The Art of Falling (11 page)

We laughed. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Maybe we could give the roommate thing a shot.”

“Really? You didn’t seem so into it.”

“Forgive me for not rushing right into rooming with someone who so recently flung herself off a building.” A man at a nearby bookcase scooted away. She looked after him with wide eyes, looked back at me, and we cracked up again. I smacked her on her good arm. “Anyway, I guess I couldn’t imagine why someone like you would want to live with someone like me.”

“I like you.”

She pulled the mask from her face. It left a triangular impression on her cheeks and chin. “When most people look at me, they see ‘someone with CF.’ But yesterday, in front of the Independence Suites, you were sharing stuff with me. Like an equal. As if I might have something to offer back, beyond calorie loading or what kind of IV port is easiest to flush.”

“But you have other friends outside the hospital. Everyone at the gym knows you.”

“They’re acquaintances. It makes them feel good to be nice to me, but they’re afraid to get close. They look into my eyes and see…I don’t know, the reflection of their own mortality or something.” Now she looked at me. Her eyes weren’t simply brown, as I first thought. They were streaked with slivers of amber. “My own mother treats me as an illness that needs to be healed. Besides my landlady, you and Marty are my first healthy friends.”

I burst into laughter. “You’re holding me up as a picture of health?”

Angela offered something I’d waited way too long to find: the fertile soil of friendship. Alongside the Avenue of the Arts lay an entirely different world, one I’d never explored. Perhaps here I could sink some roots and let the new Penelope Sparrow grow.

When my trunk was all repacked and I had nothing else to do but wait for Kandelbaum and Angela to pick me up, I realized how much I’d miss hearing my mother play the piano.

“One more ‘Moonlight Sonata’? For the road?”

I sat next to her as she played. Listened for the slow, purposeful build. The loss, and its echo. A tinge of fear, a final resignation. When my mother spoke to me through music, our hearts always connected. This time we saw the drama through together, all the way to the end.

I hugged her warmly, then patted the piano. “Daddy must have loved you very much. He gave you a great gift.”

She put her hand on my cheek. “I know. He gave me you.” Tears glistened in her eyes.

“I’m not abandoning you. But I can’t keep circling the living room floor, you know?”

I saw the Independence Sweets van pull in the driveway, heard doors open and shut. I stood and placed my hand over the heart of the piano one last time. “Don’t stop playing just because I’m not here, promise?”

She nodded. “Promise.”

“When I come back, I’ll want to hear some new pieces.”

My mother dabbed at her eyes and smiled. “Yes ma’am.”

When the doorbell rang, I asked my mother to tell my friends I’d be right out. I had one last thing to take care of. Back in my room, I took from the desk drawer that framed picture of me standing in the wings. I slipped the picture and backing from the frame and looked between them. The rosebud my father had given me before my first recital was still pressed flat, along with the little card explaining that pink roses meant admiration and appreciation. I secreted the items once again and reassembled the frame.

I set the picture back on the desk as a quiet promise to my mother, then walked out of the room. If I was to make anything of this extraordinary second chance at life, it was time to find my own muse.

• • •

Living with Angela, the movements in my life gained purpose. Just three months after my fall and with my bruises faded to yellow, I was cleaning and laundering, caring for Angela the same way my mother had cared for me, even shopping for her considerable groceries. One day when she wasn’t feeling well, about three weeks after my move, Angela decided she wanted to paint. It was late in the day—I was beat and I knew she didn’t have the strength—but I humored her by spreading newspapers on the floor and setting up the stepladder we’d borrowed from Mrs. Pope.

“You’re not up to this, Angela.”

“That’s why I have a ladder.”

I climbed up to my bunk, kicked off my shoes, and flopped down. “Why don’t you rest?”

“I’ll soon have plenty of time for rest. This fatigue is from lack of oxygen, not a need for sleep.”

Her breath was a low growl as she climbed up the ladder. The weather had grown warmer and more humid since I’d moved in. She lasted only ten minutes before she asked me to help with her chest therapy. I’d stopped in for a demo at the CF Center, but I’d had difficulty getting the hang of it. I could see faint paisley marks on her back where my cupped hands had bruised her. She didn’t complain. I knew now to listen for the right sound, like a drummer:
chawp, chawp, chawp
.

My new and improved efforts were rewarded with a rasping cough, and she removed herself to the bathroom. Then she climbed back up the ladder, dipped her brush into the can of blue paint, and swirled it across the ceiling.

I looked up into her sky. “After my father died, I always pictured him looking down on me from the comfort of a fluffy white cloud.”

“My vision of death is a little darker. He’s a neighbor—a face I see on this street every day—but I don’t know which one he is. And he’s plucking friend after friend from my life.” She rested her paintbrush on top of the ladder and looked down at me. “The group of CF kids I grew up with at Children’s? I’m the last one. There’s one lady at Presby in her forties, but I didn’t grow up with her. And she’s made it without her original parts.”

“Meaning?”

“She had a double lung transplant.”

“They can transplant lungs? Could you get some?”

“It isn’t time yet. And it’s risky. Lungs are scarce, and the rejection rate is pretty high. It’s considered a last measure.” She resumed painting.

“What do you think dying is like?” I could almost hear my mother—
Penny, your manners
. Yet Angela inspired such directness. Like all of us, she was going to die. Since her death was likely to come sooner, I figured she had given it some thought. I wasn’t wrong.

“I suppose we die in as many ways as we live. But whether your heart or brain stops first, you ultimately die because oxygen can’t reach your cells. Clogged lungs sure don’t help.”

“Do you think it will hurt?”

Angela looked out over the dunes and lowered her voice, as if death might hear her and rearrange the grains of sand. “Not if I’m in the hospital. They’ll have me all doped up.” She shifted her focus to me. Her gaze was a test. A challenge. “Most people won’t talk about stuff like this.”

I forced a smile. I didn’t want to ruin her good impression of my fortitude.

“I’ve heard the doctors say that before clinical death, there’s this wrestling match between the soul and body, as if they aren’t willing to part.”

“I’m not so sure I see body and soul as separate anymore. You saw how far I fell. You’d think my body would have expired, freeing my soul for some sort of cosmic dance. Yet I woke up alive, my soul still attached to this body as firmly as if it were imbedded within my connective tissues. If the soul wrestles to leave the body at death, that must be one hell of a battle.”

“That part freaks me the most.” Angela’s voice faltered. “There’s no controlling what’s going to happen. People even shit their beds. And I know myself—I’m gonna fight like hell not to leave.”

She briefly lowered her face to the sleeve of her shirt, then returned to painting her sky blue. I closed my eyes and matched my breath to the whisper of the bristles against the ceiling. I was almost asleep when she spoke again.

“How’s the job hunt going?”

“Huh?”

Silence. I opened my eyes. She looked disappointed.

“Penny, maybe this isn’t the best arrangement. You need to be pulling your life together, and here I am talking about grinding to a halt.”

“I’ve been trying to pitch in as much as I can—”

“I don’t want a wife. I want a roommate. Someone to help with expenses.”

“You’re right.” Angela’s fight for life felt so elemental; I wanted to be near the heart of it. Lightening her load or bringing her cheer was like giving myself a life force transfusion. So I’d been stalling, and decided to come clean. “I want to be here with you, you know? In case.”

She climbed down the ladder, stretched her neck, and looked me in the eye. “That’s not a game worth playing. I’ve returned from the realm of the near-dead so many times they’re propping the pearly gates open these days so the keeper won’t get bursitis.”

I smiled at the image.

She ripped off a piece of cellophane and wrapped it around the bristles of the paintbrush. “Have you applied anywhere?”

“I have retail experience in a dancewear store, so I did stop in at Baum’s, down the street, but they aren’t hiring.”

“At the risk of sounding obvious, you could teach dance, right?”

“I’d feel like a bit of an impostor at this point.”

She cocked her head. “Explain.”

Since she seemed truly interested, I sat up and took a moment to put my thoughts together. “It’s more than telling someone how to put one foot in front of the other. Dance isn’t the steps, it’s the motion connecting one step to the next. To suggest meaning, the dancer must create intention by directing energy through a series of linkages and…well, my links are broken. How can I inspire others when I don’t know where I’m going?”

“So taking steps isn’t the problem, but intention is?”

“Exactly.” The fact that Angela could follow my twisted reasoning made me feel more capable already. I slid off the bed, folded the stepladder, and leaned it against the wall behind the door. “Don’t worry,” I said. “If something doesn’t turn up soon, I’ll clear out so you can get a better roommate.”

“An object in motion tends to stay in motion,” she said, suddenly channeling Newton. “Let’s head to the gym. I can take you one more time on my pass.”

• • •

The expanse of exercise equipment before us must have overwhelmed Angela. She said, “Three reps, each piece, three minutes on the bike. No aerobics.”

Beneath her eyes were dark pillows, yet I knew not to suggest rest. I no longer assumed she pushed herself to exercise as a way to entertain me. She aimed to clear her lungs. To draw air. To stay alive.

We split up, working machines on the perimeter of the aerobics floor. I was over on bench press when I heard the collective gasp. I turned. The disco beat was still driving, but those taking the class were frozen in a huddle around someone on the floor.

I raced over. I couldn’t believe this was happening.
Not
now. Not so soon
.

But it wasn’t Angela who had collapsed. It was the aerobics instructor, clutching her knee, her lower leg bent at an odd angle.

“What happened?” I said.

“I was turning and then I was on the ground,” the instructor said.

“Do you have knee problems?”

She took in a sharp breath and nodded.

I looked up at the gathering crowd. “Is someone getting ice?” They stared at me as though hypnotized by the disco music. “You, go to the front desk, tell them to call 911, and bring back ice. You—run into the locker room and grab a pile of towels.”

When the towels arrived, I piled them under her knee to support it so that she could lie down, and held the bag of ice on top. Shortly thereafter, the Adonis from the front desk, Joey, arrived.

“Are you okay, Suze? What happened?”

“My knee again,” she said, dissolving into tears now that he’d arrived.

He pointed at the towels and ice I held and said, “Did you do this?”

“It was reflex.”

The paramedics arrived, immobilized the knee, and lifted her onto a stretcher.

“You riding along?” an EMT asked Joey.

“I don’t have anyone to watch the gym…”

“I could do it,” I said. “I’m—I was a dancer for many years.”

“I don’t suppose you’re certified?”

So many of the machines looked familiar. “I was recently in physical therapy, and used a lot of these. Between Angela and me, we can cover you for a couple hours.”

“Angela Reed?”

Suzie moaned. “We’d better get going,” the EMT said.

“Put Angela at the front desk. She knows the drill,” Joey said. “You cover down here. I already have a guy on the men’s floor upstairs. I’ll call from the hospital once I know how long I’ll be.”

It was longer than they thought—at least for Suzie, who would be out of the aerobics business for the foreseeable future—and I ended up with a full-time job at the Fitness Evolution, due to qualifications I’d never thought to put on my résumé: rehabilitation after an inexplicable fall from a high-rise, credibility by association with Angela, and someone else’s rotten luck.

Yet I thought it might work out. It was a snap for me to keep a group of women moving to a predictable beat for a half hour—kind of like dance, but without creative risk. No intention beyond elevated heart rate. The paycheck would be a godsend. An employee membership would also give me free workout and whirlpool time, not to mention the lap pool, steam room, and a sauna I hadn’t yet tried. I could ease my muscles back into the kind of fluid strength dance required. Make a concerted effort to maximize my physical potential and find out, post-fall, what Penelope Sparrow was really made of.

And, I had discovered the secret weapon of the exercise underworld: the measuring tape.

Before things got cranking my first day, I filled out a chart for myself, measuring calf, thigh (ugh), hips (ugh), waist, bust (ha-ha), shoulders, and biceps. That much was pain-free. I’d never measured my body before in my life; I didn’t need proof of inadequacies so obvious to the naked eye. Whatever numbers Dance DeLaval’s seamstress came up with, she took down covertly.

But then, heaven help me, I had to face the scale. My partner in crime, my lover, and my nemesis. Its base heavy and squat, its back tall and thin. The notched beam, whose numbers I’d once craved daily, now ready to damn me for turning my back.

I stepped on, holding my breath as the beam clunked to the left, then slowly and fastidiously moved the weights. The numbers didn’t have the decency to lie. Cold, hard fact: since I stopped dancing, I’d gained four pounds. I jotted down my results and hid the paper away in a bottom desk drawer.

Knowing my numbers were in that desk burdened me as much as the extra pounds. What if someone else found them? They’d know more about me than I’d been willing to tell myself.

The other girls were trying to show me the equipment, give me tips. But I couldn’t concentrate. I hovered closer and closer to the desk, protecting its contents. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I retrieved the paper, tore it into tiny pieces, and threw it away.

I didn’t need it anyway. The numbers stayed with me, as if tattooed on the tender flesh of my inner thigh.

• • •

Angela’s health improved, as if our brightening financial picture lifted a burden from her overtaxed chest.

“Joey seems really happy with you,” she told me after I’d been working a few weeks. “I heard he wants to move you into sales soon so you can make commissions. Let’s call Marty and celebrate.”

Angela thought about Kandelbaum every time she wanted to celebrate something—and she’d celebrate anything. My new hair, my new job, the blue ceiling getting finished, the clouds added. I was starting to worry about his intentions; the guy had to have at least twenty years on her. One day, when I knew Angela was tied up taking another load of secondhand books over to the CF kids at Children’s, I stopped by the bakery to talk to him about it.

He was behind the back window, making doughnuts, and a couple of small kids stood on the step he’d installed in front of the window for that purpose. They were spellbound as they watched him frost the doughnuts and sprinkle chocolate jimmies on top.