But they were in their yards, facedown. Cara abajo.
All I had on my phone were texts from a fourth-string football player and the girl who I think I’m in love with. Yeah, it’s love. Even then I knew it was. To think, two weeks ago, I had sex for the first time, I was practicing for Macy’s, and clocking in at 1250 on my SAT practice tests. I could smell victory in my life.
Mom’s work voicemail. Her voice sounding clear and upbeat—I can see her at her desk with her clipped-on ID card, Janice March, her long brown hair greying at the temples contained by the tortoise headband she always wore at work, her large brown eyes narrowing at some item on her screen and having to lift her reading glasses to her face, wearing a shawl because the office was always so cold—a mother in the prime of her life, her offspring growing up around her, her daily work meaning enough, her mate companion enough.
If my brain wasn’t bathing in chemicals fire-hosed on so as to increase the chances of my body’s survival, I wouldn’t’ve caught the emotion in my throat at hearing her voice. Instead, I left a perfunctory message she’d never hear in a strong assertive voice. Pretending to be communicating with Mom soothed, if only for seconds. “Hi, Mom. I know you’re probably just getting in but, give me a call back when you can.”
I put my palms on the windowsill, nose pressed against the glass, steaming it in expanding and ebbing blooms as if each contained a thought which got sucked back into my mind. My face went placid staring out across the street.
Mrs. Fleming lay in her yard. Flapping skirt. Mom lay somewhere, a yard, a stairwell, a street. I whined and fought back tears. Burst out with it, once. Emergency sirens lowing in the distance where tires squealed.
I wondered if any of those squeals were made by Martin. This guy I’ve been forced into knowing. Sometimes I like him. Sometimes I don’t. I’d say it’s a mutual tolerance borne out of love for Mom. I love my brother even though he’s half Martin. Sometimes when Johnny says Dad my emotional wires cross and fuzz with smelting heat and break apart because Johnny belongs to me and Martin doesn’t. There’s that split between us, and that split always causes me pause.
Wanting to try my laptop in the other room, I started to walk down the hall. I was going to catch the coverage of the world coming apart online. Finally, I’d get at least some answers, see somebody, even if only on a screen.
And then the rumbling.
The family pictures on the hall wall clattered. In one, Johnny’s missing teeth, Martin’s less sunken in and with darker hair, that wheelin’-dealin’ smirk and bullshitty gleam in his eye. Mom’s hand is on Martin’s shoulder, her wedding band sparking in the flash. The photographer kept saying stand over by Dad, no, no by your Dad, there, over there, stand over there and I said no. Unexpectedly, Martin had smiled. Maybe he was pleased that I stood my ground on that blue drop cloth next to the light umbrella. Rarely was he pleased with anything I did. But in that mall studio, an infant wailing in the waiting room, Martin was pleased.
The rumbling. I thought of the wave down the river and sounds that preceded it. Was that all this was after all? Aftershocks of some fracking-induced earthquake?
The waving bald man, the jumpers, the bleeding trashman, cops careening past.
Mrs. Fleming’s flapping skirt.
That scaly tail’s slither into the brush.
Earthquake? Yeah, right.
The low rumble got louder and the house shook.
I heard something in the rumble. A high whine. Mechanics gone wrong.
I dashed outside against all logic to see that what made this horrible sound was a machine losing its battle with gravity. There in that blue sky came a transcontinental jetliner with its nose pointing down at an angle too severe to be anything but crashing.
It came from the north and was going to crash in our neighborhood. I understood the phrase “deer in headlights” because I just froze. This behemoth hurtled at me. I say hurtling but really it was weird how slow-moving it seemed, how destined. It boomed and shrieked as its gossamer shadow passed over. I clamped my palms over my ears and winced and turned to watch it glide over the house. It got even louder then, the failing turbines shooting sound at me. I took my hands away in time to hear the ineffable crash and explosion, one, two, hitting me in the chest. I stumbled then righted. The fireball looked fake above our treetops.
I heard crackling but nothing else. No screaming and no emergency sirens pouring this way. Stunned on my heels, I watched the sky fill with black smoke, then the wind carrying some away.
My mind trilled, go see! But I knew seeing it wasn’t going to change anything, that it was only more evidence of the old world falling away. The sky itself might as well have fallen with that plane.
The plane crashed because something has happened. I’d seen it in the faces of the smiling jumpers, heard it in the trashman’s broken voice. I’d heard it in the sounds and saw it in the wave.
I didn’t jog toward the site. I crossed the street.
I had to see her face. Her mouth.
I stopped in the middle of the Flemings’ yard. Closer now, I could see Mrs. Fleming had fallen awkwardly, which meant suddenly, as the inside of one arm faced the sky as it should not. I couldn’t yet see her face, only the tangle of her graying henna hair.
She and Mom did neighborly duties for each other like collecting mail and newspapers during vacations. They swapped baked goods around Christmas and she always seemed to know what was going on with me and Johnny, waving as she made her way to her car, yelling across the street in a real voice, not a fake singsong, asking how we were, how’s such and such going. Yesterday she was carrying groceries in—the hatchback of her aging wagon open, an old Subaru replete with political stickers (strident, baffling, some in Spanish )—and she yelled across the street at me that she was going to be watching the Macy’s parade, we all will. Todos nosotros. I had to get close, to turn her over.
So, I blocked it all out, her voice, her friendly waving, who I thought she was, and summoned strength and focus like I did in band. I marched over to her and, steeling myself, moved the hair back and turned her over in one fluid motion.
Her jaw hinged open.
I was here rather than watching the plane burn to confirm it: her mouth brimmed thick with white webbing-like material I’d seen on the trashman. The texture mucoid yet dry, like no substance I’d seen. It had a translucence, a sheen to it. Her eyes open, her mouth stuffed with this cottony webby yet shiny…
I stand bolt upright, aghast, my hand to my mouth like I didn’t want it to leap into me though I knew it didn’t leap, move from person to person like a virus, bacteria, a gas. It came from inside. Something already planted.
An interloper, a freeloader. It’s there from the inception, at the conception. Always been there.
It’s there as mitosis splits us, as cells amass in the womb, latent for eons, but now it’s come out at the beckoning of the dawnsounds. Starshine-white. Crystalline shards, like some malignantly alive cotton candy issuing from the throat. I can say that with some assurance now, but even then at that moment I sensed—it came from, if not far far away… a long time ago.
Though at the time I didn’t stand there to ponder it—doing that at night when I can’t sleep, listening for them.
“Don’t do that! Don’t you touch her!” a voice bellowed from the cracked door. Half of Mr. Fleming’s face, a frantic eye. He jerked his hand at me once like shooing a fly. “You get away!” His voice feral.