The Edge of Falling

by Rebecca Serle

  “Who’s that?” Astor wants to know.

  He glances at me, his hands tight on the steering wheel. I reach down and pull open my bag. On the screen I see Trevor’s name flashing. I want to pick it up so badly. My finger itches to hit the green button, but I know I can’t. Not now. I should have listened when he told me all of that on the sidewalk. I should have let him hold me. Make me stay.

  “No one,” I lie.

  “Obviously someone is calling, Caggie.” There is an edge to his tone, a second layer that makes my insides feel cold. It’s so stupid that I’ve never thought of this before. That it’s only come to me in the front seat of his car, speeding toward Hayley’s grave, but here it is: I don’t trust him.

  I know what it’s like to be where he is. Right on the edge. Anything is possible when you think nothing is left anymore.

  “It was just Abigail,” I say quickly, hoping my quick breath doesn’t give me away. “We’re partners for a history project.” He places his free hand on my shoulder. He exhales like he’s been holding his breath for hours. “Sorry,” he says.

  I feel his hand on my arm like the wind. It makes my hairs stand on end, my goose bumps rise up like speed bumps.

  I smile back. “We’re almost there,” I say.

  He turns up the music, something low and melodic. I keep my cell phone in my hand. I want to call Claire, Trevor, Peter. I want to hear their voices, to tell them where I am. But I can’t. Not with Astor. He’s not stable, and now I know he never has been. It didn’t start on the sidewalk a few hours ago. It didn’t even start with that room in his house. It has just floated up to the surface tonight after being buried for months.

  Here’s the other thing about grief: It will stay as long as you let it. And if you find someone who wants to hold on too, it will bind you to them. It’s ironic, really, how desperately grief does not want to die.

  “No one can know where we are,” Astor keeps saying.

  He swings left and I gesture up ahead. The road splits, and our driveway is down the right-hand side. The ocean side.

  I’ve imagined coming here so many times since January. What it would feel like to turn down this familiar road. To see the headlights sweep left and then settle on our house: gray shingles, white beams, wraparound porch. You can’t see the pool from the driveway. It’s out back—an infinity pool that seems to run straight into the sea.

  “Not too shabby,” Astor says. The house will be boarded up, but I took our spare key.

  The one Peter and I have kept hidden underneath the flower pot on our front stoop. Peter had it made so we could come out here without our parents knowing. Weekend parties, overnights when I would sneak Trevor up and Claire would cover for me, saying I was sleeping at her place downtown. I was surprised to find it there, although I don’t know why. It’s not like either one of us has had to use it recently. Not until today, anyway.

  Astor kills the lights in the driveway and leans across the seat to me. I can feel the cell phone in my palm, and I squeeze it. Willing it to transport me somewhere far away from here.

  He hovers over me. “Hey,” he whispers.

  What was once sexy, heady, now feels claustrophobic.

  This car is too small for both of us.

  He places a hand on my cheek. Moves farther in to kiss me. “We made it,” I say, because I have to say something. My voice shakes.

  He notices.

  “Are you okay, Caggs?” His lips are at my ear. A flare of anger ignites inside me like a firecracker. Anger

  at him for using my nickname. Anger at myself for thinking he knew me. For letting him in and ending up back here.

  “Let’s just go,” I say.

  He kisses my cheek, then opens the door. I wait for him to come around, and in the time he does, I hold the number 2 key down on my phone. It’s Claire’s speed dial. I turn the volume down low and pray she picks up. Pray she listens.

  Then I slide the phone into my skirt pocket, speaker facing at, and get out of the car.

  There is a stone pathway to the front door that usually lights up as soon as you step out of the car (it’s set to sensors), but tonight it doesn’t. “The electricity must be off,” I mutter. Astor takes his lighter out of his pocket and flicks it, a lick of flame igniting his features. “Got any candles?” he asks. I slip the key out of the opposite pocket, the one without the phone, and feel my way to the front door. I slide it in. It gives easily.

  The moon off the water illuminates the house, and I see that it’s been emptied. There is a sunken living room that used to have two facing couches with a glass coffee table in the middle. The coffee table had floating shells framed in it, something Peter and I had made for Mom on her birthday a few years ago. All the shells we found on our beach—the Hamptons doesn’t have too many, so there were big pieces of beach glass in there, too. I remember the coffee table books, one about French cooking and another about interior design, all with uncracked spines. There were shelves on the walls with family pictures and a mantel with two candelabras, purchased on my mother’s trip to Belgium. Now there is nothing here. Not even the light smell of lilac and lavender and garlic that always seemed to linger, even if we hadn’t cooked in the house in weeks.

  Astor comes up behind me and slips his hands around my waist. “Give me a tour,” he murmurs into my ear.

  “There isn’t much to show anymore,” I say. I’m sure with his arms around my chest like this, tight, pulled, that he can feel my heart beating. It’s pounding, erratic, like it’s attempting to claw its way out of my body, scramble along the floor, and escape out to the dunes.

  “What used to be here?” he asks.

  I loop his arm over my head, out from me, and step down into the living room. “The kitchen is that way.” I gesture right, toward the French doors. We both look down at the empty room, the wood kitchen island stranded in the middle of the tile floor like a shipwrecked man.

  My eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and when I look at Astor now I can see his features. I never noticed how sharp they were. Chiseled. Like he’s been cut from marble.

  “Where was Hayley’s room?” he asks.

  I knew he was going to ask. Astor isn’t interested in the family room. He doesn’t want to know where we used to keep the board games. But the words still feel like fingers crawling up my spine.

  “This way.” I swallow.

  I lead him away from the kitchen and through the sunken living room, the hallway that used to be lined with family photographs—ones of us swimming in our summers here. I see them like negatives on the walls: Hayley with her giant heart sunglasses on, slipping down her nose. Hayley wearing her water wings, nowhere near the pool.

  We round the corner, and then we’re in her room. It’s empty, of course. No more rocking chair. No easel. No line of clogs or toy chest or coat rack where she used to hang her rain slicker, the yellow one with the polka dots that looked like little stars. It’s still carpeted, though, and her drapes are still hanging—big, pink, and billowy. Our mom picked them out. Hayley hated them.

  Astor and I stand in the doorway, and when he takes my hand, it startles me. I feel like a ghost here. Like Hayley: untouchable in my translucence.

  “Where did they take her things?” he asks me.

  “I don’t know.” I have no idea what Peter did with everything. Where they shipped it. Whether they threw it away or sold it. I think about those clogs and that slicker. The thought of someone else wearing them, or worse, them lying at the bottom of a land-fill, makes my insides feel like they’re being wrung out. Astor tugs me by the arm to the center of the room.

  He paces around, peers out the window. I’m watching him, trying to read him—any sign of what he might do. Then he goes over to the closet and opens it. “Hey, Caggie,” he says. “Looks like they missed something.”

  I walk toward him slowly. My feet feel like they’re made of lead. I hate this. I hate that we are here. He picks up a box.

  The standard shipping size
—two by two by two. Astor sits down on the floor, pulling me down next to him. He flicks his lighter again, but it doesn’t illuminate that much more—my eyes are almost entirely accustomed to the darkness now.

  He runs his forefinger along the seam. Wiggles the tape loose.

  “Stop,” I say, but he doesn’t listen.

  I can hear the waves crashing. They sound closer than I remember.

  He pulls back the top, and then we’re both peering inside. It’s filled with what looks like trash: Q-tips and a rubber duck and nail-polish remover. I pick up the rubber duck, turn it over. I don’t remember Hayley having this. These must be things Peter didn’t feel were worth storing.

  I’m relieved. It could have been photos. It could have been clothes. One of the box could have opened and smelled like her.

  But then I see a black Mary Jane poking out from the bottom. The shoes we bought for her Eloise birthday party. I fish it up. I cup it in my hands. I cradle it there, like an antique—something fragile and expensive.

  Astor sets the box down. “How does it feel?” he asks me.

  “What?”

  “Being here.”

  I force myself to look at him. “Like I miss her,” I say. Like hell, I want to add.

  “Are you sorry we came?” He runs his eyes over my face. I feel like they leave track marks.

  I gawk at him. “You didn’t give me any choice.”

  He leans over to touch me, but I slide back. I think his fingers will be cold. All at once, I don’t want them near me.

  “Caggie,” he says. “It’s okay. I understand.”

  I just keep staring at him. It’s like I’ve never seen him before.

  Something is starting to form, bloom in my stomach and climb up to my heart. Astor hasn’t asked me to talk about Hayley, he hasn’t wanted to know how I’m doing with her death, with what happened in May, but what he’s required has been worse. He’s offered his loss up like a diamond. He’s given it to me, the way Peter gave me his watchful eye, the way Claire gave me her concern. But simply understanding doesn’t make it better. Sometimes darkness stacked on darkness just makes it that much harder to find the light. I don’t want to live in this place. I don’t want my life to be an addendum to her death.

  Astor is edging closer to me, and I know, all at once, that there is a good chance I won’t make it out of here. That we either won’t leave here alive or we won’t go back. There are some things from which we don’t recover—some places that, once visited, cannot be forgotten. But there’s something I can do to move forward. I can tell the truth. I can set the record straight.

  Suddenly the images of last May are too much to bear, so vivid that if I close my eyes I’m afraid they’ll capture me. That I’ll never escape the memory. But I need to tell someone. Someone needs to know. I’ve stayed silent, but look where silence has gotten me. Pushing everything away, running, is what has brought us here. I’m ready to stop. Even if we don’t come back, at least the truth will.

  I touch my thumb to my pocket. I pray. Please, Claire, hear this. Please, Claire, you need to know.

  I take a deep breath. “You read those articles about Kristen?” I say. “About what happened last May?”

  Astor doesn’t move, not even to nod, but I press on. I have to tell her.

  “I didn’t save her,” I say. “I couldn’t have saved anyone. That was the whole point.”

  I never thought I’d say this out loud. I thought I’d take this secret to my grave. But now that I’ve started down the road, I know there is no going back. My words are strong, set, hard—like a piece of clay baked in an oven. They’re ready to come out.

  I look at Astor. His eyes are unblinking. I imagine I’m talking to Claire when I say, “I went up to the roof that night because I didn’t want to live anymore. I went up there to jump.”

  My memory flashes, calls up the imprinted scene in my mind. Me climbing over the railing. It had all just come apart that week, the grief that I had been trying to keep down low. The things I had been trying to push out into the ground through my feet. I was barely surviving, and then Trevor broke up with me and I felt like I had lost everything. That there was no point in existing anymore. I remembered the police officer’s comment: For the rest of her life, that girl is going to wish she had died instead.

  He was right. But I couldn’t take her place. I could only join her.

  Jumping was secondary. Like an afterthought. The only thing that mattered was getting up on that roof.

  I know it sounds stupid, unbelievable, even, but I didn’t think too much about it. I figured if I got up there, on that ledge, what would need to happen would happen. There was a man who jumped from his terrace in Abigail’s building fifty years ago. He lived four floors below her Penthouse, and he died on the spot. I remember reading about it in a book of news clipping my dad kept in his study. I figured I didn’t have to worry about that part. It would get the job done.

  Was I going to jump? I’ve tried a lot since that night to look back on it, to sort through the memory and determine whether I was actually going to catapult myself over that ledge. The honest answer is that I don’t know. I’m not sure.

  What I do know is that the ledge felt like the only place where I might have a shot at peace. It was the only place in the whole city I felt like it might be quiet. That I might escape the cruel memories that attacked my mind daily—every second, every moment. What came after being up there I couldn’t quite get to. I just knew that if I was closer to the edge, there’d be more space. From past and present. From the things I had done and hadn’t done. On that ledge there wasn’t room for anything else, not memories and not regrets. There wasn’t room for anything but this one thing, this one act of over and out. This space—the middle between living and dying.

  Kristen just showed up. I was standing on the edge, looking down, watching the cars swaying beneath me, when I heard her behind me.

  “Mcalister. Don’t.” That’s what she said.

  I turned around, just enough to tell her to go away. “You don’t have to be here,” I said.

  “Please give me your hand.” She acted like she hadn’t even heard me.

  I remember she seemed tall on that roof. Strong. Not the small midwestern girl who sat in the back of English class. She was a warrior up there. She might have been a hero.

  A “Give me your hand.”

  I didn’t move. I wasn’t sure how. When you have that much adrenaline pumping through your body, it’s hard to make it do anything. The connection between your brain and limbs loosens—there isn’t the same call and response. There wasn’t space to feel anything up there, not even fear. I don’t think I was sure, if I jumped, whether I’d fall or fly.

  Kristen climbed over then. She just stepped up to the wall and dropped one leg over, then the other. In hindsight she should have kept one foot planted on the other side; she should have straddled the stone railing. But I think her body was doing the same thing mine was. It was reacting. She was fearless.

  She climbed all the way over so we were both standing on the ledge. No more than sixteen inches wide. Foot. Foot. Foot. Foot.

  She took my hand. I let her.

  “Just step over with me,” she said. She touched my leg like she wanted it to follow her. “You’re going to be okay,” she said. It wasn’t the first time she said it.

  “One, two, three.” She made a move to lift her foot, and so did I, and they knocked each other. Just a tap, but the shift in balance made her step sideways. Except there was no sideways. There was only sixteen inches and then air.

  Our hands were still locked, and I felt her body drop, the snap of contact through our palms, and then my body following, catapulting forward. Down.

  I reached around and grabbed the wall. Held on for dear life. She screamed. People came running.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I said. The same words, slipped, mirrored. I don’t know whether they were out loud or not. But I know she heard them. I’m sure o
f it.

  I’ve never used that much strength. I pulled like I was pulling her out from quicksand. Or water. Like I was dragging her out from the bottom of a pool.

  I blink and look at Astor. He’s watching me with a quiet fascination, like he’s sorting through my words. Organizing and categorizing them.

  “‘The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one,’” Astor says.

  It’s a line from The Catcher in the Rye. I just look at him. It’s like I’m seeing him for the first time. The real him. The boy who never got over the loss of his mother. Who holds her memory embalmed, like a stuffed deer head on the wall.

  And suddenly the thing that binds us, that holds us together, breaks like a rope that splits at the seam.

  “Grief isn’t a cause, Astor.”

  Once I say it, the fear begins to evaporate. The fear I’ve been holding since that day, here, in January. The fear I’ve had coming out here—what he’ll do. Because for the first time tonight I realize that what he’s capable of doesn’t matter.

  What matters is me—what I can do. What I will. “We’re the same,” Astor says.

  “No,” I say, “we’re not. We’re nothing alike. You haven’t let go.”

  He leans forward. “And you have?”

  I look at him. Hard. “I’m about to.”

  He stops for a split second—poised, hovering—and then:

  “This will help.”

  In the next moment, three things happen.

  The first is that Astor takes his lighter and holds it out in front of him. Like an offering. Like a candle on an altar. I know what he’s going to do before he does it, but I’m not quick enough to stop him.

  The second is that I hear voices shouting my name from outside. Voices I recognize. Voices that sound like home.

  The third is that Astor takes the shoe out of my hands, drops it into the box, and sets the lighter flame to the edge of the cardboard.

  I just sit there for a moment, watching him. So this is the tragedy. This is the inherent bad that was always going to come of tonight. I knew we might not make it back. I knew tragedy might strike again here, but I didn’t know what form it would take.