Freefall

by Jessica Barry

  “I know, sweetheart. Me neither.”

  “It’s just such a shock. I mean, I haven’t seen Allison for a while, but the idea of her being gone . . .”

  “Had she been away from home for long? Was she on a business trip?”

  I listened to her sniffle down the line. “I— A business trip? I don’t know. I guess it’s possible.”

  “Do you think there’s anything in her room that could tell us? Did she pack a lot of clothes, or just a few?”

  There was a long pause. “Mrs. Carpenter, you know Allison doesn’t live here anymore, right?”

  My breath caught in my throat. “Oh. I see. When did she move out?”

  “About a year and a half ago.”

  “A year and a half.” I let it sink in. “Where did she go? Do you have the address?”

  “No. I . . . I don’t know,” she said. “We weren’t . . . we didn’t talk all that much by the time she moved out.” She began to cry.

  “It’s all right, dear,” I murmured quietly. Ally had moved without telling me. For more than a year, I hadn’t known where my daughter lived. If I’d needed to get in touch with her, I wouldn’t have been able to. She had absented herself from me completely, totally.

  “Most of her stuff is still here—she just took a suitcase, really—and I keep seeing the blanket we picked out together and the TV stand and the dishes and—” She was crying hard now, and her words came out in gasps.

  “Take a deep breath, sweetheart. Do you know where she was working? I tried looking up that magazine she was at before, but . . .”

  “She stopped working there a long time ago,” Tara said gently.

  “Did she get a job at another magazine? Something that might have involved her traveling? We’re still not sure about why she was on that plane, you see, and I thought maybe it would have something to do with her line of work.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “I heard she ended up working as a cocktail waitress at this place downtown.”

  “A cocktail waitress?” I tried to picture Ally—beautiful, brilliant Ally, with her college degree and her stacks of books—holding one of those trays stacked with umbrella-filled glasses. “She couldn’t find anything else?”

  “She tried, but there wasn’t anything out there . . . she was always applying for jobs when she still lived here but nothing ever came from it, I guess.”

  My mind whirred as it tried to place this new information. I needed to know more. “Tara, do you remember the name of the bar she worked at?”

  “I think it was a place called Sapphire’s in the Gaslamp Quarter.” She started crying again. I pictured her thin little shoulders being racked with sobs, and my heart broke. “I miss her,” she gasped. “I really miss her.”

  “I know you do. We all do,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her any more questions. I’d already pushed her too far. I told her to take care of herself and put down the phone.

  I tried to connect this new version of Allison with the one I remembered. She’d been full of dreams as a little girl, her head always stuck in a book or scribbling away in her notebook, photographs of London and Paris tacked to her walls. Charles and I used to catch each other’s eye when she said something particularly smart and shake our heads in wonder at this incredible person we’d made. She was going to do anything and everything she wanted, and she’d ended up a cocktail waitress. I couldn’t make the two ends meet. Being the mother of a grown child seemed to be a twinned experience, simultaneously loving the person she had become with all your soul while mourning everything she had not.

  Now it was too late, and I would never get to know the woman she had become. She’d always be stuck in time, her edges blurring as each thing I learned made me unlearn something else.

  Still. I had to try.

  Allison

  I wake up to a distant mechanical whir. An airplane, maybe, or a helicopter. I sit bolt upright and listen as the noise retreats into the sky, replaced by the quiet hum of the forest. The light leaks through the trees in fragments and I squint up at it before the pounding in my head starts again. Louder now, an insistent drum.

  I struggle to my elbows and fight against the swoon. My shoulder throbs.

  I check the bottle of water. Just a few swallows left. I gulp them down greedily before I can stop myself. I need to find water now, that’s the first thing. I remember the path. I just need to find my way back to the path.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t try. I applied to every opening for magazine work I could find, and then for every office admin job, and then for every job. I registered with temp agencies and had meetings with recruiters, who scanned my résumé with a frown and promised to be in touch, but they never were. When they did call, they told me I was overqualified, that employers wanted someone fresh out of college answering their phones, someone who wouldn’t want too much from them. I told them I wasn’t looking for anything more than a paycheck, but it didn’t matter—jobs still didn’t materialize.

  Six months went by. Six months in the unrelenting glare of constant sunshine, marooned on the sofa in the dingy apartment I could no longer afford, watching daytime television and scrolling through job listings while waves of grief battered me, relentless. The little money I’d managed to save from my old job slowly drained away, until I was faced with a choice between rent and my car. It was California, so I chose the car.

  Tara covered my share of the rent for a while, but I knew it was a strain on her, so when she finally told me that she’d have to look for a new roommate, I lied and told her I had another place lined up. She said I could stay on the couch, but she’d done too much for me already—I didn’t want her to worry about me anymore. I called an old friend and asked if I could stay with her for a few days. A few days stretched into a week, and then two, until I couldn’t look her in the eye anymore and I called another old friend, and then another. I stayed in spare rooms and couches across the city until I ran out of old friends and goodwill.

  And then I moved into my car.

  I knew my mother would have helped me if I’d asked. All through the nights on lumpy sofas and my cramped back seat and the days spent eating ramen and boiled eggs and killing time before sundown, I knew that I could have ended it all with a single phone call home. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The anger I’d felt toward her had started to fade, though I could still locate it if I searched hard enough, like a bruise that had nearly healed. It had been replaced by something slippery and harder to define. Betrayal, yes, that she’d shut me out like that, but also shame at the way I’d reacted. I had missed my father’s funeral. I had abandoned her at her lowest moment. And now I was just some washed-up spoiled brat who couldn’t even find a job. A waste of space. A failure.

  No. I couldn’t call her, not yet. I had to do this on my own.

  I heave myself onto my feet and start to pack up camp. The grass underneath the canopy is flattened now and there’s a me-shaped depression in the soft earth. I kick at the ground with the toe of my sneaker, then toss down a few branches over the scorched remains of the fire. I don’t want to leave any evidence.

  The trees seem to have grown taller in the night. I look up at the canopy, and the expanse of green seems to stretch on into the sky. I scan the trunks for the scrap of fabric I’d left to mark the path. It was just a few steps to the left of camp. Or was it to the right? I turn in a slow semicircle, twigs snapping underfoot. Everything looks the same and nothing looks familiar. It had been dusk when I’d made camp—too dark to see the details, and anyway, I hadn’t been looking.

  Stupid, silly girl.

  I squint up at the sky. The tree cover is too thick to pinpoint the sun’s arc in the sky. I can’t tell which way is east or west, or what time it is—above and below and all around me the trees stare blankly back. A drift of bluebells chime in the breeze. My nerves begin to twist.

  Think. What would Dad do?

  But he’s not here to tell me. I’ll have to
guess.

  Right. I’ll go right.

  No. Left.

  I set off with purpose, the weight of the bag a familiar comfort as it rubs against the raw patches on my back. The birds fall silent when I’m near, but I can hear them calling to each other, calls borne out of love or loneliness or fear.

  “Do you hear that?” my father whispered when we were deep in the woods by our house. I stood stock still and strained my ears—actually strained them; I can still feel the tug—until I heard a strange metallic rattling sound coming from the trees above, like someone was knocking softly but rapidly on a cellar door. “Yellow-billed cuckoo,” he said, nodding sagely. “Come on, there’s going to be a storm soon.”

  “How do you know?” I asked as we gathered our things and hurried back to the house.

  “The cuckoos,” he said, tapping a finger to the side of his nose. “They’re telling us.”

  By the time we reached the back door, the first pellets of a hard rain had begun to fall.

  I strain my ears now but can’t make sense of the chatter. I’d never had the gift, not like my dad. He’d treated the Maine woods like an old lover. “She’s a beaut, isn’t she?” he’d ask, holding out a sliver of mica or pointing to a thatch of bergamot. I would stare as hard as I could at whatever he was showing me, willing it to reveal whatever mystery it had already given up to my father, but it would always just look like a piece of rock to me, or a bunch of scraggly weeds. Eventually I’d get too cold to stop my teeth from chattering and we’d head back home, a nagging sense that I’d let him down nipping at my heels.

  And then I left the rocks and the weeds and the chattering teeth behind in favor of the constant steady beat of the California sun. “Isn’t it a little weird, not having seasons?” my parents had asked when they’d first come to visit, the smell of stale plane air still clinging to their clothes.

  “No,” I’d said, more harshly than intended, and I’d watched them shrink back into themselves a little. They’d looked so small out there under the wide blue sky. It was the first time I realized they were getting old, and would get older.

  My foot catches on a root and I stumble. There isn’t enough sun to cast a shadow, and I hunch down to see where I’m placing my feet. Maybe I’ve gone the wrong way. Left instead of right. I turn around, take a few steps back. Stop. Turn again. The branches crowd around me, low slung and intertwined. There are no more bluebells here, just scuffed black earth and a carpet of fallen leaves and the chitter of invisible insects.

  The path. What happened to the path?

  I turn again, start to retrace my steps. The deep scar across the belly of this tree trunk. The snapped arm of this branch, hanging at an awkward angle. Are these familiar? Have I seen them before? The thick tree stump crawling with lines of busy carpenter ants—surely I would have noticed that.

  Panic soars through me, its wings expanding in my throat.

  I’m lost.

  Maggie

  The phone scared the daylights out of me. Two days with the ringer off and I had forgotten the racket it made. Linda had made me promise that I’d switch it on when she left the night before, just in case she needed to get ahold of me. She tried to get me to take her cell phone, but I pressed it back into her hands. I hated the things, had never had one, and I wasn’t about to start then. I didn’t like the idea of people being able to reach me whenever they wanted. It felt like an intrusion.

  I lifted the receiver tentatively, like a grenade. “Hello?”

  “Maggie, it’s Jim. I’ve got some news.”

  My heart thudded to life. “What is it? Did they find her body?”

  “Not yet.” He cleared his throat. “They got the initial report back from the investigators. Looks like there isn’t any evidence of engine failure, which is what they originally thought.”

  “So what was it then?”

  There was a long pause. “Seems like the crash was caused by pilot error.”

  “Pilot error?”

  “They’re still looking into it, but that’s what they think.”

  “It was the pilot’s fault? He did something that made the plane crash?”

  “What I’m telling you is that right now they can’t find any mechanical fault with the plane. Maybe he didn’t chart his altitude correctly. Maybe he didn’t realize how high those mountains are. Maybe he had a medical emergency. We just don’t know.”

  “Do you know his name now? The pilot?”

  I heard the rustle of paper. Jim cleared his throat. “His name was Ben Gardner. Thirty-four, San Diego native. He was an owner-operator.”

  I wrote down his name on a scrap of paper and underlined it, twice. “What do you mean, ‘owner-operator’?”

  “He got his pilot’s license a couple of years ago and bought his own plane soon after.” There was a pause down the line. “I looked it up, and the model he was flying cost half a million bucks.”

  The breath went out of me. “Half a million dollars?”

  He grunted. “Apparently the guy was some drug industry hotshot. Head of some drug company, worth a fortune.”

  I thought of the glossy photograph of her. “Were he and Ally . . . involved?”

  “We were hoping you’d be able to tell us that.”

  I hesitated. God bless Linda for keeping her mouth shut, though in this instance, I wished I didn’t have to tell Jim myself. I took a deep breath. “Ally and I weren’t in touch.”

  Silence. “I didn’t realize. I’m sorry to hear that, Maggie.”

  “It’s fine.” It wasn’t, but there was nothing else to say. “Can you talk to someone who knew him? Maybe his parents, or a friend . . .” I trailed off. “Maybe they could tell us how he knew Ally.”

  “We’re working on it,” he said. “Someone’s trying to reach his next of kin right now—we should know more after that.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell me about him?”

  The rustle of paper again. “Not much. I had a quick look before I called you and there isn’t anything about him in the system. No police record or anything like that.”

  I felt a glimmer of relief. At least she hadn’t been mixed up with some criminal. A thought occurred to me. “Do you have a photograph of him I could see?”

  He paused. “I don’t know if that’s within regulations, exactly. I . . . You sure you want to see him?”

  “Jim.”

  “All right. I’ll send Shannon over with it.”

  “Who’s Shannon?”

  “Officer Draper. You met her a couple of days ago, remember? Little scrap of a thing?”

  The little woman rifling through my cabinets. “Oh. Her.” She’d seen me at my weakest. I didn’t want to see her again.

  Jim picked up on the irritation in my voice. “She’ll just drop off the photo and leave.”

  I sighed. “Fine. Send her over.”

  “She’ll be over right after lunch.”

  “All right then. Thanks, Jim. I appreciate it.”

  Jim cleared his throat. “Maggie. There’s something else.”

  I gripped the phone tight. “What is it?”

  I heard him take a breath. “They’ve declared her presumed dead,” he said quietly. “The coroner’s office.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. “But they haven’t found her,” I said. “How can they declare her anything if they haven’t found her?”

  He sighed. “They judged it on the evidence at the site. They don’t think anyone could have survived the crash.”

  “I don’t understand.” It felt negligent to me, and reckless. How could they declare my daughter dead without a single scrap of evidence? Maybe she hadn’t even been on that damn plane after all. They couldn’t know for sure until they’d found her.

  “They found a necklace at the crash site,” Jim said, like he could read my mind. “They’ve sent a photo of it . . . Would you mind taking a look, see if you recognize it?”

  I knew what it was straightaway, and my heart seemed to swe
ll and contract at the same moment. “It’s a gold Saint Christopher’s locket.” Jim was silent down the line. “Isn’t it?”

  Charles had given it to her a week before he died. “The patron saint of travelers and children,” he murmured as he fastened it around her neck. Ally and I had exchanged a look. Charles had never been a religious man. He seemed to read our thoughts. “Anything that promises to protect my little girl is worth a shot,” he said, and he caught my eye and smiled sadly. I can still remember the inscription on the back. God protect him as he travels, by air or land or sea, keep him safe and guide him, wherever he may be.

  Her hand reached for it as she bent down to kiss the top of his head, and I saw his eyes close as he inhaled the smell of her. I knew then that he was saying goodbye.

  After all this time, after everything, she’d still been wearing it. That had to mean something. “Where was it?”

  “They found it in some brush near the crash site.” His voice was strange, like he’d swallowed something that had gotten stuck in his windpipe. “It probably came off on impact and flew off . . .”

  I was quiet for a minute. Them finding her necklace meant she’d been on that plane. I was sure of that now, I had to accept it. But them finding the necklace but not her body . . . something didn’t add up. “I’d like to have it if I can, once they’ve finished with it.”

  “I’ll ask the coroner’s office to send it over as soon as they’re through with it.”

  Good. Then I’d have something of hers, something I could see and touch. I felt sure it would help me somehow, like a talisman. “Did they find anything else of hers at the crash site?” Clothing. A scarf. Something I might be able to hold in my arms. Something that might still carry her smell.