The Speed of Falling Objects

1

I don’t remember impact.

There’s silence, followed by individual sounds, like someone conducting a nature symphony—first birds with different songs, then the deep vibration of frogs, the buzz of myriad insects and an undercurrent of slithering that might be my imagination. I don’t know. I’ve never been in the rain forest before.

The world is dark, just a pinhole, that slowly expands. Splashes of iridescent paint turn into birds taking wing. Below, flowers explode like fireworks—crimson, hot pink, cobalt. Twisted roots tunnel into coffee-colored earth. The rich smell of organic matter mingles with the musty funk of decomposition. Above my feet, I see every possible shade of green made from clusters of leaves. Massive palm fronds reveal temporary slivers of a stormy sky. Lightning licks its dark gray fabric.

A wave of vertigo hits and I’m spinning again. Screams echo. Are they Cass’s, Jupiter’s or mine? All I know for sure is that they’re not Cougar’s.

My world is upside down.

No. I’m upside down, still strapped in, feet above my head tangled in a thorny vine that is suffocating a tree’s thick limb. The airplane seat beside me remains connected to mine but it’s empty, the metal caught in the bough of a massive tree that suspends me two stories above the ground. My stomach, despite the painful compression of the seat belt, lurches.

Where’s Sean? He was sitting next to me when... We were talking about surfing and then...

Raindrops patter down on my face. They’re hot. Rivulets leak into my mouth, tasting like copper, salt. I touch my tongue. My finger comes away stained red. I look up, a little bit to the left, and then close my eyes, brain scrambling for a different explanation.

I hear my mom’s no-nonsense voice like a siren in my brain: List everything that scares you. When you give your fears a name, it takes away their power.

The nightmares began when I was eight and lasted an entire year. After each one, my mom would make me list the things that scared me, then everything I liked, then what I wanted to be when I grew up. It became my mantra—a way to cut the dark dream threads. The list changed over the years, but now I revert to my eight-year-old self.

I am afraid of...

Heights. Snakes. The dark. Dancing in public. Headaches... Spiders. Wrong choices. Surprises. Playing sports. Losing friends. Guns... Blindness. Disappointing people. New places. Hospitals. Did I say snakes already? Bees. Migraines. Speed... Being an anchor, a problem or an embarrassment... Bad dreams.

More droplets patter down on my forehead, dribble into my hair. I refuse to look up again.

I like...

Flannel sheets. Some Thursdays. My mom’s smile. Milk Duds. Writing letters. Carrot cake... Making people laugh. Creating dioramas. Dancing if no one is watching. My dad’s phone calls. The Phantom Tollbooth. Dogs. I like dogs that I know. Dad’s show.

My head is pounding so hard that my skull may explode. If I pass out upside down, will I die? The ground is far, probably twenty feet. Unlike my father, I’m not a coordinated cat with nine lives. My neck will snap if I land on my head. Death if I’m lucky. Paralysis if I’m not. Both ankles will break if I come down on my feet, possibly fracturing tibiae and fibulae, too. Maybe only my ribs will splinter if I land on my side, but that could puncture a lung. If my back and pelvis break like twigs, there’s no way I’ll be able to drag myself out of this place.

A hysterical giggle burbles to the surface. I don’t even know where I am. My vision blurs.

When I grow up I want to be...

Adventurous. Strong. Athletic. Popular. Brave. A propeller. The solution. Cougar.

I unbuckle my seat belt and drop.

2

Four Days Earlier

Let’s call her Lady Bacon.

The fetal pig lying in a dissection pan on our lab table appears to shudder. Its once-pink skin is now a mottled tan. A rough tongue hangs sideways from a body that feels like plastic but has the weight of something once alive. She deserves respect. We’ll call her Poppy.

Trix scowls. Why do you get to name her?

Because I’m the one doing all the cutting. I tie a string around one of our pig’s forelegs, pass it under the pan, stretch it tight, then tie it to the other foreleg. I do the same thing with the back legs. The hard sternum is easy to find. I follow it down to the bottom of the rib cage, pick up a scalpel and begin an upside-down V incision. If our teacher had some nylon thread for sutures, a needle holder and forceps, it’d be fun to try to close up the incision with the stitches my mom taught me one rainy afternoon using a banana instead of a piglet.

When the smell of formaldehyde rises from the long slices, Trix gags. Don’t barf on our pig. I don’t mind the smell. It’s part of the environment of a lab where everything is controlled, clean and in its proper place.

Using the dissecting scissors, I cut through the muscle of the pig’s belly. The next two incisions are down and around the umbilical cord, then above the hind legs. When I peel back all the flaps of skin there’s still membrane attached to the muscle. I consider asking Trix to cut it but she looks kind of green.

Please tell me you’re done mutilating Poppy, Trix says.

Almost.

Did someone actually raise this pig just to kill it for our biology class? Sarah asks from her seat at the lab table in front of us. The overhead fluorescents highlight skin that’s such a pale white that it has a greenish hue, and lank, greasy hair. In fourth grade a group of kids created a giant calendar to document when she changed her clothes or showered. Turned out it wasn’t often. They posted the calendar in the cafeteria.

Mr. Petri’s fingers twist the tiny island of gray hair in the center of his otherwise bald, black dome. These pigs are a by-product of the pork industry. We don’t use ’em, they become fertilizer. You have an hour to dissect, identify and flag what we’ve studied, so less talking, more slicing.

Trix’s eyes water when I make an incision up through the chest, then cut away the rib cage and sternum. The final two cuts expose the pig’s neck. I resist the urge to twist my head to see each exposed organ more clearly.

Look at Pigeon dig in, Nate says from the table to our left, and I look up. A grin splits open the lower half of a pasty face dotted with acne.

The scrutiny of the entire class crawls along my skin like ants. Kids rarely use my old nickname. They call me Danny now, and the snickers don’t happen that often anymore. I’ve changed. But so has my dad. He became Cougar Warren when I was twelve, star of his own NetCom TV show, COUGAR. He travels around the world, sometimes alone, other times with celebrities, surviving the desert, the jungle, the mountains or even the ocean in a makeshift raft. The show’s tagline: Wits. Strength. Ingenuity. Having a dad who’s famous, especially one who kicks ass every week and hangs with rappers, actors and pop stars, definitely cuts down on harassment. There are a lot of kids in my class who want to meet him. Thing is, Cougar left my mom when I was seven. He rarely visits. But they don’t know that.

Pigeon, did you skip breakfast? Lander asks me. He’s Nate’s lab partner and fellow baseball player, sports identical brush-cut hair, though his brown skin is acne-free, and he follows his buddy around like a puppy. No surprise that Lander needs to make a joke about me, too.

Trix peers over at their pig. Wow, the big, tough jocks haven’t even picked up their scalpel. Maybe their little piggy isn’t the only one missing its balls?

Lander sneers and gives her the finger.

Trix tenses. I say, Let it go, then pin flags to their corresponding organs before moving to Poppy’s right side. It’s kind of amazing, I say, tracing the fetal pig’s heart.

Trix pinches her nose with gloved fingers. How much it stinks?

She’s the toughest girl I know, but bad smells are her downfall. No, how—

How you’re afraid of spiders, Trix interrupts, scary movies, the dark, thunderstorms, swing sets, worms, ticks, riding a bike, lumpy food and flies.

I stick in another flag. Horseflies bite. Ticks carry Lyme disease. The rusty chains on swings are an accident waiting to happen.

But you can cut open Poppy without a problem?

What’s amazing, I say, is that every living organism starts with a single cell that divides, communicates with other cells, keeps dividing until it eventually makes us, and Poppy here, with all our parts in the right places.

Trix isn’t listening. She’s playing with the gold hoop in her right nostril. It’s the latest of her nine piercings. They’re all new. Last year she was preppy—plaids, pinks combined with parrot green, high socks and shiny loafers. The year before she was into black lipstick and nail polish, dark trench coats, and eyes ringed so thickly with liner and mascara it was a miracle she could see. The only sure things with Trix are that she’s bound to change her look and she’ll always be my best friend.

Right now Trix has locked eyes with the new kid, Tim Hunt. For today, he’s her type—shaggy black hair, a nose ring, skin so washed-out that he looks like a vampire. They’ll probably go out this weekend. By go out, I mean get at least partially naked.

What would it be like to be Trix? I’m basically invisible to guys. The only boy I’ve fooled around with is George McCay. He goes to Jesuit. We met at a party Trix dragged me to, and both of us were buzzed on cheap beer. We made out. He had braces and a mouth that tasted like Doritos. I counted to sixty, then said I needed to head back to the party. I don’t think George was disappointed to see me go.

Mr. Petri is watching us. Do something, I say with a nudge.

Trix unlocks her green eyes from Tim’s. Fine.

She identifies the rest of the items on our list and when our teacher looks away, I correct her mistakes. Then I take a moment to appreciate the neat dissection. While I’m leaning over the fetal pig, I inhale to breathe in its essence.

Trix laughs. I thought we broke that tired routine.

I blush. Old habit. After the accident when I lost my eye, I had this stupid idea that if I found a dead butterfly, bird or squirrel and breathed them in it’d somehow make me whole again. In my defense, I was young and, while I thought my actions were subtle, some people did notice.

She peels off her gloves. Done. Gotta love teamwork.

"I’m the work part of that equation. Truth." Truth is what we say when there’s zero bullshit.

Trix nods. We all have our skills. Again, she eyes Tim. Yours just happens to be the science part of our equation. Admit it, you love this stuff.

I do it because you suck at it. Do tell, what do you bring to the mix?

Fun.

I snort. We met in detention in the fourth grade. Trix had cursed out her teacher, Mrs. Glass, who made the mistake of telling my friend that being aggressive in gym class wasn’t ladylike. I’d done nothing to deserve detention. I’d just ducked into the room as an alternative to an afternoon home alone. It’s been the two of us since that day.

Trix leans in and takes a selfie of us. Stop, I say, putting up my hand too late. She checks out the photo. What does she see? A pretty girl with creamy white skin, perfect curves and pink hair, though she’s a natural blonde, beside a homely one in glasses who has two different-colored eyes—gray and blue—a bad decision I made at age eight. I’m a skinny five-eight with dirty-blond hair that washes out my sallow, white skin. My hair is always in a braid so that it doesn’t obscure my view. I’ve been told I have a great smile and an easygoing personality. Other than that, I’m nothing special. So I’m beyond lucky to have a friend like Trix who doesn’t care about surface stuff like looks, or that I’m unpopular, and even defends me when I act weird.

She says, I’ll pick you up Saturday night at seven.

I consider arguing, then shrug my acceptance. Trix will show up at my door the night of whatever stupid dance the school is having and won’t leave until I go with her. You do get that my going to a dance is a waste, right? I don’t dance in public. Not since seventh grade. That was when a group of kids, including Nate and Lander, came up with their own dance. It was called The Pigeon. They stood in a circle flapping their arms like wings and poked their heads left and right, imitating me.

I’d never realized that was how I looked. I was just trying to see better because having only one working eye makes judging depth and the speed of moving objects, like people dancing with abandon, a bitch. Until then, though, I’d thought I was doing a pretty good job. Funny how a single moment changed my self-perception forever.

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