The First Time I Fell

by Joanne Macgregor

  “Okay, see you soon.”

  With Ryan on his way, I probably didn’t have time for a shower, but I scrubbed my hands thoroughly with a nailbrush, wincing as the soap and hot water stung my scraped hand. Then I washed my face and, still feeling unclean, brushed my teeth, too.

  I turned off the faucet, checked it wasn’t dripping, and then texted my mother, telling her something unexpected had come up and we’d need to reschedule supper to the next night. Ryan arrived a few minutes later. The dogs, predictably, launched into a cacophony of barking. My heart lifted a little to see his face, though I wished he was visiting under different circumstances.

  When he bent over to pat the dogs for a moment — Lizzie was leaping up against him, whining for his attention, while Darcy was snuffling around his boots — I snuck a look at his rear. Nice and lean. I pulled my gaze away before he caught me checking out his booty, and led him inside the house.

  Not wanting to go near the bag with the bone, I merely pointed him in the direction of it. He peered inside the bag and grimaced. “Oh yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s a human rib. The Medical Examiner’s office will confirm it.”

  “I touched it, and Lizzie chewed on it,” I confessed, watching as he donned latex gloves to drop the bone into a large evidence bag. “And this is going to sound funny —”

  “Funny-haha, or funny-strange?”

  “Strange.” Definitely strange. I began chewing on a nail, then remembered what my fingers had touched and dropped my hand.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “When I touched it, I felt —” How to say this? “I got a bad feeling, like a sense that there’s something … wrong with it.”

  “It’s a human rib, Garnet, found in the wilds. I’m guessing our John or Jane Doe didn’t have a peaceful death at home with family gathered around singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. You wouldn’t need much imagination to think that this” — he waved the bagged rib at me — “has some unpleasant history.”

  That made sense. Of course a human bone found where this one had been would likely have some bad story attached to it. I would unconsciously have known this, and my imagination might have rushed in to create the accompanying visceral “soundtrack” of doom and gloom. But while my rational mind seized on this perfectly logical explanation, the rest of me remained unconvinced.

  Because I hadn’t imagined it.

  What I’d experienced had been deeply disturbing, terrifying even. It hadn’t been the normal thrill of horror — that almost pleasant mixture of excitement, relief and morbid fascination — that a person sometimes feels when they brush up against remote tragedy. There was nothing normal about what I’d felt.

  “Yeah, that’s true, but …” My voice trailed off as I weighed the wisdom of saying more.

  For one thing, I liked Ryan. I thought he might be interested in me, too. I didn’t want to ruin any good opinion he might have of me.

  Back in December, he’d witnessed some of my strange behavior, but I’d never explicitly told him what I’d seen and heard, and I’d ducked his questions on how I’d known facts I shouldn’t have been able to, merely telling him my conclusions must have been lucky guesses. But back then, I’d been convinced I was going crazy, or that what I was experiencing was temporary. Now I was starting to think differently.

  So, I teetered on the edge of a cliff of my own. Should I take the leap and tell Ryan Jackson the truth? Trusting didn’t come naturally to me; it came harder than when my seventeen-year-old self leapt off the high ledge at the quarry and fell into the water hole below. Back then, I’d been buoyed up by beer and Colby’s encouragement. Now I was stone cold sober, and on my own.

  I thought again of that woman lying broken on the frozen ledge at the quarry, saw a flashback — black, white and red — of her crumpled body. According to my gut, and what I’d “seen” and felt, her plummet off that cliff had not been voluntary. The cops, however, seemed set to write her death off as suicide. How much did that matter to me?

  With Colby, I’d felt I owed him, that I needed to ensure justice was done for his sake. But this victim was a stranger to me. Did I owe her anything? I thought maybe I did, that maybe we humans were all bound together by an invisible web of humanity, and that we owed each other a duty of care. Bottom line: if that had been me lying dead on the snowy ice, and someone else suspected I’d been murdered, I’d want them to speak up.

  The irony of an atheist speculating about what she’d want when she no longer existed to have any preferences or volition wasn’t lost on me.

  “But?” Ryan prompted.

  “We’re going to need coffee for this.”

  The dogs followed us into the kitchen, but as soon as they realized that no food was in the offing, they flopped into their baskets. I put on the coffeemaker, and keeping my gaze on the machine so that I didn’t have to see Ryan’s expression, I tried to explain this strange stuff in a way that wouldn’t sound embarrassingly insane.

  “I never told you this, but in the weeks after I drowned, I had a couple of strange experiences — episodes, I guess you could call them — when I felt and saw and kind of heard things.”

  The first drops of coffee trickling into the pot were loud in the silence that followed.

  “What, like flashbacks or memories?” Ryan asked.

  “Yes, both of those. But they were of things I’d never experienced. They were other people’s memories,” I said, risking a glance at Ryan to check his reaction.

  He didn’t laugh. But he didn’t say anything else, either. No doubt he was waging an inner war between amused incredulity and innate good manners.

  “The memories — they were mostly Colby’s.”

  Ryan’s lips tightened a fraction.

  “Look, I know it sounds insane,” I said, before he could. “For a long time, I thought that it was insane, that I was having a mental breakdown, or that my symptoms were due to post-traumatic stress or concussion. I even checked in with my psych professor, and for the record, he didn’t think I’d gone off the deep end.”

  Ryan nodded, perhaps relieved to see I could appreciate the absurdity of what I was saying and had taken appropriate measures to have my mental state assessed. That while I may have boarded the express train to Woowooville, I hadn’t yet reached the end of the line.

  The coffeemaker sputtered and I poured us each a cup. Ryan took his with cream but no sugar; I took mine black and bitter, like I had ever since I’d drowned. Like Colby had taken his. I sipped it, welcoming the searing heat.

  “And then all the weird stuff stopped.” More or less. “I thought it was gone for good.”

  “But it’s back?” Ryan asked.

  “When I touched that bone, and before, at the quarry, I experienced more … funny stuff.”

  “Was that when you turned as white as a sheet and fell over?”

  I nodded, waiting for him to dismiss the incidents, or at least make light of them.

  Instead, he said, “Your eyelids were fluttering. Same as they did that time I found you going fetal at the Pond.”

  I shrugged. I would’ve thought that when I saw the flashes, my eyes would behave as they did in dream sleep — moving rapidly from side to side as they scanned the inner scenes playing out in my mind’s eye.

  “So, what did you experience?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious.

  I explained what I’d felt at the top of the cliff and when I’d accidentally touched the body. The fear and panic, the feeling of having been pushed. How I’d had a flash of the blue note paper a microsecond before I’d actually seen it, and that it hadn’t felt like déjà vu.

  Ryan watched me closely while I spoke and nodded noncommittally when I finished.

  “You said something about the bone. Did you get a feeling then, too?”

  “Yes, as soon as I touched it. But that was different.”

  I worried at a rough edge of a fingernail with my teeth, then stopped when his gaze flicked to my mouth. My decade-long struggle with anxiet
y expressed itself in two horrible conditions officially called onychophagia and excoriation — nail-biting and skin-picking. I knew the habits were gross, but they were also automatic, and when I was especially anxious — like now — the urge was almost irresistible.

  Ryan leaned up against a counter and sipped his coffee, as if settling in to hear all the details. “Different how?”

  I couldn’t find words to explain it and feared it would sound ridiculous even if I could, so I merely said, “I didn’t hear or see anything specific. It just felt —” Evil, that was the most accurate word for it. “Bad,” I finished lamely. “It shook me to my core.”

  I stared at Ryan, trying to assess his reaction to what I’d told him, but his expression was unreadable. If he felt the extreme skepticism which I suspected he must, he hid it well; there was no snort of laughter and no eye-rolling. As a cop, he had to be used to hearing some wild stuff.

  Eventually, he said, “I can see this has shaken you, and you think it means something —”

  Before he could utter the big fat “but” on the tip of his tongue, I interrupted. “It did with Colby.”

  Ryan’s brows drew together. “What do you mean?”

  “The stuff I saw and heard in here” — I tapped my temple — “and the feelings I got, that’s how I figured out who’d killed him.”

  He scrubbed a hand across his mouth. “I wondered how you knew some of that stuff. Are you saying Colby sent you clues?”

  “I know it sounds bizarre. And I’m not claiming to be a psychic or anything,” I babbled, already regretting my decision to spill the beans.

  He gave me a long, assessing look. “And are you still … in contact with Colby?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He opened his mouth as though to speak, closed it again, frowned harder and then said, “To be honest, Garnet, I’m not sure what to do with this.”

  Me either, buddy.

  He finished his coffee and began jingling his car keys, clearly eager to be gone.

  “Could you just check it out — that woman’s death? Don’t automatically assume it’s suicide, okay?” I said as I saw him out.

  “Sure.”

  And I couldn’t tell if that was a “Sure, I’ll investigate thoroughly” or a “Sure, whatever lady, just let me get the hell away from your crazy ass.”

  Either way, I figured no romantic dinner invitation would be coming my way anytime soon.

  – 7 –

  On Monday morning, while I was deep in an article on the role of pre-loss dependency in chronic grief, the doorbell sounded. At once, the dogs began barking furiously, but they stopped at once when they saw who it was — my neighbor, Ned Lipton. Today he wore a yellow bowtie and held a snow shovel.

  “Can I clear your path for you?”

  “Sure, thanks,” I said, although only a scant inch of snow had fallen in the night.

  “You’re most welcome,” he said and set to work, humming tunelessly, while Lizzie and Darcy romped around his feet, messing where he’d cleared and generally getting in the way.

  I stood awkwardly on the top step, unsure of the etiquette for this. It felt wrong to stand and watch him work, and even ruder to return inside and leave him working, but the bitter wind made light work of my thin sweater. I was just about to go back into the warmth of the house, good manners be damned, when Ned said, “I saw the police were at your house yesterday. Twice.”

  His carefully casual tone didn’t fool me — this was the real reason why he’d come over: to snoop.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Nothing wrong, I hope?” he asked, his keen gaze fixed on my face.

  “They’re investigating a possible crime.”

  He peered over my shoulder as though he thought the crime had happened in the house. “What happened?”

  “A body was found in the old serpentine quarry.”

  “I saw that on the news! So, you’re involved in that?”

  “Tangentially,” I said, offering no details. I had a sneaking suspicion that Ned was the local gossip, and I wanted to keep his nose well out of my business. “Look, I’m freezing,” I said, hugging my arms. “I’m going inside, but thanks for clearing the path.”

  He gave a friendly wave, and leaving him humming as he swept the path, I returned to my work. By lunchtime, my brain was fried, so after wolfing down a bacon, peanut butter and pickle sandwich, and drinking a bottle of beer, I crashed on the couch and napped until woken by plaintive whines and warm tongues licking my face. Me being better at decoding dog-speak than Lizzie and Darcy were at understanding my commands, I took this to mean that they were hungry.

  “Give me a minute to wake up, okay?” I said, rubbing sleep from my eyes, wiping dog spit off my cheeks, and wondering how I’d slept so deeply with the television volume so loud. The Hair was back on the news, not even trying to hide his excitement as he described the latest developments at the quarry.

  “Police have confirmed the discovery yesterday of the skeletonized remains of an unknown person, found in the immediate vicinity of the decommissioned Rare Rocks Serpentine Quarry just outside Pitchford, Vermont. The identity of the deceased person is not yet known, and although the remains are clearly old, police will need to wait on the Medical Examiner’s report before they can estimate a date of death. The remains are believed to be unrelated to the body found in the quarry yesterday by a passing hiker.”

  It occurred to me that, as the passing hiker who’d found the body, it was strange that I hadn’t been contacted by the media for comment. Had Ryan withheld my identity to protect me from being harassed?

  “That person has been positively identified as thirty-nine-year-old Laini Carter,” the reporter continued. “She headed up the marketing division of the Sweet and Smoky Maple Syrup Company and is survived by her brother.”

  Laini Carter. That’s who she’d been. And only thirty-nine years old. Again, I felt what she had as she fell, tumbling through the air, breathless, almost flying. I pressed my fingers hard against my eyes and pushed my feet against the floor, forcing myself back into the present.

  My phone rang, startling my eyes open.

  “Hey, kiddo, we were expecting you at six o’clock. Where are you?”

  Crap. I’d forgotten that I was supposed to be having supper with my parents.

  “I’m on my way, Dad.”

  I fed the dogs, locked them in the kitchen and set off for the house on Abenaki Street where I’d grown up. My mother flung the front door open before the bell finished its chime.

  “Come in, come in, it’s cold enough out there to make milk cows give icicles!” She tugged me inside and enfolded me in a tight embrace before stepping back to inspect my face. “Your eyes are still different colors,” she said, sounding pleased about it.

  My mother’s eyes were bright, her cheeks rosy, her gray hair neatly curled, and she looked like she’d lost a couple of pounds. Being back behind the counter of her esoteric store, Crystals, Candles and Curiosities, dispensing wacky wisdom and joss sticks to the county’s metaphysically minded citizens, was obviously doing her good. Dad looked the same as ever, maybe more relaxed than the last time I’d seen him. Mom being back at work and out of his hair was no doubt suiting him fine, too.

  Mom ushered us both into the dining room, which looked much the same as it had back when I’d lived there. The old spinning wheel still sat in the corner, a basket of dried flowers rested on the sideboard and the table was set for three with Mom’s blue-patterned china.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked, taking her usual seat and lifting the lid off a serving dish. “I've made turkey enchiladas.”

  Immediately, I diverted to the kitchen and rummaged through the condiment bottles inside the refrigerator, looking for something with a kick. Squinting at the label on an old bottle of sliced and pickled jalapenos, I saw they’d expired over a year ago. They still looked okay to me. A little pale, maybe.

  Back at the table, I handed the jar to my father
to inspect. “Think these will kill me?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t eat dodgy foods, kiddo. It’s going to catch up with you one day.”

  “Oh hush, Bob, Garnet’s got the gullet of a goat; she can stomach anything,” my mother said.

  That was probably true. I piled a heap of the chilis — unappetizingly limp and mushy — onto my plate and took a bite. Not bad.

  “Did you see the news?” Dad asked, using his knife and fork to divide his enchiladas into bite-sized pieces. “They found a body at the old quarry.”

  “Correction,” I said. “I found a body at the old quarry.”

  Dad paused with his fork halfway to his mouth, and Mom’s eyes bugged with astonishment. I took a big bite of jalapeno-topped enchilada, savoring the burn that was already raising a faint sweat on my brow.

  Under a barrage of questions, I filled my parents in on how I’d stumbled across the corpse of Laini Carter. My father, who had a gruesome fascination with murder and serial killers, insisted on hearing every detail of what I'd seen, but like the cops, he seemed to think the death was probably a suicide and not worth getting too fired up about. So I threw him a bone, telling him what Lizzie had dug up.

  He perked up immediately. “Well! That could be a murder, couldn't it? And you had the bone with you at the Andersens’? What did it look like? I wish you'd called me — I’d have liked to have seen it.”

  “Dad, has anyone ever told you that you're pretty strange?”

  He chuckled loudly, but someone, I noticed, was being uncharacteristically quiet. I glanced over at my mother. She was studying me intently, her face bright with excitement. Uh-oh.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “You encountered Death.”

  She said it like that, as if death had a capital letter and was a presence that I’d hung out with up at the quarry, the two of us getting better acquainted as we traded amusing anecdotes about mortality.

  “And?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea what was coming.

  “Did you see anything?”