Freefall
Page 32
“Mom.” I don’t recognize my own voice.
“Ally,” my mother says, “I’m right here, honey.” I feel her hands on my face, cool and dry. Her fingers find the scar that laces around my skull. “Oh, Ally,” she whispers, “what happened to you?”
“It’s okay, Mom,” I murmur. The pain is a mist and I have to fight my way through it to her. “It’s okay. I’m home.”
She leans down and kisses my forehead. “I know you are,” she says. “I know.”
After
Allison
“I don’t think Sox fans can take much more bad news, Chuck.
“In business news, the pharmaceutical company Prexilane has seen its share value plummet since the Federal Drug Administration announced it was opening an investigation into the safety of its top-selling antidepressant, Somnublaze. Evidence has recently come to light that top executives issued bribes to FDA officials and falsified trial data in order to cover up side effects of the drug, which are reported to include temporary psychosis.
“Prexilane’s former chief executive, Ben Gardner, was declared dead following a plane crash in the Colorado mountains, but it’s been revealed that he faked his own death in order to extricate himself from the scandal. He was later killed in an altercation between himself and his former fiancée, Maine native Allison Carpenter, also falsely presumed dead in the crash.
“His father, David Gardner, is currently awaiting trial. We’ll have more as this story unfolds.”
The newscaster shakes his expertly coiffed head. “Sounds like we’ll be hearing plenty more about this one, Susan.”
I flick the television off with the remote. I don’t want to hear any more about Ben. I’ll be hearing his name enough when the Prexilane case goes to trial.
It’s been two weeks since the incident, as I’m calling it now, even though it was more like the giant clusterfuck. I spent the first week in the hospital with my head wrapped in bandages, feeling like my brain had been stuffed full of cotton. Ben fractured my cheekbone when he hit me, and there’s a nasty scrape on the top of my skull from where the bullet grazed it. He missed by a few millimeters, the doctor told me, shaking his head in disbelief. “You’re a lucky woman,” he said, and I nodded in agreement. Yes. I was lucky.
Memories come back to me in hazy flashes. The twisted metal of the wreckage. Sam’s skull stripped of flesh. The mountains looming over me. The endless sky. The sour breath of the man in the hotel room as his fingers closed around my throat. The crunch of bone against the butt of the rifle. Ben’s cold, flat eyes as he raised the gun at me. The sour rasp of gunpowder in my lungs. The tacky pull of blood on my fingers. The terror. The terror. The terror. And then I’ll feel a cool hand on my forehead and look up to see my mother’s face above me, her eyes clouded with worry. She hasn’t left my side.
There’s still an angry scar on the back of my skull from when I fell out there in the woods, like a row of bloodied teeth sewn into the skin, and there’s a strip of skin across the top of my thigh that’s shiny and puckered where the gash has healed badly. I like to run my fingers across them both and feel their hard, jagged ridges. Proof.
The officer he shot—Shannon, I later learned—survived. The doctors said it was a miracle—someone who’d lost that much blood should have been a goner. My mom wasn’t surprised, though. “She’s a fighter,” she said. “Like you.”
I’m in Owl’s Creek now, back in my old bedroom. Everything feels smaller somehow, like living in a dollhouse, but I’m happy here, at least for now. There’s a peace that comes from padding down the stairs every morning to the sound of the radio and the smell of freshly brewed coffee, and my mother’s voice as she sings to herself.
It feels like home. That’s the thing, I guess. No matter how far you go, it’s always there, etched deep in your bones. Home.
Maggie
I can hear her stirring upstairs, padding across the hall on her way to the bathroom. I stop and listen, straining to hear her footsteps. It’s been so long since there have been the sounds of other people in this house, I didn’t think I’d ever hear them again.
I still have nightmares, and some nights the familiar loop of film starts up behind my eyes. Terror. Pain. Blood. Fire. Bone. Ally. I can still see her lying there in front of me, her cheek swollen and bruised, the top of her head bleeding. Her face so different from the one I’d known.
She is different now. She’s not the girl she was when she was growing up here, the one who would come running down the stairs to tell Charles and me about the book she just read, or the latest cause she decided to devote herself to. She’s not the young woman we went to visit in San Diego, the one in the light blue dress who lived in that messy apartment, or the pale-faced, hollow-eyed daughter who watched her father be eaten alive by cancer. I didn’t know the glossy blond woman in the photographs, but I know she’s not her anymore, either.
She’s someone else now. A woman with a quiet strength that sometimes takes my breath away. She’s the woman who saved my life, and whose life I saved in return. She’s the sum of all the people she was before, forged in the fire and turned to iron.
To me, though, she’s the same as she always was and ever will be. She’s the baby that Charles and I brought home from the hospital. She’s our daughter, and she holds inside her all the love the two of us had to give.
Acknowledgments
This book is the product of a lot of people’s hard work, but of three people in particular: my husband, Simon Robertson; my best friend, Katie Cunningham; and my friend and agent, Felicity Blunt. Simon for encouraging me to stick to my guns, Katie for reminding me to keep digging, and Felicity for reading countless drafts and pushing me on. Thank you, guys. I owe you all a lot of drinks. I’ve been very lucky to have two brilliant editors by my side, Sara Nelson at HarperCollins and Jade Chandler at Harvill Secker, along with their incredible teams, including Mary Gaule, Heather Drucker, and SallyAnne McCartin at HarperCollins and Sophie Painter and Anna Redman at Harvill Secker. Thank you to the inimitable Alexandra Machinist at ICM who, along with Felicity, kept me sane and steered me right, and to Lucy Morris, Claire Nozieres, Enrichetta Frezzato, Callum Mollison, and Sophia Macaskill at Curtis Brown. I strong-armed several people into reading early drafts of the book: Chad Pimentel, Alice Dill, and Alice Lutyens, thank you for your gentle and helpful notes, and for not telling me that the book sucked. Finally, thank you to my family—both the Pimentels and the Robertsons—for being so generally wonderful.
About the Author
JESSICA BARRY is a pseudonym for an American author who grew up in a small town in Massachusetts and was raised on a steady diet of library books and PBS. She attended Boston University, where she majored in English and art history, before moving to London in 2004 to pursue an MA from University College London. The MA course proved relatively pointless but London stuck, and fourteen years later she now has an intricate knowledge of the London bus system and automatically says “aubergine” rather than “eggplant.” (Her mother hates that.) She works in publishing.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
FREEFALL. Copyright © 2019 by Hudson & Guide Post Limited. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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FIRST EDITION
Cover design by James Iacobelli
Cover photograph © Sirachai Arunrugstichai/Getty Images
Digital Edition JANUARY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-287485-6
Version 10222018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-287483-2
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