Falling by Anne Simpson Read Free Book Online Page A

were, thought Ingrid, making their slow passage, step by step. Nothing she could say was going to change the fact that he was blind and he had to take care of Elvis, and nothing he could say to her would change the fact that Lisa was dead. It was just how life went, and people got through it. But
how
? Ingrid wondered.
How
did they?
    I thought I could do anything back then, he said.
    It had been like the Valley of the Shadow, going past the Petroski house, she thought. When they’d turned the corner at the far side of the house, everything was different.
    It was too hot to sleep that night. Elvis had gone out to the carriage house to sleep on the futon there, and Roger was on the couch in the living room. Damian was in the guest room, the one at the front of the house. Ingrid was in the bedroom she’d had as a child; she lay awake, hands folded over her chest, thinking she could hear Damian breathing as he slept down the hall. The books of her childhood wereon the shelves:
Katie and the Sad Noise, Paddle-to-the-Sea, Swallows and Amazons, Stig of the Dump, Anne of Green Gables
. In the shadows, she could still make out the dancer in the reproduction of a Degas painting. The dancer resembled a white bird.
    It had been so sheltered, that world of childhood, where a dancer pirouetted inside a painting. There had never been any worry about money, and there never would be. The land their parents had sold off had been turned into blocks of condominiums near Niagara-on-the-Lake. The Greenborough Estates, for God’s sake, had made their parents wealthy. But money hadn’t saved her father from the slow deterioration of his eyesight and then, later, having a heart attack as he came inside after gardening. It hadn’t saved her mother from getting melanoma.
    It didn’t save Ingrid from going into Emergency, leaving the bright afternoon and walking into the dimness of the hospital. It didn’t save her from seeing the look on Damian’s face, from holding him and trying to comfort him. It didn’t save her from being taken, along with Damian, down to the hospital morgue. They could have been in a bank, with someone leading them to the safety deposit boxes, except that the smell of formaldehyde was all around them. A long metal drawer was pulled out of the wall, and there was her daughter, in a white zippered bag. Like a garment bag. They unzipped her.
    Lisa, whispered Ingrid. Her whole body was trembling.
    It was Lisa and it was not Lisa. The features were all the same features, but the skin wasn’t right. It had been a matter of hours; that was all. Only a matter of hours. That very morning this daughter of hers had woken up alive and now she was dead.
    Lisa’s hair was still damp, though it had been quite a while since they’d brought her in. Her hair had dried in ropes, the way wet hair dries when it isn’t combed. There was sand on her neck. Oh, there was sand on her neck. Why should it have been sand on her neck that brought tears coursing down Ingrid’s face? Just a delicate tracing of sand, that was all. This was her daughter. Her daughter was dead. Ingrid kept thinking this, but it didn’t make it real.
    She had stood beside her mother at her father’s wake. Roger on one side, Ingrid on the other. Her mother was like a bird, and it was only the two of them on either side that kept her from gliding away. It was like that with Lisa too. Her body was hard and closed, but Lisa herself was light and feathery. She would vanish, fly up out of that narrow, bright room, if only Ingrid would release her.
    No, she couldn’t release her.
    She closed her eyes. Strangely enough, in that moment, she thought of Roger, in the Bomb Barrel, going over Niagara Falls. She had the sensation of being at the brink and realizing there was nothing to hold her back. Terrifying. How had Roger gone over the Falls? Twice. Not counting that other time he’d tried, or the time he hung upside down at the brink of the Falls for a film. She didn’t