Freefall Summer

by Tracy Barrett

  Elise’s load landed, and my dad came out of the office and stood in the doorway of the hangar. He grinned as she trotted up and threw her arms around him. “That was so much fun!” she almost shouted. “I was hardly scared at all.” Her curly brown hair had escaped from its elastic, and her smile nearly split her face in two. She kept talking while he undid the straps and pulled the harness off her. Lots of students babble out of relief that the jump is done, but Elise looked more excited than relieved, like she had really enjoyed it.

  Then she called over to me, “I bet you can’t wait until you’re old enough to do this!”

  The smile left my dad’s face, and he looked like someone had punched him in the stomach. Before I could come up with one of my stock answers, Elise’s eyes widened and she covered her open mouth with one hand. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry! I totally forgot…”

  Totally forgot that your mother died right out there, only a few hundred yards from where I landed safe and sound five minutes ago. Totally forgot that you were here that day.

  “It’s okay,” I said, falsely cheery. I didn’t want her to feel bad that she had forgotten—adrenaline will do that to you. Plus, it’s not like people avoided talking about jumping around me, which would be impossible at the DZ, anyway. Don’t say anything, I silently begged my dad, but of course he had to “set the record straight,” as he put it.

  “Clancy isn’t going to jump. She’s not so good at thinking on her feet.” He glanced at me, but I turned back to the packing table so he wouldn’t see my face, which I felt growing hot. “Jumping isn’t the right sport for her. If she had to make a decision in a hurry…” He shook his head without finishing.

  “Dad…” I swallowed the whiny tone. I should just let it go, I thought. When I turned eighteen it wouldn’t be up to him. I’d be legal, and if I wanted to skydive and hang glide and bungee jump and get a tattoo, I’d do it. Maybe all of them on the same day.

  I didn’t say that, of course. I didn’t want him passing out on the floor or sending me to a boarding school with bars on the windows, so I said as reasonably as I could, “You always say that, but when I ask you for examples of ‘poor decision-making skills’ ”—I made air quotes with my fingers—“you can’t ever give me any. If you—” I saw Elise trying to slip away from this family squabble, and I stopped. I bent back over the lines I was untangling so my dad wouldn’t see my face. I knew he wasn’t the only clueless parent in the world, but surely he’d know how humiliating it was to have Elise be a witness to how he treated me like a ditz.

  “We’ll talk about this another time,” my dad said.

  “Yeah, right,” I muttered. I knew we wouldn’t.

  Rippy hopped up on the table and batted at the lines. I pushed him away and worked without speaking until I was sure my dad and Elise were gone.

  I closed the last pack and glanced out the door. From the looks of the wind sock, it might get too breezy for students soon, maybe even for the fun jumpers. It was the weekend before the start of summer school at Clemens, and the college students had a whole summer’s worth of money in their pockets and no homework to do yet. I hoped my dad would be able to put out at least one more load. That would mean four, maybe five pack jobs, just from student rigs. Every dollar I earned went into my savings so that I could eventually go away to college. There’s nothing wrong with Clemens, but it was practically in my backyard, and I knew my dad would always find some excuse to drop in, even if he let me live in a dorm.

  “And I’ll become an archaeologist and go on digs in some country where no one’s ever heard of skydiving,” I grumbled to myself. Ha. Like such a country existed. I’d probably be in the rain forest digging up an arrowhead that proved that Amazonian Indians actually came from Scotland when some guy in a rig would land in front of me and say, “Aren’t you Dave Edwards’s kid?”

  Cynthia’s voice came crackling into the hangar, telling everyone that we were on a weather hold and only fun jumpers could go up—no students. The load that was already up landed, and the students trickled into the hangar. Rigs piled up next to me. The students trickled out again, laughing and talking, and then one of them turned back and called into the hangar, “Which one of you guys is Clancy?”

  I suppressed a groan as I straightened up and looked at the student standing in the doorway. Right behind him stood Noel, who made a jack-o’-lantern grin at me behind the guy’s back. He always thought it was funny to let people think I was a man.

  “Clancy?” the guy asked. He looked at Buddy, who shook his head. He turned to Mad Jack, who shrugged.

  I put the student out of his misery by raising my hand. “Here.”

  He looked at me warily, like he thought he would be providing the punch line to a joke. “I mean the Clancy who packed my parachute,” he explained. “I want to thank him for saving my life.” He sounded hyped up on adrenaline, and his ears were probably still stopped up, which would explain why he was so loud.

  “I’m the Clancy who packed your parachute,” I said. “And you’re welcome.”

  Noel tossed his rig onto the pile and picked up his regular gear to join the group of fun jumpers that was forming outside the door. When I glanced up to find Noel’s tandem rig, the student was still there. “Sorry.” He sounded like he meant it. “It just didn’t occur to me—I mean, I never thought—”

  “It’s okay. I know there aren’t many girls called Clancy. It’s really my middle name. And Noel likes doing that. He thinks he’s a comedian.” The guy looked sheepish and even blushed a little. “I’m a good packer even though I’m a girl, if that’s what’s bothering you. I know what I’m doing. I don’t make parachutes or repair them or anything—I just pack them, and it’s legal, even though—”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s legal. And I’m sure you know what you’re doing—it opened and everything.”

  He looked nice when he smiled. I noticed that he wasn’t much taller than me, if at all, and had light brown hair and kind of gold-colored eyes. Long eyelashes. A nice face with a cleft chin. I realized I was staring and started on Noel’s pack.

  Leon came in carrying a rig and the student stuck out his hand at him. “Thanks again,” he said. “It was awesome.”

  “You got the wrong guy.” Leon tossed his rig next to the table and went out, leaving the student staring after him.

  “That was Leon,” I told him. “You jumped with Noel.”

  “But that guy looks just like—”

  “Leon and Noel are identical twins,” I said. “At least they look identical—same height, same receding hairline, same potbelly, same everything else. But actually, they’re totally different. Leon’s right-handed; Noel’s a lefty. Leon is quiet; Noel never shuts up. Leon’s gay; Noel’s straight.”

  “Wow! It’s kind of like they’re mirror images, like their names.”

  I nodded, surprised that he noticed it so quickly. “They even part their hair on opposite sides. Their mom promised her father she’d name her first son Leon after him. Then when she had twins she named the first one Leon and the second one Noel so they’d both have his name, kind of.”

  “Good thing her dad wasn’t named Bob.”

  It took me a moment to get it, and then I laughed. “Or Otto!”

  “Or Pip. Or Asa.”

  “Asa?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a name.” Then he blushed again. “My name’s Denny. Dennis Rider, really, but nobody calls me Dennis except my grandmother.”

  “If you had a twin, the two of you would be Dennis Sinned,” I said.

  He smiled. “Never thought of that. Can’t do much with Clancy, though—Clancy…” He wrote the letters in the air and acted like he was reading it. “Ycnalc.”

  “Sounds Klingon,” I said. “My dad sometimes calls me C.C. That would work backward. My real first name is easier than Clancy, though. Backward, it’s Syrac.”

  “Your real name is Carys?”

  “It’s Welsh, after my dad’s mother,” I said. “No one ever knows
how to pronounce it, so when I started kindergarten, I told the teacher my name was Clancy. It was easier.” That wasn’t really true. I had still been Carys in kindergarten. It was in first grade that I changed it. And it wasn’t because nobody could pronounce it. Lots of kids had names that made substitute teachers stumble, and they didn’t switch to their middle names. No, it was because Clancy was my mom’s last name, and I had practically nothing of hers left to me, just a few pictures. Her rings and the pearl necklace her grandmother had given her were technically mine, but they were in a safe-deposit box at the bank. My dad or Angie did something with the rig and costumes she had worn for demo jumps. I figured that since I had nothing else of hers, I could at least have her name.

  The last student load landed, and the whoops and hollers started again, and the pile of rigs next to me grew. Denny’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen and broke into a grin as he answered it. “F-bomb!”

  F-bomb?

  He hunched over his phone and turned away. “It was awesome! I can’t wait till we do it together. You’ll love it.” He waved his free hand at me and walked out. I went back to my packing, and when I looked up again, he was sitting cross-legged against the wall, still talking. His face was shining, and even at that distance it looked like he had tears in his eyes.

  Denny glanced up as though he felt me staring and smiled again. I quickly went back to my work, ignoring the little flutter in my belly, and the next time I looked toward the wall, he was gone.

  I finally finished packing, and I was reading my National Geographic in the beanbag chair when my phone beeped. Theo wanted to know if the weather was as bad at the DZ as it was in town. I felt a twinge of guilt that I hadn’t even thought about him all day, or at least ever since I’d met Denny. That didn’t mean anything, I told myself. It was just that it was a nice change having someone to talk to at the DZ. It made the time pass.

  I looked out the hangar door, which was wide enough to allow a small aircraft to wheel in, and saw that the sky was gray. A piece of trash went skittering across the landing area, and I wondered how high the wind was. I hoisted myself up stiffly. How long had I been sitting there? It was hard to wrench my mind away from the ancient Aztecs and Incas I’d been reading about and focus on twenty-first-century Missouri.

  In the office Cynthia was yawning and playing solitaire on the computer. She brightened when she saw me. “Tell Dave we need to close down,” she said. “He won’t listen to me.”

  “Where is he?”

  She jerked her head in the direction of the lounge, behind the office.

  I hesitated. “Is Elise with him?” I didn’t want to interrupt anything.

  She nodded. “Bunch of other people too.” So that was okay.

  In the lounge my dad sat on the saggy couch, with Elise next to him—not plastered against him, but being cozy. Leon and Noel were in armchairs, and Louisa and Patsy sat on folding chairs. A newish jumper named Zach, who had just come off student status, sat on the floor, teasing Ripstop with a length of cord.

  They were telling shoulda-died stories. Skydivers never get tired of them. Louisa was in the middle of her best story, which I had heard zillions of times, about one day in the ’90s when she’d been riding her motorcycle to a DZ in Arizona. She wore her rig on her back while she drove along the highway, and she locked it down so it wouldn’t deploy by accident while she was on the road, which would probably be fatal. She got to the DZ just as a load was going up. She ran to the plane, forgetting about the condition of her rig, and when the plane turned on jump run, another jumper offered to give her a pin check.

  “What’s that?” Elise asked.

  “Something jumpers used to do back in the day, when they jumped rounds and Para-Commanders,” Zach said dismissively.

  Elise looked blankly at Zach. “Old-style rigs,” he explained. “They—”

  “A pin check is something some jumpers still do,” my dad broke in. “Including everyone at this DZ, on every load.” He looked around to make sure they got his point, and then answered Elise. “The rig is on your back, which means you can’t check yourself one last time to make sure everything is in place, so someone else on the load checks for you, and you do the same for them.” He glared at Zach, who looked down at Ripstop as though the beaten-up old tomcat was suddenly interesting.

  “Anyway,” Louisa said hastily, “sure enough, the other jumper saw that both my main and my reserve were locked down. The main never would have opened, and by the time I could have managed to unlock the reserve, it probably would have been too late.”

  “Wow.” Zach shook his head. “You packed yourself a double malfunction.”

  Everyone digested that thought in silence. Even Rippy stopped playing with the string dangling from Zach’s fingers and looked serious.

  Angie says that after my mom died, it was a long time before anyone told shoulda-died stories around my dad, but it turned out he still liked hearing them and even telling them himself. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because they’re a reminder that a skydiving accident doesn’t always have to end in death.

  Elise caught sight of me in the doorway. She smiled and slid over, patting the cushion next to her. I shook my head. “I just need to talk to my dad.”

  Then everyone looked at me, and I wished I had told Cynthia that if she wanted to close up, she should be the one to ask my dad, not me. Too late now, and anyway, I would love to be home early enough on a Saturday to be able to do something with Theo.

  “What is it, C.C.?” my dad asked.

  “The wind isn’t dropping and clouds are moving in.”

  Zach groaned. “My one day off this week!” He had shown up at the DZ a few times in hospital scrubs, but whether he was a brain surgeon or an orderly or something in between, I didn’t know.

  “Let’s see if it clears,” my dad said. “The weather people don’t know everything.”

  “Dad.”

  “Just another hour.”

  “Oh, take her home,” Noel said. “Back to that boyfriend.”

  “He’s working,” my dad said.

  “No, he’s not,” I said. “Or he won’t be for long. It’s really cloudy in town, and they’re going to close the pool.” Theo hadn’t exactly said that, but it was probably true.

  In the end my dad said we’d wait until four o’clock and see. By then it was obvious that jumping was over for the day. Elise said good-bye to me and went outside with my dad, and in a minute her car pulled up to the parking lot exit. I watched as she turned onto the road and drove away. I wondered if she’d come back the next weekend. She was nice enough, and she wasn’t trying to be a mother to me.

  Leon and Noel were going to spend the night in their tents behind the hangar and hope for better weather on Sunday, and the rest of the jumpers loaded up their cars and left. Then my dad did some paperwork while I straightened out Cynthia’s files, which were always a mess. I knew that if I nagged him, it wouldn’t do anything except give him an excuse to lecture me, which would slow us down even more. We finally left just after five.

  I’d gotten up before dawn since my dad likes to be on-site for the first load, so I slept most of the way back. It would be great to get home before the sun set for a change. My dad would have preferred to stay over Saturday night in the trailer we kept at the DZ, but even he could see how unfair it was to make me hang out at the DZ all weekend. When I was younger I used to go to summer camp—first for two weeks, then for a month, then for most of the summer—until I aged out. While I was away my dad would move to the DZ. Until I turned twelve or thirteen, it didn’t bother me that I spent my weekends at the DZ with a lot of adults. But once I was old enough to have friends and a life of my own, I complained about staying there all weekend and seeing my friends only in school. My dad was reluctant to leave me with a babysitter, except Angie’s daughter, Leanne, once or twice when he was in a bind.

  Now that I was sixteen and obviously too old for a sitter, even according to my dad, people offered to
drive me home when they were done jumping on Saturday and then bring me back again to the DZ on Sunday morning. But my dad still wouldn’t let me stay in the house overnight by myself. That meant we had to get up really early on Sunday too, but at least I could go out on Saturday night.

  I woke up when we were a few blocks from home and texted Theo. He didn’t answer. As we pulled up to the house, I saw why: he was already on the porch, sitting on a step, with his long legs stretched out in front of him. His dark hair still glistened with pool water in the gray light coming from the cloudy sky, and his lean swimmer’s build looked especially good.

  He came down to the car to help me out. I’d given up telling him that I didn’t need help, and I let him open the door and offer me his hand, as though I was too fragile to struggle out of the seat by myself. Saint Theodore the Protector. I stifled a sigh of exasperation. Better to pick your battles, Angie always told me, and this wasn’t very important. Plus, Theo liked being protective.

  The air had cooled since we’d left the DZ, and a fresh breeze stirred my hair. Theo gave me a quick kiss, his chin stubble scraping my skin. I smiled up at him. He looked so good. In the dim light, his brown eyes were almost black, and I wished I could trace his jawline with my finger without my dad seeing.

  My dad came around the car. “Anything in the trunk, sir?” Theo asked. He’d moved to Missouri from Birmingham, Alabama, the previous summer, but he still had a drawl that my best friend, Julia, said was the sexiest thing she’d ever heard.

  “Nope.” Dad shook Theo’s hand. “We’ll be going back first thing in the morning, so I left things there.”

  He wouldn’t let me tease Theo for always shaking hands, for opening the door for me. He said it was refreshing to see a seventeen-year-old act like a gentleman. I knew he meant “refreshing as a boyfriend for my daughter” because he liked neck-tattoo Cory as just a friend for me, and he preferred adventurous girlfriends for himself. He also liked how Theo did man-stuff with him, such as when the refrigerator quit and the two of them fixed it together. If I offered to help, they’d act like it was cute and tell me they could handle it.