Blind Luck

by Scott Carter

  “You ever heard this song?” she asked.

  Dave gave the wailing gospel singers another second. “No.”

  “I’ll burn you a copy. This is the Swoops. You’ve probably heard their tracks on at least a dozen samples that are on the radio today. Only this is the real moment in time.”

  She reached for the blindfold, but Dave tapped her arm. “Don’t ruin the surprise. This is part of the fun.”

  “I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “I am, you sound confident.”

  “Work with me here, will you?’

  “This isn’t an argument, it’s not like I want to be right, it’s just the way we are. The way we were born.”

  “The way we were born?”

  “That’s right, you were born in May, weren’t you?”

  “Where’d you see that?”

  “I didn’t, May’s the luckiest month.”

  “You know I should tape you when you start with this, because if you heard yourself I think you’d be surprised.”

  “Sigmund Freud, May. Pope John Paul II, May. John Wayne, May. Walt Whitman, Browning, Emerson, May, May, May. Do you want me to continue?”

  “So everyone born in May has a blessed life?”

  “I was born in January. Do you want to know who was born in January?”

  “A lot of failures and a lot of successes, just like the other eleven months.”

  “Wrong. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon, Grigori Rasputin, Benedict Arnold, Martin Luther King, and Virginia Woolf were all born in the same month?”

  “Yes. And I think a lot of people would argue that those people were anything but unlucky.”

  “And I believe you believe what you say, which is why I know you’ll be disappointed with this surprise.”

  Neither of them said a word for a while after that. As the car drove, Amy imagined a life where they were married, where she looked out the window as they drove to the cottage every weekend with two children, maybe three. In this fantasy, they had a house and a family. That’s what she wanted out of life. Every bit as intensely as some people desire wealth and others power, she wanted a family to share life with.

  Those thoughts repeated themselves until the car stopped.

  “We’re here,” Dave said. He pulled down her blindfold to reveal that they were in a parking lot. After adjusting to the light, Amy’s eyes focussed on a small plane at the end of a field covered in a layer of snow.

  “Where are we?”

  “Parachute school.”

  She looked again at the field, where someone now folded a parachute, and thoughts of falling, broken bones and blood dominated.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re jumping out of a plane. You’re going to jump, and you’re going to be fine.”

  “There’s snow on the ground.”

  “They won’t let us jump if the weather’s not right.”

  “I can’t jump.”

  “Yeah, you can.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Look, you keep saying you believe in me, right?”

  Her eyes narrowed like she hated him for using her words against her. Then a man floating to the ground fifty yards away let out a guttural scream that drew attention to how small he looked. Dave grabbed her closest hand.

  “Let’s go.”

  Instinct told her legs not to move, but she accepted his lead. The warmth of his hand made her want her entire body to be as warm. She concentrated on relaxation techniques while Dave signed them up for their instruction. Two times sixteen is thirty-two, thirty-two times three is ninety-six. But the numbers didn’t steady her breathing. The battle wasn’t against nerves or imagination; she was about to challenge a force she was convinced swayed with the gods of life and death.

  The trainer looked more like a schoolteacher than someone that jumped out of planes, and as he spoke her mind waded through every negative adjective she knew.

  “I am your instructor, although I prefer jump master,” he said in an accent she placed as Slavic. “You’re both doing tandem jumps, so the training isn’t long. We’re doing most of the work.” He gestured to another man with muscles that bulged from his orange diving gear. “Thirty minutes of your time is all we need, and another fifteen minutes to get you to the jump altitude of ten thousand feet. If the weather holds up, you’ll have finished your jump an hour from now.”

  Amy didn’t speak for the next thirty minutes. She nodded when she had to and heard what she had to hear, but her mind could not move past ten thousand feet. Dave led her to the plane, and she struggled to control a tick in her jaw that made her head jerk. Nothing is going to happen as long as I'm with Dave, she told herself. His luck will save me, his luck will save me. She didn’t process any of the questions the instructor asked as the plane took off; she just answered on reflex. She told him her height and weight, shook her head when he asked if she had a heart condition, nodded when he told her to make sure she breathed, and panicked when he pointed to a waiver and said, “Sign here, please.”

  The higher the plane rose, the harder she squeezed Dave’s hand, until they reached jump altitude. The sky looked endless, blue and dreamy that high up, as if it were its own playing field. If only fear hadn’t been numbing her body, she might have been able to enjoy the view.

  Dave kissed her hand, and she held tight as she inched her way behind the jump master. A shared harness connected them, but she wished she was connected to Dave. He flashed her a wink and leapt with his jump master out of the plane, which ignited a dizziness that burned through her.

  She heard the instructor say, “Don’t look down” and immediately looked out the plane door. It occurred to her that maybe it was her fate to jump to her death and end this streak of bad luck forever. She wished she wanted to fall so she could end the anxiety, but every cell in her body fought to keep her inside, where her feet could feel something beneath them.

  She imagined a crowd below, taunting her. She knew a certain number of people in the world wanted something to go wrong, for her to jump too straight and piledrive her body weight; for her chute to bunch up, or for the cord to snap. Those are the stories that live on for decades.

  She looked at the twelve inches or so of blue grating in the shape of diamonds that stood between her and the door, then a chip in her jump master’s harness caught her attention. This wasn’t the harness’s first job. She slid her toes forward.

  “Three breaths and go,” the jump master said.

  The alternating yellow and red stripes on his back made Amy think of stunt men, the collapse of lungs and suffocation.

  It was impossible to see any details on the ground from that height. For all she knew, they were above water, mountains or a forest. She looked straight out into a blue sky so vibrant, it made her realize she had never really seen blue until then.

  This isn’t a bad way to die, she thought. The jump master raised a thumb, and she tipped her body weight forward until gravity took over. With her arms splayed and her face rubbery, she felt anything but graceful.

  The red and yellow stripes on the jump master’s back blurred into a unified streak, until the parachute opened and tugged on her hard enough that she thought her spine was going to rip from her back. She reacted more than thought with primal screams, her fingers balled into fists, and eyes too afraid to be shut yet too disoriented to stay open. Her body dropped again. This time she saw a flash of blue sky that she was convinced was water. Up looked down and down looked up. Only the tugging helped her distinguish between falling and recoiling, then she felt a beautiful weightlessness.

  “Great jump,” the instructor yelled.

  She closed her eyes until they landed and wondered for a moment if she was going to throw up before her lungs filled with air.

  Dave ran over and kissed her forehead. “Congratulations.”

  The instructor grabbed her shoulders. �
��Don’t you feel alive?”

  She wanted to vomit, but yes, she was very alive.

  Thirty minutes later, her heart still hadn’t returned to normal as they sat across from each other in the closest diner. The place hadn’t been renovated in thirty years, but it was clean. Dave raised his pint.

  “You did it.”

  “I did.” Her mouth didn’t feel ready for a sip of beer.

  “Don’t you feel relieved?”

  “I feel shaken.”

  “What about the rush? Doesn’t it feel better knowing it’s okay to take a chance?”

  “I didn’t get hurt because I was with you.”

  He put down his glass without taking the next sip. “I didn’t jump with you. You could have died, but you didn’t. You could have been injured in any number of ways, but you weren’t. And you weren’t because you’re just another person.”

  “Another person who was with you.”

  “You can’t really believe that.”

  “I live it. If anyone other than you took me skydiving today, I’d be a tragedy on the evening news.”

  He dragged his pint across the table so that the glass screeched before leaning in enough that other people couldn’t hear him. “I’m grateful to make some money from whatever hustle Thorrin’s running with your brother, but you’re too smart to believe in this hocus-pocus. There is no such thing as lucky or unlucky, things happen because they can.”

  “That’s what you believe.”

  “That’s how it is. Babies die because they can, people get heart diseases because it’s possible, and cars crash because drivers make mistakes.”

  “Why are you in denial?”

  “I can ask the same of you.”

  The waiter asked if everything was okay, and they both nodded politely. Amy waited for the waiter to head to another table before shifting her weight. “Does the thought of believing that you’re special scare you that much?”

  “No, I’d love to believe I’m special, but I’m not. What scares me is the fact that you believe I am.”

  Twenty-Two

  As soon as Dave stepped into 29 Palson, an orderly escorted him to his dad’s room. With his hair pulled into tight cornrows and a clean-shaven face, the orderly appeared to be in his late teens, but he had to be at least twenty-five.

  “I appreciate you coming. He almost did quite a number on himself.”

  “Thank you for calling,” Dave said, rolling his folded newspaper into a baton.

  As soon as they entered Jack’s room, the orderly nodded to Dave and left. Despite an open window, the room smelled like a combination of rank body odour and sweat that had dried into unwashed clothes for a number of days. Dave walked up to his dad, who lay in bed with his back raised by three pillows.

  “What are you doing taking your mask off?”

  Jack didn’t answer. Listening to him breathe was difficult. If Dave closed his eyes, it would have sounded like he was listening to a science fiction movie, where people in protective suits take filtered, pressurized breaths.

  “Don’t pull that zoned-out crap today. I know you heard every word I said.”

  They locked eyes for a moment before his dad spoke. “Did you bring today’s line?”

  The liquid in his eyes was thick, his face drained of colour, yet he still savoured being a smartass.

  “They told me you took your mask off. You’re playing with your life doing that.”

  “I want to see the line.”

  “I’ll give you the line when you listen to me. Why’d you take the mask off?”

  Again, no answer, so Dave kept the newspaper gripped tightly in hand while they sat in a stalemate. He inspected his dad. The man couldn’t have been comfortable. His back arched in the wrong places, and his neck twisted so that it must have been kinked. A tug on the closest corner of his pillow grabbed his attention.

  “Sit up. I’m going to give you a massage.”

  “I don’t need you touching me.”

  In his singlet, his body looked its age. Sun spots covered his arms, and the once-taut skin now hung loose on his biceps. Dave pressed his thumbs into the slouched shoulders.

  “Jesus,” Jack shrugged, “I’m not cookie dough.”

  Dave dropped the newspaper into his dad’s lap. “Here’s your line.”

  “Who are the Raptors playing?”

  “The Knicks.”

  “Spread?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Put me down for the Knicks if it’s less than five.”

  It had been a year since his dad had started confusing him with his bookie. Dave had never met this Alex, but he guessed they didn’t look alike. He attributed the references to Alex to his dad’s yearning for gambling, but a part of him also believed it was a deliberate slight to reinforce a disappointment he had felt in his son for years.

  “I met a woman,” he said while his thumbs worked both sides of the spine.

  Jack was too focussed on the newspaper to hear anything. Number of games, multiplied by the total odds, multiplied by the total wager. The massage stopped.

  “Her name’s Amy:”

  Jack smacked the paper. “Bloody hell, you smudged the Chicago game with your sweaty palms.”

  “Will you listen to me for a second, Pop?”

  “What?”

  “I said I met a woman named Amy.”

  He held the newspaper close to his face to inspect the smudge before saying, “Get out while you can.”

  “Out of what?”

  “The relationship.”

  “We’re not in a relationship.”

  “Your line of work and love don’t go together.”

  “I’m not your bookie, Pop.”

  “My wife was the only thing I cared about more than gambling.”

  “I know.” He started working on the shoulders again. He rolled soft circles with his index fingers until his dad began to relax. “When did you know Mom was the woman you’d still be talking about fifty years later?”

  “Immediately. The first time we spoke, I knew I was experiencing something different, something I would remember for the rest of my life. In 1958, the city was as tight as a drum. Not one of my friends had a car, none of them had career jobs, and the chances of starting a relationship were limited to weekly dances or the bowling alley.

  “I’d earned a reputation over the years as a sweet talker, so when I pointed at a beautiful brunette with a fresh bob and said ‘That’s going to be my new girlfriend, boys,’ no one flinched. I wanted to make it interesting, so I said, ‘I’ve got a ten that says I have her phone number in the next five minutes.’ I knew Charlie Waters since we were six, and I knew he couldn’t resist a bet, so he says to me, ‘You’re on, Jackie. You got five minutes starting ten seconds ago.’ Your mom was in a conversation with a redhead that looked five years older, but I didn’t wait for a lull. I said, ‘You know, I come here every Friday, and I have never seen anyone stand out the way you do. I just wanted to come over here and tell you that you look beautiful.’”

  Dave laughed. “And what did she say?”

  “She said, ‘Is that the best you can do?’ So I look at her, confused, and she says, ‘I got promoted today, and the best you can come up with is you’re beautiful?’ So I probed, and she told me she got promoted to mailroom supervisor. I invited her out to dinner the next night to celebrate, and I never looked at another woman with lust again. She gave me her number, and I folded it up and slipped it into my pocket. When I went back over to the boys, they started clapping, but I told them I didn’t get the number and paid Charlie his ten bucks. Your mom was too special to be playing games with.”

  Jack raised his hand so that Dave had a good view of his wedding band. The look of sadness in his eyes made Dave feel bad for reminding him of his wife. Dave missed his mother too. He missed her strength, her unwavering care, and the peace she gave any situation simply by being there. But he didn’t miss her the way his dad did. He hadn’t started and ended each day
beside her, he hadn’t created life with her, and he hadn’t felt like one half of the same soul.

  Jack pointed to a photo of a cottage on an island he taped to the wall above his bed. “I want to be at the cottage.”

  The photo drew Dave in for a closer look. It had been years since he’d seen a picture of the cottage, so flashes of catching garter snakes, diving off the floating dock, listening to his dad tell stories by the fire long after his mother had gone to sleep, driving the boat, the smell of boat fuel, and fishing hit him as he absorbed the details. He hadn’t fished since his last trip to the cottage.

  Jack’s eyes dropped back to the bed. All the regret in the world couldn’t bring the cottage back. Jack had inherited the place from his mother, and over the years he’d used it as collateral for loans and lines of credit when gambling had left him short.

  Dave tried to forget the day the bank had seized the property, but the details were too poignant to erase. He’d been sure his mother was going to divorce his dad, that the irresponsibility had proven to be a disease beyond her cure, but she hadn’t even yelled at him. Instead she lay in bed with him for the better part of two days. She didn’t touch him or talk with him, she just lay with him and shared the silence.

  “I’d like to be there too, Dad.”

  “Yeah.”

  They didn’t say anything after that. Dave didn’t care why his dad took his mask off any more. He just wanted to rub the man’s shoulders until the knots came out.

  Twenty-Three

  “This is my first time in a restaurant in six months,” Amy said as she squirted a drop of sanitizer into her palm.

  Dave knew what to expect. “Food poisoning?”

  She nodded.

  “Not this time.”

  Dave had brought Amy to his favourite restaurant. Despite it being expensive, he loved the fusion menu, the low lighting and the lounge décor. Amy did her best not to think of vomit or diarrhea, but as she scanned the menu with feigned enthusiasm, her imagination turned chicken into choking and sweet sauce into sweating.