The Falling Between Us

by Ash Parsons

  Weathered furniture presses back against the walls, almost hesitant to intrude.

  Santiago gestures to a sofa, but I remain standing in the center of the room. His arm drops, and the frown returns, clouding his face.

  “I know why you’re here,” he begins.

  “How much more do you have?” I ask, my question an acid knot rising in my throat. “How many other lyric sheets? Did you take them and just decide to keep them?”

  I step forward, making him improbably step back, this mountain of a man, retreating before my anger.

  “Or is he alive?” Tears jump to my eyes. “Do you have any idea how crazy I feel even thinking that?”

  His eyes are sad. He shakes his head at me. His mouth starts to move into the shapes that will say what I fear in my bones.

  He will say the words that break me. A jumble of barbed wire tangles in my chest.

  Santiago puts his hands up. “Oh, mi niña—”

  “Tell me.”

  Santiago’s eyes move around the room like the right words to say will form in giant letters on the bare expanse of walls around us.

  “Tell me what’s going on, Santiago. Tell me!”

  I step forward again, another step away from the front door, away from the hallway behind me, pressing Santiago backward.

  Something stirs the air. An infinitesimal change, the smallest of sparks. A feeling like being watched or of nearness, the feeling of dawning comprehension, when you hear the metal link snap.

  The fine hairs on the back of my neck rise and stretch outward, uncanny seeking. Innate knowing.

  I hear the voice as I turn.

  “I’m so sorry, Rox.”

  Joshua stands behind me, close enough to touch. His hair is longer, grown out. His skin has lost its pallor, sun-warmed into health.

  Changeable green eyes, fringed by those impossible lashes, stare at me, waiting.

  My heart stops. And my breath. I feel my eyes go wide, drinking him in, afraid to blink. Afraid to move or startle the ghost of him away.

  Too hungry for the sight of him to take the chance that he might disappear.

  Shock courses through my body, a bolt that signals and fires, signals and fires, reality and unreality, overlaying each other like an X-ray of bones beneath flesh. In my head, a swimming headache, confusion. My vision blurs, and I blink rapidly, tears slip out, and he’s still there. Watching me. Waiting for me.

  A sound like a laugh and like a cry wrings out of my chest.

  Joshua is standing here.

  Joshua is alive.

  Alive! Alive! Alive! my brain chatters.

  I step toward him. My knees wobble as adrenaline dumps in and recedes like a wave, pulling solid ground out from under me.

  I stumble.

  Joshua steps in quickly, closing the small distance between us. His movement is smooth, seamless as a perfect dream. He catches me, steadies me where I stand.

  His scent envelops me. A smell of cheap white soap over a slight skin spice, some hint of tang that is wholly him.

  A scent-triggered memory: me holding him tight. Pushing my nose into the skin behind his ear, breathing him in. Committing him to memory.

  His callused hands hold my upper arms. Warmth radiates from his skin. Concrete. Real. Alive.

  Joshua.

  “You’re alive.” My voice is faint, suspended.

  “Yes.” Joshua’s eyes change, regret, the flicker of the haunted expression he always wore after becoming Joshua Blackbird.

  Then he smiles at me, sorrow and apology, and the reflected warmth that is mine. The smile from Marchant. From the first day we met. From the first day in class. A smile I learned and always knew was only for me.

  I don’t care about anything else. About the lyrics, the university, or how he is here, alive. About what Ty or Artie knows, or doesn’t want to know.

  None of it matters.

  Joy surges through me, singing at every joint and synapse. Joy and heartfelt wonder. A love that burns and stings and heals, pulling me up by the wrist. Pulling me up into the air, into the sky. I am weightless, free from grief.

  My arms lift, and I’m pulling him into me, pulling his head down, pressing our bodies together.

  Joshua laughs, a familiar and foreign sound, something from a country where we lived long ago. He pulls on me as I pull on him. Our arms can’t stop pressing, embracing. Our hands pass over each other in desperate, joyful recognition of solidity.

  This is real.

  Joshua kisses my cheeks, my eyelids, my forehead, my nose. Words burble out of my mouth in breathless gasps. Words of love and astonishment and gratitude that he’s here, alive, that we’re here together.

  Our lips meet, and the kiss catches us, holds us. An impossible rescue. Without stopping the kiss, I pull air from his lungs, pull his breath into me, and hold it there.

  The link reknits itself. The apparatus holds.

  We hold each other, clinging like strands are woven between us, a net to catch every breath. Every pain assuaged, every beauty marveled.

  Joshua Blackbird is alive.

  24

  JOSHUA’S STORY

  Santiago disappeared sometime during our reunion, reappearing only to hug me again and apologize. For keeping the secret, for not knowing what to say when I confronted him.

  My emotions churn like the wake from a boat engine, the white foam of joy covering dark waters of hurt and anger.

  But the accusing words stop behind my teeth every time I look at Joshua, his lithe frame beside mine, his face beautiful, a heart-catch smile. The dark clouds that covered him, the fear and exhaustion, are gone. All of it, vanished. He’s Shu again.

  Restored, replenished. Reinvented.

  He is the same, and he’s changed completely.

  Joshua leads me through the white stucco house out onto a sun-sheltered patio. Winding down and away from the back of the house is a dirt path that leads to a small private beach with the expanse of ocean beyond.

  The patio is furnished sparely, just like the house. There’s a low wood table and chairs with cushions in muted colors. An antique pierced-metal glider, spray painted with ocher, stands to the side, in the shade of a leaning fig tree.

  “You—” The words stop again. I am so tired, but a need to know, to accuse, gathers like a sudden infection. “How could you?”

  My need to know is fueled by anger and hope equally. Anger at being tricked, being cheated into feeling the pain of losing him. Anger buoyed and softened by the hope of forgiveness, of wanting to allow myself the gift of forgiveness, a feeling like my heart has let go and hangs there in empty air, waiting for the arc of the jump to resolve the moment. Will it fall or will it catch the swinging bar—

  Or will it be caught by another’s grip?

  Sorrow colors Joshua’s expressive face.

  Had I forgotten how my eyes love to look at him?

  My voice won’t come, caught in the fear of falling.

  Joshua’s head tips to the side, a cringe of apology. He jams his hands into his pockets. “I’m sorry I hurt you.” He clears his throat. “It’s not enough to say it. I know that. But I am sorry.”

  I want to laugh. It’s so profoundly surreal, I could almost expect the tree to start talking. Or for birds to fly to us bearing a wreath of flowers.

  He’s alive. He’s alive, and he’s standing here in front of me.

  He let me think he was dead. He wanted me to think he was dead.

  My heart falls.

  “You’re sorry.” My voice is angry, angrier than I realized.

  “I am, Rox. I’m so sorry. But I had to escape. It had to look real.”

  My cheeks are wet. Joshua’s are, too.

  “But I hoped you’d find me again. Let me explain. Please.” Joshua looks at me like he’s strapped
to a spinning wooden wheel, and I’m holding the throwing knives.

  “Please,” he says, taking my hand, holding it gently. We walk to the glider and sit, a creaking sway of precarious pieces.

  Joshua takes a deep breath. He looks out to the ocean as if its vastness will supply the words he needs.

  “It felt like there was no other way,” he says. “Dying started to feel like the only answer. And I don’t know when that feeling began. Maybe it was after Dallas. Or before. It took me a long time to realize I didn’t want to die. I just wanted that life to be over.”

  His voice falters; his chin tips down in shame or self-recrimination.

  “At first it was like a promise I could offer to myself. That it didn’t have to be this way. I could make it stop.”

  Joshua looks at me, but his eyes hold the expression of a hunted thing. Knowing the impossibility of escape.

  The glider creaks, engineered to feel smooth but groaning under the weight of us.

  “Rox, I didn’t plan to kill myself. But after Dallas, after the first tour, and everything I grew to hate . . . well, thinking about dying comforted me. It felt like holding an ace, knowing how I could end it, end everything. I’d get a car. I’d drive out into the hills.”

  Hearing him talk about killing himself so casually rocks my head back on my shoulders.

  Even if it’s what I thought he had done before the university letter came.

  Joshua’s voice continues, telling the story of how he got here.

  Thinking about dying consumed him, just as fame consumed him. It got to the point where it was always there. In Georgia, in LA, on the road; geography didn’t change it. He couldn’t escape, and more and more, he started to see how his pain was hurting the rest of us.

  The rest of us were smothered lights, deserving freedom. Me and Ty and Speed, everyone who loved him. He saw how he was warping us, bending our light, pulling us into his darkness.

  And the only way out that he could see, for all of us, was final.

  “Then right before my birthday, I was talking to Artie. She was joking about being my guardian. Saying that I was too much to handle, and when I turned seventeen, I could get emancipated, just in time for tour. I asked her what that meant.”

  He shakes his head, a hint of a smile hovering at the corners of his mouth.

  “She said I could spend my own money. Buy my mom a house. Buy myself a house. Buy a stranger a house. Do whatever I wanted as long as it was legal. ‘Be in charge of your own fate’ was how she put it.”

  I can picture Artie rattling off the possibilities.

  “That’s when I had the idea. I could arrange everything. Take care of everyone. Even me.”

  He could be someone else, and he didn’t have to die to do it.

  Joshua Blackbird, however, did. Because he knew he could never simply leave. Could never throw off the yoke of obligation, not as long as Artie, or the record label, or his mother, or anyone who wanted something more from him thought he was alive.

  “That part took a while,” he says. “Figuring out how to try to make it look like an accident. I bought the houses, the land, everything, and I gave them away, and I tried to hide this place.”

  He gives me a crooked grin. “The house I bought for a stranger.”

  Himself, in the future.

  Joshua stares out at the turquoise ocean.

  “Did Ty know?”

  “No.” The answer is short. “But after Dallas, I’d talked to him, told him to watch out for you if something happened to me. I didn’t know what else to do. Everything felt so wrong. Telling, not telling. I decided in the end not to tell anyone but Santi. He was the one person I never felt like I was hurting in some way.”

  His eyes glance at me, uncertain.

  Joshua heaves a sigh. “It wasn’t the best thinking, maybe. None of it. I can’t say I thought about anything clearly for months, once it all started. Before I came here. But it was the best I could do.”

  So Santiago arranged for a small boat with a nearly silent, fully submersible motor. It was anchored in the island’s lagoon two days before the yacht was scheduled to arrive.

  On the night Joshua was to “die,” Santiago went aboard the yacht with his own wetsuit, GPS locator and signal light, and a rope ladder. He went out his cabin window silently and swam to retrieve the small boat.

  Joshua waited for Santiago’s signal. A text message that he then deleted from his phone.

  Joshua went down to the aft deck. Got a towel and left his shirt on the bench, trying to make it look like he planned to return.

  Then he splashed into the water and swam out to meet Santiago, who waited in the dark just past the blinking lights of the dive buoy.

  Santiago slipped out of the small boat, then returned to the yacht and climbed back up the rope ladder into his cabin. Joshua was safely on his way to a holiday rental cottage on the beach, already stocked with food and other supplies. It was only an hour down the coast from his brand-new mansion. He waited there for two weeks. Didn’t turn on the news. Didn’t leave.

  He slept. He played video games on an antique console in the cottage. He read frayed paperback mysteries and listened to old music he found in a cabinet. Cassettes and records, bluegrass, blues and gospel, voices like a homecoming.

  He slept, and he waited.

  At night he opened the sliding glass doors and sat on the deck breathing the fresh, clean open air.

  After the memorial, after we went back to Georgia, Santiago came in a car with dark-tinted windows and drove Joshua all the way down to Ayudar.

  Sitting on the glider next to Joshua, staring out at the ocean, I can picture all of it perfectly.

  The details are like a Möbius strip, where you can see the departure of reality, the twisting of what we all thought we experienced, how it became the inverse—life not death, a desperate grab at a chance, a loop to catch or a bar set swinging in a wide arc.

  I don’t have to ask why they undertook such a desperate plan. I don’t ask why Santiago didn’t come to me, or Speed, or Artie, because I was there. I remember a hundred lost arguments over time. The meet and greets stopped and then reinstated over Joshua’s pleas. The tour dates that weren’t cancelled, even after he was attacked in Dallas. The command to lip-synch over a prerecorded track at a New Year’s event when he got strep throat. The endless string of nights when he couldn’t turn off, couldn’t sleep without drugs.

  Fame like a strange servitude, the scales never square, the bill never settled, the demand never sated.

  It’s easy to picture what would have happened if Santiago had gone to Artie. The reason she’s atoning for now, through protecting Ty and not finding Joshua. Because she would have intervened. She would have had Dr. Matt arrive with more pills. She would have tried to siphon off just enough pressure to keep Joshua going.

  Because in her mind, it would just have been a moment that needed managing, like all the other moments. Joshua was a person, yes, but more than that, he was a commodity.

  And wasn’t it every person’s dream? To be a star?

  There might have been pauses, but it would never fully stop. Not unless he made it happen himself.

  I look at Joshua. The plea in his eyes, powerful. Seeking forgiveness. I look away from him to the ocean. He lets me sit in silence, absorbing his story.

  I have only one more question.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, and the words feel like razors.

  “I was going to,” he says. “I was going to ask you to come with me.”

  “And?”

  Joshua looks out at the galloping waves below.

  “I thought you’d be better without me. Have a better life. One that wasn’t all about me. If I had told you, you would have felt obligated to disappear with me. How is that any fairer? How is that a life?”

 
He kicks at the bitten ground. The glider creaks and shudders.

  “But after I got here . . . after a while, I wondered. If I’d done the right thing. If I hurt you more, or less by leaving. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what was right. So I sent a clue. Arranged for the university. Then I sent the song lyrics to Artie. And I left the rest up to fate, or to you. To your choice. But I never stopped hoping you’d find me.”

  Joshua scrubs his palms on his thighs, a gesture of nerves.

  “I missed you like air,” he says.

  Suspending himself and me, here in this moment. Forgiving or falling.

  25

  THE HEART APPARATUS

  We sit in the warm heat, motionless, like the world around us is a lung and we are a breath, waiting to be released into what will happen next.

  Beside me, Joshua waits and watches me, his arms tightening to close around himself like wings of protection. But his eyes are hopeful and he offers a shy smile.

  I think of Lillian Leitzel. How she always flirted with her audience. She would banter, pose, and smile. She wanted their love, and she got it.

  And still there was never enough love for her.

  Maybe that was the need that drove her, that made her great. The reason why she never could be content in her life. It was what her lovers and her husbands realized as their love was absorbed and she was never fulfilled.

  Tragedies happen, but sometimes we court our tragedies. Make them wait with us, invite them in, like a vampire splinter, working its way under the skin. Riding in us like a parasite. Want and need never being met.

  Lillian Leitzel, my Queen of the Air, courted her tragedy every night when she took to her rope. Twisting, climbing her Spanish web, making it to the top, where she would do her one-armed planges, swiveling and flipping over her shoulder.

  She looked like a fairy queen at play, rising, over and over again. It looked like spinning. Like flight.

  Every time she would flip, it dislocated her shoulder.