7

Spiraling Out of Control

"Are you sure your grandparents won't come in to say hello and have something to eat?" Mrs. Borden asked Nick a few minutes later while their neighbors were getting refreshments and settling into comfortable pockets of conversation.

"I don't think they feel very confident with their English in front of strangers," Nick answered. He hesitated, wondering if he should just straight out tell Mrs. Borden that living with their grandparents was at best strained, and that they were planning to take Lottica and him to live in Lebreima permanently. His heart wanted to tell her, but his gut said now was not the time, so he smiled politely and offered to take his grandparents some punch. Which he knew they likely wouldn’t drink.

Mrs. Borden gave Nick two large plastic cups of punch. He'd never seen them drink anything other than tea or water. Nick pictured his grandmother keeping both cups until they arrived back home so she could empty them in the sink without offending the giver.

A small part of Nick actually admired that gentility, and he paused on his way to their car. Twice, in the space of twenty minutes, he had experienced a pang of sympathy for his grandparents. Well, maybe not sympathy, but a sense of understanding that they were as lost in this country as he and Lottica were without their parents.

Had he ever considered their loss and grief? They had lost their only son, whom they had begrudgingly followed to America. Nick was struck by how little he knew of his father's family. He’d heard many fanciful Lebreiman folktales, but little of his father’s family’s true background.

He decided that he would save his grandparents the trouble of the punch they would never drink and ducked around the side—or what was once the side—of his old house. He dumped out the cups and set them down. The yard was cordoned off with yellow caution tape, but Nick slipped under it and entered his old backyard.

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There, the memories bit him hard. Sitting in their old sandbox with Lottica making "witches brew" out of sand, dirt, bark, grass, clover and dandelions, and pouring it on ants or earwigs to turn them into super bugs that would do their bidding. Lottica burying their mom’s garden gnome because she thought it was creepy and him digging it out to wrap it up as her birthday present. His dad throwing him fly balls that sometimes lofted too high and pinballed through the limbs of the huge maple that bordered the back of their lot. His mother helping Lottica set up her telescope on the patio in the evenings. His first time flipping burgers on the barbecue only to have one end up in the coals and another on the ground with his dad laughing and calling dibs on that patty.

Nick’s eyes watered, his throat dried, his blood pounded in his temples. He turned away from the backyard. He faced the wreckage of their home. The devastation unnerved him, sending the first tiny spiders of panic crawling down the base of his neck.

The roof was completely gone, collapsed into the interior of the once richly painted walls now scorched black. Wiring and fixtures snaked Medusa-like in murky corners, and piles of what was once furniture and appliances created strange contours of darkness. It had become a black hole of his past and little could escape the pull of its emptiness.

He knew he should leave and get back to his sister and his neighbors, but Nick was drawn to the center of the house and the spiral staircase. He looked up from its base and felt a delirious sense of vertigo as he searched upward through the iron treads. Isolated, the staircase seemed like a hulking strand of DNA, and Nick had become a detached chromosome. The analogy fit. Created by their father, it was his heritage, his legacy.

Nick climbed. He could not resist the pull, and the iron treads softly rang each of his steps, tolling the years of his childhood. Each step upward heavy with longing. His dad’s raucous laughter. His mom’s ready embrace. He could smell the lavender soap she was fond of using. He inhaled deeply, his heart pounding with excitement as if she’d be there on the next step. Nick closed his eyes for a moment and tightened his hand on the railing.

Other than an odd stillness, he wasn’t conscious of the last few steps. Then he was at the top, no longer connected to a house and time that was a part of him. Nick peered over the sun-bleached neighborhood and down into the ruin below. His mind seemed to take it all in and accept the dark and light as one. He stood at the edge of a reality that had come and gone.

Where had it gone?

Could he go there?

He inched to the very edge of the top step and his hand, acting of its own accord, clutched the hawk capping the center post. The stoic features of the bird, though fastened tightly, vibrated as though ready to take flight.

Nick thought, Take me.