Breaking the Fall Read online

  Then I could barely run at all, knowing even as a stitch bit into my side and my lungs burned that to run now was the worst thing I could do. Anyone could tell at a glance.

  Slow down. Walk. Catch your breath.

  Then you can circle back to Jared. What was I going to say to him? I didn’t have to tell him anything. I could keep this to myself. “Hey, Jared, I decided against trying it tonight. It was windy all of a sudden and I figured people would be awake because of the wind.…”

  As though I could lie. As though I could stare Jared in the face and say something as untrue as that.

  The wind tossed a hamburger wrapper across MacArthur. The wind coursed through my hair and fluttered my clothes. The street was composed of islands of light from the streetlights, sodden dark in between. I skirted the patches of light, but when I found myself outside Sky’s house, I saw how I had tricked myself.

  There was a crack of light under the garage door, but the house was dark, slumbering. It was, after all, well past midnight.

  Someone was working in the garage, her dad or her brother. I could hear a radio, music I could not make out, and I could not guess why I stepped to the front porch and put my hand to the rail.

  The rail might have been cold, as everything else was cold that night, but to me it felt warm. Sky’s house. My lips actually shaped the words.

  She was in there. Right in there.

  The date palm in the front yard made a long, ragged whisper in the wind, and a palm frond rattled, dropping nearby, a gray, ghostly shape, a giant feather. The lawn was pebbled with old date pits from the tree, and I found myself unable to leave.

  Stay here. Stay here where the living people are, sleeping or studying or working on their cars, wrapped in their lives.

  Here where people are happy.

  But Jared was waiting, and when I trotted up the street where I had left him, I paused by the green NOT FOR DEPOSIT OF MAIL postal box and made a short whistle. It was a terrible little whistle, like the cheep of a sick finch.

  The bottle brush plant made the slightest shift to one side, and his cigarette was a chip of fire. He laughed. He was actually laughing in his silent way.

  He didn’t even have to ask.

  4

  “It’s all right. You did very well. For a beginner.”

  We were back in Jared’s house, in Jared’s room, and the wonderful power in my legs was gone. There was a taste in my mouth like ash.

  I thought: there’ll be a knock at the door downstairs, interrupting the party of sophisticated people, some of them speaking French and Russian.

  The faraway laughter was a little too loud. It was very late and the party was getting a little drunk and shabby.

  “No, really,” Jared consoled me, even though he laughed as he said it. “It wasn’t your game, after all. It’s mine. You shouldn’t have tried to do it all by yourself. I was wrong to encourage you.” He gestured at me like a magician: presto, now you’re happy. He was thin and dark-haired, and knew how to speak with his eyes, and with his hands.

  He laughed silently and shook his head. “I was nervous the first time, too,” he said. He smiled at me through the smoke. He waved a hand, in his grand way. “They won’t hurt you,” said Jared.

  “I know it,” I said, but I knew that what I meant was: they won’t hurt you, but they’ll hurt me. And I hated the little rasp in my voice, the dry croak I made.

  I was so ashamed—and so shaken—that my lower lip was trembling. I have my moments of minor courage. I played shortstop, and if I couldn’t get the ball in my glove, I stopped it with my face. I heard things like, “Way to go with the face, Stan.” “Great face, Stanley.”

  There was a flare of adult laughter downstairs. Jared’s parents were sitting around sucking drinks with other smart people, people in tweed and cufflinks, gin drinkers.

  I glanced around his bedroom. A carton of Marlboros was open on the dresser, and the room was a tumble of books and clothes, some of them shirts still wrapped in plastic from the department store. On the wall Jared had a map of the night sky at midwinter, a delicate tracing of Orion and Taurus, and several pinups of the sort my parents would never have allowed, tousled women with blossoming labia and hard gazes. There was a dark spill of marijuana on the nightstand. “Nobody cares,” Jared had told me once, “what I do.”

  And he had his trophies, a tangle of them there in his bedroom, on the dresser: a lighter, a gold pen, a box of oversized plastic paper clips—all of the curios, knickknacks he had stolen not for their value, although some of the objects did look expensive. They were proof that he had crept into the innermost room of a house, and snatched a token, any random object, as proof.

  It was a secret game Jared had played all by himself, until at last he had begun to hint around about it, saying, “I know a game that most people would be too scared to even contemplate.”

  Jared used words like contemplate easily. His father was the author of books about astronomy, and was always flying off to Arizona or Hawaii to visit observatories where men and women like him studied the stars. His mother did technical drawings at the university, precise representations of the jaws of extinct rodents and the fangs of long-lost birds, and she, too, was always flying off to conferences in far-off cities.

  Jared knew things. He didn’t just have facts straight, numbers ready, dates and famous writers. He knew things like that. But what was remarkable was that he made no mistakes. None. If Jared decided to walk along the top of the chain-link fence beside the DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE signs—and he did this often—he would never slip. Never falter. Never hesitate for an instant, unless he wanted to pretend to be about to fall in the way that made me scream inside myself and put my hand out to the fence and draw myself into one tight thought: don’t die, Jared.

  Don’t die.

  Once he walked across the 580 Freeway, on the pedestrian walkway over eight lanes of traffic. He goat-footed his way along the top of the suicide cage, the fence that arches over the walkway to keep people from doing just what Jared had decided he would do. It was exactly his style: watch what I can do.

  But gradually, very slowly, our new friendship became more than a shared midnight laugh, more than me watching Jared teeter along one fence, more than a matter of watching Jared bound across traffic while cars squealed.

  “It’s better than any drug,” he would say with a smile, and he had tried them all. “It’s better than sex,” he would say, and he knew all about that, being muscular and bored-looking enough to have a girl on each arm sometimes after school.

  At first I didn’t believe him. “You don’t really,” I said. “Not really.”

  He made one of his gestures. Jared could say as much with a shrug, a wave, as most people could with whole conversations, complete with charts and pointers. So don’t believe me, his shrug said. I care nothing what you believe or don’t believe. Be a little, dull person. What do I care?

  Of course, that was only a joke. Jared wouldn’t really hurt anyone, or even take anything especially important. His game was, in a way, an act of mercy. He would slip into a house, hold the lives within his power—and spare them.

  I sat in his bedroom, a friend who had failed, and Jared was kind, tossing me the pack of cigarettes and the gold-plated—stolen—Zippo. It was an old-fashioned kind of lighter, and I tossed it in my hand for a moment, thinking: the person who lost this misses it.

  “Maybe next time I’ll go with you, back to the same house. It sounds like an interesting challenge. A creaking staircase.” He widened his eyes, as though to mock me. “A gun in the nightstand.”

  “They’ll be ready for you,” I said.

  “For us,” he said.

  I’m never going back there, I told myself. Never.

  “All it takes is the right touch.” Jared leaned back in his chair, watching the smoke from his cigarette drift toward the ceiling. “It’ll be all the more fun. Burglar alarms, brand-new rented guard dogs.”

  Never, I wanted to say
. Not as long as I live. It would be a disaster. I would slow him down, and my doubt, my clumsy lack of faith, would ruin everything.

  But Jared read my thoughts.

  He wasn’t smiling. “I’ve decided. Next time,” he said. “We’ll do it together.”

  5

  The front door was not locked when I reached my own house off Park Boulevard. I froze for a second, thinking: a break-in.

  Someone’s in there, a burglar.

  I did not move, listening, even sniffing the air, trying to see through the walls of my house. Oakland is beside San Francisco Bay, and often smells of smog mixed with a kind of fog no one can see, a wet breath that chills everything. The background noise is always a grumble of traffic, a steady freeway rumble in the distance.

  My own house was so still after the chatter and chiming ice cubes of Jared’s house that the fear flashed back, all over my body. I leaned against the jamb for a moment.

  Surely, I told myself, it was impossible. Had I really entered someone’s house?

  It was leftover fear, excess adrenaline. There was no one here, hiding in my house. I was being silly. I pushed the door, and it swung almost silently, with only the barest, breathy whine of its hinges.

  My breath caught.

  My dad was sitting in the living room, gazing at the television, which was not on. He held a beer in his hands, but the beer was not open. The light at his elbow was the only light on in the house, illuminating an unopened Wall Street Journal on the table at his elbow.

  But it was only my father. His arrival was always hard to predict, but there was no reason why the sight of his profile should startle me.

  He spoke to me after I had passed. “What’s up, Stanley?” he said.

  I came back into his presence, and he found me with his eyes. His gray suit was rumpled, his new red tie unknotted, the thin half flung up across his shoulder. His briefcase was on his lap, unopened.

  “Out late,” he said. It was his usual way of asking a question, even making an accusation.

  “The Trents had a party.”

  “A party,” said my father, not a question—an acknowledgment. “That’s good,” he said, reflecting on what I had said. “Did you talk to anyone interesting?”

  “There were Russians.”

  He stirred, blinking. He had kept awake only as long as he had because worry had pricked him and kept him there.

  “Astronomers from Russia?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Figuring out the universe.” He said this without sarcasm or cynicism. My father works at a foundry, but instead of making manholes or drop-forged can openers, he balances the books and runs the computer that cranks out the paychecks. The foundry is just about broke. My father keeps the factory in business by sitting at his desk in the factory office with a calculator. He lives on aspirin.

  My mother has a similar job, doing, as she puts it, “everything,” but her calendar takes her to Chicago and Boca Raton to drink coffee with people who design computers. My mother knows how to help software companies save costs. She had just bought a twelve-hundred-dollar briefcase, and was spending the night in Seattle.

  Her absence stepped into the room like a spirit, a new, worse kind of silence for a moment. “Homework,” said my father.

  “I’m caught up.” I added what was not a lie. “Jared helps me with the math.”

  “That’s good.” Again, no irony, nothing arch or insincere. My father wanted me to go to college, and he had always encouraged me to spend time with Jared and his parents. “Don’t live the way I do,” he had told me once, drunk with paperwork, closing his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see his laptop with its deep blue screen and rows of silver numbers. “Do something wonderful with your life.”

  He broke the silence as I was about to leave. “She left a message on the machine.”

  “Is she having a good time?”

  An idle question, an exit line, but it was the wrong thing to say.

  Lately I had begun to wonder. I was wondering right then, and my father didn’t like me thinking about her. We probably shared the same thoughts.

  He cleared his throat. “You ate?” he asked.

  “A burrito with Jared.”

  “I couldn’t find the Weenie.” He meant the gizmo that turned on the television, which he called the Magic Weenie. And his words were a kind of shorthand. He meant: I couldn’t get Ruth on the phone. He also meant: I’m worried about you.

  For some reason I asked him a question I had never asked him before in my life. “Did you have supper?”

  He stirred, perhaps surprised at my question. “I more or less forgot.”

  “You can’t forget something like that. You’ll get an ulcer.”

  I was about to add, “I’ll make you something,” envisioning a can of chili, or a microwave Salisbury steak, when he said, “There was a lot of unusual paperwork.”

  His tone told me more than his words.

  “A bad day,” I suggested.

  “Oh,” he sighed, a long vowel that told me he could not talk about his work, its labors, its boredom. But he surprised me. “There was an accident. A guy died.”

  “Died?” My father never talked about the factory.

  “A guy I knew to say hi to. A nice guy. A bunch of pipe rolled on him.”

  Words vanished. I must have said something like, “That’s awful.”

  “Yes,” he said slowly, gazing at the empty screen. He didn’t talk for a long time. “Stanley,” he said, as though my name were the answer in a guessing game he was desperate to win.

  I meant to say something to cheer him, to reassure him.

  Before I could speak, he said, “I want you to take care of yourself.”

  When I was in bed, after I had fixed us some Weight Watchers lasagna, and after my father’s shower, I lay awake in what was left of the night. My father’s words kept plodding back into my mind.

  Not “a mountain of pipe collapsed.” Not “an avalanche of iron.” My father never dressed up the truth. Some pipe had rolled; a man was gone.

  I lay, staring at the blank ceiling, praying that everyone I knew would be safe, knowing how selfish this was. My parents were merely two humans in a world crowded with people.

  May my mother come home safely on the plane, and may my father be safe.

  And then I prayed that Jared would think of another game to play.

  6

  My mother never looks at you when she talks to you. It’s as though we’re always on an assembly line putting together telephones or video machines and have to keep concentrating on our work.

  It was Monday morning, two days after my failure. Seattle had been a bitch, my mother said, which meant either that she had been very successful after a lot of trouble, and wanted a round of applause from me, or that Seattle had been a disaster and was beneath the level of civilized conversation.

  My first impression was that my father had left before either of us had crawled downstairs, but I tucked in my shirt and realized that things were not that simple. My mother looked fresh, and she had plainly been up for a long time. I was used to quiet, and quiet people. It made me aware of the different kinds of silence.

  Sometimes I thought I heard them having sex. I wasn’t sure. But a couple of times in my life I had awakened suddenly, certain that a voice had called out a name. Or not even a name—just a cry, like someone awakened with a syllable on her lips. This night had been dreamless, and I had almost overslept. But something had happened. The house looked smaller, and a sweater I had never seen before hung on the back of a chair. It was a black sweater, a woman’s cashmere. And my father’s toast crust was at my elbow.

  “Eat more than a banana,” she said, adjusting her pantyhose through her skirt, a motion a little like a hula.

  “Bananas have potassium. Bananas are the perfect food. You can’t eat anything better than a banana,” I said, and then I shut up for a moment.

  “So Seattle was horrible,” I added after a while, in m
y father’s half-statement, half-question tone.

  I knew it bothered her when I began a question with so. It’s a way of dismissing everything that has been said and done, as though the following words are the point of the entire conversation.

  “I killed them,” she said. She messed up the line with her overprecise enunciation. Not “I killed ’em.”

  “Figuratively,” I responded, hating to sound so much like my father.

  A little nonlaugh as she stirred her coffee.

  I hunched against the kitchen door, gazing back at her. I didn’t have to ask. Perhaps it was the way she acted: when she was here she was always just recovering from one of their talks, or getting ready for another one. She and my father had spoken the night before, or even early that morning. It had been a hard conversation, one easy to imagine. Short sentences and long silences. Now she was off-duty, stuffing toast into the slots. The television news was on. That meant you never had to talk in the mornings. You could always become absorbed in the national weather.

  I was wondering, though, how my mother might look to a man her own age. Whether she was pretty. She had dark, very curly hair, almost nappy hair, and long, thin arms. At a Christmas party once, champagne-bright, she had said she was part everything: Cherokee, Irish, Armenian, Spanish.

  She watched the toaster, and the toaster made a click, and then a wrinkle of heat danced above it, as always when the toast was about to pop.

  My mother played a lot of tennis, and watched videos of tennis stars talking about how to serve. She would practice in front of the television, serving with an imaginary racket. She was always happy when she came back after playing at Strawberry Canyon. Before I hurt my leg, she and I would go to the courts and hit the ball back and forth, informally. I think we were both sure the other would win if we kept score. She played a lot better than I did, although I wasn’t bad. Sometimes I would win a compliment from her on my backspin.

  “New dress,” I said.