A Beginner's Guide to Free Fall
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Husbands and wives. Brothers and sisters. Mothers and daughters. Okay, everybody. Hold on tight. Davis Winger has it all. A respected engineer who designs roller coasters in theme parks across the country, he is deeply in love with his wife and has a beautiful young daughter and a happy home. Until an accident strikes on one of his rides. Nothing fatal--except to his career. And to his marriage, when a betrayal from his past inadvertently comes to light. In one cosmically bad day, Davis loses it all. His sister, Molly, is at a crossroads herself. She's coasting through a dire relationship with an incompatible man-child. And she's a journalist whose deeply personal columns about mothers and daughters are forcing her to confront the truth about her own mother, who abandoned Molly and Davis years ago and disappeared. For these two siblings, it's just a matter of bracing themselves for one turbulent summer in this redemptive and painfully funny family drama about making the best of the sharp turns in life--those we choose to take and those beyond our control.
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This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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THE OPENING
Four months from now, on a secluded beach in Turkey, Davis Winger, who came thousands of miles to start over, will drop his towel and paperback on the sand, wade into the sea, and end up under the tire of a Hyundai that has just come screeching over an embankment. He will be trapped under that car, pinned to the seabed with one final breath crowding his lungs. Time enough to lament that his daughter might now grow up without him; that he might never hear words of forgiveness from the woman he adored, and betrayed; that he might not live to build the roller coaster that his six-year-old had dreamed up from a storybook and that he had spent the summer engineering into reality. Constructing that ride, harnessing his daughter's giddy vision into a set of blueprints, was his best shot at winning back the people he loved and hurt and lost. The promise of redemption was slipping away. All alone and far from home, he'll reach for the surface as the sea encloses.
That autumn day was coming. But today it was still spring, a mild Saturday in May, and when Davis awakened next to his wife in the charmingly overgrown Baltimore neighborhood of Mount Washington, he was still gainfully employed and still welcome in his own home.
A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO FREE FALL
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The high school yearbook was basically Davis's personal photo album, but when Molly graduated three years later, below her photo it read: “Molly Winger—Not Pictured.” And the thing is, she was pictured. Her photo was right there, above the words “Not Pictured.” That was the essence of Molly. Seen yet somehow undetected. There but unaccounted for. Actually, she preferred it that way.
A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO FREE FALL
A Beginner's Guide to Free Fall
