When the World Tips Over, page 40
I keep digging and then I see it. A photograph and article from the Paradise Springs Gazette: “The Resurrection of Winemaker Theo Fall,” and my heart stills in my chest. In the photo is my father: Dexter Brown. Then I see an article a week later, “The Disappearance of Winemaker Theo Fall,” with a picture of Bernadette, Miles, and Wynton.
It cannot be. It cannot. I think how my mother and I looked for The Town for years. How we found it. How I met Wynton and Dizzy and saw Miles fly by on his skateboard. How Sadie Mae broke down with nothing wrong with her like she wanted us to stay there.
I remember you telling me your father left but you still hear his trumpet.
Are these people, these strangers, my family? Do I have a family? Two half brothers and a half sister. A little sister who sees ghosts! Another brother who is so beautiful! And you, who understood me without trying – okay, so this is when I flip the fuck out and scream into my pillow!
The ick of your marriage proposal!
The ick of how you find your way into my mind at the most inappropriate moments!
Gross and revolting, right? Yes!
But.
I guess I’ll tell you now straight out what I intimated earlier, so you don’t have to freak like I did – I’m practically a hundred percent certain we’re not related, Wynton. I’d bet the farm on it. We’ll get to why soon. Perhaps you already know?
But in this moment, I don’t know, so back to screaming into my pillow, back to every yuck ick romantic thought I had for you becoming immediately ferociously nauseating. And platonic. So so so platonic. One thousand percent platonic.
And soon, I’m crying at the photos at the bottom of the box: Miles and you from behind, hand in hand, running from a swing. Miles and you each in one of Bernadette’s arms. Then one of Bernadette and my father in a vineyard. This picture stuns me because they’re so young, probably my age, and so clearly in love. My father’s face is like I’ve never seen it, blown open. There is no fortress.
I look again at the family photo in the Paradise Springs Gazette for the article about Theo Fall’s disappearance. There’s you, Wynton, looking crushed, and Miles looking at you with sympathy, his hand mid-gesture as if the next moment he’d touch your face to comfort you. But where’s Dizzy? I look more closely and see Bernadette’s hands resting protectively on her belly and think: She’s pregnant.
He left her when she was pregnant.
He left all of you, Wynton.
But why? Why would he do that? How could he have done that?
My spine turns into an icicle then. This man, whom I trust more than anyone, abandoned his family. Just like Marigold abandoned me. Like Dave. The tears that had been from joy are now choking me. He’s worse than my mother. At least my mother is honest about who she is.
The other box is full of notebooks my father must’ve taken when he left you all. The first is so old, the pages are yellow and the handwriting is rubbed off here and there by time, but very clearly on the first page it says: Maria Guerrero. The notebook starts off in Spanish and by the end is in English. The Spanish parts have been translated, the English words above their Spanish counterparts in my father’s handwriting. Who is Maria Guerrero? I have no idea, of course. There’s also Bernadette’s journal – her name and address written on the inside cover – which seems to be exclusively letters to someone named Christophe. Not cool of my dad to have taken this – I assume it wasn’t given to him – but I’m guessing he had his reasons. Last, there’s a weathered leather notebook in Spanish, also translated in my dad’s handwriting that appears to be a wine-making manual by someone named Alonso de Falla with some very passionate scribbling in the margins to someone called S.
I stay up all that night, reading every word. The journal of Maria Guerrero (my great-grandmother?) documents her childhood in Spain, her journey with Alonso Fall (my great-grandfather?) across the sea, the life they created in a big white house in Paradise Springs, their trials and jubilations with the vineyards, giving birth to a son they call Bazzy, Alonso’s love affair with Sebastian, Maria’s many dalliances, her greatest love affair being with her own freedom, her wondrous oneliness, as she calls it.
The last half of the journal is overrun with the grief of Alonso’s and Sebastian’s deaths (Alonso, murdered by his “brother” Hector from Spain!), then Bazzy’s death many years later – she implies at the hands of his “brother” Victor so he’d solely inherit the vineyard. I learn that Bazzy came home with a baby he had overseas while in the air force, whose mother, a woman named Ingrid, had died in childbirth and that this baby is my father Theo Fall/Dexter Brown. He was then raised by Eva and the abominable Victor as Clive’s brother even though they weren’t related by blood.
I learn from Bernadette’s diary that my father didn’t know Victor and Eva weren’t his biological parents nor Clive his biological brother until he was a teenager when he found Maria’s journal under his mattress – where she’d hid it for him before she died so he’d one day know his true heritage. My father apparently told no one – for fear it would destroy Clive – until he confided in Bernadette after they married.
And from Maria’s journal, I learn how hard she tried to stay alive despite the cancer, so as to protect her grandson Theo from Victor, and one day, potentially Clive, and from what she called a Cain and Abel curse on the family – even though the Fall brothers, the Cains and Abels discussed in her journal, didn’t share a drop of blood – a curse she says that, like all curses, can only be reversed when it’s brought into light and then becomes a blessing. Am I crazy to think you and I, Wynton, could be that blessing, a bridge finally between two lineages that have battled brothers for generations? Oh, why am I thinking like this? It must be lack of sleep – I don’t believe in curses!
Except maybe I do. In the time of forever, there are plenty: girls whose wings fall off, mothers and daughters who freeze over like glaciers, dead women who sing you into silent worlds. Then it occurs to me that perhaps it’s not you and me, but Dizzy and me, who might reverse the curse, because we are the first girls in the Fall family bloodlines in over a hundred years. The one thing all those cursed Fall brothers never had: Fall sisters.
Until now.
I’ll just say this, Wynton. I think I know what broke my father’s heart.
I think I know why he left.
This is finally the fourth betrayal. Yours.
From Bernadette’s Notebook of Unsent Letters:
Dear Sleeping Dogs,
There is Right and Wrong and then in the house next door there is what’s True.
This is what’s True.
Dear Grief,
I am fourteen years old and Christophe and I are playing jacks in our lime-green-tiled kitchen in San Francisco. Christophe’s indulging me, as I’m too old for games like this. Tears run down my face as I bounce the ball and swipe the jacks into my hand again and again, hoping the game will never end. I don’t want him to leave for college across the bay. He’s promising me that he’ll come back for Shabbat dinner in three weeks, but I can’t imagine how I’m going to survive twenty-one whole days and nights without him. He’s the sun around which I revolve.
This is the last moment I’ll see my brother alive.
I was a child who had to face the lack of inevitability in life, the stranglehold of mortality, the revelation that life goes on, but the people you love the most don’t. What does that do to the forming psyche if your first experience of all-consuming boundaryless love is one of such profound loss? If you feel such a love again, do you trust it? Do you sabotage it? Are you ever again emotionally and psychologically capable of letting go of anything? Anyone?
Dear Hunger,
There is never enough chocolate, oysters, peaches, figs, filets cooked a perfect medium rare, picnics by rivers, sky, flowers, wine, kisses, love, time. There is never enough life in life. Open the cupboards. Rip open the bags. Reach your hand in for another. Walk into the forest at midnight, splash around in moonlight. Find the people who plant the sun in your chest. Seek platters of words, jugs of bright paint, whole days made of music. Kiss for weeks at a time, kiss everyone you know. I see you and you and you and you – life-thieves like me – trying to stuff more in your pockets, your mouths, your hearts during these measly lives that will be forgotten.
Dear Heart with Two Doors,
I hate you.
I wish I never had to know you.
The years after Theo and I got together were so wonderful. I caught his brightness, his kindness, his joy. Love poured into me like sun through a window. I was Hope itself in bright dresses and high heels.
And yet.
The years were also terrible.
Because of this needling deep inside me that somehow in some impossible way I might be in love with Clive too. This was a tiny bonfire that started that day on the ridge but had become, two years later, a raging wildfire I couldn’t stamp out. Because why did I catch myself thinking about him when I was salting cod? When I was pounding chicken with a hammer? When I was kneading dough, which I’d punch down so hard, again and again, I’d bruise my knuckles?
I tried to stay away from him.
And did.
Even though he pursued me relentlessly behind Theo’s back.
Relentlessly.
I rebuffed him each and every time, no matter how confused I was secretly becoming.
Until.
Dear Day It Happened,
It was a week before Theo went to some bluegrass festival in San Diego. I was waiting for him in his bedroom, snooping around, when I found a black jewelry box in a dresser drawer. Inside was an antique sapphire ring with two diamonds on either side. Was Theo going to ask me to marry him with this ring? My heart swelled so much I felt like I needed a bigger rib cage. I slipped the beautiful ring onto my finger and was admiring how it glinted as I turned my hand this way and that, when I heard steps coming down the hall. Theo? I pulled at the ring, but it was stuck. I had to get it off and back in the box and the box back in the drawer and the drawer closed before he saw it on me, and the surprise was ruined.
But I didn’t and it wasn’t Theo.
If only it had been.
Clive sailed into the room. He must’ve seen me enter the house while he was working in the vineyard. I covered the ring with my other hand, which drew his eyes to it, then they rose to my face. He stared at me much like he had on the ridge that day eons ago, like he did so very often those days.
Unfortunately, always to the same effect.
He was in work clothes and boots, was covered in vineyard, his blond hair windswept, his hands streaked with dirt. I swallowed but did not look away and the air between us grew electric. Then he was walking toward me, then right behind me, and we were closer than we’d been in years. He lifted my hand off the ring, whispered in my ear. “So that’s it. You’re going to marry my brother even though it’s me you want.” I could smell cigarettes, alcohol, sweat, danger.
“I don’t want you,” I said, but my voice broke on the you.
“No?” His hand found my bare waist. My body leaned into his touch of its own accord. My mind felt radioactive. So did my blood. “Are you sure?” he said. “You don’t sound sure.”
“I’m sure.” The words were raspy, frayed.
“Move my hand away then,” he said. “Show me you don’t want me.” I tried to, I did. “Do it,” he said. “Show me you don’t want me.”
I had to move his hand away. Had to. But I couldn’t.
Instead, I put my hand on his. I knew I had to stop, but I wanted to feel his hand on me for a second. Just one. Then another. Then his other hand was running up my stomach toward my breasts.
“Tell me to stop. Tell me you don’t want me, Bernadette,” he said. I leaned into him. “Tell me.”
“I can’t.” It was a moan.
“I know,” he said in my ear, lighting my whole body on fire, all our lives on fire.
I felt his lips, warmer and rougher than Theo’s, on my neck, his hands on me, allowing myself this.
For. One. More. Moment.
“I’ve always loved you. It’s you and me who belong together,” he murmured, his breath hot on my ear, his hands hungry on my hungry skin. “You and me, Bernie. We’re so much more alike.”
This unhinged something in me – we were so much more alike – and I spun around.
We stared at each other then, and as we did, his face lost the bravado, the bluster, and became naked, vulnerable, like I suddenly felt. Here again was the sweet boy who loved cows as well as the dangerous man he was becoming and all the fragile, wounded people in between. Here again was the wild young man who lived in my heart. But there was something else. In this moment, I saw in Clive something frightening and so familiar – there was a need in both of us the size of God.
And before I realized it, we were kissing. Before I realized it, we were two furious storms spinning into one, one built for mass destruction.
He left a note at the soufflé shop the next day with a wheelbarrow of handpicked wildflowers. A wheelbarrow. The note said: I’m only me when I’m with you. I felt the same.
But the heartbreak, the impossibility, the truth, is that I think there must’ve been two of me back then, because the other me felt this exact way with Theo too. Only more so.
I decided it was a one-time thing with Clive. A must-be-forgotten thing.
I tried not to think about it. It was all I thought about.
The betrayal I was committing was so great I could barely speak, couldn’t add words to it.
I hated myself.
I hated myself and I couldn’t stop myself.
A month later, I was pregnant, and engaged to Theo, his grandmother Maria’s sapphire ring on my finger.
I moved into the white house with Theo.
Clive moved into the brown house on the hill.
For years, I tried not to be alone with Clive.
For years, I failed.
Wynton
You’re sure you’ve died this time. It’s that quiet. But then you hear your mother’s breathing, sighing, crying. A flat, B minor, C sharp, respectively. People are music, you think.
You wonder where Dizzy and Miles are. You wish you could hear their voices, their breathing, their music.
Only Cassidy and your mother speak to you now. Your mother’s telling you that you’re her favorite child even though she’s not supposed to have favorites, and that she will, of course, deny ever having said it if you bring it up when you wake.
She tells you that you and she are kindred spirits. And then, after all these years of not-telling, of not-saying-a-goddamn-thing-about-it, she’s spilling it all, and it’s a symphony of I’m sorry.
She says she knows how much you love Theo and that’s why she never told you the truth. She says she didn’t want you to lose him as your father in your heart too, that the idea of Theo always seemed to be what kept you together, what kept you hopeful, what kept you making music.
She tells you Clive doesn’t know because she lied to him when she got the DNA results. No one knows.
Her weeping now is in D minor. The saddest of all keys.
You want to tell her you’ve always known, and you don’t blame her, that you’ve never blamed her, that you understand her, always have, because you understand making mistakes.
Boy do you ever. You understand that life – yours anyway – is – was – just a collection of mistakes.
You’re pretty sure that for her, like for you, living life is like playing an out of tune instrument.
You want to tell her that you’ve known since that day.
That day, you’re on the swings with Miles. Your dad’s pushing you and your brother into the sky, one, then the other, and you’re pumping your legs and so is Miles and then you jump and Miles jumps too because he does everything you do, and how you love that. He follows you around like you follow your father around because he thinks you’re a duck and not a duckling like him. Only you can make Miles stop crying. Only you can make Miles fall asleep. Only you can make him laugh like a crazy kid.
Only you, his big brother.
That day, you’re running home together, you and Miles, the music of Dad’s trumpet trailing you, and you take Miles’s hand because he’s your monkey, your banana, your little guy.
You call him these things when you two are alone and you’re not even embarrassed about it because it makes his face turn into light. You don’t know how his face does this. You smile in the mirror sometimes to see if your face will do it, but you just look like a boy smiling, not a sun shining.
That day, you both burst through the front door of the white house. You race upstairs to get Mom while he goes to the kitchen.
That day, you hear the noises first and then you stand in the doorway long enough to see.
Your mother and your uncle naked-wrestling in the bed. They don’t see you.
You realize they aren’t wrestling when they kiss. And kiss. Like they’re eating each other’s faces.
That day, later on, you go to your uncle Clive’s house and tell him to stay away from your mother because someone has to tell him this.
That day, he’s drunk and throws you against a wall and tells you to keep your stupid mouth shut.
You keep your stupid mouth shut.
You tell your mother you got the bruise when you fell off your skateboard.
You don’t know what to do.
For the longest longest time, you don’t know what to do.
Then The Devil Winds are here, and your mom is pregnant again and your dad has a viral pneumonia and slips into a coma. He’s in the hospital dying and finally you know what to do. The nurse told you people in comas can hear.
So, when you’re alone with your father in the hospital room, you climb up on the bed. You whisper into his ear what you saw and heard that day.
You tell your father everything so that he’ll wake up and do something about it.
Instead, he dies! You hear the machines hooked up to his heart stop beeping and turn into one long note: C sharp. The nurses rush in. No one seems to realize you’re there as they try to revive him. You know he will not revive. You know you’ve killed your father – whom you love more than anybody – with your words.
