Freefall

by Jessica Barry

  We made small talk until the waitress arrived with our drinks. I watched as Dee poured a long stream of white sugar into her coffee. “I like it sweet,” she said, catching my eye and winking. I smiled back. Yes, I liked her.

  “So you and Ally were friends?” I prompted as I took a sip of ice water.

  Dee’s face lit up. “Oh God, yeah. Totally. She was like a little sister to me or something.” She shook her head and her eyes clouded with sadness. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  I leaned across the table. “Dee, did you speak to her before she got on that plane? Did she say anything to you—anything about him, or where they were headed, or why?”

  Her eyes stayed on the table. “We weren’t really talking much lately.”

  My heart sank. “You weren’t? How come?”

  She shook her head again. She picked up the sugar dispenser and tipped it upside down, letting a thin stream of sugar pile up on the table and then swirling her finger through it.

  “Please, Dee.” She wouldn’t meet my eye. “This is important. Why weren’t you two talking?”

  She shrugged. “He thought I wasn’t good enough for her, I guess.” She swept the sugar off the edge of the table and into the palm of her hand, then tipped her head back and emptied it into her mouth.

  “Ben thought that?”

  She nodded. A few of the sugar crystals had stuck to her lip gloss, and I had to fight the urge to reach across the table and wipe her mouth. She was thirty-five if she was a day, but she was like a little girl playing dress-up in her mom’s too-big high heels.

  “Did you meet him?” I pressed.

  Her eyes went back down to the table. “Only once. He came to pick her up after work one night.” Her face darkened. “He didn’t say much. We invited him in for a drink but he wouldn’t come inside. He just sat outside in his fancy sports car and waited for her.” Her eyes darted to mine. “After that, she just sort of . . . disappeared. She still worked at the bar for a few weeks, but it wasn’t the same. You could tell her heart wasn’t in it. Then one day, she just comes in and quits. No notice or anything. Just got her stuff and walked out.” She shook her head. “I had to pull doubles for two weeks to cover for her.”

  “That doesn’t sound like her.” Every teacher she’d ever had, every boss at every summer temp job she’d held down, all of them had said the same thing: Ally was reliable. You could set a clock by her. She’d never skip out like that, especially if it meant making things difficult for a friend. “Did she give a reason?”

  Dee laughed, and I could see the silver of her fillings. “She didn’t have to. It was obvious.”

  “Him?”

  “He didn’t want her to work. He wanted her all to himself in that house in Bird Rock.” She shook her head. “It was like he cast a spell over her or something. As soon as I saw them together, I knew she was a goner.”

  She glanced toward the door and I felt her knee jigging under the table. She was getting antsy, and her grilled cheese remained untouched in front of her, the orange cheese leaking out of the bread and congealing on the plate. I didn’t have much more time. I wanted to keep talking to her for as long as I could. “Here,” I said, signaling the waitress. “Let me buy you something else. A piece of pie or something.”

  She shook her head. “I’m good, thanks.” I watched her fingers tap nervously on the mug. “I should be going actually,” she said, glancing up at the clock. “I’m meeting someone in a half hour.”

  “At this time of night? Isn’t it a little late?” I knew I sounded like someone’s nagging mother, but I couldn’t help it. It’s who I am, I thought. Was.

  She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “You’re cute,” she said. She started gathering up her bags. “You want some money for the check?”

  I waved her away. I had to stop myself from giving her a wad of cash from my wallet and instructing her to get a few more hot meals into her. She had the look of someone who was permanently hungry. “If you remember anything else about Ally—anything at all—you give me a call, okay?” I wrote my number down on a slip of paper and handed it to her. She nodded and tucked it in her bra but her eyes were on the street now, and I could tell I’d lost her. As she headed out into the night, I knew I wouldn’t be hearing from her again.

  Allison

  I polish off the last bite of pickle and head back into the cabin. It’s my second day here, my second night sleeping under a roof with a fire in the furnace and a wool blanket tucked around me. The cuts covering my body are starting to scab over, and the ache in my muscles is starting to lessen. I’ll have to leave soon. I can’t stay in one place for too long. But right now, it’s heaven.

  I set to unpicking the knots in the length of cord I found inside the hope chest. My fingers are clumsy and blunt, my nails ragged. All the while, the ring on my finger winks up at me. The diamond is dulled with grime but it still manages to sparkle.

  He proposed at Sunset Cliffs after a long day at the beach. We were sun kissed and sandy when he’d dropped to one knee, and when I kissed him I could taste the sea on his mouth. Everything about that moment was perfect, because it was about the two of us, no one else.

  I wanted to keep it just between us for a while, like a treasure, or a secret, but he insisted on an engagement party. He said his family would be hurt if we didn’t celebrate with them, and that his clients expected it. “I want to show you off to the whole world,” he’d said, kissing the inside of my wrist.

  He bought me a dress for the party—Prada, shell pink, silk. I was in the shower when he left for work, and when I came out, it was laid out on the bed like a new bride. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I rushed to get ready so I could try it on, but when I finally did, the zip wouldn’t close. I checked the label. It was two sizes smaller than my natural size, and a size smaller than the last dress he’d bought me, a month before. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it didn’t fit. I didn’t want to point out that he’d gotten it wrong, not when the gesture was so sweet and the dress so perfect.

  I went to the gym twice a day for two weeks. I ran and lunged and spun and squeezed and tucked and squatted, and then I sat in the sauna until I felt faint and flushed with righteousness. Every drop of sweat was a step closer to purification, to redemption. I ate steamed fish and vegetables and drank water with lemon and maple syrup and cayenne pepper. The weight dropped off until my cheekbones were two sharp razorblades slicing through the oval of my face.

  Every night, Ben told me how beautiful I looked, his little sparrow, and I knew it was worth it.

  I met with Amanda every afternoon to pick out table settings and linen and canapés and signature cocktails. We planned the guest list, chose the invitations. Cream is tasteful, Amanda said. White is cheap. I raised the idea of inviting Dee, but Ben stroked my hair and explained that the engagement party was more of a networking event than a social one. It wouldn’t be appropriate. I’d understood. More than anything in the world, I wanted to be appropriate. He had saved me from that life, and I would do anything to fit in with the new one he’d given me.

  I thought about calling my mother. Sometimes I would get as far as dialing her number, but I never pressed the Call button. She would want to know about my life, and I couldn’t think how to answer her. I imagined telling her that I was engaged to a man she’d never met, one who was so rich it meant that I would never have to work again, and that I spent my days alone in a house I didn’t own that someone else cleaned. And my old life . . . I was sure that she would know about it as soon as she heard my voice. She was my mother. She’d spent her life knowing things about me before I’d known them about myself. How could she not know about that? I put the phone away and pushed her out of my mind.

  I took a laxative. Two. The stomach cramps would wake me in the night and I would lie awake and picture the fat being sloughed from my bones.

  I convinced myself that there was power in abstention. There was satisfaction in keeping
my mouth closed and shaking my head. No, I said, over and over. No, thank you.

  On the night of the party, the dress zipped up easily. When we walked into the room, everyone stopped and stared. I scanned the room for a friendly face before I remembered there wasn’t any, and then I arranged my face into the smile I’d practiced in the mirror. Pretty. Demure. Saintly. Like I belonged. The women crowded around me and told me how wonderful I looked, how slim and chic. They asked how I’d done it but I just smiled and shrugged and said love, it must be love.

  I start opening the blinds on the cabin’s plexiglass windows. I want sunlight to flood the place. I want to nap in a patch of it like a cat. I want to luxuriate, even for a minute. I want to forget.

  My foot catches on something and I tip forward. I try to stop myself from falling but it’s too late, and I land hard on my knees, my bad hand scraping along the carpet, reopening the wound.

  “Fuck,” I mutter, and then again, with all my might, “Fuck!” The sound echoes off the walls of the hut. I take a deep breath, then another, and turn to see what’s tripped me.

  It’s so small, it’s a wonder I find it at all. Just a little indentation in the wood beneath the carpet, and next to it what feels like a thin raised lip. I scrape my fingers back and forth across it. Is it just a knot in the wood? No, it feels too smooth for that. I sit back and shrug the bag onto the ground. I bend down and touch the spot again. Definitely not a knot. A scrap of wood left over from when they carpeted, maybe? A stray nail? I can’t move it, though. It feels like it’s fixed to the floor. It feels intentional.

  I scramble over to where the floor meets the wall and try to pry the edge of the carpet up with my fingers. It won’t budge. I grab the knife from my bag and wedge it between the carpet and the floor, leveraging it like a crowbar. The staples pop one by one until I can finally get enough of a grip on the carpet to peel it back in a couple of firm tugs.

  There, in the middle of the bare floor, is a tiny metal latch securing a hidey-hole cut into the plywood.

  I open the lid. In the flickering light it’s hard to see inside, but I can just make out the edge of a thin, shallow box laid into the hole in the floor. In the box, nestled in a soft scrap of cloth like a newborn baby, lies a gun.

  A hunting rifle. The barrel is long and thin, the butt made from polished walnut. I pick it up carefully and hold it in my arms. It’s lighter than I expect, no more than five or six pounds. I rest it on my shoulder and look through the scope, framing the window in the crosshairs. A thrill runs up my spine.

  My father had owned something similar. He’d gone deer hunting a couple of times a year, though he never seemed to enjoy it—he’d always come back to the house pale and drawn afterward, handing the parceled meat from the carcass to my mother before retreating to the basement for the rest of the night. He’d even taken me and my mother along with him once, after I’d nagged him about it. I’d been too young to shoot—I was only nine, still at the age when death was both thrilling and unimaginable—but I remember the feeling of surprise when my mother lifted the gun to her shoulder and squinted through the sights.

  “She’s always been a better shot than me,” my father said when the bullet struck the deer between the eyes. I remember the pride in his voice when he’d said it, and the regret that flashed across his face when he’d watched me stare down at the dead deer and begin to cry.

  “This is my fault,” he said, shaking his head. “I never should have agreed to take her.”

  My mother had reached out and taken his hand in hers. “It’s the way of the world,” she said, her voice soothing and gentle. “She has to learn.”

  I move quietly now, as though someone might see, and lean it against the wall. Its long leather strap pools on the floor. I pick up the box of bullets and toss them in the bag. No sense in carrying an unloaded gun, not now, not out here. I glance at the barrel of the rifle peering toward the sky and something inside me loosens.

  This is a new sort of power, I think, tucking the rifle by the side of the door.

  And this one, I think I like.

  Maggie

  I left the motel late the next morning, after I’d checked out and stashed my suitcase with reception. I was leaving that night, even though I’d only just gotten there. I’d be jet-lagged something awful, but I didn’t want to be away for too long in case some kind of news came in, though I wasn’t sure what. Plus, I had the memorial to attend. My heart sank at the thought.

  It was another perfect day, blue skies and seventy-eight, and the sun glinted off the hoods of the cars in the lot. I remembered the red sports car from the day before, and wondered again if it had been the same one that I’d seen in La Jolla. Of course not, I told myself. To think that was to give in fully to the shadowy paranoia that had been dogging me ever since I’d gotten the news about Ally, and besides, I was in California: land of the red sports car. It was just a coincidence, nothing more.

  I headed to Ben’s house first. I still couldn’t think of it as Ally’s. I headed back up La Jolla Boulevard and took a left onto Sea Ridge Drive, and it struck me suddenly how close it was to the Gardners’ house. I wondered if Ally had liked being so close to her future in-laws. I pulled up outside the house and pressed the buzzer. I didn’t expect anyone to answer, but the speaker crackled almost immediately and the automatic gate groaned open.

  The house was bigger than it seemed from the outside and, to my eyes, uglier. It was a low-slung bungalow made up of different-sized sandstone boxes that blinked out at you from behind enormous tinted windows. The roof was painted a dark brown and jutted aggressively into space, like someone sticking his chin out before a fight. There were a couple of palm trees sprouted from a stretch of lawn so green and manicured it looked like it had been cut from a golf course, and as I walked up the path, a network of hidden sprinklers suddenly ticked into life. I guess water bans didn’t apply in Bird Rock.

  A middle-aged woman was waiting for me at the door, a bottle of spray bleach dangling from one hand. She was wearing a black tunic with a name badge that read “Teresa” and a look of impatience on her face. I took a deep breath and said the line I’d practiced in the mirror that morning just in case I made it through the gates. “Hello, I’m from Sutton Realtors. The Gardners asked me to come over and appraise the property.”

  Teresa scowled. “They didn’t tell me someone would be coming today. They usually tell me in advance.”

  A sweat broke out across the back of my neck. “There was a last-minute change of plans.” She remained in the doorway, immovable. “Please,” I said, in the most officious voice I could muster. “I’m on a very tight schedule today. You could call the Gardners and confirm but I don’t think they’d be very happy about being disturbed. Do you?”

  We stood at an impasse for another minute, but eventually she stepped aside and let me through. “I’m leaving in five minutes,” she called as she headed off down the hallway. I heard a door slam.

  The house was stunning, and not in a good way. Don’t get me wrong, I could tell it was beautiful, even if it wasn’t to my taste. Everything was white and pristine and expensive looking. It was a place I wouldn’t trust myself to sit down in, never mind drink a glass of red wine. It’s more that I felt physically stunned by it. Standing in the middle of this enormous glass box and looking at all the fancy things that Ally had been surrounded by drove home how little I’d known her. Had my daughter really been someone who would have liked all this stuff? Would she have felt comfortable sitting on the cream sofa, or padding around the plush carpet in her socked feet?

  I thought about our family Christmases, the three of us sitting around the living room, drinking Baileys and making our way through a box of Russell Stover chocolates, White Christmas on the television. Ally would have on her old track sweatpants and the Rudolph sweater she pulled out every year, and the end of her ponytail would dangle over the arm of the couch as she dug through the chocolate box looking for one with a raspberry filling. Had she e
ver lain down on this sofa like that? Had she ever fallen asleep on it, mouth open slightly, soles of her feet pressed together, eyelids fluttering as she dreamed?

  I couldn’t picture it, not for a second, but there were a lot of things I couldn’t picture her doing, and it seemed like every day I was proved wrong.

  I peeked into the kitchen, where Teresa was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor. Must be a strange job, cleaning a house that nobody lived in. From her reaction, it seemed I’d guessed right—the family was planning on selling the place. I could picture the Realtor’s ad, peppered with words like “luxury” and “exclusive” and “high-end living.”

  The master bedroom was more of the same, with whitewashed floors and a floor-to-ceiling window that framed a view of the ocean. A king-size bed dominated the center of the room. I looked away. I didn’t want to think about the bed. There was a desk tucked into the corner with a vanity mirror propped on the top. Ally’s desk. But where was her jewelry? Her makeup? The girl I knew would have covered the desk with perfume and hair spray and tiny compacts of shimmering eye shadow, and tube after tube of lipstick. Charles used to complain about the number of beauty products she kept lined up on the side of the bath. Every morning, we’d hear a crash as he tried to get into the shower followed by a quiet curse. I pulled open the desk drawer: empty. The inside of it had been wiped clean.

  I crossed the room to the closet and yanked it open to reveal a row of neatly pressed button-downs in whites and pinks and pale blues, and a hook garlanded with ties. I moved to the other closet. Trousers looped over hangers, suits giving off the dull gleam of expense. The shelves were stacked with polished wing tips and a single pair of battered tennis shoes, and a selection of leather belts coiled like snakes.

  Not a single piece of her clothing. Not one.