Lauren Miller - Free to Fall

“Nope,” Beck replied pleasantly, lifting his camera back to his eye.

I sighed, knowing I wouldn’t win this argument. It was a waste of breath to even ask.

This was how Beck rolled. Untethered to technology. He liked trusting his instinct, going with his gut. He said that’s what made him an artist. But I knew better. It wasn’t his gut that he trusted. It was the Doubt.

He started hearing the voice when we were kids. A bunch of us heard it back then. A whisper in our heads that instructed us and assured us and made us believe the impossible, urging us to the left when reason pointed to the right. The so-called “whisper within” wasn’t a new phenomenon—it’d been around as long as people had—but neuroscience had only recently pinned it down. For centuries people thought it was a good thing, a form of psychic intuition. Some even said it was God’s voice. Now we knew that the inner voice was nothing more than a glitch in the brain’s circuitry, something to do with “synaptic pruning” and the development of the frontal lobe. Renaming it the Doubt was a marketing strategy, part of a big public service campaign sponsored by the drug company that developed the pill to suppress it. The name was supposed to remind people what the voice really was. The enemy of reason. In kids, it was nothing to worry about, a temporary by-product of a crucial phase in the brain’s development that would go away once you were old enough to ignore it. But in adults, it was the symptom of a neurological disorder that, if left untreated, would progress until you could no longer make rational decisions.

The marketing campaign did what it was supposed to do, I guess. People were appropriately freaked out. I was in fifth grade then and hearing the voice all the time. Once we started learning suppression techniques—how to drown out the Doubt with noise and entertainment, how to distract your brain with other thoughts, stuff like that—I heard it less and less, and eventually it went quiet. It was like that for most kids. Something you outgrew, like a stutter or being scared of the dark.

Except sometimes you didn’t, and you were labeled “hyperimaginative” and given low-dose antipsychotics until you didn’t hear it anymore. That is, unless you were Beck and refused to accept both the label and the pharmaceutical antidote, in which case the Doubt stuck around, chiming in at random moments, causing your otherwise rational brain to question itself for no apparent reason other than the fact that that’s what the Doubt did. I worried about him, what it would mean for his future if he got a permanent diagnosis, but I also knew how stubborn he was. There was no telling Beck what to do. Especially not while he was taking pictures.

“Oh, hey, wait a sec,” I heard him say as I started toward the bus stop across the street. When I turned back around, he was digging in his pocket. “Your going-away present,” he said, holding out a small plastic box with a snap lid. I recognized the distinctive uppercase G etched into the top. The Gnosis logo. I was mildly obsessed with Gnosis and its gadgets, which, besides being slick and stylish and technologically unparalleled, were made out of recycled materials and completely biodegradable. “They’re the gel earbuds you wanted,” Beck explained as I snapped open the lid. I’d been eyeing them for months but couldn’t rationalize wasting a hundred bucks on headphones. “And before you tell me I shouldn’t have spent the money, I didn’t,” Beck added before I could protest. “They were part of the swag bag from that fashion shoot I helped with last month.”

I grinned. “Best gift ever,” I said, squeezing Beck’s arm.

“Now you can geek out even more over your playlists,” Beck teased. He was into music too, but not like I was.

“And hear you better when you call me,” I said, slipping my gift into my ears. The earbuds slid down my ear canal like melted wax. I could barely feel them once they were in.

“Assuming you’re not too busy to answer.”

“Hey. I’ll never be too busy for you.”

He smiled. “Take care of yourself, Ro,” he said then, slinging an arm around my shoulders. “And just remember, if you fail out, you can always come home and be my assistant.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, elbowing him in the stomach. “And to think, I was worried I’d miss you.” When he met my gaze, he smiled, but his eyes were sad.

“I’ll miss you too, Ro.”

I flung my arms around his neck and hugged him, hard, then headed for the bus stop again, blinking back tears.

“Okay, spit it out,” I said to my dad. “You’re obviously prepping for some big flight-from-the-nest moment over there. Let’s hear it.” We’d just split the last slice of fennel sausage pizza, and I was perusing the dessert menu, contemplating a root beer float even though I was pretty sure that Lux would tell me to skip it. Across the table my dad was twisting his red cloth napkin like he was nervous about something. I braced myself for a sappy speech. He reached for something on the booth beside him.

“It’s from your mother,” I heard him say as he set a small box and an even smaller envelope on the table in front of me. My dessert menu was forgotten when I saw the gift.

The only thing I had of my mother’s was a blanket. According to my dad, she worked on it every day of her pregnancy, determined to finish it before I was born. The design, hand sewn in pink yarn, was a series of squares, each bigger than the one beside it, that followed a particular mathematical sequence and fit together to form one rectangle. The squares were connected by yellow quarter circles made with even tinier stitches than the squares, which ran together to form a golden spiral that extended beyond the confines of the rectangle. At the two ends of the spiral, there were little orange cross-stitches, marking the beginning and the end. It was a strange choice for a little girl’s blanket, but I loved it. Maybe my mother knew that her little girl would never be into flowers or butterflies. Maybe she somehow sensed that I’d prefer the structure and predictability and mathematical completeness of a Fibonacci tile.

I never could ask her, because she died when I was born, two days before her nineteenth birthday. I was premature and there were complications, so the doctors had to do a C-section, and I guess a vein in her leg got blocked, and the clot went to her lungs. “Pulmonary thromboembolism” was the phrase on her death certificate, which I found in a box in my dad’s closet when I was nine, on Christmas Eve. I’d been looking for hidden presents.

I stared at the box, and then at him. “What do you mean it’s from Mom?”

“She asked me to give it to you.” He tugged at his beard, clearly uncomfortable.

“ When did she ask you to give it to me?” I meant When did she make the request? but my dad misunderstood.

“The day you left for Theden,” he said carefully.

“What? I don’t understand. How could she have possibly known that I’d—”

“She went there too, Rory.”

“Wait, what ? Mom went to Theden ?” I stared at him, stunned, as he nodded. “But you went to high school together. You got married the day you graduated. You always said—”

“I know, sweetheart. It was what your mom wanted. She didn’t want you to know about Theden unless you decided on your own to go there.”

“And whatever’s in that box?”

“I was supposed to destroy it, and the card, too, if you didn’t go.”

I sat back in my chair, my eyes on the box. It was light blue with a white lid and it didn’t look new. One of the corners was bashed in, and the cardboard was peeling in a couple of places. The envelope was the kind that comes with floral bouquets, not bigger than a business card. “What’s in it?” I asked.