So Theo knew how badly I was hurt, and he couldn’t even take an afternoon off to go into town where he could call me. Funny—I didn’t feel sad about that. Just kind of resigned.
I still didn’t want to talk to my dad about my mom, though. It would be weird, after so many years of hardly mentioning her, to bring her up out of the blue. It wasn’t that I was chicken—or so I told myself.
Later that day I was channel surfing and my dad said, “You know, Denny did his solo.”
I looked up from the remote in surprise. “He did? When?”
“Last weekend. I thought he’d back out after he saw you almost…after he saw your accident, but he finished up student status the next Saturday and did his solo on Sunday.”
“How’d he do?”
“Great. No problems, and he stood it up. He didn’t have a videographer for this one—said he wanted to be all alone up there. But Mad Jack filmed him from the ground so Denny could show his friend. It’s online. You want your laptop?”
I shook my head. The longer I stayed offline, the longer I could wait to reenter the real world, where I’d have to apologize to people and explain what had happened. My phone battery had died, and I didn’t tell my dad to plug it into the charger. I didn’t want to see what Theo had written to me, or Denny either.
“Did Denny buy a case of beer?” I asked.
“Well, Randy left for a while and came back with a case that afternoon, and I have a feeling some money changed hands, but I didn’t ask.”
“Dad?”
“Hmm?” The sleepy sound of his voice made me drowsy too.
“Did something—what happened to the Jump Ranch?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did they get into trouble?”
“Damn right they did. They were breaking all sorts of regulations. They’ve been closed down.”
“Oh no,” I protested. “It was my fault, not theirs!”
He said firmly, “You’re a minor, and they were culpable. And it’s not just you, C.C. The place was a mess. It’s a miracle no one’s been killed there.”
“But Raymond was so nice!”
“I know. He’s a nice guy. Sloppy, but nice. But honey, there’s a reason for those regulations. It’s okay now; they’re out of business. Our insurance company is suing—”
“But it wasn’t his fault! I don’t want to sue him for something I did!”
He raised his hand. “It’s not up to you, C.C.; it’s not even up to me. There’s no reason our insurance company should have to pay for someone else’s negligence.”
“They weren’t negligent! I had that logbook—”
“I know. Margaret Finnegan’s.” Dad’s voice was grim. “They should have asked you for ID. They should have run over safety procedures with you since Margaret’s last jump was so long ago. And most of all, they shouldn’t have allowed that canopy to be used. The feds impounded it, so I can’t inspect it, but it was obviously worn out. I would have shredded it long ago rather than risk someone’s life with it. Plus, the pack job on the reserve—”
“Okay, okay.” I lay back on my pillows, feeling dizzy. “It’s still my fault.”
“It’s not your fault that they’re closed down. They were an accident waiting to happen. What is your fault is that you’re hurt, and that you scared the shit out of me.” My dad cussed so rarely that it shocked the dizziness from my head. He went on more calmly. “Shutting them down probably saved another jumper’s life. Someone was going to get killed there—someone who didn’t know what they were doing.” Hearing my dad almost say that I knew what I was doing made me feel a little better.
I said, “But Dad, people will think you ran him out of business because he was competition!”
“Sweetie, I don’t care what people think, and anyway, I had nothing to do with it. The feds closed him down while I was here with you. He’ll probably have to sell his aircraft to pay the fines.”
I pondered that for a minute. “You should buy the Otter. It’s sweet.”
He laughed. “I don’t know any other sixteen-year-old girl who’d have an opinion about a Twin Otter, especially while she was lying in a hospital bed all busted up! Anyway, I have my eye on one of the Cessnas. Norton says it’s the best aircraft there.”
I stretched my fingers like the physical therapist had been bugging me to do. It hurt, but not as much as the day before. I carefully kept from looking at my dad and asked, “Did he jump again after his solo?”
“Who, Denny?”
I nodded.
“He was supposed to—Cynthia put him on a load and he was going to try a kiss pass with Buddy, but right before they were supposed to go up, I saw him run into the office and then out to the parking lot. He got in his car and peeled out. Cynthia said he never canceled his jump, but he didn’t come back either.”
“And you don’t know what the call was about?”
My dad shook his head.
It had to be Frederick. Should I call Denny? Or at least text? I hesitated. He must have been angry that I’d lied about my age and hadn’t told him about Theo, and he’d say things that hurt all the more because they were true. Or he’d be cold and tell me it had been fun knowing me, he was sorry I was hurt, and he’d see me around. I didn’t know which would be worse.
I tried to watch a movie but couldn’t get interested in it. I felt too guilty, both about the Jump Ranch and about what all this had to be costing my dad. It was good that Skydive Knoxton would be getting more business, what with the Jump Ranch being out of the picture. I didn’t know much about insurance, but I was sure there would be lots of bills from my surgeries and rehab, and they probably wouldn’t all be covered. I’d already decided that I was going to turn my bank account and my cashbox over to my dad to help pay them. It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could do, and I hoped it would make a difference.
It would definitely make a difference to my plans to leave home for school. I wouldn’t have the money I’d been counting on, and I’d missed too many summer-school classes to get the AP credits I needed to give me a head start on my double major. Stupid. I should forget about archaeology and major in something practical, like business or engineering.
I kept stretching my fingers. When I next glanced at my dad he was asleep, his head back against the chair. He’d start snoring soon.
I could just reach my laptop. I powered it up, using the earbuds from my iPod so I wouldn’t wake my dad, and found the video. Denny walked across the landing area and didn’t seem to notice Mad Jack filming him as he climbed into the Caravan. The next shot started when the plane, high up and small, turned on jump run. The engine cut, and then a dot appeared in the sky. “He’s out,” Louisa said. Jack, still on the ground, zoomed in on Denny, and you could make out his arms and legs. Denny did two 360s, and then a back loop, and then another one. He waved off and tossed out the pilot chute. The blue-and-white canopy opened, and I wondered who was packing while I was in the hospital.
Jack filmed a little of Denny’s canopy ride and then the landing, where Denny flared a bit too low and tripped after he hit the ground. He bounced right to his feet, though, and as he gathered up the lines and the canopy carefully to make the pack job easier for whoever had taken my place in the hangar, I blinked back tears. I was so weak that even seeing puppies in a commercial made me want to cry, much less watching Denny do a near-perfect solo.
I realized that I had never told anyone from the online school what had happened, and sure enough, there were emails about missing tests and assignments. I was about to write back to the instructor to explain that I’d had an accident when I saw an email from Denny.
I closed my email, opened it again, closed it again, and then muttered to myself, “This is stupid,” and read his message.
Hey Clancy, hope you’re doing better. I wanted to text but your phone goes to voice mail so I don’t know if it got smashed in the jump. Sorry I left without coming to see you in the hospital but Frederick got really sick with a
fungal infection and I had to go.
That was all. I couldn’t get out of bed to plug my phone in, and I certainly didn’t want to wake up my dad, so I hit “reply” and wrote slowly, painfully with my left hand, which had IV needles stuck in it:
doing ok. sort of. out of icu. how’s f?
I didn’t have to wait long for his answer.
Passed away on Monday. Funeral was today. I gave the eulogy. Advice: don’t ever eulogize your best friend. It sucks so bad.
I started typing one-handed but gave up in frustration. I pushed back the covers and sat up, despite a rush of wooziness, so I could reach the drawer of the bedside table, where my dad had left my phone and charger.
“What are you doing, young lady?”
Dad was awake. My face must have told him that something was bad wrong, because in a flash his arm was around me, holding me up as I shook. “What is it? Clancy, what’s wrong? Does something hurt?”
I said in a rush, “Denny’s best friend died and I have to talk to him and my battery’s dead—” A sob tore at my throat at the word.
“Okay, sweetie, okay. Lie back down. I’ll plug it in.” He handed me the phone. “Good?”
I nodded, trying to breathe evenly, looking for Denny’s call. The last thing he needed was for me to cry.
“I’ll just leave, then,” my dad said, showing a tact I didn’t know he had. “Tell him I’m sorry about his friend.”
Denny’s phone rang only once. “Clancy?” His voice was hoarse.
“Denny,” I said as the tears fell. “Denny. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” And although at first I meant I was sorry about Frederick, I really meant I was sorry about everything.
“Hang on for speed bumps,” the orderly said as the automatic doors slid open, and I got my first breath of fresh air in what seemed like months instead of weeks. The fact that it was muggy, humidity-laden air under a dull, gray sky was irrelevant. It was free of hospital smell and beeping machines and people waking me up to ask about bowel movements. My dad trailed behind, carrying two shopping bags with my things in them, including pain pills and elastic bands for exercises to strengthen my leg when it came out of the cast, and rubber balls to squeeze to keep my arm muscles from getting flabby. I held the strings of a bouquet of helium balloons—now semideflated—that had come from the Geezers, a stuffed skydiving monkey from Angie, and a card that everyone at the DZ had signed.
The orderly stopped at the curb while my dad trotted ahead to get the car. I don’t know which of us was more eager to get me out of there. They both helped me into the backseat, and the orderly showed my dad how to buckle me in so that the chest strap part of the seat belt wouldn’t press on my collarbone. He told me to lean forward and put a small pillow behind me.
My dad pulled into the circular drive so slowly that a pregnant woman on the sidewalk, leading a toddler by the hand, passed us. We inched into the street. “You okay back there?” he asked.
“Fine. Great.” I looked at people going about their business, little kids running ahead of their parents, traffic lights blinking from yellow to red. I had never realized before how beautiful the city was, even on a soggy, gray summer day like this one. My dad looked at me in the rearview mirror, and I could tell from the crinkles around his eyes that he was smiling.
“What?” I asked.
“Reminds me of the other time I brought you home from the hospital. When you were two days old. You were in a car seat in the back and your mom sat next to you, and I cringed at every little bump or short stop until she got mad and told me that you weren’t going to break. She said if I treated you like a piece of glass, you’d wind up believing it.”
“Huh.” I had never heard that story.
He looked at me again, and this time his eyes weren’t smiling. “I’m sorry, C.C.”
“You’re sorry? I’m the one who messed up!”
“Oh, you sure did. You’re right about that. You messed up big-time. But I think I’m at least partially responsible.”
“You? What did you do?”
He didn’t answer, acting like negotiating a curve was taking all his concentration. But I could tell he was stalling. The road straightened out, and he said carefully, “I think your mom was right—I’ve been making you think you’re fragile. I kind of wonder if that’s why you felt you had to bust out so dramatically.”
Well, hallelujah, I thought but didn’t say. I was afraid that if I spoke, he’d stop.
“I couldn’t bear the thought of you getting hurt. By anything. By anyone. I felt my job was to protect you.”
“And look what happened.”
“Exactly.” I thought that was the end of it. It was about the longest conversation of this kind we’d ever had. To my surprise, he continued. “If you had…C.C., if you’d gone in, I could never have lived with the guilt. Never. I’ve never gotten over feeling guilty about your mom, and—”
“Wait a second,” I interrupted him. I forced myself to take a deep breath. “You feel guilty about Mom? Why? You didn’t pack her rig, did you?”
“Oh no, nothing as simple as that.”
I waited.
“The thing is, she was distracted that day. She couldn’t have been in the right frame of mind to jump. And that was my fault.”
“How was that your fault?” I asked.
The words came gushing out of him so fast I could hardly keep up. “I never told you this. I didn’t want you to know. But I think you need to know it now. The night before Jenna went in, I told her I was leaving her. I told her I was taking you and going someplace to start over. I said we never should have gotten married, we were too different and I was too old for her, and now it was catching up with us. I had thought that once you were born she’d calm down, but she was just so…so wild. She’d disappear for days and not tell me where she’d been, and she was drinking before jumping—not just a beer, which would have been bad enough, but she’d drink hard liquor all afternoon and then make a sunset jump.”
I couldn’t process what he was saying. My mom did that? “Dad—you’re not saying—you don’t think she did it on purpose because of what you said, do you? Because—”
“Oh no, sweetie. I saw her; she tried everything possible to save herself. She just waited too long. She cut away too late. AADs weren’t as accurate then as they are now. She should have made up her mind to cut away earlier. I’m not saying that she meant to die.”
“Then are you saying she was drunk when she went in?” The thought horrified me.
He shook his head. “She wouldn’t drink before an important practice. And toxicology came back negative. Thank God. I don’t think I could have stood that.”
“You had her tested?”
“The insurance company did. No, I mean just what I said. I think she was distracted. She probably didn’t sleep well after our fight, and during the jump she was thinking about what I had said and about the possibility of losing you, not about the right way to deal with her malfunction.”
“Were you really going to leave her?” I couldn’t absorb this. It was all too new.
He pulled over to the side of the road, turned off the engine, and twisted around to face me. His eyes were red. He nodded.
“And you were going to take me with you?”
“I couldn’t stand to leave you,” he said. “And anyway, I didn’t think she was good for you. But maybe I was wrong. She loved you, I know that, and you loved her so much. Maybe you would have done better with her than with me.” He was crying, and then I was crying too. I wanted to hug him, but as busted up as I was, it would have hurt too much, and besides, his seat was between us.
“I wouldn’t have done better with anyone else.” I meant it. “But Dad, why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“You never want to talk about your mom. I’ve been respecting that. Angie said to give you space, and—”
“I thought you were the one who didn’t want to talk about her!”
His smile was sad. “I didn
’t—I don’t, not with anyone else. But with you, it’s different. You should know about her. And anyway, right before Angie left, she said it was time you knew. She was right, wasn’t she?”
I nodded, unable to speak.
He reached back and wiped the tears off my cheeks. “Can I ask you one thing?” I nodded again. “When you were up there—when you cut away and dumped the reserve, and then when you did your PLF—did you see her? Did you hear her? Did she help you?”
I wrestled with myself. I thought I knew what he wanted to hear, what he wanted me to say, but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t lie about this. It was too important. Besides, it was time we started telling each other the truth. “No,” I finally said. “I was alone. It was all me.” I thought he’d be disappointed, but I was wrong.
“That’s my girl.” A grin shone on his teary face. He turned the car back on and pulled into the street.
When we stopped at the house, the first thing I saw was a big banner stretching across the porch saying WELCOME HOME CLANCY. The second thing I saw was Julia standing under it, and behind her were Justin and Cory and some other people. Julia and Cory had visited me in the hospital a couple times, but my dad hadn’t let anyone else come. “Teenagers are too germy,” he’d said.
My dad got the rented wheelchair out of the trunk and settled me into it. Justin helped him haul the chair up the porch steps. Each step jolted me, and I had to bite my lower lip to keep from yelping.
When I rolled into the den, Julia ran to give me a hug, but my dad said, “Careful! Broken girl here!” and she stopped. She and Cory were used to what I looked like, but the others stared at me, various degrees of dismay on their faces. I knew what they were seeing. I was pale and thin, my makeup was all weird from being put on one-handed, I still had a bruise on the side of my face, and there was a cast from my upper arm almost to my fingertips and another one on my right leg. At least they couldn’t see the scar where my spleen used to be.
“Welcome home,” Nicole said uncertainly. I spotted a sheet cake on the table and decorations in the den.
Freefall Summer Page 19
