Even If I Fall

by Abigail Johnson

  “Mine does,” Heath says. “Not the way it is now, just...” He stops for so long that I don’t think he’s going to finish. With a swallow that looks painful, he does. “About before. Like Cal’s not gone.”

  “With mine it’s like Jason never was.” My throat constricts painfully at the admission.

  Everything about this interaction is strange. My reaction to Heath, and definitely his to me. We’re both still standing there, just a few feet from each other when anyone else in our situation would have already left. I have that desire inside me, the one that longs to throw myself behind Daphne’s wheel and speed as fast and as far away from him as I can. But I also want to stay. I can’t reconcile the two impulses, and yet the one to stay is winning. The only thing that makes me say anything is the knowledge that Jeff could come out at any moment, and I wasn’t kidding about wanting to avoid that.

  “I need to go—”

  “Where my truck broke down near Hackman’s Pond,” Heath says. “There’s this big live oak just off from the road, down by—”

  “—I know the one,” I finish quietly. His gaze is locked with mine, and it almost feels like he’s daring me to let him keep talking and begging me not to at the same time. I swallow. “It’s nice there in the afternoons, when it’s not too hot.” Heath’s stare doesn’t leave my face, and it’s all I can do not to squirm.

  “Like the day after it rains,” he says.

  I nod, knowing I shouldn’t. All I can do is wonder with a pang if it will ever not hurt to look at him.

  I’m still wondering when he walks back to his truck and I slide behind Daphne’s wheel.

  CHAPTER 9

  “I’ll do it!”

  I can’t help but laugh, a weary sound, as I roll my head toward where Maggie is expertly applying eyeliner at the vanity in front of her bedroom window the next morning. I’m lying on her bed while she films a voice-over makeup tutorial for her YouTube channel, Pretty Well Read, where she posts beauty and book review videos. Her current creation is an interpretation of the cover of Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon. It looks like colorful wildflowers are bursting out of the skin all around her eyes. The effect is arrestingly beautiful.

  “It’s not a glamorous job,” I tell her.

  She eyes me through her mirror, pausing in the process of adding teeny tiny lines to the minuscule purple butterfly she’s drawn on her cheekbone. “Zamboni. Driver.”

  Maggie has a thing for cars, or really anything with a steering wheel. Fast, slow, big, small, she doesn’t discriminate. The first time she saw me driving Bertha she practically drooled. Handing over Bertha’s keys is probably safer than letting her behind Daphne’s wheel, considering she’s already totaled two cars in the year that she’s had her license—she claims she has trouble staying focused, whereas I’m more inclined to think it’s due to her resentment toward her dad given his profession as a stunt driver. Either way, the only trick Bertha can do is occasionally leak hydraulic fluid on the ice.

  “I don’t care if I have to be a minimum-wage toilet cleaner,” she continues, “if it means I finally get to drive Bertha. Want one?” When she points to her butterfly, I nod. She stops her camera and scoots down on her bench to make room for me to join her, then positions my face the way she wants it. In minutes, I have the twin to her butterfly on my cheek, though mine is blue instead of purple. I didn’t even have to ask for the color change, that’s how awesome my friend is. “And speaking of turds, you won’t have to deal with Jeff—” Maggie’s nostrils flare when she says his name. Not even mentioning Bertha was enough to cool her temper after I relayed Jeff’s accusations from the night before. “—on your own anymore once I’m working there too.”

  I don’t respond right away. It would be so much better having Maggie at work, assuming Jeff doesn’t go out of his way to schedule us for different shifts. He’ll probably just put me on permanent bathroom duty. But she’s likely to hear from a coworker exactly why they all give me such a wide berth.

  She’ll find out about Jason.

  “You’re not wearing that bronzer I gave you, are you? I swear you just went like five shades of pale.” She plucks a giant fluffy brush from a glass jar on her vanity and starts buffing “life” back into the perimeter of my face. “There,” she says, with a satisfied nod. “You no longer look like someone outlawed figure skating.”

  “Bronzer is magic,” I say, echoing her oft-repeated phrase while I will actual color back into my face. I don’t want to think about what I’ll do if Maggie learns the truth about my brother and I lose the one remaining good thing in my life. “But driving Bertha is the smallest part of the job. It’s ten minutes every hour—the other fifty it’s a straight janitorial job.”

  “Says the girl who gets paid to drive her.” Maggie holds up two lip glosses for me choose between. I tap the peach one and then try not to move my lips as she swipes it on me.

  “Did I mention that Bertha’s top speed is a whopping nine miles per hour and typically I don’t go half that? Try turning above four and you’ll nick the ice. It’s seriously not as awesome as you’re thinking. You have to be perfectly precise with your laps to avoid overlapping but not allow any gaps. You have to grease and sharpen the blades regularly. You have to constantly monitor the hydraulic and water lines, and even when you do everything right there’s still a chance that the ice could start crawling—literally buckle in on itself—if the temperature is too low. And then there’s the fact that Bertha is a million years old and sometimes she just goes down, which means you’ll be out on the ice with a squeegee and buckets of water.” I roll my shoulders, remembering the ache from last time that happened.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you didn’t want us to work together.” She says this without suspicion or wounded feelings. She has no reason to know how true her statement is. Maggie closes the lip gloss and lowers it to her lap, her head tilted in a half puzzled, half concerned manner. “Why am I having to convince you that this is a good idea? You’d get your favorite person in the world at your favorite place in the world and I could help you finally film your audition for your favorite job in the world. What part of that isn’t awesome?”

  A year ago, I’d have said no part. Now, hearing them all together is like trying to breathe while a thick, scratchy blanket smothers me. Stories on Ice is THE national touring ice show. It may not be the Olympics, but it’s still a big deal, especially to me. Skaters from all over the country submit audition videos every year, and at seventeen I’m finally old enough to send in my own.

  I try to grin with her, but it feels more like a grimace. “I still haven’t decided if I’m going to audition.” We’ve had versions of this Stories on Ice conversation dozens of times since she found the website bookmarked on my laptop, and they all end with the same evasive responses from me. She never gets mad; she just retreats and attacks again later. And she’ll keep on attacking until she wins. That relentlessness served her well while building her YouTube channel and learning to skate, and serves me less well when it comes to things I’m not ready to tell her.

  “That’s officially the dumbest thing you’ve ever said.” Maggie swings a leg over her bench, straddling it so she fully faces me. “We can totally do this. You can do the skating, and I will make you look like a dazzling princess.” She nods to her filming equipment and computer. “They won’t be able to say no. After you graduate next year you could be touring the country as part of a national ice show! I mean, you’ll get paid to live on the ice. Tell me that’s not the best thing you’ve ever heard?”

  It is, yet I have to feign a smile and hold it while Maggie goes on about how close I am to the dream job that can’t ever be mine.

  From the first moment I stepped onto the ice, I knew I belonged there. I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t skating, when I couldn’t make myself happy just by thinking about it.

  Although Da
d and I used to make that three-hour round-trip to Odessa five days a week, we hit a wall when I was thirteen and my coach said we needed to decide what my goals were—because if I had serious aspirations, five days a week wasn’t going to cut it, not even close. The schedule she proposed and the accompanying cost kept my dad silent the whole drive home. I remember hearing my parents discussing it that night. Dad talked about getting a second job and Mom mentioned taking out a second mortgage on the house. I still believe they would have found a way for me to do it if I’d wanted, but the idea of putting this huge financial burden on my family and essentially moving in with my coach so that I could dedicate every waking moment of my life to ice-skating was terrifying.

  I loved the ice, but I loved my family more. I always would.

  So we said no, and instead of a three-hour round-trip to Odessa to train with a world-class coach at a private rink, my journey turned into forty-five minute round-trips to Polar Ice Rink in town to learn however and from whomever I could. I let the bigger dream go—the one I wasn’t sure I’d ever really wanted—and replaced it with one that promised to let both parts of my heart, my family and the ice, beat together. That was when we started focusing on Stories on Ice and my hopes to join it after high school and make it my career.

  I pored over skaters’ audition videos online and spent countless nights planning for the one I could film when I turned seventeen. But my birthday came and went, and I put it off. Because by the time I turned seventeen, everything was different.

  Jason was gone.

  My family was shattered.

  And dreams no longer fit into the nightmare we lived in.

  I’m not ready is the only excuse I can give Maggie. And I become less ready every time I visit my brother in prison, every time Mom sneaks away to cry when we come home, every time Dad disappears into his shop for hours on end without touching a single tool, every time Laura goes more than a day without speaking unless I make her.

  Every time I try to hold us together and tear myself apart more.

  Thunder booms outside, startling us both. Maggie peers out the window and scowls at the clouds rolling across the sky. “Seriously, Texas? I was kind of using the sun to film right now.” She slumps beside me as the light in her room grows dim. “Think it’ll pass before my face starts to melt so I can finish this look?” She misinterprets my slightly nauseous expression and sighs. “It’s fine. We’ll talk about the audition later.” She reaches for a makeup remover wipe and scrutinizes her now shadowed face. “My left eye looks kind of cluttered anyway.”

  Normally, I’m transfixed watching her take off her more elaborate makeup looks. But today, I’m watching the window and the bilious gray clouds sweeping across the sky. In the distance I can already see threads of rain beginning to fall.

  Tomorrow, Heath will be at the tree by Hackman’s Pond.

  And I won’t.

  I’ll be with my brother.

  CHAPTER 10

  A single knock on my bedroom door is my wake-up call on Saturday. My eyes snap open at the soft sound, my whole body alert as though an entire marching band has encircled my bed rather than Mom’s quiet footsteps moving past Laura’s door so as not to wake her. Careful as she is, the stairs creak as she tiptoes down to the kitchen.

  For a moment, I think I won’t get up. I didn’t draw my curtains fully closed the night before, so the cheery morning sunshine—bright and clear after yesterday’s rain—is dappling through the windows on either side of my bed and glinting off the shelves Dad built for me, which are full of old, slightly dusty figure skating medals and trophies. It’s going to be a beautiful day, and already I want it to be over.

  It’s the same every Saturday, that mingled sense of dread weighing my limbs and longing tugging my heart. I get to see my brother today. After endless security checks, drug-sniffing dogs and invasive pat downs, I’ll get to sit with him at a table in the visitation room inside a prison for exactly two hours—two for every one hundred and sixty-eight that he spends there each week. I’ll get to pretend we aren’t surrounded by other inmates with their own visitors and prison guards who bark out warnings if we get too close. I’ll have to smile the whole time and convince us that we’re going to be okay, that the next thirty years of once-a-week visits will be over before we know it, that watching the guards take him away afterward isn’t like having a piece of heart ripped from my chest.

  It’s more of a battle than usual to get out of bed that Saturday and I know it’s because of Heath. It’s hard enough seeing my brother behind bars; today’s visit is going to be harder still because I’m bringing unwanted thoughts of Calvin and his family along with me.

  I slip out from under my too-warm covers and turn to make the bed the moment my feet hit the ground. The bedspread is old and faded, patched together with remnants from old clothes and blankets. My grandmother made it when Mom was a little girl, but Mom had to earn it each day by doing chores and having good behavior otherwise she shivered at night. I never met my grandmother—after some of the stories I’ve heard about her I’m not sure I could’ve stomached the sight of her—and the quilt used to be locked away in a trunk in the attic, but I started using it a few months after Jason went away, feeling like I earned something that I couldn’t get anywhere else. Every morning I fold it away and keep it under my bed in case Mom comes into my room.

  Once the bed is made and the quilt hidden from sight, I move to my closet. I dress automatically, eschewing the sundresses I normally live in during the summer in favor of items that meet the prison dress code for visitors: jeans and a long-sleeve crewneck T-shirt. I remove the tiny stud earrings I always wear and slip into my sneakers instead of flip-flops. I take a little time putting on makeup and add soft waves to my hair with a curling wand. I even repaint my nails. The goal is to look nice but not overly happy. It’s a balance I’ve honed to perfection over the past year.

  Mom is similarly dressed when I find her downstairs. Laura is still in her room and Dad is nowhere to be seen. They always make themselves scarce on Saturday mornings, knowing Mom will invite them to come. They always refuse, adding to the pallor of an already melancholy event. For once, I’m glad they’re not there.

  Seeing me, Mom smiles. It’s more an expression of relief than anything else. One of her many fears is that I’ll start disappearing on Saturdays too, leaving her to visit Jason alone. The everything-is-fine act she puts on is for her own benefit as much as everyone else’s. If she had to make this trip on her own she’d have only this long-denied reality to keep her company.

  I return her smile. “Want me to drive?”

  She gathers up her purse and keys. “Maybe on the way back, okay?”

  “Sure,” I say, following her to the car. She doesn’t ever let me drive. I think it’s one of a million tiny distractions that she needs, on visitation days more than ever.

  As soon as the car starts, talk radio blares from the speakers. Mom turns up the volume.

  My knee bounces under the round table in the visitation room. There are a dozen other people in the nondescript space, including a toddler whose mother is trying to keep the child entertained while they wait.

  “Daddy’s going to come right through that door.” The mother points to the entrance flanked on either side by guards. “Can you show me how you’re going to clap when you see Daddy?”

  My knee bounces faster as I look away. Beside me, Mom is watching the now clapping child, her expression strained in the same way mine feels. Anywhere else, it’d be impossible not to smile at the sweet little face, but not here, not when Daddy is in this place.

  There is nowhere else to look for distraction. The cinder block walls are white, and there aren’t any windows. Even the air feels sterile and so artificially chilled that goose bumps pebble my skin despite the long-sleeve shirt I’m wearing. I force my gaze upward to the fine cracks in the ceiling. I’ve traced the familiar pattern
twice through when the door opens and the first inmate is led inside.

  I’m on my feet in an instant, trying not to look at the inmates’ faces as they see their loved ones waiting for them. Most of them remain outwardly stoic, but there’s usually a flash of naked emotion—relief, despair, shame—that bleeds through. I don’t know these men or what they’ve done, who they are to my brother, friend or not. He’s never once mentioned his fellow prisoners, not even the name of his cellmate.

  Jason is the fourth one in, and even though I’ve steeled myself in preparation for his appearance—one so altered from how he looked a year ago—I can’t keep from sucking in a breath I hope Mom doesn’t hear. It’s not any one thing that forms the lump in my throat; it’s everything together.

  He was always lean, like Mom, but now he’s borderline gaunt in his orange jumpsuit, with high cheekbones that look ready to split through his too-pale skin. The shadows under his always-darting flat blue eyes have deepened, and his hair, once a sun-kissed brown, is a dark stubble shorn so close to his head that no hint of the natural wave shows. What I do see is the puncture mark scars from when he was ten and he fought off a stray dog that had attacked a neighbor’s cat in our yard.

  That’s the brother I know, not this.

  The smile Jason offers is as tight as the fist around my heart.

  We’re allowed one quick hug each while a guard stands nearby in case Mom or I try to pass him drugs. His whip-lean arms barely close around me before they drop and he shuffles back a step, glancing at the guard for approval before sitting. The lump rises higher. He’s like a dog, I think, and not a loved one.

  Mom’s smile is bright to the point of looking painful. “How are you doing? Good week?”

  “Yeah, Mom,” he says, but his voice is so raspy that even Mom’s smile falters the second he glances at me. “Hey. Dad and Laura?”

  “They’re good,” I tell him, before adding what I always say. “They couldn’t make it.”