The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  “Comeer,” I said. And just like that, everything had changed. Now I was in charge. I wished I’d figured this out a long time before. I told him what to do, when to stop and when to start again, and he complied, struggled to please me.

  I knew from Tina and Chiarra more or less what to expect from sex—“It’s nasty,” Chiarra had emphasized—but the pain was sharper than I’d imagined. At one moment, I’d almost pulled back, almost changed my mind, but I had something to prove to myself now, and to Josh too. It was no different from jumping off the high dive at the pool, I told myself; no different from skipping school, no different from hitchhiking. You stick out your thumb and a car stops.

  “Are you okay?” Josh asked when I betrayed signs of pain. I nodded, motioned for him to continue.

  “Is this your first time?” he asked.

  “Shut up,” I hissed low, and he did. The look on his flushed face was doggedly obedient, wanting only to placate me, to please me so that I might allow him to continue, so that I might come here and do this again. In one afternoon, I had changed him into a boy just like any other.

  I didn’t think of my sister at all until afterward, until after I cleaned myself up in Josh’s bathroom, endured his long grateful kisses and his guilty questioning as to whether I was okay, until after he pulled his car up at the curb in front of my house. I climbed out after still more kisses and endearments, slammed his car door behind me. I didn’t think of Delia until I was walking up our weedy front walk; only then I remembered that I had left her alone for hours, much longer than usual. As I unlocked the door, I felt for the first time how sore and uncomfortable I was, as though something unnatural had been done to me. But it wasn’t unnatural, I reminded myself as I unlocked the door, and it hadn’t been done to me. I had chosen it myself, every bit of it.

  Delia wasn’t at her usual spot in front of the TV, and I stood in the living room for a minute, still thinking my own thoughts, while her absence slowly dawned on me. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the bathroom. I ran to our room. It was empty too. I stood in the reverberating silence of our messy beds. The room smelled of us.

  The whole house pulsated with Delia’s absence. I had lost my sister. I pictured myself on the evening news, crying, I came home and she was gone. The color of the walls was sickening; what I had done earlier in the afternoon was sickening. I never should have left Delia alone for so long, never should have pushed my luck this far. Then I saw a flash of something outside our bedroom window. It was Delia, running in a circle around the palmetto tree in our back yard, her hand never losing contact with the green skin, her other arm stretched out like a wing. She was such a spaz, I thought in my sudden flash of anger. Weirdo, retard, moron—I called her every insult I could think of in my mind, even as my eyes filled with tears of love for her. On her next pass around the tree, Delia saw me and waved, then ran inside.

  “What?” she asked, confused, when she saw my face. Delia stared at me with those green eyes, her round face and missing teeth and disheveled play clothes suddenly dear to me.

  “I just didn’t know where you were,” I said finally. “I was worried about you.”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I’m right here.”

  In the Food Court that night, my father ordered Chinese; I got a baked potato with ham and cheese. Delia couldn’t decide what she wanted.

  “Chicken McNuggets?” my father prodded her. Delia shook her head.

  “Egg roll?”

  “No.”

  “Fried chicken? Spaghetti? Taco?”

  “No,” Delia said, her face going soft in the red glow of the Arby’s sign. “No, no, no.”

  “Delia,” said our father patiently, always patiently. “You have to eat something. What do you want?” Delia looked around as if she didn’t know where she was, starting to cry. Her eyes fixed on me and she regarded me hatefully, her green eyes narrowed. I had never seen her this way before, none of the many times when I’d been cruel or thoughtless toward her. Delia cried and cried, moaning softly.

  I looked to my father, and for the tiniest moment our eyes met; each of us was hoping the other would handle this. He was the first to speak.

  “Delia, what is it? What’s wrong?” he asked her soothingly. He reached out to stroke her back.

  “Nothing’s wrong with her,” I snapped. “She’s just being a brat.”

  Delia’s eyes flashed up at me, surprised. Too late, I realized my mistake.

  “Dolores left me alone,” Delia said to my father, dropping her voice to a whisper, though she knew she couldn’t keep me from hearing. “She didn’t come home after school.”

  My father looked from Delia to me. His face was a smear of confusion just as it had been the time I told him my mother and I hadn’t been shopping. It was the same bewilderment crossed with weariness, with a hope that whatever we were talking about, it would be resolved soon without his intervention. But Delia was crying openly now, big salty tears running down her face and plopping onto the table.

  I thought about where I’d been earlier that day, about the red afternoon light in Josh’s room, the gratitude in his gestures when he touched me, the noises that had escaped him even though he tried to hold them back.

  “What’s going on?” my father asked me. “What is this about?”

  I ignored him and watched Delia. I wanted to hate her, to believe that she was an incorrigible brat, but I couldn’t. It was horrible now to think of her sitting alone at home—no mother, no sister, her father at work trying to piece together an accident he might have helped to cause.

  “I’m sorry, Delia,” I said. I’d spoken the words before, but I’d never really meant them. “Hey, Delia? I’m sorry, okay?”

  She wouldn’t look at me.

  “What’s going on?” my father asked again, alarmed now. Delia didn’t answer him.

  “Nothing,” I told him. “It’s okay. We’re both okay.”

  “Dolores, you have to look after your sister while I’m gone,” he said. “With your mom away, I need to be able to depend on you to help out.”

  We both stared at him. He almost never mentioned my mother, and he certainly had never referred to her absence as a hardship. He took a sip of his coffee and checked his watch. To him, this discussion was over.

  “When is she coming home?” Delia asked him.

  “She’ll come home,” he assured her. “When she’s ready.”

  “Mom said the astronauts might be okay,” Delia announced, as if this had been what she had meant to say all along.

  “When did she say that?” my father asked, the surprise lifting his voice.

  “The night of the accident,” I explained. “Delia, she said you could hope, right? She said you could hope they were okay.”

  “Yeah,” Delia said. She didn’t seem surprised that I knew this. “We can hope.”

  “Delia, I don’t think—” my father started. But I caught his eye and shook my head no. Delia should be allowed to keep talking about hope if she wanted, even if in some way she had to know there was no hope. Delia heaved a sigh and looked as relieved as we were that her crying was over.

  As always, distant music played. My father bought us ice-cream cones, soft serve, and he let Delia have one even though she hadn’t eaten any dinner. He stroked her hair while she ate it, still sniffing.

  26.

  THAT NIGHT, I SNUCK OUT AGAIN AFTER DARK. THE WARMTH and humidity had come back, so when I looked up I no longer saw the crisp field of stars, only the brightest ones peeking through the murk, faint and few.

  I walked twenty minutes or so along the main road, then waited for a car to come by. The first thing to pull over was an eighteen-wheeler. It grumbled to a stop at the shoulder, then the passenger-side door, far above me, popped open.

  “Are you lost, honey?” the driver called. I could tell from his voice that I could trust him, that he had kids of his own.

  “I’m not lost!” I yelled up at him. “I know where I’m going.”

&n
bsp; I climbed up into the cab and pulled the door closed behind me. The driver was a small, slight man, a few years older than my father, neatly dressed in khaki pants and a cardigan sweater. He was going in my direction, toward the Space Center; he didn’t ask me why I was going there. On his dashboard, I saw a picture of a girl and a boy smiling.

  “How old are they?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s out of date,” he said, smiling at the picture. “My oldest just started college.” He pulled the truck back out onto the road, bumping and jostling, and I found it pleasant to ride so far above the surface of the street.

  When we pulled up to the gates at the first checkpoint, everything was closed and locked, the guard station empty.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?” the driver asked, hunching over to scan the horizon, his chin almost touching his huge steering wheel.

  “I know where I’m going,” I insisted. “My dad works here.”

  “How old are you, honey?” he asked. I could tell he didn’t quite believe me about my father. He didn’t stop looking around.

  “Sixteen,” I said. I’d been experimenting with lying about my age. So far, I’d always gotten away with fourteen and fifteen; sixteen only sometimes. The driver sized me up and didn’t blink an eye. He nodded, then turned to search the horizon again.

  “You should get your license so you can drive yourself,” he offered happily.

  “Oh, I have my license,” I assured him. “I just don’t have a car.”

  “A car. Sure,” he agreed quickly. “That’s half the battle, isn’t it?” He continued to look around as we talked, hoping to see some responsible adult presence before he let me go.

  “I’m going to wait for you here,” he announced when he saw none. “Just in case. You go run make sure your father’s here. I don’t want to leave you with no way to get home.”

  “Oh—oh no, really, that’s okay,” I stammered. “He’s working late. He was supposed to pick me up but he got stuck working.”

  “It’s dark out here. There’s alligators,” the trucker insisted, half kidding.

  “My dad has me come out here and meet him all the time,” I said. This sounded ridiculous, even to me. But I didn’t want this kind trucker waiting for me; knowing he was here waiting and worrying about me would ruin everything. I tried to give a reassuring smile while I opened the door.

  “Okay, thanks! ’Bye!” I yelled.

  “You run back and tell me when you’ve found your dad,” the driver called after me as I got out. I pretended not to hear him.

  Outside, I was struck by the warm swampy smell, a wilderness smell. The heat was hotter in the dark, the sound of the truck’s door slamming behind me oddly muffled by the humidity. Far away and all around me, the low sounds of insects and reptiles pulsed. I ducked under the metal checkpoint gate—now I was officially trespassing on restricted land—and walked along the road toward Launch Control and the spectators’ stands.

  The road was long, longer than I remembered. Everything at the Cape was separated from everything else by miles of nature, and though in a car this made for a pleasant drive, I had no idea how long it would take to reach Launch Control on foot. Maybe all night. I walked through pools of light from the sodium lamps above, each of them bending their heads over me protectively.

  I walked and walked. For a long time, I could still hear the low hum of the truck; the driver was waiting for me after all. I had thought I would find his waiting intrusive, but actually it was comforting, a sound I could go back to, a presence like my father’s, waiting without impatience for as long as I might take.

  I walked until I no longer heard the low thrumming sound of the truck’s engine; I couldn’t be sure whether he had turned it off or if he had finally given up waiting for me and driven away. Everything out here was far away on the horizon, and nothing seemed to draw any closer as I walked. I’d thought I would be afraid to be alone out here at night, but even in the dark, this place was familiar. I had seen it enough times to imagine it: rolling green rises, not hills exactly, but gentle swells, ditches filled with water and lurking alligators. The wide beige crawlerway bisecting the landscape. The Banana River lapping against its banks, a wild beach, and past that, another narrow strip of land where the two main launchpads stood, 39-A and 39-B, from which Challenger had launched. And past that, the ocean into which it had crashed.

  I reached the Launch Control Building, with its narrow row of windows facing the launchpads. Until I recognized it, I had started to doubt I was anywhere near the right place. I recognized the VIP stands, the white bleachers where I’d sat with Eric and our fathers to see the launch. I started climbing up the stands, recalling for the millionth time our awkward conversation that day, the way I’d cried, the way Eric had looked at me with such shy concern.

  About halfway up, I saw something on the top row of bleachers, a long object disturbing the even rows, maybe a blanket someone had left behind after the Challenger launch. It was farther away than I’d first thought, and when I got closer, I saw that it was a person lying across the seats, a man with his arms folded under his head, looking up at the stars.

  Though I’d been thinking of Eric, though it was Eric who had told me about coming to the Cape at night, I didn’t allow myself to even suspect that strange form could be him until he sat up and looked at me, until I could see his squinting face. His dear pale face thrust forward, struggling to recognize me too.

  Eric’s face was studiously blank, his eyebrows lifted only slightly. He didn’t acknowledge me at all except to pick himself up and shift over a bit, as if there might not be room here for both of us. I settled down next to him, remembering that day on the school bus in seventh grade when we had swayed next to each other, struggling not to touch.

  “Did you take another cab?” he asked by way of greeting.

  “Nope,” I said proudly. “Hitchhiked.”

  “Hitchhiked,” he repeated. “You’re going to get killed.” His voice was flat, but I still felt a weird satisfaction that he was concerned for my safety.

  “Why, how did you get here?”

  “Drove,” Eric said simply.

  “Drove,” I repeated, feeling inexplicably annoyed with him for always one-upping me. “You’re only thirteen,” I informed him. “You can’t drive.”

  “It’s against the law,” Eric said smugly. “It’s not a physical impossibility.”

  “Where did you learn to drive?”

  “My father used to try to teach me. I wasn’t very good at it, so he stopped. But I picked up the basics.” I could imagine Mr. Biersdorfer yelling at Eric from the passenger seat, turning redder and redder as Eric rode the brakes, stalled out the motor.

  “He started when I was about ten. I couldn’t even reach the pedals. He learned young, I guess, because he grew up on a farm.”

  “I see. And what do you drive?”

  “My mother’s car,” he said.

  “Doesn’t she know you take it?”

  “If she does, she doesn’t say anything about it. She probably doesn’t know, though. Her room is on the other side of the house from the garage.”

  “How often do you come out here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “Depends.” I could imagine him driving here every night, doing his homework by the light of a flashlight, eating a picnic dinner.

  I wanted to tell him everything then, everything that had happened—my mother’s trips to the strip mall to see Eric’s father, my mother’s leaving us, my afternoon with Josh. The phone call I’d made to Rick Landry, which had a weird way of disappearing and then presenting itself again in my mind. Each time, I felt anew the shock of what I’d done.

  “My dad’s going to be in a lot of trouble,” Eric said matter-of-factly.

  “Why?” I asked quickly.

  “Well, he’s Director of Launch Safety,” Eric said carefully. “He’s responsible for—”

  “I know what your father does,” I interrupted him
. “Believe me.”

  “Okay.”

  “He won’t necessarily take the blame. Depending on what kind of evidence they find, he might be able to wiggle out of it.”

  Eric shook his head. “Even if they find the cause and it’s something he couldn’t have prevented, they’ll still fire him. They basically have to.”

  “Do you think he knew something?”

  Eric shrugged off the question.

  “He knew about a million problems before every launch. A lot of problems he never even heard about. He listened to what the engineers said and he made a decision.”

  We sat silently for a long time, listening to the faraway sounds of alligators croaking.

  “Do you remember when we came here with our dads?” I asked.

  Eric was quiet for so long that I feared he had stopped speaking to me for some reason, but then he answered.

  “Of course I do,” he said.

  “I was so embarrassed when I cried. I thought you’d think I was stupid.”

  Eric shook his head. “No,” he said. And this seemed such a generous word from him. Just, No: not stupid. No, don’t be embarrassed.

  “I wanted you to like me again so badly,” I said.

  He was silent again.

  “Did you hear what I said?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “I knew that. I knew you wanted me to like you again.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  Eric sighed. It was a sigh I’ve come to know well from boys and men, the sigh of being asked for more than they want to give. I thought of that time at Eric’s house, when my mother talked and laughed in the Biersdorfers’ living room while Eric and I whispered together in his room. I knew now that that had been the closest I’d ever felt to anyone, just talking quietly together, offering bits of fear and history. I would never have that again.