The Speed of Falling Objects Read online

  Later that night Trix looked up facts about pigeons to make me feel better about my new nickname. Like they can fly up to fifty miles per hour, make great pets because they always find their way home, and can morph their wings into different shapes to fly in storms. It didn’t help, but I appreciated her effort.

  The good news is that I’m more coordinated now. When you lose your eye as a little kid, as opposed to as an adult, your brain has an easier time adjusting to the new normal, and eventually adaptation becomes mostly automatic. I’ll always have a blind spot on my left side, and I’ll never be a great tennis player, but the trick to fitting in is never putting myself in situations where my monocular vision is exposed.

  Trix helped me get through whatever torture our gym teacher planned in junior high. We had verbal cues for when I should swing a bat, kick a ball or leap over a hurdle. Sometimes it worked. Now I take bowling for gym. It’s a benefit of going to a broken-down old high school that has a few lanes in the basement. My friend also helped me break the habit of turning my head by pinching me hard enough to leave a bruise every time I did it around her. And I never dance, because even though I no longer move like a pigeon, deep down that bird still flutters around inside me.

  Trix asks, “Come over tonight?”

  I shake my head. “I need to study.”

  “I’m getting the results from my private investigator.”

  Trix nibbles her lower lip, a nervous tick. I could tell her she has a great family already and that she’ll always have me, but she’s been obsessed with finding her biological parents and it’s my job to have her back, so I say, “I’ll be there.”

  3

  There’s a note on the fridge: Pull flank steak out. I take off my glasses, make a quick kale salad, a ginger marinade for the meat, do my homework, then grab one of the medical journals my mother leaves on every surface of our place in northwest Portland. It’s her version of decorating. Mine is creating dioramas, three-dimensional boxes depicting different scenes. They’re scattered throughout our apartment.

  I like working in miniature so I use jewelry boxes for my creations. My favorite is in a rectangular bracelet box that rests on the kitchen windowsill. It’s a scene from the arctic, complete with an igloo, mini-glaciers, several people, a pack of dogs and a polar bear I made out of toothbrush bristles. With each diorama, I use the scalpel my mom gave me, once she was sure I wouldn’t slice an artery, to cut elements from balsa wood. Then I hand paint or cover them with textured material. The last step is a visit to our local antique and junk shop, for a surprise to place inside each scene. My favorite discovery so far is a miniature pocket watch. It’s hung around the polar bear’s neck, like he knows, with the glaciers melting, that his time may be running out.

  Other than my dioramas, nothing has changed since we moved into our two-bedroom, one-bath apartment when I was eight. Early on, mom hung framed posters of the skeletal and circulatory systems and detailed renderings of the body’s organs on the living room walls. I’m not sure if I memorized them or if they seeped into my brain through osmosis. She also taped a handprint turkey I drew in kindergarten, now faded to pastels, to the dented stainless steel fridge. An interior designer wouldn’t be impressed, but the apartment is like a comfortable old shoe and it’s home.

  I sit down at the kitchen table and let the medical journal fall open.

  Case XXI: Nineteen-year-old male. Working with handheld drill while on a ladder. Ladder tipped, resulting in a ten-foot fall. Landed on 18˝ drill bit, face-first. Bit went through right ocular cavity. Exited back of skull. Right eye destroyed...

  My mouth has gone dry. A key scrapes in the door lock. It swings open, letting in a rush of icy December air and my mom, also a force of nature.

  “Hey, Danny. Glasses?”

  I put them back on as she dumps an overloaded messenger bag on the kitchen table. She shrugs off her down jacket, red scarf and hat. Her cheeks are pink circles on a smooth white canvas, jaw-length blond hair alive with static. Even though she’s my mother, I recognize that Samantha McCord is beautiful. Nice for her but embarrassing for me as I fall far from that tree.

  “Which case are you reading about?”

  “Drill bit.”

  “Worst part was that he was uninsured. Over $100,000 in medical bills.”

  My mom is obsessed with insurance, mostly medical, but also car, fire, life and wrongful death. It makes sense in a morbid way. Her own mother died in a car wreck when she was eighteen. There was a small life insurance policy. Four months later her father was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. He was dead in six weeks. The combined policies got my mom through college. My dad didn’t have the same safety net. He was eleven when his parents died and there were no insurance policies.

  I turn on the broiler and put the steak in the oven while my mom massages her feet. If the ER is busy, she rarely sits down at work.

  She says, “Brain injuries.”

  This is the game we play every night before dinner. She baits a hook, tosses it into the water. I usually bite. My mom enjoys it. “Yes?”

  “They don’t require a huge blow. A small fall on a ski slope can put a kid in a coma, even kill them, while an old woman can get trampled by a horse and wind up with a headache.”

  I ask, “So how do you figure out what a patient needs when they come to the ER?”

  “If they’re responsive, ask questions. If not, get information from the family to see if the patient has a history of illness or drug use. Take scans. Sometimes a patient will seem fine, lucid, but later have migraines, ask repetitive questions or have seizures.” She opens the oven, flips the steak over and puts it back under the broiler.

  “Why?”

  “There’s bleeding or swelling in the brain that, over time, creates so much pressure inside the skull that it damages the brain tissue, sometimes irreparably.”

  “Sounds painful.”

  “Unbearable.”

  I remember how I felt after the accident. Like a bomb kept exploding inside my skull. Samantha pulls out the flank steak and expertly slices it. I ask, “How long does it take until the patient dies?”

  “Minutes to days. But they don’t always. What would you do to save them?”

  She sets the steak and salad on the table, then sits across from me. We both dig in. “The skull is like a football helmet, right?”

  “Meaning?”

  “There’s no give. So I guess I’d find a way to get rid of the pressure. Maybe drill holes through the patient’s head? Or is that too brutal?” I stab a piece of meat and pop it into my mouth.

  “Not brutal at all,” she says between bites. “A neurosurgeon can either drill a hole in the skull and put in a shunt to drain the fluid or remove a piece of the patient’s skull to give their swollen brain room.”

  My mom’s eyes gleam. She was planning to be a surgeon, but my parents met halfway through her undergrad at Berkeley and she got pregnant. They married. Cougar started working on the first iteration of his show, traveling a ton, and Sam was left struggling to get through college while taking care of me. Money was tight. Everything Cougar made went right back into his show. When she finally graduated, my mom had to figure out a way to make a living, fast. She chose nursing. When she couldn’t afford a sitter, she’d bring me to the hospitals where she worked. I’d do my homework in the emergency department’s waiting room.

  “Earth to Danny?”

  “Do you ever wish we had more family?”

  Samantha eats another piece of steak. “Why?”

  “It would’ve been easier on you.” My parents don’t even have siblings.

  She wipes her mouth with a napkin. “Wishing for something you don’t have is a waste of time.”

  Cougar’s nickname for my mother is Commander Sam. She hates it, but in a way it’s a compliment. She’s pragmatic, determined and, like a tank barreling to
ward enemy lines, nothing stands in her way. Both her parents were in the army. She doesn’t talk about them much, but does say that they taught her there are problems and solutions, right and wrong. My dad falls in the wrong category—tried, found guilty, with no execution but also no reprieve.

  “I took Friday and Monday off.”

  For my seventeenth birthday, which is next Friday, we’re going on a road trip to check out a few Oregon colleges. Early December isn’t the best time for college tours. It’ll be cold, rainy and gray. “You do realize that you’re way ahead of schedule?” I’m only a junior.

  One brow arches. That single brow lift means she’s quietly lining up her arsenal, ready to pick off any protest like a sniper. “Scholarships go fast.”

  “What about a state school in California?”

  She frowns. “We can’t afford out-of-state tuition.”

  Both of us were crazy hungry so we polished off our meal in record time. Mom jumps into cleaning up. If I went to the University of Southern California or the University of California, Los Angeles, I’d be close to where my dad lives when he’s not filming, maybe get to know him better. I take a deep breath before entering enemy territory. “We could let Cougar help with tuition?”

  She lets my question dangle, which isn’t a surprise. I was seven when my parents divorced. It was only a few months after my accident. Sam refused child support, which wouldn’t have been much in the early days but could’ve helped a little. Even now that Cougar is successful and wealthy, she won’t take a dime or let me take anything other than birthday and Christmas gifts. She says her decisions are based on keeping me safe, but I’m not seven anymore.

  I’ve poked the bear and wait to see if she’s going to attack. Samantha rinses the steak pan, then dries off her hands and says, “Danny, have you thought more about what you want to study in college? Nurses can always find a job.”

  She’s watching me, her jaw tilted like she’s ready for a fight. My suggestion doesn’t merit a response. I guess college in dreary Oregon isn’t the worst thing in the world.

  “Danny?”

  “I’m still not sure what I want to study.” Trix’s plans change every five minutes and her parents just smile about it. One day she’s going to be a fireman, like her dad, the next a shoe designer or join Cirque du Soleil. Me? I’m interested in science, but I want to be everything I’m not and different from my mom, who is equal parts drive, anger and regret.

  The phone rings—a momentary reprieve.

  “Hello...? Fine, Cougar,” my mom says.

  My stomach clenches a tiny bit, like always. Sam hands me the phone. “Hi, Dad.”

  4

  “Hey, guess where your dad is right now?”

  I say, “Africa, Thailand, Mongolia?” He really could be anywhere in the world.

  “Nope. LA, sitting poolside at Chateau Marmont.”

  “Cool.”

  “Cool? Yeah, pretty much the coolest hangout in Los Angeles. I just had a meeting with Gus Price’s people. Drumroll. He’s in for an episode of COUGAR. He has a few days open, and there’s a tie-in with his next project, so we’re filming in a week. Three days, the Peruvian rain forest. It’ll be epic. Given Gus’s visibility, a great episode might even get me a movie deal. We have a script, just need to hook a major studio for backing. Be pretty cool if your dad made the leap to the silver screen, huh?”

  “Really cool. But you’re already famous.”

  “True. But this would launch me into the stratosphere. Goodbye, Venice Beach. Hello, Malibu. Cougar Warren, action-adventure hero. Move over, the Rock, right?”

  I smile so he can hear it in my voice. “Right.” I’d reconciled myself to him forgetting my birthday was coming up. He’s a busy guy.

  “You don’t know who Gus is, do you?”

  My mom is staring at me, a deep groove forming between her eyebrows. “He’s an actor.” I know only because Trix dragged me to his last movie, a remake of an old film called American Gigolo that starred Richard Gere. The original was about a high-price male escort who gets framed for murder. Gus’s version is about a homeless kid who’s rescued from the street by a glamorous female pimp. She sets him up in an expensive apartment, then sends him out to sleep with older women. “In Gus’s last movie, he was framed for murder but ended up being given an alibi by one of his famous clients,” I say to show my dad I’m tracking. What I don’t add is that Gus’s eyes are pretty amazing and he’s so good at acting that I actually believed he was that homeless kid.

  “Exactly! Gus is the hottest teen actor in the world right now and he’s going to do my show. Gus Price, in the rain forest? Add flash floods, venomous snakes, spiders that paralyze, stingrays and electric eels—it doesn’t get hotter than that. You still terrified of bugs?”

  “Pretty much.” He laughs so I do, too. When I was eight, my dad showed up for a rare visit. We went to an entomology exhibit at the local science museum. It featured live bugs from around the world. Kids could touch and even hold the ones that didn’t bite or sting. I remember there were hickory horned devils—giant yellow caterpillars with orange horns sprouting from their heads—long-legged katydids that looked like green leaves with sticklike legs and ant lions, bristly, brown spiderlike bugs with curved jaws.

  Before the accident, I would’ve loved the exhibit. I was the kid who wasn’t scared of anything, just like my dad. But having one eye changed things. When Cougar put a giant black-and-white-striped goliath beetle on my left shoulder, my blind spot, and I felt it crawling up my neck, I FREAKED out. Cougar took me outside and asked, What is wrong with you? I couldn’t articulate my terror, but it was the idea that on one side I was now defenseless. That was the day Cougar started calling me by my nickname, Danny, instead of my first name.

  “I’m not planning a career in entomology,” I admit.

  Cougar chuckles. “Yeah. You’re not cut out for that.”

  He’s right, but inside I wince.

  My dad visited only a few more times since that day. When I was nine he was in town to do local press. He took me swimming at the coast. The news had just run a story about a shark attack—a great white bit off a surfer’s leg below the knee. Cougar and I were playing in the shallow water, splashing and having fun, when the sand suddenly dropped away and I was in over my head. Petrified, I forgot how to swim. He dragged me out, choking and spluttering. When he said I needed to go back in the ocean and conquer my fears, I grew so hysterical that a couple on the beach intervened. Cougar hissed in my ear, Stop it! On the drive home my dad told me he was sorry and not to worry about it. But he could barely look at me. I sensed that I hadn’t just humiliated myself. I’d embarrassed him.

  Cougar asks, “Ready for the big surprise?”

  “Um.”

  “I’ve cleared it for you to come along!”

  I hold the phone a few inches away until the reverberations die down. “Excuse me?”

  “You, me, Gus and a few remaining crew members who couldn’t make the trip with the production team are going to Peru on Sunday. I’ll have my assistant FedEx your ticket. You have a passport, right?”

  “Yes.” Last year there was a school trip to Mexico. I got a passport, just in case we could pull together enough money for me to go. It didn’t work out, so I drove to Vancouver with my mom and sat through a weekend seminar on streamlining hospital emergency rooms. My leg starts jiggling. I can’t help it—hope launches like a rocket.

  “We’ll meet in LA, fly to Lima together, then on to Iquitos.”

  His enthusiasm is infectious. “Where’s that, exactly?”

  “Eastern Peru. It’s the gateway into national parks with hundreds of millions of hectares of unexplored tropical Amazonian rain forests. There’s not even a name for where we’re going. It’s one of the most remote, rugged, deadly parts of Peru. If we’re going to see jaguars, it’s there. Are you stoked, Danielle?
”

  Danielle. My insides contract, and this time I’m ten years old again. Cougar was in town for a single afternoon. We rented bikes to ride along the Willamette River. Before the accident I was a whiz on a two-wheeler. I was only four when I learned to ride without training wheels. My dad always crowed that I was a superior athlete, like him. That day, on the flat, paved path, I crashed five times. In my defense, it was the first time I’d tried to ride with one eye and my depth perception was way off, plus I was nervous. Cougar kept looking back, shaking his head. He didn’t have to say the word inferior. I understood, even then, it was the opposite of being superior. When he dropped me off at the apartment, he said, “Goodbye, Danielle.” It was the first time in my entire life that he’d ever called me by the given middle name on my birth certificate. As soon as I got inside and shut the door, I vomited. Cougar called me Danielle from that day on.

  “Danielle?”

  Despite the name, excitement makes my body hum. This is my chance to spend more than a few hours with my dad. “Yes! I’m down!”

  The expression on my mom’s face reads, Why are you still on the phone with that ass? Hope falters midair. There’s no way she’ll let me go to Peru with my dad. When I was little, she barely let him take me out of the house during visits. Excitement is replaced by heaviness in my bones, like gravity is working hand in hand with reality to pin me to my boring life. I remind myself that it’s still interesting to hear about my dad’s adventures. “Being so cut off... Won’t that make it hard to film?”

  “Hell yes. It’ll take hours in a power canoe to get upstream to our start location. You might get to see pink dolphins, alligators called caimans, freshwater sharks, monkeys, plus some of the most poisonous frogs, snakes and spiders in the world.”

  The idea that my dad thinks what he’s describing is a plus makes me laugh. “Wow!”

  “I know! You’ll need about a week off school.”