Lessons in Falling

by Diana Gallagher

  She scans the paper in front of her. “She already has two visitors. I’m sorry.”

  Has. Present tense. Still breathing.

  “But–”

  “I’m sorry,” she says firmly. “Come back tomorrow.”

  I SLEEP WITH my phone clenched in my palm. Every hour between midnight and six a.m., I wake up, certain that it’s the vibration of a text message. It never is. It’s just my mind.

  “My mom works on the neonatal floor at Stony Brook, and she says that Cassie’s out of critical condition,” Jacki Guzman tells me at our lockers, wiping away a tear in relief. “She’s stable now. It was, like, a miracle recovery. Aren’t you so glad? I am so, so glad.”

  Out of critical condition. While I don’t know how accurate secondhand information from a neonatal nurse is and I’m pretty sure that all sorts of laws are being violated by these details being shared, it’s enough to fill me with hope.

  Word catches that Cassie is out of danger, and high tide returns. When she comes back to school, there will be whispers. Right now, though, everyone is as jovial or annoyed as they’d be on any other day.

  How are you? I text her.

  An instant later, the response: Got a hot doctor.

  Finally.

  I’m shaking and laughing a little because of course that would be Cassie’s response–flippant and irreverent–and when Jacki shuts her locker and watches me with concern, I ignore it. Who cares?

  My fingers rush to reply, hitting all the wrong letters and forcing me to retype. The same panic from yesterday rushes through me, as though if I don’t reply fast enough, she’ll vanish. They wouldn’t let me in yesterday.

  Yeah, I don’t remember much of yesterday. So casual, as if she’s telling me about a night of drinking.

  The next message arrives just as briskly. Please visit? I miss you. All I do here is sleep.

  Whatever led her to the water, she’s back again, away from rock bottom and swimming back to the surface. She’ll be back, she’ll get through this, and I won’t let her fall again.

  Clutching the phone so that those precious words don’t slip away (she’s alive, she’s okay), I find Juliana in the cafeteria next to Andreas, who’s in the midst of illustrating on his napkin with a ketchup-dipped French fry. When she looks up and sees me, she seems almost grateful for the interruption. “Cassie texted me,” I tell her. “She’s okay.”

  Several nods bob around the table. “Cool, cool,” says Dimitri, taking a tremendous gulp of milk.

  Juliana’s eyebrows spike up enough so that I know Cassie didn’t text her.

  I win. In some feeble way.

  “MISS!” A NURSE calls. I’m already past. I’m the girl racing her best friend down to the shoreline.

  When I round the corner, Mrs. Hopeswell has her back to me as she leans against the wall. “Alan?” she calls.

  I slow to a stop. My breathing is too loud for this corridor.

  She turns around and gives me a ghost of a smile. “Oh, Savannah.” Based on the wrinkles in her green blouse and the disarray of her hair, she probably slept on a hospital chair. “How are you, honey?” She’s Cassie with dark hair, a little shorter and a little plumper, with the same luminous eyes that pin you in place.

  What’s the appropriate response?

  Luckily, she doesn’t wait for my reply. “She’s awake.” Her fingers circle each other without taking hold. “She’s looking forward to seeing you.”

  Did Cassie tell her about our meeting with Mr. Riley? Did he leave a message on their voicemail, wanting to meet with her parents? Were those conversations about focusing on “viable career paths” so bad that she believed her parents would rather not see her again?

  “Savs?” Cass calls from the room.

  I expected wires and machines. Vestiges of salt water and purple-blue skin from hypothermia. Instead, Cass sits cross-legged on top of the blanket with a Chinese checkers board, hair in a simple ponytail. Her cheeks are egg white.

  When she smiles, I extend my arms for a hug, for once being the initiator of such affection. I probably won’t let go. The nurses will have to wrench me away. She’s okay. She’s okay.

  She’s cool under my arms, hugging me back without the usual vigor. “I’m sorry,” she says. Her eyes are glassy. I’ve never seen Cassie cry. Not when the kids used to tease her for being so tall, not when she dated Toby Mickelson in eighth grade and he dumped her before the Moving Up Dance. “It’s just…it’s been a bad time.”

  I settle in next to her. “It’ll get better from here.” Unbidden, my mind flips back to You wouldn’t be able to handle it. Cassie meant that about El Pueblo, sure, but was it also a code for her? What about Juliana–what does she know?

  She musters up a shaky smile. “So what’s everyone saying about me? Did anyone cry? I will bet the three dollars in my wallet that Jacki cried.”

  I wonder if her mother listens at the door. What have their conversations been like? What about with the doctors–is Cassie steering around them, too?

  Whatever she’s been hiding, I want her to feel like she can tell me. “So how are you…” Doing? Feeling? What are you supposed to say when your best friend– laughing, scheming, singing to silly songs on the radio–tries to kill herself?

  She nods like I’ve filled in the blanks. “They put me in the psychiatric emergency room and let me tell you, it’s some wild shit in there. Like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Don’t give me that look, Savs, I did read it.”

  The last thing on my mind is her schoolwork. Instead, I’m seeing her walk into the water, shivering but not turning back. Her engine rumbling, puffs of smoke coughing out of the tailpipe. The final line to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem we’d studied last year, scribbled in her loopy cursive and left on the passenger seat.

  “Police officers are stationed down the hall, just in case. There was a lady who was yelling the entire time I was there. Makes you reconsider the whole living thing.” She half-smiles. “Kidding. I don’t want to end up back there, that’s for sure.”

  We fall quiet, listening to the clink of marbles against the checkers board. Roll in, roll out. No method to the way she’s placing them, yet she doesn’t seem to mind.

  “What happened that morning?” I say finally.

  Cassie coughs as though she hasn’t heard me. “I’m thinking about going into filmmaking. Art direction, cinematography, special effects. What do you think? You could write the screenplays.”

  I turn to her, disturbing the precarious balance of the marbles. She swoops over to catch them, fingers shaking. “You know you can talk to me, right?”

  “Yep.” She rolls the marbles around in her palm. “Lately I’ve seen so many images, and all of them are moving.” That half smile again. “Could be the drugs talking.” She returns them to their hollowed spots on the board. Tap. Tap. “I think I should consider film school instead of art school. My dad seems to halfway approve, though he probably just feels bad.”

  Is this the way she talks to her doctors, leading them down detours until they get lost and give up? Even I’m having a hard time keeping up.

  Do better.

  I failed to follow when it mattered most. If I can piece together the answers now, I won’t lose track of her again.

  “Why did you leave the car running?”

  The slightest flush of pink blooms in her pale cheeks. “In case I changed my mind.”

  She wasn’t set on it. I cling to that. She wanted a way back.

  When one of the marbles slips loose, the ping of glass against metal resonates in the near-empty room.

  “If I had died,” she says, looking at me frankly for the first time, “you would have spoken at the funeral, right? None of those other assholes making up bullshit about how much I meant to them.”

  “Of course,” I say automatically. Always Late Nick, all the summer friends who held Cassie’s attention by the bonfire–they’re not here. They don’t matter; they never have. “Why did you
call me that night?”

  “I don’t remember.” She lines up the marbles on the board. “But I knew you wouldn’t answer.”

  That hits me straight in the stomach, swift and strong as a fall onto the balance beam. “I would have if I’d known–”

  “Thing is, Savs, your life’s like a hallway. Along both sides, the doors are wide open.” Her fingers touch each marble. “People are hanging out the doors. Savannah! Come in! Bring your PSAT scores! My hallway? The faster I walk, the faster the doors close. It’s only me in there.” She tilts the board. The marbles stream across the metal grooves and tumble to the floor. She doesn’t make a move to pick them up and neither do I; I’m rooted to this clinical white blanket, unable to budge until she finishes. “I know what you’re thinking. I could have tried harder, right? Gone to class and shit. But I couldn’t have done anything differently. Do you know what I mean? I wouldn’t have been able to change a thing. It wasn’t in me.”

  I want to yell. I want to tug on her bony shoulders and shake her until her eyes focus and she realizes what she’s saying. Instead, my stomach hurts as though her words physically struck me.

  Failing my road test, blowing out Dad’s tire, messing up in the gym–none of it compares to the crushing reality that if I’d answered the phone, I could have stopped this. She’s all but said it herself.

  “I’m sorry,” I say instead, and I hate that my voice wavers because I need to be the strong one. I can’t fail again.

  She inspects the board as if she hasn’t heard me.

  I try again. “What are you going to do now?”

  She runs her fingers over the grooves where the marbles had been. “They’re keeping me under observation to make sure I don’t make any sudden moves, I guess.”

  I wish she had said, “Open those doors.”

  CASSIE’S EULOGY. I feel ill even considering it; after all, I would have been the obvious choice to speak. I’d have to stand in front of Ponquogue’s senior class, packed into a church that Cassie never attended. “Hi, everyone, I’m Cassie’s asshole best friend who didn’t answer the phone the night before her suicide.” I would have been the one to throw flowers on her grave.

  I’d start with the Cassie that I knew first, when poetry and Beth O’Leary (of all people) solidified our friendship. While kids at every other school on Long Island ran outside for Field Day and ate hot dogs to celebrate, we’d crowded into the library for the First Grade Poetry Jamboree. As the crowd had strained to hear Sarah Langhorne’s “My Puppies and Me,” Beth had leaned over. “Where’s your mom, Cascade?” she’d asked innocently.

  “On her way,” Cassie said just as smoothly.

  Christina McGovern peeked around Beth’s shoulder. “Beth said your mom’s in the loony bin.”

  Cassie stood completely rigid. The applause thundered around us as Beth and Christina stared at her expectantly.

  Then Beth shrugged. “I heard it from Liam? On the bus?”

  “Liam is stupid,” I said firmly. “Cassie’s mom got a flat tire. She’ll be here soon.”

  Despite the fact that there was no way to prove how I had this information, they retreated as I grabbed Cassie’s arm and pulled her away from the sweaty flock of first-graders.

  By the final day of school, Cassie and I were best friends. It was simply understood. She braided my hair on the bus and gave chilly looks to anyone who teased me for being short. By the first day of second grade, I was officially Savannah. I slipped on the name like a too-big coat that I’d someday grow into. It was a mature name, one without the childish ring of “Katie.” It didn’t sound like anyone else’s name in my family.

  The Cassie that everyone knew best was the girl in middle school. She became fingers and a right eye squeezed shut behind a camera. Sure, everyone believed they were a photographer with their cell phones, but Cassie was actually good at it. She came to all of my meets and captured me upside down. The hallway displays for the photo classes became Cassie’s displays. I became cooler because I was that midair girl in the pictures. Everyone was cooler in her pictures. They were deeper; they had contours and shadings.

  Maybe Cassie should have taken self-portraits. Maybe that would have helped.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THEY MIGHT HAVE changed their numbers. That’s my first excuse.

  The second excuse is the one I fear–that they’re pissed and have rendered me irrelevant after those early weeks of well-wishes and Come to the gym soon!

  Cassie has been in the hospital for three days, which means I’ve had three nights of sleeping for three hours apiece and plenty more hours spent staring up at the shadows playing across my ceiling. I’ve reimagined every conversation. The afternoon we spent in her kitchen after I’d called her that morning, the way she’d shifted from defeated to no big deal, everything’s fine so convincingly. Her arm around me as we stood facing the ocean, her eyes glittering as we talked about New York City. The way Mr. Riley shut her down.

  The constantly replaying loop of memories yields one conclusion: I should have known. I shouldn’t have accepted her evasive answers. Instead of letting the phone roll out of my hand, I could have talked her out of it, or talked to her for so long that she fell asleep and stayed in bed that morning instead of driving to the bridge.

  Not only am I a shit driver and gymnast, but I’m a shit friend, too.

  I stop at Emery’s number. She was the one I felt closest to, the one who laughed the loudest at my jokes and rolled her eyes when Jess preened in the mirror. I click her name first, and before I can talk myself out of it, I add Ally, Monica, and Jess to the group message.

  Hey, strangers, I miss you! I’m sorry I disappeared.

  Weak, but honest. It’s the best I’ve got right now. The reality–I’m sorry I was too jealous and wallowing to feel happy for you, or to even talk to you–seems a little heavy for an icebreaker message.

  “I don’t know about those girls,” Cassie had said as we hung out in the backseat of my dad’s car on the way home from a meet, eating potato chips (the perfect post-competition snack, obviously). “I think you only like them because you’re under the influence of chalk.”

  “We spend almost thirty hours a week together,” I’d said.

  “You’re always trying to beat them. What kind of friendship is that?”

  Yes, Monica was as tightly coiled as her dark curls, and Jess would cheat during strength and get us all in trouble. We understood each other, though; the same exhaustion burned in our muscles and we’d struggle to lift our arms as our coach Matt said, “Just one more bar routine.” (“Just one more” meant we had at least three more.)

  Cass, however, did have a valid point. Relegated to the couch with a glass of water and a vial of painkillers, it hurt me too much to see the videos they posted and read their enthusiastic texts about new skills and future plans when I no longer had either. So when I offered evasive answers to their questions about my knee, they’d stopped asking. I’d let them drift until they were out of sight.

  Somehow, with Cassie right beside me every day, she’d nearly slipped away. I can’t be that friend anymore. I have to be alert. It might be too late for my old teammates to forgive my absence from their lives. If there’s a shot to make amends, though, I’ll take it.

  In the early morning rush at Ponquogue High School, with a volume level that has mercifully returned to high tide under a full moon, I check for a response. Story of my life lately.

  Seeing you at the bonfire was quite possibly the highlight of my eighteen years of existence, Emery replies. She’s written back to me individually instead of to everyone.

  By the end of first period, no one else has replied, confirming what I suspected to be true. I’m a terrible friend.

  Another message from Emery. Sooooo you’re coming to practice today, right?!

  For a moment, I actually consider it.

  When I was younger, it was the safest place I had when Richard first deployed to Afghanistan. It was my own world th
at came with its own set of problems and challenges. It was one that I knew how to maneuver. I was certain if I practiced hard, the outcome would be what I wanted. Then, of course, I learned that the latter wasn’t true.

  As the hallway thins out, I maintain the same slow pace. Is it just me, or are people avoiding eye contact? Either it’s because I’m the near-dead girl’s best friend, or my father is handing back a test today.

  This is not the normal, safe senior year I’ve been banking on. To say the least.

  Emery’s relentless. Gymnasts are focused, that’s for sure. So. Practice. Yes?

  No. No.

  I turn the corner for my locker and smash into Marcos’s chest. He stumbles into Jacki and her locker slams shut. “Ow, ow, ow! You just broke my hand!” she exclaims. Tears, immediately.

  “I’m sorry.” Marcos takes her baby-pale hand in his and examines it. “Can you move your fingers?”

  Get your hand out of his.

  Where did that thought come from? I fling open my locker and it resounds with an unreasonably loud bang. Subtle. “Don’t you guys have class?”

  “Study hall.” He flips her hand over, looking at the knuckles.

  Jacki hiccups her way to calmness. “I’m gonna have to go to the nurse,” she says, voice cracking, but the tears have subsided. I bet her hand wasn’t even in her locker. I bet she’s scared of loud noises like children who fear thunder. I know the difference between just sound and real pain.

  “Hey, Savannah.” Perhaps satisfied that Jacki’s injury will not require surgery or, I don’t know, a hand replacement, he approaches me. His fingers rest on the edge of the locker door, holding onto it hopefully. The same hands that plunged into freezing waters, pulled Cassie to the shore, kept her alive.

  His dimples crease as he smiles at me like it’s the most natural greeting in the world. “I like your hair.”

  That’s all it takes. I like your hair. The spiky pieces stand up with static cling from my run-in with his shirt.

  I close my locker and put my hand on that coconut hair. Pull his cool lips to mine. He tastes like morning.