The Heavens Rise

mistake before he made it, none of them got to him in time.

Donald crossed the carpet with too much speed and force. He stumbled in his final steps, pitching forward into his son’s body. And for a few seconds, it seemed like it would just be a slight nudge, that’s all. But as Donald Ferriot threw his arms around his son’s waist and prepared to pull him free of the glass spiderweb he’d hurled himself into, the window gave way right in its weakened center and both men became a single tangle of limbs that vanished in an instant.

Then it sounded to Marissa like all the chairs in the room had gone over at once. Silverware and glasses were knocked from the tables as everyone jumped to their feet at the same moment. The screams came next; a single piercing wave of them that said the shock of what they had all witnessed had worn off almost instantly.

To Marissa it felt like a stampede, and in the midst of it somehow, Heidi Ferriot ended up in her arms, her knees going out from under her, the bellows coming out of her a blend of rage and agony. Marissa wanted to lift her hands to her ears to blot out the terrible sound; instead she held tight to the shuddering wreck of a woman who was making them.

8

The oak branches outside Ben Broyard’s window cast dancing shadows on his bedroom ceiling. Night had fallen hours ago, but he was too exhausted to reach for the bedside lamp. This wasn’t just exhaustion, he knew, but a bone-deep sense of loss that felt completely alien. Not just alien. Adult. That was the thought he kept returning to; that what had happened this week to him, to Anthem, to all of them, was an adult thing, more significant and lasting than graduating high school or having sex for the first time.

Loss. Grief. Words that had tumbled off his tongue too easily over the years but which he’d learned the real meaning of only that week, when his best friend was replaced by a yawning, fathomless darkness surrounding miles of empty swamp road. He’d always been the mature one, the one who said the adult thing in every situation, but now he realized that to be mature, you had to know more than the dictionary definition of words; you had to know what it felt like when those words hit you in the gut.

Ben was only ten when his father died, an aneurysm during dinner that dropped the man to one knee next to the kitchen table, and then face-first into oblivion. And what he remembered most about that time was how Nikki’s parents let her sleep in his bed because her prolonged embrace was the only thing that allowed him to get through the night without waking up in tears. He could remember how everyone had closed in around him en masse; his best friend, aunts, uncles, cousins, even his mother, who’d just been made a widow in her late thirties—they had all worked in concert to protect him, the baby, the only child of a good man gone too soon.

How many times had he heard those two words back then? Too soon, too soon. Well, eighteen was also too soon, right?

Still, everything about this week was different. He wasn’t the baby anymore, for one, and he had no special status amongst all those who had gathered on the banks of Bayou Rabineaux, spreading grid maps of Tangipahoa Parish across the hoods of their sun-baked cars, loading into fantail boats to assist in the fruitless search. No one left behind was special or more significant than any other. That’s what the sudden disappearance of an entire family could do; it sent out a pressure wave that leveled all their loved ones with the same explosive force, rendering them incapable of caring for the man, woman or child standing next to them.

At times, he’d found himself praying to a God he wasn’t sure he believed in and asking the simple question, Is this how you would have me grow up? Not with a great love or some accomplishment, but the sudden unexplained absence of the person I cared most about in the world? Is this how you would have me start in the big wide grown-up world?

Nikki, the only person in his life who’d taken him aside and told him she would always be there, no matter who he turned out to be. No matter who he fell in love with. And what had he done? Just nodded and smiled as if she’d offered him a ride home after school that day, as if he didn’t understand what she truly meant. Yeah, thanks, Nick. Hey, that new cheerleader’s kinda hot, maybe I should ask her out, huh?

Down the hall, his mother had turned up the volume on the TV just enough to let him know she was parked in the living room a few feet from the front door. And because their house was a small shotgun cottage, that meant she had the back door in plain sight as well. So he was basically under house arrest. Again.

If she hadn’t called and made them come home when she did, he and Anthem would probably still be traveling back roads, hanging missing-persons flyers all over the state. But it had been a hell of a first day, that was for sure.

They’d started around dawn and managed to hit every gas station window and restaurant bulletin board from Madisonville to Gonzales. They had a flyer for each of them. Nikki, Mr. Noah and Miss Millie. And for most of the day, it had felt good. They were doing something. Being proactive, as Ben’s mother liked to say.

But after she ordered them home, their adrenaline surges subsided, and as they were driving back on Interstate 10, the setting sun a blood-orange bonfire behind them, each too consumed with thoughts to turn on the radio, that’s when Anthem exploded with the first sobs he’d let lose since Nikki vanished. And they were snotty, choked things, desperate wheezes combined with terrible, gut-clenching whines, and Ben could only rest his hand on Anthem’s shaking knee lest he lose control of his car. And after a while, he managed to speak again. “I was going to go. I was going to go with her, to North Carolina. That’s what I was . . . That’s what I was—” going to tell her that night, Ben knew; Anthem didn’t need to finish.

Now, as Ben watched the dance of shadows on his ceiling, he envisioned the flyers the two of them had left all over the state that day. He saw the black-and-white faces of Nikki, Mr. Noah and Ms. Millie staring out at night- shrouded highways, their frozen smiles abandoned to the reluctant company of bored gas station attendants and grimy shelves of junk food.

Better to see these things, he guessed, than to imagine what might have become of their SUV that night. The scraps of evidence they’d been left with could be easily assembled into a nightmare: the mangled guardrail scraped with banners of black paint that matched their Lexus, two cracked pieces of rear bumper, one half of the SUV’s rear window that had been recovered from the mud a good distance from where they went off the road. All he had to do was run through this list in his head before he saw Nikki trapped inside the sinking car, fists pounding the windows, black water rushing in to fill her screaming mouth.

It was the third or fourth ring, he couldn’t be sure which one exactly, that stopped his tears.

“It was him,” the girl on the other end said as soon as Ben picked up.

Not Nikki. And he wondered if he’d be sidelined by this realization for the rest of his life, whenever the phone rang unexpectedly. But he did recognize the girl’s voice. After the hell he’d put her through, and the confession he’d wrung from her, he figured Brittany Lowe would never speak to him again, but here she was.

“You asked me why I did it,” Brittany said. “The story, about hooking up with Anthem. You asked me why I—”

“Why you lied. Yeah, I remember.”

“He wanted me to.”

“Anthem?”

“No! Jesus. Aren’t you watching the news?”

“I’m kinda tired, you see, my best friend, she disappeared last week and we’re still looking for her so —”

“Marshall Ferriot,” she said, unwilling to be the victim of his sarcasm. “The guy who just jumped out a window at the Plimsoll Club?” Ben was stunned silent. “He’s the one. He’s the one who asked me to lie, all right? I figured I’d just tell you now since, you know, it doesn’t look like he’s going to live and all.”

When Ben didn’t respond, Brittany Lowe let out a long, pained sigh and hung up, leaving Ben staring at the hardwood floor, rings of sweat beading in between his face and the phone that was now trembling in his right