The Great Big One Read online

  Aiiiieieiieee—

  They squealed as she sang. Laughter. It was a catching thing, mockery. Unlike Charity’s music, this was a song the whole town knew. Every time Griff had had his foot kicked into his back leg, every time he’d gotten shoved from behind, they’d been singing it to him:

  You don’t belong.

  This time the song was carried by Leo’s voice. They sang backup in the poisoned hawhawhaw laughter in the back booths. Smiles stretched to smirks and in the second minute of the song, near the end, people got loud. Griff could see the ugliness swell in them. Hungry eyes, desperate to chew up any beautiful thing they could. Leo had poisoned the room. Charity gave him a quick, trembling look, like someone about to tip backward off the edge of something—and he could not save her.

  She climbed down from the stage. She left. Gone.

  “Let’s give it up for Just Charity and Griff!” Rab howled, hustling toward the stage.

  Some people clapped. A sloppy response. Confused chatter.

  Griff felt a hot twist in his stomach, an eruption and shouting—his voice. He did not know his voice could sound the way it did, or how fast he could move. How strong he could be. He did not expect the table to flip so easy, the glasses to shatter. The first few sets of arms he shredded like ribbons and aimed for his brother’s throat and too many arms, he could not get to Leo so he peeled off and cut through the crowd, moving into the place where Charity’s mother had been but was no longer—

  Outside.

  Mist hung thick in the air and it was warm for October. Two sets of brake lights on opposite sides of the jetty. He ran until his chest throbbed and he tasted iron deep in his throat and the car was gone.

  Now, on the edge of the parking lot, the Urchin looked too small to hold such a vast, ugly thing.

  He’d let his wall down. He’d let them see. It was his fault, and he’d done nothing.

  He tried to outrun the hot, sticky feeling—racing from the pavement to dune grass and onto the slick and stony tidal flats—but the memory filled his lungs and the final look in Charity’s eyes cramped in his stomach and beat with the ocean’s pulse and the lighthouse swung, oblivious—

  WHOOMP!

  Stop! He hated it tonight. Wanted to scream, break something.

  Griff’s foot slipped into a stone tidepool with a deep, throaty glug and he staggered. Freezing water. His sock slurped against his boot’s interior. Cold soaked into his toes. The rippling water quieted.

  Stale tidepool.

  Nothing fine or feathered swam inside. Mussels clung with straw beards. A hermit crab moved with tight, spider jerks, and dozens of prickly black skeletons hunkered in the pool’s pocked, moonrock surface. Urchins. Because you had to be barbed and clawed and sealed up tight to survive. What would they all do, now that the music was gone?

  He’d listened to enough police reports to know.

  What happened next was the Patriots drank until they remembered they hated the Surfer Boys, and the Surfer Boys recalled they never could stand the Lumberjacks, and they’d crash one another’s heads in and spill out bloody and broken because the only song left was “You Don’t Belong” and the only ones to sing it to were each other.

  He could walk back and start a fight. Throw the first bottle.

  He turned back and something stopped him. A slap on the rocks, near the ocean. A small silver flash. It landed with a wet, sharp sound, like a piece of meat dropped on a stone countertop. Rockfish. The ones with big, searching eyes. Sad clown lips. They got trapped sometimes, after a full moon tide, and always tried to make it to the water. The rockfish jerked as if electrocuted.

  Griff ran. He needed to bring it to the water.

  His left foot plunged into another stone bowl freezing and soaked—hold on! Because it would choke on the air. It would starve or split its skull on stone. Get broken by the journey, snatched by a bird, and the whole ocean was so close.

  Griff couldn’t see it anymore.

  You’d find rockfish all the time on the beach, smashed up. Mottled with flies and lifeless and that’s how you got broken out here. You made the mistake of thinking you could escape.

  TWENTY-SIX

  GRIFF SLEPT DOWNSTAIRS WITH THE DRY GOODS, IN A COT between some of his father’s salvaged equipment from the ’64 tsunami and 200 pounds of rolled oats because they smelled better than most things when they leached through plastic tubs. He woke early to stiff footfalls. Descending steps. Maybe his mother. He was starving. He hadn’t eaten since lunch, the day before.

  Griff looked up to find Leo staring down at him.

  His brother. Griff had not yet entwined the events of last night with the person standing there. The horrific memory didn’t seem to fit the familiar body, calm eyes, and measured posture, so it just suffused the air between them—an awful nightmare miasma.

  “Hey, brother,” Leo said, standing in a shaft of light. Dressed, wearing their dad’s camo jacket. He pointed at the basement’s only window. “Check it out. Spotlight sun. That maple is The Most Important Tree in the World.” An old game they played. Giving names to the things that shone brightest.

  Leo was trying to win him over. Hoping the memory of last night would just go whooshing out in the cross-breeze. It would be easier that way.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Leo said. He said it like a commandment. Like Get moving.

  Griff lay and held his breath.

  “I didn’t—” Leo hushed his voice. “I didn’t mean for it to be so loud. It just felt like a joke. I got a little drunk, okay? Jonesy brought whisky. It was stupid.”

  Griff, in his mind, examined Leo’s Standard Relationship Repair Strategies.

  Step 1: Optimistic Distraction.

  Step 2: Aloof Apology.

  Step 3: Embarrassing Admission.

  Next, what would it be? An invitation? An us-and-them conspiracy?

  “We’re all going to the lighthouse tomorrow morning. The whole band. Charity, Thomas. All of us. We want you to come.”

  “Charity’s coming?” Griff asked.

  “She said she would.”

  “After last night?” Griff asked.

  “She might come,” Leo said. His voice had changed.

  Leo’s feet clicked up the wooden steps.

  Click, click, click, click—

  Footsteps stopped. Then returned, growing louder.

  Click, click, click.

  Griff squeezed his eyes shut. Griff could hear Leo breathing. He looked up. This time he did not know what to expect.

  “I shouldn’t have done it,” Leo said.

  This was not on the schematic. Griff sat up. His brother’s face, barely visible.

  “Why?”

  “You know why,” Leo said. “I’m tired of always losing.”

  Griff put his face into the pillow. He was shaking. Eyes squeezed shut. His brother’s last words came soft and hollow, like a breath across the neck of an empty bottle:

  “You two were glowing up there.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE NEXT DAY THEY WENT TO THE LIGHTHOUSE.

  It was Sunday, October 28.

  Griff couldn’t remember if he woke with that familiar dread—that something bad was going to happen. Or if it was a day like any other day. Or if those two things had become the same. What he remembered was waking up on the basement cot again to the scent of salt water and old oats and walking up the wooden steps to find Leo already dressed in the kitchen.

  He was wearing black pants. White T-shirt. Boots laced up.

  Their father’s camo jacket. Small black backpack.

  Griff said, “You always get to wear that jacket.”

  “Fine. Here. Take it,” Leo said. He pulled it off, tossed it across the table.

  It made a soft knocking sound—tok.

  “We’re going to the Point?” Griff asked. “Why?”

  “There’s a plan. You’ll love it.”

  The house had that haunted feeling of parents being gone at odd times. Mom at Shoreli
ne Gifts early to receive a shipment. Dad at a weekend workshop with Dunbar. Dust motes on lazy glide paths. Leo had just eaten a bowl of cereal, a few abandoned flakes swimming in the milk. He was sitting straight-backed in their father’s seat like he’d claimed the throne and would be there forever.

  “Where are Charity and Thomas?” Griff asked.

  “They’re meeting us there,” Leo said. “I’ve got the truck.”

  Had Charity been texting Leo? When she wouldn’t respond to him?

  Leo stood. He walked past Griff and down the hallway past the rack of hung coats. Never once had their father allowed Griff to drive the truck. Griff looked at Leo. He could leap onto his back and punch hard, screaming—no parents to stop him. Instead, as if pulled by an invisible thread, Griff stood and walked to the door, laced up his boots, taking care to weave all the way up the tongue, catching all the grommets, nice and snug, toe to ankle.

  The truck started in the driveway—a bolt of panic—what if Leo left him behind?

  Outside, it was surprisingly warm.

  Griff took a breath—brief delight at sunshine and rustling leaves. The fresh air blew some of the cobwebs from his thinking. Just a drive to the Point. Charity might be there. It was a beautiful day. He climbed into the truck.

  Griff wanted coffee. He would not ask Leo to stop. Refused to give him an opportunity for kindness.

  The truck sat up high on the road and Griff rode shotgun. He rolled down the window. The sun lay like a warm glove on his exposed forearm, wrist, hand. The metal body of the truck felt good and strong. Autumn air, cold in his ears, had already grown its winter teeth.

  The ThunderChicken was there waiting. Thomas, wearing sunglasses and leaning against his proud vehicle like it was a position he’d been rehearsing for a sunny weekend in October. There were surprisingly few vehicles. Two pickups. One small Geo.

  “Where’s Charity?” Griff asked.

  Leo checked his phone. “Not here yet.”

  They got out. Leo gave Thomas a backslapping hug.

  “Good morning, buddy!”

  Griff watched Marine Drive for the flash of an incoming car. In the grassy parking lot peninsula, dead-eyed October sunflowers bobbed their heads as the breeze picked up, carrying a pulse of the Pacific chill, ruffling his hair. Griff grabbed his arms. The coat. He’d left the coat on the kitchen table where Leo had thrown it. They stood around and didn’t talk much, waiting for Charity.

  They could already hear God’s Mouth.

  Hoom.

  “Did you check the tide tables?” Leo asked.

  “Forty-five minutes to low tide,” Thomas said.

  “We need to go,” Leo said. He was right. To make it there and back, you had a window of two hours. They’d lost thirty minutes.

  “Without Charity?” Griff asked.

  Leo shrugged.

  “C’mon,” he said. Thomas followed. Griff shook his head, looked back at Marine Drive. He turned and followed his brother. He wondered if Charity had ever agreed to come at all.

  The water sounded high.

  Some days, it pulsed like a giant lapping tongue. Today, a stone-and-water kick drum. They walked to the west side of the lot, where a small mouth in the canopy widened to a soil-and-sand footpath down through rows of dramatic, wind-whipped lodgepole pines. Twisted by salt and spray, they contorted themselves like a collection of prehistoric insects and wooden giants, needle-hair blown back in great green shocks. Krummholz.

  “Walkin’ through the crumb holes,” Thomas sang. “Stompin’ through the crumb holes!”

  Charity could’ve riffed with him. Thomas would’ve dropped a beat. But no Charity. Without her, they limped along like a three-legged dog. Down at the bottom of the trail, Leo tried to fill the void with enthusiasm. He walked ahead, tossing comments back on the wind—

  “—great show overall, though, good turnout—”

  “What are we doing, Thomas?” Griff asked quietly.

  “Going to the lighthouse,” Thomas said. “That’s all I know. There’s something Leo wants to show us.”

  “Where’s Charity?”

  “I don’t know,” Thomas said. “God that was terrible.”

  They stepped from loamy, root-bound soil to sand. Flies all over the beach. Big as bumblebees. They clung to long ropy chutes of seaweed. Bullwhip kelp, all over the beach. The smell of vegetable rot, old cabbage. Leo up ahead and crouching over something. His backpack. Riffling through.

  “Bro!” Leo yelled back.

  “What?”

  “Where’s the coat?”

  “What?”

  “Dad’s coat!”

  “I left it at the house!”

  Leo stared at him. Like Griff forgetting the coat had ruined his whole day. Like they might as well turn back because he forgot the stupid coat.

  “So what?” Griff screamed into the wind, threw up his arms.

  Leo stood up. Paused. Then kept going. Onto the wide mud flats, picking his way through the beached sand dollars. Pulling himself up onto the boulders. Griff hated the way Leo moved. Farther ahead than usual. Was Charity meeting them at the lighthouse?

  Griff moved faster. A sand dollar crunched beneath his foot like a small plate. Alive, now in pieces. Griff walked forward to boulders that rose up from the mud and then he climbed. He should catch up. By the time he reached the trail, Leo was already at the top of the short, steep summit.

  He waited for them near the cluster of signs: BEWARE UNSTABLE ROCK LEDGES, BEWARE RIP CURRENT, AVOID UNSTABLE LOGS, TSUNAMI ZONE, BEWARE SNEAKER WAVES. Each depicted its own tragic tableau: a stick figure tumbled from a cliff with small triangular rocks. A stick figure was pulled by an arrow out to sea. A stick figure sequentially murdered by toothy waves, a torrential rainstorm, rolling logs, a falling boulder.

  “Clade City,” Thomas said. “The most dangerous place in the world to be a stick figure.”

  They usually paused here, at the top. It was the most sweeping view in Clade City, lighthouse to the right, the Ruins to the left, and nothing but the bold, blue world spread out in front. Griff used to stand in the wind and put his hands to the side of his face like blinders. Erase all signs of civilization, taste the sea, and pretend he was flying, hurtling toward the horizon at unknown speeds.

  “There he goes,” Thomas said.

  Leo hadn’t stopped. Already working down the sharp descent and into the canyon toward God’s Mouth. The stone path stretched like a catwalk alongside the lip of a turbulent whitewater chute. At high tide, the surf below galloped landward and smashed itself into a cavern you could hear all the way from their bedroom window. Named God’s Mouth, because it seemed to speak with each intake of foam.

  Shhhhhh or HOOM!

  The cavern hissed.

  “Dragons,” Thomas said, clasping Griff’s shoulder. “Be careful.”

  And Leo was already halfway to the crossing. To reach the lighthouse, one had to traverse a stone land bridge 15 feet above the cavern. It was the width of a narrow sidewalk, bald and crumbling on its downward slope. Griff’s chest always fluttered, seeing it. The crossing was safe and stable enough. In Clade City, people brought their dogs. Parents took children by the hand. Their father had led them across dozens of times, since elementary school.

  “Just don’t look down,” he’d told them.

  The pool at God’s Mouth was a violent froth. Churning as if lashed by a submerged propeller. Like it would chop your legs off at the knees. Even in a town with nothing to do but drink and dare each other to go first—nobody went swimming in God’s Mouth.

  As Leo advanced, a wave came in—high for low tide. It moved like a white horse at a stiff canter and broke itself on the rocks.

  HOOM!

  Griff sped up. They were supposed to wait before the crossing. Their father had taught them to cross together. Why did Leo have to be so far ahead? Was she really waiting for them at the lighthouse? He moved into a jog. A stone the size of a baseball, underfoot, caught in the arch. Griff stu
mbled sideways and the stone bounced, clattered down the ragged cliffside, lost to water.

  “Careful, bro,” Leo said. He looked back and smiled.

  That was it. And the lighthouse looked dark. Griff remembered Leo’s lie—Jonesy and I shot it up. Remembered Can you tell Griff the music doesn’t come from the lighthouse—Griff slipped on scree then and righted himself on even ground, walking toward his brother.

  “Hey—”

  Griff came quick.

  HOOM!

  The sound shook his shirt against his skin. Brine on his lips, rimming his eyes in a saltwater haze, and he’d push through—you could cross the ledge in ten seconds, just hug it close, his father always said, stay on the inside, a tender chunk of rock could come right off under your heel—

  “Bro,” Leo said, “let me go first. I’ve got something—”

  No. If she was there, Griff would see her first.

  Griff pushed past him. Shoved Leo against the cliff wall. A train of blood between his ears, click-clack thunder as he stepped onto the ledge. Griff was ahead and this is when you trip, with everyone watching. He pressed a hand to the brittle cliffside. Cold stone. One foot, the next, count to five and you’re halfway—

  Deep breath and HOOM!

  A foamy pop. Water slashed his ankles. Breath trapped in his chest and he spun toward the rock wall, palms on stone. Legs shaking. Don’t lean or your boots will shoot out on slick rock and then your stomach drops and you are pedaling air with feet and the shock of water—

  “Keep going!” Thomas said.

  “It’s supposed to be low tide,” Leo said.

  “Sneaker wave,” Thomas said.

  “Breathe, bro,” Leo said. “Breathe and move.”

  “I’m fine!” Griff screamed. His words ricocheted against the rock, rang in his ears. Fine. Failure, failing. Leo would help his little brother. Griff seethed, pushing and pulling air through clenched teeth. Cold air, sucking his lips. Chest scraping stone. He sidled over. Almost.

  “Just another step,” Leo said.

  Leo had already started across.