Freefall

by Mindi Scott

  I wasn’t going to worry about what could have happened, though. Really, I was more interested in trying to figure out where Rosetta and I could go to change out of our soaked clothes and keep dry for a while. She had a bunch of friends who lived nearby, of course, but the idea of hanging around any of them sounded as bad—or worse—than being stuck with her aunt, uncle, and a pile of board games. My place was our best bet, really. Jared and the guys were all out of town, and Mom would be heading to Good Times for her shift soon. The problem, of course, was Rosetta’s car phobia. The Valley is a long walk from the golf course.

  Rosetta came over to me after finishing up her conversation about our near-death experience. Together, we stood dripping on the carpet next to a rack of men’s jackets as we stared out the window at the rain pelting down on my sad-looking car. “Any ideas yet?” she asked.

  And that’s when I got one. A good one. The best one.

  “Yeah, I’ll tell you in a minute,” I said, trying to sound calm even though my heart was already beating faster at the thought that I might be able to make this happen today. “First, let’s put your bag in my car so we don’t have to worry about it.”

  Rosetta followed me back into the storm and waited as I dealt with the bag and stuck it in the trunk. Then I took a deep breath, walked around to the passenger side, and opened the door. “I know this is earlier than we’d talked about, but I think you’re ready,” I said.

  “Ready for what?”

  But I could tell by the way she’d started chewing on her lip and shaking her head that she knew.

  “This is a serious situation here,” I said. “We’re completely soaked, the trees are trying to kill us, and any second we could get struck by lightning. So we should get out of here. I’ll take you to my place. We’ll get dried off. Change our clothes. Figure out what to do with the rest of our afternoon. Sound good?”

  “Seth, no,” she said, shaking her head harder now. “I’m not prepared to do this. I mean, not at all. I’m supposed to have seven days left. Remember?”

  My excitement was fading already, but I had to follow through. I’d known it wouldn’t be easy ever since that day at the coffee shop when she’d first told me she had this phobia, but now I had to do my best to convince her. “Rosetta, just try. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “I don’t think I can—”

  “See, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Don’t do that. Maybe it will help you to try to think the same way you did when you convinced yourself to go bungee jumping that time?”

  “That was different.”

  I pretended like I hadn’t heard her. “Ready?”

  She was hanging back, shivering and wringing her hands. She didn’t look like she was ready, or like she was capable of getting there on her own. I helped her out by putting my hand on her back and scooting her closer. The seat and floor inside were getting soaked already, but I didn’t care about the car. This was going to be so worth it.

  “You can do this,” I said. “I know you can.”

  Rosetta moved with me, her body tense like she was about to bolt at any second. I wasn’t going to let that happen, though. If I could just think of the right thing to say, I could calm her down. I would help her do this. I had to.

  “You’re going to be fine. I promise,” I said.

  Rosetta was staring at the car. She reached out, touched the edge of the open door, and then jerked her hand back like she was afraid of getting sucked in.

  “Seth, I can’t,” she said between quick, uneven breaths.

  Should I back off? Try to come up with a new plan?

  We were so close here. She was so close. It would take only a few quick movements for her to go from standing next to the car to sitting inside it. This was not the time to give up on her. If she just ducked her head, stepped in, sat down . . .

  “Try thinking about how great you’re going to feel when this part is over,” I said. “Like free-falling or whatever, right?”

  She was standing frozen now, chewing her lip like crazy. Her eyes were wide and unblinking. I wished I knew more about how this whole overcoming-your-fears thing was supposed to work. Was I doing it right? Was this helping her at all? She looked so scared.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” I said, wiping streams of water from my face with one hand and rubbing her back with the other. “I’ll drive carefully. I’ll be the safest driver you’ve ever seen.”

  That must have made something click because finally Rosetta started moving.

  Just . . . not toward the car.

  Instead, she pulled away from me and stepped backward. “I’m sorry,” she said, bending to grip the tops of her knees as she panted like she’d just finished a marathon. “I can’t do it. I can’t.”

  Then she took off running.

  5:14 P.M.

  Through the sheets of falling water, I could just make out Rosetta as she sprinted to the grass, stopped suddenly, and sank to her knees. She was crying. Because of me. Because I’d been so sure that I could make her get in the car even though she’d said she wasn’t ready. Because I’d fooled myself into thinking I could somehow cure her of a clinical disorder.

  Still standing where she’d left me, all I wanted to do was punch something. Repeatedly. My own face, maybe. I mean, what was my problem? But instead of dwelling, I closed up the car and ran through the rain after her. The closer I got, the more my insides felt like they were being squeezed.

  I’d fucked up. Completely. And I didn’t know how to fix it.

  She was sitting all scrunched so that her knees were pulled up, hiding her face.

  “I’m such an asshole,” I said, lowering myself onto the grass next to her.

  She didn’t respond with words. She just sobbed onto her pants.

  When I’d seen her crying in the stairwell, I’d been clueless about what she would want or need from me. Unlike then, this time it was my fault she was crying. I had little doubt that what she wanted was for me to stay back and keep my hands off her. Part of why I’d pressured her at the car was because I’d wanted so badly to get her alone. I knew it and was pissed at myself. She probably knew it and was pissed at me too.

  “I shouldn’t have done that back there,” I said. “I know it didn’t help you. I only made things worse, and I’m sorry. I’m a jerk. A dick. A complete asshole dickhead loser—”

  “Stop,” she said quietly, still not looking up.

  I stopped.

  And then we sat there in the wind and the rain, soaked and shivering beside each other. I tightened my jaw to keep my teeth from clanging together like hers. This had been such a bad, bad idea. All of it. I should have taken her up on the Scrabble when I’d had the chance.

  After a few minutes, Rosetta stopped crying. She raised her head, looked at me, and then looked away, dabbing at her nose with her sleeve.

  I said, “I really am sorry.”

  She said, “It isn’t your fault.”

  I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe that she believed herself either. But she was giving off a vibe like she didn’t want to talk about it anymore, so I decided to let it go. For now.

  “We need to get you out of this rain, but I’m kind of out of ideas here,” I said. “Do you want me to walk you back to your house?”

  She shook her head. “I’d rather walk to yours. I mean, if you don’t mind.”

  Unexpected, but it was exactly the thing I’d needed her to say. I stood and helped her to her feet. “I don’t mind.”

  5:57 P.M.

  By the time we were in sight of the faded Riverside Trailer Park sign, Rosetta and I were as soaked as two people could get. My jacket felt like it weighed a hundred pounds, my pants were chafing against my legs, and my socks and shoes were completely waterlogged. But even with the wet clothes, I was burning up. Long, treacherous walks can have that effect on a person, I guess.

  “Here we are,” I said, pointing at the wreck I call home. Mom’s Honda and Kendall’s MINI Cooper were parked in
the driveway. “Home sweet dump.”

  Rosetta grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze, but she didn’t say anything. This was more embarrassing than I’d thought it would be. I couldn’t stop wondering what she was thinking. Up where she lived, everything was nice and perfect. Down here, everything was tacky and broken.

  She waited on the steps that led to the covered porch while I went to the door. I couldn’t see into the living room—we hadn’t bothering opening that set of curtains for weeks—but I could make out noises from the TV. After flinging the door open, I stood in the doorway and yelled, “Mom! Can I get some towels out here?”

  Her voice rang out from what sounded like her bedroom: “Is that you, Seth?”

  “Yeah!”

  I didn’t know who else she had calling her “Mom” these days with Jared being out of town.

  About two seconds later, Kendall came through the kitchen. Her hair had been dyed black with blue on the ends sometime in the less-than-twenty-four hours since I’d seen her. With her purple top and short black skirt she had kind of a comic-book chick-villain look going on. “Anita, it is him,” she called over her shoulder. Then she said, “What happened to you?”

  “Rain.”

  Mom came out with curlers in her hair, dressed in a skirt for work but with her shirt still unbuttoned. Peeking out the kitchen window, she said, “Baby, I didn’t hear the fan belt-slash-muffler that usually announces your arrival, and I don’t see your car out front. Based on that and the looks of you right now, I’m thinking you broke down or wrecked somewhere.” She put her hands together as if she were praying. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded. “The car’s fine. We just . . . felt like walking.”

  At the mention of “we,” Mom and Kendall glanced at each other, puzzled, and then leaned to look past me at Rosetta. “Towels,” Mom said, running off. “You need towels!”

  Kendall raised her eyebrows, and then headed to the kitchen like she was pissed about something.

  A minute later—with the important buttons done up now—Mom came back, handed me the towels, introduced herself to Rosetta, and then closed the door on us so we wouldn’t let all the heat out as we took off some of our wet stuff.

  “Is Kendall here to see you?” Rosetta asked, holding the base of her very messy-looking ponytail with one hand and sliding off her hair tie with the other.

  I pulled my shoes and socks off and dropped them out of the way. “No. She used to live next door. She hangs out with my mom all the time.”

  Rosetta leaned her head over the rickety railing and started ringing her hair out. “Oh. I didn’t realize that.”

  There hadn’t been much chance for Rosetta and me to talk after we’d left the golf course. Our adventure trekking down the Hill, with all the nonstop pummeling rain and violent wind, had kept us busy. But I’d been thinking the whole time, and we definitely had more important stuff than Kendall and my mom to discuss. I wasn’t sure I had the guts to go there, though.

  “I’m wondering about something,” I said, shrugging out of my jacket. “It’s about your parents. About what happened to them. If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to. I don’t want to push you. And I don’t ever want to make you cry again. So maybe I shouldn’t ask.”

  She was watching me. Curious. “You can ask. It’s okay.”

  I let out a loud breath. “So. I’ve been thinking. Your parents. They were killed in a car accident?”

  She nodded.

  “And you were with them at the time?”

  She nodded again.

  “And that’s why you don’t ride in cars.”

  That one wasn’t a question, but Rosetta answered anyway. “That’s exactly why.” She pulled off her jacket and set it next to where I’d put mine on the railing. “We were T-boned on the passenger side. And nobody around here really knows this part, but I was the one driving my dad’s car at the time.”

  Whoa.

  Ever since the dance, when I’d found out both Rosetta’s parents had died right before she moved here, I’d been thinking it must have been from an accident of some sort. A car wreck had seemed most likely because of Rosetta’s phobia. But it had never occurred to me that she’d ever learned to drive, much less that she had been behind the wheel at the time of the crash.

  Rosetta went on. “The other driver was drunk and didn’t have a seatbelt on. I was the only one in either vehicle who lived. The cars were mangled and there was glass and blood everywhere. I mean, everywhere. It wasn’t until the paramedics got me out that I realized very little of that blood was mine.”

  The only time I’ve ever seen a dead person was when I found Isaac. He’d been lying there on the lawn, looking pretty much like he was asleep. But Rosetta. She’d been trapped in a car with her parents. Her dead and bloody parents. I couldn’t even imagine what that must have been like.

  Even though I figured it would mean next to nothing, I said those same useless words I was always saying to her: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Rosetta had tears in her eyes as she threw herself against me. I held her tightly. Kept her upright. But she didn’t break down. I guess maybe she was too exhausted by now. “I’m not much fun to be around, am I?” she asked, her face partially buried in my neck. “I mean, it probably isn’t every day that you get stuck listening to someone talk about how she killed her parents.”

  I shook my head. “Rosetta, don’t even say that. You didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Maybe not. But if I’d been a more experienced or observant driver, maybe I could have avoided the collision. Or if I’d been driving faster. Or slower. Or turned down a different road. There are thousands of things I could have done differently. Any one of them could have prevented it.”

  I pulled back a little and looked into her eyes. “You said I couldn’t have guessed what was going to happen to Isaac that night. That’s just as true, if not more, for what happened to you.”

  “That’s what my former shrink was always trying to drill into my head, but I never believed it.” She looked away. “Did it help when I said it to you? Did you stop holding yourself responsible?”

  I thought about it for a second. And, actually, no, I hadn’t stopped. I didn’t want to admit that to her, though, so I just said, “The thing is, all you did was get in a car and drive like millions of people do every day. You couldn’t have known anything like that would happen. It was not your fault.”

  She nodded. “On an intellectual level, I get that. And yet here I am, making us both miserable. I’ve been thinking, maybe I should see if trying a new therapist might help me. Does that sound like a good idea?” She smiled the tiniest of smiles. “Or do you think I’m just plain crazy here?”

  I pushed her wet, tangled hair off her forehead. “I don’t think you’re any kind of crazy.”

  6:13 P.M.

  “I’m not sure why you’re bothering with this,” Kendall said. “Rosetta already noticed the mess on her way in.”

  Rosetta and I had come inside now, and she was taking Mom’s suggestion and getting warmed up in the shower while Mom finished putting on makeup in her bedroom. This had all been going on only about five minutes, but so far I’d already changed clothes, thrown the dirty ones into the washer, kicked all the crap under my bed, and taken an armload of dirty dishes from the living room to the kitchen sink. Now I was putting the scattered mail on the table in a pile.

  “I’m bothering because if it’s cleaner when she comes out, she might think what she saw before was her imagination,” I said.

  “Hmm. Interesting theory.” Kendall picked up Mom’s fuzzy pink blanket, folded it, and set it on the back of the couch. “So, it’s pretty weird how you two felt like going for a walk in the middle of a hurricane, huh?”

  “Not really. Rosetta has that ‘no riding in cars’ deal going on, remember?”

  “Oh, right.” Kendall smacked her forehead. “Her environme
ntal pledge thing!”

  The way she’d said it, I couldn’t tell if she’d honestly forgotten or if she was just being a bitch. Either way, I was too drained to get into it with her. “How are things with your dumbass secret boyfriend? You kick him to the curb for good yet?”

  “That’s my plan,” she said. “Assuming, of course, that I can get ahold of him and convince him to meet me in a secret place to have the secret discussion where I end our secret relationship.”

  “Right. Like you do.” I stepped around her to grab Mom’s sweater off the chair in the corner. “So will that talk be happening before or after you have your last secret hookup?”

  She punched my arm. But she was smiling, so I could tell she wasn’t really pissed.

  Mom came out of her room. “I’m off to make my millions. Kendall, you want to run and scootch your car over so I can pull out?”

  “Actually, I’m leaving too,” Kendall said. “There’s no way I’m hanging around here while Seth’s trying to get laid.”

  Mom fake screamed and covered her ears. “Okay, you absolutely cannot say things like that about my baby boy!”

  “I’m sorry,” Kendall said, patting the top of my head. “It’s just that wittle Seff is gwowing up so fast!”

  I gave her my best “eat shit” look. I wasn’t sure what the hell she was trying to do, but this was not a conversation I ever wanted to be having in front of my mother.

  Mom cleared her throat. “Enough of that. Let’s get a move on, girl. I’m already running late.”

  They both grabbed their purses and headed out the door. But before closing it Mom came back inside, her forehead lined with worry. She kissed my cheek and glanced in the direction of the bathroom. “You be good.”

  “Mom—”

  “I’m dead serious here, Seth. Promise me.”

  I sighed.

  8:01 P.M.

  Rosetta’s phone chimed. She grabbed it from the coffee table. “All right,” she said, looking at the screen. “Vicki’s text says she’ll cover for me if necessary. But only if I tell her what I’m really up to tonight.”