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Back Falling Save as PDF
Chapters (29)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Epigraph
  4. ONE
  5. TWO
  6. THREE
  7. FOUR
  8. FIVE
  9. SIX
  10. SEVEN
  11. EIGHT
  12. NINE
  13. TEN
  14. ELEVEN
  15. TWELVE
  16. THIRTEEN
  17. FOURTEEN
  18. FIFTEEN
  19. SIXTEEN
  20. SEVENTEEN
  21. EIGHTEEN
  22. NINETEEN
  23. TWENTY
  24. TWENTY-ONE
  25. TWENTY-TWO
  26. TWENTY-THREE
  27. TWENTY-FOUR
  28. ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER PIKE
  29. Copyright Page

Kelly considered. “You can help me. I want you to get me a number.”

“Whose?”

She told him and he shook his head. No fucking way. But she persisted; by the time she left his car he promised to have it for her by that night. She did not know how he would get it. Charlie had his ways. If only she had called him on the flight to Ohio.

Kelly went inside her apartment and immediately felt worse. Emptiness waited in every room like an open grave. She did not know whether to bury the past or pray for tomorrow. Of course it was the present moment that really sucked. There was nothing to do with her loneliness. She could not call Anna because Tony would answer and the sound of his voice would make her go mental. She was the outsider now. There was nothing she could do to get back on the inside. And she had always been a person of action.

She made herself a bowl of white rice and had a glass of warm water. There was a whey protein drink she was able to swallow without barfing but she was not in the mood. She didn’t even have a TV. Worse, she had no real friends. For the last six years, her family and job had been her life.

The phone mocked her. She could call Charlie but he must be sick of her by now. How many times could she keep asking the same question?

“Why did he leave me?”

“Because he doesn’t care anymore,” she mumbled.

When she had awakened in the hospital, she had thought the doctors had amputated her lower body. She remembered looking down and seeing a mass of oozing tubes and bloody bandages. The pain was a crawling insect the morphine drip was unable to crush. It was only when she shot herself into a stupor that she had been able to bear it.

A group of doctors came to talk to her. They brought colored diagrams of her intestinal tract and pointed with a pen to the parts they had cut out. She was not exactly sure but it looked as if they had left her with drastically stripped-down equipment. One surgeon joked that at least she didn’t have to worry about appendicitis anymore. Banks’s acid had melted away the pesky thing.