When the World Tips Over, page 42
To her astonishment, fifteen minutes later a text came in from Lizard: never stopped liking you
Then: Should’ve come to hospital before
here now
came yesterday too
Followed by: Sorry
Then: There’s a reason
Finally: Hurry so I can tell you
Omg, your dad!
She read the texts again and again, fireworks going off in her head.
She showed them to her father. He smiled. “As I said, good going, champ.” He called her champ!
“Hurry,” she whispered.
He smiled, then mussed her hair with his hand. “Pedal’s to the metal.”
Miles
Miles was absolutely, absurdly, certain he was Homer or Keats ever since his father said he liked his poem. He wanted to write the entire world down in his pocket pad. This new world, where he had a father and a half sister and the half sister just happened to be his favorite person he’d ever met – well, tied with Felix, who this moment had his shades down, his arm out the truck window and was in a customary rhapsody about the world around him. “You’re right, man, light on water is bomb – that’s some serious sorcery for sure.” The Canine Traitor was sleeping at their feet as the three of them raced back to Paradise Springs.
Right before they’d left Whispering River, his father had put his hand on Miles’s shoulder and looked at him with so much affection, it had made Miles dizzy. “You’re almost a man,” he’d said, his voice breaking. And Miles the human had cried again. Who knew if he could ever trust or forgive or understand the man, but somehow, he did feel like he could love him. It was possible he’d never stopped.
Miles had called his mother when they were still in Whispering River. His heart had pulsed in his ears as the phone rang. How would she take this monumental news? But Dizzy had gotten to her first. “I can’t believe any of it,” his mother had said to him, her voice sounding strange and far away, not at all how he’d expected. What does your mother say about it? his father had asked Miles earlier, which obviously meant there was a whole lot to say about him leaving that he was unwilling to say, a whole lot that his mother hadn’t shared. For years. What were they hiding? Why did his father really run away and stay away and change his freaking name?
“We’ll be back soon, Mom,” he’d told her. “If anything can bring Wynton back, it’s him.” He’d basically turned into Dizzy. A true believer.
“I agree,” she said in the same strange voice that seemed detached from her person. “Drive safely.” Was she in shock? Was she terrified to see her husband after all this time? He’d never heard her sound this way. Was it because of the infidelity that must’ve led to Cassidy? She’d ended the call without saying anything more, not even goodbye.
And in a few hours, they were all going to be in the hospital room together.
He noticed the purple RV was behind them again, even though they’d pulled over earlier for some reason. In the side-view mirror, he glanced at his father and Dizzy yakking away. What he never imagined in all his many imaginings of his father and his whereabouts was that the man was living five hours away in a yellow house with a daughter. So mundane. Why hadn’t the detective his mother hired been able to find him? How hard could it have been? A winemaker in Northern California using an alias. Unless the detective did find him? Or maybe there was never any detective? Did his mother make that up? She must have. But why?
What was it going to be like when they were all together? This was intense.
He turned to Felix. “Did Cassidy tell you any stories about my parents? Or about the” – he made quotes – “‘Fall brother curse’ and how it might have manifested between my father and his brother Clive?” Miles was aware he sounded loopy and didn’t care.
Felix shook his head. “I fell asleep or started spacing by then. Sorry, man. It was a lot of Fall family stories.” He smiled the lethal half-smile. “I didn’t know you guys then. It was about all these randos floating and glowing and killing each other.”
Miles laughed. “I’m sorry, Felix. That must’ve been really weird back there. Sorry you got roped into such drama.” Felix had had a front row seat to the most emotional moments of Miles’s life. He’d seen Miles come utterly unglued. And Miles still felt comfortable around the guy. It was bizarre. More than comfortable. He made Miles feel more like himself than he ever had. He’d somehow helped Miles move into his own life.
“Are you kidding?” Felix said. “Major drama fan when it doesn’t involve me. And when it does.” He grinned.
He’s a drama queen! Like me!
You! I’m so mad at you, Sandro! How could you choose my father over me?
I’m sorry.
How could you not have told me Beauty was my dad?
I’m sorry.
I thought Beauty was another dog! He couldn’t get over it.
What does it matter? Love is love.
I know that, jeez. But I thought it was a romantic love, not our kind of love.
Sometimes platonic loves are the most profound. I thought it would upset you.
Well, you were right. It has.
Meanwhile, Felix was now half smiling at Miles, and it was making Miles’s neck hot and his thoughts hotter. Per usual. He wanted to blurt out, “I fucking love you,” but instead said, “What?”
“Just can’t believe Cassidy’s your half sister.”
I can’t believe it either, Sandro said.
“And I can’t believe we found your dad.”
I can’t believe that either.
Stop repeating what Felix says. It’s annoying. How old are you anyway? I thought you said you were eighty-seven in dog years, which makes you sixteen in human but if you knew my dad when he was a teenager—
That is a rude question and one I choose not to answer.
How can you be so old? Actually, how do you know all that old-time slang?
I take the Fifth!
Sandro, the immortal dog.
Has a certain ring to it.
“Now that I know it,” Felix said, “I can’t deal how much you and Cassidy look alike and seem alike and just wow.”
Me neither. Just wow, Sandro said, jumping up on the seat between them, putting his snout right in Miles’s face. Forgive me. I love you and Beauty equally. I chose your truck, didn’t I?
Maybe you only loved me all this time because I remind you of him.
At first … yes.
“Really, you and Cassidy could be twins,” Felix said.
You definitely could be twins.
“Oh my God, Sandro, stop repeating everything Felix says!”
Felix lifted his shades, looked at Miles with raised eyebrows.
“What? Yeah, Sandro talks, okay? Same as you. Except right into my head. I’m not crazy, well, maybe I am, but this is not a new crazy. Don’t worry.”
Now you’ve done it, Miles.
Felix was processing this, biting his lip, observing the two of them. “Will he talk to me in my head? Will you, boy? Or do I have to be a Fall?” Sandro turned on the seat, licked Felix’s face. “I want to hear you too.”
“And, like, what’s going on here?” The words were out before Miles could stop them. He gestured in the space between him and Felix. “I mean, is there anything going on here, because it feels like there is. I’ll just say it, for me, there absolutely is. I’m into you. Really into you, Felix. Are you for sure unavailable?”
Do you realize you said that out loud, Miles?
I don’t care anymore! I feel like I’m exploding. I need to know.
Felix looked at Miles. “Not sure…” he said. “I really don’t know… There’s like a lot we haven’t talked about.”
Miles nodded. He wasn’t merely rocking the boat; he’d just capsized it.
Um, Miles? Felix didn’t say no about there being something going on between you.
Oh my God, you’re right. He didn’t say no!
He didn’t say yes either.
Right. Right. But he didn’t say no. He said we had to talk about things.
Miles caught himself smiling like a fool in the side mirror and next to him Felix was grinning also like a fool, and Cassidy was his sister, and his long-disappeared father had hugged him in a way that made him cry like an actual human being, and this father was going to wake his brother, whom he no longer hated despite some family curse, by playing a trumpet. So, who knew anything?
Miles looked at Felix. He wanted to move into Felix’s life too. He wanted to know what was really going on with him. Miles said, “So, can we talk about all the things we haven’t talked about yet?” He wanted to add, but of course didn’t: so we can make out already.
Cassidy
We’re getting closer to the night of the accident, closer to this afternoon when I met your mother, Wynton. Yes, I just met Bernadette. I told her everything and asked her what I needed to – one of the scariest moments of my life, if not the scariest.
I honestly don’t know if I just ruined all our lives or made them better.
We don’t have much time left, just the two of us. Later this afternoon something thrilling and terrifying is going to happen in this room. I’m not spilling beans, but I hope you like surprises. I’m nervous as can be. And more hopeful than I ever remember being.
But before I tell you about the meeting with your mother, I need to share how it was coming back to The Town again after all these years.
Meeting you all.
So, the same night I find and go through the boxes, I throw some things into a suitcase, fill a backpack of books for company, some novels, some books on California history (I inherited my mother’s interest), and leave a note that I’ve gone to see my friend Summer at Davis, so my dad doesn’t worry. On the online ride board for the hot springs, I type in: Heading south to Paradise Springs. Want to share fuel, driving, stories, adventure? I’m exhausted and shaky from staying up all night reading the journals and notebook. I don’t trust myself to drive alone.
I pack the truck, then wait by the greeting hut at the hot springs, hoping for a response to my post. I’m in the same spot where I bottomed out in Purple Rain all those years ago after the car chase with my father, the moment my life got bifurcated into before and after.
Like it is again now.
The dawn light’s swimming through the trees, making the leaves gleam. A glisk, I think, tattooed on my wrist, maybe my favorite word of all. Because, ultimately and ideally, isn’t that what life is: a fleeting glance at a glittering sight.
Soon, a response to my post comes in:
Let’s go to Paradise! Not a serial killer, hoping for same in driving companion. Reached my limit on enlightenment. Get me out of here please, Felix Rivera from Colorado. PS not my phone, so respond quickly if you can. I laugh and we text back and forth, making a plan to meet by the greeting kiosk in an hour.
A giant in sunglasses shows up wearing a tie-dye shirt and plaid shorts. His hair’s wrapped around some kind of something that looks like a bone. He has pine needles in his hair and a nutso mustache. “I don’t normally dress like this, but I’m trying to pass,” he says with a loopy smile that immediately takes away any concern he’s a creep.
“Tarzan chic. Well done. Way to commit,” I say.
He smiles and his cheek dimples. He’s good-looking and seems sweet – a gentle giant, I think as he rifles through his backpack, saying, “You will not believe the caliber of snacks. We’re talking Pringles, Fritos, Cheese Puffs, salt and vinegar potato chips.”
“Where did you find the contraband?” I ask. “Salt and vinegar are the all-time fave.”
He tosses me a bag. “Walked two miles to a gas station mini-mart. My personal rebellion against seven straight days of meals featuring soy strips, which in the Colorado culinary community we call leather.”
“Are you part of the Colorado culinary community?” I ask, pushing aside the boxes and the backpack of books so he’ll fit. I was expecting a reasonable-sized human when I packed the cab of the truck.
“I was on my way to culinary school when my plans changed,” he says, but before I can inquire further, he adds, “What’s all that?”
He’s eyeing curiously the boxes of Fall family memorabilia and journals. What to say? “Research,” I tell him, which is kind of true. “For an essay about this old wine country family that settled in Paradise Springs in the early twentieth century from a small town in Spain. Particularly this dude named Alonso Fall. But it might turn into a novella too. I don’t know.” An essay? A novella? Whatever. And it happens to be my long-lost family whom I’m going to foist myself upon and blow up my father’s life and all their lives, not to mention my own! I try to hide the panic, the excitement, the uncertainty, and keep my voice even. “That’s why I’m going down.” I remind myself that Dizzy and Miles might not be my half sister and half brother. I’m about ninety-nine percent certain Clive is your father, Wynton, because of what’s said in Bernadette’s diary, but it ends years before she became pregnant with Dizzy and there are only a few entries about Miles, none revealing. I feel like I need them to be my siblings as much as I need you not to be. At this point, I’ve convinced myself the moment I meet them, I’ll somehow know if we’re related. Or not.
“You’re a writer?” Felix asks.
“One day maybe.”
“For school?”
“Yeah.” I lie some more. “Stanford.” Well, I deferred, so kind of true?
He nods, doesn’t question further because he’s gotten distracted. I follow his gaze to a Western bluebird sitting on a nearby branch, a male, I note, spotting the orange throat. It’s amazing how much information I’ve retained from all the science walks with Marigold. Felix’s hands are now pressed to his chest as if he’s overwhelmed or possibly dying. “Holy shit, is that bird blue or what?”
I laugh, relieved to look at this little thrush for a moment with him. “He really is very blue.”
I put the boxes in the lockbox on the flatbed so there’s room enough for Felix in the cab, then we’re on the road and Tarzan is practically giving every tree and glimpse of river a standing ovation. I’ve never seen anyone so overjoyed by nature, genuinely so, not performatively so, like my mother. The more I ride with him, the more I feel like I’ve never been in a forest before or on a country road or alive even, and soon the two of us are exclaiming together from one glisk to the next. It’s very fun. At some point in between our outbursts, he turns to me, looking like a six-year-old and says, “So, guess what? I had my first three-way last night in the hot pool.”
“Congratulations!” I say, mirroring his enthusiasm on this as well. This is not an uncommon experience at the hot springs at night, but I don’t have the heart to tell him.
“It lasted less than a minute.”
“Um, that blows.” I tilt my head. “Or doesn’t blow actually.”
He cracks up. “Right? Worst threesome ever.”
I’m laughing too and it’s like we’re already friends.
“It was with this mermaid girl and her merman boyfriend.” He grins. “They surrounded me. Didn’t have a chance … but yeah, so … the dude looked like my best friend Eddie. Like they could be doppelgangers.” His tone changes with this reveal – there’s longing in it.
I look at him. “In love with the bestie?”
“A total cliché, I know, why I left Denver.” He sighs, doesn’t say anything for a bit, then adds, “It wasn’t just that. Why I left.”
But he doesn’t say more, and I don’t want to pry, so I say, “Sorry you’ve been having a hard time.”
“Yeah, it’s been rough.” It’s clear he says this not to open a door but to close one, so I let it rest. A moment later, he turns to look at me and says, “Wait, so why are you writing about this guy again?”
I fill him in some more and he seems interested, so I begin the tale, our family story, Wynton. I weave bits and pieces from Alonso Fall’s wine-making manual, from Maria’s journal, from Bernadette’s diary, from my old California history lessons, from my mother’s In the Time of Forever stories, from mine, from the wind and rivers and warblers outside the window.
As we whiz down the very same highway my mother and I had on our way to The Town so many years earlier, I tell Felix about the people that populate our saga – a story of two lineages that have led us to this moment in time, that has led me to you, Wynton. Occasionally, I speculate for dramatic effect, i.e., Bazzy’s witness-less death of which Maria suspected Victor in her journal. Who knows what really happened? And I admit Felix’s size may have had something to do with Hector getting larger and larger in the story. I leave out a brutal beating of young Alonso and Sebastian by Hector and Diego when they were caught in Alonso’s bed – which from notes in Alonso’s wine-making manual seems likely the true reason he fell into a depression that led to him fleeing Spain. I couldn’t bear to do that to them (again) – and to Felix – with my own words.
I leave out and mishmash other things too. It’s true Alonso, Sebastian, and Maria created a perfect idyll for themselves within the walls of their house, but most of the outside community believed Alonso and Maria were husband and wife and Sebastian a dear old friend from Spain. It was still the Wild West that Marigold had described in my California history lessons, yes, but it wasn’t nearly as wild, lawless, freewheeling – and gay – as it had been decades earlier when the rivers still teemed with gold and the Northern California cities and towns with men.
And I skipped over prohibition, a period that sunk a lot of wineries, but not theirs because in those years they made a sacramental wine that became very popular.
Anyway, guess what happens? Felix falls asleep! But I don’t care, I blab on, realizing how much I need to tell the story, for me, to have these people as my own, to see myself apart from Marigold, to find myself in a great-grandmother like Maria, who could be a good mother and still fly, to imagine a love for myself unlike the ones Marigold modeled, but like Alonso and Sebastian’s that transcended time, distance, even death.
