Free to Fall

2

IT WAS AN ETERNITY TO AUGUST. There were days when it felt like it would never come, that time had actually slowed down and would eventually stop. It didn’t help that my ordinarily laid-back father had become cloyingly nostalgic and sentimental, gazing at me over the dinner table like the dad character in a sappy wedding movie. My stepmom wasn’t any better.

Thankfully, they both worked full-time, my dad at his latest construction site and my stepmom for a chocolate shop in Beacon Hill, so I was on my own during the day. I spent nearly every afternoon with Beck, accompanying him on whatever photo assignment his mentor-of-the-week had given him. Beck was in the national apprenticeship program, which meant he’d intern in his chosen field for the next two summers then go straight into the workforce after high school, trading college for a two-year federally subsidized internship. When he got his last assignment of the summer—to chronicle a day in the life of someone living in Nickelsville, Seattle’s last remaining tent city—Beck just about exploded with excitement.

It was the evening before my departure, and we’d been hanging out among the fuchsia tarps all day. It was after seven already, and Beck had thousands of pictures of his subject, a homeless man named Al whose left leg stopped just above his knee. The light was starting to fade now, and I was no longer as comfortable as I’d been midday. I’d turned Lux on silent, but the words PROCEED TO A SAFER NEIGHBORHOOD were blinking on my screen.

“Wasn’t your assignment a day in the life?” I asked Beck in a low voice. “Not a night in the life? We should head back downtown.”

“During the golden hour?” Beck had his camera to his eye and was rapidly shooting as Al built a small fire in a metal bucket by his tent. “Rory, look at the sky. This is a photographer’s wet dream.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Gross.”

“If you need to go, you can,” he said, his face still behind his lens. “I know you have that dinner with your dad.” I was leaving early the next morning, and my dad was taking me out for a going-away dinner at Serious Pie, just the two of us. I’d told him it was more than fine for my stepmom to come with us, but he insisted we go alone, assuring me her feelings wouldn’t be hurt. I doubted this but was happy to have him to myself on my last night at home. Kari was great for my dad, but I could relate to her even less than I could to him, which is to say, not at all.

“I don’t want to leave you down here alone,” I told Beck, my voice even quieter than before.

“I’ll be fine,” Beck said, finally lowering his camera and looking at me. “The light will be gone in another thirty minutes or so anyway. And he’s here.” He pointed at the uniformed cop sitting in his car across the street.

“Okay,” I said, still uncertain. There was a reason Lux kept people like us out of neighborhoods like this (if you even could call a homeless encampment a “neighborhood”). “But will you at least launch Lux? I’ll feel better if I know it’s running.”

“Nope,” Beck replied pleasantly, lifting his camera back to his eye.

I sighed, knowing I wouldn’t win this argument. It was a waste of breath to even ask.

This was how Beck rolled. Untethered to technology. He liked trusting his instinct, going with his gut. He said that’s what made him an artist. But I knew better. It wasn’t his gut that he trusted. It was the Doubt.

He started hearing the voice when we were kids. A bunch of us heard it back then. A whisper in our heads that instructed us and assured us and made us believe the impossible, urging us to the left when reason pointed to the right. The so-called “whisper within” wasn’t a new phenomenon—it’d been around as long as people had—but neuroscience had only recently pinned it down. For centuries people thought it was a good thing, a form of psychic intuition. Some even said it was God’s voice. Now we knew that the inner voice was nothing more than a glitch in the brain’s circuitry, something to do with “synaptic pruning” and the development of the frontal lobe. Renaming it the Doubt was a marketing strategy, part of a big public service campaign sponsored by the drug company that developed the pill to suppress it. The name was supposed to remind people what the voice really was. The enemy of reason. In kids, it was nothing to worry about, a temporary by-product of a crucial phase in the brain’s development that would go away once you were old enough to ignore it. But in adults, it was the symptom of a neurological disorder that, if left untreated, would progress until you could no longer make rational decisions.

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.