Falling by Anne Simpson Read Free Book Online

putting the air conditioner on high. There was someone in a silver SUV behind her, waiting, and she drove away from the pump. She kept going, and in the rear-view mirror she saw the boy come out with money in his hand. She didn’t want it.
    He waved to stop her, but she turned onto the blazing road and went down the hill past the dead elm to the ramp that led back to the highway before pulling the car onto theshoulder and getting out. She didn’t know what she was doing; she’d hardly pulled the car off the road. It was half on the road, half on the shoulder. She left the door open so that anyone could have slammed into the car, taken the door off. A person was supposed to be in control. She was in control. Everything gleamed in the heat.
    She walked in a straight, sure line through the weedy, dry grass by the side of the road, where the clover was all bedraggled, up the slope of the hill. There was a bald eagle at the top of the elm, but she only noticed it because it glided away. Her mother would have said it was a sign, if her mother had been alive, but she wasn’t. It was a sign. She went to the dead tree and threw her arms around it.
    Yes, she was crazy. She was half crazy. She wanted to hold something. She would have held that boy at the gas station. The man getting out of the silver SUV to put Premium in the tank. She would have held anyone.
    She held the tree. She felt the coarse elm bark under her hands. There were tiny scratch marks later on her hands and her arms, and she didn’t know how they got there. There might have been blood. Was there any blood? If only it had been her, not Lisa. She held on to the elm tree. She held on and held on. That tree was not living; it was dead, but she held on.
    Down below, near the road, a boy passed on an ATV. He stopped. He looked up at her and adjusted his yellow helmet. She thought of a hornet, because of his yellow helmet, but he wasn’t real. Some things were real and some things weren’t. The eagle had been real. The tree was real. The boy with the yellow helmet was not real.
    She kept holding the tree, and the boy went away after a while.
    Elvis gets upset, Roger was saying to Ingrid.
    He’s just scared that everything will change, she said.
    It’s going to have to change.
    You could have someone come in, said Ingrid. You could have a girl come in.
    No, said Roger, not a girl. Why not?
    A few weeks ago he was on his way home from the workshop and he noticed a girl. He followed her home and stood across the street from her house for hours, until the girl’s mother called the cops. If I had a girl come in, it would just be trouble.
    Well, someone older then.
    Maybe.
    You’ll be all right, Ingrid said. One way or another.
    The blind leading the blind, said Roger.
    They turned the corner from Morrison onto Ontario Street.
    We used to go bicycling here, she said.
    There weren’t as many cars then.
    And we’d go past those two kids. Remember that? The Petroski kids.
    They had that disease – progeria, I think it was.
    They looked as though they were ninety years old, she said. Remember how their mother put blankets over them when they were sitting on the front porch? They had Hudson’s Bay blankets over them and a look in their eyes as if they were prisoners of war. We were probably about the same age, but they had that look in their eyes. I wonder what became of them.
    She was silent for a moment. Well, I guess we know what became of them, don’t we?
    Yes.
    Tears came to her eyes when she thought of this. The Petroski kids had never been children. They’d never had bicycles. They’d never gripped a bicycle’s handlebars while going crazily around a corner, as she had, with the slender pink and blue plastic streamers whipping in the wind as she rode past the Petroski house, laughing, because Roger could ride his bicycle without hands and make faces at the same time.
    No hands, she said. That’s how you rode.
    That’s right. I did, didn’t I?
    Here they