Freefall

by Jessica Barry

  “Here’s forty,” I say, peeling off the bills and handing them to her. “Keep the change.”

  She counts out the bills and shoves them into the register. “You cut your hair?”

  My hand reaches up to my sheared head. I’m still not used to the feel of it underneath my fingers. “Yeah. Time for a change.”

  She nods approvingly. “It looks cute.”

  “Really?” My eyes prick with tears and I’m instantly mortified. Am I really that pathetic? Like a dog who’s been kicked again and again and then rolls over when someone offers him a bone? I wipe my eyes roughly and manage a smile. “Thanks. Well, see you.”

  “See you.” Her eyes have already trailed back up to the screen, where a young couple are now crying over a dining set.

  I drive the Subaru the block and a half to Main Street, past the empty storefronts and the bars with dark frosted windows and the lone diner with its faded sign advertising two-for-one breakfasts on Mondays. I park in front of the pawnshop. The owner is standing out front waiting for me, the shutter already half open.

  “Right on time,” he says as I hop out of the station wagon. “See you got yourself a new set of wheels. Chet look after you all right?”

  I remember the look on his face when he handed me the keys, like a little kid who’d just sneaked a cookie without getting caught, and smile. “Yep.”

  He looks around the front of the car. “You still got the dealer’s plate on it.”

  I nod. “He’s letting me use it until I can pick up my plates from the DMV.”

  He raises an eyebrow but doesn’t comment. “Come on then,” he says, nodding toward the shop.

  We both duck under the shutter and into the shop. Inside, it’s dark and cool. He disappears into the back and reappears with a stack of bills. “It’s in twenties,” he says with a shrug. “All I could get.”

  “That’s fine.” The wad of bills is too thick to fit in my pocket so I end up cradling it awkwardly in my hands. “Well, I should get going. Thanks for your help.”

  “You’re the one I should be thanking,” he says. He looks at me for a minute, the silence settling between us. “I hope you won’t mind me asking, but what’s a girl like you need with all this cash?”

  I shrug but don’t say anything. I don’t have time to answer questions, and the less he knows, the safer I’ll be. Him, too, probably. “I should get going,” I say, glancing pointedly at the Subaru outside.

  “Sure,” he says. “I hear you’ve got a long ride ahead of you.” He and Chet must have talked after I left the dealership. I wonder what else they had to say about me. I notice that he’s stalling and realize he has something to say—something he doesn’t want to. He reaches up and scratches the back of his neck. “Somebody was looking for you.”

  “Oh yeah?” I try to sound casual but I can hear the slight quiver in my voice. “Who?”

  He shakes his head. “Wouldn’t say. Tall fellow. Dark hair. Didn’t look like he was from around here.”

  I don’t know anyone who matches that description, but I know immediately who it is. “What did he want?” I don’t need to ask—I know that, too. He wants me.

  “Wouldn’t say that, either. Just described what you looked like and asked if I’d seen you.” He pauses and nods at my head. “Except he said you were blond.”

  My eyes search his face. “What did you tell him?”

  “Told him I hadn’t seen a pretty blond stranger round here in nearly twenty years.”

  The breath whistles out of my lungs. He’s bought me some time. I don’t know how much, but it’s something at least. “Thank you.”

  “No need to thank me. Whatever business you’ve got, it’s your own.” He looks at me steadily. “Still, I think it’s best you’re on your way now. No telling who else he’ll be asking, and some people around here’ve got big mouths.”

  I nod. “I’m leaving town now.”

  “Well. Good luck.” He picks up the newspaper, flicks the pages out, and smooths them down on the counter. “You take care of yourself.”

  I walk out into the blinding sunlight and straight into the car. I slip the money out of my jeans and shove it under the front seat. It’ll have to do for now.

  I’m sparking up the ignition when I see him. He’s leaning against a lamppost and even though I can’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses I feel them on me and know he’s been watching me. Waiting. He reaches into his pocket and steps off the curb.

  I punch the gas and drive.

  He showed me how to download the spyware onto my phone. “You see?” he said, tapping at the screen. “It’s easy.” I nodded, though I felt sick with fear. He saw this and smiled at me reassuringly. “You’ll do fine.” He dropped a chip into my palm and wrapped my fingers around it. “Download everything,” he’d said, pointing to my closed fist. “Keep it hidden. Somewhere he would never think to look.” He nodded toward my necklace. “Do you always wear that?” I looked down at the Saint Christopher’s locket my father had given me and nodded. “Then that might be a good place to hide it.”

  I hesitated. “Why aren’t you doing this yourself? Why did you come to me?”

  He smiled a sad sort of smile and shook his head. “No one would believe me,” he said quietly. “They’ve made sure of that.” He leaned forward and took my hands in his, and I noticed again the dark circles under his eyes. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in weeks, months, maybe years, and I wondered what exactly he’d gone through to get to this point. “Anyway,” he said quietly, “you can get close to him in ways I never could. He trusts you.” He reached over and took my hand. His eyes burned into mine. “Before you do this, I want to be sure that you know what you’re getting into. If they suspect you, even for a second—”

  I shook my head. “They won’t. I’ll be smart about it. Even if Sam doesn’t trust me, I know Ben does. He would never think I’d do anything to hurt him.” As soon as I said it, I knew it was true, and the thought of betraying him was a hot knife running through me. Still, I had to know the truth. I couldn’t live my life without knowing who I was getting into bed with every night.

  He must have seen that on my face—desperation mixed with determination—because he sat back down heavily on the bench and took my hand in his again. We sat there in silence for a minute, both of us thinking our separate thoughts and feeling our separate fears. Eventually he looked up at me and nodded, just once. “We can’t meet again. If they see the two of us together, it’ll be game over.”

  The thought left me feeling stranded and at sea, but I knew he was right. He’d led me to the path, but I had to go down it on my own.

  “You have to protect yourself. He’ll be watching you, Allison. If you think, even for a second, that they’re on to you, you have to disappear. Do you understand?” I nodded weakly. My mouth was dry and my tongue pressed itself against the roof of my mouth and stuck there. “You’ll need money. Do you have any?” I shook my head, humiliated by the admission, but he didn’t flinch. “Put aside a little every week, in amounts he won’t notice. Keep it somewhere safe. You’ll need the cash for a passport and a plane ticket if you need to disappear.”

  “I don’t think it will come to that,” I said, managing a smile. It was all so absurd.

  He stared at me for a long moment, and I struggled to hold his gaze. “Please. I need to be sure you know what you’re signing up for.”

  I realized he was serious. “Fine. I’ll do what you want.”

  “Good.” He kept his eyes on mine. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  I thought about what I was agreeing to. I would be betraying the man I loved, the man who had rescued me from a spiral of self-destruction and made me into someone brand new. I would be risking my future. If what he was saying was true, I might even be risking my life. But I knew that if I didn’t do it, I would never be able to find my way back to myself again. I would be lost forever.

  “I’m sure,” I said, as confidently as I could muste
r.

  “Good.” He stood up and gathered the scattered pages of his paper off the bench. “Someone will be in touch about the passport.” He held out a hand and I took it. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Allison. You look after yourself.”

  “You, too—” I faltered. I realized I didn’t know his name.

  “Anthony,” he said. “But my friends call me Tony.” He turned and walked away across the freshly mowed grass, the paper tucked neatly in the crook of his arm.

  It was the last time I saw him.

  Maggie

  The world, in that moment, seemed to slow almost to a stop. I could hear the blood rushing through my veins, and the sound of the ticking clock in the kitchen, and the rustle of the leaves in the trees outside. A swirl of dust motes sparkled in the air. The colors seemed brighter, too, like the Technicolor they used in the old movies Charles and I used to watch on Sunday afternoons. The deep red of the tiled kitchen floor. The acid green of the apple sitting on the countertop, waiting to be sliced. The bright gold of the sunlight as it streamed through the window. It had stopped raining, I realized, and the sun had come out.

  “Maggie? Are you there?”

  I blinked, slowly. Yes, I was still there. “What is it? What do you know about Ally?” My voice didn’t sound like mine. It was strangled and too high, like my throat had been stripped by something caustic.

  “I can’t tell you over the phone.” He sounded panicked. “I’m coming over.”

  I looked frantically around the kitchen, with its worn Shaker cabinets and chipped worktops and its empty, barren fridge. Suddenly the idea of him—this stranger, this man—in my house felt all wrong. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “You’re right. They might have bugged your place. We shouldn’t even be talking over the phone. Meet me at the coffee shop in twenty minutes.”

  The world seemed to tilt and I had to brace myself on the counter before my knees gave way. “Tony, you’re not talking any sense. You sound crazy.”

  “I’m not crazy!” His voice was angry, manic.

  I felt a fissure of fear jolt through me. I didn’t want this man in my house. “I’m not saying you’re crazy.” I was using my most soothing voice, the one I’d used for students who used to come to me at my desk at Bowdoin, ashen faced, and announce that they’d deleted their term paper. “Just tell me what’s going on and we’ll figure it out.”

  “But if I tell you . . .” There was a muffled sound down the line and I realized he was fighting back tears. “I’m so sorry, Maggie. I’m so sorry. I’ve been wanting to tell you for so long, but I didn’t know how. I got her mixed up in all this. It’s my fault she’s dead.”

  My heart was pounding in my chest, and my stomach was filled with cold, heavy dread. “Please, just tell me what you know.”

  He was silent for so long I thought he’d hung up, but then his voice came through the phone, quiet and reed thin. “She was investigating Prexilane. I told her what they were up to and she was gathering evidence on them, recording phone calls . . .”

  “What do you mean, she was investigating them?”

  “They killed her because she was trying to expose them. Your daughter was very brave. A hero. That’s what I wanted to tell you. That’s why I came all this way . . . I never thought you’d get mixed up in it, too.”

  “Please, I don’t understand—”

  He took a deep breath. “The necklace, Maggie. It’s all in the necklace.”

  The line went dead.

  “Tony? Are you there?”

  But there was no one there. Just the dial tone ringing in my ear, and when I tried to call him back, the phone just rang and rang.

  2,105 Miles to Go

  Allison

  I’ve been on the road for a couple of hours, the hum of the engine lulling me, the snippets of talk radio filling the car and then dropping away under a haze of static. It’s late afternoon, and the fingers of terror have slowly loosened as the road spools out in front of me, but the image of the man in the sunglasses is still imprinted on my mind.

  I’m sure of two things: I’ve never seen him before in my life, and he’s been sent to kill me.

  How long, I wonder, has he been following me? Was he up there in the mountains? Was he looking in on me as I slept in the cabin? Did he see me get into Luke’s truck back at the trail shop, or in the motel, as the TV flickered across the darkened walls?

  Deep in my bones, I know the answer. Deep in my bones, I’ve known he’s been with me the whole time, just one step behind, the scent of me always in his lungs. The thing is, spying is easy. I know that from experience.

  A part of me still didn’t believe what I’d been told in the park that day. Part of me agreed to install the spyware on Ben’s phone and listen in to his conversations in order to exonerate him. He’s innocent, I thought, as I waited for him to fall asleep. This is all just a misunderstanding, and once it’s cleared up, I can keep living this life. The belief stayed with me as I sent the spyware to his phone by text, typed in the password I’d memorized, and—with one tap of a finger—watched it download. My own phone flashed up with a notification. “619-555-3364 is now active.” He’s innocent, I thought as I’d crawled into bed beside him and pulled his warm back toward my chest. Now I can prove it.

  I was on the treadmill in the gym below our building when the first call came through. There was the tinny sound of Beyoncé coming through my headphones, and the steady thud of my footsteps, and the heave of my breath, the thrum of my heartbeat, and then there was a clicking sound and voices in my ear.

  “I just heard back from the lawyer.” It was a male voice, deeper than Ben’s, but familiar. “It looks like they’re going to push ahead with the class action.” Sam.

  “Shit.” Ben’s voice sounded strange, strangled. “How bad is it?”

  “Bad. The shareholders are already losing their shit. We need to bury this, fast.”

  My stride faltered and I had to grab the handrails to stop myself from falling. I hit the emergency stop button and the conveyor belt lurched to a halt. The woman running next to me glanced over at me and smirked.

  “If we settle, the FDA will look to pull the product. We can still fix this.” Ben’s voice shook a little, and I felt a twinge of pity. “We’ve got R&D working around the clock. It’s only—what?—three percent who are affected?”

  “Eight.”

  A sharp intake of breath. At least Ben still had the capacity to be shocked. At least there was that. “It’s a good product, Sam. It’s helping a lot of people.”

  Sam cleared his throat. “Look, I don’t like this either, but we don’t have a choice. If this goes to court, we’re fucked. I saw the briefing.”

  Ben cursed under his breath. “Anything we could point to? Drug use, family history of mental illness?” My stomach lurched. I had let this man put his hands on me, his mouth, his tongue. I had let him come inside me.

  “They’re clean as a whistle. The lawyers have sewn it up tight this time. She was a schoolteacher, for Chrissakes. Her husband’s a social worker. No history of depression before she had the baby.” There was a long pause. My vision swam and I realized I’d been holding my breath since the conversation began. “We don’t have a choice, Ben. They’ve got a gun to our heads.”

  Ben let out a long breath. “How much?”

  I would soon learn that that was always the question: How much will it cost? How much for their silence? How much to make this go away?

  Sam cleared his throat. “Three million. Three and a half.”

  “Pay him four and get him to sign an NDA so tight you could bounce quarters off it. I want him to understand that if he ever breathes a word of it, we will bury him.”

  “Got it.”

  The line clicked off and Beyoncé filled my head again. I jumped off the treadmill and sprinted to the locker room, pushing past women in various states of undress and making it to the toilet a fraction of a second too late. I was sick on the floor of th
e cubicle, the smooth jazz playing from the locker room speakers muffling the sound of my retches.

  Maggie

  Everything about the place was the same as it had been when I’d come there with him. There was the same whir and clank as they frothed the milk, the same bitter smell of roasted coffee beans mixed with the synthetic florals of an air freshener, the same guitar music playing in the background. The same waitress brought me coffee along with an oversize chocolate chip cookie on a plate. “They’re getting thrown out at the end of the day,” she’d said with a shrug when I asked her about it, so I smiled and thanked her even though the thought of the butter and sugar coating my mouth was enough to turn my stomach.

  Everything was exactly the same, but the place felt completely alien to me. The whole world felt unfamiliar and frightening, like shining a flashlight under a refrigerator and seeing the filth that had collected.

  I forced myself to sit there and sip my latte and nibble at the free cookie so as not to be rude and watch the long arm of the clock swoop around in its slow circle.

  He didn’t show up. I knew he wouldn’t, but I had to sit there anyway, just in case.

  I was wearing the necklace, and kept touching it to make sure it was still there. After the waitress had cleared the table, shooting me a sympathetic glance and asking if I’d like another cookie, which I declined, I took it off and spooled it in my palm. The cup of the locket was dented and there were spots where the cheap gold had rubbed off, exposing the nickel underneath, but otherwise it looked exactly the same as it had when Charles had given it to her all those years ago.

  I clicked open the locket with shaking fingers and stared at the photograph nestled inside. I could still remember when it had been taken. It was on a family vacation to Ogunquit, and Charles had been angry with me for getting us lost, and I’d been angry with him for getting angry at me when it was his own damn fault that he didn’t want to bring a map, and all three of us had been hot and tired and sunburned and covered in sand. I think the photo had been Ally’s way of making peace among us. “Smile!” she’d said, or more like demanded, and she’d lifted the old Canon we’d given her and snapped the picture before we had a chance to argue. Charles’s smile looks genuine—he could never stop himself from smiling at his little girl, no matter how irritated with his wife he might be—but mine was tight and forced. I was probably already worrying about where we’d get groceries for the cabin, or whether I’d taken enough cash out for dinner, or if I’d remembered to lock the back door.