The Falling Woman: A Novel

by Richard Farrell

  She sat up on the bed and began to laugh. Radford didn’t know why, but she laughed harder, her head falling to her knees, her laughter filling the cabin. He thought maybe she’d cracked, that maybe the pressure was too much.

  “What the hell is so funny?” he said.

  “You think I’m getting on an airplane?” she said between gasps. “Really?”

  38

  They spent Wednesday night in a motel off I-64. She didn’t know where they were, only that they had crossed into West Virginia. Erin said nothing when Radford gave her the key and said good night. She thought about running, about disappearing, but where would she have gone? That night, she slept poorly if at all. When she did sleep, she had awful dreams, dreams of fire and falling, dreams that shook her awake. In the morning, Radford knocked on her door early, handed her a coffee, and said they had to get going. She went indifferently with him, like a prisoner.

  They drove through the day on Thursday. A steady rain started to fall. Roads, towns, hours went by. She barely spoke. What she felt was numb, and confused, and entirely drained.

  Radford drove in his stocking feet. He told Erin that they would have to drive well into the night to make it back in time for the hearing on Friday. Erin replied that she didn’t care.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this can’t be easy.”

  “This is the way Adam came, but in reverse, when he brought me to the cabin,” she said. “That feels like a century ago.”

  “I need to ask you something,” he said. “How much do you trust him? Adam.”

  “I trusted him a lot,” she said. “But then he went behind my back to you, so who knows?”

  “But now,” he said, “will you reach out to him?”

  “For what?” she said. “What difference does it make?”

  “Would he call the press?”

  Erin shook her head. “Technically, he can’t,” she said. “He’s also my lawyer.”

  They had stopped for dinner in Terre Haute, Indiana. They still had nine hours to go. As they finished dinner, Erin spotted the first news van. The white van zoomed past the restaurant. Radford saw it too.

  “We’ll have to get off the main roads,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s not for us,” she said.

  “I can’t take the chance,” he said. “They could be tracking us somehow.”

  “What difference does it make?” she said. “Why not just hold a press conference right now?”

  Driving away from the restaurant, she thought for the first time about the families still holding out hope for their loved ones on the plane. What could they be thinking? She thought about Claire and Tory. Were they paying attention to the media frenzy? It had turned into a circus now. So much of what she’d done, so many of her decisions to disappear were meant to protect them from more suffering. It all seemed to have backfired.

  “We’ve got to get off the main drag,” he said again. “It will add time to the trip.”

  “You’re going to have to sleep, Mr. Radford,” she said. “Let’s just stop. We’re not going to drive all night.”

  “We are,” he said. “I have no choice. The hearing is tomorrow afternoon. I have to be back.”

  “Why should I care about your hearing?” she said.

  “Do you know what the easiest thing for me to do is?” he said. “To get on a plane, fly to my meeting, and just tell them who you are. I could end this all that easily.”

  “Then, why don’t you?” she said.

  The rain was steady and darkness had begun to fall. The hills in the distance released steam out of the treetops. She was exhausted, in need of solid rest, real sleep.

  “I don’t understand what you’re doing,” he said. “Maybe I don’t need to. You have your reasons. Had the press not shown up at that restaurant, we could’ve handled it without all this bullshit. I’d already be in Kansas by now. I don’t like what’s happened to you. It’s not how this should’ve gone down.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “How could I disappear from my family? How could I choose to stay away?”

  “In fact, yes,” he said. “That’s not my primary concern right now, but yes. Why?”

  She stared out the window. The world raced by in a blur.

  “It’s an impossible question to answer unless you understand what it’s like to say goodbye,” she said. “I sent my daughters off to college in the fall with the expectation that I would be dead before spring. We were all prepared for that. We’d said our goodbyes. Claire and Tory helped write my advance directive. We cried, we laughed, we told stories.”

  “That doesn’t explain your decision though,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t.”

  “I don’t have much time left. Why is that so hard to understand? Doug, Tory, and Claire, they’d already let me go. They deserved that crash to be the end. The goddamn chemo wasn’t supposed to buy me so much time. And yet, after nearly dying, I suddenly felt so alive.”

  “What happened to you,” he said, “what you went through—it’s beyond an explanation.”

  “It would’ve been easier if I’d just died,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “It would have.”

  She smiled. She appreciated his honesty. For some reason, the fact that he’d taken his shoes off while he drove made her trust him more. Finally, the tension in the car seemed to ease. Inexplicably, she realized she felt comfortable around this man, despite everything that had happened. She trusted him in a way she hadn’t trusted anyone in a long time. As they drove, she closed her eyes and tried to sleep. The sound of the wheels and the steady thrum of the road beneath them was peaceful, but sleep eluded her.

  “Don’t I have a right to privacy?” she asked after a very long silence. They were outside Indianapolis by then, the lights of the city glowing on the dark horizon. At this hour, the roads were all but clear.

  “Of course, you do,” he said. “None of this is fair.”

  “And yet, here we are, dodging the press, rushing back to a hearing where you will expose me to the world, everyone will learn that I’ve been hiding.”

  “What are you so afraid of? What do you think is going to happen?”

  She couldn’t answer because she had no answer that would make sense.

  Radford couldn’t figure out if the car was being tracked, but he was determined they were not going to be hunted down and forced to perform before TV cameras. If he was going to do this, if he was going to tell the world that he’d found this woman, then he was going to do it in the public hearing, like a professional.

  Erin sprawled out in the back seat while he fiddled with the navigation app on his phone. The app kept trying to keep him on the interstate. He would plug in an alternate route, but the female voice kept coming on the phone’s speaker: “Make a U-turn.”

  The flatlands of Indiana sprawled ahead as the pitch-dark night enveloped the car. Porch lights from distant farmhouses glowed like signal fires. He envied the simplicity of the lives inside those houses, envied their steadiness, their sleep, their faith in the land, and their predictable routines. Of course, what did he know of the people who lived inside those inviting-looking homes? Maybe their lives were just as confused and uncertain as his.

  Erin stirred in the back seat.

  “You need to sleep,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” he said, lying to hide his exhaustion.

  “You’re stubborn,” she said. “But dying on the road isn’t going to bring me back any faster.”

  She was right. He’d already looked ahead to find a place to stop and rest. He didn’t want to give up those precious hours, but endangering their lives made no sense.

  “There’s a motel just over the border in Illinois,” he said. “We can stop there, shower, and sleep. But we need to get back on the road early. It’s going to be tight.”

  “What are you going to do with me?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But when the time comes, I’ll
be honest. I won’t lie to you.”

  “I could just run,” she said. “I used to run marathons before I got sick. I could just start running and disappear again.”

  “I don’t think you will,” he said. “I don’t think you want to run anymore. You just want this to be over.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” She paused, then said, “The weird thing is, I sense that you’re running too. Am I wrong?”

  “My wife wants to have a baby,” he said.

  “Charlie, that’s wonderful!”

  Hearing her use his first name startled him a bit.

  “I don’t want kids,” he said. “I never did. I’m breaking her heart every time we talk about it.”

  “Why don’t you want kids?”

  “I need to succeed at something. This job is important to me. I need to make something of myself.” The words sounded hollow when he said them out loud. “Besides, I never saw myself as a father. Never thought it was something I could do well.”

  “No one does it well,” she said. “When our friends started having kids, when we did, everyone ran around reading books and putting their children in enrichment programs, hiring private coaches, choosing expensive private schools. It felt insane. No one knows how to be a parent, Charlie. Children find their own way. In spite of our best intentions, they’re really on their own.”

  “Maybe I don’t want all that chaos in my life,” he said. “Maybe I want some control.”

  “Do you love your wife?” she asked.

  “She’s wonderful,” he said. “I’ve never wanted anyone else. Never even really thought about other women.”

  “The idea of being a father frightens you that much?”

  “It overwhelms me.”

  It felt good to talk to someone this openly. Many of the things he was telling her were things he had never said out loud before. He’d hinted at them with Wendy, danced around the truth.

  “I miss sex,” Erin said. “My husband and I . . . Let’s just say that we didn’t have a lot of passion left. When I woke up in the barn, I was filled with this intense desire to be awake again. I’d never experienced anything like it.”

  He turned on the high beams. She talked about other things she missed: Bacon. The smell of a lawn mower in June. The feel of a sweaty shirt on her back after a long run. A day with nothing in it but books.

  “I was so tired of being sick,” she said. “Death didn’t frighten me. The treatment did. All those drugs, that radiation, the constant visits to the doctor. Treatment took away everything worth living for.”

  “Is there no hope?” he asked.

  She smiled. “There’s always hope, Charlie.”

  For a few moments, their lives felt easy, relaxed. He hated to acknowledge how much he simply liked her. Under normal circumstances, they could’ve been friends. Maybe even more, despite their age difference, or maybe because of it. He always played the part well. Always acted like he was immune to everyday temptations and missteps. But he was tempted by something with Erin, and it surprised him. He had judged her when he first heard about her affair with Adam. He categorized people in those black-and-white ways. Good and bad. Faithful people and cheaters. But was that fair? He wouldn’t act on this feeling; he felt sure of that. But he had to admit that the constant good-guy act was growing thin. He was learning that life was a hell of a lot more complex than he once thought it was.

  For a few minutes, they were just two people being honest with each other. How long since he’d been this vulnerable with someone? The reality was, he enjoyed this woman’s company. He realized he didn’t want their trip to end.

  “How did you do it?” he asked. “How did you walk away from your life?”

  She pondered his question a moment.

  “I didn’t. My life walked away from me. I finally just accepted that reality,” she said. “How long have you been married, Charlie?”

  “Just over five years,” he said. “We’ve been together longer.”

  “You said you love her.”

  “I do,” he said. “She pulled me out of a dark place. I suppose I pulled her out of a hole too.”

  “There will be other dark places. Life is a process. You change,” she said. “You don’t mean to. You don’t decide to start behaving differently. It just happens slowly, bit by bit. A year passes, then a decade. And then you wake up one day next to a stranger.”

  Radford spotted the motel sign ahead. He didn’t want to stop, but they couldn’t go much farther without rest.

  “The guy Wendy dated before me,” he said, “he used to beat the shit out of her. When I found out, I wanted to kill him. For years after, I thought I might actually hurt the son of a bitch if I ever saw him.”

  “My father died when I was just a kid,” Erin said. “I went to get a carton of milk, and by time I got home, he was gone. My sense of the world completely shattered.”

  “Life turns on a dime, doesn’t it?” he said. “It looks so stable, so predictable, but none of it really is.”

  “Yet it can get so stale,” she said. “Routines harden into habits. Habits turn into meaningless rituals. My husband is a good man. Doug took wonderful care of me when I became sick. But for years before that, I was invisible to him. Before, I was a piece of old furniture that shared the same address with him. I had walked away from the relationship long before I fell out of the airplane.”

  “But won’t your new life end up that way too? In five years, in ten? Doesn’t it always devolve into patterns?”

  “Not mine, maybe yours,” she said. “Maybe we need a way to reset. Every decade or so. We get to check out of our lives and experiment with a new one.”

  Radford slowed the car. He glanced in the mirrors to make sure no one was trailing them before he turned into the motel parking lot. They still had more than six hours of driving ahead. He’d started this trip sure of what he was doing, but he realized now that he wouldn’t finish it that way. Erin’s questions, their conversation, felt real and honest. He hadn’t talked to anyone so openly in a long time. He couldn’t simply dismiss her anymore as a piece of evidence, as a data point, a story he wanted to tell in order to advance his career. But what was the other choice?

  She’d slipped into a deep silence. He kept trying to picture her body crashing through those trees, the barn roof, the hayloft, the earth. How was it possible? How could she have made it through? She was just sitting there, in the seat next to him, staring out the window, like it was just a normal day.

  He parked the car behind the motel.

  39

  They were all over the news. In his motel room, Radford flipped from one cable news channel to the next, and even at this late hour, the reports still played. Footage of Wednesday’s debacle at the restaurant in Virginia, the crowd in front, the satellite poles on the road. But they didn’t have a name for her, and so far, no one had tracked them to this motel. The news reports only speculated. No one at the restaurant had talked, and as far as he could tell, they had managed to slip away from the news vans that were tracking them.

  When had he first seen the reporter? The bar in Kansas. He’d thought she was flirting with him then. But had he seen her before? Had she been trailing him all along? It didn’t matter now. If Gray had put that woman on his trail, then Gray would have to answer for it. Radford turned off the television. A few minutes later, there was a knock on his door.

  Erin stood in the hallway with a bottle of wine and a corkscrew in her hand.

  “Where the hell did you find that?” he asked.

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” she said. “What’s the agency policy on drinking with the subject of the investigation?”

  He pulled the cork and retrieved two plastic cups from the bathroom.

  “You’ve seen the news?” he asked.

  “My fifteen minutes,” she said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  They toasted each other with the plastic cups. Radford sat on the edge of the bed. Erin sat on the floor, he
r back against the door.

  “Why do you really not want kids?” she said. “I don’t buy the career bullshit. I had a career. I managed both. You can too.”

  He took a long sip of wine, listening for the sound of news vans outside.

  “My father wasn’t the best role model,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe I am making excuses. I suppose I wanted to figure myself out first.”

  “I used to dread the sound of Doug’s feet in the morning,” she said. She put the cup down and curled her arms around her legs. “The trickle of water from the sink, the clink of his razor on porcelain, the self-satisfied sigh as he splashed water on his face. I dreaded the light coming on in his closet, would close my eyes and pretend to be asleep. I could be hard and cruel. And yet I loved the man. I saw the singular decency of him in this world. He never complained, never resisted what life threw in his path. He was, by all measures and accounts, a good man.”

  “Meaning what?” he said.

  “Maybe we never figure ourselves out,” she said. “In the barn, in those long, dark, quiet hours after, I wondered what it was all for. What was I leaving behind? My life, Charlie. What has my life meant?”

  “One might argue that such moral reflection is normal after trauma,” he said. “Your life flashes before you. You take stock when the bottom falls out.”

  “But I saw something else too,” she said. “I saw my life as a long straight line. What I once valued, the choices I once made, my lapses in judgment, my failings and shortfalls—it all ran in the same direction.”

  “Consistency,” he said. “That’s good.”

  “No, Charlie, that’s not good. That’s death. I’d done the best I could, mostly for the girls, but the longer I contemplated my life, the longer I tried to make sense of what it meant, the more I saw a new path. I didn’t have to keep walking that line. The fall severed more than just my connection to the tangible world. Quite profoundly, it severed my connection to myself, or at least to the self I had been.”