Freefall

by Jessica Barry

  Well, if they wouldn’t, maybe somebody else would. I tried the house on the left first, but no one answered the bell. I thought I saw a curtain twitch in an upstairs window, but it could just have been my eyes playing tricks on me. When I pressed the doorbell for the house on the right, I heard the patter of footsteps and a woman pulled open the door in her dressing gown. I told her my car had broken down and I needed to phone a tow truck, and she ushered me inside. It’s amazing how trusting people can be when they see an old lady in distress.

  I got as far as the parquet floor entryway when I admitted my car hadn’t really broken down. Still, her eyes didn’t show any fear, just confusion mixed with a little pity. “Are you lost?” she asked, and I shook my head and told her I was looking for the Gardners, that I was Allison’s mother, that I just wanted to talk to someone about her, and did she know them, and did she know their son, and did she know my daughter? But I saw her face slam shut as soon as I mentioned their name, and soon I found myself back on the other side of the gate and her door closed tightly against the world again.

  Whoever the Gardners were, and wherever they were hiding, they’d briefed the neighbors beforehand. I didn’t think there was much point in knocking on any more doors—it was clear no one was going to talk.

  I turned and headed back up the hill toward my car. The red sports car roared past me just as I was climbing in, leaving a wake of hot, gasoline-scented air behind it.

  I drove to the Motel 6 on Pacific Highway too fast, my mind wandering back to the empty-eyed mansions up in La Jolla. I checked in and sat in my room, watching twenty-four-hour news and eating a tuna sandwich I’d picked up at a gas station on the way. The place was done out in Crayola colors—orange carpets with bright blue accents—and I had to keep closing my eyes to get a rest from it. Outside, I could hear the splashes and squeals of kids as they played in the pool.

  They weren’t talking about Ally anymore. Whenever they mentioned the plane crash, she was just an afterthought. Ben was the main event now. There were infographics that charted the sales of Somnublaze, interviews with his peers in the pharmaceutical industry, exterior shots of the Prexilane headquarters with solemn-faced journalists speaking in respectful tones about him. I stared at the skyscraper on the screen. I’d driven past it on my way to the hotel, just a quick glance and then it was gone. You couldn’t escape him, though, or that magic pill of his. San Diego was peppered with billboards advertising it, the blond woman’s smile stretched ten feet wide, holding a giggling baby with eyes as blue as the sky, and underneath, that same damn slogan. “Now I can have it all!”

  I wanted to phone into one of these news programs and ask them why they weren’t talking more about my daughter. She was a person in her own right, not just a passenger or a fiancée or a “glamorous companion,” as some slick-haired asshole had referred to her. She was smart and kind and funny and worth ten of him. Twenty. She was the girl who’d insisted on choosing the hamster with three legs from the pet shop because she was sure no one else would love it. She was the college student who had written an op-ed for the newspaper about the lack of protection against sexual assault on campus. She was the woman who had read to her father for hours as he lay on the sofa staring up at the ceiling, fists clenched against the pain. She was a light in this world and now she was gone, and no one seemed to give a damn except me.

  I checked the time—quarter to eight. Time to take a shower and freshen up before I headed back out for the night. I was drawing the curtains closed when I noticed a man standing next to a bright red sports car in the parking lot below. I watched as he climbed into the car and peeled off into the dusk.

  Allison

  She led me here, my mother. She must have. I asked her for help and forgiveness and she delivered me one more time. How else can I explain how I woke up on the floor of a cabin, a fire (that I must have lit, or maybe it was her) still smoldering in the coal furnace?

  I strip off my clothes and stare down at my naked body. My bad shoulder throbs and I can see that a dark bruise has appeared. My skin is red and mottled from the cold, my fingertips still blue and stinging as the blood forces itself back into them. My toes are swollen and oddly shiny, as if the skin has been polished, and the soles of my feet are puckered and tender to the touch. There’s a jagged red smile on one of my palms from where the rock cut into the flesh. I’d gripped it so tightly, I’d drawn blood.

  His house in Bird Rock was like something out of Architectural Digest. When he first told me about it, he said it was his favorite place in the world, and as soon as I stepped foot inside, it had been mine, too. I wanted to be folded into its cool white walls and fall asleep listening to the murmured hush of the rock pool.

  So when, after a few weeks together, he asked me to move in with him, I said yes. I tried to put him off helping me move—I didn’t have much, just a couple of bags of clothes and a few books I’d salvaged from Tara’s place—but he insisted, and soon we were pulling up to the low-slung building in Logan Heights in his Tesla. I watched him take in the apartment, the cracked paint and the drunk neighbors you could hear through the walls and the smell of damp cigarettes that permeated everything.

  “Let’s get you out of here,” he said, and slung one bag over each arm and headed out the door. We were silent on the way home, me stealing nervous glances at his profile, his jaw set tight.

  When we pulled up to the house in Bird Rock, he switched off the engine and turned to me. “What were you doing, living in a place like that?”

  I stared down at my lap. Shame swept through me. “What do you mean?”

  I felt his eyes on my profile. “What kind of a life were you living?” I heard the accusation in his voice, sharp as a dagger.

  I forced myself to look at him. He had to see my eyes if he was going to believe me. “I was waitressing,” I said, as calmly as I could manage. “You know that.”

  He was silent, and in that moment, I was sure that he could see straight into my soul, right down to its dirty, putrid core. He knows, I thought, panic rising in my chest. He knows about all of it: the drugs, the hotel rooms, that jail cell in Palm Springs where I prayed to a god I knew wasn’t listening. I could hear the rumble of a far-off engine and the hum of the cicadas and the faint snip of the gardener’s shears from two houses down and the thumping roar of my own heart. I closed my eyes and waited for him to say the words. It’s over.

  I felt his warm hand cradling my chin. I opened my eyes and met his. “I hate that you had to serve drinks to those assholes, and I hate that you had to live in that shithole apartment.” He shook his head. “Something could have happened to you living there.”

  I let myself feel a sliver of hope. He wouldn’t be talking like that if he knew the truth. He wouldn’t feel concern for me. He would feel disgust. I managed a shrug. “The apartment wasn’t as bad as it looked.”

  “Brave girl,” he murmured. He brushed the hair back from my neck and smiled. “I promise you’ll never have to struggle like that again. Okay?”

  I took in a deep, stuttering breath, like I’d been underwater for a long time. I nodded and let myself fall into him, too wrung out from adrenaline to answer. It was over. He loved me. He believed me. I really was saved.

  I take a minute to look around the cabin. It’s a small, squat room, low ceiling and tightly braced with neatly jointed two-by-fours. There are four windows, one for each wall, all of which have their blinds tugged down snugly. It’s dark in here, but there’s a candle stub sitting on top of the chest in the corner along with a pack of matches, and with shaking hands I manage to light it. The door is jammed shut but the frame is splintered, and I can see now that I must have broken it to get in. That explains the freshly blackened shoulder. How did I find the strength? I think again of my mother’s strong hands. It was her somehow. I know.

  There’s a row of high shelves stacked with canned food—I spot a jar of pickles and my heart soars—and a jerrican of water. Inside the chest, there’s a wool b
lanket that smells like wet dog and a few more candle ends and even a thick-bladed hunting knife, its edge blunted but useful nonetheless. There’s more coal for the furnace, too.

  A thought jolts through me. My bag. Shit, where is it? I cast my eyes around the place, already cursing myself for having lost it, but there it is, shoved neatly against the far wall. It’s the same bewildered relief I felt on countless mornings waking up with a thudding hangover and a deep sense of unease, only to find my wallet still tucked inside my bag and my phone resting peacefully on the nightstand. Maybe hypothermia works the same as drunk logic—everything goes out the window except for an abiding sense of responsibility toward personal belongings.

  I take a deep breath and exhale. Water. Canned food. A roof over my head. A stove. Crazy how so little could make me feel so rich.

  I hang my damp clothes on the railing outside to dry. It’s a child’s drawing of a day, yellow sun high in the bright blue sky. I look back at the house. It’s a funny place, no more than a wooden box on stilts. I can see now that it’s a hunter’s blind. I recognize it from hikes I took with my dad as a kid. No wonder it feels abandoned—hunting season doesn’t start until the fall, which means the place has probably been shut up since last winter. I’ll open the blinds when I get back inside, let some air in. Maybe I can stay here for a few days, heal up, get some strength back. Hopefully any trail I’ve left behind was washed away by the rain. Hopefully I’m safe here, at least for a little while.

  I sit on the top step and tilt my chin up to the sun. I eat a few pickles, careful not to swallow them too quickly. My stomach will be the size of a pea at this point, or a pearl. My hand reaches for the necklace before I remember again that it’s gone. I touch the sharp ridges of my collarbones. A month ago, I would have given anything to have collarbones like these. Now they just remind me of how fragile I am, how vulnerable.

  You’re nothing but a bag of bones, my mother used to say when I came home from college, even though we both knew it wasn’t true. The bagels and the keg beer caught up with me after the first semester, but I didn’t manage to outrun them until my senior year, when I lived in an apartment with two other women and subsisted on bags of salad leaves and Foreman-grilled chicken breasts lightly spritzed with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. That was the first time I learned that eating could be a competition, and that eating the least could give the winner a sort of power. Of course, by February my skin was terrible and my hair was like straw. I was in a fucking terrible mood all the time, too. But the power . . . I didn’t want to give up the power that came with being thin. So I joined a gym and taught myself to like kettlebells and cardioblasts in the same way I’d taught myself to like I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. (I could believe it, I really could.)

  I consider my body carefully now. In the sunlight, each slender hair on my arms shines with its own specific halo. The stubble on my shins that I usually keep so carefully in check looks like the iron filings in that kid’s game with the magnet and the moustache. My skin is alternately blistered, bruised, bitten, and rubbed raw, and there’s a mulchy, slightly fetid smell coming off me. My stomach—the focus of so many early-morning mirror inspections—is flat to the point of concave, and my hips have slimmed to near nonexistence.

  It’s not just five days of eating like a squirrel and almost-dying that’s done this to it. No. This body is the product of a whole lifetime of careful winnowing. I’ve been so good at it, I’ve almost disappeared.

  When I get out of this, I think. Ha. Okay, if. If I get out of this, I’m going to eat the biggest fucking bagel of my entire goddamn life, and I’m going to keep eating bagels and Mars bars and eggplant parmesan and whole fucking wheels of cheese, and I will never, ever try to take up less space ever again. I will stretch these limbs of mine out wide and I will not budge, not an inch, not ever again.

  Maggie

  I waited for the sun to go down before I set out for the Gaslamp Quarter. I had the bar marked out on the map, but when I got there, the sign was for Ruby’s, not Sapphire’s. The bouncer working the door explained that they’d changed management recently. Not a very imaginative new manager, I thought. I asked if he’d known Ally but he shook his head before parting the curtains and letting me through.

  The place was so dark that at first I couldn’t have seen my hand if I’d held it in front of my face. There were low tables scattered around the room, and a small platformed dance floor in the back. The customers were nearly all men, and the waitresses—tall, gorgeous creatures in short skirts and impossibly high heels—were all women. I took a seat at the bar in front of the skeptical-looking bartender.

  “You sure you’re in the right place?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow at me. I ordered a gin and tonic and tried to stop my hands from shaking as I pulled my wallet out of my purse.

  I waited until I had the drink in front of me and had placed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter to ask him.

  “What’s the name again?” he asked, leaning in and straining to hear above the relentless din.

  “Allison,” I shouted above the thumping music.

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell with me, but I’ve only been here six months.”

  “Is there anyone else I could ask?” I saw him hesitate, wondering if I was going to make trouble. “Please?”

  He shrugged and jerked his thumb at a redhead jabbing her finger at a screen behind the bar. “Ask Dee,” he said. “She’s been here forever.”

  I thanked him. I sipped at my gin and tonic—watered down—and waited for the right moment to catch her. It finally arrived when she came around the bar to grab a bottle of champagne from the fridge. “Excuse me,” I shouted, and she looked up, face already locked in a mask of pleasant impatience.

  “Jimmy will be with you in a sec, sweetheart,” she called, nodding toward the bartender.

  “He told me to talk to you. He thought you could help me.”

  She rolled her eyes but flashed an indulgent smile and propped her elbows up on the bar. I decided I liked her. “Okay, but make it quick—I’ve got a customer waiting.”

  “I was wondering if you knew my daughter, Allison. Allison Carpenter.”

  Her smile faded. “Oh shit,” she said, and suddenly I saw the face behind all the makeup. She looked young and scared. “You’re Allison’s mom?”

  I nodded. “Did you know her?”

  She glanced toward the door, as though she were expecting Ally to come through it. “Yeah,” she said softly. “She was my friend.”

  The bartender appeared and tapped her on the shoulder. “Table eighteen’s getting restless.”

  She picked up the champagne bottle and two empty glasses. “I can’t talk right now,” she said hurriedly. “Can you meet me after my shift?”

  “What time?”

  “Midnight. I’ll wait for you outside.”

  I nodded. “I’ll be here.”

  She was about to move away but turned back. “Be careful, it gets a little dicey around here late at night. If anyone asks you for anything, just keep walking. And tell Juan I said to look after you. He’s the guy on the door.”

  I watched as she straightened her spine, tilted her head back, and fixed her features into a smile before sashaying toward the man waiting at table eighteen. She bent neatly at the waist when she placed the bottle on the table, and I watched his hands skim the edge of her skirt as she poured.

  I looked away. There was a strange feeling about the place, an undercurrent of something stronger than the overpriced, watered-down drinks. I flagged the bartender when he passed. “How come all the customers in here are men?”

  “I guess they like the atmosphere,” he said with a sad smile, and I tipped the rest of my drink down my throat, climbed off the stool, and made my way out into the night.

  I wandered around for the next few hours, looking into the steam-fogged windows of dim sum restaurants and Mexican cafés, past the open doors of bars where fists of noise punched out into the s
treet. There were empty corners where the homeless had spread out sleeping bags, and people stepped over and around them like they were boulders in a current. I tried to make sense of what I’d seen back at the bar. Had Ally really been one of those miniskirted girls being pawed at by sad old men in suits?

  I wished she’d come to me. If she’d needed money that badly, she could have come to me—I would have given it to her. I would have given her anything.

  She must have hated me. The thought filled my head like a balloon, pressing out all other thoughts. She must have hated me to have worked in that place rather than ask me for help.

  I was back outside Ruby’s at quarter to midnight. I didn’t go in this time—I couldn’t face it. Juan smiled and asked if I was cold, offered to run inside and get me a cup of tea, bless him, even though the night was still warm. I shook my head and asked him about himself, where he’d come from, what he was doing there, but he shrugged and said that he was just passing through. It was the sort of place where you spent your time waiting for something else to come along.

  Dee came out at ten past midnight. She was in baggy jeans and sneakers then, but she still had a full face of makeup. She took me by the arm and led me to a diner tucked down an alley. The lighting inside was too bright, and as we slid into one of the red leather banquettes I could see where her mascara had bled into the fine lines under her eyes. She wasn’t as young as I’d thought.

  “You want anything?” she asked, signaling the waitress without looking at the menu. “Coffee?”

  I shook my head. “If I have coffee now, I’ll never sleep. Just a glass of water for me, please.”

  She nodded and ordered herself a cup of coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich. “I know I shouldn’t,” she said, patting her flat stomach, “but I’m always starving after a shift.”