Freefall

by Jessica Barry

  Zero Miles to Go

  Allison

  I pull the car to the curb a block away from the house. Outside, a little boy wobbles up the street on his bicycle, training wheels holding him steady. His mother is close behind, sipping iced coffee out of a straw, baby strapped to her chest. I wait until they pass, and then I get out of the car and sling the rifle around my neck.

  I’m calm as I hop the first fence. This used to be the Walters’ house—I had a crush on Billy Walters when I was thirteen and used to gaze over the fence in the hope of catching glimpses of him—but now the mailbox out front is unmarked, and the blue wooden cladding has been painted a deep green. There’s a pool in the backyard now, too, and I skirt around a cluster of pool toys: diving rings, a half-inflated raft, a nest of Styrofoam noodles. I glance in the windows as I go past. It’s dark inside, the kitchen empty and still, but a pair of golden eyes peer back. A large orange cat is sitting on the windowsill, eyeing me suspiciously.

  I keep low and press myself against the perimeter of the fence. It’s bordered by thick shrubs, and the small green leaves catch on my clothes. My jeans are sticking to my thighs, and I can feel the sweat dribbling down the back of them and pooling in the shallows of my knees.

  I climb the next fence, into the Mancuzos’ yard. Mr. Mancuzo was always proud of his roses, and they’re as beautiful as ever, huge pink blooms yawning up at the sky. Laundry waves gently on the line: a couple of undershirts, a bedsheet, a single pillowcase. Mrs. Mancuzo died a few years before my dad. Cancer, too. From somewhere deep inside the house, I hear the forced-chipper voices of a daytime talk show. I press my back against the wall and hurry on.

  Next, the McCormicks’, and then the Stones’, and then the Woodburys’, who’ve left the lawn mower out in the yard to rust.

  And then, finally, our house.

  I peer over the fence. The first thing I see is the swing set. It’s a little rustier than before, but still standing. I remember my father pushing me on that swing, higher and higher until, for the briefest moment, the chain went slack and I would feel the stomach-flip of weightlessness. I remember my mother cautioning him to take it easy—She’ll fall off! she’d yell—but he wouldn’t listen. Higher and higher and higher until I could lean back and see only the sky above my shoes.

  Now, setting eyes on it for the first time in over two years, I’m struck by how familiar it all is. The grass is a little overgrown, and the usually neat rows of begonias are looking a little worse for wear, but still—nothing’s really changed. Everywhere I look, I can see shadow versions of myself, and memories intersecting and overlapping until they dissolve in a sort of enveloping haze.

  I take a deep breath. There is still one person alive in this world who matters to me, and she is just beyond those glass doors.

  I’ve got to find her.

  Maggie

  I’m lying on the couch, but I can’t be sure how I got there. Time comes in stuttered bursts. My vision blurs. I reach up and touch my forehead. My fingers come away wet, my own blood mixed with Shannon’s.

  Shannon. Oh, God.

  My eyes focus for a second and I see Ben sitting in a chair opposite, watching. “Don’t try to move,” he says quietly. “It will hurt too much.” His voice is almost kind.

  I rest my head back on the arm of the sofa and stare up at the patterned whorls on the ceiling. Charles plastered it himself when we first moved in. I close my eyes and let the weight press down on me. I am so tired now, down to my very bones. Everything in this world is lost to me now. All I want to do is sleep.

  “How did you know?” My voice sounds strange to my ears, like it’s coming from far away. “About the locket, I mean. How did you find out?”

  “Your phone,” he says quietly, and I curse myself for not being more careful. Ben’s voice breaks through the silence. “I’ve liked listening to you.” My eyes flicker open. He’s looking at me with something that’s almost like affection. “You remind me of her.” I close my eyes against him. I hear him get to his feet. “Who else knows what’s on the microSD card?”

  I can’t bring myself to answer. The effort of opening my mouth is too much. He repeats the question. I hear him moving toward me. He places a hand on my forehead. It reminds me of when I was a child and my mother would lay a cold compress across my eyes when I had a fever. “Please.” His voice is gentle. Soothing. I feel myself lulled by it. “I don’t want to make this any worse than it has to be. Just tell me everything you know, and this will all be over.” He’s pleading now, desperate. I open my eyes just enough to see his silhouette, backlit by the afternoon sun streaming in through the window.

  I shake my head, just a little. Ally died trying to uncover his secrets. I’m not about to let her down. Not now. Not again.

  I feel a shadow fall over me and I know he’s above me now. It’s only a matter of time before he pulls the trigger and ends this.

  I’m ready.

  Allison

  The house is silent as I approach it, unwilling to give up its secrets. I try the back door. Locked. I lift the potted plant to the left of the door and pick up the small bronze key tucked underneath. Some things never change. I fit the key in the lock and turn it, wincing at the sound, and slowly slide open the door.

  I step inside.

  The kitchen is dark except for a shaft of light coming through the window. I inhale. It smells like bleach and coffee and olive-and-thyme Yankee Candle just like always, but there is something else there now. Something feculent and metallic. That’s when I see it. Her. The body sprawled on the floor, the face peaceful except for the dot of blood at the corner of her mouth and the hole in her chest. The floor is spread sticky with black blood. The smell of it overpowers me, its sickly sweetness filling my nostrils, seeping into my lungs, my skin. Bile catches in the back of my throat and I have to force myself not to retch.

  I’m too late.

  Wait.

  I crouch down next to the body. I don’t recognize her face, but I can tell that she’s young. She’s wearing a police uniform. I sag with relief. It’s not her. There’s still a chance.

  There’s a noise coming from the living room. A faint scraping sound. I freeze. The sound of the blood pounding in my ears drowns out everything else, and I have to force myself to quiet my thundering heart. I listen again. There’s nothing now, just the steady ticking of the clock, but it feels as though the walls are throbbing. Someone is in there.

  I raise the rifle to my shoulder and take a step forward. I’m at the edge of the doorway, the late-afternoon light throwing shadows into the hall. I edge my way around the frame, breath caught tight in my throat. Dad’s old armchair comes into view, and the fireplace with its mantel lined with knickknacks, and the threadbare rug, and the photograph of me. It was taken when I was a senior in high school, at a professional studio off Route 32. The photographer was an old hippie, complete with worry beads and a long graying ponytail, and he’d encouraged me to unbutton a few more buttons on my blouse and hike up my skirt a little. “Such a gorgeous girl,” he’d said, almost to himself, as the camera clicked away. I’d just smiled and smiled. No one had called me pretty much yet in my life, other than my parents, and hearing the words had held a sort of power over me. When I got the negatives, I felt a little sick. There I was, pouting for some old man, my shoulder cocked toward the camera, hand balanced on thrust hip. I ended up tossing half of them in the garbage before I showed my parents. Dad had picked out the one that was now framed on the wall. It was a close-up of my face, and I was smiling with all my teeth, like the kid I’d really been.

  I lean forward and crane my neck around the corner. I can see her now, lying back on the sofa, her eyes closed. My mother. It’s such a normal sight, my mother asleep on the couch, hands tucked into her armpits like always, knees bent, feet tucked together. But something isn’t right. Her skin is yellowish and waxy, and her eyes seem to have sunk into the bruised skin of the sockets. The breath catches in my throat. There’s a mark on
her forehead, deep. There’s blood.

  I’m too late. I’ve lost her. He has taken everything from me now, every single scrap of self that I’d managed to build and rebuild and scrape together and hide away. All of it is gone. I am no longer loved by anyone in this world. I have nothing left to lose.

  Rage surges through me like an electric current.

  He did this.

  As soon as I find him, I am going to fucking kill him.

  Maggie

  There’s a voice. It’s small and faint and faraway, but it’s there. I can hear it. I reach for it like a plant reaches for the sun, up up up up up into the light.

  Allison

  I’ve lost it now, all pretense of stealth. A noise swells up in my rib cage, somewhere between a scream and a howl. I charge into the living room, gun fixed to my shoulder, finger pressed tightly against the trigger. My eyes search the room for signs of movement, but there’s no one else here, only my mother lying on the sofa, just like my father lay on that same sofa two years ago. I push the thought out of my skull. “Where are you?” I scream, the rifle rattling against my collarbone. “I want to fucking see your face, you fucking coward!”

  There’s a noise, a low, brittle rasp, and I freeze. It sounds like a bird beating its wings against the walls of its cage. It’s coming from my mother.

  I drop to my knees in front of her, and the rifle drops with me. “Mom?” Her eyelids flutter. “Mom, can you hear me? It’s Ally. I’m here, Mom. I’m home.”

  Her lips part but no words emerge, just a moan from somewhere deep inside her. Relief surges through me, followed by an almost-animal urge to protect her. She’s still here with me. I won’t lose her now.

  “Don’t worry. Just relax. I’m going to get help.” I touch the wound on her forehead. The blood around it has started to coagulate, and a dark bruise has begun to form. Nasty, I think, but not fatal. Relief flows through me again, warm as bathwater. “It’s going to be okay,” I whisper.

  “You made it.” I spin around to see Ben emerge from the corner, a gun pointed at my head. “I knew you would.” I glance down at the rifle lying at my feet. He kicks it away and the rifle skitters under the sofa. My mother moans softly. He’s looming over us both. There’s blood spattered on the starched white collar of his shirt.

  “Leave her alone,” I say, climbing unsteadily to my feet. He keeps the gun trained on me and I hold up my hands. “I don’t care if you kill me, but promise me you’ll leave her alone. This is between you and me.”

  He shakes his head sadly. “She knows too much now.” He takes a step forward. “This is all your fault, you know. It didn’t have to be this way. We were happy together, weren’t we?”

  His eyes are plaintive. I feel a dull pain in my breastbone, like an old bruise being prodded. “Yes,” I said softly. “We were happy.” The ghost of a smile appears on his lips, and he reaches out and touches a finger to my cheek. A chill runs through me. “But it was a lie,” I say, taking a step back. “You aren’t the man I thought you were. You’re a monster.”

  His head snaps back as if he’s been struck. “And what about you? Are you the person you told me you were?” He lets out a mean laugh. “You were just some coked-up whore when I met you.”

  My eyes dart to my mother lying on the sofa. “That’s not true.”

  He laughs again and takes a step closer. “What’s wrong? Are you afraid your mother will find out what you were really up to at that bar and won’t love you anymore?” He reads the shock on my face and smiles. “I knew all along. Do you really think I’d propose to a woman without running a background check on her?” He shakes his head. “That’s what hurt the most, you know. I pulled you out of the gutter. I lied to my family about you, pretended that you were this sweet, naive little girl from Maine, brought you into my world, and gave you everything you wanted—everything.” His eyes are wild now. “I gave you everything,” he whispers, “and you betrayed me. So now, I’m going to take everything away from you.”

  My knees start to give way and I have to steady myself on the back of my dad’s armchair. “You won’t get away with it. They’ll find out what you’ve done, that you’re still alive. You’ll go to jail.”

  He shakes his head. “You ended up doing me a favor. When I first heard about the crash, I was angry. Sam was like a brother to me. But when the first reports came out listing me as the pilot, I realized that it might be better to stay dead. Easier for everyone.” There’s a weight in his voice, and for a minute I can see him again, the man I fell in love with, the one who talked about saving the world, who wanted more than anything to make people happy. With a blink, he’s gone. “Once this is all taken care of, I’m going to disappear.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t understand. If you’re going to disappear anyway, what does it matter if Prexilane is exposed?”

  He smiles a little half smile. “My parents are the only two people who knew I wasn’t on that plane. My father agreed to keep up the pretense as long as I bought him enough time to get the equity out of the company before shit hit the fan.”

  The pieces fall into place, one by one. “Your parents know you’re alive?” I think of the grief in my mother’s eyes in the photograph from the memorial, and the pain she must have suffered thinking I had been killed in some horrific twisting wreck of metal and blood. His parents had been spared that pain. They had been spared everything.

  “My father has been behind the scenes for a while now, ever since the shareholders got wind of the settlements.” He looks in that moment like he must have looked as a child, small and vulnerable and desperate for approval. “I told him that I would fix it. I told all of them I would fix it, but they didn’t believe me, and then you took away my chance. I was going to make things right, Allison. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I would have made things right.” He cups my chin in the palm of his hand and I feel his fingers trembling against my skin. “Why didn’t you let me make things right? I loved you.”

  I twist my head away from his grasp. “You never loved me. You just wanted to dress me up like a doll and fuck me.”

  He shakes his head and smiles. “You’re right. I should have just paid for it like everybody else.” He lifts the gun and I watch him unlatch the safety. My vision tunnels. In a second, the bullet will be released from its chamber and it will tear through my skull and kill me. And once he’s killed me, he’ll kill my mother, too. I can’t let that happen. I have to stop him.

  My entire body tenses, my muscles like coiled spring. The blood thunders. This is it. This is my chance. I close my eyes and launch my body forward into space.

  My forehead connects with the bridge of his nose with a crack. Shock makes him drop the gun but soon he’s down on the ground, one hand searching desperately for the gun while the other holds his shattered nose. Blood pours onto the wood floor. I’m dazed, too, my head throbbing from the impact, stars spinning behind my eyes, but I can still see enough to stamp on his fingers as they wrap themselves around the butt of the gun. He lets out a howl and then swipes out at me desperately, his fist connecting with the edge of my kneecap and sending me crashing to the floor beside him. We’re grappling now, arms and legs wrapped together, breath heavy, mouths searching for flesh to bite. The floor is slick with his blood and our sweat. It is all so familiar, so close to the way we used to fuck, violence almost indistinguishable from a certain type of love. He sinks his teeth into my shoulder and I scream.

  He’s standing on top of me now, with the butt of the gun tight in his fist, and he swings it down onto the side of my skull and the pain is shocking, literally shocking, a sort of hot white heat that sears through me. I open my eyes long enough to see him lift the gun and point the barrel and the tendons in his hand tighten as his fingers squeeze the trigger and there is the crack of a gunshot and he is falling on top of me and his weight is enough to snuff out my remaining breath.

  Maggie

  I’ll never stop hearing the sound the gun made when it hit her, nor the
sight of her falling to the ground. Lifeless.

  He was standing over her, his back turned toward me. He’d forgotten I was there, I could tell, but I knew he’d remember soon enough. I had to act fast. I pulled myself up and felt around under the sofa until I found it. The rifle.

  When I hefted it to my shoulder it felt just like cradling a baby. Natural. As if I’d been doing it all my life.

  The safety was already off and my finger found the trigger just as he raised the gun again and pointed it at Ally. I saw her eyes open, I saw the terror in them as she stared down the barrel of that gun, and I squeezed the trigger.

  A rifle like that isn’t meant to be used in the home. It’s meant for long-range kills. The recoil threw me back against the sofa and the smell of sulfur filled my nostrils. I looked again and saw him standing there, swaying. There was a hole in the center of his back already blackening with blood.

  He fell forward onto Ally and I heard the breath whistle out of her lungs.

  I tried to pull him off her but I couldn’t. He was too heavy, or I was too weak. Time passed. I don’t know how much. Maybe a few minutes. Maybe an hour. And then a door opened and a strong pair of hands were on my shoulders pulling me away and the only sound I could hear were the ragged sobs that I realized, after a while, were coming from me.

  Allison

  A weight is lifted off me.

  Breathe.

  “Don’t move her too much,” I hear a voice say. “Careful with her neck.”

  I open my eyes and look up at a familiar face peering down at me. “Don’t worry,” Jim says, “just try to stay still. The ambulance is on its way. You’re going to be all right, though. You’ve got a nasty bump on your head, but you’ll be just fine.”