Freefall Page 3

  Eventually, the sun came up.

  As soon as I heard Jim’s footsteps on the walk, I knew what he’d come to tell me. Something about the slow, heavy plod of his shoes on the brick as he came up the path told me everything I needed to know.

  I pulled open the door. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  He looked stunned for a moment, and then his face softened and he nodded, just once.

  I expected myself to be hysterical, to collapse at his feet and weep and wail, but there was a stillness inside me, as though I were floating several inches above my own head. I shifted to one side to let him pass and watched his back retreat into the kitchen.

  I stood in the doorway. “Where is she?”

  “They found the plane halfway up Electric Peak. The pilot must have misjudged the altitude, I guess, though they’ll know more when they find the flight recorder.”

  I felt myself nod, as though hearing it was the most natural thing in the world, as though I’d been expecting it all along, which I guess I had. All those times I’d waved her off on the school bus, or at the airport, or in cars driven by strange boys, I would find myself thinking that I might never see her again, that she might be taken from us, and now she had been. “When can I see her?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “It might take a while for them to get everything sorted. There’ll have to be an investigation, and who knows how long those things can take . . .” He shifted on his feet, and I could tell there was something he hadn’t said.

  “When can I see my daughter, Jim.” It was no longer a question.

  He raised his eyes to mine. They were small in his face and rimmed with pink. “There was a fire at the crash site . . . some kind of explosion on impact, they think. There wasn’t much . . .” He shook his head. “There was a lot of damage at the site.”

  I pictured scorched earth and melted metal, singed hair and burning flesh. “Excuse me.” I ran to the bathroom and threw up the morning’s coffee. Brackish liquid splashed up the white porcelain of the bowl, and the acid burned the back of my throat. My little girl, my gorgeous little girl. I thought of her face as a child, her smile as wide as the moon, and imagined it disintegrating in front of me. How could I still be living when my only daughter was dead, obliterated on some mountain halfway across the country? What did it mean that I hadn’t died, too, that my heart hadn’t immediately stopped beating the moment hers had? I spat into the toilet. What sort of a mother could continue to live when her child was dead? I placed my forehead against the cool rim of the bowl and forced myself to breathe.

  I found Jim staring blankly at the backs of his hands. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you that,” he said, shaking his head. “There was no need.”

  “No. I don’t want you to hide anything from me. I want to know everything about what happened. Every single damn thing.” Facts. The thing I could cling to, like a buoy in the middle of the ocean. “Do they know the name of the pilot yet?”

  “Still looking for next of kin. Do you know if she was seeing anyone? Maybe it could have been a boyfriend?”

  “Not that she’d mentioned,” I said. It was the truth, in a way.

  He nodded. “Did you know of any . . . I don’t know how to put this. Did you know of any trouble Allison was in?”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “Aw, hell. Drugs, drinking—that sort of thing?”

  “Ally wasn’t a big drinker, and I never knew her to do drugs, but—” I left the rest unsaid. I didn’t know my daughter. I hadn’t known her for a while. “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason, just a couple things turned up in the system— Anyway, it looks like it was in the past. Forget I said anything.”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “You’re not holding out on me, are you?”

  He shook his head. “Of course not.” Jim Quinn had always been a terrible liar.

  “Will there— Is there something of hers that was left? That I could have?”

  He looked up at me, and the sadness in his eyes was enough to flatten anyone. For a second, I hated him for it. I didn’t want his sadness or his pity. I wanted only the sharp edges of facts. “They’re still sorting through everything up there. Trying to identify . . .” He stopped himself. “Like I said, there’ll be an investigation, so it might take a bit of time before they release anything, but I’ll make sure you get anything you can as soon as possible.”

  Anything. My daughter had been reduced to a thing. What would Jim do, I wondered, if I screamed right then? Just one long, loud wail. Probably send for the doctor to sedate me. Or more likely, send Linda over with her bagful of drugs.

  He stared down at the flat of his hands and sighed. “They want a photo of Allison.”

  “Why? I thought you said they had one of her at the airport.”

  “Not them . . . the media. We keep getting calls from television stations asking for one, and if we don’t give them one ourselves they’ll end up finding one on the internet or something.” He paused. “I thought you’d want to be the one to choose it.”

  Allison’s photo. My daughter. Out there for everyone to see. I thought of people sitting on their couches, saying how pretty she was, how young, what a shame. Pitying her. Me. It made me feel angry. But I knew Jim was right. “Okay,” I said quietly. “I’ll take a look and see what I can find.”

  Good, I thought. Yes. It was a task. A task that was small and could be accomplished.

  I climbed down the uneven wooden steps into the basement and switched on the light. The bare bulb flickered across the concrete walls. I’d always wanted to finish it, maybe put a library down there, or a game room, but Charles insisted on using it as a shop. Now the disused workbench languished in the corner, along with a tangle of old power tools and, inexplicably, a full beekeeper’s outfit hanging from a peg on the wall. Charles was a man who’d loved a hobby. The stone floor was cool on my bare feet. Snowshoes and cross-country skis mixed with tent poles and camp stoves. Every other spare inch was covered in cardboard boxes, some opened, most not. I picked my way through them until I found the one I was looking for, a small box with the words PHOTOS 2004–2016 scrawled on it in black Sharpie. There wasn’t much reason to take photos after 2016.

  Back in the kitchen, I sliced open the top with a pair of scissors and peered inside. Jim watched wordlessly. At the top of the pile was a photo of Charles and Allison smiling together in the snow. I flipped it over: 12/24/2011. CHRISTMAS EVE. We’d been on our way to the car to get to the carol service at Christ the King when Ally had stopped and flopped back in a bank of snow on the front lawn. I thought at first she’d fallen—she was no longer used to dealing with the snow—but then I saw that she was making a snow angel. Before I knew it, Charles was on his back, too, arms and legs moving like windshield wipers. When they stood up, there were two perfect angels left in the snow, and I took a photo of them with her new iPhone, laughing with their arms around each other. She’d had it printed that day and tucked it in the tree so it was waiting for us in the morning. It had been a perfect Christmas that year.

  I put the photo to one side and took out another handful. I had to be ruthless about it—I couldn’t afford to relive every memory. I flicked through the cruise to Bermuda that Charles and I had taken when he’d retired, a camping trip to the White Mountains he’d taken with a few of his friends, a weekend on the Cape. Photos of us with Ally when we’d gone to visit her in California, her tanned and glowing and happy, me and Charles pale and jet-lagged but relieved to find her doing so well. I can still picture that apartment, just ten minutes from the beach and filled to bursting with equally tanned and glowing friends of hers, all doing internships or graduate degrees and falling in and out of love. On our last night in San Diego, Charles and I had taken them out to dinner to their favorite Mexican restaurant. We’d sat back from the table and smiled as the girls fell on the fajitas like they hadn’t eaten in weeks. Charles managed to flinch only a bit when the bill came, and I remember gett
ing on the plane the next morning feeling so proud of my little family. I put aside a photo from that trip, one of Ally wearing a pale blue cotton dress, her dark hair shining as she smiled into the sun. My eyes slid to the remaining photographs. This one was from the Fourth of July 2015, Charles standing by the seafront as fireworks explode behind him. In it he isn’t facing the camera, but I could see the thinness of his legs inside his trousers, like matchsticks, and the defeated slump of his shoulders. I pushed it away.

  I stared at my hands outstretched on the worn wooden table. My knuckles were swollen and sore. I turned my wedding ring around slowly, feeling it tug on the skin underneath. I hadn’t taken it off in so long, I couldn’t imagine what my finger looked like without it. The skin beneath the band would be pale and shiny, and there would be an indentation where the ring pinched. It was too small for me, it had been for years, but the ring’s design—delicate latticework cut into gold—meant it would have been ruined if I’d tried to have it enlarged, and anyway at that point it would have to have been cut off my finger, because there was no way to get it past my knuckle. They were welcome to do that just before they shoved my body into the furnace, but not a minute sooner.

  Jim reached over and took my hand. The warm pressure of it stunned me. How long had it been since someone had taken my hand and held it?

  They hadn’t had to cut Charles’s ring to get it off. I had slipped it off his finger before they took him away. I’d thought I’d have wanted him to be buried with it, but he’d chosen to be cremated, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it melting—it was cheap gold, we’d been poor when we got married—so I slid it off his finger and onto my thumb and it stayed there until I got home and tucked it into my jewelry box, next to the opal earrings he’d given me for our thirtieth anniversary, which I was always too afraid to wear in case I lost one of them. I had to keep his ring safe for him, just in case. Just in case he came back.

  I couldn’t have told Ally why I kept it. I knew what she would have said if I’d told her that, deep in my heart, I believed that somehow her father would come back to me. She would have told me that denial was a natural part of the grieving process, but that ultimately it was important to let go. She’s very rational, Ally. She takes after me in that regard (magical thinking about my dead husband aside) though I’m sure she’d hate to admit it. She always wanted to be like her father, dreaming big dreams about the stars, rather than down on earth filing facts away in little boxes like me. And who could blame her?

  I suppose I did, a little. I can admit that much.

  I picked up the photograph of her smiling in her blue dress and ached at the sight. It was a deep, primal ache, the same one I’d had since the day she was born—the day she’d started on her trajectory out of my orbit and out into the world, away from me.

  I handed the photograph to Jim. “Here,” I said. “They can use this one. It’s from a few years ago, but she can’t have changed that much.”

  He studied it for a minute. “She always did have a beautiful smile.”

  I looked down at the photograph. “She gets it from her father.”

  He slid the photo into his shirt pocket and stood up from the table. “I know you said you wanted to be alone, and I don’t want to push it, but—”

  I held up a hand to stop him. “Tell Linda to come whenever she can.”

  He nodded. “I’m sure she’ll be right over. I’ll be in touch as soon as I know anything more,” he said, walking to the door. “And Maggie? Maybe start screening your calls. These media people will start calling the house once the news breaks, if they haven’t started already. They’re a bunch of ghouls.”

  The thought of speaking to a reporter about Ally made my stomach churn. I didn’t want them having a piece of her. I wanted her all to myself. “Thanks, Jim. For everything.”

  “I wish I could do more to help,” he said, and then he shut the door behind him and the house was silent again.

  I sat at the kitchen table and let myself feel the heaviness in my chest. It was like my rib cage was being pulled apart bone by bone. Barney snaked his way around my ankles but I couldn’t bring myself to reach down and pet him. I couldn’t do anything.

  The clock ticked. I wondered if it was possible for me to rip off my own skin, just claw my way out of it and leave my old bones and my ravaged heart behind.

  I glanced up at the counter and saw the two little pill bottles standing to attention on the butcher’s block. I picked one of them up—the Valium—and tilted a pill into my palm, then two. I swallowed them without water, feeling them scratch at my throat, and then sat back down at the table and waited for the feeling to stop.

  Linda arrived just as the pills were kicking in. She came through the door without knocking and as soon as she saw my glazed eyes, she nodded. “Good for you.” She sat down across from me and held my hands. The drugs did their job. It was almost—almost—like not feeling, except for the moments that the pain would pierce through.

  “Do they know anything?” Linda asked finally. She’d been silent for three-quarters of an hour, surely the longest she’d gone without speaking in her entire life.

  I shook my head. “There’s going to be an investigation.” My tongue felt thick in my mouth.

  “Well, that’s good,” she said. “At least you’ll know. Any more news on the pilot?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing yet.” I was failing her again. We all were. There were answers out there and I couldn’t get them. Ally needed facts and I’d intentionally blurred my edges. I was weak.

  “Jim said they were still waiting to hear about next of kin, but surely they can’t keep holding back his name. The press’ll dig it up soon enough, anyway.”

  The phone rang as if on cue. We both sat still and listened to the answering machine pick up. It was still Charles’s voice—“You’ve reached the Carpenters, leave a message after the beep. Beeeeep!” I knew I should change it; Linda even offered to do it herself, knowing how much I hate the sound of my own voice, but I couldn’t erase him. We’d never owned a video camera, so this was it. A joke on an answering machine.

  The machine clicked on and a smooth, low voice filled the house. “Hello, Mrs. Carpenter, this is Leon Terzi from the Boston Herald. I’m so sorry to hear of your loss. I’d love to speak with you about your daughter if you have a moment—she seemed like a very special girl. I’m putting together an article on the accident and I’m sure our readers would love to hear your memories of Allison. You can reach me at 617-555-4923.”

  Linda and I listened to the sound of the phone going dead. “Asshole,” Linda muttered, gathering herself up and switching on the coffee machine. “What the hell am I doing?” she asked, flicking it off again. “Let’s have a drink.”

  “No thanks,” I said, waving her away. I watched her flick the coffee machine back on and pull two mugs down from the cabinet. I was still foggy from the Valium but I could feel it starting to clear out of my system. The weight had returned to my hands and feet and the room moved at the pace of my vision. I wanted a drink very badly, actually, and another of those little blue pills, but the phone call had shaken me back into myself. I shouldn’t be trying to hide from the pain. I should be letting it wash over me like so many crashing waves.

  My daughter is dead.

  My daughter is dead.

  My daughter is dead.

  “The nerve of that man calling the house,” Linda said, settling herself back down at the table and taking a sip of her coffee. I could smell the Baileys she’d slipped into it instead of creamer. “I’ll talk to Jim, see if there isn’t something to be done about it.”

  “I just won’t answer the phone,” I said. I wouldn’t have answered the phone anyway, but this made the choice clearer.

  “Make sure you don’t watch the news, either. You don’t need to see the reports. I’ll bring over some movies if you want. Or that Jane Austen program on PBS I was telling you about.”

  I shook my head. “There’s no need.”<
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  “I’ll stay with you tonight, anyway. Keep you company.”

  I shook my head again. Poor Linda. She wanted to help so badly, but I had nothing to offer. I was on an island that she couldn’t reach. No one could.

  “You really shouldn’t be alone—”

  I sighed. She wasn’t going to let it go. “I know you’re trying to help and I love you for it, I do, but I’d rather be alone.”

  I saw her face drop and I knew I’d hurt her feelings, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone—not even her—sitting in my house watching me go through this. I didn’t need anyone to bear witness. I was witness enough.

  She pushed back from the table and started rummaging through the refrigerator. “Let me at least make you something for dinner before I go,” she said. “I can’t let you starve to death.” She froze. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

  “You’re allowed to say the word ‘death,’” I said, even though hearing it had sent a chill through me. “It’s fine.”

  “No, it’s not fine,” she said, spinning around. “It’s anything but fine, and I just wish I could— I just wish—”

  “I know,” I said, getting up and moving toward her. I put my hand on her back. I could feel the heat coming off her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes. “I’m not meant to be the one crying, I know I’m meant to be the strong one, it’s just, I feel so—so—”

  “You’re not meant to be anything other than what you are,” I said, rubbing my hand across her back. I felt very tired then, and my arm was heavy as I dragged my palm back and forth. “You don’t need to apologize.”

  “I do,” Linda said, eyes suddenly flashing. “Someone should apologize for this, so why shouldn’t it be me? You don’t deserve this, Maggie. Charles didn’t deserve what happened to him and Ally didn’t deserve what happened to her and you sure as hell don’t deserve what’s happening to you now.”