When Light Left Us, page 1
For those who stay
Also by Leah Thomas
Because You’ll Never Meet Me
Nowhere Near You
CONTENTS
The Nameless Canyon Observation Deck
Part One: September 7: (Day Thirty-Three)
1: Eyes
2: Hands
3: Ears
4: Outside
5: Hands
6: Eyes
7: Outside
8: Ears
9: Hands
10: Outside
11: Eyes
12: Hands
13: Ears
14: Eyes
15: Hands
16: Outside
Part Two: October 31: (Day Eighty-Seven)
1: Ears
2: Eyes
3: Hands
4: Outside
5: Eyes
6: Hands
7: Outside
8: Eyes
9: Ears
10: Hands
11: Eyes
12: Ears
13: Hands
14: Eyes
15: Outside
16: Ears
Part Three: November 23: (Day One Hundred Ten)
1: Luz
2: Hank
3: Maggie
4: Ana
5: Luz
6: Margaret
7: Hank
8: Ana
9: Luz
10: Hank
11: Sister
12: Luz
13: Mother
14: Brother
15: Other
Thanksgiving
Acknowledgments
THE NAMELESS CANYON OBSERVATION DECK
When he was four years old, Milo Vasquez asked for a tree house.
The Vasquezes’ cracking stucco mono-level teetered on the brink of a canyon bereft of palms, cacti, or even spiky yuccas. There were no trees within miles of the plot of Chihuahuan desert they called home.
From the dirt grew mostly bear grass so toothy and clawing that for years, during short family walks along the cliff on cool purple evenings, Milo’s dad had lifted his kids by the handholds of their underarms and levitated them away from potential mauling. “Bears bite hard,” he told them.
Every Vasquez heard Milo’s impossible request. Hank and Ana had just been picked up from volunteering at the high school concession stand. Neither was in the marching band, but fund-raising to send their sousaphone-wielding friends to Europe beat riffling through Highlights magazines in a waiting room, watching their mother bite her lip and their father bite his nails.
Milo, Mom, and Dad were returning from a visit to Gailsberg and the third doctor in as many months who could not explain why Milo no longer asked questions, or spoke in complete sentences, or said much of anything at all.
“Can we build a tree house for everyone?”
Milo’s voice struck the truck like a summer storm, threatened to roll the rusting Chevy off the narrow road that wound around Nameless Canyon.
Ana recovered first. “For everyone, Milo? You mean everyone in Eustace?”
Hank barked out a laugh as big as a holler. He squeezed Milo’s shoulders with mitt-size hands. “That’d be a freakin’ tree city.”
“A tree city is called a forest. Besides, Eustace is basically a pimple. Not everyone takes up as much space as Hank, Milo.” Ana had just spent three hours guarding the till, watching her big brother throw Snickers at every one of his endless friends who passed by.
“Big enough for the family,” Milo clarified. “Not too big.”
“That’s an amazing idea, Milo,” Hank declared.
“Sure, except there aren’t any trees in Nameless Canyon.”
“We can grow some, Ana.” Mom rotated almost entirely in the passenger seat to fix shining eyes on Milo. “Remember Mrs. Noell from 4-H? We helped her plant those carnations downtown? They bloomed all the way until October! She could give us some tips.”
“I could invite the guys over to help,” Hank added. “We’re all bored as hell during the off-season.”
“Dad already has enough tools, I think.” But Ana smirked when Hank elbowed her. Hank had paid for every one of those candy bars at the stand, pulling wads of his dwindling summer earnings from his back pocket and plopping them in Ana’s palm along with a Milky Way (he knew she hated peanuts). “Right? Dad?”
Dad hadn’t made a sound. His gaze flitted across the discordant pieces of his little family: the tangled limbs of three wildly different creatures, crammed into the backseat with their knees knocking, and their mother, craning toward the knot of them as if she longed to be caught up in it. “Dunno. Growing trees takes years, guys.”
The sinking of shoulders in the backseat seemed likely to weigh the Chevy down, to flatten the tires and yank the bed straight through the road.
“Donovan,” Mom warned.
At last Dad rewarded Milo with a rearview wink.
“Fine. I hear you, papi. We’ll build your tree house.”
That night Hank reminded Milo that observation decks—like the one they’d seen on a family trip to the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, for example—could be just as cool as boring old tree houses. “We don’t have a forest, but we’ve got a lot of stars. I dunno. Maybe we could look at those instead?”
Milo liked that idea so much that he climbed the tree of Hank until his little arms were secure around his big brother’s neck, and Hank ran a lap around the house with Milo riding piggyback. Breathless from laughter, Milo whispered: “We need a blueprint.”
Hank wasn’t great at drawing. None of his friends were, either.
But one of Hank’s classmates was better than great. Hank could never talk to Brendan Nesbitt, but he’d noticed him every day for months. Brendan sat in front of Hank in Health class and drew startling, lovely shapes in the margins of his notebooks. None of the shapes were half so startling or lovely as Brendan Nesbitt himself, which was why Hank could never talk to him.
Brendan was startled and not just startling when Hank blurted his request in the spare minutes before second bell.
“I’ll pay you back somehow,” Hank stammered. Brendan had already pulled a pad of graph paper from his backpack, was already drawing. “I can help you do any heavy lifting you might need. Or I can come reorganize your house? Your garage? I’d help you with homework but that’d be dumb. I mean, you’re definitely smarter than me.”
Brendan didn’t lift his head, but Hank felt the flit of his gaze like feathers. “How about you and your brother just let me see the final product?” Now Brendan stared right at Hank and smiled. “Invite me over sometime, Hank.”
Hank flushed. Again, he could not talk to Brendan Nesbitt.
After two days Brendan delivered the completed blueprint. That evening, Hank rushed through his homework and chores so he could slouch next to Milo on the bottom bunk. He pointed out finer, unnecessary details in the artwork, like the stars Brendan had charted in the background and the threads of wood grain he had etched in soft pencil.
Milo only had eyes for the architecture. He pretended to stroke an invisible goatee. “Yes. This’ll do.”
The Vasquez brothers spent an hour coloring in Brendan’s lines with crayon.
Ana, fledgling filmmaker, waited until Friday to invite Marissa Ritter over to assist with the cinematic staging of Milo’s observation deck.
Marissa’s main area of expertise was screenwriting—she and Ana were making movies on their phones even in the good old days when their shoes still lit up. Marissa had been officially in charge of their scripts for two years, ever since she won the fifth-grade writing contest with a piece about sentient furniture. Still, Ana couldn’t imagine building a set without Marissa’s input. And Marissa was better at dealing with little kids. Ana, with all her edges, always worried she’d cut Milo by accident.
Marissa held Milo’s hand while Ana led the way along the slanted sides of Nameless Canyon, dodging the thistles that lurked below the Vasquez home. Ana stopped every few steps and pressed her thumbs and forefingers together to form a square with which she could frame the sky. Marissa showed Milo how to do the same. Soon all three were viewing the canyon through the make-believe camera lenses of their hands.
By the time the sun was setting, Ana had her hands on her hips and her feet firmly placed. “Milo, if we build the platform in exactly this position, and have it facing out at this exact angle, you know what?”
“What?” Milo hazarded.
“The view from the deck will be totally cinematic.”
“An actual vista,” Marissa confirmed. She and Ana wore matching sunglasses.
Milo set a Matchbox car at Ana’s feet to mark the spot.
When Maggie Vasquez informed Mrs. Noell that her green thumb was no longer needed, Mrs. Noell offered them dead trees instead of live ones. “We’ve got some scrap lookin’ for a good home. Send Don over to pick it up.”
It was Maggie who turned up instead, with all three kids in tow. Mrs. Noell led them to the woodshed, clapped Ana on the back, mussed Milo’s hair, and demanded Hank rejoin the club and forget about that sports nonsense.
Ana referenced the blueprint for specifics and Hank sifted through the pile, pretending not to have memorized every detail of Brendan’s drawing. Milo was in charge of the measuring tape; he couldn’t stop the yellow strip from snapping back at him like a broken snake. Maggie kept Mrs. Noell busy with chatter, helping the older woman repaint the 4-H logo on her minivan.
All four Vasquezes were filthy with paint and sweat and s awdust by the time they pulled away. The Chevy was full to the brim with lumber.
They drove home at dusk with the windows rolled down, singing into the breeze.
Dad promised he’d play the foreman. But when it became clear that he couldn’t get enough daylight time off work to even break ground under Milo’s Matchbox car in the desert, Maggie left school early to bury a shovel in the earth.
The following weekend, Hank made good on his offer to involve the basketball team. Soon a gaggle of noisy, jumble-limbed teens was hoisting beams and planting them, or, in the case of known doofus Orson Liu, sledding down the desert slope on plywood slats. Marissa made an appearance, collecting footage for a future time-lapse montage. Come nightfall, Maggie treated them all to pizza, then chased them out.
Days after that, Mrs. Noell brought over some of her 4-H staffers to mix and pour concrete at the base of the six main beams. They produced hammers and nails and drills from hidden pockets. They became an orchestral cacophony of constructing, solidifying the horizontal supports, the cantilevered landing, the decking. Come nightfall, Maggie treated them all to pizza, beers, and conversation, and did not chase them out until morning.
Throughout this, Milo took up his post just within view of the bustle, creating mock-anthills and whispering to them, building bridges in the dirt, catching clouds in his expert finger-frames.
Once, between the third and fourth weekends, Dad woke up early before his commute to set off down the slope with his toolbox. Milo clunked after him in hand-me-down boots. Even in the half-light, Dad saw well enough to rescue Milo from the bear grass.
Dad stood quietly in the morning chill, pinkened by the sunrise. He scratched his head at the pillars aimed at the sky, the lines binding them together. He held a penlight to Brendan’s creased illustration. He cursed and set the artwork aside.
Milo held out a box of nails for him. Dad spent twenty minutes placing an additional board along the deck railing, hammering a superfluous triangle into place.
Finally the family was sanding and staining the wood, bumping shoulders. Their hands became red, raw meat. They drank their weight in water and crisped in the dry air.
Finally Milo stood between his siblings and his parents on the deck. Wind whistled between the boards. The glazed surface shone, but not enough to reflect the sky. Ana and Hank were right about the view. From here, the world was a forest of stars.
Milo toed his way to the railing. Hank shadowed him, ready to pull him back from the edge if need be. Ana passed Milo a paper airplane.
“Go on,” Dad murmured, from the darkness behind them.
Milo pulled his arm back and sent the plane over the edge. Mom whooped.
The Nameless Canyon Observation Deck was beautiful.
Two days later, Dad threw a hamper of clothes, his turntable, a milk crate full of peeling records, and his toolbox into the belly of the Chevy, started the engine, and drove away from his family. He left little apart from bear grass and nothing so much as an explanation in his wake.
The remaining Vasquezes abandoned the gleaming observation deck to wind and sand, which chipped away at the polish for three empty years.
No remaining Vasquez witnessed the moment when a cinematic something, searing and bright as a falling star but colder than any star could be, traversed the perfect desert vista on a June evening. It plummeted into the depths of Nameless Canyon.
This bright cold something hit the cracked earth and broke into a thousand scuttling insects of light. They set the grass aglow and nestled into the brambles, seeking warmth where there was none.
This bright cold something, alone, in a thousand squirming pieces.
When the Vasquez children found it, they took it out of the canyon. They let the broken pieces of a star-born orphan live inside them, and made it whole, and named it.
This bright cold something did not amount to a father, but Milo, Ana, and Hank learned to make do.
They were the sort of kids who built tree houses in the desert.
PART ONE
SEPTEMBER 7
(DAY THIRTY-THREE)
1
EYES
For the first thirty-three days after Luz left, Ana spent every night in the kitchen pantry.
She did not sleep.
Sleeping would have come easier if her shoulder blades hadn’t been pressed against wooden shelving, or if she hadn’t been coughing on unsettled puffs of cinnamon and paprika every time she jostled the spice rack, or if she could ever have convinced herself that turning off the dangling ceiling bulb was a good idea.
Sleeping would come easier if she could bring herself to close her eyes.
Ana didn’t really do that anymore, not when she could help it. Those two wetlands had become deserts. If she ran into her seventh-grade science teacher, Mr. Chilton, maybe she could joke about that: “There’s been a complete biome shift, Mr. Chilton.”
But Ana wasn’t in junior high anymore, and she didn’t know who any of her teachers would be. And Ana didn’t make jokes anymore.
For jokes to land, usually you have to look your audience in the eye. There were red asterisks where Ana’s eyes used to be, webs as vast and complicated as constellations. No one could bear to look into them.
A handful of quiet doctors had made house calls since July. Ana had been given eye drops and therapy and medication. Last week, a small man in green had passed through the entrance of the fumigation tent and then the front door and pulled an actual pendulum from his pocket.
He attempted hypnosis.
The small man closed his eyes long before Ana did, rubbing tears from them and excusing himself. Dr. Ruby stood up from the threadbare recliner beside the door and shook his hand, accepting his apologies with what looked to Ana like a small smile.
Half of Dr. Ruby’s face was a mess of shiny pink burn scars. That smile may have been anything but. Ana’s eyesight was blurry these days.
Since Luz’s departure, Ana blinked only when her body forced her to. But blinking is necessary, and fighting a necessary thing for so long meant that every time she did succumb, Ana’s eyelids scraped her eyeballs like sandpaper might.
Short flickers of sharp pain: this was what Ana deserved for losing Luz.
They say if you stare into stars you go blind.
Ana wondered about that. If she lost her sight, maybe she would learn to let darkness exist again. Could she move away from dimly lit nights in the pantry, back into the cool black of the bedroom she shared with her mother? Could the sound of Mom’s whistling breath be enough to lull her to sleep again?
Or would the darkness of sleep mean seeing Dad?
For ages after Dad left, all the way up until Luz appeared, Ana had dreamed about Dad nightly, in memories looped like unspooling film. The day Dad let her braid and put hair clips in his beard unspun into a memory of Dad taking her to the book fair after her first parent-teacher conference, then unspun into the morning Ana had walked into the bathroom to find Milo standing next to the yellowing shower curtain, peering at the drain as if Dad had been sucked down it.
In Mr. Chilton’s class, Ana had learned that nature abhors a vacuum. Potholes are the first places puddles form. Pores always get clogged. Empty things wish they weren’t.
Ana wasn’t afraid of the dark. She was afraid of the emptiness behind her eyelids. She was afraid of what might fill that emptiness if she closed her eyes.
She was afraid it would not be Luz.
On the last night of summer break, after weeks of sitting in cupboards and refusing to leave the funereal quiet of the house, Ana found the duct tape. It had been hidden from her inside one of the pockets of her mother’s hanging shoe rack. She peeled two segments free and smoothed them across her forehead and upper eyelids, relished the stickiness on her lashes and eyebrows, the rawness of air on her exposed eyeballs.
The duct tape clung especially to a grisly scab over her right eye. At least the stitches had been removed. Last time, the black thread had stuck fast to the tape, even when Mom tore it away. What a complete mess.
Ana tucked the roll into her hoodie pocket and walked the distance from gritty bedroom carpet to worn hallway carpet to the kitchen’s peeling linoleum. Mom didn’t look up as Ana passed behind her; she was rubbing peroxide into the stained patch of floor in front of the sink again. Milo dozed at the table, Spaghetti-Os slipping from his spoon, headphones blaring loud enough to echo, short legs kicking table legs.
