Down World

by Rebecca Phelps

  “Brady told you about Piper?”

  “It wasn’t his fault. Don’t get mad at him. I made him tell me.”

  “Of course,” he said, nodding as if to himself. “You like him.”

  I broke away from him then, feeling the blush fill my cheeks despite myself. “What? No, I don’t,” I insisted weakly.

  “And so you’re glad Piper hasn’t come back.”

  “Of course not. Do you think I’m a monster?”

  “No,” he said, looking at me again. “You think I am.”

  I shook my head, but I couldn’t deny it. A monster is exactly what I had been told Kieren was for the past three years.

  “I’ll tell you more,” he continued. “But not here. Someone else might be coming. Let’s get our bikes. I’ll take you home.”

  We walked together down the corridor and up through the boiler room, sneaking out of the gym entrance past a group of sweaty basketball players who were taking a short break by the water fountain. We didn’t say anything to each other the whole time, and yet I felt like we had broken through something. The silence between us seemed comforting, not strained.

  Out back, I saw his old Schwinn locked up next to my bike, so they sat side by side. I realized he must have gone home after school and then come back. It was the first time I’d seen him on something other than his skateboard, and I wondered if Kieren had come back here only to look for me. Or had he come for the same reason I had? Maybe he did visit Robbie after all.

  I didn’t ask, though. If the answer was yes, I had a feeling he’d tell me in time. We biked alongside each other, able to cut through a nearby park now that the warm spring air had thawed the last of the winter ice. A bloom of pink petals rained down from a row of cherry blossoms, forming a pink sea that lined the path back to my house.

  Finally, we got to the end of my street, the same place where he had stopped the last time. We pulled over, our legs straddling our bikes. He stared in the direction of my house. “I can’t go any closer,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “She still hates me.” I knew he meant my mother. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement, as though he had been in my house over the past few years and knew it to be a fact.

  “She hates everything,” I told him, and hearing the words out loud, they sounded very cold and perhaps a little too dramatic. But they were true.

  He nodded, still looking at the house. “If she ever hurts you, you come and tell me.”

  “She’s not like that. She just . . . she’s sad. I hear her sometimes . . .” It was hard to talk about my mother, but it occurred to me that I had never had the opportunity to tell anyone what it was like to live with her. No one had ever asked. “I hear her in the bathroom crying. Sometimes she just closes her bedroom door. She doesn’t come out. I want to knock. But I don’t.”

  “I do care,” Kieren said then. “About Robbie. Of course I care.”

  “I know you do. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “I’ve been trying, M, to find a way. A way to get him out of there, but for good.”

  The shock must have taken over my face.

  “There’s a group of us. We’ve been working on it for a long time. Piper was part of the group. But she acted alone and screwed everything up. We weren’t ready yet.”

  “I’m in,” I said. I didn’t even think. “Whatever it is, I’m in.”

  Kieren stole one more glance at my house and started to turn his bike around. “You know the pyramid house? On the other side of town.”

  “Of course I know it,” I said with a laugh. “You dared Robbie and me to spend the night in it once, remember? What about it?”

  “Tell you later,” he said, and then hopped up onto his seat.

  “Tell me what later?” I asked. He didn’t hear me, though. He had already ridden away.

  The next morning, I was licking the last bit of whipped cream off a stack of blueberry pancakes at Pat’s Diner, my parents both chewing absentmindedly on either side of me, when a woman I didn’t know approached us, staring intently at my mother. She was about Mom’s age, but she somehow seemed younger. Maybe it was the flowing white dress or the long, braided hair falling halfway down her back.

  “Rain?” she asked, as she approached the table. She said it like it was a name.

  My mother’s eyes opened wide for a moment, then darted back down to the table. She straightened herself up and seemed to shuffle for a moment, so visibly uncomfortable that my dad and I couldn’t help but exchange a glance of concern.

  “Ana,” my mother said, revealing her own name. “It’s Ana.”

  The woman seemed confused for a moment, but nodded when she took in me and my father—some hidden conversation they were having right in front of us.

  “Ana. Of course.” Then she offered my mother a smile that seemed so completely genuine and warm, there was no doubt in my mind that she had not confused my mom with someone else.

  “I’m Sage,” she said to my father, when no introduction came from my mother. Another weird name. My father stood up and shook her hand, and when he did, a bracelet full of little blue beads rattled on her ample wrist.

  “Steve,” my father responded, and my mother seemed to snap to life upon hearing his name.

  “Sorry,” my mother said, shaking off whatever thought was clouding over her brain at the moment. “Sage, this is my husband. My daughter, Marina. You remember.”

  “Marina,” Sage exclaimed. “My, my, my, look at you. I met you once, but you wouldn’t remember. You were very young.”

  Dad looked to Mom then, clearly waiting for an explanation that wasn’t coming.

  “Jesus, she looks just like you, Rai—Ana.” She turned to me then, her big, warm hand enveloping mine. “You look like your mother, did you know that?”

  I shook my head, because I didn’t really know what the appropriate response was. I did have my mother’s Mexican coloring and brown hair, but my father’s Irish eyes. Honestly, considering the tired, defeated look my mother usually had these days, I didn’t really consider her comment a compliment.

  “Such a beauty,” Sage continued.

  “Sage and I grew up together,” my mother offered. It was an awkward addition to the conversation, however, not betraying a hint of warmth. Instead my mother seemed caught, as though Sage might reveal secrets about her that I wasn’t supposed to know.

  “Won’t you sit down?” my father asked.

  My mother waited a beat too long before seconding the offer. “Yes, please sit down.”

  “We have to be going, thank you.” Sage nodded over her shoulder to a man at the counter who could have only been with her, judging by his all-white clothes and the string of beads hanging around his neck. “We’re just in town for a couple of days.”

  My mother’s eyes flickered to the man with a flash of recognition and a half-hearted smile, but then she looked away again, back to Sage. “Your mom still live here?”

  “No, she passed,” Sage said, the calm in her voice not wavering for a moment, as though she had come to peace with the fact.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” my mother said, and I could tell it was true. “She was very warm.”

  “Yes, she was,” Sage agreed. “George and I wanted to see the old grounds.”

  “They’re gone,” my mother offered, a bit too quickly. My mother looked again at the man by the counter, who offered a sad smile of recognition, but made no move to approach her.

  “Yeah, so I saw. Just a gas station now, huh?”

  My mother nodded. “And some fast food places.”

  My father put his hand on my back then, almost in a protective way, and I wondered what he was protecting me from. What were the old grounds? And who was Rain?

  “Well, I guess that’s it, then,” Sage concluded, and for the first time a bit of sadness cro
ssed over her face. “The end of the road.”

  My mother nodded. She offered the woman another half smile. “I should go say hi to George,” she said, as though it had just occurred to her.

  “He’s not feeling well. Maybe next time.”

  My mother nodded and settled back into her seat, somehow chastened. “Tell him I hope he feels better,” she said so quietly I almost didn’t hear her.

  Sage smiled and nodded, causing all her jewelry to jangle around her.

  “It was good to see you, Sage.”

  “You too, Rain.” Sage caught herself, a beat too late. “Sorry . . . Ana.” She turned to me then and smiled. “Such a beauty.”

  Sage walked away, the little beads on her wrist rattling and a scent of some kind of exotic oil trailing behind her, and we all watched as she and George left the restaurant.

  The walk back to our house from Pat’s Diner was typically awkward. My father whistled an old tune that I recognized from an album he used to play, and my mother pretended to smile whenever she caught my eyes.

  “Lana’s gonna come over later, okay?” I asked.

  “Of course,” they said in unison, but they were both distracted.

  The rest of the day, I tried to put the lady from the diner out of my mind. Christy and my friend Lana from St. Joe’s came over, and we painted each other’s nails and talked and watched old romantic comedies from the ’80s. Lana had a boyfriend, she told us. Christy had been promoted to first violin in the school band. I was happy for Lana. I was happy for Christy. But my mind kept drifting.

  Had my mother been living a double life all these years? What else about her past didn’t I know? My friends kept talking, but I didn’t hear a word they said. My mind was fixated on one thought:

  Is her name really Rain?

  My mom came into my room late that night after the girls had left and sat on the edge of my bed, something she hadn’t done in a long time.

  “Did you have fun with your friends?” she asked. She looked so beautiful in the light from under my door, her hair pulled back and a soft black sweater on. Little blue earrings I hadn’t seen her wear in years were dangling from her earlobes, and I think she was even wearing lip gloss. I wondered if she and Dad were having a little date or something.

  “Yes,” I said. But I couldn’t help thinking about how far away from the other girls I had felt all night, like there had been a wall between us. Maybe that wall was Robbie, or DW. There were so many things that didn’t get said in this house. Which was why what my mother said next surprised me so much.

  “I know how hard it’s been for you, Marina. I know you’ve been alone. And I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.” I had understood for a long time that my mother was depressed, and that there was nothing she could do about it.

  “It is and it isn’t. We all make choices. But I want you to know how much I love you, how proud I am of you.”

  The tears started to sting behind my eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time she had said something like that to me.

  “You’ve done everything right,” she continued. “And I know how strong you are. Stronger than you realize.”

  I took her hand, and she clutched mine with both hands.

  “You are my warrior,” she said. She kissed me on the forehead and said it again. “You are my warrior.”

  “I love you, Mom.”

  She nodded. “I love you, too, Marina.” She smiled at me before she left the room.

  It was the last thing I remember her saying to me.

  In the morning, she was gone.

  CHAPTER 8

  At first, my father and I assumed Mom had gone to visit Robbie’s grave. She would sometimes do that without telling anyone, just to be alone there for a while. But after several hours, when she hadn’t come home, we called the cemetery. They hadn’t seen her.

  My dad made a few phone calls. Neighbors stopped by. People came and went. And the day grew long and hours passed. Soon it was getting dark. There was no word of her.

  You are my warrior, she had told me. What did that mean, Mom? Did you think I was strong enough to live without you? Did you just leave?

  A police officer came by after dark to tell us they believed she had been spotted. A man had seen someone walking on the train tracks near the station late the night before, after my mother had said good night to me. The woman on the tracks matched my mother’s description. According to the officer, the woman had been standing in the middle of the tracks, as though waiting for the train to come hit her. The witness screamed for her to get off the tracks, but apparently she said she couldn’t. She insisted that she had to wait for the train, then shouted something else that the man couldn’t make sense of. So he called the police. But by the time they arrived, the woman on the tracks had left.

  “We suspected . . . ,” the officer paused, eyeing me before deciding whether to continue, “perhaps attempted suicide.”

  I could feel, rather than hear, my father inhale by my side. The air in the room became quite stiff, oppressive even.

  “We searched but couldn’t find her. We can’t be sure it was your wife.” The officer was a middle-aged man, wide around the middle, with more hair on his knuckles than on his head. He couldn’t look my father in the eye, and instead talked to his chin.

  “And then about an hour ago, we get a call from the high school. Security guard was reviewing some footage this morning and he caught a woman sneaking in through a back window in the middle of the night. No record of her leaving, however. We’ve searched the school, but we can’t find any trace of her.”

  “You think it was her?” my father asked, and I couldn’t gauge from his voice whether he found any of this surprising. It was like he was made of steel.

  “We need you to come look at the footage, sir. To verify it.”

  My father nodded, his hand on my back. I remembered how he had put his hand on my mother’s back while they were telling me about Robbie’s accident.

  I love you, too, my mother had told me.

  “You can do it in the morning, if you’d like,” the officer continued, twirling his wedding ring around his fat finger, where it tangled with his knuckle hair.

  “I’ll come now,” my dad answered, turning to me. “You’ll be okay for a bit?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  He kissed my forehead, and they both stood up and turned to leave the room. But before they could make it very far, I stood up myself.

  “Sir?” I asked.

  “Yes?” the officer responded.

  “The man who saw her on the tracks . . .”

  “You mean the witness?”

  “The witness, yeah. He said the woman on the tracks said something that didn’t make sense. What was it?”

  The officer glanced at my dad, as if looking for permission to respond. But my dad was already lost in his own mind.

  “She was raving,” the officer said, shaking his head. “Something like, ‘It’s on the tracks. It happens on the tracks.’”

  It took me about fifteen minutes to bike down the path to the train station, after sneaking down the stairs at one in the morning and carrying my bike from the garage, through the kitchen, and out the back so as to not wake my dad by opening the garage door. He hadn’t been able to confirm much at the police station. The surveillance footage had looked like her, but it was blurry enough that he couldn’t be sure. He had come home about an hour after leaving, his shoulders slumped, and kissed me good night.

  A light rain fell on my head now, which I tried to cover with a hoodie that blew off the moment I started pedaling. Soon the rain soaked my hair and made my jeans stick to my ankles. I kept pedaling anyway, even as the denim against my skin felt like icy fingers pulling my knees in the opposite direction.

  The first bolt of lightning came as I approached the train
station and threw my bike down on the pavement. I started walking along the track. Looking for what, I had no idea.

  I felt like a complete fool. I became aware suddenly of how cold I was, shivering, my teeth chattering. There was nothing on these tracks but cold rain. I was empty and numb, so I decided to head back to my bike. But first, I took one last long look down the length of the tracks, as far as I could see through the dark swirling images that danced in the rain.

  And that’s when I saw the figure.

  It was far in the distance, maybe a hundred feet down the tracks, down in the part where the accident had happened. For just a second, seeing the silhouette against the gray splattering rain, I felt like maybe it was him—Robbie. Like somehow he had escaped and had come to find me. I ran towards him.

  But, of course, it wasn’t him. And not until I was a few feet away, the silver curtain of rain the only thing between us, did I see that it was Kieren.

  He was examining the tracks, as though looking for something, walking with his head down. He didn’t see me approach.

  “Kieren!” I called.

  He looked up, startled. “Go home, M.”

  “What are you looking for?” I asked, my voice cracking a bit.

  “Nothing.”

  My lips were quivering from the cold and I could feel my whole body tremble.

  He threw up his hands, frustrated. “Come on,” he said. “You’re freezing. Let’s get you inside.”

  “How did you know to come here?”

  “Inside,” was all he said. He took my arm and guided me back down the tracks.

  We didn’t speak as I picked up my bike and started pushing it. Kieren lived a block from the station, and I didn’t realize he was taking me to his house until we were at the door.

  “Around the back,” he said, taking my bike and leaving it under an eave as we walked around the side of the house to a sliding glass door that led to the downstairs rec room.

  The rec room was just as I remembered it from years before, the same posters on the wall of some basketball players I didn’t know from the ’80s. The posters, I assumed, belonged to Mr. Protsky, Kieren’s dad, and I realized in that moment what a great disappointment it must have been to him that his son had no interest in sports.