Freefall Summer

by Tracy Barrett

  She pounced. “Aha! So there is someone! That photographer guy—Mad John?”

  “Jack. Don’t be crazy.”

  “The straight one of the twins?”

  “No.”

  “A jump student?”

  I didn’t answer and she pounced again. “Ooh, Clancy, tell me!”

  “There’s nothing to tell.” I sounded feeble, even to myself.

  “Then why are you being so weird?”

  I sighed. “I’m not being weird. I’m just tired. There’s a new jump student named Denny and he’s really nice, but that’s all. I swear, Julia. I’m not interested in anyone but Theo. You know that.”

  “When the cat’s away…” She raised her eyebrows at me meaningfully.

  I couldn’t help laughing at her; she looked like a little kid excited about a surprise.

  “I swear, Jules, nothing has happened. No kiss, no flirting, no nothing. He’s cute and all but he’s just there to jump.”

  Julia looked skeptical, but the commercial ended and she unmuted the TV. I kept my phone on the coffee table but Theo didn’t text.

  I didn’t hear from Theo again until Wednesday, and it was a phone call, not a text. He called while Julia was taking me home after we’d gone shopping. My dad had finally loosened up to the point where he’d let Julia drive me short distances during the day.

  “Hey, Clance,” Theo said. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  “Where are you?” I asked. “Theo,” I mouthed at Julia.

  “I have an afternoon off, so I’m in town doing laundry and catching up on things. My mom has emailed me every day, and she doesn’t seem to get it that I can’t read email at camp, so I just spent forever answering all her messages.”

  I let myself out of the car and waved good-bye to Julia, who said, “Say hi for me” and drove off.

  I sat down on the porch steps. “Julia says hi.”

  “Say hi back.”

  “She left already.”

  Awkward silence.

  “How’s work?” Theo asked at the same moment that I said, “How’s camp?” and again there was that silence.

  Theo broke it with, “Really good.” I waited for another long description of the rock climbing and the kids and the other counselors, but the silence stretched between us.

  I finally said, “Julia’s trying to quit her job already. Her mom’s having a fit about it.”

  “Good old Jules.” More silence.

  “My dad put me on salary,” I said. “He’s paying me by the hour now, not by the rig.”

  “I know—you told me last time.”

  “Oh right.”

  Argh. Had we already run out of things to talk about? So I told him about Travis and his cross-country canopy ride even though Theo wasn’t very interested in shoulda-died stories or student mishaps. “And Theo, guess what?”

  “What?” He sounded distracted.

  “My dad thinks that Den—that someone else drove and I just went along to navigate, but I was the one driving.”

  “Your dad let you drive off the DZ?”

  Had he even been listening? “No, Theo,” I said more sharply than I meant to. I softened my voice. “He thinks someone else was driving. He doesn’t know it was me.”

  “Good thing it was a little country road on a weekend,” he said.

  Suddenly, I found it hard to breathe, like Theo and my dad were smothering me, and the images of the candlestick and the profiles flashed into my mind again. It seemed like it would be forever until I went away to college, to a place where no one would think I was either too ditzy to drive on a country road or too prudish to do anything even remotely edgy.

  I stood up. “I’ve got to go. Thanks for calling.”

  “Miss me?”

  “A ton.” Suddenly, I meant it. We never had awkward silences when he was there in person, and he always paid attention to what I was saying. “When are you coming home?” I didn’t care if I sounded needy.

  “Not till the end of camp in August.”

  “You don’t have any time between sessions or anything?”

  “There’s a break, but it’s too short to drive all the way home and all the way back.”

  “I miss you.” My voice caught.

  “I know, sweetheart. I miss you too.”

  “I love you.”

  “Love you too. Bye.”

  I went into the house, where my dad was sitting at the sewing machine, finishing up the garish canopy he’d started the week before. “That might actually look okay, on second thought.” I fingered the ripstop nylon. “I mean, it’s not like canopies have to be subtle. And at least it’ll be visible.”

  He grunted and finished a seam. “Done!” He stretched. “How’s your classwork coming?”

  “It’s good. We’re getting into the Renaissance.” I found Renaissance art, with its emphasis on order and symmetry, much more satisfying than medieval art, where all sorts of odd things could pop up—three different parts of a saint’s life all happening at the same time, perspective going off in wacky directions, strange critters poking their heads around columns in churches. Altogether too chaotic for me.

  He glanced at the clock. “Yikes, look at the time. Can you put that stuff away?”

  I gathered up the scraps of nylon, sorting out the pieces that were still large enough to use from the scraps to toss. “You going out?” I asked as he went into his room.

  “Picking up some tools,” he called back, “and then going to dinner at Elise’s.” He poked his head back through the door. “If you’ll be okay on your own?”

  “Dad. I’ve been old enough to legally babysit someone else for five years. Of course I’ll be okay on my own.”

  The first time he had left me alone (which wasn’t until I was almost fifteen), I’d noticed a lens poking out from the back of the bookcase. It was a nanny cam. I’d ripped it out of the wall and left it on the kitchen table where my dad would be sure to see it, along with a note saying that if he wanted me to run away, he should go ahead and install a new camera, because I refused to live with a father who spied on me. After he stopped freaking out about me running away, which I had to admit was just a threat, he used that line that all parents say: “It’s not you I don’t trust—it’s other people.”

  “What other people?” I had said. “Julia’s the only person who comes over, and we just watch TV and talk. If you don’t trust Julia…” The nanny cam disappeared, and neither of us ever mentioned it again.

  Now he asked, “Do you want to call Julia or someone to come over for dinner? I’ll order you a pizza.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got some things to do. You kids run along and have fun.”

  He grinned at me, and in a few minutes I heard the shower running. He’d call the landline on a flimsy pretext partway through his date, and I’d pretend not to know that he was checking up on me, but other than that I’d have some precious alone time.

  After he left I tried to watch TV. I was too restless to concentrate on anything, so I turned it off after a few minutes and put on music way louder than my dad would have allowed. Something about that phone call with Theo had been…unsettling. I tried to tell myself it was just that I hadn’t seen him in a long time, but it hadn’t been that long.

  On an impulse I sent Denny a text.

  Me: How was the jump?

  He answered almost immediately: Best yet. I did some 360s and didn’t need any radio for the landing

  Me: Did you stand it up?

  Denny: Almost. Stumbled at the end

  Me: Going again next weekend?

  Denny: Bright and early Saturday morning!

  Me: How are the monkeys?

  Denny: Stinky. Obnoxious. Don’t let anyone tell you monkeys are cute. They’re mean. Class good?

  Me: The usual

  No response for a few minutes. Then he texted: What are you doing tonight?

  Me: Not much. My dad went out

  As I hit “send” it occurred to me
that he might think saying I was alone was an invitation, so I hastily added, About to do some homework. Online test on Friday

  Denny: How do they know you’re not cheating?

  Me: They don’t. It’s on the honor system. The tests don’t count for anything. They’re just practice so you know how you’re doing

  After a minute or so I read: You’ll ace it. See you Saturday

  Me: See you

  How stupid was it that I got my feelings hurt that he didn’t see my parentless state as an opportunity? We’re just DZ friends, I told myself firmly. Jump buddies. I had never made a friend on the DZ that I also saw off-site, so this was nothing new. I told myself that I’d imagined the awkwardness when we touched accidentally. He hadn’t been blushing—he was still on an adrenaline high from his jump, and that must have been why his ear was pink.

  I scrubbed down the kitchen counters, which didn’t need scrubbing, and organized the silverware drawer. Everything else was in perfect order, so I flopped down on the couch and tried to study.

  Finally, I caved. I went into my room and sat down at my laptop. I had finally convinced my dad that Wi-Fi wasn’t a luxury but a necessity, so I could have used it anywhere. But I needed the privacy of my room even though my dad wasn’t home.

  It had been a while—long enough that the link didn’t autocomplete when I started typing it in the browser. While I hadn’t been viewing the video, a few other people had. Not many, though. The numbers always spike after a skydiving accident, when people get ghoulish, but there hadn’t been a fatality in the U.S. in ages. They always made the news. My dad said that if they reported on every jaywalker that was hit by a car, there wouldn’t be anything but dead-jaywalker stories in the news, but let one jumper go in and it makes headlines.

  The video started. I had seen it so many times that every little shake, every little pop in the low-quality audio was familiar. It was ominous too, like everything in the universe knew what was about to happen.

  I paused the recording and slowly moved it forward, willing my mom to do something different. But what? She had cut away at exactly the wrong moment, but she had no way of knowing that it was going to be the wrong moment.

  Jumpers try to avoid reserve rides, even though every instructor reminds students, “When in doubt, whip it out.” It’s not only the expense of paying a rigger to repack the reserve. Reserves open fast, and the hard opening can give you whiplash, but it’s not the discomfort either. The main thing is that jumpers are superstitious. If you dump the reserve and it malfunctions too, you’re sunk. Nowhere to go. Reserves just about never malfunction, and the odds against both the main and the reserve malfunctioning are astronomical, but still….

  So my mom had tried everything to clear the main. She did exactly what you’re trained to do, exactly what I’d heard my dad and Leon and Noel and Randy and Louisa and Patsy tell their students: “If the pilot chute or the main canopy gets stuck, you have to break the burble.” So she flipped over. It didn’t work, so she flipped back to cut away, so the canopy would fly away cleanly. She had no way of knowing that the AAD would fire at precisely the wrong moment, making the two chutes—the main and the reserve—snag each other, and that neither one would open.

  I watched to the end, seeing the pink canopy and the white one wrap around each other, making a big nasty barber pole that didn’t slow my mom down enough to make a difference. Then, when Angie dropped the camera, the ground came up, up, up to the camera lens, and then—whomp. And the screen went black. Was that the last thing my mom saw? The ground coming up, and then nothing? What did she think about in those last seconds? Did she think of me? Of my dad?

  After I went to sleep, I saw it over and over again, only sometimes she cut away sooner and sometimes she cut away later. But no matter what she did, it ended the same way, with the camera thumping on the ground and the sounds of screaming and crying.

  I woke up when my dad got home, and I wanted to ask him to come sit by my bed until I fell asleep again. I wanted to tell him about how Theo was acting weird and how confused I was about Denny—about whether he was just a DZ friend or whether he was interested in me (and whether I was interested in him), and what I should do about it if he was. Or I was. I wanted to confess that I’d driven the car on Travis day and had done just fine.

  I couldn’t. He’d ground me forever. Anyway, he wasn’t the sit-by-the-bed-until-you-fall-asleep kind of dad, and even if he were, once I got started, I’d tell him about watching the video. And seeing that we hadn’t talked about my mom’s death ever, not even once, I couldn’t do that.

  “Are you saying you want to go to the DZ right after dinner?” My dad blinked at me over his newspaper as though the words I had spoken were incomprehensible. Which I guess they were, as this was the first time since I was twelve and had a crush on a jumper named Tad that I had wanted to leave for the DZ on a Friday. “Why?”

  “There’s nothing going on here tonight, and with Theo gone I don’t have anything else to do. And this way I won’t have to wake up at five a.m. I could roll out of bed, ready to pack, just as the first load is landing.” I pushed the cereal around in my bowl, avoiding my dad’s eyes. I wasn’t really sure myself why I was eager to get there.

  “You don’t want to do something with Julia tonight?”

  “I’m seeing her this afternoon, and then she and Justin are going out.” Julia had forgiven Justin for whatever it was he had done and the two of them were spending every waking minute together (and some sleeping ones too, though my dad didn’t need to know that), so as soon as he was off work, they’d be together. Most of my other friends were away for the summer or working. “So can we?”

  He lowered his paper, looking uncomfortable. “Well, the fact is, I thought you’d be going out tonight, so I invited Elise over. She’s going to teach me how to make lasagna. It would be rude for me to eat and run.”

  I was so startled that I couldn’t think of what to say for a moment. “Oh, so you want me to clear out?”

  “Well, that’s not the way I’d put it….”

  “It’s okay.” I tried to hide my surprise. Dad taking cooking lessons. Dad wanting some time alone with a lady. Huh. “I’ll see if Nicole or Cory or someone wants to go to a movie.”

  “You’re sure? You could stay here and learn how to make lasagna too.”

  “Right, like that’s what Elise is looking forward to—spending the evening with her date and his kid!” I laughed, and he smiled uncomfortably. “Fear not, revered sire. I’ll get out of here. When’s she coming?”

  “She said six thirty, after work.”

  “Right. I’ll be out by six.”

  “Be sure to tell me where you’re going and who you’re going with. I’ll call you after a while to make sure everything’s okay.” He went back to the newspaper, and then my phone pinged to tell me that Julia was outside.

  As we walked to the park, where they had outdoor music on Friday afternoons in the summer, I told her about my dad and the cooking lesson. She glanced at me. “So are he and Elise serious?”

  “I don’t know. Is lasagna-making an accepted form of courtship?”

  “Well, you know what goes with Italian food. Wine…candles…love songs playing in the background…” She let her voice trail off.

  I tried again to imagine what it would be like if my dad got remarried, or even if he stayed with the same woman for more than a few months. It would be weird. But good weird or bad weird? He hadn’t been serious about a woman since my mom died—at least as far as I knew, and given that we lived together in a tiny house, I’d probably know. I supposed I’d be glad if my dad was happy, and it would be nice to have his laser focus off me for a while, but it was still a strange thought.

  “So what band is playing today?” I asked as we went through the park gate.

  “Uh-uh. No changing the subject. Do you like her?”

  I squirmed. “Yes. Sure. I guess so.”

  “Have you talked to your dad about her?” />
  “Not really.” Unexpectedly, I felt a catch in my throat.

  Julia patted my arm. “It’s okay,” she said softly. “But don’t you think you should let him know how you feel?”

  “We don’t do that.” Julia never got it. She and her mom and her sister, Celia, lived together in what my dad called the Estrogen Palace. They talked about their feelings a lot and sometimes got into fights that ended in tears and hugging. Julia didn’t understand what it was like living with my dad, no matter how many times I told her that he might look tough but he got uncomfortable when I tried to talk about anything personal.

  “Well, maybe you should.” I followed her to the band shell, and we spent an hour on a blanket with lemonade and pretzels—our favorite snack since our first picnic together—listening to terrible music.

  When Julia went to the Porta-John, I texted Nicole to see if she wanted to do something that night, but she was going dancing with friends. She invited me along, but I declined. I’d wind up getting no more than three hours’ sleep, and I didn’t want to be a zombie when I was packing the next day, even though I could probably do it in my sleep by now.

  Just as I expected, everybody else was either out of town, unavailable, or doing something I would never be allowed to do. I was about to put my phone away when something occurred to me. Before I could lose my nerve, I texted Denny: What are you doing tonight?

  Denny: Channel surfing. Chinese takeout. You?

  Me: Want to try Mexican instead of Chinese?

  A pause. Then: Sure. You mean that place you told me about?

  Me: Manuelito’s

  If we took the time and effort to go out of town, Denny might think it was a date. Which it wasn’t. Also, I figured if I took him to Manuelito’s, no one who saw us would be suspicious, because if I was cheating, I wouldn’t be so public about it. But if they happened to see me with Denny at some out-of-the-way place, they’d think I was hiding.

  Clearly, I was overthinking the whole thing.