Breaking the Fall (5 page)

I was almost hoping that Jared would suggest some other house, or another plan altogether. We were going down an alley, not a trashy, puddle-strewn alley, but a well-ordered back passage with white paint on the telephone poles up to head height, and red reflectors on the gate posts.

The house loomed over the fence. The hulk of its roof was dark. The three chimneys were sharp black shapes.

That voice was back, the dry, fanged voice in me: you remember this place, said the voice with a kind of glee.

This was the house. This was the place I had promised myself I would never visit again.

“It's too early,” I whispered.

“It's an appropriate hour. Past midnight.”

But there was a light on upstairs, a dull copper glow. I pressed my eye to a crack in the fence. The wood was new, and a bead of sap kissed my cheek. There was another, brighter light downstairs.

“They expect us,” Jared breathed.

My stomach was a knot.

“They've gone to bed,” he said, with something like satisfaction, “but they're nervous.”

I don't blame them, I thought, my spit drying to nothing.

“A challenge,” he said, and his smile flashed in the darkness. He put both hands on the top of the fence and was over it in an instant. He hissed at me through the fence, “Come on.”

Stay where you are, I told myself. Stay right here. Let Jared do whatever he wants to do. It has nothing to do with you.

But the fear was already working in me, like the yellow pills Jared and I had taken one Saturday, giving me a feeling of power that made my heart hammer. This fear was what I hated, and what I craved.

The fear itself pulled me over the fence, where I followed Jared toward the great, unsleeping citadel of the house.

10

From the start there was something wrong.

There was danger here, greater than before.

And yet from the beginning the danger only made the darkness sweeter.

The back door was not locked, but a chain kept it from opening more than a few fingers wide. A kitchen window eased upward for a few heartbeats and then stopped. Another window pushed upward, too, but when I shouldered Jared up to it, I could feel him shake his head, the movement communicated throughout his body, a tremor:
no.

I was sick deep inside, in my stomach, where there was something cold and dead. Cold and dead, but stirring, aroused to life. The windows opened easily. They weren't locked. They weren't locked at all.

And they should have been.

I was alive again. Those gray, fuzzy hours in the classroom, those nights lying drowsy in my bed, those endless conversations, the books, the television—it was all nothing. There was nothing else that made me feel so close to my own heartbeat.

Nothing else lifted me like this. This, I saw, was what I really wanted. Smells were fresh, sounds were vibrant. This was what it was to be alive—alive as cats were, and hunting hawks, alive like the owl, gliding, seeing everything.

It was easy. Jared stood on the gas meter and worked at the window with a long, thin shaft I recognized only after a moment as a screwdriver. He didn't need to break anything—the metal blade was only a lever. The window sighed upward, and then it froze in place.

Jared jumped down and said, “Worm in, Stanley.”

Too easy, I wanted to say. I even took in a breath to say the words, “It's a trap.”

His voice was a slap: “Be quick.”

And I agreed. The danger didn't matter—if anything, it made me more keen. The window sill had been recently painted with a glossy, slick white that let me slide easily. I snaked, worked my arm and shoulder, and then my entire upper body into a room that smelled of laundry detergent.

The floor creaked under me. I caught my breath and listened.

There is no feeling like it; I was where I did not belong. The thought was like a second heartbeat:
Wrong. This is wrong
.

The washing machine reflected the bad light, and seemed to glow. A laundry basket, a skeletal tub made of woven plastic, rested beside me on the floor. There was a breathy presence somewhere off to my left—a water heater.

I opened the window even wider. It shimmied upward, chattering in its wooden runners. Chill air seeped into the warm room. Jared climbed up and in, and his hand sought mine in the half-dark. I gripped it, and steadied him as he sprang to the floor.

The floor did not creak. It made no sound at all.

The linoleum floor had been waxed, and it glistened with a light from somewhere off in the house, a light so bright it leaked all the way to the washer and the dryer, making it easy to see.

He melted to the doorway without a sound. He turned to find me with his eyes. “In a situation like this,” Jared said, panting just a little, so that his words were breathy. He was not whispering, daring the house to overhear him. “In a situation like this, we have to be very quick.”

He stooped, tucking in his head. He heard something.

We both listened to the purr and sudden silence of a refrigerator. The unseen appliance, far off in the kitchen, gurgled.

He put his hand on my arm, lightly, the kind of touch he might use to soothe a nervous animal. “You stay here.”

Prove yourself to Jared, my mind said. He thinks that you are not equal to this.

My voice was still, but he knew my thoughts. His eyes glittered in the bad light. When he spoke next it was a command, devoid of any humor or kindness, but supported by what both of us knew was the truth: “Don't even try, Stanley.”

Arguments flowered in me. I could do it. I knew it. He was being unfair. On the other hand, there were hundreds of other houses. There were other nights.

He twitched around the corner and was gone. My body followed him into the kitchen. He did not seem to hear me. When he turned to see me, there was a new look in his eyes, nothing I had seen before.

He was intense, awake. His eyes looked at me not as a friend, not as someone he knew, but as a potential problem, a threat.

I did not read fear in his eyes. It was something cold and even unkind. He didn't want me there. He knew I would slow him down, entangle him in my own inexperience. This look alone was enough to make me shrink to the cold hulk of the refrigerator.

Then Jared's attitude shifted, his wariness melting for a moment. There was the glint of a tooth. He was smiling. He lifted a finger to his lips, and crouched in the doorway. He motioned me forward, and indicated a place in the corridor ahead of us.

A house has a smell, a distinctive atmosphere, and a sound, the nature of the hush the walls throw up against the undercurrent of traffic. I saw nothing. Carpet. A distant doorway, and the feel as well as the sight of the living room that had nearly trapped me as I fled the thudding footsteps.

I felt blank and heavy with stupidity, beastly dumbness, and could not imagine what Jared was trying to tell me.

Then I saw it.

There on the wall was a single, hard red point of light. A bright tiny red star, more scarlet, more fake-gem bright than anything natural. The star glittered alone on a square plate of stainless steel. A key was thrust into the steel plate. A ripple of sensation swept my skin, a feeling nearly like pleasure. I could not name what I saw, but I understood what it was.

Something knew we were there.

11

Jared put his hand over my mouth, stifling what I was about to say.

His lips met my ear. “They are already on their way.”

I shivered, all the way through my body.

He whisper-answered a question I had not asked: “Silent alarm.”

I had guessed that it was a silent alarm, of course, and felt a tickle of resentment. He must think I'm really inept, I told myself, to go explaining something like that.

But the feeling in my belly was no longer anything like pleasure. The tiniest bit of pee leaked from me, and I felt it blot into my underwear. I groped for him, and tried to hang onto him, drag him away.

He cringed just far enough to avoid me.

I sensed his laughter. His voice was a whisper, but it was a statement that canceled every thought in my mind. “I'll be back in ten seconds.”

Come away with me, my soul called, as though he were already someone who could be reached only by prayer. Please, Jared.

He was gone.

I had always known he was like no one else. But now I understood what a rare creature he was. Jared could feel no doubt, and no fear. He was like no other human being.

And he had left, to escape from the ordinary company of a person like me. I felt what Jared must see in me: how common I was, how unsure of myself.

I should have held him, wrestled him, made a noise to force Jared out of the house. Even now I could call out, and wake up the sleeping strangers.

There was a whisper of footfall on the stairs, a sound I sensed more than heard. There was, more than that, a silence that spilled upward, into the second floor, a nonsound that I knew was Jared's presence.

I held my breath for a moment, imagining—
knowing
—that he must be in the bedroom now, must be creeping toward the dresser with its dimly lit personal treasures.

I huddled, my heart beating so hard, each beat rocked my body, my throat so constricted I nearly could not breathe.

It ended quickly.

Brakes moaned outside, and a car door made a metallic cough as it was flung open. There were two cars, and steps on the pavement—crisp, hard noises that were at the very edge of my hearing.

Yet a third car sighed into place somewhere in the street, beyond and far away and yet right there, right inside me, each quick footfall, each creak of clothes or leather, sounds not heard so much as felt, like the mutterings of my own body, the clicks and whispers of my insides.

The fanged voice in me said: let's see you turn invisible now.

Tires crackled on the asphalt, and a car jockeyed to a new place in the night, perhaps to block the street, and as it worked into the position a light flashed red, splashes of vermilion blinking off and on.

The scarlet warning flashes lasted for only a few heartbeats, and then someone, an unseen hand, snapped it off.

But the blunder had been made.

Wooden floors made the softest click. Jared was on the stairs. I straightened, lips parted, screaming in my mind:
run!

But Jared was there in the hall, his silhouette blocking sight of the little red star for an instant. The sight of him spun me, freed me to escape because I knew he was right there, behind me as I ran. I skittered briefly on the waxed floor, plunged into the laundry room, and snaked my way through the window.

I did not fall. I clung, gasping, to the sill.

A flashlight worked the dark. The beam swung toward me and missed. It pooled on the brilliant blades of grass, then swung from tight circle to oblong. It pulled back toward me where I squirmed, dangling from the window.

I fell.

What you have to do, Jared had said, is roll, lowering your shoulder, tumbling into the fall. That way you can't get hurt. I have injured myself before. I lost time as a sophomore, having to study at home because I stepped funny on second base.

My mouth filled with warm water. I was all over the grass, one arm far away, by the fence, the other hand squashing an ice plant. My skull was in fragments, all wet and leaking, the crushed bits of it rasping as I jerked my head.

Jerked, and then woke.

I plunged upward, onto my feet, and staggered. I tasted blood, and ran a ragged, drunken course to the back fence, barely aware of what my legs and arms were doing as they fought the back fence, punched it, kicked it, found some purchase in a knothole, a splintery grip at the top edge.

I windmilled over the top of the fence, and half stumbled to the gritty pavement. I lunged onward through the dark, and then I saw it.

It was the distinctive shape of a police car, that brute-vehicle menace that means: power.

I stopped myself, bent double, and knelt. The ground swung back and forth around me. Nausea flashed on and off.

Jared was nowhere.

I had left him behind.

I put my hands to my hair, feeling above my ear for the stuff that had leaked from inside my head. It was wet and gluey. My fingers moved gingerly, and I knew that a brain infection was what I deserved for abandoning my friend.

Back. I have to go back.

I stood up slowly. My hand felt for support, and found a cinderblock wall. I was going to throw up, and then, just as surely, I wasn't.

I knew where I had to go.

I sprinted back toward the fence, one of my knees so weak I ran with a crazy limp. But I was fast.

Until I realized that my body had grown heavy. I was slow and fighting something. I was struggling to overcome a strange, ungainly weight. I was struggling against a shadow that clung.

It was a human being.

My adversary's grip was on my shoulder, and pulling me back by one arm.

I went down.

Caught.

12

So this is what happens.

The law had me, the law and all it involved, things I could imagine only as blank-faced authority, loveless and without mercy. I saw it now. How could I have forgotten? The gray world, adult and without life, was always going to catch me. It catches everyone.

There was the splash of a thought, a pain more than a memory: my parents. This will be an ugly surprise for them.

I tried to stir, and I was, to my amazement, able to move my arms and legs. The arms that held me were not strong at all, not nearly as strong as I was. They trembled.

He was laughing.

“You ran like a crab, Stanley.”

I tossed myself free and stood. I spat blood, panting.

“Like a crab,” he said. “All bent over.”

“What happened to you?” I asked before I was aware of being able to speak.

His foot splashed a puddle. He was gone, and I followed, over another fence, and across a pile of rattling boards, dim and warped in the darkness. A dog was upon us, wagging its tail and growling, exposing its teeth and leaping around us, wanting to kill us and play with us at the same time.