The Falling Woman: A Novel

by Richard Farrell

  “I got caught up again,” he said, knocking on the door. “I’m sorry. I’m going nuts with these last details.”

  When she refused to respond, he knew things were bad. In their growing repertoire of domestic thrusts and parries, closed door/running water ranked just below lights out/asleep. Not a full-scale nuclear attack, but the warheads were armed. He’d pushed his luck with a string of late nights, and Wendy held grudges, not forever but long enough to warrant some form of apology and self-abnegation.

  “Tomorrow, I’ll have to sit across from Dickie Gray,” he said. He lowered himself to the floor and sat with his plate on his lap. “The man’s forgotten more about accident investigations than I’ll ever learn.” He hoped exposing such vulnerability might soften his wife’s hurt feelings. The water kept running. The door remained closed. “The man’s a legend. I’m not kidding. He’s the real deal.”

  He heard her feet shuffle across the bathroom floor. Was she softening? Was she moving toward forgiveness?

  Wendy Luard Radford always carried herself with a nonchalant charm. She never tried to impress, never needed to show off her beauty. After they started dating, and Wendy confessed about the abuse she’d endured at the hands of her ex—a semipro kickboxer, part-time DJ, and full-time scumbag—Charlie could barely contain his own rage. He wanted to find the man, rip his head off, literally kill him, consequences be damned. Even now, years later, he still struggled with that possibility and wondered if he would ever be able to let it go. The thought of that man touching Wendy’s body still made him sick. But Charlie knew that if he ever thought he was saving Wendy, if he thought she needed his protection, he was sorely mistaken. The ex-boyfriend was her one lapse in judgment, the single regret that she’d admit to.

  The woman he married turned out to be tough, durable, and strong. Most days, she needed him far less than he needed her. He loved her, plain and simple, a classic old-fashioned love. He never wanted to be with anyone else. Never felt tempted. He marveled at the combination of her resilience and decency. At times, he felt foolish, loving a woman as much as he loved Wendy. He never talked about it with the guys, never participated in the male banter of coveting other women or reducing them to sex objects. He loved her so much he was almost embarrassed by his feelings. And with each passing year, she became more mysterious, not less.

  He knocked on the door again. For all her strength and charm, Wendy could also tumble into despair without warning. More and more, a darkness overtook her, like a spring storm blown across the prairie. During those times, Charlie could only stand back and watch. He’d find her sitting in the dark, an empty wine bottle on the floor. Other times, she wouldn’t get out of bed. Once she fell asleep with an open bottle of sleeping pills next to the bed. She swore that she wasn’t suicidal, swore that she had simply drifted off to sleep after taking one pill, but he became more attentive after that, worried about her more. And when she fell into melancholia, no amount of attention, kindness, or love could draw her out. And the source of Wendy’s despair was within his power to solve. Wendy wanted to have a child.

  Not having kids was something they’d agreed on together. He’d been honest with her from the very start. At the time, she seemed to feel the same. A life together without complications. Only their love to sustain them. Simple. Clean. But she was seeing her OB tomorrow, and reluctantly, Charlie agreed to go with her.

  At last, she opened the door. Soft light backlit her.

  “Why do you put yourself through this?” she said.

  Wendy’s long red hair fell across her freckled shoulders, which he loved almost as much as he loved her. She’d been a swimmer in high school, and her muscles remained ropy, rounded, perfect. His heart still raced when he touched her skin. She stepped out of the bathroom and sat next to him. He stroked her arm. Thin, golden hair glistened in the light.

  “I’m so nervous for tomorrow,” he said.

  “Should you put so much stock in a first meeting with this guy?” she asked.

  “He’s the best at the agency,” he said. “This doesn’t always have to end poorly.”

  “I worry you’re setting yourself up for more heartache,” she said.

  “I need this, Wend,” he said. “His approval matters to me.”

  “Can we talk about the other thing?” she said.

  He didn’t want to switch gears, but she leaned into him and her hair fell across his chest.

  “My feelings haven’t changed,” he said. “I love you more than life itself, but I’m not cut out to be a father. You know that. You know why.”

  “Nothing is worse than this, Charlie,” she said. “It’s like I have this hole inside me.”

  He reached out and held her hand. Her skin felt cool and soft.

  “I want to be a mother. I want to have a child with you. I’m not going to give up.” She kissed him lightly on the lips. “Now tell me about the magnificent Dickie Gray.”

  5

  Beneath the spun-aluminum finial ball, her grandfather’s American flag fluttered in the breeze. The flag’s field of red and white stripes unfurled, folded, unfurled again, its canton of forty-eight white stars on blue cloth snapping as another gust lifted its edge. Chipped paint and rust freckled the lower pole. At the flagpole’s base, sprigs of marsh parsley and skunk weed threatened to choke the just-emerging shoots of tulip bulbs that Erin had planted last fall.

  Out of the slate-gray sky, two eastern crows arrived. She loved birds, though she hated crows, with their iridescent coats and arrogant squawks, bullying the lesser birds away from her feeders. The first crow hopped along a brick pathway that cut through the fallow gardens, followed by the second. Where the brick path widened to the patio, dried leaves swirled in intermittent wind. The leaves scattered up to the porch. One of the crows squawked, and they both startled and flew.

  Their house was a turn-of-the-century Colonial Revival with weathered shingles and burgundy shutters. A side door faced the Chesapeake like a sailor on starboard watch. Standing at an upstairs window, she stared toward the water, trying to avoid her reflection in the glass. Thin and gaunt after the session with the doctor, she knew she was still sick but not yet dead. The news was still settling over their lives.

  Behind her on the bed, a suitcase sat open. She’d packed and unpacked three times already that morning.

  “I don’t want you to go,” Doug said.

  Instead, Doug wanted her to begin a third cycle of gemcitabine. They’d been arguing about it for a week, ever since the oncology report came back. But the prospect of six more weeks of stomach pain and debilitating headaches—no. Enough was enough. She’d agreed to two cycles to buy time. She’d done that.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, turning from the window. “It’s only a few days.”

  Once again, Doug listed the various risk factors associated with her planned trip: delays in treatment, disruptions in routine, fatigue, anemia, infection, relapse. A litany she knew by heart.

  “What happens if you throw a clot?” he said. “From where you’ll be, it’s more than two hours to the nearest hospital.”

  She returned to the window and imagined oceanfront cabins, sugar pines, books, and a string of silent days on the Marin Headlands, away from all this disease, treatment, and madness. Away from Doug.

  “The crows never go hungry,” she said.

  Doug didn’t respond.

  Her husband was a practical man, kind and sincere too but contemptuous of her whimsy. As he’d done since they first married, he ignored her musings. They were an ill-suited match, except they’d been together a quarter century, raised a family, built a beautiful house in Annapolis, sent the girls to a private university in Pennsylvania. Cancer never fit into their plans. Though the latest reports were encouraging enough—the tumor had not grown, radiation and chemo had checked the spread, no metastases, no evidence of trouble in her diseased body’s hinterlands—the news did not signal a victory but, as her doctor had said, a much-needed truce.

&nbs
p; Erin refolded her jeans when Lexie entered. The stout English bulldog snorted and paced back and forth near their bed. Lexie was her dog, loyal to her. She wondered what would become of the dog after she was gone. More and more, these questions stole into her thoughts: What would become of the dog? Who would care for the gardens? Who would take out the recycling? She worried about the most mundane details, as if her death would simply interrupt the routines.

  Lexie hated suitcases. Like Doug, the dog was a creature most comfortable with habit. The sight of packed luggage triggered a primordial fear, manifest in frenetic hip shakes. Erin scratched Lexie’s chin until the dog settled.

  “A retreat for cancer survivors?” Doug said. “It sounds nothing like you.”

  “I need a break,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I’ve earned it.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve always been so,” he said, checking himself, “so damn impulsive.”

  He avoided anger the way another man might avoid a downed high voltage line. In a moment, he’d back away and apologize for cursing. Sometimes she wished he’d just stand and fight.

  “Don’t worry about how it affects the rest of us,” he said.

  Or he’d cut the power and pout. She hated this more.

  “You need a break too,” she said. “You’ve been taking care of me all winter.”

  She’d made him lists. Doctors to call. Appointments to cancel. Insurance claims to complete. He needed lists. Doug measured self-worth through task completion. His use of lists had become one of the great strains in their married life. After the girls went to college and she became sick, Erin began to feel like little more than another item on his endless lists. But ever the masterful accommodator, she learned to adapt to his behavior, even came to appreciate the security and comfort in the contours of his rigidity. Outside, the crows returned to her gardens. She crossed the room, wrapped her arms around her husband, and kissed his cheek.

  “This disease has taught me patience, compliance, even a measure of grace over the last six months,” she said. “But self-pity has no place.”

  Her words wounded, but perhaps some wounds were unavoidable. She released the embrace, zipped her suitcase, stared out at the crows, and thought of Adam.

  Adam Moskowitz worked upstairs from her at Hawkins, Lemenanger & Walton. Erin was in contracts, with its monotonous days that compensated for accuracy, not style. The litigators orbited a different planet. She knew Adam only by reputation. He’d been lead counsel on a class-action suit against a major Japanese automaker. Airbags kept exploding. Instead of saving people, the airbags were killing children. In his closing statement, he quoted Shakespeare: “Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.”

  For weeks after, everyone at HLW was talking about him.

  One morning, a year before she was sick, Adam joined her in the lobby elevator. He was on his phone, on the way to the tenth floor. Tall, with broad shoulders, a pleasant, easy smile, he looked like an athlete, deeply confident, like he could do anything, with penetrating blue eyes that softened when he smiled.

  “I know you,” he said.

  “I doubt that,” she said, trying to suppress the shameful surge of schoolgirl energy rushing through her chest. She’d never cheated on Doug, never really even been tempted until Adam came bursting through her defenses.

  More than a year passed before anything happened. Sometimes they’d eat lunch together or send occasional emails that grew more personal over time. He told her he was leaving his wife; she complained about Doug’s habits, the absence of passion. Eventually, they wound up together in Atlanta for a meeting. By then, the outcome was inevitable. For three days, they stayed on the same floor at the Hyatt without so much as a hug, until she lingered after the HLW partners’ dinner and they shared a bottle of Lodi zinfandel. He walked her to her room, touched her wrist, and they kissed.

  6

  That morning, Radford was so nervous about his meeting with Dickie Gray that when he entered L’Enfant Plaza, he forgot to clip his ID badge onto his shirt pocket. A frustrated security guard directed employees around him while he fumbled in his briefcase. By the time he reached the elevators, his starched shirt was already soaked through with sweat. Photographs of vintage airplanes adorned the walls. Constellations, Comets, old DC-3s. The NTSB also investigated highway accidents, train and subway wrecks, maritime disasters, but if the agency were the athletic department of a high school, the aviation investigators were its football team. And if Radford were to push that logic, he was the JV water boy while Dickie Gray was the varsity quarterback.

  Radford hoped Yankee X-Ray could finally get him on the field. But he needed his report to be perfect. If he screwed up in front of Gray, he might not just get cut from the team but possibly be expelled from the agency itself. In the past year, there’d been a hiring freeze, with more cutbacks rumored.

  He spent the morning proofreading his work. Four times he talked himself into making changes to the report, and five times he reprinted the whole damn thing, all fifty-one pages. After lunch, he wrote up an addendum to the final draft and slipped it into the back of the folder. As he printed the final copies, he thought of a dozen more questions he needed to ask.

  He called Wendy before heading up to up to Gray’s office.

  “God, Wend, I’m so nervous. What if he doesn’t accept my report?”

  “You’ll be fine,” she said half-heartedly. “Don’t forget my appointment this afternoon.” She was still upset over yesterday’s unresolved argument, but he’d called to get a last-second pep talk, not to continue their talk about having a child.

  “Don’t be mad,” he said. “Please don’t be mad at me now.”

  “Nothing ever changes,” she said. “Good luck, Charlie. You’ll do great.”

  On the sixth floor, a receptionist directed Radford to wait in Dickie Gray’s office. “Mr. Gray will be back soon.” Radford welcomed the reprieve and silently rehearsed his opening statement.

  Gray’s small office possessed a commanding view of the Washington Channel, but the room was a disaster. Boxes were stacked on the floor in haphazard fashion, boxes containing years’ worth of evidence, reports, and technical data. But it was as if Gray never had filed a single document in his career. Toward the rear of the office were more files, while folders, pens, and empty root beer cans littered his desk. The trash can overflowed with paper. The office suggested disorder but not quite chaos. The backlog of true diligence, Radford thought.

  There’d been rumors about Gray, that he was only hanging on, collecting a check and pushing paperclips. Radford refused to believe that the mess was a symptom of a man who didn’t know when to quit. Newspaper headlines and photographs, mostly aerial black-and-whites of accident sites, hung in Gray’s office. Radford recognized a few of the photos. A shattered L-1011 in Dallas. The grisly pieces of the Concorde at de Gaulle. A famous image of the Pan Am logo on the plane’s tail in ruins at Lockerbie. Standing there, in the midst of the man’s work, Radford suddenly felt very small, a movie extra called in to talk with an aging star. He’d spent two months laboring over every detail of Yankee X-Ray, worrying about the weather, the tire pressure, the goddamn fuel quantities, but Dickie Gray had done the real thing. For a second, Radford considered signing the report, leaving it on Gray’s desk, and slinking out of his office.

  “You crack the case?” Gray said, coming up behind him. Radford stood and awkwardly stuck out his hand, which the older man shook quickly. Gray crossed through his office, navigating around the labyrinth of boxes to sit at his desk.

  Dickie Gray was tall, with a beer gut ballooning over his belt. He resembled a truck driver with a Tennessee drawl more than an ex-fighter pilot with two air medals. In clear violation of agency protocol, Gray wore jeans, work boots, and a plaid shirt. His close-trimmed white hair thinned at the back, and his skin was deeply tanned, a generational fuck-you to sunscreen companies everywhere. He’d spent most of his time in the field, in contrast to the majority of
sun-starved bureaucrats imprisoned in this building. Radford knew nothing about Gray’s personal life, but everything about the man’s appearance screamed lifelong bachelor, a man married to his work. There were no arguments over children, no distractions. If there were a Mrs. Dickie Gray, Radford imagined her on the shortlist for sainthood. His gray-blue eyes were steely and intense, though wrinkles now encircled them, softening his face. Gray scanned his messy office, spotted his target, and reached across his desk. He grabbed a manila folder and handed it to Radford.

  “Your overtime forms,” Gray said. “All signed and approved.”

  Radford suspected a secret order to all the seeming chaos, an esoteric system that made no sense to an outsider. He bet that the old man could find any file in the room in six seconds.

  “Let’s get a drink,” Gray said. “For obvious reasons, I no longer hold meetings in here.”

  Without waiting for Radford to agree, Gray stood, grabbed his faded blue windbreaker off a hook, and turned off the office light. Radford checked his watch. He didn’t have time for a beer, but he certainly couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Wendy would have to understand, even if he arrived a few minutes late to the doctor’s appointment.

  Outside the headquarters building, a bright spring afternoon greeted the two men. The cherry blossoms were peaking late, and tourists swept over the city with their cameras. They crossed the Mall, passing art museums, the cavernous buildings of the Smithsonian, before turning left up Pennsylvania Avenue past Lafayette Park. Gardeners in green jumpsuits mowed the White House lawn in the fading light.