Falling for June: A Novel (6 page)

“I’ll be damned,” he said aloud.

Then she was gone, and he was once again alone.

5

I
HAD BEEN RECLINING
on the sofa with my legs crossed, and the old man’s tale had held me so captivated that I hadn’t even noticed that they had fallen asleep until I took advantage of a pause in his story to stretch and nearly fell onto the floor.

“Are you okay?” he asked, seeing me stumble.

“I’m fine,” I said, shaking it out. “Where did you say the bathroom was again?”

“Just down the hall there on your left.” He reached for his cane and started to rise. “I’ll make you some more tea.”

“No thanks,” I said. “The one cup seems to be working as advertised.”

I didn’t think I was away that long, but when I returned from the shitter the old man was gone and there was a glass of water and a plate of sliced apples on the coffee table in front of where I had been sitting. When Mr. Hadley reappeared, he was carrying a plate of apple slices for himself and a glass of milky liquid that I could tell tasted terrible just by how it looked.

“I thought you might like a little snack,” he said, indicating the apples with a nod. He set down his plate and took up his cane to lower himself into his chair again. “I’m supposed to take my medication with food, but an apple’s about all I can stomach any longer before noon. That and MoonPies.”

“Thanks,” I said, biting into an apple slice, then adding quietly, “Just what I need after that Smooth Move tea too, more fiber.”

I said it under my breath but I could tell he heard me because he laughed. I guess those hearing aids worked pretty well. Then he said, “It’s a lovely sound, isn’t it? The crunch of an apple. Have you ever heard a horse eat one?”

“No, I don’t think I have.”

“Well, maybe later we’ll go out and feed one to Rosie.”

“You have horses here?”

“Just Rosie. I’ve managed to place all of the other animals elsewhere, but Rosie’s blind and she’s been rather bad off since her seeing-eye horse passed away. She can’t eat a whole apple at once any longer, on account of her missing teeth, but she still loves them. June spoiled her something terrible and she almost expects one every day. Won’t touch a carrot, but she sure loves apples.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, where will Rosie go?”

I didn’t say it exactly, but by “where will Rosie go?” I meant when the bank foreclosed. He seemed to understand, though, anyway.

“She’ll be gone by then,” he said.

“Yeah, but where?”

“Who can say until they get there,” he mused, with a bit of a twinkle in his old eye.

He pulled his bridge from his mouth and picked a piece of apple peel free that was caught in its wires. Then he smiled at me with no front teeth. “Don’t get old if you can help it, kid. You start losing pieces of yourself. What doesn’t fall out, they want to cut out. Of course, of everything I’ve lost I probably miss my mind the most.” He laughed at his own joke and slapped his knee. Then he reinserted his bridge and picked up his drink. He winced when he sipped it. I knew it tasted bad.

“Are the apples enough for you?” he asked. “I have some microwave dinners.”

I assured him that I was fine, and he leaned back in his chair. Then he smiled again, this time with all his teeth.

“Shall I continue with my story then?”

“Sure, but I do have a question. I’m assuming that was your wife, June—the lady on the roof with the parachute. But I’m curious why she wasn’t wearing any shoes.”

“That’s a good question, Elliot,” he replied. “A good fine question. And I wondered the same thing. Especially after I found her boots . . .”

6

H
E FOUND HER
boots sitting neatly together on the top step just inside the roof access door, with the socks stuffed inside. Why she had left them there before jumping he could not have guessed at the time. Perhaps they had been part of her disguise, he mused, or perhaps she had planted them as a kind of false clue. They were old worn hiking boots in men’s size nine, and they were much too large for her feet as he remembered them. He was quite shaken by the encounter, and it eventually occurred to him as he squatted there that he should probably disappear before being discovered, so he scooped up the boots, tucked them beneath his arm, and hurried off down the stairs.

The headline in the morning newspaper read:

DAREDEVIL DOLLY

BAREFOOT BASE JUMPER STRIKES AGAIN

Witnesses on the street had watched her land. A few claimed to have seen her running around the block and climbing into a waiting car, although what make or model none could say. She was described by some as being extremely short, and by others as being unusually tall, but all could at least agree that
she had been barefoot, appearing like a vision from the overhead fog and touching down in the street with the nimble grace of a sparrow, before gathering up her parachute and vanishing just as quickly as she had appeared. Speculation in the article ran wild: “She’s a communist spy.” “She’s doing it for nuclear disarmament.” “No woman would dare it, I say; she must be a man wearing a disguise.” “She’s a fame seeker.” “Thrill seeker.” “She must be Scandinavian; only a Swede would be crazy enough to jump from a building in the fog.”

The next day the papers had moved on.

But David Hadley had not.

Their rooftop encounter had rattled his psyche more than a little, and no sooner had he descended to his office cubicle, concealing her boots quickly beneath his desk, than he found himself already obsessed with finding her again. He wanted to see those smiling eyes; he dreamed already of hearing her call him “darling” one more time. Plus, he should thank her, shouldn’t he? She had, after all, narrowly saved him from suicide. But mostly he wanted to seek her out because he found himself pondering what exactly she had meant when she had said, “What if you have to let go of your life to truly live it?”

She had said much more in their brief talk, he knew, but these were the words that had echoed in David Hadley’s mind as he stood on the ledge, watching her drop away into the fog. And now he had to know how it felt: falling like that, rushing toward certain death, then choosing at the very last second with the pull of a cord to live. And, like everyone else, including the newspapers, he also had to know why.

If there was a positive side to his new obsession, it was that David no longer thought about suicide. Nor did he stop at the liquor store on his way home ever again. Instead he would walk to the library after work and spend evenings with his face pressed close to the blue screen of the microfiche machine,
searching for a picture or a name. There were several prior jumps reported in the newspapers—one from the Space Needle, after the painting crew had inadvertently left the roof access hatch unlocked; one from scaffolding on the famed Smith Tower; and another from a communications antenna atop Queen Anne Hill—but no one had a clue as to her identity. Investigators had only recently decided, after several eyewitness accounts and the aid of one hastily shot and grainy tourist photograph, that the jumper was actually a she. Which left them to wildly hypothesize as to why a pair of men’s size-nine boots were left behind at the scene of each jump—with the exception of the most recent one, of course, since David Hadley had those boots sitting now beside his bed.

He was not proud of it, but because he had no one in his life to hide anything from he was not ashamed either, and each night before going to sleep, David would take the socks from the boots and hold them to his nose as he drifted off to sleep. The fragrance was of wool and leather and a hint of something else too—something subtly sweet that reminded him of summers as a boy. He was not sure why he smelled her socks like this. Many months later, when it was almost too late, he would come to understand that it was because he already loved her. He had resigned himself that day on the roof to falling nine hundred feet to end it all, but he never would have guessed he’d fall much farther in less than the time it took to turn and look into her smiling eyes. All he knew for sure was that he had to find her again.

An awkward visit to the Seattle police department armed with a poorly concocted lie about an old college friend he was trying to locate landed him the number to a local sketch artist. He went to see her the following day. But although he sat with her in her studio for most of an afternoon, all he seemed able to recall were the stranger’s eyes.

“And you say you knew her well, huh?” the artist asked.

“I guess not as well as I thought,” David replied.

He walked out with a sketch of her eyes floating on a page, a wise and knowing smile without a face. It looked less like a portrait sketch than it did a rendering of a Buddhist symbol someone might have wanted tattooed on his or her arm.

David would sit in his bed at night, propped up against the headboard with her socks in his lap, holding the sketch before him, staring at the eyes and trying to animate her from his memory upon the page. And as with anyone who looks for any one particular thing long enough and doggedly enough, he eventually came to see not what was there, but what he wanted to be there instead. He saw her so clearly one evening he retrieved a pen and began tracing in the rest of her features. By morning, of course, his sketch looked nothing like the way he remembered her, and he quickly whited the pen lines out, making a promise to himself to only mark it from then on with pencil. Which he did each night as day by day his obsession with finding the Barefoot BASE Jumper grew.

Being an accountant, he made a spreadsheet outlining what it was he knew about her. She was an expert with a parachute. She had a disregard for the law. She had a thing for men’s shoes. He guessed her age to be close to his own, but of this he was still unsure. She had had tan toes. Tan toes, yes, and three of the toenails were pink, he remembered. He wrote it all down. Anything beyond these general facts, however, he hadn’t any clue. And he seemed to be losing hope of ever learning more. Then late one night, while his list-in-progress rested on his nightstand and her socks rested in his sleeping arms, he woke from a dream and sat bolt upright in his bed.

“The door was unlocked!”

Early the next morning he was in the building maintenance office, waving his drawing in front of the super’s face.

“I know it was you,” he said. “Who else has a key to that stairwell door?”

“Lots of people do,” the super replied, casually sipping his coffee and looking over the mug’s brim at David with an expression somewhere between curiosity and fear.

“I’m not with the cops, I promise,” David went on. “And I’m not interested in telling the papers who she is either. I work at Caldwell and Strong on seven, and you can verify that in the directory. Look, here’s my building access card.”

The super waved the offered card away, reaching instead for a clipboard on the desk and holding it out for David to see.

“This here’s the list of everyone with keys to that door. You can see yourself there’s two dozen companies. Whoever your Daredevil Dolly turns out to be, her little stunt just made my job a lot harder. From here on the locks are changed out and everyone wanting up has to come to me. I hope you find her, fella. And when you do, you tell her I ain’t at all happy. You hear?”

That was on a Friday. Saturday he found himself at a parachute center housed in a small airport north of Seattle. He spent an hour there harassing the woman who maintained the flight manifest with his drawing. “Sir,” the woman finally said, her patient eyes melting slowly into pools of anger, “the weekend’s our busiest time, and I’m afraid I’ve told you four or five times now: nobody here knows anything about the Barefoot BASE Jumper.”

Just for good measure, he held the sketch up one last time.

“You’re sure you don’t recognize her?”

“Looks a lot like a young Bette Davis to me,” she said. When David sighed, she added, “Or maybe Cybill Shepherd.”

“Those two don’t even look anything alike,” he said.

“Hey”—she shrugged—“it’s your drawing, buddy.”

Another weekend, another parachute center, another disap
pointment. He was quickly running out of hope. Despite causing him frustration, however, David’s obsession was improving his life. He was out meeting new people, even though it was to harass them with his sketch; he was sleeping more, because dreams were the one place he could clearly see her face; and he was becoming more efficient at his work, if only to be able to leave the office early in order to continue his quest. He even saw his name slowly climbing up the office bonus board for the first time. But none of this mattered to David. All he could think about was finding her.

But not even the strongest of attractions can be maintained in a vacuum, and as the scent faded from her socks, his enthusiasm for the search began to wane. He found himself feeling lonely again, spending long evenings cooped up in his apartment with only the TV for company. He had replayed his rooftop conversation with her in his head a thousand times, recalling the promise she had extracted from him to give himself another chance. And it was this promise that kept the thought of suicide from crossing his mind again. But he was sinking into a depression just the same.

Then one evening he saw an ad for the local humane society on TV, and he began to cry. He wasn’t quite sure why; maybe he saw himself in the sad puppy’s eyes. The next day, a Saturday in early June, David was driving home from having his first colonoscopy—which had left him feeling more than a little vulnerable, even though the prognosis had been all clear—when he passed by the humane society and recognized its sign from the commercial. He pulled over and went inside. The dozens of sad faces staring out at him from their cages immediately overwhelmed him. No way could he do it, he told himself. No way could he be responsible for another living creature. He could hardly take care of himself and he knew it. But he also knew that his shrinking from anything that resembled responsibility
had been a recurring theme for him since the day his father had died.

The woman at the front desk looked defeated when he told her he had changed his mind. So defeated in fact that David asked if there might be some way other than adoption that he could help. He had meant something along the lines of a financial donation, and had even taken out his checkbook, but much to his surprise, she waved the check away and asked him if he had a driver’s license instead. And so he began his days as a doggy driver, taxiing terriers and chauffeuring shih tzus all over the city, logging long hours each weekend on the road, delivering the little yapping companions to new, if sometimes temporary, homes. He hated it, or so he claimed. But in truth it was the best thing to ever happen to him.

He would address the little faces in his rearview mirror as they looked out through the bars of their carrier doors. “You want to listen to the radio?” he’d ask. “Do you prefer classical or jazz? Neither? Okay, stop barking. I turned it off.” He went as far north as the Canadian border, and as far south as Portland, and even though he was loath to admit it, he began to look forward to these drives, and to his furry companions, finding it more and more difficult each time to say good-bye. Then one day a doggy delivery forever changed his life.

It was on a Friday, the fourth of July, when he left the office to pick up a cocker spaniel, having no idea that he would not return to his job for several weeks. He picked up his yapping companion and drove it south to Puyallup, fighting traffic to reach his destination before the fireworks began. Arriving at the puppy’s new home, he lingered for just a moment in the foyer, being welcomed by the licks of a half dozen dogs, when he once again laid eyes on the face he had been dreaming about all this time. He walked without a word into the kitchen and stood staring into those smiling eyes.

The flyer was hung from the refrigerator by a fruit magnet, and it read: “Even racehorses deserve a happy retirement.” It was an advertisement for an animal rescue called Echo Glen, and in the picture on the flyer she had her arm around the neck of a horse as it ate grain from the palm of her hand.

David reached into his pocket for his wallet and pulled out the worn and tattered sketch he had carried with him all this time. He unfolded it and held it up. Yes, he thought, if nothing else, he had in fact captured her smiling eyes.

“It’s lovely work they do up there at Echo Glen,” the homeowner said, appearing beside David at the refrigerator. “And it’s not just horses. They rescue dogs, cats, goats, and all sorts of other animals too. Have you been out there yet?”

“Do you know who she is?” David asked.

“Of course,” the woman said. “Everyone knows June.”

June.
So that was her name. June. June. June. Yes, it even sounded right.

“May I take this?” David asked, reaching and pulling the flyer free from its magnet without even waiting for a response.

He drove home beneath the colorful bursts of fireworks, but he hardly saw them at all; his heart was bursting with an excitement brighter still. He was half tempted to keep going when he reached Seattle and drive to the address on the flyer, but he decided against it and spent a near-sleepless night in his bed, reaching countless times for the lamp so he could pick up the flyer and look again at her face.

The next morning he was up before dawn and in the freeway fast lane, heading north out of the city. In the seat next to him he had the flyer and a map. When he finally arrived at Echo Glen, the gates were open, but he hesitated in the street with his blinker on, too nervous to turn up the drive and too committed to turn back. But as so often happens, fate made
the decision for him in the form of a honking lumber truck barreling down on him in his rearview mirror. He turned in and drove through the gates.