The Year They Fell

by David Kreizman

  “No.”

  “I could come back another time or—”

  “We’re done with the tutoring.”

  “Oh, because your grandma said—”

  “We’re done with the tutoring.”

  “Understood. But if you wanted to talk—”

  “We never ‘talk.’”

  “Well, we were always busy with math during our tutoring sessions, and I took pride in helping you succeed and stay eligible for the team. Remember when you showed me that B plus you brought home? That was a good moment, wasn’t it? I felt like we were … like before, when my mother babysat for you and Josie and me—”

  “What do you want from me, Harrison?”

  “What do I want?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I want … I want to understand why my mother isn’t here anymore. Because planes want to stay in the sky. People want to stay with their kids, right? They don’t just disappear, not without a reason. Don’t you want to know that?”

  “I want to go home. Can you take me home?”

  * * *

  The nurses called Grandpa and Grandma and warned them I’d escaped from the hospital. They were out in front of the house waiting to bust me when Harrison screeched to a stop.

  Grandma went right to Harrison’s side of the car. “How could you think this was a good idea? You’re supposed to be the smart one!”

  “He asked me,” said Harrison with a shrug.

  “He’s not well!”

  Josie saw me struggling to get out of the car on wobbly legs. “You should go, Harrison,” she said.

  “He asked me.”

  “I know. Go home now.”

  Harrison nodded. “So … I’ll be in touch.”

  As he got back in the car and sped off, I looked up at the house. So many thoughts banging around in my brain. Home from the hospital. No Mom in the kitchen. No Dad in his study. Grandma and Grandpa were arguing about whether they should take me back to the hospital. I needed them to shut up. Josie took my arm and walked me up to the front porch.

  “Hey, Jackie,” said Grandpa Ralph, “wait’ll I show you what I did to the shed.”

  “It’s time for you to go, too,” I said.

  “Go? Go where?”

  “Home. You need to go home.”

  Grandma looked at me like I’d spit on her. “You want us to leave? For how long?”

  Grandpa caught on pretty fast. I think part of him was waiting for this day. He wanted to help. He loved us. But he didn’t sign up to be a parent to two teenagers. He’d retired from that a long time ago. “Come on, Nell. Let’s pack up.”

  “What’s wrong with you? We’re not leaving them. Jackie shouldn’t even be out of the hospital. What would Richard and Michelle think about us abandoning their children?”

  “We’re eighteen,” I said. “We’re not children.”

  “You’re not? We all saw what happened to this house when you two were left alone. You’re not capable of taking care of yourselves.”

  “Get out. Now!” I didn’t mean to hurt her, but I couldn’t help myself. I needed them out of my house.

  Josie hugged Grandma’s tiny bones and whispered in her ear. Whatever she said made Grandma go limp for a moment. Josie held on and kept her on her feet until she recovered her balance. Then she kissed Josie on the cheek, wiped her tears, and said, “What are we waiting for? Let’s go pack, Ralph.” Ten minutes later they were gone. For the first time since the night of the party, Josie and I were alone in our house.

  “So I guess we should celebrate your release.”

  “You mean my escape?”

  “Can’t believe you recruited Harrison to drive the getaway vehicle.”

  “He drives like a maniac. I’m lucky to be alive.”

  Josie opened a bottle of Dad’s fancy wine from the cellar. I didn’t even like the taste, but it did the job. Usually I could drink a six-pack of beer and feel nothing, but after one glass, I was buzzing. My bruised brain was half drunk already. When it got dark, we sat out on the patio and had our first drink together as emancipated adults. Lying there on a lounge chair next to Josie, my head finally felt calmer. We were alone.

  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. I missed Mom and Dad so much it burned. But I’d also be lying if I said it didn’t feel kinda good. We could do anything we wanted. No more events at the club. No more curfew or bedtime or allowance. No more Dad harassing me about my grades and my “work ethic.” Josie and I answered to no one but each other.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It wasn’t our first fight. Won’t be our last.”

  “I mean for the game. You probably thought I was paralyzed or—”

  “I love you, Heart.”

  “You too, Soul.”

  Josie fell asleep in her chair. I grabbed two fleece blankets and tucked one around her. As I lay back on my chair, I heard music coming from Harrison’s house. In a downstairs window, I saw a bald guy in a loud shirt strumming a guitar. Who the hell is that, I thought as I drifted off to sleep.

  When the doorbell rang, I thought I was dreaming. But the throbbing in my head confirmed that I was awake. Josie didn’t stir. My vision was blurry, but I somehow staggered into the house. I squinted hard to read the clock. 11:32 P.M.? What the hell would someone be doing here? I opened the door to find Archie standing on the porch, scooter leaned against the wall, sketchbook in his hand. He scrunched his glasses up with his nose. “Jack, hey … I heard you were home. That’s so good. Really, really good. So, I was wondering if … Is Josie around? I just wanted to talk about something.”

  “About what?”

  “Yeah, I mean we’ve been talking about things and we had plans to hang out…”

  Seeing him standing there set off an alarm in my brain. Four days of headaches and dizziness. Four days of feeling like crap, with no end in sight. Four days of knowing how badly I’d scared Josie and remembering how I’d let her down before. Finally, she’d found some peace, and now this little shit was here to bother her? Had he been showing up here in the middle of the night while I was in the hospital?!

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Can you tell Josie I’m here?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “She texted me a little while ago. We’ve been working with Harrison on something.” He tried to look past me into the house.

  In that moment, I felt like it was his fault that my head hurt so much. Everything was his fault. “Is this about the crash? Are you filling her head with some kind of shit?!”

  “No. I’m not trying to … I just … We’ve all had a lot of questions and we’ve been trying to answer them.”

  “You really think you’re going to find answers? Who the fuck are you, TMZ?”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

  “But you have.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “And you do?” I knocked his scooter off the porch. Some of the pressure blew off and it made my head feel a little bit better.

  “If I could just show this one idea to Josie—”

  More pressure. When I got like this, it felt like one section of my brain would just stop working. That’s not an excuse for what I did, just an explanation. I grabbed Archie by his shirt. Everything started to spin as he tried to pull away. If I’d let go, I would’ve fallen right off the porch, so I hung on. He tried to push himself away from me and I almost lost my balance. Now I was furious. How could someone like him almost knock me down? I shoved him back, right off the porch and into the hydrangea bushes next to the steps. He tumbled over backward, his glasses dropping into the bushes, and his sketchbook fell out of his hands and landed at my feet.

  “Jack, I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

  I leaned over to pick up the book and the vertigo was intense. But I wanted to see. I wanted to see what was so important that he had to carry that thing with him everywhere. So I started riffling through the pages from back t
o front. Even with blurry vision, I could see that the pictures were of us. Harrison and Dayana and me. And Josie. Mostly pictures of Josie. They bounced around in time and documented years of her life. Josie at a football game last year. Josie looking sad in the cafetorium. Josie sitting on a tree stump on the playground. I stopped on that picture. Josie must’ve been fourteen in that picture. I concentrated on small pieces of the drawing at a time. Her face bruised, a tooth chipped. Darkness swelling up under her eye. She’s damaged. And yet she’s beautiful.

  As Archie clawed his way out of the bushes, everything became clear for just a second. I knew exactly when he’d drawn this picture. He was with her that night after the softball game. Around 11 P.M., I’d gone in to check on Jo and she wasn’t in her bed. I freaked out. What if she was walking the streets? What if she was going to hurt herself again? What if she’d gone to Murph’s house? Without telling Mom and Dad I grabbed my bike and went racing around town looking for her. If I found her, I was going to tell her that I knew. I was going to explain how sorry I was for not looking out for her, how I’d never let her down again. I never found her that night.

  But Archie did. He sat right next to her on that stump and he drew this picture. Without a word, I tore it from the sketchbook. A long, ragged tear. Archie screamed, but I kept going. Each rip gave me another tiny bit of relief. I tore them out, page by page, one after another as Archie begged me to stop. I ripped each one out until I reached the first page in the book, a drawing of Archie and Josie, sitting on a branch of a big tree.

  “Please,” he cried. “Please don’t.”

  It was too late to stop now. Like I’d done with all the others, I ripped it from the book, balled it up like trash, and threw it into a shallow puddle at the bottom of the stairs. And for just a moment, my head finally stopped pounding.

  10

  HARRISON

  -Island Hopper Airlines—Safety record? Mechanical issues?

  -Captain George Solomon—Flight hours? Incidents? Personal life?

  -Phillip Gallagher—Job/responsibility at Fort Benson

  -Richard Clay—Clients? Litigation history? Government connections?

  -Meet with Archie to compare notes.

  Some people are susceptible to the flu or stomach viruses. For me it’s always been ideas. A thought enters my central nervous system, makes a home in my brain, and takes hold of me. Once infected, I can think of little else. The thoughts just keep repeating and growing until I feed them. Mom used to tell me it was a strength. I’d envision a concept for a science project or an essay, and I’d have no choice but to commit every waking hour to its completion. You may not be the most naturally gifted in your class—you have your father’s genes to thank for that. Your focus and dedication, that’s what makes you special. Mom didn’t understand what it was like to be in the grips of an idea. Sure it could be helpful when the idea was creative and it served The Plan, but sometimes the thoughts that infected me were dark and negative. They were impossible to ignore.

  Hard to pinpoint when the idea about Mom’s plane crash infected me. At first it was just a question. If planes want to stay in the sky, then what caused hers to fall? People don’t just disappear without a reason. So I put in a call to the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes. The NTSB told me they were working with authorities in Anguilla and St. Martin and that the crash was still under investigation. That’s when I began my own investigation. I read everything I could about aviation accidents and their causes. I read about the model of plane Mom had flown on and about Island Hopper Airlines, which operated the flight. The plane had an excellent record and the company had never had a crash. So why now?

  Why them?

  The investigation really took hold while I was serving my suspension for punching Cody Salamone in the face. I love to see you in the throes of a project, Mom used to say. It’s like watching an artist at work. I covered my walls with my research and printed copies of every article written about the crash in newspapers and online. But nothing seemed to point to a reason. Until the day I read the blog Archie’s aunt posted on her sister’s wedding anniversary. Unlike her others, this post focused less on the surviving kids and more on our parents and their legacies. Along with her grandiose descriptions of the five people who had lost their lives (Jennifer Rebkin, beloved counselor and mother) was a photo taken at a gala event hosted by the army base where Archie’s father worked. In the photo Phillip Gallagher was shaking hands with Jack and Josie’s dad while surrounded by a pack of grim-looking officers in uniform. I was surprised to see them in a setting like that and even more surprised when a search revealed that Mr. Clay’s law firm often dealt with military and government contracts.

  I reached out to Archie and invited him to meet me at the diner. I didn’t know if Archie had the same questions I did, but I knew he had a wide-open mind. When we were kids playing together, we made a good team. Archie had a big imagination for crazy stories, but I was good at working out the details so they’d make sense.

  Archie would say, “This swing set is a spaceship that’s going to take us up to Saturn.”

  I’d say, “Saturn is just a big ball of gas. We should go to Mars, where the air is poison, but we could live in a giant bubble.” And then Archie would pull out his crayons and draw us on the flying swing set in a giant bubble on Mars.

  I spent the morning collecting my notes and sorting through documents I’d printed out. I was excited to share what I had found. When I showed up with my research in Mom’s old briefcase, Archie was waiting in a small back booth. He was not, however, alone. Archie and Josie sat next to each other and picked at a plate of well-done french fries. Archie’s sketchbook sat closed on the table in front of them. At first, I was pleased to see her there. I had questions for her, too. But as I approached the table, I became distracted by the way their elbows brushed against each other. I imagined their knees were doing the same underneath the table. They were talking so intently that they didn’t even notice me until I sat down across from them.

  Their closeness threw off my equilibrium. Maybe it’s because I’d never experienced that kind of closeness myself. I’d never been to the prom or held a girl’s hand at the movies. I certainly wasn’t against it. The truth is, I thought about girls all the time. It was impossible not to. The halls of RBHS coursed with sexuality. You literally had to move out of the way or be bumped by some couple with their arms around each other.

  It wasn’t only the beautiful, popular students hooking up either. The fever spread all over, even reaching my Math Olympics team when calc wizard Greg Chung fell for logic specialist Amber Jenson before States. This is why you and Mackenzie Markowitz are numbers one and two, Mom had said when she saw them holding hands at a competition. You have your priorities straight. Greg and Amber spent the remainder of our road trips kissing in the back of the bus. Mackenzie Markowitz and I sat in the front, trying not to turn around. She and I had been fighting for the number one ranking in our grade for many years. Our rivalry was intense and often ugly. Mere decimal points separated our GPAs. Every quiz, test, and paper was a battle in the overall war for valedictorian. And while Mackenzie Markowitz was not unattractive if you were someone who appreciated her shiny brown curls and the dimple that formed in her right cheek when she smiled, her personality was as toxic as the air on Mars.

  “I should sit in the captain’s seat for today’s competition,” Mackenzie Markowitz said.

  “Why, so we can lose?”

  “You really have no social skills at all, do you, Rebkin?”

  “Luckily I make up for it with my superior skills in mathematics.”

  “You know I scored higher than you on the last AP calc test.”

  “A statistical anomaly.”

  “Can we not talk for the rest of the ride?”

  “I can. I have doubts about your capacity for silence.”

  “Well then let me quiet those doubts,” she said, folding her arms and turning her back to
me.

  I liked nothing more than defeating her, whether in class or in a Math Olympics team bus debate. I thought all the time about ways to get under her skin and prove my dominance. But sitting so close to Mackenzie Markowitz while Greg and Amber were all over each other a few rows back made it hard to concentrate on the competition.

  Mackenzie Markowitz and I spent those bus rides in dense silence as I practiced math equations in my head and tried not to think about Greg and Amber and all the other couples in school who maybe probably definitely were having sex.

  I wasn’t even safe in my own bedroom. How to explain the torture of overlooking the Clays’ backyard from my window? Every warm day since ninth grade, Josie and her friends would sunbathe by the pool in their tiny bikinis, drinking iced coffees and posing for selfies. On days when I tutored Jack, he’d insist that I go around through the front so they wouldn’t know I was there. I wasn’t certain whether he was embarrassed by the fact that he needed a tutor, or by me. Still I’d pass the patio doors on the way to the study and catch a glimpse. They were less than twenty feet away, and yet they existed in a different stratosphere. They were beautiful and carefree. I had never even kissed a girl and suffered debilitating glitches. But I had goals. And Mom assured me that once I was successful, the women would come looking for me.

  In the meantime, I took long showers. Many long showers.

  I was not expecting Josie at the diner. I suddenly felt I had interrupted a private moment between her and Archie. When they finally noticed me, Josie scooted over an inch or two in her seat, creating distance between them. “Hey Harrison,” she said. “Sorry I can’t stay long. I’m going to see Jack at the hospital.”

  “Maybe I should go visit him. I could help him catch up on his schoolwork.”

  “That could be good … but he’s still having headaches and dizziness. Mood swings, too. Like he gets all angry for no reason.”