Paradise Falls (6 page)

“No. He had the bigger Carlyle with him. Grayson.” Jacob jabbed at the bag. “I could’ve taken them.”

“I know,” Faisal said.

“I wanted to kill him. He hurt her.”

“You have a plan for that.”

Panting, Jacob stepped back from the bag. Fire spread in his chest as walked to the squat racks. He changed into an old pair of sweats, and Faisal helped him load the bar. The boy struggled to move the big forty-five pound plates, but Jacob didn’t interfere until he attached enough weight required for a warm up set. One set down, and Faisal immediately loaded more weight. It took a few more to build up enough pressure to squeeze all the unwanted thoughts out.

“She’s not supposed to be here,” Jacob repeated.

The barbell ground on his neck. Fully loaded, the barbell weighed twice as much as a grown man. The last repetition was a shaking, muscle-grinding struggle that ended with the solid clang of steel on steel when the weight settled into the rack.

“I’m getting too close. She asked me out.”

“Where?”

He shook his ponytail loose..“I don’t know. Technically she made a date to make a date with me.”

Faisal quietly laughed.

Jacob eyed him. “Not funny.”

Jacob went back to the weights. When he racked the bar again he set his hands on his hips and breathed, getting his wind back before he spoke. “Where are we on the Freedom of Information Act requests on the bridge repairs?”

“Nothing yet,” Faisal said.

“How are the lawyers doing with the shell companies?”

“It’s slow going. There are a number of limited liability companies, all belonging to one another.”
 

He shrugged. Jacob ran his fingers through his hair and flexed his left hand. Everywhere he looked, dead ends.

Jacob racked the weight for the final time and headed to the next rack to begin overhead presses. Faisal followed, patiently observing Jacob’s exercises. The weight pressed hard against his bare palms. Gloves were a crutch. Better to toughen the skin, the way his dad did. Dad’s hands were rawhide.

 
His left hand throbbed. He saw Jennifer again, floating gracefully through her dingy little kitchen, offering him milk she didn’t have.

“What would you do?” Jacob said.

Faisal shrugged. “That is not my place, sir.”

“Yes, it is. I’m asking you, what would you do?”

Faisal shrugged. “I just work here.”

Jacob looked at him at sighed.

“That’s not funny. I’m going to find a way to let her down,” he said. “I can’t involve her in this. When it starts, I don’t want her anywhere near it.”

Jacob sat on a bench, and flexed his throbbing hand. Jennifer stepped out of a dream that morning. If it hadn’t been for the cop, he might’ve killed Elliot right there. Tendons stretched in his shaking left hand, and the scars from the skin grafts covering the reconstructed bones formed an intricate map.

Nine months they held him; first in a stinking hospital bed where the old man tended his wounds. Then they put him in a room and started with the cuts. Remembering a book describing how a Vietnam prisoner of war made it through by playing a new golf course in his mind every day helped him through it.

Jacob survived what they did to his body by making a fortress of his mind. It had walls of stone and steel, but the real protection lay within. One wing of his mind palace was his house. The aging carpeting under his bare feet. The battered table in the kitchen. A whole wall of pictures behind the living room couch

The upstairs was perfectly recreated, too. The office his mother and father shared, their desks nestled side by side. His bedroom, and Candy’s, across the hall. The door was ajar. The frilly pink sheets were rumpled, warmed by slanting rays of light from the window and strewn with the debris of a pre-teen girl’s life. Dolls on the one hand, sparkly makeup on the other.

The fortress had other wings he could visit in his mind. In the very center was a woman. The grief etched the image into his memory and never faded. In a bath robe and pajamas, the angel’s feet bled and left pale red tracks in the snow as she ran to the abyss.

Jacob was seventeen years old when he saw Miss K for the first time and he instantly knew she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Every day he would go to remedial English in Miss Garrison’s room and Miss K would be standing outside, leaning on the lockers, watching the students in the hall with a new teacher’s enthusiasm for the rules and for authority.
 

He memorized everything about her, from the way she always itched her left ankle with the toe of her sneaker to how she would blow loose strands of hair out of her eyes.

She was perfect. Long, graceful legs with muscles like steel cables, flat stomach, there was even something about her shoulders that he liked, and then there was her hair. She had gorgeous hair, rich and silky.
 

His chest twisted when he first noticed she was wearing a wedding band. A little voice in his mind chided him for even thinking a woman like her would ever take an interest in him.
 

Jacob was no stranger to the female body. Breathless explorations with his first girlfriend and the wonders of the Internet left him well acquainted with the female form, but he would have traded all of that for a flash of desire in her stormy eyes, soft auburn hair sliding through his fingers. It was an impossible dream. She was so far out of his league that they weren’t even in leagues.

The night the bridge fell, the school cop dragged her back from the brink and held her down until she regained her senses. The same man dragged Jacob back as he tried to climb down to reach his sister.

Then reality hit. He couldn’t feel the cold anymore by the time he sat shivering and soaked from melted snow in a waiting room. Calvin Carlyle came to tell him they were all dead. His mother, father, and sister would never come home.

His mind snapped to the present. “You can go,” he said to Faisal.

When he was alone, he stood and charged at the heavy bag, disregarding the pain in his hand. The bag swung hard, creaking on its anchor in the ceiling joist. He hit it again and again, each blow punctuating the images flashing in his mind. He spun on his foot and drove his heel into the bag in a savage roundhouse that swung the bag almost to the ceiling before crashing back down and nearly sent him sprawling.

Something bothered him about that morning. He’d seen signs of psychological trauma before. The way something from the past could well up like sewage from a storm drain and stain the present moment, crowding out all other thought. It was in Jennifer’s eyes.

Elliot grabbed her hair on purpose. He knew it would trigger her. Jacob was too tired to hit the bag anymore. Furious energy melted into cold, ragged fatigue. He drifted over to his desk, sat down, and rested his forehead on his palms. He needed to focus to see the bigger picture.

Jacob took an old micro tape recorder from the top drawer. He kept the message by forwarding it from phone to phone, before finally recording it a few days before he was deployed. His thumb pushed down the red play button and he drew his hand back and listened to his sister’s voice.

“Hey, Jake,” she teased in her girlish voice, “I hope you had a good time with your stupid video game. I made sure Mom and Dad took me to Olive Garden just like always. I didn’t buy you anything for Christmas. I hope you’re happy.”
 

His mother said something. His sister’s phone didn’t pick up the words, just a faint hint of her voice.

“Mom says to hang up. We’re almost home.”

6.

Shearing rock and twisted steel shrieked. Debris crashed into the river and sank. The noise came from the boards under her feet, and from the walls. The kitchen television blared until the speakers distorted and the little grilles blew out of their plastic frames in a shower of sparks.

 
A driving rainstorm sent a muddy wave through the street. Jennifer clutched the old sliding doors between the kitchen and living room.

The world shook and red, blue, and amber flashed in the window as the sirens wailed. The freezing wet floor stung her bare feet. The world turned under her until she fell on her side with a grunt. Dread clenched in her chest like a fist of frozen stone grasping her heart.
 

Open the door.
The dream would end when she opened the door. None of this was real. The past couldn’t harm her, but the dream refused to end. All the windows in the back of the house blew out at once in a hail of glass that sent razor shards skittering over the floor.

The door opened. The wind carried the rain, snow, and icy hail sideways. Her dress caught on a crooked nail and tore at the seam. Sobbing, she clutched the tatters, but the dress unraveled in the wind. The front windows all burst out, spreading glass through the air in a glittering fan.

Running was her only defense, but no matter which way she ran, the bridge was always there. In the distance she could see the old skeleton of interlocked triangles and steel chains that formed a jagged mouth. Taillights transformed into red and hateful eyes. The metal twisted and bent, then snapped apart with a great twanging sound.

“Jennifer!”

Franklin’s voice cut through the roar. Great gasping sobs froze on her cheeks as the snow thickened around her ankles, and bloody footprints trailed behind. Her skin turned brittle from the cold. She didn’t want to wake up anymore. She might reach him.

The bridge contorted, and the overhead struts slammed down. Their little red Honda folded up under the beam. Franklin’s pale frozen hand reached out for her.

Jennifer leapt forward with both hands outstretched, but her fingers slipped through his without touching. She could feel the heat of his skin as the roar rattled her bones, and she was thrown backwards.

Waist deep snow sucked the warmth from her body and the glass shards sliced into her skin. She screamed. The bridge pulled back, leaving shattered footings like stumps of broken teeth. It all fell into the river, leaving nothing before her but empty air.
 

Eyes blurred with tears, she screamed and screamed and screamed. Frost coated frozen limbs. She pulled herself upright and felt her legs breaking, the flesh shattering and shearing. The bridge rose in a great metal hand with twisted, jagged fingers that reached for her.

Jennifer went down hard on her side, kicking her legs until she scrambled against the side of the bed. Chest heaving, pain shot up her leg from her ankle and the cuts on her arm throbbed. The reedy voice of her neighbor and landlady came through the wall in a muffled shout.

“Jennifer!” Mrs. Carmody slapped the wall with her bony fist. “Girl, you alright?”

Jennifer rose slowly to her feet, testing each step. She could still feel the glass cutting her skin and carving into her heels.

It’s just a dream.

Barely dressed, Jennifer answered the thumping on her front door to find the aged woman in a pale blue dressing gown and slippers standing there. She looked up at Jennifer with her sad eyes.

“Now, you come over to my side.”

“Mrs. Carmody--“

“Now.”

Jennifer sighed and walked over, locking her door behind her.

The little woman walked through a mirror image of Jennifer’s side of the house to the kitchen. Jennifer sat at the kitchen table, an old one with metal legs and a melamine top. Mrs. Carmody used a gripper stick to fetch a box of hot cocoa packets.

“You’re having cocoa,” she said, sharply.

“It’s eighty degrees outside.”

“Don’t argue with me, girl.”

Jennifer closed her mouth and waited until the old woman finished warming up the milk, then dumped in the powder. Daring to make cocoa with water would earn a severe tongue-lashing from Mrs. Carmody.

The cup was warm, and the cocoa was hot on her lips and spread heat through her chest. The old woman sat down, leaning on the table to steady herself.

“What gave you such a fright?”

“I had a nightmare, that’s all. I’m sorry I woke you.”

Mrs. Carmody shook her head slightly, as if shaking it too hard might send it rolling off her neck. “Don’t you worry about that. You didn’t wake me. I’m too old to sleep. That wasn’t just a nightmare, girl.”

“I dreamed about the bridge,” she said.

“Oh.” Mrs. Carmody nodded heavily with a sad, knowing smile.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jennifer said, taking a sip of cocoa. “It happens now and then. It’s just a dream.”

“I’d say it isn’t.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “It’s normal to have bad dreams.”

Is it normal to wake up on the floor? Is it normal to scream in your sleep?

Jennifer brushed her hair back over her shoulder. The old woman looked at her patiently, as if there were something obvious she wasn’t seeing. Jennifer looked down.

“When are you going to stop wearing that?”

Jennifer drew her ring to her chest. “It’s mine.”

“That boy wouldn’t want you to live like this, child.”

“I’m not a child,” she said sharply.

Mrs. Carmody leaned forward.

Jennifer tried not to scowl.

“I was ten years old before my family owned a radio. I remember sitting right there in front of it when we heard that Pearl had been attacked. That radio sat there all through the war. Used to sit around it and listen and wonder where my brother and uncle were. One came back with one leg. The other didn’t come back at all. My uncle had six children, and them and his wife moved in here, with us.

“That radio broke and we bought another, then one after that. I remember when we first got television. We had one channel, but that was enough. Never thought I’d watch a man walk on the moon.

“My uncle’s children are all gone now. If they were here they’d have grandchildren older than you. I lived my life tucked up in this old house, I don’t want to see you do the same, you hear?”

Jennifer frowned. “I… I don’t know. I…”

She downed the rest of the cocoa with a gulp, not caring that it was too hot. Mrs. Carmody took the cup, hobbled to the sink, and rinsed it out under the faucet.

“Your boy Franklin wouldn’t have wanted it either. He was a sweet boy. Not like them other ones.”