When the World Tips Over, page 30
“Miles, are you okay? You don’t sound like yourself.”
He laughed. “I’m good. Really good actually. What about Alonso and Sebastian? Do you know about them?”
I do.
C’mon, Sandro. Shhhh.
I won’t shush. Also, I wish there’d been one dog in the stories. Talk about a lack of representation. If you ever become a writer, Miles, I hope you give me a voice.
Promise, Miles told Sandro, reaching his hand down to shake his paw.
“Who’s Sebastian?” his mother asked. “And why are you thinking about this right now? Seriously, Miles, are you okay?” She paused. “All I know is that Alonso and Maria came from Spain and started the vineyard with six magic vines. Ha! I sound nuts too. But I do remember your grandfather Victor telling us about the magic vines the day I met your father. I was just writing about that. Anyway, Alonso founded the town in – can’t remember – early 1900s maybe? But who is Sebastian?”
“He was Alonso’s boyfriend,” Miles said.
“Miles, where are you getting this information? Alonso was married to Maria.” She paused, then exclaimed, “Wait! Sebastian’s Spanish Bakery was the name of the café we leased when my parents and I arrived in Paradise Springs. The place that became our soufflé shop. It wasn’t owned by the Falls then though, some out-of-towner. I remember it had been empty for decades. My father thought it was beshert, like it had been waiting for us.” This jarred Miles. Could there be some truth to the stories, then? Was it the same Sebastian? How he wanted it to be.
“Apparently Cassidy’s researching Alonso Fall for some college course on California history because he founded the town. She told Felix all these stories about him when they drove down together, weird ones full of giants and floating people and curses. Obviously, she took artistic license.”
“That’s odd.”
“I guess she came down to do more research or something.”
“Well, if it’s true, couldn’t have been easy being gay back then.”
Miles thought about this. How over a century ago, his great-grandfather seemed to live his life more on his own terms than Miles did. He had an impulse to tell his mother then and there that he too was gay. Instead, he said, “We’ll be back soon. Promise.”
“Please. I need you both. I think Wyn does too.”
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
Miles spotted a hawk soaring above the treetops, followed it with his eyes. “I have this memory of Wynton and me on swings and Dad was there, and we were close, like really really close. I don’t know what happened…” He hadn’t known he was going to share this.
His mother was silent for a moment and then said, “I think it was very hard on your brother when your dad left. He changed after that and—”
“But he and Dizzy are so tight … so … why not … me?” He hardly ever talked like this with his mom. But something had shifted in him. He didn’t know if it was Wynton’s accident or finding out Wynton went to jail for him or Dean Richards telling his mother the truth about him. Or maybe it was hanging out with Dizzy and Felix last night and Cassidy before that. Or who knows? Perhaps it was Cassidy’s stories now rolling around in his head. But he definitely felt different, like all the rooms inside him were being redecorated.
“Oh Miles. Maybe this is the wake-up call. When Wynton’s better, hopefully you two will finally be able to have a real relationship.”
“Maybe,” he said. But that seemed impossible to imagine. It was easier to believe that they were cursed. Their relationship felt cursed to Miles.
He said goodbye and slipped his phone into his back pocket. He looked upward half expecting to see Alonso and Sebastian waving to him from above, but there were only a few puffy clouds idling over the treetops. Miles had been hearing about and dismissing the existence of Dizzy’s floating ghosts for a very long time – she’d freaked when Alonso and Sebastian rose into the air for the first time in Felix’s story. “It’s the kissing ghosts, Miles! I knew one of them was Alonso Fall! I just knew it!” Sure, he wanted floating spectral ancestors who were queer. I mean, seriously, who wouldn’t?
Too bad he didn’t believe in ghosts.
Wish we could float too, he told the dog.
Oh, me too! Sandro the levitating Lab!
Miles laughed. And Miles the hovering homo!
Miles rubbed noses with Sandro, then stood as Dizzy and Felix spilled out of the shop, grub in hand. Miles shared that Wynton might’ve made some progress, then Dizzy started in about the kissing ghosts again.
“I’m so happy the kissing ghosts are Alonso and Sebastian!” she said for the hundredth time that morning. She handed Miles a wrapped sandwich. “I so want to be like Maria Guerrero, don’t you? She just does whatever she pleases.”
“She’s the giver of zero fucks,” Felix said.
“I want to be like Alonso Fall,” Miles said as he began unwrapping his sandwich, curious what the chef got him.
“You are Alonso Fall, Miles!” Dizzy and Felix both blurted, their voices overlapping.
“Except Miles isn’t gay,” Dizzy said matter-of-factly to Felix.
“I am actually,” Miles said, the words falling from his lips easy as rain.
There was surprise in Dizzy’s expression, and excitement. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Oh my God! You are so Alonso Fall. I had no idea you were cool this whole time!”
Miles realized he was shaking. Because he’d just done that. He’d actually done it! “I think I’m having a spiritual awakening,” he said, hoping he sounded at least a little ironic.
“I am too,” Felix replied with no irony.
“Oh good,” said Dizzy. “Maybe you’re both mystics like me.”
“Mystics in the middle of freaking nowhere,” Felix said, and they laughed. Then Felix’s hand landed on Miles’s shoulder. “Good work, Mr. Fall,” he said. Miles’s throat tightened and eyes burned at the gesture, the words, the acknowledgment of what had just happened. Telling Dizzy was the equivalent of yelling from the rooftops. He’d come out. For the briefest, boldest moment, Miles rested his trembling hand on Felix’s, which still was on his shoulder, and when their eyes locked, he was certain all the doors in all the world blew open.
He felt as winged as Maria, exultant, like his heart was expanding in his chest in fast motion. There was some fear too, at the edges, for how everyone else was going to respond, but for now they ate their sandwiches (Felix had gotten him egg salad with avocado on pumpernickel). Between bites, they all smiled at each other like they were legit brainless.
“Keep going, Felix,” Miles said as they climbed back into the truck. “What happens next?”
The Fall Family Curse
(As Told to Felix by Cassidy on the Drive to Paradise Springs, a Week Earlier)
This is what happened in the time of forever on the day of Alonso’s murder.
Alonso, Sebastian, Maria, and Bazzy, now sixteen, were seated around a table eating lunch on the porch. At first, they thought nothing of the shaking ground and rattling air, assuming it was a tremor. The vineyard was empty of workers, as it was Sunday. They held on to their chairs, waiting for the earthquake to subside, when Bazzy pointed, fear in his face. “Look!” he said. A goliath of a man tromped down the long drive with a teenage boy of normal size in tow.
They all watched the giant stop to sink his teeth into one of the redwood trees that lined the drive, then felled another simply by touching it. Alonso’s blood ran cold. Maria stood. “It’s the end,” she said. Sebastian went inside, and when he returned, he was holding a rifle.
“No,” Alonso said. “No violence.” Sebastian lowered the hammer and uncocked the gun.
“But who is it? What is it?” asked Bazzy, nervous.
“That giant man is my brother. But not a good kind of brother. Not one in blood or spirit,” Alonso said. He took a breath, met Sebastian’s eyes, said, “Purple green blue.”
“Purple green blue, Alonso.”
Some families have their sorrows doled out over a lifetime, a little tragedy here, a little there, still others seem to live joyfully for decades only to have the suffering come all at once, one tragedy piling up on the next. This family was the latter. For years, there was barely a raised voice, barely a tear shed in the big white house. There were birthday parties, harvest feasts, hikes to waterfalls, endless dinners in the vineyard with friends from town. There was the delight of raising Bazzy, who spent his afternoons after school crashed in the vineyard reading books – the black dog from down the way always by his side – and his nights kissing neighborhood girls on rocks in the moon-filled river. But to Alonso, Bazzy, with his wildfire hair that now nearly grazed his shoulders, remained his love bug, no matter the boy’s age.
The world darkened as the shadow of Hector fell across the porch, across the life Alonso and Maria had built from nothing. Alonso walked down the driveway toward his colossus of a brother and, he assumed, his son, Victor, trying to control his gait so as not to reveal his quaking terror. He told himself that surely all Hector wanted was money, and Alonso could and would be generous with him. Bygones be bygones.
But Hector had something else in mind. He lifted his massive hand out of his massive pocket and at the end of it was a gun.
In a flash, Sebastian re-cocked the rifle, pointed it at Hector’s heart, and pulled the trigger, but he wasn’t quick enough. Sebastian’s bullet didn’t save Alonso’s life as it took Hector’s.
Both Fall men fell dead in the same moment. Then, right there on his feet, Sebastian released a soul-shattering cry and died of grief, which made it easier for his spirit to hop-walk out of his body, down the porch steps, just in time to reach for the hand of Alonso’s spirit the moment it struggled free of Alonso’s body. Alonso and Sebastian, in spirit form now, entwined, then retired to the sky to get reacquainted in their new incarnation. (Who knows what happened to Hector’s spirit? Perhaps he didn’t have one.)
Three men dead, and for what?
Bazzy and Maria laid Alonso’s and Sebastian’s bodies side by side on their bed in the purple green blue room. The wailing of mother and son could be heard as far as the city, as could the vengeful words of Hector’s son, Victor, directed at Bazzy: “I will take your life for my father’s.”
By morning, Alonso’s and Sebastian’s dead bodies were holding hands. No one could explain this. A real love story is not falling in love once, but again and again through all sorts of incarnations. Theirs was a real love story.
A statue of Alonso was erected on the town square.
Bazzy, grief-stricken over the loss of his father and Sebastian, cut off his fire-red locks and enlisted in the air force when he turned eighteen. While overseas, he fell in love with a British nurse named Ingrid who died in childbirth. He returned home to Paradise Springs with his three-month-old baby in his arms: Theo Fall.
Maria called her grandson, Theo, love bug.
Despite her sorrows, Maria lived on for son Bazzy and grandson Theo, her hair never graying, instead growing redder, and perpetually tumbling with flowers. It filled her entire bedroom while she slept, and when she walked to town, she was her own floral procession. She spent her days writing in a journal, recording everything that had happened.
But there was Hector’s son, of course. Victor was equally as cruel as his father, but far cleverer. He never returned to the half-eaten manor across the sea. Instead he moved into the white house and learned to keep his nefarious intentions to himself, play-acting as a brother to Bazzy, and eventually marrying a woman named Eva, with whom he had a son, Clive.
Then at the age of twenty-four, Bazzy was killed in a tractor “accident” – Victor, the only witness. Well, the only sentient witness. Alonso and Sebastian saw the murder of their son by his “brother,” Victor, who wanted the Fall vineyards for himself.
You see? Another generation, different Fall boys, different circumstances, same tragic outcome.
After Bazzy’s death, Victor’s wife Eva, who was kind, insisted on raising Bazzy’s two-year-old son Theo alongside their own son Clive, much to Victor’s displeasure. The boys were brought up as brothers.
The grief of losing Bazzy, after the deaths of Alonso and Sebastian, was too much for Maria to bear. She became ill, and one day, after she hid her journal in a safe place, she climbed onto the roof of the house and took off her blouse. Her wings burst forth into a glorious span. They flapped a few times, lifting Maria off her feet. She then glided around the property surveying all she, Alonso, Sebastian, and Bazzy had created together, her hair streaming across the sky. This was how Maria – the freest spirit of all of them – left the living world and crossed into the next, dying mid-flight.
It was a sight. Alonso and Sebastian watched it all from their perch above the vineyard.
To this day, the river slows in lament as it cuts through the Fall property, and the birds sing louder in the trees as if trying to warn the Falls of all that happened and all that still might.
This family curse is not the kind from without but from within. It snakes through time, through blood, through water, from father to son. Holes in hearts that should’ve, could’ve been filled with love, instead filled with hatred, envy, jealousy, greed. Alonso could not protect himself or his son Bazzy. But maybe his story from the time of forever will protect the rest of the living Fall brothers.
And the family blessings? Let them fall out of this story, out of the time of forever, like gems to be caught in the open palms of the living:
Alonso and Sebastian’s eternal love.
Maria’s soul-freedom.
The way the three of them dreamt a life into existence, making the world conform to them, not them to the world.
This was the secret history of a family that does not yet know itself.
But soon will.
Wynton
Cassidy says she needs a break before telling you the third betrayal, the most crushing of all. She says she’s going to tell you the stories of your ancestors instead.
The stories are weird and they upset you. You have way too much in common with the villain Hector.
You want her to stop talking about envies and jealousies and curses between brothers. You want her to stop holding up this magnifying glass to your rotten soul. You beg her to shut up, but the story goes on and leads exactly where you think it will.
After she leaves, you turn the stories around and around in your mind. You realize something.
This is why your heart stops.
Miles
Miles’s phone blew up the moment they crossed into cell service range, right as Felix was describing Maria’s winged ascent to her death.
“Uh-oh,” Dizzy said, gripping Miles’s arm.
Miles called their mother, who told him that Wynton had gone into cardiac arrest and had been resuscitated by the nursing staff with chest compressions and medication. Miles wanted different words, not these lit matches, wanted his mother not to sound frantic and somehow hollowed out at the same time. And now, a high-pitched humming noise was coming out of Dizzy, who’d surely heard, because her head was glued to the other side of his phone. Miles tried to keep his own voice steady so as not to scare Dizzy further, then ended the call.
Behind smudged glasses, Dizzy’s eyes were blurred with tears and fear. Miles realized he was rocking in his seat, made himself stop, put an arm around his sister, which quieted the terrible humming sound. “He’s going to make it,” Miles said with confidence despite the fear pounding through him. Since they were only a couple miles outside of Whispering River, they decided they’d head home if they couldn’t find Cassidy right away.
They drove in silence, in dread, the thick tree cover allowing in little light. Miles stared at the ancient redwoods, so full of time – thousands of years – unlike them, who had so little. How had he not understood this before? How had the severity of Wynton’s situation not penetrated until this moment? A wave of compassion swept over him. Poor Wynton. He was the guy full of voltage and fury, who blew the lids off jars, who walked into a room and electrocuted all present. How could this have happened to him? And why hadn’t Miles tried to talk to him in the hospital? He’d been so caught up in his own stingy miseries, his preoccupations, his victimhood. God, why had he never tried to talk to his brother when he wasn’t in a coma? Not once. Maybe he was also to blame for their shitty relationship. Really, why did Miles never take the reins in his own life at all? He was the anti–Alonso Fall. He was the object of a preposition, never the subject of the sentence that was his life. It was like he’d been in the closet about everything, not only being gay.
But how to change this? How to change anything? How to be a brother? How to be a person? He wanted to be … more, to do better.
Miles squeezed Dizzy to him, then he took a breath, and said, “Love you, Diz.” It was the first time he’d ever told her, and in response, she plastered herself to his side, clamping both arms around his waist like he’d seen koalas do to tree trunks. It melted him.
Storytime was over, and what about those stories anyway? Could there be truth to them? Did Hector really murder Alonso? And Victor, Bazzy? Didn’t seem possible, did it? Felix said he’d gotten confused by all the names at this point, started spacing, and then fell asleep, but if it happened, even some of it, what was wrong with his family? What kind of family outside the Bible had all these murders? Maybe they really were cursed. And he and Wyn as much as the rest of them.
“This is the sign for the hot springs,” Felix said, pointing at a big yellow arrow on a wood board. “For those in the know. Cassidy works in the reception kiosk.” Dizzy disentwined from Miles and sat up straight. Miles wiped clammy palms on his jeans. This was it. Would Cassidy be there? Would she think they’d lost their marbles? Of course she would. Because they had. He’d only ever spent a few hours with the girl! Still, he felt a little breathless at the thought of seeing her again. Possibly in mere minutes.
Felix turned onto a dirt road that traversed a mountain face at a steep pitch. “Forgot to mention this road’s gnarly,” he said. On both sides, homemade signs were nailed to trees either with arrows or warnings: “Slow down” and “That means you!” They barreled downward until bottoming out in a gully where a sign said: “Welcome! You’ve Arrived!”
