When the World Tips Over, page 23
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. “Oh okay, don’t worry, I’m not…” Miles said, again trying to hide the disappointment. He could feel blood rushing to his face.
“Oh, yeah, I know you aren’t,” Felix replied, “of course not. I didn’t mean…”
“No, I know, I didn’t think you did.”
“Okay, all good.” Felix’s cheeks were as flushed as Miles’s must be.
“All good.”
“How about I dig a hole and we both jump in?” Felix said, and they each laughed a nervous, awkward laugh, nothing like the train of hilarity they’d boarded together earlier. Felix went on. “But what I really need to tell you is that when I left, I got a ride from Denver to this tiny Northern California town, about five hours away from here, spent a week at these hippie hot springs up there, then got a ride down to Paradise Springs with this girl named Cassidy in a super cool vintage orange truck.”
Miles’s heart blew open. He jumped to his feet. “Cassidy? No way!” The relief, the joy, caught him off guard. “You know her? Wow, dude. So that means you know where she lives?”
“I know the town she lives in,” he told Miles. “I know where she works too.”
“Holy shit!” Miles said. “Let’s go. This is amazing! We’ll bring her back. She’ll wake my brother from his coma!” Miles was entirely aware he sounded like Dizzy. “Yes, I know, dude. I sound wacko,” Miles said. “But we have to find her! Got a driver’s license?”
Two hours later, Felix, Miles, and Sandro were heading north on Hidden Highway on a mission to find Cassidy. Miles was in a flurry of hope, half-bewitched even, like if he spoke to the trees hugging the winding road outside the window, they might speak back.
Cassidy
Starting where I left off, Wynton. Had to slip out for some coffee to keep going. I really do feel like Scheherazade. Felix, the guy I drove down here with, was right on about that. He’s a trip. I can’t wait for you to meet him.
Okay. Mom and I are creeping south on Hidden Highway, headed straight for the second betrayal. And our meeting – yours and mine, Wynton – in the meadow when we were thirteen. I can’t wait for you to enter this story! Hidden Highway is the kind of road we usually avoid in Sadie, but it’s the only way to get to Paradise Springs (your town!) from the north. The only way to find Dave Caputo, who, if you recall, weeks before, left us in the night after asking my mother to marry him and me to be his daughter. Do you know him? So strange it was Dave who led me to you.
Anyway, Paradise Springs is in a valley we’ve never noticed on the map before – which we find odd. I’m in the passenger seat of Sadie, scraping a peanut butter jar clean with a spoon. We’ve never been this low on supplies before. We’ve never been so skinny either. Weeks with Mom in The Silent World and me waiting for the sound of Dave’s rig returning have taken a toll. All I want is to see him again, to become a fearsome threesome like he promised, to be his sous chef, to have him carry me around again like a surfboard. I’ve never known a want so unwieldy, so consuming. Nor have I known a fear like the one gnawing into my every thought, making my heart beat too fast: It can’t be Mom and me alone anymore.
“We’ll get there in a month at this speed,” I say. We’re going ten miles per hour now instead of the thousand mph of earlier.
“So be it.”
I unbuckle myself and go in back, sit at the table.
“Aren’t you going to tell me to fasten my seat belt?” I yell up at her.
She doesn’t answer, making my rebellion useless. I strap myself in, then ball my hands into fists, letting my ragged dirty nails dig into my palms until I see blood.
I think a terrible thing: Maybe Dave will take me and be my father even if he doesn’t want to marry Mom anymore.
I’m holding my breath for as long as I can, in rounds. On the fifteenth go, I hear Mom say in a strange voice, “Cassidy, come up here, please.”
Mom’s pulled Sadie into an overlook on the side of the road, so I walk easily to the driver’s seat to peer over her head out the panoramic front windows. We’re on a ridge over a valley blanketed in vineyards. There are hot-air balloons in bright colors floating at different heights. It’s gorgeous, but I know that’s not what has swept my mother’s face clean of heartbreak and disappointment, of acedia – her spiritual torpor. She points and says, “See there?”
In the distance, surrounded by vineyards and orchards and redwood forest is a hillside town that, from this angle, looks like it’s floating in the air. There’s a river wending and winding back and forth through it all the way to the valley beneath.
“The Town,” I whisper, not quite believing my eyes.
“Maybe,” she says, taking my hand. “I think so. Finally.”
We descend a mountain road full of hairpin turns. I buckle into the passenger seat. The river begins cutting into the highway so we’re crossing rickety wooden bridges and catching glimpses of waterfalls cascading down rock walls. We’ve rolled down the windows and Sadie is full of the sound of rushing water, the scents of eucalyptus and pine, and a sweet thick aroma we can’t place until we hit the valley floor and trucks loaded with grapes begin joining us and the road turns more and more purple as we go, as clusters of grapes fall off trucks and are smashed by tires, including ours.
“I think I’m getting drunk from the air,” Mom says. “Must be harvest time.”
“It’s the purple brick road,” I say.
As we ride along with the grape trucks, I notice orchards of avocados, olives, figs. I see a brown horse and a black one side by side, their coats gleaming in the sun. Fields of cows chomping on grass. One vineyard we pass has a band of fiddlers playing while women in flowery dresses like we wear stomp grapes in a giant wooden vat.
Their laughter sounds like bells as we pass.
I pinch my arm to make sure I’m awake.
“No wonder it’s called paradise,” Mom says.
It occurs to me we’ve crossed over into one of her In the Time of Forever stories. I’m imagining how we’re going to live happily ever after with Dave in his dream shack in The Town, this place we’ve been looking for almost my entire life. “Makes me wish I could paint,” Mom says, awe in her voice, her eyes fixed to the window. “I told you we’d feel it in our bones, didn’t I?” I nod. She was right. I feel it in every bone. “I just don’t understand how we missed this whole valley,” she says. “Why didn’t I notice it on the map before?”
“Maybe it wasn’t on the map before.”
She looks at me and smiles. I know she’s thinking those words could’ve come out of her mouth and I’m feeling it too, our sameness again, but it doesn’t feel treacherous like it has lately.
“You’re my best friend,” I say to my mother.
I see her eyes fill up. “And you’re mine.” I can’t believe all the bad things I’ve felt and thought about Mom in the last few minutes and weeks (and years!) and how they’ve all been erased by the feeling I have now as we approach The Town together in Sadie Mae.
We take the turn-off for Paradise Springs holding hands, full of hope.
Cassidy
And then Sadie Mae is parked outside of Robert D. Caputo’s house, the address we found at the library in Jackson. If Dave’s wreck of a rig weren’t in the driveway, it would be inconceivable that this is where he lives. The house is palatial, a glass castle in the middle of the forest. There’s a wildflower garden on one side of the house and a spectacular succulent garden on the other. Rhododendron bushes line the path to the door and trellises with waterfalls of peach polka roses are all over. There’s a grand redwood tree in the center of the yard.
Edenic, adj. of or resembling the Garden of Eden.
“Oh boy,” Mom says. “Didn’t expect this. Expected more of a hippie shack.”
“He built it,” I say. “With his hands.”
“But he said it was a shack. I’m sure he did. Didn’t he?” I nod. She goes on. “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to ram Sadie right into that wall of windows.” I look at Mom, shocked. “What? I would.” A sudden storm of mirth breaks over us and we both start to laugh. “We could roll Sadie through this gorgeous flower garden on the way.” This breaks us up further, giggling and chortling in the front seat, feeling like criminals. “C’mon,” she says. “Let’s do this. Let’s find my betrothed.”
“My stepfather-to-be.”
We open Sadie’s doors, full of bluster, full of some righteous purpose, a feeling that he’s ours, that this is our dream, our town, finally. A feeling of Mama Bear, Papa Bear, and Baby Bear living happily ever after in The Town. It’s like we’ve forgotten that he left us without a word, that he lied to us, tricked us. I have anyway. Mom takes my hand, and we walk down the pristine path to the house.
(Wynton, I need to remind you here that we haven’t bathed or brushed our hair or teeth or eaten much for weeks. We smell rank and are skeleton-thin and our skin’s a mosaic of dirt and residual despair. Our sundresses look like used napkins. Our hair could nest flocks of birds, or more likely, bats. Mom’s bare feet are so black, they leave prints on the light gray slate path as we approach the glass mansion. We must look like creepy ragamuffin dream-creatures, out of time and out of place, but we don’t realize this yet.)
We knock on the door, our spirits high and hopeful as they’ve ever been.
Then there he is: Dave.
Because the house is mostly glass, we see him coming toward us down the long white hallway.
Let’s stop time here: Because this is a moment of tumbling joy for me. It’s the marooned me seeing a plane circling over my desert island, me waving my hands, me climbing up a rope rescue ladder out of a terrible untenable predicament. Delightful Dave the Dazzling Dick Weasel, I’m thinking repeatedly in this moment. I don’t care how different he looks, that he’s cut his hair and shaved his face, that he’s so clean, so scrubbed of the elements, of us and our time together. I don’t care that there’s this new thing about him I can’t identify because it’s so unfamiliar to me, but I will tell you now what it is: wealth. Dave looks rich. He has that casual, easy air of entitlement, of safety, of predictability. He’s wearing loose-fitting jeans with a long-sleeved crew-neck burgundy shirt that hugs his chest. He glides gracefully through the glass house, like water.
A geyser of hope goes off in me.
“Dave!” I exclaim under my breath, jumping in place, thinking: Papa Bear! Unable not to think it.
Because we’ve stopped time, I can tell you for this split second, before tick turns to tock, before my heart breaks, betrayed for the second time, before my mother’s and my world spirals even further into uncharted despair, I see that the first expression that crosses Dave’s face on seeing us through the glass wall of the glass house is an expression of relief, of joy, of Thank God. That, for him, for this split second anyway, we are his rescuers too.
Mom grabs my hand and I squeeze hers.
But time doesn’t stop when we want it to – Wynton, you know this more than anyone – when we need it to; it plows ahead like a runaway train with no conductor, and so there’s a woman, also gliding gracefully down the hallway behind Dave, a woman with long brown hair in a loose ponytail, an elegant pretty woman in flowing black pants and a tank top, a woman, I imagine, with a closet full of shoes and a kitchen with marble counters who goes to Pilates class and maybe runs a company from a corner office. A woman I’ve only ever encountered on celluloid. She’s followed by two children, a dark-haired girl who seems to be four or five years younger than me with bright eyes carrying a stuffed purple hippo and an even younger boy, a wild-haired, milk-mustached kid who looks more like the Dave I remember than the Dave before us. He’s holding his sister’s hand. Dave’s frozen in place now; any remnant of relief or joy on his face has been replaced by terror. Except for Dave’s expression, this family, Dave’s family, clearly, looks like a stock photo trapped in a frame behind glass.
And we’re about to shatter that glass.
Dave jumps into action. We watch like it’s a movie as he tries to herd his wife and kids away from the door, shooing them back down the long white hallway, but it’s too late because the woman’s opened the door and the kids have bottlenecked at her feet. There’s fury in her eyes.
Mom’s making a choking noise beside me. I sneak a glance at her, see she’s swaying like her knees may be buckling. She grabs my shoulder and nearly pushes me to the ground. My heart’s never beat like this. I wonder if my chest’s going to burst.
Dave’s saying, “I got this, Joanne.” Joanne. Joanne’s face has gone so pale, it seems like it would be cold to the touch. I can smell her perfume. She doesn’t wear jasmine oil like we do, but the kind of perfume people spray at us when we go to department stores to buy Mom’s lacy underwear.
Joanne turns to Dave and says, “This is them?” Says it like we’re roadkill that’s been brought to her doorstep. But he’s told her about us? Mom pulls me to her as if to shield me from the woman’s disdain. The woman flips a dismissive hand at us, her nail polish like little fires at the end of her long fingers. “This is them?” she repeats, staring at us, something even more disdainful than disdain in her voice now: amusement.
Her nose twitches then, and that’s when I realize we smell.
Mom, Dave, and I all seem to have lost the ability to speak. My stomach growls and everyone looks at me. This seems to plug Dave’s faulty cable in. “Yes,” he says to Joanne. “This is Marigold and Cassidy.” Then to Mom, he says, “Marigold, I’m so sorry. This is my family.”
“Are they homeless people?” asks the little girl.
“They stink,” says the boy, breaking into a fit of giggles.
I gasp. I’m a dirty smelly girl with a dirty smelly mother.
“They need a bath,” the boy says.
“Who are you?” the girl asks me.
“They’re no one,” says Joanne, gathering her kids up in her long arms. “A client of Daddy’s.”
The girl says, “But why’s she crying?” It takes me a moment to realize she means me. I wish my mother would say something.
The woman squats and says to the kids, “Who’s hungry for popovers? Last one to the kitchen’s a rotten egg.” And then she says to Dave, “Get rid of them.”
Get rid of them.
I can’t breathe.
They’re no one.
How is everyone else breathing? Before the woman follows her children to the kitchen for popovers (my stomach’s hollow with hunger) she meets my mother’s eyes and says, “Leave my family alone. Leave this town and never come back.”
My mother, who still hasn’t spoken, nods at the woman. “I didn’t know,” she whispers.
Something passes between the two of them, something I don’t understand, but whatever it is, it wipes the meanness off the woman’s face for an instant, and underneath it there’s a sadness to match our own. She nods at my mother, then turns and sweeps down the hallway without looking back.
Dave exhales, shuts the front door with them on the inside and the three of us on the outside. Dave and I are both looking at Mom. She seems to be vanishing like a blue morpho butterfly that looks as if it’s appearing and disappearing when it flies away from you. I’m scared she’s already in The Silent World, but a new standing-up version.
Except then, like the blue morpho, she blazes back to us. “How could you do that to me?” Her face is rigid, her eyes hard, and her voice is about as fierce as I’ve ever heard it. “How could you do that to Cassidy?” Her eyes are lasers shooting into him. Not a blue morpho but an assassin bug now that injects its poison right into the body of its prey. “You’re a monster. A lying, hypocritical monster in Gucci jeans in a fucking literal glass house.” She’s spitting the words at him. “You disgust me.”
He reaches for her arm, but she pulls it away from him. “Do not touch me.”
“You’re right. I am a monster,” he says, his voice reeling with emotion. “I’m so sorry, Marigold. There’s no excuse for what I did. I got so carried away. I wanted to be that guy, not this guy.” He gestures toward the glass palace. That’s when I notice Dave’s shrinking, as if vertebrae are being pulled out of his spine one at a time. “I never left that master’s program, never drove away from everything expected of me. I wanted to but didn’t have the guts. I’m a coward. I’ve never done anything not expected of me. Until you. My father, he just – I am an architect with my dad’s firm in San Francisco. This is his house. We summer here.” He points to the rig. “Mushrooming’s a hobby.”
“Like us,” Mom says. “We were this summer’s hobby.”
Does Mom notice that Dave’s shrinking?
He closes his eyes. “No. I fell in love with you, Marigold. I didn’t know what to do.” His voice has matched hers with its fierceness. “I fell in love with both of you. Felt more at home in your life than I ever have in mine. I couldn’t resist. You were living my dream, and I lost my mind. I was so happy up there with you two.” He’s like a devil’s flower mantis, I think, an insect that pretends to be the flower it sits on. He pretended to be like us but he’s not like us. “So many times, I wanted to tell you but…” He meets Mom’s eyes. His voice breaks when he says, “I just didn’t want to ruin it. I felt like … like I was inside the sun for that month. Or it was inside me. I’ve never had that feeling before, not even close.” He runs his hands through his hair, messing it up so it’s more like I remember. “I meant everything, every word I said to you. I left that morning to come here and tell Joanne I was leaving her. And I did. I told her everything. She asked me to stay for a few days. To give them that. That I owed them that. A few days turned into a few more. Then a few more. And it all started to feel like some dream. Like some make-believe—”
Mom’s crying now and it’s too much. Dave’s words are too much. Dave’s shrinking is too much. It’s all too much. “I don’t want to be the make-believe part!” I shout. “I hate make-believe. I’ve always hated make-believe. I hate you both!” Then I’m running away from the big glass house, from my make-believe mother in her make-believe world, from Dave, who’s someone else’s father, not mine. I’m running from weeks of living in the cramped sour squalor of my mother’s psychic vacancy. I’m running from this feeling of existential unworthiness I never knew was in me until: This is them? Until: They stink. Until: They’re no one. Get rid of them. Running from the cleanliness and order and predictability of these rich people who make me feel like – no – make me see what I am: a dirty smelly girl who belongs to a dirty smelly mother who is not right in the head and never will be.
