The cliffs, p.1
The Cliffs, page 1
Title Page
The Cliffs
by Elley Cooper
The Breaking Wheel
by Andrea Waggener
He Told Me Everything
by Elley Cooper
About the Authors
Teaser
Copyright
Tyler knocked his sippy cup off the kitchen table. Again.
“Careful, buddy,” Robert said, picking it up and setting it in front of his son. Robert tried to feel relieved that his already-well-worn copy of How to Handle the Toddler Years, which he jokingly called “the owner’s manual,” assured him that it was perfectly normal for toddlers to knock over cups, throw food, and demonstrate an often-overwhelming amount of emotional instability. But just because it was normal didn’t mean it was easy.
“Play phone?” Tyler said, eyeing Robert’s phone on the table.
Robert set a bowl of cereal and bananas in front of Tyler. “It’s not time for you to play with Daddy’s phone. It’s time for you to eat your breakfast and get ready for day care.”
Tyler, distracted by his bowl of Cheerios, sliced banana, and sippy cup of milk, began happily eating.
That’s another thing about two-year-olds, Robert thought. Their emotions can turn on a dime. When Robert had last taken Tyler to the pediatrician, he had unloaded on her about Tyler’s wild mood swings.
The pediatrician had just laughed and said, “Welcome to parenthood.” She had then promised him, as she always did, that the task of parenting would get easier as Tyler got older.
But when would it get easier? When Tyler was three? When he was old enough to start school? When he was in college?
Robert knew that for him, the hardest thing about parenting was that it was something he had to do alone. He had never planned to be a single parent, but he had no choice now that Anna was gone.
Robert had met Anna his junior year in college. He had never believed in the “finding the one” theory of romance—surely there wasn’t just one person in the whole world who was right for you—and yet his and Anna’s connection was immediate. They loved the same books and movies, and when they started having more serious conversations, they discovered that they shared deeper values, too. They dated through the rest of college and got engaged right after graduation, agreeing on a one-year engagement to give them some time to get used to being real grown-ups with real jobs before they got married.
Robert settled into a steady but not terribly exciting job with a local lifestyle magazine, and Anna got a position as a first-grade teacher. They got married barefoot on the beach, and both sets of their parents chipped in to help them out with a down payment on a house. Their little bungalow had seen better days, but it still had plenty of charm, especially for young, energetic first-time homeowners who were willing to put some elbow grease into renovating it.
The only downside, as far as Robert was concerned, was the house’s location, right next to the town’s most notorious geographical feature: the Cliffs. Although these rocky outcroppings possessed a rugged beauty, they also had a grisly history. The highest of them was nicknamed “Jumper’s Cliff” by the locals because it was a common site for suicides over the generations.
It seemed that everyone knew of someone who had chosen to end it all at the Cliffs. The jilted high school homecoming queen from Robert’s mother’s generation, the businessman who lost all his money due to bad investments, the grandmother with a terminal cancer diagnosis. There were stories about the Cliffs that were fact, and stories that were fiction, but true or not, these tales made people look at the geological features with a mixture of fear and awe, especially Jumper’s Cliff. Teenagers gathered there and creeped each other out with scary stories. Younger kids whispered that the ghosts of the departed still haunted the place where they had chosen to make that final leap.
Robert had grown up hearing those stories, and the Cliffs creeped him out. Anna insisted that, while the suicides themselves were sad, the Cliffs were just rocks; they didn’t really mean anything. Besides, the house’s proximity to the Cliffs was why it had been such a steal. Attributing any dark meaning to the Cliffs was nothing short of superstition.
Robert knew she was right. And once they moved into the house, he was so happy with his new wife and his new life that he hardly thought about the Cliffs at all. When he looked back on it, the first year of their marriage was a blissful blur of love and laughter.
In his mind, he could play out scenes from that first year like a montage in a romantic movie: the two of them riding bikes together, cooking dinner together, cuddling in front of the TV with a big bowl of popcorn between them. Sure, one of them would sometimes have a bad day at work or come down with a cold, but these problems were minuscule compared to the happiness they took in each other’s company.
Although the first year of their marriage had been great, the happiest time in Robert’s life had come when Anna was pregnant with Tyler. They had been married two years when they found out she was pregnant, and they were both over the moon with delight. There was something about the idea that they had created a new human being because of their love—it seemed almost magical. As happy as they had been as a couple, they knew they would be an even happier family.
Throughout Anna’s pregnancy, she had glowed like some kind of ancient mother goddess from mythology. Robert had glowed, too, so full of love he didn’t know what to do with all of it. He massaged Anna’s feet when they were sore after she came home from teaching all day. He went out to fetch her mint chocolate chip ice cream when she said it was the only thing in life that could possibly satisfy her cravings. They were in perfect harmony during her pregnancy, two dedicated gardeners growing their baby together.
But then things went wrong.
Two months before the baby was due, Anna started complaining of swelling in her hands and feet. When she called the nurse at the obstetrician’s office, she had said not to worry about it, that swelling was common among pregnant women, especially in the hottest months of the summer. Reassured, Anna had bought bigger shoes and soaked her feet in Epsom salts and otherwise ignored her symptoms. But when she went in for her regular checkup, her blood pressure was so alarmingly high that the doctor insisted that she be admitted to the hospital immediately.
After that, things were a nightmarish blur in Robert’s mind: all the IV drugs the doctors gave her in a failed attempt to bring her blood pressure down, the decision to deliver the baby early by Caesarean section in hopes of saving her life, the massive stroke she suffered on the operating table that left Robert a single father. For a long time, he was numb. None of it even felt real.
Since Tyler was born early, he was tiny and unable to breathe on his own without exhausting himself. He had to stay in the hospital for a few weeks until he gained weight and his lungs developed more. In a shocked daze, Robert would visit his new baby in the neonatal intensive care unit. He would scrub his hands and put on a face mask before entering the brightly lit white room lined with plastic incubators in which impossibly tiny babies lay. Robert would stand by his own son’s incubator and look at Tyler’s small, skinny body, wearing a diaper the size of a fast-food napkin. The parents of other babies in the NICU always looked tired and worried like Robert did, but they arrived in couples, so at least they had each other.
In horror, Robert would look at his son and think, Kid, I’m all you have in this world.
It was not a good way to start out in life—motherless and stuck with a father who couldn’t eat, sleep, or go a full hour without crying. In his exhausted, grief-stricken state, there were only two facts Robert knew for sure:
He was all that Tyler had.
He was not enough.
Robert had muddled through the last two years, managing to hold down his job somehow and provide Tyler with food, clothing, and shelter. Robert had withdrawn from his friends because he didn’t want their pity and because for a single father of a toddler, grabbing a bite to eat after work with his buddies was not an option. At five o’clock sharp, he had to leave the office to pick up Tyler from day care. After that, it was time to go home and fix his supper. Then came playtime and bath time and—if Robert was lucky and Tyler would actually fall asleep—bedtime. The toddler owner’s manual was clear: Without a regular schedule, life with a toddler descended into chaos. Robert had quite enough chaos in his life, so he tried not to deviate from the daily schedule.
Once Tyler was finally asleep, Robert mindlessly surfed through the channels on TV or played Warriors’ Way on his laptop. Sometimes Bartholomew, the orange cat, sat with him, but most often, he did not. Bartholomew had been Anna’s pet before she and Robert had married, and Anna used to refer to him jokingly as “my first husband” because of the way he guarded her jealously and had never warmed up to Robert. Now, with Anna gone, Bartholomew would accept food or the occasional pat from Robert, but he never gave Robert the impression that he was doing anything more than tolerating him because he was the dispenser of cat food.
Was Robert lonely? Yes, painfully so. But he was also too busy and exhausted to do anything about it. After Tyler’s bedtime, he allowed himself two or three hours of mindless screen time of one kind or another until he fell into bed himself, knowing that he was going to wake up to a day that was nearly identical to the one before, with the type and duration of Tyler’s mood swings being the only wild card.
Right now, though, as Tyler was contentedly picking up Cheerios and stuffing them in his mouth, he was adorable. His hazel eyes—the same shade as Anna’s—were framed by long, sooty eyelashes. His curly black hair surrounded his head like a halo, and his mouth was a cherubic rosebud, also like his mom’s. In fact, Tyler resembled his mother so much that it made Robert’s heart hurt. Looking at his son, Robert felt overwhelmed by love but also by fear. What if he lost Tyler like he’d lost Anna? Over and over, the what-ifs played on the screen of his mind like a trailer for a movie no one would ever want to see.
Even though Robert couldn’t look at Tyler without thinking of Anna, he never talked to Tyler about her. Tyler was too young to understand death, and Robert wasn’t doing such a great job of understanding it himself. In his heart, he knew it would probably be a good idea to start showing Tyler pictures of his mom and telling him little stories about the kind of person she was, the things she used to say and do, how excited she had been about becoming his mommy. But he could never bring himself to take out any of the pictures of Anna hidden in the attic. If he tried to talk about her, the words stuck in his throat and he said nothing. Even saying her name hurt too much, especially because when he looked at Tyler, he was staring into Anna’s eyes.
Like he did every weekday morning, Robert choked back his sadness along with some black coffee and drove Tyler to day care, letting him play with his phone all the way. After he had dropped off Tyler, he went to work, only nodding at colleagues who greeted him with “good morning.” He didn’t want to seem rude, but he didn’t want to get into a conversation, either. His own reactions were too unpredictable. Once he started talking, what would he say? Would he get all emotional in front of someone he didn’t even know very well? Would he break down entirely? And if he did break down, what if he wasn’t able to put the pieces back together?
Robert knew that no matter how bad he felt, he had to hold on to his job. It was the only way he could make any kind of life for Tyler. And so today, like every other day, he sat at his cubicle and worked without stopping, trying to empty his mind of everything but the task in front of him. He stopped at noon and took out a sandwich, eating it so mindlessly that once he finished it, he couldn’t even have identified what kind of sandwich it had been. He walked to the bathroom, then to the water cooler. He was refilling his water bottle when a voice behind him said, “Hey.”
He jumped as though startled that he wasn’t the only person in the building. He turned around to see Jess, the nice, bespectacled copy editor and self-confessed “grammar nerd” who had been hired at the same time he was. She and he used to chat a bit before Anna died. Before he was broken.
“Hey, Jess,” he said, moving away to let her have a turn at the water cooler and, he hoped, to go back to his desk without being disturbed further. He turned to walk away.
“Hold up a sec,” Jess said.
“Me?” Robert said, even though it was clearly him she was talking to. Reluctantly, he turned around.
“I was just noticing you eating your sad little sandwich at your desk.” Jess filled up one of those weird paper cones with water from the cooler. Who had decided that those were adequate drinking vessels? She grinned at him. “Well, maybe it was a delicious sandwich, but it looked sad to me. And I was thinking … I know you can’t go out after work because you’ve got a kiddo to fetch, but a lot of us go out for half-price sushi on Wednesdays at lunch. Maybe you could go with us sometime?”
Sushi had been Robert and Anna’s favorite food. They had learned to love it in college and had also learned to use chopsticks together, picking up sushi rolls, dunking them in soy sauce, and popping them into each other’s mouths. While a lot of couples went out for steaks or seafood or Italian for special occasions, for them it was always sushi.
How could going out for half-price sushi with a bunch of random people from work live up to all those romantic sushi dinners with Anna? The answer was simple: it couldn’t.
It would only bring back memories to make him sadder.
Still, Jess was nice for asking him. For taking pity on him.
“Yeah, maybe I’ll join you sometime,” Robert said, not even trying to sound convincing. “Thanks for inviting me.”
“Okay,” Jess said, sounding surprisingly disappointed. “Robert?”
“Yeah?” He didn’t know where this was going but already knew he didn’t like it. Wasn’t this a workplace? Shouldn’t they be working?
She looked down for a minute like she was collecting her thoughts. “You know,” she began, “before things changed so much for you, you and I used to be friends. We used to talk. If you ever want to talk again, I’m here.”
Robert knew he was in danger of his emotions bubbling up to the surface, which couldn’t happen. He couldn’t be a basket case at work. He had to get out of this conversation and get back to his desk. “That’s very kind—”
Jess rolled her eyes. “I’m not being ‘kind,’ you goof! I like you. I’ve always enjoyed your company. And I’m a single parent, too. Not for the same reason you are, maybe, but I bet we still go through a lot of the same stuff. Talking about some of it might be good for our sanity. What’s left of it.”
Robert felt himself smile a little. Against his will, he was remembering why he had liked Jess. “I’m down to crumbs myself,” he said. It was a joke, but like a lot of jokes, it contained the truth.
“I hear you. And who knows? Maybe our kids could hang out. We could take turns watching each other’s rug rats so we could maybe have an evening out every once in while.”
“Don’t make any promises. You haven’t met my kid yet,” Robert said. Had he just made two jokes in a row?
“He’s two, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe I should give it a year or two before I offer my babysitting services.” She smiled at him, a warm, genuine smile. “Listen, I’m giving you a free pass this week, but next Wednesday, you’re going out for half-price sushi with us. No more sad little sandwiches for you.”
Robert gave her a little wave. “I will consider your invitation. Thank you.” He turned to go back to his cubicle.
“It’s not an invitation!” Jess called behind him. “It’s mandatory! Mandatory sushi! Which would be a great name for a band, by the way!”
* * *
Robert sat back down at his cubicle. He was pretty sure that his conversation with Jess was the longest conversation he had had with a nonfamily member in months. Like someone who hasn’t exercised in years and suddenly finds himself back on the treadmill, he was exhausted. No more chitchat today. He stayed at his desk, where he worked nonstop until five. When it was time to leave, he felt no sense of relief. He was simply moving from one series of tasks in one location to another series of tasks in another. Off went the graphic designer hat, on went the dad hat.
Robert pulled into the parking lot of Tiny Tot Academy and went into the cheerful, red-roofed building to fetch his son. He entered the room with the big red number two on the door. The walls were peppered with construction paper cutouts and unintentionally abstract crayon-scribble drawings. Robert found Tyler’s bubbly young teacher, Miss Lauren, surrounded by toddlers playing with the brightly colored toys that cluttered the floor. While being outnumbered by volatile little people seemed terrifying to Robert, Miss Lauren looked perfectly at home and greeted Robert with a smile. She stood up to get closer to Robert’s eye level. “He was a happy boy for most of today,” she said, “though there is one little thing I should tell you about.”
Robert braced himself for bad news. He hoped Tyler hadn’t hit some other kid. Or bitten somebody. It seemed like every day care had one kid who was the biter. Nobody wanted to be the biter’s parent.
Miss Lauren smiled again. “Don’t worry. He didn’t attack anybody or anything.”
Robert let himself breathe a little.
Miss Lauren pushed back her curly brown hair behind her ears. “It was just that today I asked the kids to draw pictures of their families and talk about them. Being two, most of them just drew blobs or scribbles, but then we sat in a circle and everybody talked about their families and who was in their pictures. Tyler’s friend Noah noticed Tyler didn’t have a mom in his picture and asked him about it. Tyler got a little upset, I think mostly because someone pointed out his family was different.”
Robert hated to think of Tyler being singled out because of his loss. Did that kind of behavior have to start so early?
