.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s just getting used to life on his own, I guess,” she says.

  I look at Mom’s giraffe stars, Arcturus brighter than the others. “So how come he couldn’t take us this weekend?” The stars turn into a wineglass—the kind with the long stem. Around the top is a lipstick stain. I don’t draw any of it.

  “That’s adult-stuff,” she says.

  My limbs go tingly and numb at the same time. I want to say something but I don’t know what to say. I stay quiet because maybe Mom will eventually realize that her answer was insulting.

  I look back at the sky. I see three new constellations.

  An explosion.

  A broom.

  A frying pan—the frying pan I learned to make grilled cheese sandwiches in that’s at Dad’s house now.

  I sit up and hurry to get the dots on the paper. I connect them. I see that the explosion is in front of the broom, as if the broom is cleaning up a mess. And the frying pan acts as the dustpan—the place where the broom is collecting the explosion.

  Mom says, “Are you all right?”

  I hum and nod. No time to answer her. No time to explain how it feels to get the pictures before I draw. No time to clean up another mess of insulting answers and excuses. No time to tell her about Leah Jones and the missing ring.

  When I turn off my headlamp and lie back down on the blanket, I see it clearly in the sky. I am the broom. I am the explosion. I am the frying pan.

  Jilly is petting the meteorite like it’s a cat.

  “I don’t get it,” Jilly says. “I know Dad loves us but he doesn’t seem it.”

  “He loves us,” I say. “But he’s just going through something hard, I guess.”

  We’re on my bedroom floor doing a jigsaw puzzle that we’ll never finish.

  “I’m going through something hard too,
” she says. “Doesn’t mean I just throw my family away.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “I hate this puzzle,” she says.

  “Me too. Let’s put it away and do something else.”

  The phone rings. Both of us sit up straighter.

  Mom tries to keep her voice down, but she can’t. House is too small and her feelings are too big. “You can’t just waltz in halfway through Sunday,” she says. “I’m already making dinner.”

  Mom isn’t making dinner but I don’t care that she’s lying.

  “No. Not while you’re like this,” she says. “No. Not even on speakerphone.”

  Jilly hears this and can’t stop herself and I’m not fast enough to stop her either. She runs down the stairs and says, “I want to talk to him!”

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. That’s what Mom will say later.

  People think depression looks like one thing. Sadness, usually. I guess people who don’t know much about depression think that people who have it walk around crying or being pessimistic all the time. But depression isn’t that easy to describe. It’s different for everybody. From what Dad’s said, he feels like someone else, which is weird, but since I’ve known him for twelve years, I can say that it looks that way from the outside, too.

  It makes him do things like snap or yell or stare into space or drive away for a few hours or sit in a room with no lights on for a day or hug us too long or curse and say he shouldn’t be on planet Earth. It makes him do things like cancel our weekend together on a Friday and then call up on a Sunday and ask Mom if he can have us for a few hours because he feels delayed-bad for canceling.

  “Hey there, kiddo!” I hear his pixelated speakerphone voice echo in the kitchen.

  “So whatcha doing?” Jilly asks.

  “Well, I called Mom to ask if maybe I could take you girls out to dinner tonight but she … uh … but it might not be a good idea. So we’ll have to save it for our next weekend together.”

  “When’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  Mom says, “It’s the seventeenth.”

  “It’s forty days ’til the end of school,” Jilly says.

  Dad says, “Hold on. It can’t be the seventeenth. I have plans.”

  Mom doesn’t say anything and I feel like I should go downstairs but I know if I do, my arms will turn into brooms and I will try to clean up the mess that’s being made over the phone line.

  “It’s forty days until the last day of school,” Jilly says again.

  “We’re going to have to switch out weekends,” Dad says. “I’m not here on the seventeenth.”

  Mom says, “Jack, you’ve had the schedule for months. It’s on your phone calendar. It’s in a spreadsheet. It’s what you agreed to. You can’t just switch things in and out.”

  “And Liberty found a meteorite!” Jilly says. My heart drops.

  Dad laughs. “It’s probably not a meteorite, honey. Those are pretty rare.”

  “How would you know?” Jilly says. “You haven’t even seen it.” I hear her walking and then stomping up the steps. My arms are brooms. My legs are brooms.

  All I hear before Jilly explodes into my room is Mom saying, “You can pick the girls up on the seventeenth at five, like it says on the paperwork … No … No. Stop, Jack. Just … I’ll talk to you when you’re feeling better.”

  “Can you believe he said that?” Jilly says.

  “Yeah. He’s not himself,” I say.

  “He’s a jerk is what he is,” Jilly says.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “He can act like a jerk sometimes, but he’s not a jerk,” I say with my broom mouth, my broom tongue.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Jilly says. “Why aren’t you mad? It’s your meteorite!”

  “We had a deal,” I say.

  “I know … but I wanted to tell him. You know, so maybe he’d come get us when he’s supposed to or something. I mean, it’s a meteorite, right? It’s something he’s interested in. It’s … it’s special.” At this, Jilly crumbles.

  All my brain can come up with to say are broom words. You’re special. You’re more special than a meteorite. You’re interesting. He didn’t mean it that way. He’s unwell.

  Instead I say, “I can’t believe you told him. Just leave me alone.”

  Before I can find my broom hands to clean up my own mess, I’m walking down the stairs, through the kitchen, past Mom, who’s staring into space at the kitchen table, and out the back door. Across the deck. Across the yard. Down the path that leads to Lou’s first tree stand. Mosquitoes are out. They bite me and get bellies-full of broom blood. I don’t even swat them away or turn back for bug spray.

  I get to the tree stand—a metal platform high in a tree with a ladder—and I climb. Hunters sit up here for hours in the fall waiting for deer to walk into range. I lie on the platform and I feel weightless. Then I roll on my side and look out over the forest and scare myself thinking about how far I would fall if I fell.

  When I go back inside, Mom has dinner almost ready. I set the table and we sit down to eat.

  Jilly starts crying before we even start eating. “I’m sorry, okay?”

  I nod and force out a smile so she won’t make a big deal.

  Mom says, “What’s going on?”

  Jilly says, “Nothing,” through her tears. It’s not convincing. Obviously.

  I eat the rest of my dinner in silence.

  When I’m done loading the dishwasher, I take my Sunday-night shower.

  I see myself as the broom. I watch as all the dirt I swept up spirals down the drain. It’s a lot of dirt. More than just today. More than a month. More than a few months—since the week we fell, or before that.

  I think about how maybe I was a broom before I ever knew it.

  I talk to the rock about it.

  “Jan was right,” I say.

  The rock says, “You should probably tell your mom about Leah and the ring.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “I’m right, though,” the rock says.

  “I’m not even talking about that,” I say. “I’m talking about how I clean up everyone’s messes.”

  “Okay,” the rock says.

  “It’s not about any of that other stuff,” I say.

  “Okay,” the rock says.

  Don’t think I’m going irrational. It’s just that I need a friend and what better friend to have than one that’s been in space? How many kids at my school have been to space? None. How many of my parents? None. How many psychologists? None.

  Library day at school starts with a jinx.

  At the bus stop, Finn Nolan asks me if I did my science homework.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Can I borrow it?” he asks. “Just for the ride to school.”

  I don’t want to say yes. But I also know Finn needs the homework. But I also know he could toss it out the window just to get me in trouble.

  I hand it to him and he says, “Thanks, Liberty. You’re saving my butt.”

  He gave me the paper back when we got off the bus and said thanks again.

  I just never know what I’m getting with Finn Nolan.

  Library is the second class of the day. I hover by the R books in the fiction section. I pretend like I’m looking for a book, but I’m not. I’m looking at the place I hid Leah Jones’s ring. I’m wondering what I should do about it.

  Leah is sitting at a study desk with her fake-husband of four months, Mike, and they’re giggling about something. She looks at me and I look away. She says, “Mrs. Hanson! Liberty is staring at me again!”

  The librarian ignores her. Or doesn’t hear her.

  I start sweating. I try to take a few deep breaths. It’s as if the air-conditioning in the whole building just got switched off.

  “Liberty? Come sit down. You’re red. And pale.”

  In my mind I’m thinking no one can be red and pale at t
he same time, but I feel both red and pale, and Mrs. Hanson is a librarian, so she probably knows best.

  I keep my eyes closed once I sit at her chair. The room rises in a buzz of conversation as she kneels next to me and asks if I can make it to the nurse’s office.

  “I probably just need some air,” I say.

  She touches my forehead. “You’re burning up.”

  Just like a meteor hitting the atmosphere.

  The nurse takes my temperature and I’m 102.3. I fall asleep on the cot waiting for Mom to pick me up.

  Three hours later I’m taking a pill the size of a small dog. It’s strep throat. I have to stay home for the rest of the week, but I should be fine for our weekend with Dad. Mom works from home on Thursday and Friday because she’s worried. On Friday she finds me standing in the kitchen staring at the toaster.

  “You okay?” she asks.

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  I can’t tell her what’s really happening.

  Every time I walk by the toaster, I still feel like throwing it.

  Every time I walk by the R bookshelf in the school library, I want to retrieve Leah’s mom’s ring and return it.

  I don’t do either.

  First sleepover at Dad’s house. The bunk beds are great. The kitchen is filled with our favorite snacks. Jilly seems fine and I’m okay.

  Dad is still skinny and kind of pale. He says he’s sorry this took so long. He wants Jilly and me to know he’s getting better but he doesn’t know how to tell us because he says he’s not good at talking. We’re in the kitchen.

  “It’s like there’s a thing that makes me mad when I’m not even mad. But I am mad, just not at you. Or your mom. I’m mad at stuff that has nothing to do with you guys. At all.”

  Jilly and I look at each other.

  He says, “I know you’ve heard me yelling but it wasn’t really me yelling.”

  It was totally him yelling, by the way. No one else came into the house and yelled for him.

  “I mean, of course it was me yelling. And you heard me yelling at your mom but she didn’t do anything wrong. Same as when I yelled at you two. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s me, not you. You know? I mean, I have problems.”