It didn’t stay that way, though. Soon it was as if there was this filmstrip of memories unspooling in my head all the time. Dad taking us to the sideshow at Coney Island or to those art movies at the Angelika. Dad leading us on a forced march to the Strand bookstore, where he’d press his favorites into our hands: Harry Potter. The Dark Is Rising. The Left Hand of Darkness. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Every day there were more images, and they came faster and faster until I felt as if I were on a treadmill that I couldn’t keep up with and couldn’t get off of either.
The only time I could escape it was when I was running, so each night after sundown I’d leave my tent and sprint the mountain trails. The batteries in my flashlight had died—I lost count of how many times I fell in the dark. How many skinned knees and bruised elbows. It didn’t matter. If I stumbled, I got up and pushed harder, ran faster. I’d run until the sun came up and then I’d pass out. Sometimes I’d get a few hours of sleep before Dad was there again, just outside my tent, calling me for breakfast or to get ready for school.
One night I finished my run at the reservoir and collapsed on the shore, my legs sore and my lungs feeling like they had sprouted thorns. When I caught my breath, I sat up and looked out at the water. It was a patch of blackness, just a little darker than the woods around it. There was a rhythmic splash as little waves fell against the beach and retreated. Owls hooted and frogs croaked. For a second the world was caught in this easy balance. I breathed in and out, calm, centered, but then there was a flash in my head and the reservoir on Lucy’s Promise became the reservoir in Central Park. It was a bright summer day, and we were on our way to see the polar bears at the zoo. Dad had me on his shoulders and you were walking by his side. It was all so clear. I could hear Dad’s voice. I could smell his aftershave.
I stripped off my clothes and dove in. I was still aching from my run, but I leaned into the pain instead of ignoring it, digging my arms through the water. As I swam, it hit me how all of my memories of Dad were from when we lived in Brooklyn, as if the minute we moved to Black River, he began to fade. Instead of doing his work in a corner of the living room—blasting his music while we played video games on the couch—he was in his office, usually with the door shut. Six hours of work a day became eight, then ten, then twelve. Weekends evaporated. Then it was missed dinners, missed performances, missed track meets. We told ourselves it was nothing. A temporary thing. He’d just won the Hugo, and everybody was saying the Eisner was right around the corner. People were talking movies. TV shows. Even Mom laughed that night when you said we weren’t living with Derrick Cassidy anymore, we were living with Derrick Cassidy, Award-Winning Creator of Cardinal and the Brotherhood of Wings.
But then he forgot that doctor’s appointment—yours or mine, I don’t remember—and Mom decided she’d had enough. The second she walked in the house, it was doors slamming and the two of them screaming at each other, and me thinking, Is this really Mom and Dad? They were like strangers with our parents’ faces. You tried to get between them, but it was no use. I remember hiding out in your room, wondering what world we had stumbled into and if it would ever be possible to get back to our own.
Once I got out to the center of the reservoir, I flipped onto my back and let myself float with my arms stretched out. Tiny waves lapped at my ears, alternating the sounds of the surface, crickets and frogs and night birds, with the silence below. I’d heard that the reservoir was nearly fifty feet deep at its center. Every inch of that darkness pulled at me.
Sometimes late at night I’d leave my room and walk toward the slip of light coming from beneath Dad’s office door. This was a few months before the outbreak, after he’d started sleeping in there instead of in bed with Mom. Only it never seemed like he was sleeping. I could hear his chair squeaking and his pencil scratching. Sometimes, standing there in the dark hallway, I’d lay my palm on the door, the way they taught us to do in school if you thought there was a fire in the house. But it didn’t feel like a fire. It felt like we had a black hole trapped within our walls, like Dad had collapsed into this infinitely dense, infinitely cold thing.
Other times I’d lie in your room, staring at the ceiling while you talked. Dad’s overwhelmed. Mom’s frustrated. Things will go back to normal soon enough. Don’t worry, Cardinal. Everything will be fine, Cardinal. You’d say it with a smile and a laugh, and then you’d flop into bed next to me and we’d read issues of Love and Rockets or Ms. Marvel. And I believed you. Of course I believed you. You were my big brother. You were right about everything.