Freefall

by Jessica Barry

  I walk him back to his truck and watch as he climbs in. “You going to be okay?” he asks, the roof light like the moon’s glow above him.

  “I’ll be fine,” I say, not believing it but not disbelieving it now, either. I’ve learned enough to know not to question these things. “Thank you. I can’t tell you how much—”

  “Don’t mention it.” He sticks an arm out the open window and places a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know what happened to you out there, and I don’t know where you’re going or what sort of mess you might find yourself in, but you strike me as the surviving type, so I’m not going to worry about you.”

  There’s a charge from his fingertips as they touch my skin, and I imagine inviting him upstairs to my room. It would be so easy to let it happen. The heat of another person. The taste of his mouth on mine. The feeling of safety, however fleeting or imagined. Instead, I smile and tap the hood of his truck. I can’t let him get dragged under with me. I have to see this through on my own.

  He starts up the engine. “Well, goodbye, Allison. It’s been a pleasure.” He tips an imaginary hat and throws the truck into reverse. The wheels kick up a cloud of dust and I watch until his taillights disappear.

  Maggie

  I tossed my keys onto the counter and heaved myself into a chair. I was jittery from the extra caffeine and my nerves were frayed. I replayed the conversation with Tony in my head: the look on his face when he told me to be careful, and the way his mouth tightened into a thin line when I asked what he’d meant by it. He just shook his head and repeated his cautions, and then a few minutes later he made his excuses and left. I didn’t know what to make of it, or of him, and our meeting had left me with a strange taste in my mouth.

  I looked around the kitchen. The countertops were grimed with coffee stains and toast crumbs, the tile floor was scuffed and dull, and the mail was stacked in a precarious pile on the desk. The whole place looked like it was behind a filmy pane of glass. I’d always prided myself on keeping a clean home, but looking around I could see that I’d let the place go. I was embarrassed to be living like this. Embarrassed that I’d let people into my home in this state.

  I pulled myself to my feet and rummaged around in the cabinet under the sink for cleaning products. Windex in hand, I set to work cleaning off the stove top and wiping down the windowpanes. Balled-up, grease-smudged paper towels collected in my wake, and slowly but surely the kitchen started to look like itself again. The caffeine hummed through my veins as I tackled the desk with a bottle of Pledge. A layer of dust came up with the first swipe, and I scolded myself again for letting things get so bad.

  I straightened up the pile of mail and moved to shove it into the cabinet above the desk, promising myself I’d look through it next. A letter slipped out from the bottom of the stack and fluttered to the floor. I picked it up, my back groaning in complaint. It was the letter from the bank saying it was closing down Ally’s account.

  I read it over and felt myself getting angry all over again about the bank running down her account like that. I knew I should just let it go, be glad that a piece of paperwork had taken care of itself, but the injustice of it still rankled. I finally decided to go down there myself and give them a piece of my mind.

  I shoved the cleaning products back under the sink, pulled on a fresh T-shirt, and headed out into the muggy late-afternoon air.

  The bank was getting ready to close by the time I got there, with just one window still open, the rest of them shuttered. Wendy waved to me from the window and came out to give me a hug.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the memorial,” she said, pushing her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. She nodded toward the closed door of an office in the back. “Peter wouldn’t give me the time off, the jackass.” This was said in a theatrical kind of stage whisper, though her voice still echoed through the place. “Linda was in here earlier and said it was a beautiful day.”

  “It was.” Wendy had gone to high school with us, and the six of us—me and Charles, Linda and Jim, Wendy and her husband, Mike—used to get together to play cards or go out to supper together. That changed when Charles died—Linda and Wendy encouraged me to still join their card nights, but it wasn’t much fun being the fifth wheel, so I stopped coming and eventually they stopped asking. Still, I had a fondness for Wendy. Everything about her was just a little bit bigger than you expected—her voice, her laugh, her jewelry. She was oversize in nearly every way.

  “Now,” she said, smiling her too-big smile, “what can I do for you today?”

  I pulled the letter out of my bag and handed it to her. I watched as she scanned it, her smile turning to a frown. “I’m sorry,” she said, handing it back to me. “Somebody should have given you a call rather than sending a letter like that.” She shook her head. “It’s these damn computers—everything’s automated these days.”

  “It’s not the letter,” I said, brushing away her apology. “That account’s been dormant for years, which means the only way it would have gone to zero is if the bank was charging for use of the account.” I felt myself getting hot and flushed as I spoke, the old anger coming so quickly to the surface. “What I want to know is why a bank like Saint Mary’s—a local bank that my family has been using for God knows how long—is charging their customers like they’re some big corporation. It’s not right, Wendy.”

  She shook her head sympathetically, and when I’d finished she led me over to one of the too-firm armchairs that lined the side of the office. “I’m sorry you’ve gone through all this,” she said as she handed me a paper cup of water. “I think there has to have been some kind of mistake. The thing is, we don’t charge our customers banking fees.”

  I lifted my eyes to hers. “You don’t?”

  She shook her head. “The board suggested it a couple of years ago, but Peter wouldn’t stand for it. He thinks it’ll be bad for business, and for once he’s right.” She looked at the letter again. “Do you mind if I have a quick look into this?”

  She scurried back behind the teller window and I heard her clacking loudly at a keyboard followed by a series of sighs and tsks and gasps. Finally, she emerged with a sheaf of printouts in hand.

  “I’m not technically supposed to show you these as you’re not the account holder, but given the situation . . .” She handed them to me and busied herself with straightening out a stack of leaflets while I scanned them. They were Ally’s bank statements from the past year. The account, unlike what I’d assumed, was far from dormant. In fact, over the past few months, she’d been making steady deposits—each a few hundred dollars—followed by one withdrawal that wiped out the whole balance. Every last penny.

  I squinted at the date listed next to the withdrawal: it had been made just a week before the plane had gone down.

  Allison

  I look at my key. Room 113. I swing the bag over my shoulder, tuck the rifle under my arm, and trudge up the steps to the first-floor mezzanine. Mine is the last one on the row.

  I turn the key in the lock and push open the door. The smell of cigarette smoke and mildew and stale sweat hits me before I set foot inside. I flick a switch and a fluorescent light flickers uncertainly overhead. The carpet is red-and-blue plaid and worn bare in places, a queen-size bed marooned in its center, a pair of flat pillows lying limp on the floral-sprigged comforter. A cheap pine wardrobe squats in the corner next to an unplugged minifridge, and a fan spins lazily overhead.

  I drop my bag and the rifle and kick the door shut. Already my own stink has begun to overpower the other stinks in the room, and I wonder if I can find the energy to take a shower. Instead, I drink gulps of bathroom tap water from a cloudy toothbrush glass and try not to look at my reflection in the mirror. I’m not ready to see myself, not yet. I peel off my clothes and leave them in a pile on the bathroom floor before turning out the light and climbing into bed.

  It’s still early, only just twilight, and I can hear the hum of cars as they drive past and the occasional
blast of a stereo. I get up and check the lock on the door and slide the chain through the bolt, then press my ear to the door. I listen for the muted sound of the television in reception but can’t catch it.

  I stare at the phone cradled on the bedside table. Cream-colored, plastic, with a note taped to the base warning that long-distance calls will be charged. My fingers itch to pick it up and dial her number, but I can’t risk it. They might have bugged her phone, and no one can know that I’m coming until I get to my mother’s door. Not even her.

  The mattress creaks beneath my weight and a spring digs into my shoulder blade. The heat has gone out of the day and I can feel the air moving beneath the fan’s blades through the thin sheets. It’s strange, being in a bed. My back has grown used to the hard ground, and the yield of the mattress feels like I’m lying on top of an enormous marshmallow. The silence is strange, too. No crickets chirping, no mournful hoot of an owl. Just the occasional murmur of a passing car and the steady, low whir of the fan.

  I reach for the remote on the bedside table and press the red power button. The TV sputters to life. There’s no cable and the reception is hazy and everyone’s face is a strange, lurid orange, but the noise that fills the room is instantly soothing. I flick through the channels. An old episode of Friends. Dr. Phil. Entertainment Tonight. All this has been here while I’ve been out there. Same as always.

  I land on a twenty-four-hour news channel. A blond woman in a bright red dress tells me that the stock market has fallen six points today and that there are worrying signs for the economy ahead. A gray-haired man in a gray suit shakes his head grimly at her before turning toward the camera. “Tonight, police are investigating a woman accused of placing her partner in critical condition following what some are calling a violent rampage. Witnesses describe seeing Melanie Traynor screaming and holding a knife while her young children looked on—”

  I click off the TV. I’ve seen enough.

  It took three days after Sam came to the house for me to dig the scrap of paper out of the ski boot in the back of my closet and dial the number. He hadn’t sounded surprised to hear from me. “You ready to hear what I have to say?” That was it. No questions about why I had changed my mind. It was like he’d known I would change it all along and wasn’t interested in hearing the details. We arranged to meet the next day.

  He barely glanced up when I met him at the bench in Murray Ridge, just lowered his newspaper an inch and nodded for me to sit down. It was a Monday afternoon, and the park was deserted except for a pair of young mothers pushing pigtailed toddlers on the playground swings and a college kid in a pair of cargo shorts walking a pack of unruly dogs. In the distance, a lawn mower hummed. When the breeze shifted, I could smell the lemon-crisp scent of freshly cut grass.

  I sat down. “Ben’s business partner, Sam—he came over to the house and was asking questions about you.” The man lowered his paper. I saw the shock register on his face, along with something else. Fear.

  He cursed under his breath. “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t say your name or anything”—not that I knew it, I realized—“but he asked if I’d been approached by anyone about Ben’s business.”

  “What did you say?” His eyes bored into mine.

  “I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  “Do you think he believed you?”

  I thought about Sam’s inscrutable face as he questioned me, the anger in his voice when he realized I wasn’t going to tell him what he wanted to hear. I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  He stood up abruptly, sending the newspaper that had been tucked neatly beside him flying. “Forget it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s too risky. Just forget the whole thing. Pretend you never met me. That guy . . .” He ran a hand across his mouth. “You don’t know what he’s capable of.” His face drained of color, and he suddenly looked ten years older, and scared shitless.

  Sam’s hands suddenly loomed into my vision, with their neatly manicured fingernails and flat, meaty palms. He held them close to his body, fists tensed, like a boxer waiting for the chance to throw a clean punch. Fear rushed up my throat, bitter and acidic.

  Sam was Ben’s best friend. His second in command.

  And now I knew for sure that he was dangerous.

  I close my eyes and will myself to sleep, but I can’t stop seeing the photograph from the paper. She looked so tired, like a woman who’d been beaten up by life. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her like that. Growing up, she’d been the strong, sure hands that would lift me off the swing set, the arms that had held me when I cried. My father had been filled with magic, his eye always lighting on something new, his desire to know the world addictive and intoxicating, but my mother had been the earth.

  And then she took him from me.

  I can still feel the nub of the carpet under my bare feet, and the smell of sickness in the air—antiseptic mixed with sour breath and bedsheets that turned fetid, no matter how often they were changed. I’m standing in the doorway. My father is lying on the sofa, his eyes lightly closed, his face drawn and jaundiced. At first, I think she’s holding his hand, but then I see that she has one hand on the morphine pump and the other on his chest and that her face is wet with tears and then her eyes meet mine and I know, I know that he is dead.

  It wasn’t that she had done it. I knew, deep down, that it was what he wanted, and that he would have asked her to do it. It was that she had done it without me. And, worse, that he had, too. He had taken himself away from me, and in that moment I had hated them both for their selfishness, for thinking that I was too weak to face it, for cutting me out. That’s how I felt: as though I’d been surgically extracted from them, like a vestigial organ that had proved itself useless. Of course, now I can see that I was the selfish one. What my mother did was an act of love, pure and simple, and I rewarded her by taking my love away.

  I push away the shame. No. I’ve punished myself enough for one lifetime. I think of the photograph in the newspaper, the locket around her neck, the face looming at the edge of the frame. I have to go back, even if I’m terrified. Even if I know I probably won’t make it out. Even if she’s found out everything I did, and hates me for it, just like I hated her. None of it matters now. I have to save her.

  I get up and pad across the room to my bag. I unzip it and plunge my hand in, feeling around the lining for the heavy edge of card. I nudge it toward the slit in the lining and pull it out.

  I flick the passport open and look at the photograph. I stare back at myself, blond and tanned. I’m smiling at the camera but my eyes look frightened. The name underneath is not my own. It’s the name I chose to fit the person I was going to become, exotic and mysterious, a mermaid washed ashore. It was going to get me to Thailand. At least that’s what the guy I paid in cash had promised.

  I pull out the ticket that’s tucked between its pages. One way to Phuket. I try to imagine the sun on my skin, the white sand spread out in front of me, the scent of coconut milk and jasmine in the air. The turquoise of the ocean. I look at the ticket again. The flight is meant to leave from LAX in a week. I thought it would be over by then. I thought I’d be free and clear.

  I slip the ticket back into the passport and slide it back into the lining of my bag. Maybe it’s not too late, but first, there’s work to be done.

  The Man was waiting for him outside the shop. His boots were covered in dust from the trail and he was smoking the end of his last cigarette.

  —Can I help you?

  —A pack of Marlboro Reds.

  —Give me a second to open up.

  Luke unlocked the door and flicked the light switch. It was early but the sun was already hot. He’d have to stock the fridges with water.

  He walked behind the counter and picked a pack of Marlboros off the shelf.

  —You need matches?

  —I’m good.

  —That’ll be $5.65.

  The Man h
anded him a ten.

  —Cigarettes are cheap out here.

  —I guess that depends on where you’re coming from.

  —Not from here.

  —Yeah, I figured.

  Luke handed the Man his change and waited for him to leave. Something about the Man unsettled him. He looked too comfortable in himself. Like his bones were too loose in his skin.

  The Man slid the cigarettes from their cellophane and tapped the pack in his palm.

  —Where did you take her?

  —Where did I take who?

  —You know who.

  They stared at each other across the counter. Luke felt a trickle of sweat slide down his spine.

  —I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  The Man placed his hands on the counter and leaned forward. Luke could see the black curve of his eyelashes now, the stubble marking his upper lip, the dip of his cleft chin.

  —You’re going to tell me where you brought that girl one way or the other. I recommend you choose the easy way. The Man smiled.

  Luke could smell the tobacco on his breath.

  —Though I do admit I enjoy the hard way, if that’s the way things go.

  Luke felt his knees buckle.

  Maggie

  I sat with the bank statements spread out in front of me on the table. I felt a strange kind of comfort in knowing that she’d kept something back for herself, some shred of independence, though it was mixed with a sense of unease. Why had she decided to use this account after so many years? Was it because she was trying to hide something, or protect herself from something—or someone? Nearly two thousand dollars withdrawn in a single day, all in cash. What had she needed it for?