The Falling Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

Christmas day with friends," she said.
    "I'll be driving back to Berkeley the day after." I heard the click of metal on metal as she slipped the key into the ignition.
    "Can I come?" I asked quickly. "I won't be any trouble. I thought maybe ..." I stopped, caught in a tangle of words.
    The colored lights flashed on her face: red, blue, green, gold, red, blue. I have a clear memory of her face, frozen like a snapshot. The air around us seemed cold.
    "Come with me? But your father ..." She stopped. "You'll be spending Christmas with your father."
    "I want to go with you," I said quietly. "I need to."
    I watched her face in the changing light. She was no longer frozen: her eyes narrowed and her mouth turned down, weary, unhappy, maybe frightened. Her hand clenched the steering wheel and the lights flashed red, blue, green. "I'll be leaving soon," she said. "Another dig. I can't ..."
    The dream had gone wrong. I stepped back from the car. "Never mind," I said. "Forget it. Just forget it."
    "Here," she said. She reached in the backseat and pulled a blue feather from the band in the straw hat.
    "This is a quetzal feather. They bring good luck."
    I stood in the driveway, holding the blue feather as she backed the car away from the house. The colored lights reflected from the wet pavement, and her tires hissed as she drove away. I threw the feather down on the pavement. When I looked for it in the morning, the wind had blown it away.
    I woke to the scratchy sound of a stewardess's voice over the loudspeakers. "Please fasten your seat belts and return your seats to their upright position. We are now landing at the Mérida airport. We hope you have a pleasant stay in Mérida, and thank you for flying Mexicana." The voice repeated the message in rapid Spanish. I understood a few phrases in the flow of words, vocabulary from the high school Spanish I had taken long ago.
    The man in the seat beside me smiled at me and said, "Feeling better?"
    I nodded, smiled the mechanical smile, and turned to the window to avoid conversation. Through the window, I looked out on a dusty-green carpet pockmarked with cigarette burns, streaks and patches of gray-white. As the plane came in for a landing at Mérida, the carpet became trees and scrubby bushes; the pockmarks, small fields and roads. I could see thin lines of black slicing through the carpet: roads heading for the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean coast. Then the plane was down and I could see only the runway and the terminal.
    I felt disoriented and peculiar. The world outside the plane window looked flat and unreal, like the image on a TV screen. The sun was too bright; I squinted, but it still hurt my eyes. The plane pulled into the shade of the terminal and the other people on board were stretching and talking and pushing into the aisles, eager to get somewhere. The man who had been sitting beside me was standing already. He glanced at me. "Can I help you with anything?"
    "No," I said. "No, thank you." I did not want help. I wanted to be left alone. When he did not move away, I began rummaging beneath the seat for my purse. By the time I found it, he had given up and was heading away down the aisle. While the other passengers filed out, I took a small mirror from my cosmetics case and looked at myself. I was pale. When I lifted my sunglasses, I could see the dark circles below my eyes.
    I sat for a while, letting the rest of the passengers crowd toward the doors. I followed the last one out.
    As I stepped out onto the boarding stairs at Mérida, I realized that no one was going to stop me. I had flown away from home, from my job, from my former lover. No one had stopped me. I hesitated, squinting into the bright sun. The boarding ramp seemed very high; the terminal, far away. Remembering my vision of falling, I clung to the handrail, unable to take the first step down the stairs.
    "Is there a problem, señorita?" asked the steward standing beside me.
    "No," I said quickly. "No problem." The