The Einsteins of Vista Point

— Two —

THE FORBIDDEN TOWER

The Tower was absolutely forbidden to the four Einstein kids. They were allowed to admire it from the outside—the clean lines of gray sandstone bricks that made up its walls, the precise planes of its nine sides, the gentle arches of the now mostly boarded-up windows—and even sit on the stone stairs in front of its enormous metal doors; but, as their parents had made clear to them, the Tower wasn’t part of what they owned, and they were to make no attempt to go inside. Not that doing so would be possible—the doors were locked tight (though none of the four kids had dared test this), and several No Trespassing signs were posted on the building. The place certainly looked abandoned—its windows were covered, and the masonry of its outer walls was chipped and flaking in spots and mildewed in broad patches—though all the Einstein kids had agreed it didn’t appear quite as run-down as their parents had led them to believe before they’d seen it for themselves.

“This must have been the coolest rest stop ever,” Ruth had said when the four of them visited the Tower on the day of their arrival. “So scenic, so romantic. The kind of place I could write about.” She looked around wistfully and then said, “When Bridgette Carlisle gazed out at the river from the Vista Point Tower, she knew she would love Thomas Cooper forever.”

“No one would read that story,” Ethan had said, shaking his head and turning to point—his arm fixed straight and steady—upriver. “Interesting. From here, Mount Knox is almost exactly at a forty-five-degree angle.” He took his compass out of his pocket and began to fiddle with it.

Miriam pantomimed a jump shot in the air. “Forty-five degrees when the ball leaves my hands,” she said, and Ruth sighed heavily. Miriam called out, “And that’s a three-pointer for the win!” as she stared at an imaginary hoop, and then she stopped and peered downward to the river far below and the strip of highway that ran just beside it.

“I wish they hadn’t built the highway down there,” she said. “Dad says if they hadn’t, the old road up here would still be the only one through, and people would still be traveling by and stopping here. The Tower never would have gotten so run-down.”

Zack, however, wasn’t thinking back to that visit from a few days before just now—he had slowed his run and was striding closer to the stone building, keeping his eyes out for any sign of movement. He was keenly aware that his father might be watching him from the kitchen window, far behind him on the other side of the big field that separated their house from the Tower. He veered off to the west, close to the forest that bordered the field, and drew near the bluff; and then he trotted down the slope a short way, deliberately overshooting the Tower and glancing at its front stairs as he did. No one was in sight. Zack came to a stop and turned around. The slope now blocked his view of the house—and ensured that his father could not see him—as Zack studied the building. All was silent beneath the high, hot sun, and Zack felt not only all alone but very distant suddenly, as though his new house were miles away.

The memory came to him once again from late August of the year before.

All seven of the Einsteins had gone to the Western State Fair, south of Roseburg, near the town of Hugard. Zack and Susan, his younger sister by two years, had stayed with their mother while the others had scattered to enjoy the rides and sights and booths; Ethan and their father had stayed together, and the two older girls had gone off on their own. By eight o’clock, with twilight deepening and the strains of a country music band wafting from the arena at the center of the fairgrounds, Zack and Susan were sharing cotton candy while their mother led them to the gate and out to the street that lined the way. The three of them stopped and waited beside the chain-link fence, noise and lights and people and cars moving in a swirl of motion before them. A huge WELCOME TO THE 2001 WESTERN STATE FAIR! banner was strung between two high poles just before them.

“Where are they?” Zack’s mother said after a short while, scanning for the others. “They should be here.”

Susan plucked at a wisp of cotton candy clumped on the stiff paper stick Zack held, and the two of them giggled and smacked away happily. Zack felt his mouth and cheeks becoming sticky from the pink sugar. His mother appeared worried as she glanced about.

“Wait right here, you two,” she said, giving Zack a severe look. She pointed to the gate just off to their right. “Maybe they thought we were meeting inside.” And with another hard stare at Zack, she said, “Don’t move from this fence, okay? I’ll be right back.”

Susan was focused on the cotton candy; but then she stopped plucking at the sugary wisps, gave Zack a sly look, and said, “Susan sees a man wearing purple flip-flops.” She lifted her chin to look skyward, her typical way of confounding Zack whenever they played this game.

“Right there!” Zack said almost immediately, pointing to a man who’d just passed them and who was, indeed, wearing purple flip-flops. They both loved this game, all the more so because it always seemed to exasperate their siblings.

“And now Zack sees a woman holding two caramel apples and a hot dog,” he said.

“I see her!” Susan said. “Gosh, remember last year when you ate two hot dogs before we rode the roller coaster?”

Zack clutched his stomach theatrically. “Don’t remind me!”

As Susan reached to snatch another shred off the stick Zack held, a kitten appeared from behind a plywood program stand beside them.

“Look!” Susan said, pointing to the tiny gray cat. She knelt to reach out to it as Zack watched; and then she jerked her hand too quickly, and the small thing darted off.

“Oh no!” Susan called as the kitten skipped through the mass of people passing on the sidewalk—and before Zack could stop her, Susan was racing away.

“Hey!” he yelled, but she was gone, following the tiny cat; the last image he had was of his sister—in her blue shorts and her favorite white sweater—frantically chasing a kitten. After that, his memories were only of a weirdly dark sky, the squealing of car tires, an awful thud, and then what sounded like a thousand people shouting all around him.

The moments from that point on were pure chaos, and he never could recall how his mother—and then his father and his siblings—had found him or how he understood Susan was missing, and everyone seemed to be crying or in shock or feeling some other emotion he couldn’t understand. In fact, as hard as he tried to remember the details of what had happened after Susan rushed away, his mind couldn’t make any sense of it. How he’d ended up back at his house and what happened later that night—none of it remained with him. There were days of strange sadness, and then a funeral, and then weeks of nothing more than sitting in his room or lying on his bed; he still couldn’t remember what had happened or what he’d done during that time, though eventually he returned to school and the days continued marching forward. He only knew that Susan would never be coming back—and he felt absolutely that the reason for this was that he’d let her follow the kitten. There had been something he had failed to do or some part of him that had caused things to unfold as they had.

“I never should have left the two of you alone,” Zack’s mother would often say whenever she took him up in a tearful embrace. “Never.” But he always felt she was only trying to make him feel less sad by claiming it was her fault. He knew better. He’d not watched his little sister as carefully as he should have. His mother or his father or Ethan or the girls could say whatever they liked—he knew the truth of things.

Zack gazed at the Grand River below. A bridge, the only one within twenty miles up or down the broad river, spanned the water to the east, though it was so far away and so far beneath him, the cars on it moved soundlessly, like small toys on a distant track. For that matter, the water itself appeared to move slowly enough from up here that the river looked like a long, motionless strip of blue that stretched to each horizon. Unbroken forest covered the hills on the opposite shore, so distant that the trees merged into a single cover of thick green. Zack studied the Tower once again. The girl must have gone back into the woods, he thought.

The gray building looked imposing in the sunlight, both graceful and sturdy, and Zack considered how perfect it must have been before the tall windows were boarded up and the tiles on its roof cap had become frayed or torn loose. It was hard to believe, now that he’d visited the Tower a few times, that it had been allowed to fall into disrepair like this. He squinted and tried to picture the building as it had once been.

Something moved inside.

At a window—just barely visible through the wooden boards covering it—on the upper level of the Tower, a silhouette appeared momentarily, a shadow that passed so quickly, Zack couldn’t be sure his eyes hadn’t played a trick on him. He waited and watched, but nothing more appeared; he took several steps toward the Tower, scanning the upper windows all the while. And as he drew closer to the stairs, he saw something he could hardly believe: The doors to the stone building were slightly ajar.

Zack walked softly up the few steps. In the space created where the doors had been left open, he saw a thin portion of the inside of the Tower, shadowy and dim, with only a bit of light from the few windows high above. He put his hand on one of the doors and turned his head to listen within. No sound came. Zack leaned closer to the crack in the doorway and saw muted light gleaming off a marble floor. He glanced at the river one more time, and then he gave a slow pull on one of the doors and entered the Tower.

— Three —

A NEW FRIEND

It took a moment for Zack’s eyes to adjust to the dimness inside, but once they did, he was dazzled by what he saw. Aside from the white marble floor—so pure and delicate, Zack almost felt he was hovering on air—the walls were smooth and held a light-pink hue. He’d assumed they would be gray sandstone, simply the other face of the bricks on the outside; but these walls were seamless and clean, as though they’d been painted just the week before. The stone ribs of the insides of the columns rose up and around Zack on all sides; and although the window openings on the first level were covered in plywood, a few unbroken windows—done in panes of green and yellow glass—high up on the second level allowed in a delicate light that gave the entire interior a spectral glow. It was like being in a deep part of the forest late in the day with tall cedars all around, when the air is a pleasant and soft emerald and everything feels quiet and still. What was most remarkable, though, was that the inside of the Tower wasn’t a fraction as grubby or run-down as Zack would have guessed, particularly given the condition of the exterior—in fact, the inside looked almost perfect, as though it had been closed up one day and had suffered hardly at all in the time since.

Zack stared upward at the golden-tiled domed ceiling. At its very center—the highest and farthest point from where Zack stood—was something round and silvery that looked a bit like a very flat smoke detector, though this seemed so out of place that Zack was certain he was mistaken. He looked more closely, and an unaccountable feeling of intrigue came over him. The thing—whatever it was—glinted in the faint light as Zack shifted his head to get a better view. It was, it seemed, some sort of large medallion set in the very midpoint of the ceiling, though the light was too faint to let him make out any detail. Zack was curious, powerfully so, about what it was.

He scanned downward from the dome’s peak. Between the two levels of the Tower’s interior, set in a circle around the rim dividing the sections, were small sculptures—plaques, Zack realized, faces of what appeared to be people from long ago: Native Americans in headdress, pioneers, settlers, soldiers in peaked caps. As Zack turned to look at each one, he noticed a narrow marble staircase against the wall to his left, and his eyes traveled up to where it reached the second level. There, just above the railing, the girl with the ponytail of red hair was staring down at him.

“Hi,” she said softly, greeting him with a hesitant, barely raised hand. The shadows were so deep where she stood, it was difficult for him to see her.

“Hi,” Zack answered as he lifted a hand in return. There was something so easy and natural about the girl’s voice and the way she acknowledged him that Zack wasn’t startled or surprised at all. As he gazed upward, Zack thought the girl would say something, but she only clutched the railing before her and kept looking down at him.

“How did you get in here?” Zack said. His voice echoed in the airy space.

The girl pointed to the door Zack had left open behind him. “I just came in,” she said with a soft shrug.

“It wasn’t locked?” Even as he spoke the words, Zack mentally reviewed the handful of times he and his siblings had visited the Tower, and realized they’d never once tried the doors. They might not have been locked at all.

The girl shook her head. “No. I just came in. I’ve been outside lots of times before, but this is the first time I’ve been inside.”

“We just moved here,” Zack blurted out. “I mean, me and my family.”

“You live in the big house over there?” she said, pointing.

“Yeah. My name’s Zack. We used to live in Roseburg.”

“I’m Ann.”

Zack glanced at the doors once again. “Are you by yourself?”

She nodded, and then, with a tug on the railing to stretch her chin over its top, she said, “You should come up here and take a look.”

Zack moved quickly to the stairs and skipped up them, and then he was standing just before Ann and marveling, once again, at how much she resembled Susan—her red hair, her ponytail, her big brown eyes. She was even about Susan’s height.

“I thought I saw someone in here when I was outside,” Zack said. “And it was you.”

Ann smiled with her lips pressed tightly together, and she nodded with excitement. “I thought I saw someone outside. And it was you!” She gave a little shrug and looked as delighted as if Zack had brought candy for them to share. “At first I thought you were a boy I know from school, because you have bushy black hair like him. And you’re skinny, too.”

Zack felt himself smiling at Ann in return. “How old are you?” he said.

“Nine.”

“I’m eleven,” he said.

“One and one. Wow!”

Zack laughed. “My birthday was in October. When’s yours?”

“May fifth.”

“Cinco de Mayo.”

“What?” Ann said.

“It’s a holiday.”

“It’s my birthday.”

Zack laughed once more, but only because Ann spoke so bluntly, so sincerely. “You live near here?” he said.

Ann nodded. “Vista Point is the best. There’s waterfalls and places to swim and trails. I love to hike around and explore. That’s one of my favorite things to do.” She glanced over the side of the railing. “I like it in here. I always wanted to see inside.”

“I just didn’t know we could get in,” Zack said. “I thought it would be falling apart, but it’s pretty nice here.”

“It really is.” She began examining the ceiling, her mouth dropping open. “Quiet, too.”

“How far away do you live?” Zack said.

“Just on the other side of the woods.”

“Your parents let you go out alone?”

“I know every trail around here,” Ann said, which, Zack thought, didn’t really answer his question. “And all the good places to swim. I’ve always lived in Vista Point.”

Neither spoke for a moment, and a deep hush held inside the Tower. Zack glanced at the medallion in the ceiling; there appeared to be words written on it.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Ann said. “I don’t.”

“One brother and three sisters,” Zack said. He paused. “But the youngest sister isn’t here with us anymore.” And then, because he felt he’d revealed something—partway, at least—that he didn’t want to explain, he said, “The others are with my mom, shopping in Thornton Falls.”

Ann was looking at him; she seemed to be waiting for him to go on speaking. “What do you mean, she’s not with you anymore?” she said.

“She had a bad accident last summer,” Zack said. He glanced at the ceiling.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ann said, and the Tower became silent once more. Ann stretched her neck over the railing and swept her eyes slowly over the walls and marble floor of the Tower, a deliberate and steady survey.

“You okay?” Zack said, turning to her.

She looked at him and gave a tiny, reassuring smile. Her teeth were slightly crooked, which made her look a bit younger than nine, Zack thought.

“What’s your favorite thing to eat?” she said. “Mine is oatmeal with chocolate chips in it. It’s so good!”

Zack laughed loudly—Ann’s question had been completely unexpected.

“My favorite thing to eat?” he said. “I guess German chocolate cake. My mom always makes it for me on my birthday, and my dad says it’s lucky to eat that kind of cake, but I think he’s just making that up.”

“My mother told me this place is lucky,” she said.