The Stepping Off Place Read online

  Dedication

  Dedicated with love and laughter to TFB,

  an indelible spirit

  I USED TO THINK OUR MEMORIES BELONG TO US. Now I don’t think they’re that cooperative. They interrupt when they please, and leave right when you want to hold them in your hands and arrange them on a shelf, so they tell the story you think they should. They haunt you or comfort you at will. But when memories are all you have left of a person, you’ll take them thin as the tail of a cloud or so thick you’re lost in them for hours. Just don’t ever assume you have memories; your memories definitely have you.

  In my mind’s eye, I watch the one of me leaving my Scofield Dinner Theater job that day in August right before the start of senior year, worrying about things that didn’t matter for shit, completely oblivious to the way my world was about to detonate. Shouldn’t I want to be that version of me again? Obviously the correct answer is yes. The weird thing is, I don’t think I do.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  1. August 27

  2. Then: June 18 ~ Two Months Earlier

  3. August 27

  4. Then: June 19

  5. August 27

  6. Then: June 19

  7. August 28

  8. Then: June 20

  9. August 28

  10. Then: June 20

  11. Then: July 3

  12. August 30

  Part Two

  13. Then: July Days ~ The Thimble

  14. Then: More July Days ~ The Thimble

  15. Then: August Days ~ Back in Scofield

  16. Now: September 1

  17. Now: September 2

  18. Now: September 3

  19. Now: September 4

  20. Now: September 5–6

  21. Three Years Ago: July ~ The Thimble

  Part Three

  22. September 6

  23. September 7

  24. September 7, Continued

  25. September 8

  26. Sky Above Clouds

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Cameron Kelly Rosenblum

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  August 27

  I didn’t know this was the day I would stop breathing.

  It was rush hour in my hometown of Scofield, Connecticut, and I was heading home from my matinee hostess shift at the dinner theater. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten my running clothes and still wore my compulsory hostess uniform: a polyester “girl tux” with a skirt instead of pants, too-thick panty hose, and black loafers. God help me. I just hoped nobody spotted me. I crept along with the other cars jammed on the Post Road. It was the kind of traffic where you should pay attention so you don’t rear-end someone, but the sky was so captivating I couldn’t take my eyes from it.

  The clouds were equal-sized puffs arranged as though a pastry chef had carefully decorated the endless sweep of peacock-feather blue. It was so impossible and so much like this Georgia O’Keeffe print Hattie had hanging in her bedroom called Sky above Clouds IV, it bordered on freaky. Hattie and I texted each other when we spotted one or two O’Keeffe clouds—perfectly oval ones—but this was like Georgia herself had stopped in Scofield and painted the sky. I wanted to FaceTime Hattie. She would love it.

  That this would be illegal while driving wasn’t the reason I didn’t. I didn’t FaceTime Hattie because it was August, which meant she was still at her summerhouse on The Thimble, an island off the Maine coast. The Thimble, by the way, is a six-hour drive from southern Connecticut.

  Six.

  Hours.

  Cell service on The Thimble ranges from patchy to nonexistent, and Mr. Darrow won’t get Wi-Fi up there. He prefers his islands rustic. So, not only does Hattie desert me every summer for eight solid weeks, but we can only communicate via snail mail. And she sucks at writing letters. Care packages? She rocks them. But no letters. No words. It was the Hattie Way to arrive right before school started each year. This was our last spin on the Scofield High merry-go-round. We were finally seniors.

  It’s hard to pinpoint when Hattie Darrow became my social oxygen. It didn’t start out that way, and I don’t think she meant it to happen any more than I did. We’d been best friends for almost six years, and it must have been gradual, like how our bones grew longer and our faces lost their baby plump. We didn’t notice that, either.

  Right now, I couldn’t drag my eyes from these clouds. They seemed alive, the way they moved as one. A driver behind me beeped and I jerked my attention back to the road. That’s when I saw, four cars ahead, Hattie driving her ’85 VW Rabbit convertible. The top was down and she had her blond hair in a ponytail. Her shoulders were tan and I recognized the white straps of the shirt we picked out the day before she left in June.

  “Snowcap!” I cried shamelessly. Her car is black with a white top, like the movie candy. “You’re home!” I nosed up on the SUV ahead of me, but nobody was moving.

  I watched Hattie’s head dip to a beat, so I knew she had music on, which meant she was singing. Badly. I turned up the radio to see if her beat matched whatever songs played on our stations, but there were only commercials. Why was she back already?

  We rolled past Mighty Bean, the café that may as well be part of Scofield High School.

  Normally, I would hunker down so nobody could recognize me, but I reached for my phone instead, thinking I could at least call. I saw a cop car in my rearview mirror and practically heard Hattie say, “Watch it. Johnny Law’s on the case.” A laugh bubbled out of me.

  My need to be out of the suffocating panty hose became unbearable. Hattie wouldn’t have been caught dead in them. They were a crime against the natural world, those hose. I wondered if I could slip out of them while driving, but the used Ford Fiesta I shared with my older brother Scott was a stick shift, requiring a foot on the clutch. Besides, the knot of cars scuttled forward. This was my chance.

  Hattie zipped ahead, under the commuter rail bridge. I lost her. Johnny Law hooked a right toward the train station, so I buzzed around a pickup and under the bridge. I passed the Sport Shop. A mannequin clad in pastel golf clothes pointed his club toward Snowcap, cheering me on in the kind of Scofield style Hattie would have found hilarious.

  I gained on her. Only a silver Jaguar separated us, driven by a coiffed matriarch I vaguely recognized as a friend of my parents. She wasn’t my concern, but I tapped the horn, hoping to get Hattie’s attention without seeming obnoxious.

  Hattie’s head remained stubbornly focused on the road ahead. The light turned green, and we were off again, down the big hill beside the graveyard. We passed the library, then the police station. At the next light, I leaned my head out the window.

  “Hattie!”

  Jaguar lady cast an uneasy glance in her rearview. I smiled weakly. Hattie remained oblivious, engaged in pulling the elastic from her hair, smoothing a new ponytail, and retwisting the elastic, a habit she claimed was unconscious. Though I couldn’t see her face, I knew she held the elastic in her teeth.

  “Hattie!” I yelled, louder. Nothing.

  “Hey, Harriet!” I bellowed. Jaguar lady’s eyebrows disappeared under her puffy gray bangs. Hattie’s head maintained its metronomic dance. Is she ignoring me? a pathetic part of me wondered for a breath. I recognized the familiar anxiety swooping over me like a huge bird ready to land. All it needed was the opportunity, and it would roost. No, I told myself. Hattie wouldn’t ignore me. Of course not.

  But the light turned green and she sped off, alpha wolf of the traffic pack. The gap between her an
d the Jaguar widened. I pressed the gas and passed the Jaguar, thankful for the lack of Johnny Law. She topped Three Church Hill and was out of sight again. I smiled when I crested it and saw the red light at the next intersection. “Gotcha,” I whispered.

  But when I got to the line at the light, Snowcap was nowhere. I lifted my sunglasses, squinting into the horizon and its endless field of confection clouds. No Hattie.

  On three of the four corners were churches. On the fourth was Pickle Barrel Deli. The choice was obvious, given her obsession with Pickle Barrel deviled eggs. They grossed me out, but I always brought her a half dozen packed on ice for my annual July Thimble visit.

  I turned into the deli driveway and rolled behind the building to its small parking area. No Snowcap. I turned off the car. My lips tingled, like I’d had a shot of novocaine. I got out and stood on the concrete. My thighs were sweating under the asphyxiating hose. I tried to ignore a ripple of light-headedness.

  I peeked through the deli’s screen door and when she wasn’t inside, I checked behind the big smelly dumpster, like maybe she’d hidden, which was stupid and of course she hadn’t.

  I stood motionless, between the dumpster and my car. Hattie had achieved the truly impossible. She’d vanished.

  I glanced at the sky. The clouds were marching into the distance, like a passing parade. Like they’d ushered her off.

  I spent the ride home trying to convince myself I must have been mistaken. I called her, Johnny be damned, but it went straight to voicemail. I imagined telling the story to Hammy. “Maybe I had a premonition,” I pictured myself saying to him, “and she was coming home early.” And Hammy would laugh, because a) he’d be as psyched as me if that were true and b) we both knew I was way too practical for premonitions.

  But here’s the thing. When you have to reconcile something that doesn’t make sense with something your emotions say is true, your emotions win. Try to convince yourself all you want; deep down you’ll know you’re lying. Hattie was there. Then she wasn’t. It happened.

  I made my way home and tried calling her again from our driveway. Straight to voicemail again. Instead of leaving a message, which I’d long ago learned she wouldn’t listen to, I texted her. What happened to you? I saw you, then you disappeared! wtf, are you now magic? I waited a few seconds. Nothing. I tried to shake it off. My after-work run would uncoil me, I thought. It always did. Hattie had convinced me to join the cross-country team last year, and this year we were co-captains. I totally did not deserve this honor, but Hattie and I were the only seniors, and I think Coach Smitty didn’t want me to feel like a total loser, so she made us both captains. I’d spent all summer trying to get my 5K faster than the younger girls, and I’d become kind of accidentally addicted.

  Our house was dark and quiet when I got inside, the hum of the refrigerator the only sound. Boomer, our fat black Lab mix, lifted one eyelid and rearranged himself on his bed before sighing. My little brother, Spencer, age ten and deep on the autism spectrum, is never quiet, so he must have been out with his caregiver, Linda. It’s against MacGregory code to discuss it, but the only time our house is like this is when Spencer is out of it. We all love him so much. But when he’s gone, we can stop checking to see if he’s okay. We can let five minutes in a row pass without looking up from our books or our show or our absolutely anything.

  So, yes, he was gone, and Dad of course wasn’t home from NYC yet. Scott was painting houses on Martha’s Vineyard with his fraternity brothers this summer and planned to go straight back to Colgate from there. Mom was probably upstairs in the office planning for her big autism charity gala in October. She had been honored by the American Autism Coalition three years in a row for her massive fund-raising success. She’s a classic overachiever, and had met her match in raising money for autism research; there is no end of need, and Laura MacGregory has no end of energy to devote to it. Autism and Mom make a symbiotic perpetual motion machine. At the moment, I did not want to get recruited to stuff more envelopes. That may sound cold, but I’d stuffed in sets of fifty for weeks. I crept to the kitchen.

  I stood in the light of the refrigerator, staring at milk and mayonnaise and whatnot, and wondered again if I was so desperate that I dreamed Hattie up. God, that was needy. I thought I’d made some strides this summer with Hammy, I really did.

  I poured an iced tea and leaned on the kitchen table, sliding out of the loafers and peeling off the offending hose at last. They kept the shape of my feet and calves and looked something like a decomposing body on the floor tiles. I rustled them with my foot and rechecked my phone.

  The stairs squeaked. My mom appeared, in her robe. It was nearly dinner. She’s the kind of person who comes to breakfast dressed. More alarming, her eyes were red and puffy. “Sit down, honey,” she said softly.

  I had seen her cry once in my life, when our cat Leopold died. I was seven. That’s it. Either she cried in private or she was superhuman. I had yet to figure out which. My neck pulsed. “Will you sit?” she repeated. “Please?” I obeyed.

  “What?” My lips tingled again. “Where’s Spencer?” In a flash of sickening clarity I saw our family without him, floundering like fish on a hot dock. Who would we even be? My breathing sped up.

  Mom shook her head. “Spencer’s fine.” Her voice was strangled. She covered my hands with her cool ones. “It’s Hattie,” she whispered. “Something terrible has happened.”

  Her words bounced off my face. “I just saw her.”

  My mom squared her shoulders. The room vibrated with the fridge. She closed her eyes and kept them closed. I watched tears travel the newly charted path on her cheeks. It was chaos. Blackness leaked over my peripheral vision. “I’m so sorry, Reid,” she was saying, “but Hattie drowned last night in Maine.”

  “No she didn’t,” my voice said, but a hole started to tear open deep inside me. I saw her in my mind, passing the Jaguar just a few minutes ago. Didn’t I?

  She looked up at me from her chair. Her lips vanished she squeezed them so tight. She nodded and nodded, her nostrils red and trembling.

  “Stop doing that!” I wanted to slap her away, this weird version of my mother. “She did not!”

  My mother was a crumbling statue, dropping her head. Her shoulders convulsed. Twice. She inhaled and leveled her eyes with mine. “Reid, it’s true. Her uncle Baxter called an hour ago. I spoke to him myself. She . . . Hattie . . .” Her tears ran in rivulets, but her eyes had mine in a choke hold. “They’re investigating it as a suicide.”

  I heard myself laugh through a sob. “That’s fucking ridiculous.” I couldn’t look at her and took my glass to the sink. The air had dissolved into buzzing molecules swimming around me.

  “It’s still unclear,” she whispered. “But—”

  “Shut up!” I threw the glass down. I never talked to her like this, and it was empowering and disgusting. The glass didn’t break and I whirled to yell at her more, but her face was red and twisted in a silent cry.

  “Oh God,” I croaked, nauseous. Rubber legs carried me to the back door. Boomer heard the screen slide open and rushed to my side. We bumped into each other and I stumbled onto the flagstone patio to the edge of the pool, searching the sky. No more evenly spaced confections. The clouds had dissolved into tatters, ripped sails that betrayed me.

  Our O’Keeffe sky was gone.

  I couldn’t breathe. I never would again.

  Then

  June 18 ~ Two Months Earlier

  Hattie and I drifted around the pool on our floats like lily pads. We hadn’t said or moved much in the last hour, soaking in the end of a long afternoon of sun. We had officially become Scofield seniors today at 12:35 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, after the final exam. It was Hattie’s last night in Scofield, and thank God, because a kinda bitchy girl who just graduated, Sabrina Bradley, was having a huge summer send-off party and I would never go alone. Tomorrow, Hattie would leave for The Thimble.

  When I first heard of the summerhouse on an island named
The Thimble, I pictured a quaint cottage with brightly painted lobster buoys hanging on the front door. Wrong. The Thimble was a private island the Darrows had owned for three generations, by my count. The house had six bedrooms and was part of a family compound, complete with a stable, a dock, and a boathouse. Mr. Darrow loved sailing.

  I was gazing at a group of clouds that resembled a school of fish, debating whether they were worth mentioning, when Hattie said, “I’m going to lose it tonight at Bradley’s.” Hattie’s the kind of person who calls a junior-snubbing senior like Sabrina by her last name—to her face—which is so brazen it impresses the senior and earns Hattie acceptance. Fondness, even.

  “Huh?” I responded lazily. My fingers played across the top of the warm water trapped in the raft with me.

  “I just decided.” Hattie’s voice is sort of low and a little raspy, which can make it seem like she’s letting you in on a joke. Which a lot of times she is. Now she lay on her belly, eyes closed, which we both knew was her way of prompting me to question her.

  Always game, I said, “Care to elaborate?”

  “I’m getting this whole virginity thing over with,” she replied. “Tonight.”

  I rose to my elbows. Cold water spilled into the raft. “What?”

  She still didn’t move. “I don’t want to be a virgin anymore. Think about it. It’s a burden.”

  “A burden?”

  “Yeah. You keep waiting for the right guy, and all that is just bullshit. There is no right guy in Scofield. Which means I go through senior year a virgin, and the next thing you know I’m in college, and nobody in college wants to sleep with a virgin.”

  “Seriously?” I cocked one eyebrow.

  “Yeah. Nobody worth sleeping with, anyway. I’m not going to be the inexperienced one. You can spot inexperience a mile away.”

  I couldn’t suppress my laughter. “Oh my God. You think you can tell who’s a virgin by looking at them?”

  “Can’t you? Compare Fiona Mejos to Emma Rose.”