Falling for June: A Novel

by Ryan Winfield

  David felt his quads twitch and flex as he leaned out, as if his muscle fibers themselves knew what was coming and were protesting. Second thoughts fought to save his life, but corporeal doubt was no match for the certainty of his spiritual pain, and feeble reason was no match for the voice. “You’re brave, my man. I always knew you were. That’s it. Just a little bit farther.”

  Then his head went quiet and calm washed over him. For the first time in a long time he felt fine. So this is all it took, he thought. Freedom had been waiting here all along. All he had needed was an opportunity and the resolve to follow through.

  He leaned out, attracted by the gravity of relief and the promise of a rush toward quiet bliss. His eyes were still shut, his knees trembling—no, maybe, yes. He knew he had decided when the chatter of his thoughts stopped altogether and his lips curled into a smile. He had found a solution at last.

  Now willfully, he inhaled his last breath.

  Leaning out into the void.

  No fear left.

  He felt his stomach lift, his legs going limp. Then he heard another voice, this one quite different from the other, and coming, it seemed, from outside his head:

  “You can’t change your mind halfway down.”

  David opened his eyes, saw the fog beneath him, and panicked. His arms came out instinctively and began flailing in the cool damp air, the gyroscopic thrust arching him, pulling him back, steadying his precarious stance on the ledge. Then he looked to his left, from where the voice had come, and saw a woman standing next to him. The adrenaline coursing through his system had his brain firing double speed, but even so, or maybe because of it, time seemed to have slowed, or perhaps stopped altogether, as it sometimes does for those who have come to the end of a life and have only moments left with which to contemplate it. And although David was mildly aware in some remote corner of his mind that he was still standing on a roof ledge nine hundred feet plus above the street, all he could think about was this curious creature standing next to him with the peculiar and enchanting smile.

  It was the most mysterious smile David had ever seen. Although it was not so much upon her mouth as it was contained within her eyes. It was a smile at once intimate and elusive, familiar yet strange. Her irises twinkled with ironic exuberance from within the folds of the tanned and crinkled skin that surrounded her eyes. He could not tell their color. He could only tell that they seemed to be illuminated from within and altogether too bright for the gray light in which they both stood, side by side now, on the quiet roof. She was gazing idly out at the city below them, as if the two of them were nothing more than old friends enjoying the view. She was slight of frame, almost birdlike in her build, and yet she was somehow anything but small. He could not have guessed her age. She appeared both impossibly young and utterly timeless. There were deep lines etched on her face, but they contrasted so sharply with the youthful energy in those sparkling eyes that he would have believed her had she claimed to be either side of seventeen or seventy-five.

  All of this ran through David’s mind in mere moments, of course, and when he finally realized that he had not actually jumped, and that this woman was not an apparition come to visit him in death, he opened his mouth and in a nervous, high-pitched voice that sounded very out of place considering the circumstances, asked her the only sensible question that came to mind: “Do you work here in the building?”

  “Only today,” she replied, very conversationally.

  His gaze dropped to the Building Maintenance logo on the breast pocket of her jacket. The jacket was blue, and she wore a blue backpack that matched it so perfectly he only saw it because the straps crossing her chest bisected part of the white lettering. None of this would have seemed out of the ordinary had he not glanced farther down and seen that she was not wearing any shoes. She had on khaki cargo pants, the kind hikers often wear, and their bottoms were cinched tight around her thin ankles, showing off her sockless feet. David noticed that three of her toenails were pink, as if she had started painting them but had given up.

  “Are you planning to jump?” she asked.

  David lifted his gaze back to her face. She was looking directly at him. Her eyes were still smiling, but they seemed to him to contain something else now too. Possibly concern, he thought, or perhaps just curiosity.

  “Ah, well, not really,” he stuttered. “I was just looking.”

  He wasn’t quite sure why, but he stepped back down off of the ledge. Her head turned to follow him, but she did not move. She was eye level with him now.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know.”

  “I’m not ashamed,” he said. “I have no reason to be ashamed.”

  This was an enormous lie of course, because he was ashamed about everything and he wore it like a neon safety vest. But she did not challenge him. She only smiled more deeply with her eyes and said, “Good.”

  Good. The way it rolled from her mouth gave it much more meaning than the word itself. Good. As if she were telling him with that single syllable that he was right to not be ashamed, and that he never should be, ever. Good. As if the word itself was a reason to live.

  “Are you planning to jump?” he asked.

  “Oh, I never know what I’ll do anymore until the moment comes and I’ve done it. Although I guess it did take a little planning to get the door unlocked today, so it would seem a shame to waste all that effort.”

  He felt his heart sink. Part of him had thought that maybe she had come to convince him that jumping was a bad idea, and his realization that she might be as suicidal as he was stripped him of even this little glimmer of hope.

  “So, you do mean to jump.” It was a statement more than a question, for he already knew the answer. Somehow, he knew.

  “I sure as hell don’t want to hike down all those stairs,” she said. “It was a real trek just getting up them. No, I think jumping seems the faster way down.”

  He began to panic. Was he talking to a lunatic? Should he restrain her? Call for help? He knew he was in no position to give advice on the subject, but at least he hadn’t been so cavalier about jumping to his death.

  “You mean to tell me you’d rather jump than walk down stairs? That’s your reason for wanting to die. Are you mad?”

  “Why of course not, silly,” she replied. “I’m not jumping because I want to die. I’m jumping because I want to live.”

  “You want to live?”

  He was feeling rather confused, naturally.

  “Yes, I want to live,” she said. “And so should you.”

  “I should?”

  She nodded. “I think so. Don’t you?”

  “But you don’t even know me,” he said.

  The smile in her eyes deepened. “I think I know you better than you think.”

  Something about the way she looked at him made him believe that maybe she did.

  “But what if there doesn’t seem to be any point to living?” he asked.

  He detected a subtle nod of her chin, a momentary look of sadness, as if she understood his statement all too well. But then her lips curled at the corners and her eyes took on their sparkle again. “Maybe there is no point to life,” she said, “except falling pointlessly in love.”

  This caught him off guard, and for some reason he blushed. Then he felt the old resentment rise, the one buried deep in his guts that he only took out on special occasions when he wanted to simultaneously feel sorry for himself and hate his ex-wife.

  “I know for a fact that love has killed more people than it’s saved,” he said.

  As an accountant, of course, he knew damn well that this likely wasn’t true and certainly couldn’t be proved, but he said it anyway. But if she disagreed with him, she chose not to argue over it. She simply shrugged it off and said, “You’re so cynical.” As if that were news. As if he hadn’t just been about to kill himself. “Besides, wha
t if life and death aren’t separate things anyway?” she asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘aren’t separate’?”

  His mind was working overtime to keep up.

  “Well, what if they’re just sides of the same thing? What if death is not the opposite of life, but rather the one part that gives all the rest of life its meaning? I’m not saying it’s so. But what if it is? What if you have to let go of your life to truly live it? Wouldn’t that give you an edge on the rest of the world, knowing that, now that you’ve looked into the abyss and stepped back from the ledge?”

  On some subconscious and metaphorical level David thought maybe he understood what it was she meant. As a suicidal accountant standing on a roof, however, her words confused him greatly.

  “Let go of life to live? That sounds a little clichéd and a lot hopeless.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But hopeless can be a good place to start again.”

  A cold wind came up and pressed against his back and he suddenly felt unstable, and surprisingly, especially to him, afraid of falling. They were after all on the edge of a very high building. The wind seemed not to worry her, however. In fact, it hardly seemed to touch her slight frame, and only the ends of her hair danced in the cold breeze. His mind raced to make sense of what was happening. He glanced behind them at the open stairwell door, then back to her. He wanted to say something thoughtful, but words betrayed him. Then he realized that while they had been talking she had actually stepped closer to the edge and her pink toes were hanging over. He recalled her first words to him, and as if his having taken that one small step down off the bulkhead had somehow reversed their roles, he repeated them now.

  “You can’t change your mind halfway down.”

  Her face lit up once again with her mysterious smile, and she held him suspended in her eyes. He knew then that she would jump, and that he was powerless to stop her.

  “Make me a promise, will you, darling?” she said.

  David was lost for a response, hung up on the intimacy of the word darling, but she went on without waiting for an answer anyway.

  “Don’t make a choice today that your future self can’t undo. Please, promise me. We all owe ourselves that. We all owe the child inside of us at least a chance to be forgiven by the man or woman we’re destined to become.”

  He was shocked by her familiarity and her insight. Had she been in the bathroom with him when he looked into that mirror? Had she been reading his mind here on the roof? Perhaps he had jumped after all, he thought, and this was just some crazy imagined conversation occurring in the last milliseconds of brain activity as he smashed at a hundred miles an hour into the sidewalk below.

  “Promise me,” she said again.

  “Promise you that I’ll give myself another chance?”

  “Yes, exactly that.”

  Something about her eyes made it impossible to do anything but agree—and not just agree for the sake of agreeing, but to actually agree and follow through.

  “I promise,” he finally answered.

  “Good,” she replied, the simple word filled again with hidden meaning.

  Then, having secured his promise, her eyes released him. One moment her smiling eyes had offered the intimacy of a lover—“darling,” she had called him—and the next moment they had withdrawn into themselves as quickly and coolly as two flames being turned down in their lamps. She was still standing there with him, but he felt suddenly helpless and alone on that roof. Then she turned her eyes away.

  With one quick and powerful motion that reminded David of the uncoiling of a spring, she leaped away from him and out into the gray. He lunged forward to grab her, but he was too late and only the bulkhead saved him from falling over after her. His heart sank and he felt like puking again. He was afraid to look down. Then he heard a thick whoosh of air followed by a sharp snapping sound, and he leaned over and saw a bright-yellow smiley face grinning up at him from the top of her parachute canopy as it disappeared into the fog.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said aloud.

  Then she was gone, and he was once again alone.

  5

  I HAD BEEN RECLINING on the sofa with my legs crossed, and the old man’s tale had held me so captivated that I hadn’t even noticed that they had fallen asleep until I took advantage of a pause in his story to stretch and nearly fell onto the floor.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, seeing me stumble.

  “I’m fine,” I said, shaking it out. “Where did you say the bathroom was again?”

  “Just down the hall there on your left.” He reached for his cane and started to rise. “I’ll make you some more tea.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “The one cup seems to be working as advertised.”

  I didn’t think I was away that long, but when I returned from the shitter the old man was gone and there was a glass of water and a plate of sliced apples on the coffee table in front of where I had been sitting. When Mr. Hadley reappeared, he was carrying a plate of apple slices for himself and a glass of milky liquid that I could tell tasted terrible just by how it looked.

  “I thought you might like a little snack,” he said, indicating the apples with a nod. He set down his plate and took up his cane to lower himself into his chair again. “I’m supposed to take my medication with food, but an apple’s about all I can stomach any longer before noon. That and MoonPies.”

  “Thanks,” I said, biting into an apple slice, then adding quietly, “Just what I need after that Smooth Move tea too, more fiber.”

  I said it under my breath but I could tell he heard me because he laughed. I guess those hearing aids worked pretty well. Then he said, “It’s a lovely sound, isn’t it? The crunch of an apple. Have you ever heard a horse eat one?”

  “No, I don’t think I have.”

  “Well, maybe later we’ll go out and feed one to Rosie.”

  “You have horses here?”

  “Just Rosie. I’ve managed to place all of the other animals elsewhere, but Rosie’s blind and she’s been rather bad off since her seeing-eye horse passed away. She can’t eat a whole apple at once any longer, on account of her missing teeth, but she still loves them. June spoiled her something terrible and she almost expects one every day. Won’t touch a carrot, but she sure loves apples.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, where will Rosie go?”

  I didn’t say it exactly, but by “where will Rosie go?” I meant when the bank foreclosed. He seemed to understand, though, anyway.

  “She’ll be gone by then,” he said.

  “Yeah, but where?”

  “Who can say until they get there,” he mused, with a bit of a twinkle in his old eye.

  He pulled his bridge from his mouth and picked a piece of apple peel free that was caught in its wires. Then he smiled at me with no front teeth. “Don’t get old if you can help it, kid. You start losing pieces of yourself. What doesn’t fall out, they want to cut out. Of course, of everything I’ve lost I probably miss my mind the most.” He laughed at his own joke and slapped his knee. Then he reinserted his bridge and picked up his drink. He winced when he sipped it. I knew it tasted bad.

  “Are the apples enough for you?” he asked. “I have some microwave dinners.”

  I assured him that I was fine, and he leaned back in his chair. Then he smiled again, this time with all his teeth.

  “Shall I continue with my story then?”

  “Sure, but I do have a question. I’m assuming that was your wife, June—the lady on the roof with the parachute. But I’m curious why she wasn’t wearing any shoes.”

  “That’s a good question, Elliot,” he replied. “A good fine question. And I wondered the same thing. Especially after I found her boots . . .”

  6

  HE FOUND HER boots sitting neatly together on the top step just inside the roof access door, with the
socks stuffed inside. Why she had left them there before jumping he could not have guessed at the time. Perhaps they had been part of her disguise, he mused, or perhaps she had planted them as a kind of false clue. They were old worn hiking boots in men’s size nine, and they were much too large for her feet as he remembered them. He was quite shaken by the encounter, and it eventually occurred to him as he squatted there that he should probably disappear before being discovered, so he scooped up the boots, tucked them beneath his arm, and hurried off down the stairs.

  The headline in the morning newspaper read:

  DAREDEVIL DOLLY

  BAREFOOT BASE JUMPER STRIKES AGAIN

  Witnesses on the street had watched her land. A few claimed to have seen her running around the block and climbing into a waiting car, although what make or model none could say. She was described by some as being extremely short, and by others as being unusually tall, but all could at least agree that she had been barefoot, appearing like a vision from the overhead fog and touching down in the street with the nimble grace of a sparrow, before gathering up her parachute and vanishing just as quickly as she had appeared. Speculation in the article ran wild: “She’s a communist spy.” “She’s doing it for nuclear disarmament.” “No woman would dare it, I say; she must be a man wearing a disguise.” “She’s a fame seeker.” “Thrill seeker.” “She must be Scandinavian; only a Swede would be crazy enough to jump from a building in the fog.”

  The next day the papers had moved on.

  But David Hadley had not.

  Their rooftop encounter had rattled his psyche more than a little, and no sooner had he descended to his office cubicle, concealing her boots quickly beneath his desk, than he found himself already obsessed with finding her again. He wanted to see those smiling eyes; he dreamed already of hearing her call him “darling” one more time. Plus, he should thank her, shouldn’t he? She had, after all, narrowly saved him from suicide. But mostly he wanted to seek her out because he found himself pondering what exactly she had meant when she had said, “What if you have to let go of your life to truly live it?”