The Great Big One Read online

  “I’ve got it,” Griff said. “Stop talking!”

  Griff crossed. He straightened his feet on the stone saddle where the narrow ledge widened to a broad shelf. Leo was already nearly halfway across, but there was something wrong with the ocean. Drum gone still.

  The horizon was off. Too thick and too blue.

  Coming fast. Soundless. Griff had never seen a real sneaker wave. Leo did not see it. He was looking at Griff with his mouth parted, a crease between his eyes. Griff knew the look. Leo was worried about him.

  Griff did not have time to scream his name.

  Leo spun, braced himself against the rock and the wave was too high to pound and break and so it just washed. Like pouring a bowl of water over a baby in the bath. A low wet slosh and no one there now. Puddles, ponds, rivers sluicing down from the ledge, a soft waterfall.

  Gone. Rock ledge with Leo. Gone now. The foam in the stone pool was the same, except now Leo was down there. Leo’s right down there. His arms and legs and head and chest and voice, down there.

  Moving like he never moved.

  Loose, jangling. Crumpled and tossed, and Griff grabbed his own wrists. Grabbed bare flesh. He looked down at his brother and back at the ledge and down at the shirt moving in white water and could not see his sweet brother’s head. Could not see his brother’s face—

  “He’s, he’s, he’s—”

  A pink bloom in the water. Lips, a bent elbow.

  Alive! His small elbow moved in the froth, you could see it move.

  HOOM!

  Screaming. Who was screaming? He’d jump but boots—boots like stones strapped to your feet and Leo, wearing boots—laces and knots—Thomas with his phone, now crossing the ledge—

  “Stop. Griff, STOP!”

  Faster! Just jump with boots and now Thomas too close, screaming in his face, screaming NO—LET ME GO LET ME GO—they crashed back against rock—WE’LL ALL DIE, GRIFF WE’LL ALL DIE

  Can’t paddle foam. Tread foam. Can’t tear a wrist and make it a cord. Screaming, grabbing his own shirt because something had to rip and tear, the impulse becoming a plan, something to do—make a line, throw out a line—

  MAKE A LINE!

  No jacket, no bracelet, no Leo. Thomas tore off his jacket, his shirt, jeans, stood in underwear and Griff was tying square knots strong knots he was good with his hands, denim to cotton to nylon to denim and lying flat, it would reach, because the story is—

  HOOM!

  —close call, that’s the story. Almost happened, the story is wrong and broken otherwise—

  Focus.

  Griff dangled the shaking line of knotted clothes slapping stone, did it even reach? Can’t tell. Water lurching against rock. Foam, no elbow, no lips, no small chin, no eyes no arms no shoulders no legs, hands—

  Leo. So strong when his hands grab, it will pull him straight in.

  When you grabbed the line you almost pulled me straight in? Leo, remember? Close call.

  No hand yet—

  Line of limp clothes hanging.

  Get up! Rewind, Leo. Put him back. Two minutes please God if anything my whole life just two minutes and counting—ten seconds okay, you could hold your breath twenty, thirty, sixty scary, getting too long—

  —how long until the sirens?

  He and Thomas stripped to underwear, shaking and so pale.

  The sun shone and it was cold.

  In the distance, something like a little bell. He couldn’t breathe. Yes, like a little bike bell with handlebar streamers on a perfect sunny day. And sirens. A pretty perfect day, then the ledge. A pretty perfect life, now this forever. Wringing shirts and jeans to get them dry, that’s how the knots hold better, they hold better when they’re dry, so do that, get them dry.

  Wringing will split the webbing between thumb and forefinger done long enough, you’ll blow your voice out for a week if you scream long enough, so keep wringing those motherfuckers, keep squeezing, hands bleeding on your perfect October day, a day like any other day, or maybe, you just knew deep down and all along that something bad was going to happen.

  ANDANTE

  The answer is never the answer… the need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

  —KEN KESEY

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE FUNERAL WAS NOT THE HARD PART.

  There was no body to stare at. Leo’s body was not recovered.

  Everyone was dressed in black and you could pour your heartbreak into the empty coffin and the tissues and the hole in the ground, all of which were there, Griff was told, for closure. Food and flowers. Cards and tears, all critical. Given the strong turnout, and abundant food, and weather that was gray but not pouring, there were worse ways to spend an afternoon in Clade City—but where was Leo?

  Griff wondered where Leo was for these small white cakes with the cream cheese frosting which Ms. Marizza hadn’t made since two Thanksgivings ago. Where was Leo to laugh with when their aunt Christina sneezed on the potato salad point-blank without apology because she was allergic to peppers. Leo, to help count how many drinks the CigBiz had before she moved from the couch to the floor and seemed unable or unwilling to get up for nearly an hour. Leo, to place bets on how many clove cigarettes Uncle Ron would sneak in the garage.

  It was Leo’s funeral, and he wasn’t even here.

  Griff was wearing his bracelet, which no one noticed. He wanted to find Leo at the funeral and show him: See, Leo. I remembered. It was the first thing I did when I got home.

  Eventually it got dark. People collected their families and each other. They went with all the same people they came in with. They left the loss behind.

  The loss would not be concealed in an empty coffin or shut into a pit in the ground or wrapped in a tissue and thrown away. The loss would be borne. Carried alone. And when there was no longer an accommodating space for loss, it still had to fit somewhere.

  Placed in the spaces between notes. In the backseat of Dad’s truck. Loss would be the tight and squeezing thing in the toe of your shoes when you walked to school, in your pockets with the jangling keys. The breaths between words.

  Mostly in your throat. So you learned to breathe around it.

  At school, the day after the funeral, Griff was afraid he’d punch every sad and sorry face, but those faces were helpful. It was better when the whole world carried a piece of it. When you are sad, the therapist said, listen to sad music. Music should be mood-compatible. At first, the world was mood-compatible. Teachers and parents and relatives and everyone in Clade City played along, except Leo.

  How did Leo fit in all this?

  Griff wanted to ask his mom: When will Leo be home?

  He needed to ask somebody. When he got home from school, he panicked in the room with his brother’s empty bed, could not breathe. The question, swelling to block his windpipe. If he didn’t get the question out, he would choke on it. “When will Leo be home?”

  He made himself say it.

  In first grade, Leo always played with the neighbors across the street. They could only have one friend over at a time and had always requested Leo by name. When his brother left, Griff would sit in the window and watch. He couldn’t stop asking his mom:

  When will Leo be home?

  His mother kept the blinds down and curtains drawn. The next day, sometime in the early evening, she came out of her office with bolts of fabric draped across her forearm.

  “Magnets?” she asked the room. “Tacks?”

  His father stood and went into their bedroom. A few minutes later, something crashed. His father came out with a dustpan full of glass. Light danced on the ceiling, flickered on the walls. His mother followed him and pulled an old burlap coffee sack over the mirror near the front door. Stuck it with pins.

  “We’re supposed to cover the mirrors,” his mother said.

  When they could not be covered, mirrors were removed. The interior of the medicine cabinet gaped with metal shelves and Leo’s toothbrush. Lotion. Floss. A big plastic jar o
f vitamin C gummies. In their bedroom, the closet mirror was blocked by a gray tapestry, held with magnets. Leo’s clothing hung inside.

  Five pairs of shoes, unlaced.

  Shoes, waiting. Shirts, waiting. Pants. Plates. Chair and dinner. Hanging keys waiting. Dental floss waiting. Everyone and everything waiting for Leo to come home.

  TWENTY-NINE

  IT WAS SOME AFTERNOON.

  Charity was crying in the hallway.

  She was staring at him like someone on TV. He felt trapped behind glass. She was shaking her head:

  Why, why, why, why—

  Griff was confused, shaking his head too. Charity’s hair was shorter. Corkscrews. Her face was different. Not even her. Her eyes were puffy and her cheeks were puffy and she was screaming on the glass screen and saying—

  —why won’t you just talk to me?

  Someone should talk to Charity. She was hurting.

  Can’t someone do anything?

  Griff was crying because she was so sad and—someone do something! He couldn’t watch this movie anymore, and thankfully the camera pulled back and Charity grew distant. Her whole walk was different. Like she was wading through something ankle-deep.

  Charity exited the frame. Griff was alone in the hallway.

  It was him she’d been talking to.

  He breathed. Tried to get air over the stone in his throat.

  He should message her. Respond in some way. That knowledge sat like a tiny shiny silver thing at the bottom of a well with a cut rope and broken bucket.

  Even if he could fish out that little bit of energy—

  Well—

  How could he respond?

  He couldn’t remember a single thing Charity had said.

  THIRTY

  SUNSHINE.

  Sometime in the spring.

  The world was no longer mood-compatible. Springtime. The blooming of sundresses and tans. Smiles and white teeth, hard on the eyes.

  Griff and Thomas were standing up front, giving a class presentation on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Griff looked down. Full camo. Unbelievable. He almost laughed, except he was talking:

  “The quake will be a 9.0 at least. We know this because the earthquake has happened every 300 to 500 years since 600 BC. We know it’s coming because of the ghost forests left behind, and the stories of native people. Like the Thunderbird and the Whale. How all creation lives on the back of a whale. The Thunderbird picks it up, drops it in the middle of the desert—”

  Griff’s voice sounded smooth and confident. It reminded him of his brother.

  “How likely is this to happen?” asked Mandy Thompson. “Like, in our lifetime?”

  “Well,” Griff said. He removed a quarter from his pocket. “How rare is it to flip a quarter and have it come up heads twice in a row?”

  He flipped the coin. Heads.

  “Pretty common,” she said.

  “It’s statistically more likely than that.”

  These were facts.

  People listened to facts. He wondered if it was his words, or the camouflage, or Leo’s death. When people looked him in the eyes, they looked compelled and curious but also cautious. They looked into him like he was an abyss. They wanted to know what was down there but were afraid to fall in. Thomas was now talking. This was his part, which played like a campfire ghost story of What Will Happen When It Hits:

  “Homes will slide off their slab foundations,” he said, doing his most descriptive gestures. “Crumple like paper balls. The land liquefies and gas lines snap and now you’ve got a 700-mile wall of water—”

  Thomas nailed it. Outside, the Thunderbolt screamed. Their weekly drill.

  BADADDAADADABRREEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

  Half the class jumped. A magician’s timing. The only trick Thomas still did.

  The wildfires had come.

  Now Griff was having dinner with his family. One, two, three. Four chairs again. A big box of red wine. Surgical masks on the table.

  “These are the N95s,” his father explained.

  Green and secured with elastic straps, like something you’d wear in surgery. His father looked so angular. Like his skeleton was swelling, bursting blood vessels in his cheeks. But he was full of energy, talking about these masks. Long fingers dancing on the boxes, prying them open.

  “—fine-enough filtration to suspend the particulate matter. Left over from the pandemic. But they need to be secured. Right against the cheeks. Can we try?”

  “Now?” his mother asked.

  Her hair! So different. Reddish brown with a gray patch on top, splitting like a silver egg yolk over the crown. And her skin. Like she’d taken it off and had it laundered wrong so it came back baggy and stained beneath the eyes and even her teeth looked smaller, like pebbles. My god, what happened to Mom?

  Griff could cry, just for Mom.

  You are living a nightmare life.

  He gripped the table, trying to breathe. The message repeated itself:

  You are living a nightmare life.

  “There you go,” his father said, snugging the mask over his mother’s small face. “Feel that? That’s perfect. You’ll be fine. Griff?”

  She sat wearing her green surgical mask. Damp eyes. Griff put his on.

  It smelled like hospitals. Breathing in a sauna. Underwater.

  No, no.

  If he couldn’t catch his breath, the table would tilt and he’d spill onto the floor and his parents would fight again. He’d turn them into murmuring, shouting, blubbering whales.

  “It’s about the cadmium,” his father explained, delirious with facts. “The filtration on these respirators at .3 microns can prevent the cadmium—”

  Cadmium! That was the thing. Got down into your pink lungs and turned them gray and we don’t need to remind anyone here what happens next. Death, followed by endless family dinners. Persistent meatloaf, unbuttered potatoes, corn that tasted like the can it came in.

  Would there be Special Corn again?

  Had they missed the harvest? Would they even bother to drive to the farm with an empty seat in the pickup? Eat at a table that had an empty fourth chair and then no chair and now, suddenly—a chair again?

  “Can I be excused?” Griff heard himself say.

  It was happening again. That flutter-eyed feeling.

  He blinked his bedroom into focus. Tugged on the bottom of his shirt, which rode too high over his belt, tugged on the ankles of his pants, which rode too high over his feet. Ran a hand through his long hair and looked at the paracord bracelet on his wrist. Pulled it hard.

  His desk calendar was full and healthy, dripping with appointments. Hashtags and figure eights and other symbols for Marksmanship Training, Outdoor Survival, Cascadia Subduction Training. Unmanned, the chessboard of his life was still in play. Other people, moving all the pieces around.

  He put the calendar on his bed.

  He flipped forward all the way to December and saw GAP ACADEMY ORIENTATION. A cold breeze through his chest. Right. That was happening. He flipped back to today and traced the date with his finger. No red circles. It was late June. Summertime. He was no longer a junior.

  Oh he could scream.

  He could break a window and leap out and run circles or he could just collapse. They don’t tell you that you’ll still be carrying the loss for months and months after the funeral. Hauling a boulder. That’s why you lose weight. Why you cannot sleep or get out of bed. On the days you can get it smaller than your fist, the stone is flat-bellied and sits meditatively on your tongue, soaks up the juice in your mouth and slowly grows big again. If you fell in the water, you’d sink dead to the bottom.

  Griff stood. His closet mirror was covered with butcher paper.

  Had he done that? What happened to the gray fabric?

  TOE Box, still locked. All their notes and files were outdated. Missing the most vital piece to the grand puzzle.

  LEO IS DEAD.

  Leo’s death was part of any universal truth. Part of God, if there wa
s a god. Now, synchronicity and magic and the fabric of existence could not hold together without that tight little stitch—Leo is dead, and you didn’t save him.

  May as well leave it locked. There’s nothing else to know.

  THIRTY-ONE

  SUMMERTIME.

  Jonesy was smoking a cigarette in the front seat, swearing out of the corner of his mouth at every car that failed to do his bidding.

  Fuckin’ hippie bug. Fuckin’ Lexus. Fuckin’ Buick.

  They were headed to the regional meeting to be honored for the Early Alert Response System, which was now a big deal. There would be over a hundred people there. Jonesy and Slim pronounced hundred like hun-derd, rhymed with thundered, the way pleece reports rhymed with fleece reports, and the internet was the innernet, like a tunnel rather than a web.

  “Hundred,” Griff said to himself. It didn’t sound right. Neither way sounded right.

  Griff had a binder on his lap. He was presenting on EARS, and bunker construction, and the basics of emergency evacuation protocols because he had just received an early-bird full-ride scholarship to Gap Academy, which would begin directly after his senior year.

  “Want a turn, Griff?” Slim asked. He pointed to the radio.

  For what? Music. Sweet guy. Slim remembered he liked music.

  “It’s fine,” Griff said.

  He didn’t even realize anything was on.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “THERE’S SOMETHING FOR YOU,” HIS MOM SAID, “IN THE MAILBOX.”

  “Why didn’t you bring it in?” Griff asked.

  “It’s fun to get mail yourself. From the big black box. When’s the last time you got mail?”

  Griff grabbed up his shoes, then felt a strange buzz. Like, he needed to go faster. Whatever was there might dissolve to ashes. He went barefoot and the grass was warm. Squishy dirt. Mud between toes. The earth was still alive. A million blades of grass, still alive. The whole living earth didn’t care about Leo or the mail.