A Party Trick at Thirty Thousand Feet Chapter 09

Caleb’s body was found by the search and rescue team three days later.

He had landed less than two hundred meters from the spot where I died.

The blizzard had buried most of his body in snow. Only one stiff arm remained visible, stretched toward the edge of the cliff.

Will went to identify the body.

When he returned, he sat crouched outside the funeral home for an entire afternoon. He didn’t

smoke or speak. He just stared at the ground.

Jonathan was wheeled in later.

Neither of them said a word to the other.

The brothers who had once been inseparable couldn’t even bring themselves to look at each other

anymore.

Caleb had made his will six months earlier.

He had sold all his company shares and divided the money into three portions.

One was set aside for Jonathan’s spinal treatment. Another was donated to a mountain rescue foundation. The last was transferred to Will’s account, with a note in the memo:

[Use this to give Juli a proper grave. Do whatever you want with the rest.]

Will didn’t spend a single cent.

He withdrew the entire amount in cash, piled it up in front of my grave, and set it on fire.

It burned all night.

He said he’d never treated me well when I was alive, and he couldn’t stand the thought of using

Caleb’s money on my grave now that I was dead.

After that day, Will disappeared from New York.

He walked away from the company, gave up his house, and canceled his phone number.

Some people said he’d gone to France. Others claimed he was volunteering as a teacher in some

small European town.

Every year on my birthday, a bouquet of tulips appeared at my grave without fail.

The card always carried the same few words: [I’m sorry. I was wrong.]

Jonathan didn’t die.

The fall from the second floor had shattered his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.

His parents took him home and hired a full–time caregiver to watch over him around the clock.

The only parts of him he could still move were his head and mouth.

He spent every day lying in his rehabilitation bed, livestreaming a confession titled [I Killed a Girl.

At first, a few hundred people tuned in just to call him a monster and tell him he deserved it. Later, some viewers started sending gifts, begging him to stop talking about it.

He ignored them.

Every day, he went live at the same time and retold the whole story from beginning to end.

Whenever he got too emotional, he’d even slap himself across the face. Sometimes one side of his

face would swell badly.

Someone once asked him why he kept doing it.

He replied, “Because I want to feel something. I can’t find peace, and neither can she. So why should anyone else get to?”

Rebecca lasted three years in prison before her mental health began to deteriorate.

Apparently, once the other inmates learned what she’d done, they started imitating a woman’s cries in the middle of the night. They’d even mimic my voice screaming, “There’s no handle!”

Eventually, she broke down. She stabbed her own neck with a toothbrush but survived. She was transferred to the prison’s psychiatric unit.

Her parents visited her once.

Separated by the glass, they asked if she regretted what she’d done.

She tilted her head and thought for a long time before answering.

“I regret not getting to see her fall with my own eyes.”

Her father suffered a heart attack right there and spent three hours in the hospital being treated.

I floated near the ceiling of the psychiatric unit, watching Rebecca for a while.

She took her medication and ate her meals on schedule. Sometimes she’d sit by the windowand talk

to the empty air.

She always said the same thing.

“Go on, Juli. Jump. Once you’re gone, Caleb will be mine.”

I didn’t want to watch anymore, so I turned and left.

The mess they’d made of their lives no longer had anything to do with me.

What finally made me stop was the anniversary of my death that year.

A girl I’d never seen before came to visit my grave.

She looked to be in her early twenties. She wore a gray hoodie and a pair of Converse sneakers so worn that their original color had almost faded.

She placed a bouquet of daisies in front of my tombstone.

“Hi, Juli. My name is Mabel Carlisle.”

She crouched down and used a handkerchief to wipe the dust off my gravestone.

“Caleb sponsored my education. He sent me a thousand dollars every month for four years, starting

in my sophomore year of college. He never told me why.”

She took an envelope out of her bag. It was made of yellowed paper, and the handwriting was

crooked.

It was Caleb’s.

“Caleb told me he had a girlfriend who was afraid of heights. But he kept making her go hiking with ¡ him.

He said that someday, if he got the chance, he wanted to take her on a cable car ride that wouldn’t scare her. They’d slowly make their way up the mountain, stopping halfway to have some hot

chocolate.

Then he’d tell her, ‘See? Being up high isn’t so scary after all.‘“‘

Mabel folded the letter and tucked it into a crack at the base of my tombstone.

“Ndidn’t get into a great college, but I’m in good shape. Last year, I joined a mountain rescue team.”

She gently patted the photograph on my gravestone and smiled at me.

“Caleb never got to take you on that cable car ride, so I went in your place. The view was incredible.

It really was.”

A breeze swept up from the foot of the mountain, making the daisy petals tremble.

For some reason, I felt a lump in my throat.

Even though I no longer had one.

The people who were still alive continued to find their own clumsy ways to atone, to remember, or simply to lie to themselves.

But I no longer cared.

I watched Mabel walk away from the cemetery one last time.

Her steps were steady, one after another.

The wind carried my consciousness away.

And this time, it was truly gone.