The Falling Between Us

by Ash Parsons

  Angel Rey came and cried with us. Real tears, not for any cameras. Before and after the memorial service. That day, vivid and unreal. A private ceremony, but the Birdies were there, lining the road between the chapel and the cemetery. Silent and crying, holding flowers, throwing the flowers at the limos, since there was no hearse, gripping giant pictures with his heartbreak smile.

  The blur of shared time lost, of grief spent together, continued for some time after the service.

  We came together as a group one final time and filmed a public service announcement.

  It was Tyler’s idea. He knew that there were fans who believed their favorite musician had committed suicide.

  He couldn’t stand the thought that it would be something they would think of as a choice. Or that they might see as romantic. A grand gesture. A way out. The only way.

  Tyler’s wide-open heart drove him, coaxing Artie to help him set up the Blackbird Foundation, a crisis intervention group, rooted in fandom, seeking to empower and aid anyone who needed it.

  They interviewed and hired foundation members and employees, basing it in LA. Using an empty office in the suite Joshua had bought for Artie as the headquarters.

  Even Artie was completely on board in the end.

  The primary message was one of hope. That depression lies. That no one is alone; there is help. For everyone.

  Even if I didn’t share Ty’s conviction that Joshua’s death was an accident, I shared his goal—that the message was important and people needed to hear it.

  And it helped everyone, I think, to say something. To take action.

  To try to build a safety net to catch others when the one we lost had slipped past us ever more steadily into the dark.

  Then after that, however slowly, life moved on. People moved on.

  Livie and Tyler went back to Georgia.

  And I went with them, home to Marchant. To Grandma, who wanted to share my grief but couldn’t travel to LA. So I packed up my few mementos, my circus books, a few of Joshua’s shirts that still smelled like him, my clothes, and the tablet.

  Before we left, Artie sat us down. For once she seemed to be having a hard time talking but eventually got through what she was trying to say.

  When Joshua turned seventeen and emancipated himself just a few months ago, when he took control of all his assets, separating them from Livie, he met with some financial advisors.

  In addition to setting up Livie’s allowance and a fund for Ty’s schooling, he had drawn up a will.

  It would take a little while to get sorted out, but we were all taken care of. Ty, Livie, me. Santiago and Speed and the rest of the band. Even Artie.

  Joshua had also arranged for the dancers and roadies to be paid for a year’s worth of work should the tour be cancelled for any reason.

  Somehow I made myself sit quietly and listen. Held my mouth clamped shut and didn’t turn to Ty and howl that this was the ultimate proof that Joshua had taken his own life.

  He had left no question of where his money would go.

  But Ty asked the question anyway, in the middle of it, asked Artie if she knew why his brother had done this thing. The will. The accounts.

  Artie shrugged and said he had wanted everything done at once when he was emancipated. So he wouldn’t have to think of it again. A single blur of lawyers, papers, and signings.

  So we all had a little money now. Gifts from Joshua with which we could do whatever we wanted.

  In the exhaustion of numbed grief, it felt like another grudge I would carry against Joshua. An anger I would inhabit later, when I had the emotional strength to feel it. That he would think of everyone around him, that he would give to each of us, yet didn’t care enough about himself—or me—to wake me up so that he wouldn’t be swimming in the middle of the night all alone, in an ocean so large that it could swallow lives whole, gone without a trace.

  I came home to my grandma’s, and now it’s almost as if I never left. Except the house is new, modest but new, nice. Not a trailer. A ranch style, brick and siding and shutters, a wide front porch with rockers. Four bedrooms for two of us, plenty of room to go and be by myself if I need to.

  Mostly I follow Grandma around like a satellite. Following her daily, elderly person schedule. One foot in front of the other in a daze of deliberately suppressed feeling.

  I won’t listen to the radio with her, so we watch daytime TV, napping with it on, with lunch uneaten or half-eaten. Every day empty, every day the same. I only leave the house to take Grandma to her doctor in town. Or I’ll drive us to the grocery store, and I don’t even shoplift anything to make it fun. I’ll take her in, help her get the things on her list.

  Sometimes we’ll go into the army surplus store and the string of pawnshops and thrift stores across from the Dollar General. I’ll buy thick canvas army belts with flat brass snap buckles, or surplus desert boots, or black BDU pants. Anything that feels like it was supposed to be somewhere else, doing something important.

  Saving somebody.

  I cut them off or tear them up, or draw on them with marker, hitching belts and buckles tight over my waist and hips, wearing them with secondhand shirts from bands people once loved.

  I nearly shave my head, but in the end just hack at it with scissors like I always do, dumping a whole bottle of insane red over it when it starts to grow out too much.

  I read all my books again. Lose myself in them like losing myself in a pillow fort.

  I reread everything about Lillian Leitzel. All the circus books I have, piecing her story together. She would pin her long hair up in sections, so that as she twirled and lunged it would fall down, piece by piece, like she was an engine revving, shaking itself apart with the violence of her abilities.

  I sprawl in my bed, reading all the different retellings of her tragedy, and the tangled tragedies that came after. A harrowing story of untimely deaths, first accidental, then deliberate. And before death, the sorrowful tale of lovers who couldn’t be together, despite their passion. Or perhaps because of it. How the love of her life, her estranged husband, Alfredo Codona, spiraled into slow, desolate self-destruction from the loss of her. Even though they were separated when she fell, even though they had fought viciously when together and after separating Codona pursued another; still their love consumed them, refusing to be extinguished. They had been trying to come together again. When she fell, he raced to her side.

  She died two days later.

  In the end, Codona’s grief became destructive. It started a downward curl of despair. He took death-courting risks on the trapeze; threw endless, dangerous tricks Leitzel had forbidden him from performing. Without her, no one told him no. No one could catch his endless falling. He threw himself away, ruined his shoulder, and could no longer perform at all. He married again, another circus performer, Vera Bruce, even though he knew she didn’t love him. Even though he still loved Leitzel.

  Perhaps the choice to marry Vera was just more falling, or perhaps it was a desperate grab at a chance at love and life again, even as he fell out of control, down and down, his story ultimately ending when he left the circus completely, and Vera left him. When she filed for divorce, something snapped in him, some last safety catch that linked him to who he used to be. He killed her and then himself, made himself a murderer, a twisted thing that once had been the King of the Trapeze.

  Losses warped him, first the loss of Leitzel, then the loss of his abilities, and finally the loss of how he saw himself. He became a broken, tragic, and hateful creature.

  But Leitzel . . .

  Leitzel was always a blazing fire, true to herself. Passionate where others were timid, risking everything for a single moment of love and the adoration of the crowd.

  It unfurls as I read, the reason I have always been in love with her, my Lillian Leitzel, the Queen of the Air. With my idea of her. Her life, a little like J
oshua’s, nothing like mine, except for the hunger that was never sated.

  It’s her passion for life that I love. Her daring. How she would claw and fight for what she wanted, fearless and unashamed, drinking life in great, sloppy drafts, never once slowing or counting the cost.

  She makes me feel brave even though she fell. Because she risked falling.

  I can let go of the bar, can let myself fall through the air. It doesn’t matter if the ground is rushing up toward me, or if there is a net waiting to catch me. It doesn’t matter if no one else sees me fall. The point is to fly, even for a second.

  I start lurking in online Birdie chats, follow them on Tumblr, on Twitter, search all the blogs and forums and hashtags I can find.

  Holding on to Joshua through them.

  There’s a bloom of fan-edit videos every week, memorials, GIFs of tribute flowers and his perfect, shattering smile.

  Then there’s footage from the last concert.

  The whole thing is getting released, first streaming on a paid site, then on Blu-ray and across all platforms, The Last Concert. The show interspersed with interviews with the band.

  Interviews with Angel Rey and Speed, both seeming shell-shocked with loss.

  Artie’s on it as well, talking about Joshua Blackbird’s legacy. As if she is the one to protect it for the ages. As if he were entirely her doing.

  More time passes.

  “Forever or Never” is everywhere. Every radio station, Pandora, YouTube, hits that keep ratcheting up, bookending a public life, just the way it started.

  A death benefit. It would have been a hit anyway. Of course it would. Look at him singing it on The Late Late Show. It’s searing. Like a wound opening. The troubled eyes, the strangely haunted yet energized lyrics.

  The Birdies love it, cry over it, comment on it. They make art from his art. Tributes, videos, drawings. Detune the song and slow it down. Make his song plaintive and sorrowful.

  I even find a beautiful, hand-drawn pencil sketch of a photo Artie stole from my phone and used as the cover art for the single “Lullaby for Love.”

  It feels like a punch that takes my air, and I can’t stop looking at it.

  There are all-out fandom wars between Birdies who think Joshua committed suicide and Birdies who think his death was accidental. Their battles flame across channels, across Twitter and Tumblr and fan-fiction sites, scouring each other with their certainty.

  Birdies who want to grieve and don’t want to pick sides tag their posts with #DovesForLove.

  There are even Birdies who are convinced Joshua isn’t dead at all: #LazarusBirds. Their theories are ink-black poison to me, dumping pain into my veins. The death deniers uniformly sound like the type of conspiracy theorists who think the moon landing was faked, or that Tupac is still alive.

  I filter and block them out every time I’m online. There are only a few of them, the smallest subset, and it’s easy to make it to where I don’t ingest their poison.

  I create a sock-puppet account, a fellow-Birdie profile, to join in their obsessive fascinations. To talk about the moment in “Forever or Never” at 2:26 when his voice cracks, real emotion, not performance—

  I start reading fanfics, RPF—Real Person Fics. I even find myself in a few of them. The Girl from Home.

  I know it’s unhealthy. I don’t care.

  I devour them. All of them. I read the ones where he’s with Angel Rey. I read the ones where he’s with an OFC (Original Female Character) or OMC (Original Male Character). I read the ones where he’s with Speed or other guys from the band, other celebrities, the opening act. I read the ones where he’s with Tyler.

  Weeks pass as I live in the stories they weave for me.

  It’s a sickness that I cannot purge. It’s a sickness, and I let it take root.

  I feed it.

  I read alternate universe adventures where we all live in a medieval world with dragons, or have superpowers and fight crime. I read the “five times” story prompts, read the requests for “fix-it” fics, where everything is magically made better.

  I read about imagined first times that never were: first loves, first kisses. It makes it safe, cushioned in the haze of fiction, to think of what actually happened. Real moments, beautiful and worth remembering.

  The first time Joshua kissed me, we were in the ninth grade. It was by the lake, this little inlet, a bubble of water that seeped into a kidney-shaped area where there was a free boat launch that the power company maintained. Even though most of the people who went there didn’t have boats and just used the ramp as a zero-entry walkway into the lake.

  Years ago, some kids had found a ski towrope floating on the water, tangled in the tree stumps and leaf-stir, shallow grass, and other debris, thrown off or snapped or otherwise just lost from the fast boats that fly by in the middle of the lake, a world away from us clinging to the edges.

  The towrope had then been tied to a leaning tree overhanging the water’s edge. If you could climb at all, you could shimmy up the scrawny, precarious tree, snag the towrope, and pull it back to shore. Kids would spend all summer grabbing the tow bar, swinging out over the water, doing elaborate flips or just letting go, arc-falling sloppy parabolas all the way into the water.

  A few kids had been there when we’d first arrived that day, but they’d gone. Ty wasn’t with us, either, for a change.

  Joshua and I swam, splashing each other, floating on our backs, holding on to arms or hands like otters so we wouldn’t drift away from each other.

  We were floating. The water tipped over my stomach when I moved my legs to stay afloat. Joshua rolled at me and pushed me down, dunking me, then wrapped his arm around my back, pulling me back up.

  I dunked him in revenge and took off, swimming as fast as I could to the shore.

  Joshua followed and then forgot about revenge, focused on climbing the tree to get the towrope.

  When he had it, he shimmied down the tree and held it out to me.

  “You can have it first.”

  “Thanks.” I grabbed the tow bar and planted my feet on the worn root-shelf, leaning back, most of my weight borne by the ski rope.

  But Joshua was still holding on to the bar, standing beside me, near the slope-leaning tree, a small smile on his lips.

  My heart stuttered, unable to decide how to react, speed up or slow down, as Shu leaned into me, touching his lips to mine.

  He held on to the ski bar with one hand and slid the other around my shoulders, like he could keep me from falling, both of us letting our weight pull against the towrope.

  His lips were soft and warm, and neither of us closed our eyes.

  Then he was straightening, an even bigger smile on his face. He let go of the tow bar, leaving it in my hands.

  “Okay,” he said, sweeping a hand toward the lake. “Have a nice flight.”

  I jumped up and back, pulling myself up on the bar, swinging out over the water. Letting go at the right moment, at the height of the arc, you could feel like you might take to the air, for a single instant.

  I yelled and threw my arms out, pinwheeling to stay upright, running my legs, a holler of exhilaration, cut off when I submerged in the water.

  Joshua grabbed the rope and swung, doing a belly-curled horse-dive, hitting the water with just the right concussive force that it whumped as the air was pushed down and out, showering me.

  A memory that takes my breath away, that comforts and cuts. So I lose myself online again, in the fandom, a filter between me and grief.

  The best things, better than the videos, the fics, the GIFs—the best of them all, are the accounts devoted to decoding “Orpheus’s Last Lyric.”

  Which is being recorded, of course. For the tribute album.

  The entertainment news shows and the gossip bloggers had already swarmed over the lyrics, especially the title, repor
ting about the myth of Orpheus, a demigod with a divine voice that could enchant any listeners. Who moved even the beasts and the rocks with his songs. He fell in love with Eurydice, and when she died, went into the underworld to bring her back, but failed. Orpheus mourned and sang his grief. He died, torn to pieces by the wild women, the Maenads, who could not stand that he would not love them.

  The talking heads draw parallels to the Birdies, to the frenzy of “fangirls,” and especially to Mira, of course.

  But the Birdies dig deeper. They analyze the lyrics. Illustrate each line with pictures, video clips, links to supplemental material, interviews, poems, texts—

  And for all their fanatical devotion, for all that people have always derided the enthusiasm of young women, of “fangirls,” for all the ways the world—myself included—mocks them—

  They’re not stupid.

  I read their analyses. Because I will never know what he meant, and I can never ask him. So I feed from the hive mind of the Birdies. For them it’s purging. For me it’s oxygen, water.

  JoshuaMyLove posted a link to a poem on the National Poetry Foundation website—one I remember reading with Ms. Kearney and Joshua, back before the tour began.

  JoshuaMyLove: “Orpheus’s Last Lyric” References This Poem—“Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith.

  Hits and reblogs and comments follow.

  The title of the poem. The one he quoted in “Orpheus’s Last Lyric.” That talks about drowning.

  The whole line is from the dead man—the poem, short and devastating, starts like it’s being told. A story. A sad thing that happened.

  And that was what I remember affected Joshua when we studied it.

  “They don’t even know him,” he had said, finger jabbing at the text. Ms. Kearney had waited for him to say more, his participation rare, his engagement virtually extinct.

  I waited, too.

  “They’re talking about him, how he liked to play jokes, I guess,” he had said.

  Ms. Kearney nodded.

  “They didn’t even know. They didn’t have a clue what was really happening. Not just with the drowning—but all of it. He was just—this guy. He was just this role to them.”