The Year We Fell From Space Page 14

  I laugh because she knows just the right time to tell a joke.

  “I’m worried about you, Liberty,” she says.

  I stop laughing.

  She says, “You have a lot of stuff going on. Starting middle school. New friends. New everything. And this is all new, too.”

  “I hated everyone last night. And this morning. Even you.” I say this and I don’t even cry. Something is wrong with me. I don’t hate Mom but I just told her I hate her.

  “That’s normal.”

  I say, “That doesn’t help.”

  She nods.

  “Everything I do is wrong,” I say. “When I’m with Dad I don’t even feel like I can breathe right. Or eat right. He always makes a big deal if I get a grilled cheese sandwich and then Tiffany got one and he was fine.” Mom is quiet. Listening. “He always loved Jilly more anyway because Jilly is perfect and still little and he doesn’t like me because he thinks I’m a tween. But really he just wants to have a fast, excitement-filled weekend so he can deal with us being there.”

  Mom says, “But it’s not because he doesn’t like you. It’s because he wants you to like him. I know that’s hard to understand at the moment but think about it a while.”

  “As long as I can stay here until Sunday,” I say. “I’m a kid. He’s an adult. He should be the one thinking about it for a while.”

  “You can stay another hour at most. But then I have to take you back to your dad’s house.” She sees my face and adds, “Jilly must already miss you.”

  Her phone dings with a text and she ignores it.

  “I didn’t really hate you,” I say. “I’m just so hot inside. I thought about living in one of Lou’s tree stands.”

  “Not a lot of room up there to sleep. First step is a doozy,” she says. She points to my star maps. “Are you getting back into your old habits? I hope so.”

  I hold up her map. “You can have this one. Maybe you can connect the dots. I can’t.”

  “What? No. That’s your thing. Not my thing.”

  “I can’t do any new ones until these are done. And I can’t figure them out,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “My hands are brooms,” I say. I hold up my hands.

  Mom looks at me like she’s making the appointment with Jan in her head right this very minute. “Okay,” she says.

  “Just connect the dots the way you see them,” I say.

  She walks toward the door with the star map under her elbow. Smiles. Says, “Stay in your pajamas and I’ll run you back to Dad’s in a half hour. Sound good?”

  I’m not sure why, but yes, it sounds good.

  “When you said everything you do is wrong earlier, what did you mean?” Mom asks on the way to Dad’s house. I think her timing isn’t the best. I don’t want to walk into Dad’s crying.

  “I just feel like everything is my fault or something,” I say.

  “Like the divorce?” she asks. “Because if it’s the divorce and you want to talk about it, I can.”

  “I don’t want to make you upset,” I say.

  “I don’t care if you make me upset. And I don’t think you will. I probably haven’t done a great job of talking to you about it because it was hard there for a long time.”

  “It’s not hard anymore?”

  She takes a deep breath as if she’s asking herself. “Not as bad as before, no. Rosemary has helped me a lot. It’s a process, like grief.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ask me anything.” She pulls the car over and parks on the side of the street.

  I sit for a minute trying to think of the most important questions.

  “Okay,” I say. “This is what I think happened. I think Dad wasn’t a great husband for a long time because he had depression and he didn’t know it. Right?”

  “Something like that,” she says.

  “And then once he found out, he felt bad.”

  “He didn’t like taking medication and he didn’t like knowing that he wasn’t perfect, I think,” Mom says.

  “So what—he …” I stop because this feels like adult-stuff. It is adult-stuff. I suddenly want no part in adult-stuff. “Um … he found a girlfriend? While he was still married to you? Because he wasn’t perfect?”

  “Uhh,” Mom says.

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to answer that,” I say. I really don’t want to know any adult-stuff ever again.

  Mom makes that face where her lips curl in and she’s grimacing a bit. “As silly as that sounds, your guess is about right.”

  “Even though Jilly and I were born and we were having a good family life and all that?” I ask. “He just went and got a girlfriend.”

  “You’ll have to ask him how he did it. The whole point was that I didn’t know,” she says. “And don’t think too badly of him. We had a great marriage for a long time. This girlfriend stuff is a lot more common than you think.”

  “It’s gross,” I say.

  “It is what it is.”

  “Gross.”

  “Yeah. It’s gross.”

  I hesitate. “I … uh … did you do it, too?”

  “Nah. Not my style,” she says.

  “Did you ever feel like everything you did was wrong?” I ask.

  “Since Dad moved out, all the time. But now I know it was the right thing to do. I mean, now that he’s happy with Tiffany, I’m glad we decided to separate.”

  “I don’t think he’s happy with Tiffany,” I say.

  “Well if he’s not, then that’s his problem.”

  “How can you say that? He’s Dad!”

  “His problems aren’t my problems anymore. Unless they involve you guys. His problems are his problems,” she says. “I tried a long time to help him. In the end, Dad made some choices that I couldn’t help him with. And here we are.”

  “Did Dad think he was wrong about everything once?”

  “Yes.”

  “We always said that I was like him and Jilly was like you. Should I be worried I’m going to act like him when I’m older?”

  “No. Because you’re not the same person. You’re you. He’s him. You have support now, so if you have thoughts like his, we can work on them early. He didn’t have that. You’re you. He’s him. And while we all have things in common, the choices we make are ours.”

  “He cheated on you!”

  “Right.”

  “That’s a horrible choice!” I say.

  “It is. But he had some sort of master plan. Inside his head. Secrets,” she says. “Just remember—the more open and honest you are, the better your life will be. With or without depression. Depression shuts people up. That’s one of the ways it’s dangerous.”

  I was shut up since I misplaced Leah’s mom’s ring and didn’t feel guilty about it. Maybe longer. I haven’t told anyone anything for real since January. Just the rock.

  I say, “Can we go back to the house? I forgot something.”

  She turns the car around in a parking lot and we head back up the hill. The whole way, I consider telling her about the ring. It’s my secret. It’s probably the thing that’s making me so hot all the time. And now—now I know that even if the stars keep their side of the deal, Mom and Dad don’t want to be together.

  I feel so immature.

  I wasted the whole month wishing for something impossible. Like when Jilly asked for a hedgehog even though she knew she couldn’t get it.

  But this is different. Jilly was happy when she got a hamster instead. I haven’t thought about being happy with what I got. I haven’t really even thought about what I got. A mom in one house. A dad in another. I haven’t really thought about that since the week we fell from space. I just felt like I was still falling the whole time.

  When we get to the cabin, I go inside, get my backpack, and roll the meteorite into it. Still can’t believe how heavy it is. Still can’t believe a meteorite fell to Earth while I was sitting right there. But it did. Some things are impossible to believe but they happen anyway. L
ike my dad cheating on my mom because he felt like he should be perfect. Like me picking up the ring off the hallway floor and not giving it to a teacher because I was afraid of what Leah would say. Doesn’t make any sense. But maybe that’s what fear does. It makes us do weird things that make sense in the moment, but make no sense from nine months away.

  Maybe, from where Polaris is, 433 light-years away, all of this makes sense.

  When I get back into the car, Mom asks what’s in the backpack.

  “A meteorite.”

  “Looks big,” she says. She’s saying it like there’s no meteorite in my backpack.

  “It’s not that big, but it’s heavy because it’s got metal in it.”

  Mom looks puzzled. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Yup.”

  “Was it from that night when the windows broke?”

  “The rock is sorry it broke your windows and I’m sorry I broke your windows. We have a lot in common.”

  We stay quiet until we get to Dad’s house.

  I’m still in my pajamas.

  “How could you just walk away like that?”

  That’s Dad. He doesn’t notice that I have a 130-pound backpack on my back. I scoot past him as he’s talking in his serious-Dad voice so I can sit on the couch and coax the shoulder straps off my arms.

  “We were worried!

  “You have to think about us, too!”

  Jilly is sitting at the kitchen table. She’s rolling the edge of Tiffany’s tablecloth between her fingers and she looks like she wants to cry. I hope she doesn’t hold back. I hope she cries and Dad stops paying attention to me.

  “You can’t be so selfish!” he says.

  I’m not sure what’s happening to me. I ask the rock. Brain-to-rock-brain. The rock can’t tell me what’s happening. Next thing I know, I’m hot as daytime on Mercury and words are coming out of my mouth.

  Loud.

  “Selfish? You cheated on Mom. You’re selfish!”

  Dad looks at Jilly. He looks back at me. He looks at Tiffany, who’s doing a great job of counting the lines in her palms over in the chair. He says to Tiffany, “I need a minute with you.”

  “I’m right here, Dad. You can’t listen to me when I’m finally telling you my feelings? Seems pretty selfish to me!”

  Dad goes upstairs with Tiffany. I pace the living room and end up at the kitchen table with Jilly.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  She says, “He said it was my fault for letting you leave.”

  This makes me hotter than I already was.

  I hear Tiffany talking to Dad in their bedroom. I can only hear the low murmur of conversation, not actual words. He isn’t saying anything. Jilly starts to cry.

  “He cheated on Mom?” she asks.

  I nod. I feel so guilty. She probably shouldn’t know this stuff so young.

  “Did she tell you this?”

  “I asked her,” I say. “She answered.”

  “You brought the meteorite,” she says, and points to the backpack on the couch.

  “I don’t even know why, now.”

  “Were you going to show it to him? And some maps?” she asks.

  I look at the couch. That’s what it looks like. It looks like I brought all the things that matter to me for some kind of show-and-tell.

  “Mom said he’d be happy to see me and that he’d understand.”

  “He was worried,” Jilly says.

  “Well then he should have been happy to see me,” I say, grabbing one of the two maps and handing it to Jilly. “That’s your map now. You have to find what you see in there and draw it in.”

  “I don’t make maps,” Jilly says.

  “Just this one. Connect the dots for me.”

  She unrolls her map on the kitchen floor and looks at it from every angle. Squints. Sighs. She gets a pencil and sits next to it. I sit on the couch next to the meteorite.

  By the time I’m called upstairs to talk, I’m angrier than I was before I walked in. I have so many questions.

  “Can’t you see why I left this morning? Can’t you see how hard this whole year has been? Can’t you see what you did to me and Jilly? Can’t you feel bad for just one second about what you did to Mom?”

  Tiffany is downstairs with Jilly. It’s just me and Dad. And these questions.

  “I feel awful about what I did to Mom,” he says.

  I stay quiet.

  “I feel awful for what I did to our family,” he says. “But I don’t know what that has to do with you walking to Mom’s this morning. That’s dangerous. You can’t do that again.”

  “Well I can’t climb Mount Everest every other weekend. And neither can Jilly. We just want to have weekends off like normal kids.”

  “You could have just told me,” he says.

  “You don’t listen,” I say.

  We’re quiet for a minute. It’s tense quiet, not forest-silent-walk quiet.

  “Your mom texted to say she told you about what really happened,” he says.

  “I already knew, Dad. The first time we came here you had a glass by the sink with lipstick on it.”

  He looks ashamed. He should.

  “And that time you came to drop off my strep throat medicine and had a woman hiding in the car. Do you remember that? Jilly and I both watched when she sat up.”

  “You were spying on me?” he says.

  “No. We loved you and you were our father and we missed you and would watch you drive away. We didn’t know there was a woman in the car until she sat up. You laughed the whole time. Is it funny now?”

  He puts his face in his hands.

  “And what about us? You didn’t see us for three months after you left. You kept saying you would and then you’d cancel. You told us you’d try and you’d come back and the family would maybe work out,” I say. “You just lied.”

  He says, “Stop.”

  I don’t stop.

  I tell him that we needed him. I tell him that we loved him. I tell him that we’re trying. “Look at how we treated Tiffany the night we first met her. We were nice! And then suddenly you don’t even tell us that she’s living here and we were still nice!”

  He can’t pull his face out from behind his hands.

  I try to find any part of me that isn’t hot. Everything is hot.

  “If you cared about us at all, you’d have told us what was going on,” I say. “You’d explain it to us. Try to help us understand why you decided that Mom and Jilly and me weren’t enough to make you happy. But I don’t think you’re happy. Not even now with your new girlfriend and your fancy single life. I don’t think you’ll ever be happy.” I didn’t curse once but I feel like everything I just said was a curse word.

  He’s still sitting there with his head in his hands.

  I don’t have time for this.

  I get up and leave the room and slam the door.

  I go downstairs and I feel trapped. Tiffany is on the floor with Jilly squinting at the map.

  Jilly says, “We heard all that, you know.”

  Tiffany says, “You have every reason to be mad.”

  I say, “I can’t stay here.”

  Jilly says, “My stomach hurts.”

  Tiffany starts to cry.

  She was the last person I expected to cry. I thought maybe Dad would and Jilly, of course. Or even me.

  Now I feel horrible.

  We’re at Burger King. It’s dark out, so it’s got to be past eight o’clock. Dad’s eyes are red and they look small on his face. Tiffany is eating her french fries one by one and doesn’t seem to be chewing them.

  Jilly is pretending the toy she got with her kids’ meal is interesting but it’s really just plastic junk.

  I say, “This is depressing.”

  No one answers. So I take a bite of my hamburger.

  Fast food is gross.

  I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat at Burger King again.

  We had a family meeting because Tiffany was crying
. Dad said that it wasn’t fair of me to make Tiffany cry. Tiffany said that I didn’t make her cry. Dad didn’t listen to her until she cried more.

  Dad and Tiffany went back upstairs to work things out. Jilly and I watched TV. I don’t even remember what we watched and it was only a few hours ago. Then, when Dad and Tiffany came downstairs, he said we were going out to eat. He was in sweatpants. We came to Burger King.

  When we get back to his house, Jilly looks so tired. I feel tired but also super awake. The meteorite is still in my backpack on the couch. Tiffany pours herself a glass of wine. Dad sits at the kitchen table with a piece of blank paper in front of him but no pencil.

  Jilly goes to my backpack and opens the zipper.

  I don’t stop her. I do say, “Be careful,” because if the rock rolls out, it could fall and break her foot.

  I help her get it out of the backpack and we prop it up with pillows.

  Tiffany asks, “What’s that?”

  I say, “A meteorite.”

  She looks at it, and then me, and then she walks over to the couch. “Like, from space?”

  Jilly says, “Yep. All the way from space.”

  “Are you serious? Jack. Are they serious?”

  Dad has found a pencil and is writing something on the piece of paper in front of him.

  “I saw it fall,” I say. “Pretty amazing.”

  The rock says, “You asked for change. I brought you change.”

  I look at Tiffany. I look at Jilly.

  No one else hears the rock.

  “It’s just a rock, right?” Tiffany says. “It’s not really from space. Right? Can rocks even fall from space?”

  I say, “Stuff falls from space all the time. Well, not all the time. That would be weird. But yeah. This rock was a meteor and then it got through the atmosphere.”

  “You were there?” Tiffany’s eyes are big, like I’m telling her a secret.

  “The boom broke the windows!” Jilly says.

  “I have something for you,” Dad says. I didn’t even hear him get up. Sometimes when he’s really sad, he moves around and makes no noise at all. He hands me the paper. I go to read it but he tells me to read it when I’m by myself. I stuff it into the pocket of my pajamas and I reach onto the couch and hand him the last no-connection star map.