Falling Read Free

Occasionally the ambulance gleamed in the sunlight as it rounded a curve, going past a farm on one side, then a farm on the other, where a cattle barn was being raised. At a new house past the farm, a woman finished putting out her second load of laundry and gave the line a last, quick jerk to send it out farther.
    Below the road, the water of the harbour was serenely blue. A bald eagle could be seen making a slow circle through the air above an island off William’s Point. A man cutting the grass at the small golf course at the end of the point stopped his tractor mower and got off to light a cigarette. He dragged deeply on it, scanning the water and the broad shoulder of Sugarloaf. Someone was paddling a green canoe beyond the islands just below him. Across the water to the west, the man could see a flash of white on the road near Lanark, but he didn’t know it was an ambulance. He threw the cigarette down into the grass and stepped on the butt.
    After the ambulance passed the abattoir and the north end of the Landing, a trail that traced the edge of the harbour wetlands, it turned into the hospital. The angelus was ringing at the convent, a large brick building that lay on the slope above the hospital, just as the ambulance drew up at Emergency. The paramedics jumped out and quickly took the body on the spinal board inside. Damian followed.Though it was hot, he still had the blanket around his shoulders like a cloak.
    It was over, Damian thought. How quickly life went out of someone. This was his first time seeing it, and he knew, without absorbing any of it fully, that he would never be able to forget it. He would walk through these doors and something would come crashing down. The years would come to him; he could see them as if they were shapes in the distance, but this single event would mark the rest of his life. He was alive, and Lisa was not.
    He hesitated for a moment. It was dark beyond the doors, but once he got inside his eyes would adjust to the light. This went through his mind as he paused, though he paused for no more than a second or two. One of the paramedics glanced back at him, and he knew he had to follow. He took one step, then another, but as he moved it seemed to him that he moved through one year, another, a third. He went across the threshold and felt the unbearable weight come down on him.
    Then the glass doors closed behind him, and he was lost to view.

 
    THEY COULD HEAR THE ROAR of Niagara Falls when they got out of the car.
    Damian stretched, but Ingrid set off immediately down the wooden stairway, lured by the thundering sound that came up through the leaves of the darkly crowded maples. He caught up with his mother at the bottom of the steps in a parking lot set with rows of jewel-bright cars. Beyond was a green swath of lawn and clicking sprinklers near the old power plant, and tour buses making a slow funereal procession along the road by the river. A great plume of mist lifted into the air as powerfully as a raised fist, forming and dissolving into a shifting, changing shape that softened and folded into air above.
    You shouldn’t be seeing it like this, murmured Ingrid.
    Damian glanced at her: white hair pulled back from her face, straight nose, tanned skin. Her chin was lifted up slightly, as if she were trying to catch the scent of something.
    How should I be seeing it? he asked.
    I should have brought you here years ago – you and Lisa.
    It had been a long drive, and now the heat made him dizzy. He closed his eyes and stood swaying as small, dancing shapes sparkled behind his eyelids. He wasn’t keeping up with her train of thought.
    Are you all right? she said.
    I’m okay.
    He was thinking of how his father had taken him, together with his sister, to see the waterfall at James River when they were young. It had been nothing like this; it had been merely a modest rush of water over some rocks. The path to the waterfall had been thick with spruce, but there were places where the