Free to Fall

by Lauren Miller

  The marketing campaign did what it was supposed to do, I guess. People were appropriately freaked out. I was in fifth grade then and hearing the voice all the time. Once we started learning suppression techniques—how to drown out the Doubt with noise and entertainment, how to distract your brain with other thoughts, stuff like that—I heard it less and less, and eventually it went quiet. It was like that for most kids. Something you outgrew, like a stutter or being scared of the dark.

  Except sometimes you didn’t, and you were labeled “hyperimaginative” and given low-dose antipsychotics until you didn’t hear it anymore. That is, unless you were Beck and refused to accept both the label and the pharmaceutical antidote, in which case the Doubt stuck around, chiming in at random moments, causing your otherwise rational brain to question itself for no apparent reason other than the fact that that’s what the Doubt did. I worried about him, what it would mean for his future if he got a permanent diagnosis, but I also knew how stubborn he was. There was no telling Beck what to do. Especially not while he was taking pictures.

  “Oh, hey, wait a sec,” I heard him say as I started toward the bus stop across the street. When I turned back around, he was digging in his pocket. “Your going-away present,” he said, holding out a small plastic box with a snap lid. I recognized the distinctive uppercase G etched into the top. The Gnosis logo. I was mildly obsessed with Gnosis and its gadgets, which, besides being slick and stylish and technologically unparalleled, were made out of recycled materials and completely biodegradable. “They’re the gel earbuds you wanted,” Beck explained as I snapped open the lid. I’d been eyeing them for months but couldn’t rationalize wasting a hundred bucks on headphones. “And before you tell me I shouldn’t have spent the money, I didn’t,” Beck added before I could protest. “They were part of the swag bag from that fashion shoot I helped with last month.”

  I grinned. “Best gift ever,” I said, squeezing Beck’s arm.

  “Now you can geek out even more over your playlists,” Beck teased. He was into music too, but not like I was.

  “And hear you better when you call me,” I said, slipping my gift into my ears. The earbuds slid down my ear canal like melted wax. I could barely feel them once they were in.

  “Assuming you’re not too busy to answer.”

  “Hey. I’ll never be too busy for you.”

  He smiled. “Take care of yourself, Ro,” he said then, slinging an arm around my shoulders. “And just remember, if you fail out, you can always come home and be my assistant.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said, elbowing him in the stomach. “And to think, I was worried I’d miss you.” When he met my gaze, he smiled, but his eyes were sad.

  “I’ll miss you too, Ro.”

  I flung my arms around his neck and hugged him, hard, then headed for the bus stop again, blinking back tears.

  “Okay, spit it out,” I said to my dad. “You’re obviously prepping for some big flight-from-the-nest moment over there. Let’s hear it.” We’d just split the last slice of fennel sausage pizza, and I was perusing the dessert menu, contemplating a root beer float even though I was pretty sure that Lux would tell me to skip it. Across the table my dad was twisting his red cloth napkin like he was nervous about something. I braced myself for a sappy speech. He reached for something on the booth beside him.

  “It’s from your mother,” I heard him say as he set a small box and an even smaller envelope on the table in front of me. My dessert menu was forgotten when I saw the gift.

  The only thing I had of my mother’s was a blanket. According to my dad, she worked on it every day of her pregnancy, determined to finish it before I was born. The design, hand sewn in pink yarn, was a series of squares, each bigger than the one beside it, that followed a particular mathematical sequence and fit together to form one rectangle. The squares were connected by yellow quarter circles made with even tinier stitches than the squares, which ran together to form a golden spiral that extended beyond the confines of the rectangle. At the two ends of the spiral, there were little orange cross-stitches, marking the beginning and the end. It was a strange choice for a little girl’s blanket, but I loved it. Maybe my mother knew that her little girl would never be into flowers or butterflies. Maybe she somehow sensed that I’d prefer the structure and predictability and mathematical completeness of a Fibonacci tile.

  I never could ask her, because she died when I was born, two days before her nineteenth birthday. I was premature and there were complications, so the doctors had to do a C-section, and I guess a vein in her leg got blocked, and the clot went to her lungs. “Pulmonary thromboembolism” was the phrase on her death certificate, which I found in a box in my dad’s closet when I was nine, on Christmas Eve. I’d been looking for hidden presents.

  I stared at the box, and then at him. “What do you mean it’s from Mom?”

  “She asked me to give it to you.” He tugged at his beard, clearly uncomfortable.

  “When did she ask you to give it to me?” I meant When did she make the request? but my dad misunderstood.

  “The day you left for Theden,” he said carefully.

  “What? I don’t understand. How could she have possibly known that I’d—”

  “She went there too, Rory.”

  “Wait, what? Mom went to Theden?” I stared at him, stunned, as he nodded. “But you went to high school together. You got married the day you graduated. You always said—”

  “I know, sweetheart. It was what your mom wanted. She didn’t want you to know about Theden unless you decided on your own to go there.”

  “And whatever’s in that box?”

  “I was supposed to destroy it, and the card, too, if you didn’t go.”

  I sat back in my chair, my eyes on the box. It was light blue with a white lid and it didn’t look new. One of the corners was bashed in, and the cardboard was peeling in a couple of places. The envelope was the kind that comes with floral bouquets, not bigger than a business card. “What’s in it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” my dad replied. “She asked me not to open it and I haven’t. It’s been in a safety deposit box at Northwest Bank since two days after you were born.”

  I reached for the envelope first. The front was blank, but when I picked it up, I saw handwriting on the back. My mom had written my name, in blue ink, right along the seam of the flap. I recognized her handwriting from the tag she’d pinned to my baby blanket, which I kept in a little zippered pouch on my nightstand. Aurora. I hated my name, the hardness of the r’s, but in my mom’s loopy script, it looked so feminine and delicate, so unlike its typewritten form. I touched my finger to my tongue and then pressed it onto the tip of the cursive capital A. The ink bled a little, and when I pulled my finger away, there was a faint blue stain on my skin. It seemed impossible, that the same blue that had been in my mother’s pen, a pen that she’d held and written with when she was very much alive, was now on my finger. I felt tears creeping toward the corners of my eyes, and I blinked them away.

  Writing in ink along the edge of an envelope’s flap is like sealing it with wax. If it’s been opened, you can tell because the tops of the letters don’t line up exactly with the bottoms. These were unbroken. Is that why my mom had written my name where she had, to let me know that the words inside were meant for only me? My heart lifted just a little at the thought.

  “Are you going to open it?” my dad asked. He was, I realized, as curious as I was about its contents. I slipped the envelope into my bag.

  “Not yet,” I said, and reached for the box. The gift I would open now; the note I would save until I was alone.

  The box was lighter than I expected it to be, and when I picked it up off the table, I heard a sliding rattle as its contents slipped to one side. I took a breath and lifted the lid. Inside was a silver cable chain with a thick rectangular pendant. My dad smiled when I pulled it from the box.

  “I thought that might be what it was,” he said. “She didn’t have it on when
she d—” He choked a little, his eyes dropping to the table. “When you were born. I always wondered what she’d done with it.”

  “This was hers?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “She came back from Theden with it,” he said.

  I palmed the pendant, studying the odd symbol etched into its surface. It looked kind of like a fishhook with the number thirteen beneath it. Her graduation year. “What is it?” I asked.

  Dad shrugged. “I always assumed it was some school thing,” he said. “Your mom never said. But she treasured that necklace. I’m not sure I ever saw her take it off.”

  I set the pendant back in the box. “I’m so confused, Dad. Why would Mom ask you to lie to me?”

  He hesitated for so long, I wondered if he was going to respond at all.

  “Something happened to your mom at Theden,” he said finally. “She was different when she came back.”

  “Different how?”

  “The Aviana I grew up with was ambitious, for one thing. Not in a bad way. She just had these big dreams, you know? When she got into Theden, I figured that was it. She’d go, and she wouldn’t come back. And that was okay. I loved her. I just wanted her to be happy.”

  “And was she?” I asked. “Happy?”

  “I thought so. She had all these new friends and was always going on about her classes. When she didn’t come home for Christmas our senior year, I resigned myself to the fact that I probably wouldn’t see her again. Your grandparents were gone by then, so she didn’t have much of a reason to come back.” His brow furrowed. “But then, about a week before she was supposed to graduate, she showed up at my house and told me she’d dropped out. She said she’d changed her mind about college. Didn’t want to go anymore. She said she wanted to start a family instead. Then she asked me to marry her.”

  I stared at him. This bore no resemblance to the love story I’d heard growing up. Two high school sweethearts who eloped in the Kings County Courthouse on graduation day and honeymooned in a camping tent. That version made sense. This one didn’t. My dad could tell what I was thinking.

  “Your mother was impulsive,” he replied. “Irresistibly impulsive. And I was powerless to refuse her.” He smiled and signaled for our waiter. But he hadn’t given me the answer I was looking for. He may have explained why he’d gotten married at eighteen, but not why my mother had wanted to, or, more important, why she would’ve dropped out of the most prestigious high school in the country just shy of graduation. Why she would’ve given up her future for something that could’ve waited.

  “And that’s it? That’s the whole story?”

  Dad looked hesitant, like he didn’t want to say yes but couldn’t in good conscience say no. “Your mom, she was unlike anyone I’d ever met,” he said finally. “She had this . . . quality about her. An inner calm. Even when we were kids. She didn’t worry about stuff the way the rest of us did. It was like she was immune to it almost.” He paused, and the thought I did not inherit that shot through my head. His eyes were sad when he continued. “When she showed up at my house that day, she seemed . . . shaken. But when I’d ask her about it, she’d shut down.”

  “What could’ve happened to her?” I asked.

  “I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times,” Dad replied. “Wishing I’d pressed her more to find out. But I thought I had time. I didn’t think she’d . . .”

  The unspoken word hung heavily between us. He didn’t think she’d die. But she had, just eight months later.

  “But something happened,” I said. “Something must’ve.”

  Eventually Dad nodded. “Something must’ve,” he said.

  3

  “PEANUTS OR PRETZELS?”

  “Pretzels.” Hershey held out her hand without looking up. We were midair, side by side in first class (thank you, Theden), and I was waiting for her to fall asleep so I could finally open the card from my mom, but my companion was completely immersed in one of the many gossip magazines she’d downloaded to her tablet. I hadn’t slept the night before, thinking about that little paper rectangle, wondering what it said, hoping it would answer the shit storm of questions in my head.

  “Sir? Peanuts or pretzels?” The flight attendant had moved on to the man across the aisle from me.

  “Peanuts,” he mumbled, and the flight attendant reached into her cart.

  “Uh, actually, would you mind having pretzels instead?” The man, Hershey, and the flight attendant all looked at me. “I’m allergic to peanuts,” I explained.

  “There was no allergy listed on the manifest,” the flight attendant said accusingly. “Cindy!” she called down the aisle. “Is there an allergy on the manifest?” Cindy consulted her tablet then came running toward us, tripping over a man’s foot and nearly face-planting in the process. I heard Hershey snort.

  “Aurora Vaughn, 3B. Peanuts.”

  Our flight attendant’s expression went from accusing to five-alarm fire. She started snatching peanut packages from passengers in neighboring rows.

  “Sorry,” I said to the guy across the aisle.

  “So what would happen if you ate one?” Hershey asked me as the flight attendant handed me a bag of pretzels.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I had a pretty bad reaction to a peanut butter cracker when I was three. A woman at my daycare had to use an EpiPen.”

  “Does it freak you out?” Hershey asked. “Knowing that you’re one poor snacking choice away from death?”

  I looked at her. Seriously? Who said things like that?

  “No,” I said, reaching for my earphones. “I don’t even think about it.” I didn’t need to. Lux analyzed ingredient lists, tracked allergic reactions and food-borne illnesses in other users who consumed the same foods, and alerted you if someone in your immediate vicinity was either allergic to something you were eating or eating something you were allergic to. The only time I had to be cautious about it was in confined spaces with no network access. In other words, on planes. I slipped in the earbuds and turned up the volume.

  A few minutes later Hershey flung off her seat belt and stood up. “I have to pee,” she announced, dropping her tablet on my lap and stepping over me into the aisle. As soon as she was gone, I yanked out my earbuds and pulled the envelope from my bag. Careful not to rip the paper, I slid my nail under the flap and gently tugged it open.

  The card inside was made of soft cotton paper, the kind they didn’t make anymore. My brain registered the number of handwritten lines before my heart did, and when my heart caught up, it sunk. There were only three.

  I formed them free, and free they must remain

  Till they enthrall themselves;

  I else must change their nature.

  I turned the card over, but the other side was blank. So much for answering my questions. This had raised a hundred more.

  “What’s that?” Hershey was back. I hadn’t seen her walk up.

  “Nothing,” I said quickly, and tried to slip the card back into my bag. But Hershey snatched it. Her eyes skimmed over the words. “Weird,” she declared, handing it back to me as she settled into her seat. “What’s it a quote from?”

  “I dunno. It’s from my mom.” As soon as I said it, I regretted it. I did not want to talk about my mom with Hershey.

  “Did it come with a note?”

  I shook my head. This was the note. Instinctively, I reached for the pendant around my neck. It was surprisingly heavy on my collarbone.

  I saw Hershey open her browser to GoSearch. “Read it to me again,” she said.

  “‘I formed them free, and free they must remain—’” I said, and paused, puzzling over the words I’d just read as Hershey typed them. Who formed who free? “‘Till they enthrall them—’”

  Hershey interrupted me. “It’s from Paradise Lost,” she said. “Book Three, lines one twenty-four to one twenty-six.”

  “Is that a play?” I’d heard of Paradise Lost but knew nothing about it.

  “A poem,” He
rshey replied. “A super long and super boring poem published in 1667.” Her eyes skimmed the text on her screen. “Oh my god, shoot me now. Is this even English?”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “John Milton,” she said, tapping the thumbnail of his photo to enlarge it. She zoomed in on his eyelids. “A man in desperate need of blepharoplasty.”

  Hershey clicked back to her magazines, bored already. I pulled up the Panopticon entry for Paradise Lost on my own tablet and began to read. The poem, considered one of the greatest literary works in the English language, retells the Biblical story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I tapped a link for a full text version of the poem and my eyes glazed over almost as quickly as Hershey’s had. None of the books we’d read in class were anything like this. Public school curriculum focused on contemporary lit, novels that had been written in the last twenty years. Was this the kind of stuff they read at Theden? Panic fluttered behind my ribs. What if I couldn’t keep up?

  I closed my eyes and leaned back against the headrest. Please, God, don’t let me fail, I said silently.

  You won’t fail.

  My head jerked. I hadn’t heard the Doubt since the summer before seventh grade. I remembered the effect it’d had on me back then, the peaceful feeling that settled over me after it spoke. This was the opposite experience. I was rattled and unsettled and all those other words that mean not at all okay. The Doubt was for unstable people and artists and little kids. Not, as the application packet had made explicitly clear, for Theden students. The psychologist who’d conducted my psych eval asked at least three times when I’d last heard the voice, relenting only when she was satisfied that it’d been more than three years. If the members of the admissions committee knew what I’d just heard, my time at Theden would be over before it started. That was part of what made my new school different. You couldn’t just be smart. You had to be “psychologically impervious.” Immune to crazy.