Even If I Fall

by Abigail Johnson

  I hate that they don’t come. Laura is still so young and Jason was always one step down from a superhero to her, so a part of me understands that it might be too hard for her to see him here like this, knowing what he did. But I don’t understand Dad’s refusal to visit. Jason is his son. No crime, however awful, can change that. And Jason isn’t that person; I know he’s not. Whatever happened that night, whatever drove him to act out in that brief burst of violence, that’s not the person sitting across from me.

  That’s not the person who pleaded guilty rather than put his family through a long and painful trial in the hopes of getting a lighter sentence.

  That’s not the person who asks about his dad and sister every week even though they refuse to visit him.

  That’s not my brother.

  “Dad’s so busy,” Mom hurries to add with an exaggerated eye roll. “Did I tell you about the order he’s been working on? The buyer wants him to replicate a ten-chaired Russian dining set that belonged to his great-grandparents. All he had was a faded photograph, so it’s a lot of design work and research for me before he can even start.”

  “Sounds like a lot.”

  “It is, but I think it’ll be really beautiful once it’s done. And Laura is good. I can’t believe she’s already fourteen. I can still remember your fourteenth birthday,” she says to Jason. “And yours.” She reaches for my hand and squeezes it. “Time goes by so fast.”

  Jason lowers his gaze to the twitching hands he’s resting on the table. Only last week he’d let slip how long the days feel here, how sometimes he’ll watch a clock and swear the hands are turning backward. He normally doesn’t say things like that, about what it’s like for him. He normally doesn’t say much at all, preferring to let Mom talk with my occasional interjections, which is why I don’t answer right away when he asks me a question.

  “So what happened with the Camaro? Guy wouldn’t budge on his price, would he?”

  “Actually, he did,” I say, warming to the subject change. “I brought my friend Maggie with me and we kind of bullied/charmed him into the price I wanted. It helped that I had cash, but yeah. I bought a car.” I start to reach for my keys to show him the ridiculous fuzzy keychain, but abort the gesture midway when I remember that I had to surrender them along with all my other belongings at security. Jason’s gaze is sharp, following my movements, and I know without a doubt he guessed my intentions and it’s another unwelcome reminder of his situation. “Anyway, I named her Daphne.”

  Jason shakes his head a little at my propensity for naming inanimate objects, but it’s accompanied by an exhale that’s at least partially a laugh. “That’s a terrible name for a muscle car.”

  Lightened by the once-familiar teasing from him, I smile. “Trust me, I regretted it after about the hundredth time she stalled on me.”

  “What’d you expect buying a stick when you’ve never driven one?” He glances at Mom. “You guys shouldn’t have let her buy that car. I wouldn’t have.”

  I still think he’s teasing me, so I laugh. “Right, like you could have stopped me, besides—”

  Jason sneers, and it’s such an alien expression on his face that I don’t even try to finish telling him that I’m now completely comfortable driving stick. I don’t know what switch I hit, but I try to throw it back. “You always told me Camaros were your favorite cars,” I say, tucking my hands into my lap. “She’s even blue.”

  Jason’s eye twitches. “So you get to own it for me? That’s great, Brooke. I’ll be sure to think about you stalling it all over town next time I’m walking around the yard.” He pushes back into his chair so forcefully that it skids, screeching across the floor and causing the guards to move in. Mom and Jason and I have to repeatedly assure them everything is fine before they retreat.

  I can see Jason struggling to control his breathing even after they move away and Mom steers the conversation toward more neutral territory. I’m barely listening. The car was supposed to make him happy. Sure, I liked the car, and now that I can drive stick, I prefer it to automatic. But the reason I found that Camaro in the first place was for Jason. I never for a moment considered he would resent me owning a car he wouldn’t get to see, much less drive, for decades, if then. Sitting across from him, I feel so foolish for not realizing how much it would bother him. I’m still stewing in self-recrimination when Jason says my name and I lift my gaze to meet his.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I got upset.”

  His apology makes me feel worse. “No, it’s my fault. I wasn’t thinking. I thought of you as soon as I saw the Camaro and I knew you’d love her.”

  “I would. I do.”

  “Yeah, but for yourself.”

  His eye twitches a little again. “Maybe, but that’s not an option. If it can’t be mine, then yeah, why shouldn’t it be yours?”

  Because you shouldn’t be here, I think. Because you belong outside with us, driving a car you’d love and enjoying everything else that would have been yours if you’d made one different choice.

  Unbidden, Heath’s face tangles in my thoughts, and it’s all I can do to push it away and focus on my brother for the too-little time I have left with him that day.

  “Do me a favor though, okay?”

  I’d do anything for my brother and he knows it, so he doesn’t even wait for my assent before asking.

  “Don’t go on any main roads until you can handle the back ones without stalling. This would be easier in the car, but basically, what you need to do is—”

  I open my mouth to tell him Maggie already taught me, but I feel Mom’s hand squeeze my knee beneath the table and I close it while Jason goes on to explain the process.

  He rarely says more than a sentence or two together, but now he’s talking and animated as he gestures and mimes the movements I need to make next time I drive Daphne. He does this sometimes, comes alive in a way the prison seldom lets him. It’s bittersweet, seeing him like this, because it never lasts. A single wrong word or a sound or even just a random thought, and he’ll go quiet as sudden as a candle snuffing out. I’m watching him intently so I see it happen, like a flinch, and I have no idea why. One second he’s smiling and shaking his head about my car, and the next his shoulders are rolling in as his head drops down, the transformation happening before my eyes in the most heartbreaking way possible. He’s gone for the rest of the visit, lost in himself no matter what Mom or I try to do or say to draw him back out.

  After Mom hugs Jason goodbye she moves away to give my brother and me the semblance of privacy for a few seconds. I wrap my arms around his waist and try not to think about how much less of him there is to hold.

  “You’re really okay?” he asks, his words muffled by my hair, softening the rasp.

  I want to return the question to him, only I know I won’t like the honest answer any more than he’ll like mine. So I sigh audibly. “I spent all my money on a car that hates me. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

  I feel his slight laugh and it’s like sunshine finding its way into this windowless room. I want more of it. “Maybe when you call this week you can go over shifting gears again with me?”

  “Sure, Brooke.”

  A cleared throat from the guard makes me let him go, but his expression doesn’t dim when he looks at me.

  “But you gotta practice on your own too. Why don’t you drive out on the dirt road by Hackman’s Pond? You know we’re pretty much the only ones who go out that way since they paved Williams Field Road. You can stall and start without anyone around to notice.”

  I lower my eyes and, when I answer him, mine is the voice that sounds hoarse. “Maybe,” is all I can say, because I know that today at least one other person will be there.

  “No maybe,” he says, looking and sounding more like my bossy brother. “You gotta leave me knowing you’re gonna do right by that car.”

  Looking up at hi
m, I nod.

  CHAPTER 11

  Mom and I don’t say much after leaving the prison. I keep waiting for it to get easier, for it to feel normal seeing him in that environment, but it never does. If anything, it gets harder to have to leave him in a place he doesn’t belong any more than Heath’s brother belongs in a grave.

  I glance at Mom once the prison is well behind us, but if her thoughts are similar to mine, no part of her shows it. Her hands on the wheel stay loose and relaxed while mine tighten around the hem of my shirt. Blue, Jason’s favorite color. Mom’s blouse is the same hue.

  Closing my eyes, I will my heartbeat to steady.

  “Headache?” Mom asks, switching off the radio and briefly turning to me.

  “No,” I say. “Just thinking.” But she’s already reaching for her purse, and I take the aspirin she gives me without protest.

  “He looked better today, don’t you think?”

  I resist closing my eyes again. I don’t want to remember Jason as we left him. There’s always something desperate lurking below the surface in his face when they take him away, a fear and longing that he knows better than to voice. Some visits, I have to pry my fingers from the edge of the table, not because I want to stay but because I can’t bear to leave without him.

  And yet...he took a life.

  I glance out the window and the few trees we pass, they aren’t live oaks, but they’re enough to remind me of the boy who might have been waiting for me, and the boy whose life was taken.

  Two hours later we hit the dirt roads that signal we’re a few miles from home. Apart from the warm breeze and the cicadas’ timbal clicking, the afternoon is as quiet as the road is empty. I lean back at the odd slowing of my heart, wondering if even now there’s a red truck parked by Hackman’s Pond.

  I hesitate by our car when we get home, and my unwillingness to go in is more than the usual reluctance I feel whenever Mom and I return from visiting Jason. It doesn’t even help that I see Uncle Mike’s truck parked out front, and Uncle Mike usually makes everything better.

  Uncle Mike isn’t technically my uncle. He was my dad’s best friend growing up and is the closest thing to a brother he has now, and to hear him tell it, the owner of a still-broken heart from when Mom chose Dad over him. Mom always reminds him that they barely dated and that he was the one to introduce her to Dad.

  Uncle Mike is still single though. Back when he used to drink and would end up crashing on our couch some nights when we had to take away his keys, he’d sometimes say stuff about how he should have fought for Mom instead of watching his best friend steal her heart. He always laughed it off though, made some joke to me, Jason and Laura about any prospective single moms we might know.

  Uncle Mike is trudging up from the basement when Mom and I push open the screen door. His gaze alights on Mom’s face first, but the smile he gives me is almost as good. Uncle Mike isn’t as tall as my dad, or as broad. He still has all his hair, blond and a little curly, though he keeps it short, and he’s constantly lamenting his inability to grow a full beard. He’s a nice-looking guy, Uncle Mike; he’s just never going to catch the eye of the one woman he wants to catch.

  He hurries over to hold the door for us.

  “Thanks, Mike,” Mom says on her way to the stairs. “Can you stay for dinner?”

  “What kind of fool would say no to that?” He cranes his neck to watch her ascend the stairs. Then his gaze falls on me. “Hey, kid. How’s the ice treating you these days?”

  “Cold,” I say.

  “No kidding. When are you heading off to the Olympics to win me all those gold medals?”

  I offer a tight-lipped smile. “Any day now.”

  “Yeah? ’Cause I figured out this move that I think you should do. It’s got gold written all over it. It’s kinda like a cross between The Karate Kid crane kick and a hula.”

  I’ve never seen The Karate Kid, and watching Uncle Mike do...whatever he proceeds to do in my living room, I have my doubts about his ever having seen it either. He almost crashes into the coffee table as he balances on one foot before striking a pose so ludicrous that I have to laugh, a loud one that comes right from the belly.

  “Right?” he says, straightening and then wincing as he rubs his knee. “I’ll teach you after dinner, ’cause it’s not as easy as it looks.”

  Another laugh erupts from me. This is what Uncle Mike does. He makes the near two-hour drive up from San Angelo every Saturday that he can while Mom and I visit Jason. He distracts Dad and Laura if they let him, and always, always finds a way to make me laugh when I get home, even if he has to nearly break a bone to do it.

  He lets me help him limp to the couch, and then hits me with a real question while I’m still off guard.

  “How’s J?”

  I meet his gaze, mine instantly sobering, and claim the chair opposite him. “The same?”

  “Kid.”

  I draw my knees up, wanting to squirm under his stare. Next to Laura, our parents and me, nobody loved Jason more than Uncle Mike. After fourteen years of sobriety, he fell off the wagon hard when Jason went to prison. He’s the only one who has any idea what it’s like being behind bars, having spent two years in a minimum-security prison after his third drunk-driving strike almost fifteen years ago.

  “He’s hanging in there. I know it helps seeing us. I think it’d help more if Dad and Laura came.” I don’t mention Uncle Mike visiting. It eats him up that his request was denied due to his past felony conviction and the fact that he’s not technically family.

  Uncle Mike hangs his head. “I’m working on your dad.”

  “I know. Thanks.”

  After a moment he says, “You tell him I love him?”

  Jason, he means. I nod.

  When the silence stretches on, I start to stand.

  “What about the skating thing? The real one. What’s it called again?”

  “Stories on Ice.”

  “Stories on Ice,” he says, smiling. I don’t smile back. He scoots forward on the couch. “You know I was kidding about the Olympics. This ice show is a big deal. I’d be real proud of you.”

  The clouds outside shift, letting a beam of dying sunlight through the windows, bathing us in a warm glow, and for a heartbeat, I feel better.

  “Proud of her for what?” Mom asks, unwinding her earbuds as she comes downstairs dressed for another run. This on top of the predawn one she already took. There aren’t any marathons coming up, none that she plans to run in anymore, but she trains like she’ll be running one in a week. If she could time it, she’d probably run all the way to the prison and back each week in an effort to exhaust her mind as much as her body.

  “Storybook on Ice.”

  “Stories on Ice,” I correct in a much less enthusiastic voice.

  Mom halts on the second to last step. “What?”

  I understand her surprise even as I’d hoped—at least a part of me had hoped—not to see it.

  “That’s the plan, isn’t it?” Uncle Mike asks, eyes wide and as innocent as he’s capable of making them—which isn’t very. “You agreed she could set college aside if she made the show. When is the audition deadline?” He looks from me to Mom, and it’s anyone’s guess to say who looks more ill at the question.

  I know the answer just as surely as Mom does, but neither of us is inclined to give it. We used to talk about it all the time, but that was before. How can I leave, or even think about leaving? If I made the show, I’d be touring the country for most of the year. Laura wouldn’t talk to anyone besides a bird she keeps caged for fear he’ll fly away. Dad would take up permanent residence in his workshop, sanding away at himself more than the wood he shaped. Mom would be left running away from it all, literally.

  And Jason. He’ll be fifty when he gets out of prison, older than Mom and Dad and Uncle Mike.

  I don’t know that
any of us will make it that long.

  My hand flies out to the nearest wall to hold me up when it feels like nothing else ever will. I can’t do it. “Howard College,” I say, almost like a gasp. “I’m going to enroll in community college when I graduate. Being far from home doesn’t really appeal to me anymore.”

  Jolting back into motion, Mom nods. “People don’t give community colleges enough credit these days. And she can always transfer somewhere else later if she wants.”

  Uncle Mike frowns at me. “Yeah, but what about skating? We’re not just gonna let you give that up.” He turns to Mom to pull her to his side, but she’s already halfway out of the room and doesn’t look at either of us.

  “I think I forgot to preheat the oven. Mike, do you mind? 350?”

  Uncle Mike is on his feet before the request is out. He’ll do anything for her, even drop a conversation cold simply because she’s not ready to have it. She won’t meet my gaze, but Uncle Mike does. I try to smile at the apologetic look he gives me, and I manage enough of one that he moves past me into the kitchen without saying anything.

  “Mom?” I call when she bends to retie her running shoe. “I think I’m going to head out for a bit. Maybe see if Maggie wants to go with me to the rink.” The words turn bitter on my tongue. I don’t like lying to her, but neither do I want to hurt her by revealing where I actually intend to go. She might decide to veer from her normal run south along the Wilcox River to watch me.

  She hesitates, but if she can convince herself that Jason’s cadaverous form “looks better,” then my lingering pallor from Uncle Mike’s question should be nothing. She nods before turning toward the back door. “Be home in time for dinner.”

  I leave through the front, hating that I feel better as soon as our house and the people in it fade from the rearview mirror.

  CHAPTER 12

  I don’t stall even once as I drive down our long driveway and turn up Boyer Road. I like that all the roads back here are dirt, especially on the days after a light rain when the ground is packed down and still a little red. It makes them feel alive to me. It’s a few miles before I see any other houses, but the earthy smell of cattle and manure reach me long before I see the McClintocks’ ranch. A few cows look up as I pass, and I let my gaze travel fondly over the soft brown bodies until they shrink out of sight in my rearview mirror. I turn west on Pecan Road, which leads me farther away from town rather than toward it, and the road becomes less defined, with tufts of wild grass sprouting up between faded tire tracks. Jason was right about how little used these roads are these days.