Freefall

by Jessica Barry

  He pulls a face. “What do you want a dealer’s plate for?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I don’t want him to ask questions. I just want him to sell me the car so I can get out of here.

  He passes a hand across his face again, and this time a deep smudge appears on the tip of his nose. “Three and you got yourself a deal.”

  I fudge the paperwork, signing Amanda’s name in place of my own. The idea of her being the proud owner of a used Subaru is enough to tip me into hysteria, and I peel out of the lot gulping down laughter and struggling to see the road.

  I asked Chet to point me toward the nearest Walmart—I knew there’d be one, there always is—and he’d told me it was a couple of towns over, in Ponderosa. I drive carefully, taking it slow and waving cars past when they stack up behind me. I know that driving this way is probably more conspicuous than speeding, which is what everyone else seems to do on these long, wide, near-empty roads, but I’m too nervous to go above fifty. My head feels clouded, like it’s stuffed full of that pink insulation foam they used in houses during the eighties, and I’m worried I’ll lose concentration and crash.

  I walk through the swooshing sliding doors and feel the blast of air conditioning hit my scalp. I’m suddenly self-conscious, aware of my short hair and dirty clothes that still carry the smell of dried sweat. The irony of being the worst-dressed person in Walmart isn’t lost on me, and I allow myself a little smile as I grab a cart and head quickly toward the beauty section.

  I spent hours haunting the aisles of drugstores in San Diego, swiping nubs of eyeliner on the inside of my wrist and smudging them to see how they’d blend. I could afford to go to the fancier places, of course, where black-smocked women flocked around me, cooing over my complexion and pressing free samples into my hands, but I liked going to Rite Aid and CVS better, the brightly lit rows of cosmetics holding the familiar promise of a new self, or at least a concealment of the old.

  Now I roll past the eye shadow trios and candy-colored nail polishes and blunt plugs of lipstick without a second look. I feel a faint thrill at my lack of interest, like a teenager changing the dial when her former heartthrob comes on the radio. I realize, with a shock, that I’m not interested in being pretty. What can a new lipstick offer me now?

  I toss a toothbrush and toothpaste into the cart, along with a stick of deodorant and a pack of bandages. My toes have started bleeding again; I can feel the slippery squelch of blood in my sneakers. I head for the clothes department and throw in a three-pack of white T-shirts and a pair of jeans. A new bra, a pair of underwear. A six-pack of athletic socks. I find a pair of plain white sneakers in the shoe department and toss them into the cart, too. I want to dress anonymously, invisibly. I want to be anyone.

  I take a detour to the hunting aisle. I figure they’ll take one look at me and turn me away, taking me for a lunatic or a vagrant, but instead the guy at the counter hands me the box of ammo without batting an eye. I hurry to the checkout counter before he has time to change his mind.

  I bundle the bags into the trunk of the Subaru and drive back to the motel. The cleaner is changing the bed and gives me a look of open disgust when I walk in. I see the sheets piled up in her cart, the white cotton smeared with dirt and sweat. I smile apologetically and wait outside on the walkway. There’s a red plastic chair next to my door and I sit down heavily and rest the bags at my feet. I stare out across the parking lot. Mine is the only car in the lot apart from the receptionist’s Honda.

  I feel the box of bullets against my foot and wonder just what I plan on doing when I get to my mother’s house. Every option I come up with is histrionic and absurd, like something out of one of those telenovelas the maid used to watch while she cleaned the house. Then again, my life has been histrionic and absurd for a while now. I should be used to it.

  Ever since overhearing the argument between him and Sam, I found myself studying Ben’s every move, looking for some kind of clue. I started noticing how often he went into his study when he took a call, the way he locked his laptop in a drawer at night, the fact that he always changed the subject when I asked about work, demurring that he was too tired to discuss it, or that I’d find it boring.

  I was getting nowhere. I called the man from the coffee shop again and begged him to meet with me. He knew something about what Ben and Sam were into, and I needed to know what it was.

  He took a little convincing. “I told you,” he said, “it’s too dangerous. If they even begin to suspect that we’re talking . . .”

  “They won’t,” I said. “I’ll be careful.” There was silence on the end of the line. “You’re the one who approached me in the first place. You can’t just trigger a bomb at the center of my life and then walk away when it starts to smoke. You owe it to me to tell me what the hell is going on.”

  We met at the park. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of photographs. “Here.”

  I flicked through the photos. They were mostly of women, though there were a few photographs of babies, too, gazing up at the camera with huge clear eyes. “Who are they?”

  “They’re people who’ve died because of Somnublaze,” he said quietly.

  I looked at him. “But—why would a child be on an antidepressant?” I held up a photograph of a little boy no more than a year old. “Why would a doctor prescribe something like that to him?”

  He smiled sadly. “He didn’t take the drug. His mother did.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t understand.

  “Somnublaze was specifically marketed to women with postpartum depression,” he explained. I stared at him blankly. “One of the side effects is temporary psychosis.”

  It took a moment for it to sink in, and when it finally did, I went cold. “You mean these kids were killed by their own mothers?”

  He nodded once, and turned to gaze out across the park. It was a beautiful day, the clear air carrying a tinge of sea salt, the sky a bright cobalt blue. It felt wrong to be talking about such dark things.

  I remembered a story one of the customers at the bar told me, about how he’d been alone in his house late one night and had seen a stranger staring up at him from the street below. When he caught the stranger’s eye, the man charged his front door, headbutting it over and over until the frame splintered. The customer locked himself in his bedroom, pushed a desk against the door, and called the police. By the time they got there, the stranger had forced his way into the house, only to drop dead on the stairs. He’d staved in his skull breaking down the door. There was blood everywhere, the customer told me, eyes wide. It turned out that the stranger was a happily married man with two kids he adored and a good job. He’d just snapped—that’s what the police told my customer. Like he was a piece of peanut brittle.

  People just snap. But to kill your own child . . . “What makes you think it was Prexilane that made them do it?”

  “I saw an early study,” he said. “It ran for a year. At the end of it, a half dozen of the participants had experienced some kind of psychotic breakdown. One of them went mute for a week. One of them washed her hands until the skin cracked and bled. One of them had a psychotic break and banged her head against the bathroom wall until she knocked herself unconscious. Her husband found her on the floor, covered in her own blood.” He shook his head. “It was horrible. Just horrible.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said again, but the truth was, I was beginning to. Like it or not, I was starting to understand. I felt the wooden slats of the bench digging into my back and pressed myself against them. I wanted to feel the pain. I wanted to remind myself that this was real.

  He shifted his weight toward me. “They shortened the trial lengths. They knew that the side effects would only kick in after prolonged exposure to the drug—three months at least—so they shortened their clinicals to eight weeks.”

  “If this is true, how did it make it past the FDA? Surely there are safety nets in place to prevent this kind of thing?”

  He laughed
bitterly. “There are people everywhere who are happy to look away for the right price. Even there.” I saw his fists tighten. “And those who aren’t willing to play ball—” He shrugged. “Well, they have ways of dealing with them, too.”

  I stared at him. His face was lined, his eyes pouched and heavy. He looked like a man who’d gone one too many rounds with life, and had lost. “How do you know all this?” I asked.

  A pause. “I used to work for them.”

  “For the FDA?”

  He nodded.

  “What happened?”

  He kept his gaze down on the grass. “Let’s just say we didn’t end on the best terms.”

  When he lifted his eyes to mine, I was surprised to find they were filled with tears. “You were the guy who wouldn’t play ball?”

  He looked away. “They tried to pay me off at first, and when I wouldn’t leave it alone, they spread lies about me. They didn’t just take my job away.” He shook his head bitterly. “They took everything from me, and they didn’t give a shit. Just like they don’t give a shit about these people they’re poisoning.”

  I glanced back at the photograph of the little boy. His eyes were a chocolate brown, with irises so big they almost edged out the whites entirely. “You’re saying that the people at Prexilane know about this? That Ben knows?” Even saying his name felt like a betrayal.

  He nodded and passed a hand across his face. “I’m sorry.”

  “But—why would they do it? If they knew the side effects, why would they still put the drug out on the market?” There was one last shred of hope inside me, and it was hanging by a thread.

  He sighed. He looked exhausted, like he hadn’t slept in weeks, maybe months. “Why does anyone do anything? Postpartum diagnoses have skyrocketed in the past decade. There’s more awareness than ever, and with that awareness comes the search for a magic pill to stop it, and with that magic pill comes—”

  The last thread inside me snapped. Ben loved me, but he loved something else more. I knew this because I loved it, too, and I had done things for its sake I couldn’t bring myself to name. I had seen glimpses of the same compulsion living inside him, driving him on. “Money,” I said quietly.

  He smiled sadly. “It makes the world go round.”

  I thought of the house in Bird Rock, our bed with its vast expanse of white cotton sheets, the closet filled with beautiful dresses, his voice when he called out my name. I closed my eyes and watched it all disappear. I took a deep breath. “Tell me what to do.”

  Maggie

  I sat back in my chair and let out a sigh. For all intents and purposes, Prexilane was a success. So why would it be entertaining an offer from a slash-and-burn operation like Hyperion?

  I thought of the commotion I’d overheard at the Prexilane offices, the way the receptionist’s eyes had become guarded as soon as I started asking questions, the look on the suited man’s flushed face when he’d asked if Hyperion had arrived. I couldn’t say I knew much about corporate business, but I knew panic when I saw it. What I couldn’t figure out was what was causing it.

  I flicked back through my notes, hoping to find something that might help point me in the right direction. In the section of notes about the trip to San Diego—Christ, I thought, that already seemed like a lifetime ago, though it had only been a week—I spotted a website address scrawled in the upper left-hand corner. The address of the postpartum forum where those women had been discussing Somnublaze.

  I typed the address into the search bar and hit Return.

  Not Found

  The requested URL/fgererg was not found on this server.

  Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

  I felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. How could I have been so sloppy? I should have gotten in touch with one of the women, asked her about her experience, seen if it had something to do with the pills she was taking. I allowed myself to get distracted and I lost a piece of the puzzle. I’d let Ally down.

  I got to my feet and poured the dregs of my cold coffee down the sink. I was anxious, restless. Ants under the skin—that’s what Charles used to call it. I couldn’t sit at that table for a second longer. I needed to do something with myself—anything that would distract me from that blank computer screen and that stupid blinking cursor.

  I trucked down to the basement, balancing an overflowing laundry basket on my hip. The air held the familiar tang of must and damp. I pushed the laundry into the machine and poured in a capful of Tide and set it away. The forum thread nagged at me. Why had it been deleted? Was it a technical glitch, or had someone intentionally taken it down? And was it just a coincidence that it had disappeared right at the moment that Prexilane was about to be sold off? The more I found out, the less I seemed to understand—it was like trying to sift sand with a fishing net. But one thing stuck: Ally believed in what was right, and I was sure now—to my core—that Ben had been mixed up in something bad.

  When I got back upstairs, a little winded from the climb, I did what I’d always known I was going to do and picked up the phone and dialed Tony’s number. He was the only person I wanted to talk to about all this. I wasn’t sure why, but I was sure that he was the only one who would understand.

  He picked up on the first ring. Just the sound of his voice down the line calmed me. “Tony, it’s Maggie. Sorry for calling like this, but I need to talk to someone.”

  “I’m happy to talk to you anytime. What’s going on?”

  “It’s probably nothing . . .” I hesitated. Now that I had him on the phone, I wasn’t sure where to start. The bank account, Hyperion, the deleted website . . . all of it swarmed through my head.

  “Whatever it is, you can tell me,” he prompted gently. It wasn’t the first time I felt like he could read my mind, but it still took me by surprise, and I found myself wondering what kind of luck had brought him into my life just at the moment I needed him. It felt like the first piece of luck I’d had in a long time.

  “I found something out about David Gardner’s company today.” I explained my recent discoveries in one long breathless sentence, Tony making encouraging noises down the line to show he was listening but otherwise keeping quiet.

  “And you’re sure they were talking about Hyperion when you were at the Prexilane office?” he asked when I’d finished.

  “Sure as death and taxes.”

  “And the forum thread disappeared between then and now?” His voice sounded tight.

  “That’s right. But I can’t be sure it’s not just a coincidence,” I added hurriedly. I didn’t want him to think I was some kind of conspiracy theorist. Everyone else around me seemed to think I’d lost my mind—I didn’t want him thinking that, too.

  I didn’t have to worry, though. He let out a low whistle. “Sons of bitches,” he muttered under his breath before catching himself and apologizing. “I don’t mean to curse. What else did you find?”

  I took a breath. “Ally was hiding money. She was making regular deposits into a local account up here, and she took all of it out the week before the crash. Two thousand dollars, cash. What would she need that amount of money for?”

  “To get away.” He said it so quietly I almost didn’t catch it.

  “What did you say?” There was a muffled, strangled noise, and I swear I heard him start to sob. “What did you say?” I said again, and my own voice sounded hollow in my ears. I gripped the phone so hard I was surprised the plastic didn’t snap. “Tony, do you know something you’re not telling me?”

  There was a pause, and I heard him heave out a long, shuddering sigh down the line. “I never should have got her mixed up in this.” Ally. He was talking about Ally.

  “Tony, please,” I begged. I was shaking so hard that my teeth were chattering in my skull. “If you know something about her, you have to tell me.”

  Finally, he cleared his throat. “You’re right,” he said softly. “It’s time you knew the
truth.”

  Allison

  I spent last night in the hotel room, flicking aimlessly through the channels and thinking about what was coming. The only time I left the motel was to run across the street to the gas station to buy a couple of grayish hot dogs, a pack of Ho Hos, and a fifth of whisky. I left most of the Ho Hos but drained the whisky, eventually passing out to the sound of Ina Garten making a soufflé.

  I check the clock—the pawnshop will be open in half an hour. Time to go. I shower, shave my legs, brush my teeth, comb my hair. It feels important to be clean. I dress in the new underwear and white T-shirt and stiff blue jeans before packing my things and throwing my bag into the back seat of the Subaru. It’s still early but the day’s heat has already settled around the town like a thick blanket. The door of the car is hot to the touch. I tuck the rifle and the box of bullets under the passenger seat.

  I walk across the parking lot to the motel office and pull open the door. The same receptionist is still staring up at the television screen, though now she’s watching a property show.

  “Are you ready to see your new kitchen?” the host trills, and I find my gaze drifting up toward the screen, eager for the big reveal.

  The receptionist snaps her gum. “You checking out?”

  My eyes flicker to hers and then back up to the television, where a woman is crying over an oven. “Yeah. Should just be for one night. I paid up front for the first.”

  She smirks. “I thought it was your friend who paid.”

  I shrug. I can tell she’s trying to get a rise out of me, but I don’t have time to get into a thing with this woman. “Same difference. It’s thirty-four, right?”

  “Thirty-eight. We had to charge you extra because the sheets were so dirty. The maid said she had to bleach them twice.” She snaps her gum again to punctuate the point and I will myself not to blush. I don’t care what she thinks about me, I remind myself. I don’t care what anyone thinks.