Before I Fall

“It’s too late,” she says, and in that second when I’m not holding on tightly enough she wrenches away from me and hurtles onto the road just as two vans converge, about to pass each other, and all I see is the shine of metal and something white suddenly launched into the air, and for a second I feel an overwhelming sense of joy, and I think she’s done it, she’s flying, and time seems to stop with her glittering in the air like a beautiful bird. But then time resumes, and the air doesn’t hold her, and as she drops there’s a piercing sound splitting the darkness and again it takes me a long time to realize it’s me, screaming.

GHOSTS AND HEAVEN

An hour and a half later I’m parked in Lindsay’s driveway, and the two of us are watching the rain turn to snow, watching the world go quiet as, in a moment, thousands of raindrops seem to freeze in the air and come drifting silently to earth. I’ve already dropped off Elody and Ally. On the way home from the party nobody spoke. Elody leaned back against the seat, pretending to sleep, but at one point I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the glitter of her eyes, watching me.

“Jesus. What a night.” Lindsay leans her forehead on the window. “So crazy, you know? I never would have thought…I mean, she was obviously screwed up, but I didn’t ever think she would…” She shivers, shoots a look at me. “And you were there.”

When the police came, and the ambulances—followed by all the people at Kent’s party, drifting through the woods, quiet, suddenly sober, attracted by the sound of the sirens like moths to a flame—they found me standing by the side of the road, still staring. I’d even been interviewed by a female police officer with a big mole exactly at the point of her chin, which I had focused on like a single star in a dark sky, something to orient me.

Was she drunk?

No.

Was she on anything else? Don’t be afraid to tell me.

No. At least—I don’t think so.

Lindsay licks her lips, fidgets her hands in her lap. “And she didn’t…she didn’t, like, say anything? She didn’t explain?”

It’s the same thing the police officer asked me earlier: the final question, maybe the only one that matters. Did she say anything to you? Anything at all to give you a sense of how she was feeling, what she was thinking?

I don’t think she was feeling much of anything.

To Lindsay I say, “I’m not sure it’s the kind of thing you can explain.”

She keeps pressing it. “But I mean, she must have had problems, right? Stuff at home, right? People don’t just do that.”

I think of Juliet’s cold, dark house, the TV shadows climbing the walls, the unknown couple in the hard silver frame.

“I don’t know,” I say. I look at Lindsay, but she keeps her eyes averted. “I guess we’ll never know now.”

I feel a sense of emptiness so deep it stops feeling like emptiness and starts feeling like relief. I imagine this is what it would be like to get carried off on a wave. This is what it would feel like in the moment that the thin, dark edge of shore ducks its head beyond the horizon, when you roll over and see only stars and sky and water, folding in on you like an embrace. When you spread your arms and think, Okay.

“Thanks for dropping me off.” Lindsay puts her hand on the door handle, but makes no further motion to get out. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

“I’ll be okay.”

I watch patterns of snow coming down at an angle as though flowing, cresting, breaking on a massive current, a tide that leaves the world glittering. It’s beautiful. All I can think is that it’s the first of many things Juliet won’t see.

Lindsay is chewing on a nail, a habit she’s always claiming to have kicked in third grade. The automatic garage light has clicked on and her features are all dark.

“Lindsay?”

She jumps like we’ve been silent for hours and she’s shocked to see me still in the car. “What?”

“Remember that time in Rosalita’s? After you came back from New York? When I walked in on you in the bathroom?”

She turns to stare at me, not saying anything. Her eyes are a deeper dark than the rest of her face, two spots of total blackness.

“Was that really the only time?” I ask.

She hesitates for just a second. “Of course it was,” she says, but her voice is a whisper and I know she’s lying.

And now I realize Lindsay’s not fearless. She’s terrified. She’s terrified that people will find out she’s faking, bullshitting her way through life, pretending to have everything together when really she’s just floundering like the rest of us. Lindsay, who will bite at you if you even look in her direction the wrong way, like one of those tiny attack dogs that are always barking and snapping in the air before they’re jerked backward on the chains that keep them in one place.