Even If I Fall

by Abigail Johnson

  Taking a deep breath through my mouth, I do my best to ignore all that and focus only on Laura’s face.

  “I’m busy,” she says, without taking her eyes from the open laptop she’s staring at.

  I lean over and close it.

  “Hey.” It’s a half-hearted protest at best, but still a good sign. I wait for her gaze to shift from the computer to me.

  “I need you to come to a carnival with me.”

  My sister stares at me.

  I spin her laptop toward me, open it and start typing. “There’s one a couple hours away and I need you to come with me.” I turn the screen back to her so she can see the site detailing all the rides and guaranteed fun for the whole family. I make sure the largest image clearly shows the Salt & Pepper Shaker ride that she used to love even though the sight of it makes me queasy. She glances at it then at me.

  “Just go with Maggie.”

  I shake my head. “Her mom is making them repaint all the bedrooms in their house together. I want to go with you, and...I might lose my nerve if I wait too long.”

  The apathetic mask my sister always wears slips. “Nerve for what? Why do you need to go to this carnival?”

  I take a deep breath. “Because it’s the closest Ferris wheel I could find and I’m tired of being afraid of heights.”

  The mask stays down. “You’re serious?”

  She can see that I am.

  “Why now?”

  The fact that my sister is actually engaging with me is the deciding factor in telling her the truth—or at least most of it.

  “Don’t say anything to Mom, but the audition deadline for Stories on Ice is coming up next month. Maggie has been bugging me about it, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least film something. Anton already agreed to partner with me, but I’m having a hard time even being that little bit off the ground.”

  I tense as the oddest expression overtakes Laura’s face. I’d almost swear it’s relief, but that doesn’t make any sense, and anyway it’s gone too quickly for me to decide.

  “You haven’t mentioned it in so long,” she says. “I thought you weren’t going to try anymore.”

  “I’m not,” I say, wondering that she’s not more panicked the way Mom had been. I have to tread carefully here. If I bring up Jason directly, I’ll lose her like I did last time, and yet I can’t leave him out entirely either. “I don’t know that I want to leave everyone here, at least not right now.”

  Laura turns to look at Ducky in his cage. “I think you should.”

  I’m sure I don’t hear her right. “Audition?”

  She nods. “I know they’ll pick you. You should do it.”

  I reach to brush her knee with two fingers so that she’ll look at me. “They tour year-round,” I say softly. “I’d be gone more than I’d be home.”

  She pulls her knee away from my outstretched hand so that I can’t touch her even that tiny bit. “I know.”

  Slowly, I straighten. I want it not to sting, but the fact that she cares so little about seeing me regularly feels like a slap. “It would just be you, Mom and Dad for the next few years until you left for college. You’d be fine with that?”

  She shrugs, and even that small gesture is half-hearted.

  I know I wanted Mom to be sad that I was giving up on auditioning. I didn’t want Laura to be sad exactly, but I wanted to see something that showed she’d miss me, not more of her indifference. That hurts worse than anything.

  Laura clicks something on her computer and closes out the carnival page. “You don’t need a Ferris wheel. Just go stand on the porch railing.”

  I slam her laptop shut. “Why don’t you care? About anything! I could stand on anything or I could wait for Maggie. Instead I found a stupid carnival with one of those stupid Salt & Pepper Shaker rides that you love in a stupid town far enough away that no one will recognize us. I wanted to do something with you, spend time with you, face this thing that genuinely frightens me with you.” I suck in a deep breath, waiting for her response, for her to say or do anything, but she doesn’t. And it breaks my heart. “I’m trying so hard and you act like just being in the same room with me bothers you. What did I do, huh?” I stab my fingers against my chest. “What did I do?”

  “Nothing!” she screams and I flinch back. “You did nothing! I told you something was wrong when he came home from college, but you didn’t listen. We should have talked to him—we shouldn’t have let him go out that night. I could have gone after him...” The heat in her voice vanishes as quickly as it ignites, and for a second I think she’s going to cry, but she just presses her lips together until the rest of her face smooths and her shoulders lower back down.

  She may have wrestled her control back but I haven’t. My breath hitches as I stare at her. “You’re saying—you think it’s my fault? That I—we could have stopped him?” My eyes blur when she refuses to look at me. “Laur—you can’t believe that anyone could have known what was going to happen. Jason didn’t even know.”

  Her gaze snaps to mine, hard and glaring for one heart-stopping instant. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?” She draws her laptop back and opens it, her finger gliding over the track pad like the last few minutes never happened.

  I’m near tears and she looks like she could fall asleep.

  “Laura,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “Please come with me. We can talk and figure some of this out. I didn’t know you felt this way, but I need to.”

  Without looking up she says, “You can go. I don’t feel like going to a carnival.”

  * * *

  I know Heath won’t be there, but I go to our tree anyway. The early-morning mist hovering over the grass hasn’t fully dissipated. It almost swirls as I walk through it. When I reach the trunk, I let my fingers linger over the scarred remains of Jason’s initials.

  I don’t know what to do about Laura. I feel like every time I try, I make our relationship worse. Jason would have known what to say to her. If I were where he is and he were home, the two of them would be on their way to that carnival right now. I turn, sliding my back down the trunk until I’m sitting on the dew-damp grass. I don’t know if she just can’t deal with Jason’s confession or if she blames me somehow or resents the fact that her favorite sibling is gone and she’s stuck with me. We’re so different. She’d always been the wild, impetuous one, leaping off bridges, whereas I start to panic when I’m a few feet off the ground.

  I doubt I would have been able to set foot on that Ferris wheel no matter how determined I’d sounded earlier. It was one of those fleeting thoughts that I’d grabbed on to because I wanted it. Me and Laura, taking a mini road trip, eating fried everything and maybe, just maybe, helping me try something a little less extreme than a Ferris wheel, like a merry-go-round. I laugh to myself thinking about it, because Laura and I would have laughed too.

  The sound trails off. It could have been a nice day. It could have been the start of a lot of nice days. I’m trying and she’s not. I keep looking for ways to show her that I care, and she keeps showing me over and over again that she doesn’t, that she won’t. Nothing I say or do seems to change anything. I reach out and she pulls back, literally. I really thought it would be different this time, that she wouldn’t be able to deny me asking for help, but she did. She more than did. She was worse than indifferent. And for the first time since Jason left, it doesn’t make me feel sorry for her.

  Filling my lungs with resolve as much as air, I push to my feet and, without letting myself think about it, climb onto the waist-high branch in front of me.

  Okay. This is fine. I can do three feet off the ground.

  I step up on a higher branch, wrapping my arms around the trunk like a human koala bear.

  Four feet off the ground. Still okay. Five...dizzier, dizzier. Don’t fall, don’t fall.

  I flatten my belly on the branch
I was standing on, sucking in air until my vision is steady and the ringing in my ears has stopped. Then, instead of climbing down, I stand back up again.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Why do you hate my face?”

  “I don’t hate your face,” I tell Heath. It’s nearing sunset the following day and even though I never made it above seven feet off the ground the day before when I was practicing on my own, I’m done with letting my fear of heights ground me. I need to acclimate to ten feet off the ground—not just getting my head ten feet off the ground, it’s being that high while balancing on my stomach Superman style. I feel like I’m ready for more, which is why I just told Heath I want to start practicing overhead lifts.

  “What happened to sticking with the low lifts? The ones that don’t end up nearly breaking my nose?”

  “The low lifts aren’t good enough. It’s the high ones that I need to be able to do.” Then in a quieter voice, I add, “It’s the high ones I’m afraid of.”

  Heath huffs a little. “Yeah, me too.”

  My nerves still feel somewhat frayed from the day before, what with Laura and the fact that I nearly fell out of that stupid tree more times than I can count. I’m annoyed and I don’t care if Heath knows it. “Look, I have to learn this, okay? If you’re not going to help me then say something now so I can start looking for someone who will.”

  Rather than draw back at my combativeness, Heath leans forward. “When did I say I wasn’t going to help you?”

  “You’re complaining.”

  “Yeah, so? You’ve smashed into my face a bunch trying this stuff.” He shrugs. “I’m going to complain about that and I’m not exactly psyched by the prospect of it happening again.”

  “That’s my point,” I say, a little too loudly.

  “No,” Heath says, keeping his voice steady if a little patronizing. “It’s mine. You’re afraid of heights—”

  “I’m working on that.”

  “—and,” he says without acknowledging that I said anything, “you’re asking me to put you in a position where you’re afraid and where that fear tends to cause me a decent amount of pain. I’m just stating the facts.”

  And I’m just grinding my teeth. “I have to film my audition video in five weeks. I have to do lifts—and not little beginner lifts—in that video. I have to do them on the ice, which means I really can’t afford to fall. Falls are inevitable when learning lifts. I’d rather fall now, on the grass, with—” I’d been about to say with you, because unlike Anton, Heath’s proved himself strong enough and quick enough to keep both of us from suffering any serious injuries, but something keeps me from admitting that “—enough time to get them right.”

  Heath doesn’t act like he noticed the amended statement. “And I get that, I do, but how are you going to learn anything when you nearly pass out every time your feet leave the ground?”

  I narrow my eyes at him. “I am not that bad.”

  He narrows his eyes back at me. “You’re not that good either.”

  “I seriously want to scream at you right now.”

  “Yeah? Go ahead.”

  I don’t scream at him. I let my nails dig into my palms until the urge passes. “I tried, okay? Yesterday I asked my sister to come ride a Ferris wheel with me.”

  Heath raises his eyebrows, and I can’t tell if he’s impressed or thinks I’m an idiot for even considering being up that high off the ground.

  “And?” is all he says.

  “And nothing, we didn’t go. I asked, she told me to go stand on our porch railing instead. So I came here, and I climbed this tree.” I turn my head to the live oak and look at the highest branch I reached. It feels pathetically close to the ground when I look at it. My shoulders sag and I sigh. “I sort of climbed this tree. I tried anyway.” I gasp a little when I face Heath again because he’s moved right in front of me. I have to tilt my head back to meet his gaze.

  “You came here yesterday and climbed this tree?”

  “Tried,” I say, swallowing at how close we are.

  “Did you fall?”

  “I’m not going to answer that.”

  One corner of his mouth lifts. His eyes make a sweep of my body, head to toe and back again, and I feel dizzy even with both my feet firmly planted on the ground. “You don’t seem hurt.”

  “That’s because I only sort of climbed the tree.”

  The other side of Heath’s mouth lifts to join the first. “Sort of is still something. I’m not a big fan of your sister for blowing you off, but I’m pretty impressed that you tried to aim as high as you did. Where’s the nearest Ferris wheel?”

  “There’s a pop-up carnival happening right now in Lubbock.”

  Heath laughs out loud and I smile. “Would you really have gone?”

  “To the carnival? Yes. On the Ferris wheel? I guess I’ll never know.” Considering that the mental image alone makes me feel like I have food poisoning, I have a pretty good idea.

  “Kind of extreme though, isn’t it?”

  It is. If it were only about my fear of heights, the porch railing would have been more than equal to the task. But it was about Laura too, or I tried to make it about Laura. It’s not easy talking about how things are between my sister and me, not just because I never have before, but because I can’t fully suppress the twinge of guilt I feel complaining about anything related to this situation with Heath. But he encourages me to go on once I’ve started, and soon we’re sitting together on the ground and the whole situation between me and Laura is out, her withdrawal from everything and everyone, including me, and my continued missteps every time I try to connect to her the way we used to.

  Heath leans back against the tree trunk and watches the fireflies blink off and on around the bank of the pond in the distance. Finally he turns to me. “That sucks.”

  “It does,” I say, shifting my weight so I’m leaning more fully against the trunk too. It’s plenty large enough for us to share, but I’d been worried about accidentally brushing shoulders with him while I was talking and had kept myself stiff and leaning slightly away. Now, when our shoulders touch, I don’t feel the need to pull away. It’s nice, feeling him there beside me. It’s even nicer that he understands and knows that there isn’t an easy fix to what’s broken between my sister and me.

  “Tell me about your sister,” I say, wanting to give him what he’s given me if I can.

  Heath draws a knee up and drapes an arm over it. “Gwen and I were never close, but I guess we’re further away now. The difference between us and you with your sister is that neither of us is trying.” He looks at me, catches my gaze briefly before looking away again. “My mom had Gwen when she was really young, they made it work, my mom and dad, but they waited to have me and Cal until nearly ten years later. Gwen always felt more like a third parent than a sibling, and now that my dad is basically gone, she really tries to act like a parent. It’s not great for any of us. She thinks she’s helping by telling everyone what to do, but a lot of the time I’ll turn my truck around when I see that she’s home.”

  “Where do you go?” I ask.

  “Nowhere. Work, if I can.” He looks at me. “Here.”

  I hold his gaze. It feels naked and safe, and at the same time, I feel naked and safe. And I feel warm—too warm, like I should look away but I can’t.

  “That sucks,” I say.

  Heath laughs, hanging his head a little as he looks away again. “Yes and no.” He sobers. “I don’t know what to do about my sister, but it’s good...here.”

  “Hmm,” I say, not wanting to probe into that last statement. I think I know what he means, and I know it’s a lot safer to leave anything more unsaid.

  “Tell me why you’re doing this.”

  I frown. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re doing all this for an audition that you don’t even plan to send in.”r />
  “I told Maggie that I’d—”

  He waves his hands, cutting me off. “No, you said you’d audition to get her off your back. Why all the rest? Why do you care about adding lifts and working this hard on something no one else is going to see?”

  Taken aback by the question, I falter. “I don’t know. It’s important to me to do a good job.”

  He leans into my personal space. “Yeah, but why? Is it so you can change your mind about auditioning?”

  “No.” The answer is automatic and loud even to my ears. Heath’s expression says he doesn’t believe me, and I feel my dimple as I clench my chin. “I don’t do things halfway. That’s not who I am. And this—” I gesture around our practice area “—this was my dream for a really long time.” My throat tries to tighten but I keep going. “It’s not—” I almost say it’s not anyone’s fault that I have to let it go, but that’s not true, so I shift and hope Heath doesn’t notice. “It’s my choice to let it go, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. I still wish I could skate, and I still want to film the best audition video I can, even if it’s just for me.”

  Heath stares at me for what feels like a very long time but in reality is probably only a few seconds. “And it has to be,” he says. “Just for you?”

  I don’t have to list the reasons I mentally give myself. More than anyone else he’ll understand my one word answer. “Yes.”

  Maybe I imagine the sadness in his eyes when he nods, or maybe I only imagine it’s for me. Either way I don’t know what to do with it, so I look away when I push to my feet. “Anyway, Maggie wouldn’t let me get away with doing less than my best. She’d be suspicious and might even insist on being there when I submit my audition. If it’s good, she won’t have any reason to question me. I don’t want to lie to her.”

  Heath makes a sound and rolls his head.

  “What?” I ask a little sharply.

  “It’s just...you know you’re still lying to her.”

  “I never agreed to use the audition. It’s not a lie if—”