The Speed of Falling Objects

by Nancy Richardson Fischer

  “Luxury?” I sit up and face him. “I’m a one-eyed girl nicknamed Pigeon. My father ditched me, then used me as a freaking hook for his show. My mom both loves and resents the hell out of me. The best things I’ve ever heard anyone say about Danny Warren are that I have a nice smile and an easygoing personality. I’m one step up from their family pet. But I made myself a lot of those things. I let them happen. It was easier to be what people expected, beat them to the punch line. A luxury? To be what I really want to be is a battle I’m just beginning to fight.”

  Gus shakes his head. “You don’t get it. I’m not just responsible for myself. My income pays for my entire family—food, clothing, travel, homes, private schools and my mom’s lifestyle.”

  “I go to public school, live in an apartment, will probably have a ton of debt after college, but one day I’ll be a doctor—possibly a one-eyed, kick-ass surgeon. Sounds like you’ve made enough money to keep your family comfortable. I understand wanting to do that, needing to do it. But the rest is your choice. So stop blaming everyone else.”

  We glare at each other, daring another word, excuse, apology. Neither of us speaks. That night we brush our teeth in silence, then sleep back to back, an impenetrable wall between us.

  DAY SEVEN

  37

  In the morning it still hasn’t rained. I collect a nest of grass and twigs and put them in a plastic bag, so tonight, if it gets wet, I can still make a fire. Gus and I eat a piece of fruit, then drink half our remaining water.

  A dragonfly alights near my feet, its wings a delicate lattice of indigo and silver. Monkeys babble above. When I look up, I see they have white manes around their faces. Tamarins. A red-and-white-spotted caterpillar inches my way. I use a stick to move it along. The thump of bullfrogs has become almost as normal as my heartbeat along with insects’ varied drones. A pair of scarlet macaws wing by, their red head feathers made brighter by the green and blue of their wings. Leaf-cutter ants march along a dirt highway carrying their prizes overhead, guarded by soldiers. Everywhere there’s life. I’m part of it, existing in this place in a way I never thought possible. Despite last night’s fight, Jupiter’s and Cougar’s terrible injuries, it makes me...proud and strangely grateful.

  What do I see? I see a girl who’s surviving.

  Something is crawling in my hair. I take a long, calming breath. “Spider or scorpion?” I ask, pointing to the spot on my head.

  Gus leans over. “Beetle. Do you want me to get it?”

  “No.” Carefully, I pluck the beetle free. It has orange flecks along its polished brown shell and wriggles between my fingers. I set it down, watch it scuttle away.

  Gus asks, “Do you hate me?”

  There are dark circles beneath his eyes. He didn’t get much sleep. I turn the question over and look for the truth beneath it. I don’t hate Cougar for disappointing me, Samantha for allowing old resentments to affect my life, or Trix for wanting me to share her discontent, so why hate a guy with whom I have zero history? Gus owes me nothing. “No. I don’t hate you.” And I don’t think he’s that totally shallow actor I met the first day, either. That was a knee-jerk reaction to his rejection. He’s just the guy he thinks he needs to be.

  I work through the snarls in my hair, then braid it tight to avoid trapping more insects. After securing my braid with a vine, I take the machete and start clearing our way. We don’t talk at all, the silence filled with the living rain forest, the whoosh of my blade, our labored breathing as we duck, climb and balance inside the tangled Amazon.

  “What’s your favorite place?” Gus asks when we take a break to drink some water.

  I mop the sweat from my face. The humidity is stifling. “I haven’t found it. You?”

  “It used to be bathrooms.”

  I actually laugh. “Why?”

  “You have a great laugh.”

  My face gets warm but I know he’s just trying to make up for what he said. “Bathrooms?”

  “Before I got really famous, but I was getting recognizable? It gave me a break from feeling like people were watching me. That’s something you have to get used to.”

  “I’ll take your word on that. Favorite animal?”

  “Dog. I got my brothers a vizsla last Christmas. His name is Boone. He loves going mountain biking with them, but inside he’s chill. Plus, he’s super protective. I’m not home that much so I like knowing Boone is there.”

  Gus cuts open a passion fruit, hands me half. Slippery seeds slide down my throat. The heat has made me dizzy but the fruit’s sugar helps.

  Gus asks, “Favorite TV show?”

  “Before this luxury vacation? I would’ve said my dad’s show. But that’s not the truth. COUGAR is fun to watch, but I love shows that document what happens in an emergency room. There’s one called Oakland ER that has more trauma cases come through their doors than any other ER in the country. Gunshots, knife wounds, RTT with a BBB.”

  Gus raises one brow. “What’s that?”

  “Rat-a-tat-tat with a baseball bat.”

  He chuckles. “So the truth is you like blood and gore. No wonder you could reset Jupiter’s leg.”

  “I don’t mind it, but what I really love is watching men and women in super stressful situations figure out how to diagnose and treat. Also how doctors and nurses have to remember their humanity. Cases are people. They have wives, husbands, siblings and children. Treat one person, and you affect countless others who love them. It’s this amazing, living network, like an electrical grid for a giant city, but human beings are the lights.”

  Gus stares at me for a long moment, then picks up the machete and begins clearing a path. I follow him through a crosshatch of branches, trying to avoid the ants streaming along the bark. Only one bites me. It’s not that bad. Getting bitten by a snake makes everything else pale in comparison. A stick bug is frozen on a low branch. Gus points it out. I wouldn’t have noticed. It’s slender with a body that’s the color of mossy wood, the perfect camouflage. “Cool,” I say, no longer jealous of a creature’s ability to hide in plain sight.

  I ask, “What would you be if you could be anything in the world?”

  Gus says, “I used to think an astronaut, but that was my dad’s dream.”

  “You can have the same dream.”

  Gus whacks at a branch. “Watch it.”

  A brown snake slithers beneath the brush. Gus leaps onto a fallen trunk, pulls me to safety. I let go as soon as I can. “So?”

  “When I was little, there was a farm down the road from our house,” he says before ducking under a termite nest hanging off a narrow limb. “I’ve seen pigs, goats, even horses born. In another life, I’d be a large-animal vet.”

  “No fans, paparazzi or big payday.”

  Gus frowns. “You said if I could be anything.”

  In this moment, I again see the little kid who lost his dad. He stepped into his father’s oversize shoes before he had the chance to find his own path. There’s a part of me that wants to repeat that Gus can be anything he wants to be. But maybe that’s not true. I ask, “Song?”

  “‘Sailing toward Never.’”

  “That’s my mom’s favorite.” I can hear her humming it softly as she does dishes. A surprising ache accompanies the memory. An orange-and-black-striped cricket hops by my foot. He’s so small it’s a wonder he can survive in the Amazon. He nabs a tiny ant. For this moment he’s a predator but at any second he might become prey. I ask, “What if you don’t make it home?”

  “Life insurance kicks in. My mom and the kids will be fine.” Gus chuckles. “Better than fine. And someone will probably make a movie out of this ordeal where I’m the hero that dies in the end saving a gorgeous fellow plane crash survivor in the process.”

  I joke, “Who’d play me?”

  Gus reaches out, brushes a strand of hair off my cheek. “You’d play yourself.”
>
  I take the machete and lead on. Fool me once. Truth.

  “You ever going to totally forgive me?”

  “Sure. Sing ‘Sailing toward Never.’”

  “We’ve already established I can’t sing.”

  “You start. We can trade off.”

  Gus groans, “Cougar was right. You have gotten bossy. Okay, fine. ‘The wind tells a story the waves underline. The moon lights blue waters. Stars fall from the sky—’”

  “‘I never did call him and now I know why,’” I sing. “‘His promises burned me, turned to ash in the wind. His love was a boundary, his words poison lies. He promised forever but I’m sailing toward never.’”

  I step over the knotted root of a massive tree. The river below is no longer raging. It bends right then abruptly widens until it’s at least three hundred feet across. It’s not white water. It’s not a channel that will dwindle into nothing. It’s a tributary of the Amazon we can navigate. A cobalt blue butterfly the size of my hand floats along currents of hot air. Maybe it’s a sign. The chrysalis has broken open. Hope that Jupiter and my dad will both live surges through me.

  “Come on,” I say. “We have a lot to get done before you can return to your world and I can get back to mine.”

  38

  It’s late in the day by the time we’ve cut enough bamboo and vines to make a raft. We make camp above the river, just in case there’s another rainstorm and the water level rises, and build a quick shelter using the poncho and remaining duct tape. When we finish, we haul the bamboo we’ve cut down to the river.

  “Ideas?” Gus asks, hands on his knees, breathing hard.

  I catch my breath, too, and wait until the spots dancing across my vision clear. “Episode sixty-seven. Lie down.”

  Gus smirks. “Excuse me?”

  I ignore the implication. “We need to make the raft long enough that if we’re on it for days, we can lie down. When the bluegrass singer Abby Tucker joined Cougar in the Everglades, it took them two days to navigate out of the swampland. They took turns sleeping. Luckily Cougar slept with one eye open, because Abby almost slipped off the raft into crocodile-infested waters.”

  Gus looks at me like I’m a freak. “Just do it.” He stretches out on the dirt. I put a piece of bamboo beside him, whacking a notch with the machete, satisfied to see him flinch. I cut through the bamboo, a one-eyed girl teaching a movie star how to make a raft that’s going to float us out of the rain forest. “After you cut all the big ones this length, we’ll place the crosspieces. Make sure you save the narrower bamboo for that. Got it?” He nods. I give Gus the machete. “I’ll start a fire. When you’re done, we can lash the raft together.” Over my shoulder I add, “We’re out of duct tape, so don’t cut yourself.”

  Gus calls, “I’m flipping you the bird.”

  I don’t look back. “I figured.” With dry tinder it doesn’t take me long to start the fire, breathing into the nest of grasses until there’s a strong flame, then setting the ball of fire in the hole I’ve dug out and adding wood. I watch the fire burn for a few minutes, slowly feeding it until it gathers together, gets hot. Gus doesn’t look up from his work as I fill our bamboo containers, then carry them back to the fire to boil.

  “What’s next?” Gus shouts an hour later.

  I walk down to the river, hand him a water bottle and try not to notice how the sweat on his upper body glistens. Does this guy ever look like crap? Gus downs half his water in one swallow. He’s gathered his hair into a bun to get it off his neck. The shorts he wears, ripped and stained with mud, hang lower on his hips. He’s lost weight, too. But instead of making him gaunt, it just accentuates his muscles. Stop staring. “It doesn’t matter,” I mutter. Truth.

  “What?”

  To hide my red face, I turn away, place the skinny pieces of bamboo perpendicular to the larger ones, evenly spaced. “Now we lash them together. Do you know how to make a clove hitch?” Gus shakes his head. I don’t tell him that I don’t, either. In almost every episode of Cougar’s show, knots come into play. I’ve seen Cougar make square knots, clove hitches, end loops, stoppers and slides thousands of times. How hard can it be?

  The clove hitch takes me several tries, but I pretend it’s the vine’s fault, not mine. If Gus notices, he doesn’t say it. “Ready?” Gus nods. “Okay, put the length of a vine by the bamboo, cross one end under and around, like a figure eight, then tuck the short end under the diagonal,” I say, demonstrating. “Now you try.”

  Gus messes it up not once, not twice, but five times. Finally, I put my hands over his and guide them through the knot, ignoring the heat radiating from his skin, the not-unpleasant tang of his sweat and the loose strands of hair that brush my cheek. Once we make the hitch, I undo it. “Again,” I say, rocking back on my heels.

  “Who made you queen?” Gus asks. On his second try he makes a decent clove hitch.

  “Okay, now after you do a hitch holding the two pieces of bamboo together, add a few frapping turns—”

  “Frapping?”

  “Tightening, like this.” I demonstrate. “And then finish with a square knot.” I work through making a square knot, show Gus. He gets it the first time. “We have to do that at each spot the bamboo crosses. Got it?”

  “Aye, aye, Commander Danny.”

  The name makes one side of my mouth crook up. We mostly work in silence. When we finish with our knots, we have a roughly eight-by-six-foot raft that I wish my dad could see. He’d tell me all the things that were wrong with it, explain how he’d do it much better, but there’d be a tiny place, deep inside his leathered heart, where he was proud. Tomorrow we’ll take this raft down the river, paddling with the extra bamboo, until we find help for my dad and Jupiter. Please let us find help.

  The mosquitos, always swarming at dawn and dusk, give up their full frontal assault for the night. The river is so wide here that a large expanse of sky is visible. The stars, with no ambient light, are brilliant. Kneeling at the edge of the river, I splash water on my face and neck, washing the day’s stickiness away. Gus kneels a few feet away, splashing water on his chest, dipping his head, then shaking off like a dog. I spy a caiman’s eyes in the river, watching. We’re not for dinner, I silently tell the prehistoric creature. It slides beneath the surface like it understood me.

  Together, Gus and I pull the raft away from the water’s edge, then head back to our fire for what I hope is our last night in the wild. After finishing the snake Cougar caught, we wash it down with water that now tastes sweet to me. We dab on insect repellant, then chew on our hibiscus twigs.

  Gus leans back on his elbows, the twig resting on his lower lip. The flickering fire makes the flecks in his eyes glint like fool’s gold. He asks, “Truth or dare?”

  My stomach flips. “Pardon?”

  He points his toothbrush at me. “You heard me. What else is there to do tonight? Truth or dare?”

  He’s trying to embarrass me. “Truth.”

  “What’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told?”

  I sift through the ones I can remember, find the most innocuous. “When I was ten, I cheated on a math test so I could get an A. When the teacher caught me, I said I hadn’t looked at someone else’s paper.”

  Gus makes a cheesy, surprised face. “Wow! You’re a total rebel. Did you lie about stealing a pack of gum, too?”

  “Sorry I don’t live up to your high lying standards.”

  Gus shrugs. “If you’re not going to really play, we can forget it.”

  The way he says it, like I’m incapable of being honest, or too afraid, pisses me off. “Fine. Here’s my most horrible lie. There was a girl in fourth grade named Sarah. She rarely showered or changed her clothes. Turned out her mom was an alcoholic. When we were freshmen, her mother drove drunk and killed a college student. But no one knew about Sarah’s mom back in elementary school. A group of kids made a chart sh
owing the days Sarah showered and how many times she wore the same stinky clothes in a row.” My face gets warm. “Back then? I was getting teased enough that I didn’t want to go to school. Anyway. Every kid in my grade was called into the principal’s office when a teacher discovered the chart, asked if they made it or knew who did. I lied, said I didn’t know.”

  “But?”

  “I didn’t make the chart, but it was my idea. I wanted to turn the spotlight on someone else.”

  “Pretty rotten. But you were just a kid.”

  It’s hard to look at Gus but I do. “It was cruel. If I ever get out of here, I’ll apologize to her. Your turn.”

  “Truth.”

  “Same question.”

  “There are so many. Every time I had to promote a movie I hated, or talk about a costar who was a pain in the ass and rude to the crew, or—”

  “Totally lame. Tell me a lie that really matters.”

  The muscles in Gus’s jaw clench and unclench.

  “Quit posing and say it.”

  “Fine. I didn’t miss my plane because of a meeting with a director. A few buddies came to Brazil with me. We partied all night. I was hung over, slept in. That means everything that happened, the plane crash, Mack, Cass, Jupiter, your dad? It’s on me.”

  My jaw drops and the planet stops spinning. Despite the heat, goose bumps break out on my skin. Any words I might’ve uttered dry like dust and blow away. It’s a huge lie. Monumental. If... If... If... Gus is watching me, waiting for a meltdown. But instead I turn away from emotion and analyze what he’s said like it’s a case study.

  There are countless factors that produce any result. Life isn’t a controlled experiment in a laboratory. Long before Gus, there was Samantha, Cougar and our messed-up family dynamic. There was Cass and Cougar’s unbalanced relationship. Jupiter’s and Sean’s work schedules. A production crew already in Peru, with a director who made myriad decisions about the proposed episode that impacted all of us. There was Mack, the experiences that shaped him and made him willing to take risks another pilot would’ve avoided. It’s ridiculous to think that Gus is responsible for every dynamic and decision made over decades or in the past months, weeks or hours. And he’s certainly not in control of nature. Gus is a small dot on an enormous timeline that started long before he became involved with my dad’s show, long before our plane ever crashed.